TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for July, 2003

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A glory of e-books is that they require less investment by publishers and readers. What’s more, they can be called up instantly. Too, they are more open to “viral marketing”–fans can talk them up and spread the good news. With file sharing technology, publishers can let readers pass along sample chapters or even complete books. Various forms of protection, including the best one of all, fair prices, can help assure the right compensation for creators.

Luddites smug about the p-book world might consider a paragraph in a BusinessWeek review of recent novels about the industry:

Has book publishing fallen into a state of material and moral rot? Consider a few symptoms: Publishers’ seasonal catalogs loaded with already-ripe-for-the-pulper schlock. Fat advances that are thinly disguised payoffs to prominent pols. “Authors” (athletes, porn stars, celebrity girlfriends) barely capable of penning a shopping list. Media conglomerates dependent on big-name writers, whose books get piled in giant stacks meant to stampede superstore customers. The list goes on.

Meanwhile here’s a BusinessWeek quote-paraphrase from The Last Days of Publishing, one of the reviewed novels:

“Like light from a distant star,” he reflects, a publisher’s catalog describes books “signed up long ago by editors laid off by a management no longer in place for a house that, in all but name, may no longer exist.”

BusinessWeek has kind words about most of the novels reviewed, liking The Last Days of Publishing the most, followed by Foul Matter, while not so enthusiastic about The Storyteller, “a self-indulgent muddle of a suspense novel that considers the highly topical issue of plagiarism.” As the magazine notes, “commerce and creativity can still coexist” at times.

Still, an important point comes out along the way. BusinessWeek asks why “a turkey like The Storyteller would be picked up by Doubleday and get a nice-size print run of 25,000, not to mention the benefit of a muscular distribution apparatus, while the stimulating Last Days of Publishing finds a home only at a relatively weak university press and a print run of 4,000.”

E-books, anyone? Isn’t it time for a better publishing system? With TeleRead, big publishers could still be major players, but, via word of mouth and otherwise, it would be easier for books from smaller publishers to make their mark and help elevate standards of the industry.

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From Circulating eBooks to PDAs in France Landowski Library Lends Life to eBooks–an item in InfoSynch:

Since May 2003, Landowski library in Boulogne-Billancourt has been running an experiment in lending eBooks for PDAs, Smartphones and Tablet PCs. The publishing company Mobipocket is the partner for this 12-month-long test which enables any registered reader of the library equipped with a compatible device to load various selected eBooks from an infra-red station located in the library. The works delete with time and include reference books like dictionaries and tourist guides. Readers will be able to access the works directly from home thanks to a web site specially adapted for the library.

The Shifted Librarian’s Jenny Levine writes: “I finally found a page from the site describing this project, but of course it’s in French. Here’s the translation from Google, although it doesn’t really provide any further information. I’d be interested to see how the Library’s patrons feel about the project along with usage statistics.”

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Gemstar’s e-book division is now more or less kaput, but what if outsiders bought it and you could buy similar hardware, new? Or at least benefit from a better bookstore arrangement–maybe even with fairer prices?

Perhaps there’s hope. On the RCAebooks list, I’ve just spotted the following from an Alabamian named Mark Bodenhausen:

I am currently working on a proposal for a group of investors interested in Gemstar’s eBook division. The proposal includes a revised business and marketing plan and I wanted to hear input from you all about what you specifically liked or disliked about your eBook.

Among the questions:

How much would you be willing to pay for server space? Proposed fees are $20 a year for storage up to 10MB with an auto-upload feature for Outlook and Outlook Express email users that would provide digest versions of local email as well as documents.

For more details, including other questions, contact Mark Bodenhausen. Meanwhile let’s hope that Gemstar will be open to a deal.

Further thoughts: The real attraction is the hardware. It’s not the most up to date but at $100-$125 could provide real value. What if Bodenhause and friends did a tablet that worked more gracefully with HTML and ASCII and even had provisions for an Open eBook format? And could read Microsoft Reader and Mobipocket books, too?

Bodenhause could keep the bookstore open in the interim to serve existing owners, but I doubt that’s where the real money is. While ex-Gemstar CEO and present SEC target Henry Yuen tried to succeed through exclusiveness, the best bet for investors would be the opposite–openness.

This is strictly a bottom-line question. Bodenhuasen happens to chair the Libertarian Party of Alabama, but I believe that this fact will be pretty irrelevant as long as he understands the appeal of an open approach and also does not discriminate against books with which he disagrees.

