TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for November, 2002

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“The important thing, from my point of view, is that we don’t repeat a Beta vs. VHS disaster. In the VCR field, consumers delayed their choices. Ultimately, if they wanted to watch movies or tape shows, they had to pick one format or the other. With e-books, if there are 6, 7, 8, 10 incompatible, narrow, non-interoperable, competing standards, the public doesn’t have to choose any of them. They can simply go with what’s worked for the last 1,300 years: paper books. In this particular arena, it may not be that we duke it out and the winner survives. If a standards war breaks out, the loser could be everybody. Without standards, we may not have an e-book industry.” – Dick Brass, Microsoft VP for technology development, as quoted in Wired News on Oct. 8, 1998.

The TeleRead take: Four years later the public still must struggle with a bunch of competing standards. This Thanksgiving week, we are grateful to the deities at Microsoft for getting the Open eBook movement started within the little world of e-books, but at the same time we’re dismayed that today’s standards exist only as a file conversation format for publishers and the like. Hey, Open eBookers, finish the job.

Exactly who’s to blame for the industry-crippling delay? No finger-pointing here. Whatever the facts, however, Joe or Jane E-Book User still must choose formats or at least struggle with more than one on the same machine.

Oh, and then there are all the protection-related obstacles that still exist for libraries wanting to circulate copyrighted e-books in different formats. It will be interesting to see if the recently announced Digital Library Reserve system from Overdrive, an Open eBook Forum sponsor, can truly help or will in the future.

Let’s hope that some progress on the standards question is made Dec. 5 at the TabletPC Publishing Conference presented by Open eBook. Don’t count on this, however. In fact, some participants at the conference seems more interested in promoting the proprietary formats for reading newspapers on Tablet PCs.

And here the people in the e-publishing biz wonders why they aren’t more successful? Time to cut out the hype and deliver some true industrywide standards. Yes, as Dorothea Salo has noted, there are complexities–for example, handling not just text but also graphics. But with enough coordinated effort, these could be overcome.

Meanwhile one hopes that hardware vendors, even those of dedicated machines for e-books, will allow their products to read ASCII and HTML–unlike the greedsters at Gemstar, who are trying to fence in their users. The affordable Linux tablet expected from Lindows.com could be a terrific alternative for uppity folks who hate the proprietary approach.

By David Rothman

Editor’s note: Amos Bokros, long active in TeleRead, lives in Florida and will soon enter teaching. He has a reading disability believed to be caused by a combination of dyslexia and Attention Deficit Disorder. Below he proposes a better gizmo to turn written words into spoken ones.

When I hear books, not just read them, I can concentrate and understand much better. At first I used recorded books on tape. Then I tried Optical Character Recognition software like OpenBook (not to be confused with Open eBook). It enables a scanner to scan a book page by page and then read out loud and highlight every word. But scanning is slow and tedious. Maybe in the future all books and all reading material will be available in a digital format and there will be no need for any kind of OCR. I have written several articles for TeleRead about how a national digital library would help learning-disabled individuals. But unfortunately TeleRead won’t happen immediately. Meanwhile what about other help for people like me?

Suppose a lightweight portable device could instantaneously read out loud each word of a book as the device was pointing out the words. The device would be similar to the supermarket scanners used to read barcodes and automatically record the price of merchandise. Only, this new gadget would scan words and automatically read them aloud. That way, I could go to a library or a bookstore, take any book off-the-shelf and be able to read it immediately. The words wouldn’t have to be in a digital format. Such a device could not help the blind or people with motor skill problems, but it would aid many others with reading disabilities.

A primitive version of such a device already exists. Selling for $279, including an earphone and adapter for external loudspeakers, it is called the Reading Pen II and put out by Wizcom Technologies Ltd. I bought this electronic pen some time ago. Unfortunately, however, it failed to do what I hoped, and I summed up the big problems in a note to Wizcom.

First, the Reading Pen II was uncomfortable to use for long periods of time. Second, the pen reads too slowly, and I could not speed it up with an adjustment. Third, the pen did not have a feature to automatically read words after they were scanned; instead a reader would have to press a series of commands each time after scanning a word or a line. Fourth and last, the electronic pen would stop reading each time it could not recognize a word–instead of just saying out loud each letter as the program OpenBook does. This made the Reading Pen II extremely tedious to use, at least for me.

With just simple technological changes, however, Wizcom could make the pen more useful. Let’s say it could be developed either as a stand-alone item or something that could be an attachment to a laptop or palmtop computer. I personally would prefer a device being an attachment to a palmtop computer; that way, Wizcom could include more refinements and let users customize the pen better, such as by speeding up the reading rate.

A pen device like the one I have described would not take away the need for e-books or the advantages of a national digital library. But it would help people with reading disabilities be able to compete better–even before all books and periodicals are available on digital format.

No one I’ve spoken to thinks the reading device I have described is either technically infeasible or too costly. What we the public should do is plead that Wizcom or some other company make such a product. There is actually quite a sizable market for this new kind of device.

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Turns out that John de Jong, a coauthor of the literacy report mentioned by the BBC, saw the TeleRead blog directly from his computer in Holland–without the BBC having forwarded our request for his email address. Oh, the wonders of Google. Meanwhile, from his contribution to the e-book Reading for Change, here is some wisdom for librarians, educators and policymakers in countries everywhere:

“Reading has pervaded human life for centuries, but the set of skills required for successful reading changes continuously. Looking up information on the Internet is becoming an everyday activity for a growing number of people and provides a clear example of a context in which reading requires skills that go far beyond decoding. Traditionally, printed material goes through a process of scrutiny and editing by a number of persons before it reaches the reader. Information on the Internet, however, shows a more diverse quality. Though some of it has been edited, a significant proportion has not, and readers will have to rely on their own critical skills in deciding whether and how to use the material. Furthermore, the sheer volume of the information available necessitates the use of selection criteria. To gather information on the Internet requires the ability to scan and skim through large amounts of material and immediately judge its merit. Critical thinking has therefore become more important than ever in reading literacy (Halpern, 1989; Shetzer and Warschauer, 2000; Warschauer, 1999). Warschauer (in press) concludes that overcoming the ‘digital divide’ is ‘not only a matter of achieving online access, but also of enhancing people’s abilities to adapt and create knowledge using ICT’. The correlation between data on the proportion of national populations in OECD countries using the Internet (CIA, 2001), and overall PISA 2000 reading literacy scores for those countries, is 0.53. As people consult the Internet more frequently, they will probably become more adept. Education systems can, however, boost the process by equipping students with the appropriate reading skills.”

By David Rothman

The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism is the classic expose of media coverups. So TeleRead is reproducing nine chapters of Upton Sinclair’s book–perhaps the first time that so much of it has appeared on the Web. The rest of the free text will follow via our efforts for Project Gutenberg; you can e-mail us if you want to be notified when that happens. Meanwhile, for proofing help, we’re grateful to Betsy Connor Bowen, a TeleRead volunteer, writer and ex-English teacher.

Please note that TeleRead is an e-library advocacy group, not a publisher, but this is one book we felt had to go online.

Upton Sinclair surely would have approved. The original hardback and paperback editions of The Brass Check even appeared without a copyright notice since Sinclair wanted to reach as many readers as possible. Would that he have been alive in the era of the Web.

In its time The Brass Check was a best-seller–self-published, surprise of surprise–but it eventually faded into oblivion. Simply put, this is a impressive case history for using technology to help reform our publishing and library systems by increasing the diversity of material available to rich and poor alike.

Meanwhile check out an essay from Robert McChesney and Ben Scott. It’s an adaptation of their introduction to forthcoming reprints of The Brass Check in paperback and hardback from the University of Illinois Press.

By David Rothman

“Children’s interest in reading has more impact on their academic performance than their socio-economic group, research suggests. Young people from even the most deprived backgrounds could outshine their more affluent peers if they regularly read books, newspapers and comics outside school, the report Reading for Change says. While socio-economic background plays a role, it is not a dominant factor in predicting involvement in diversified reading. The report authors say the findings are highly significant and suggest that encouraging reading for pleasure could be one of the most effective ways of bringing about social change.” – BBC, November 20, via ASCD SmartBrief.

The TeleRead take: TeleRead territory, of course. No, we didn’t pay the report’s writers to conclude: “While socio-economic background is weakly related to the profiles of reading, access to books at home seems to play a more important role”–the document’s exact words, as reported by BBC. Notice, too, that Reading for Change alludes to the glories of reading for fun? That’s a core premise of TeleRead. It isn’t enough to put educational and technical books on the Net. If nothing else, with thousands of contemporary books of all varieties online for free, more parents would be tempted to read and serve as positive role models, regardless of their economic statuses. Let’s not duplicate on the Web the old “savage inequalities” about which I wrote some years ago in a paper commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education.

Frustratingly, while the BBC was forward-thinking enough to write up the Reading for Change report, I don’t see a link to it–or even detailed contact information for the document’s authors. The BBC does say: “The study analysed the results of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Pisa survey which examined the knowledge of 15 year olds.” Anyone have more specifics?

Update, Nov. 27: Yes, Dr. John H.A.L. de Jong, at Language Testing Services in the Netherlands, does. He’s the second listed authors of the report in e-book format–the title page credits Irwin Kirsch, John de Jong. Dominique LaFontaine, Joy McQueen. Juliette Mendelovits, and Christian Monseur–and he says you can download it at http://www1.oecd.org/publications/e-book/9602071E.PDF. I’ve just done so and look forward to reading it. The full title is Reading for Change: Performance and Engagement Across Countries: Results from PISA 2000. PISA stands for Programme for International Student Assessment. Fittingly, the book is free. So is access to a wonderful collection of performance-related news clips about students in the United States, Canada and elsewhere.

I’m not sure if Dr. de Jong heard about the TeleRead item through the BBC or other means, after I asked the network for more details, but what makes this fun is that he himself is the author who wrote the sentence about reading as leverage for social change. Bravo, Doctor!

Additional thoughts: A large number of books in the household won’t just help directly. Obviously it will also serve as an indicator of a family’s general interest in learning. Still, without the easy availability of books, including those read for pleasure, learning won’t be so easy. Hence the need for TeleRead and other measures as ways to promote leaning for the nonrich.

Coincidentally, here in the States, the Nov. 18 issue of BusinessWeek says: “While the U.S. prides itself on being the land of opportunity, economists have grown less optimistic about the ability of American children to leap ahead of their parents’ station in life. A six-figure income remains beyond the grasp of all but 14% of American households…. And recent research has found a higher-than-expected correlation between people’s position on the income ladder and the rung their parents once occupied.

“In the 1980s,” says BusinessWeek, “studies concluded that, on average, only about 20% of the earnings gap between any two people would persist a generation later as an earnings gap between their children. That would have indicated a society with lots of mobility. However, estimates were later raised to around 40%. Now, research by Bhash Mazumder, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, concludes that fully 60% of the income gap in one generation persists into the next generation, on average. That would mean that children of poor families would tend to be poor as well.”

The article quotes the Fed economist as saying that educational loans would help. Of course. But so would a well-stocked national digital library system and better funding of existing libraries, if we extrapolate from the research of John de Jong and colleagues. If you’re a policymaker or educator or other person interested in reaching Dr. de Jong, just email me and I’ll pass on your note.

Meanwhile we’ve posted a Net-related excerpt from his authoritative book.

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Last June certain bloggers dreaded the forthcoming debut of a copyright-oriented blog from the graduate J school at the University of California at Berkeley. Why let the establishment co-opt the medium? Mightn’t the writing be sterile? So far, so good, however–based on the actual blog. The bIPlog is often opinionated, and that’s good since we don’t need blogs that just ape the standard news formulas.

The TeleRead take: Let’s hope that the Berkeley experiment is replicated well at other schools–and at real-life newspapers and magazines. Dan Gillmor set a good example. And speaking of synergy between blogging and institutions, don’t forget library blogs. Now let’s think in the other direction–bloggers quoting conventional sources. Imagine the greater range of content in serious blogs if they could link directly to contemporary books and even passages within them.

A well-stocked national digital library system with stable links and tight integration with local libraries and schools would help. Many magazine and newspaper archives could be included, too.

Currently, alas, the mainstream press is obtuse to the need for a TeleRead approach; the idea seems thoroughly publicity proof despite occasional breakthroughs. Perhaps as student journalists blog–and learn about such joys as vanishing links and stupid linking policies–they’ll come around and influence their elders. Which isn’t to say that the linking issue is the only reason why the press should be writing about TeleRead, given all the societal benefits. Consider the recent BBC item on the obvious advantages of children growing up in book-rich households, and keep in mind TeleRead’s slogan: “Bring the E-Books Home.”

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“Widening its adoption of the Linux operating system, International Business Machines Corp. Friday said it would collaborate with Sharp Corp. of Japan on a handheld computer that runs the open source software.” – Associated Press via Yahoo.

The TeleRead take: Let’s hope hope this helps set back the idea of Windows-only e-book formats for consumers. MicrosoftReader has its glories, but needs to be available in Linux, too. A TeleRead approach, of course, would address the format issue.

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“Someday, the textbooks Language of Literature and American Nation may join the ranks of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Color Purple: banned from classrooms. Not because they’re too controversial; rather, because they’re too fat To avoid creating generations of back-pain sufferers, schools have been searching for ways to lighten the load that children carry in their oversize backpacks. Solutions include buying classroom texts, using more worksheets, allowing more time to get to lockers, and demonstrating how to properly pack and carry bags.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer via Education Week and Library Stuff.

The TeleRead take: “One reason why e-books may be a better fit for students,” Library Stuff’s Steve Cohen observes. California, as the Philly article notes, has even legislated against the problem.

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From Luke Francl:

Dan Bricklin, creator of VisiCalc and pen computing pioneer, reviews the Toshiba 3505 Tablet PC he purchased. Bricklin has an interesting perspective because he was co-founded Slate, which developed software for the Newton, Microsoft’s earlier Pen Computing platform, and Penpoint. In his review, Bricklin addresses specialized e-book readers:

If reading on screen is so important, why not just build an electronic book for reading? The answer is simple. You need to have a portable general purpose machine like a laptop anyway for composing, calculating, and running specialized applications. By the time you build a good enough “book” machine that can also connect to the Internet with whatever technique you have available (dial up, 100baseT, 802.11) and connect to the devices you’d like (USB), and be upgradable, etc., you’re already spending enough for most of a laptop. It’s silly to pay twice, so the more general laptop has always won out. It’s only in the case of a completely different form factor, and a price down in the range of a software package or PC peripheral (which is what a Palm cost and was positioned as) that you’d buy both. By making the Tablet PC a full-fledged Windows machine, with access to all the normal peripherals and applications, you don’t have that tension of needing to pay twice as much.

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Minus handwriting recognition–but also minus an outrageous price tag–an approximately $500 tablet machine should be shipping in the next few months from Lindows.com.

Can it handle e-books in the MicrosoftReader format, say, or the one for the Adobe eBook Reader? We’re not sure how a LindowsOS emulation of Windows would do in this case. But if you’re looking for a cheap way to display books in HTML and other nonproprietary formats, the new Lindows portable just might be the way to go if it lives up to its ballyhoo.

We couldn’t agree more with Lindows founder Michael Robertson about the economics of tablet computers for the masses. In describing the much-touted Tablet PCs, he said: “Newly announced tablet computers are debuting with big price tags in the $2,000 to $3,000 range. While there will always be some techno-elite who purchase the latest toys no matter what the price, most people can’t justify such costs. To reach the masses, tablets need to be substantially below $1,000. Anything priced higher will simply be a novelty and something you won’t want to risk spilling coffee on.”

Be interesting to see if the Lindows tablet has or will work with wi-fi. Wouldn’t be surprised if it did. Lindows says the machine is “wirelessly-networked.”

All in all, the $500 model just might be a great way to read e-books on the sofa and enjoy a screen much larger than those on PDAs.

It also could be a natural for libraries and schools that hate proprietary e-book formats. Of course, if the emulation mode will allow the Lindows tablet to work with MicrosoftReader or the Adobe or Mobipocket equivalent, then so much the better.

While TeleRead won’t endorse any particular hardware or operating system, we can’t help but get excited over this product, assuming the reality is the same as the hype. Here’s to the possibility of a $250-$350 tablet a year from now!

Not so coincidentally, Robertson founded MP3.com, and with the new machine, he is unabashedly going after budget-minded people in their 20s and 30s. He says they’re far more accustomed to keyboards than their elders and therefore might not be as interested in handwriting recognition as Microsoft hopes. If a good, cheap foldup portable keyboard isn’t around for the Lindows tablet, we hope it soon will be. Not that handwriting-recognition wouldn’t be nice. But affordability first!

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“If you want to read about a dumb idea resulting from lack of coordination by sectors of the publishing industry, then this is your lucky day. Here goes: Imagine if you had to use the AOL browser to visit any newspaper’s websites, but had to use Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 to visit any magazine’s sites, but had to use Opera 6 to visit any broadcaster’s sites, but had to use Netscape 6 to visit any e-commerce site. OK, that’s far fetched, but something similar is really happening in regard to the new Tablet PCs: Zinio and the magazine industry are unveiling proprietary software designed for reading magazines on Tablet PCs. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times, Adobe Inc., and Kent State University’s Institute for Cyberinformation are unveiling software for reading newspapers on Tablet PCs. McGraw-Hill, the AOL Time Warner Book Group, and other academic publishers are formulating other software designed for reading textbooks on Tablet PCs. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the catalog industry is working on its own proprietary software for Tablet PCs.” – Vin Crosbie, E-Media Tidbits, Nov. 11.

The TeleRead take: Hey, so what happened to the open Web? Newspaper and magazine publishers are doing a great job of wallling themselves off from the Net at large–just the oppose of the TeleRead vision. Those bozos don’t need Bill Gates to do ‘em in. They’re doing a fantastic job on their own.

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“Despite growing evidence that a dynamic school library increases reading scores, what was once the academic backbone of Florida’s schools is becoming little more than a warehouse for old, useless books. An Orlando Sentinel investigation of school libraries across the state found a system educators call a national embarrassment. Outdated books occupy shelves. Untrained clerks oversee dozens of media centers. Libraries close frequently for testing and picture days.” – The Orlando Sentinel via Education News and Library Stuff.

The TeleRead take: E-books to the rescue–at least as part of the solution? For years TeleRead has been noting the desirability of children having a wide range of books and other content that would address their needs and interests. At the same time please note that a national digital library system would not replace K-12 librarians and other media specialists who could help the children absorb the books. Rather it would enable the librarians and other professionals to do a better job.

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If you’re ever rushed to the hospital and the ER physician needs information in a hurry, you just might benefit from some essential medical facts being handy on a PDA–perhaps even as an e-book.

A good starting place to learn more about PDAs in healthcare would be a highly focused resources area from OSF Saint Francis Medical Center Library & Resource Center and the University of Illinois at Chicago Library of the Health Sciences. It is full of goodies on hardware, software, databases and other content for health professionals. What do you look for when selecting PDA hardware? How can librarians handle checkout procedures for hardware? Just what kind of PDA-related information is around for pediatricians or family practitioners? What information for neurologists or other specialists might a hospital put on a specialty PDA? The Saint Francis-Illinois area can answer the questions directly or point you to other places such as Duke University’s PDA site for health professionals.

Simply put, this is a Net resource whose usefulness is instantly apparent even to those outside the health field. If nothing else, check out the Flash demos created for a health conference earlier this year.

For more information, you can reach Saint Francis’s Lori Bell, who started the Handheld Librarian blog. She has also helped to run a study called Academic Libraries Take an E-Look at E-Books, which contains some interesting observations on the strengths and weaknesses of e-books–complete with some direct quotes from students themselves.

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While the world at large begs for an e-book format standard at the consumer level–something that runs on a variety of machines without publishers having to struggle with different flavors–Microsoft on its own could be moving in that direction. Check out an eWeek article and related links listed there.

Looks as if ePeriodicals just might end up an Adobe/PDF competitor in the worlds of e-books and other electronic documents, not merely magazines. In a speech extolling the Tablet PC yesterday, Bill Gates called ePeriodicals “an extension of the eBook work that Microsoft has been doing for a number of years.” Fascinating implications here for the Open eBook community. Supposedly ePeriodicals is years from commercialization. We’ll see about that. What if Microsoft folds its book reading software into ePeriodicals or vice versa or, more likely, does a third product?

Of interest, too, for those of us concerned about the nexus between content and software systems and what it may mean to consumers’ pocketbooks, is a statement from Grant Duers, a general manager with Microsoft’s Advanced Reading Technologies unit. eWeek reports: “Microsoft’s Duers said that ePeriodicals is likely to emerge more as a set of ‘distillation’ tools for publishers than as a complete end-to-end platform managed by Microsoft. But he also said Microsoft is interested in dabbling with different subscription models for making digital content available.”

Meanwhile Adobe has made nice about the Tablet PC and was part of the ballyhoo. Surprising? No. Adobe thinks PDF is forever. But, hey, some people felt the same about CP/M.

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Are you reading this via our VoidStar address for RSS Version .92? Don’t worry if your RSS stops working. Most likely it’ll be because we’re changing to a new address as part of a site upgrade. The details will be coming later on. Drop by http://www.teleread.org/blog for the new .92 address when the old one stops working. The RSS .91 address most likely will stay the same.

Speaking of RSS, the initials stand for “Rich Site Summary.” If you don’t know what that jargon means, check out Jenny Levine’s slideshow. Simply put, RSS is a way to spread your thoughts around to other bloggers and even allow them to display on their site the headlines (and more) from yours. It’s an electronic version of newspaper syndication, you might say. Only, you get to be George Will or Ellen Goodman.

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“The Democrats in the Senate tend to be more pro-business than the Democrats in the House… With respect to the entertainment industry, I don’t think these things have been particularly partisan.” – Chairman and CEO Hilary Rosen of the Recording Industry Association of America, on CNBC tonight, when asked how the elections would affect the copyright and trademark scene.

The TeleRead take: True, true, true, or at least that last sentence of hers. Indeed the Democrats are among the worst offenders. Bill Clinton did some wonderful things to get America online but appointed a copyright lobbyist to mold his copyright policy for the Net–encouraged by all the millions that Rosen and other fatcats raised. Consider, too, Democratic Senator Ernest “Fritz” Hollings of South Carolina, the man whose slogan in effect is “Hollywood Inside.” In fact, in some ways, the recent Republican triumph may even mean improvements.

Months before the elections, smart conservatives were rejoicing how the Democrats had alienated young Net-oriented consumers. The stupidity and greed of the Democrats, in regard to Net issues, would hardly be the only explanation for the Dems’ defeat. But they nicely illustrate the warped priorities of the party as it exists today. I myself am a lifelong Democrat, by the way. It’s just that, quite objectively, I find the behavior of my well-bought party on many Net-related matters to be loathsome. Here’s a wonderful URL.

TeleRead itself is nonpartisan and, in fact, has drawn support across the ideological spectrum.

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Bill Gates hoped that donated PCs would reinvigorate rural America and otherwise help close the digital divide. Alas, many bright young people in farm country are using library computers to find jobs in the cities, and in a New York Times interview, he comes across as far less of a gung-ho Carnegie than before.

Meanwhile, via board talk on the LISnews site, some librarians say his PC gifts not have been a full blessing. One says the machines “caused an already understaffed, stressed-out-to-the-max staff to be further screamed at when people could not use the word processing. Also when they broke due to misuse and overuse.”

The TeleRead take: Gates, whom I’ve never hesitated to knock when he deserved it, may be a little too hard on himself in this case. The donated computers were right for their time, and are still right even if, at least in the past, marketing seemed to coexist with philanthropy.

What we need now, however, is a TeleRead-style approach. Libraries could loan out tablet-style computers to introduce citizens to e-books and related technology. That, in turn, would help popularize the technology and drive down the production costs. Needless to say, a well-stocked national digital library could also increase demand for the hardware and software. And it could help staunch–not end–the rural-to-city migration by putting more material online.

What’s more, TeleRead would help librarians adapt national resources to local communities. Let’s empower neighborhood libraries, not replace them. The Gates plan has been a useful start. It just needs to evolve–and, if anything, be expanded. It’s not as if the Gates Foundation is on the verge of bankruptcy. The quarter of a billion devoted to the library project is still just a speck of Gates’ assets, even post-bubble.