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Check out some new voice synthesis technology from IBM. “US Male Voice 2″ is much less robotic than some of his predecessors in the synthesis world and in fact sounds a bit like Jimmy Stewart, if you go by the pauses. Sooner or later will Netfolks and Hollywood fight over such issues as unauthorized use of celebrity voices for reading e-books?

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The new chairman and CEO at the Recording Industries Assocation of America is Mitch Bainwol, who once was chief of staff for Bill Frist, the Senate Majority Leader. He’ll replace Hilary Rosen.

Washington remains a well-bought place via campaign contributions and overpaid celebrity lobbyists, but a little hope comes from a recent column in the Post, one whose message Baiwol and the rest might want to consider: When Money Talks Too Loudly.

Actually I’m thinking in the long run. More and more members of the MP3 generation are reaching voting age, and many will want to swap movies, not just recordings. The broadband or compression technology will eventually be there to accommodate them. So what happens when Hollywood want to turn them into criminals? Future pols just might not be as helpful. Even today, pols are not absolutely predictable. As Post columnist Ann Applebaum writes in a different context about lobbyists:

A fine idea, hiring prominent people, but it’s possible to overdo it. Congressional backbenchers rarely have the chance to portray themselves as crusading heroes, impoverished Davids fighting wealthy Goliaths. Attacking lobbyists–or their fancy, formerly important political friends–allows them to do it. So beware, influence buyers, of the unpredictable impact of money in Washington–where it really is possible to spend too much.

Bottom line? Hollywood–and, yes, the e-book industry, too–should go for durable business models that allow for both easy file swapping and fair compensation for creators. Under TeleRead this could be possible through swap fees (paid by either consumers or a national digital library fund). Content-providers wouldn’t make as much money off individual units, but would do just fine from increased volume. Of course, given Washington’s current penchant for favoring money over logic, the “send ‘em to jail” school may well prevail for the moment–at the expense of the industries it is supposed to protect over the long run.

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Will Microsoft hasn’t released Reader softfware for the Smartphone, but Mobipocket is on the way, according to msmobiles.com, going by a report from a Mobipocket fan named OzGirl. (Via Pocket PC eBooks Watch.)

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“Over the past two decades, increased concentration in the publishing industry has been accompanied by significant escalation in the price of serials publications, eroding libraries’ ability to provide users with the publications they need.” – Information Access Alliance, which consists of the ALA and other groups.

The TeleRead take: The alliance calls for a new federal standard for anti-trust enforcement. Check out its white paper, which, alas, is in PDF. Would you believe, the cost of medical journals has gone up 43 percent since 1998 and that math and science journals are 32 percent higher.

My fantasy is that the CEO of an information conglomerate is about to kick the bucket and will live only if the doctors can use a certain cure that actually doesn’t exist, because the researchers lacked affordable access to the necessary knowledge.

A voice from above whispers to the CEO. If he goes back in time and lowers the price of his medical journals–and prevails on fellow publishers to do the same–then the cure will materialize.

Needless to say, perhaps the same concept might apply in the future to electronic versions of medical textbooks.

(Found via Library Stuff.)

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So what are the most popular authors among users of Project Gutenberg? For privacy reasons, PG doesn’t track this as closely as it could, but here are the probable biggies as reported by PG founder Michael Hart in an email today to the eBook Community list:

Mark Twain
Jules Verne
A. Conan Doyle
Charles Dickens
Lewis Carroll
Leo Tolstoi
Nietzsche
Melville
Poe
Daniel Defoe
Einstain
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Jane Austen

PG also finds a heavy demand for “some reference works” and a “surprising” amount of fiction and non-fiction about the Wild West.

Strange, but I thought that e-books were supposed to threaten culture as we know it. Perhaps the big names on PG’s hit list can calm down the AAUP.

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I’m all in favor of “academic freedom”–part of which is the right to come across as an imbecilic Luddite pandering to the like-minded. But should the American Association of University Professors have published an article as sloppy and dishonest as the one by S. David Mash, a “Ph.D. student in higher education administration at the University of South Carolina”?

The title of Mash’s article is Libraries, Books, and Academic Freedom: Can Academic Freedom Survive the Death of the Book? A better question, however, is whether the AAUP’s full credibility of the moment can survive Mash. If this example is representative work from him–let’s hope not–then he strikes me as a Jayson Blair of academics.

In his ramblings for the May-June issue of Academe, Marsh apparently refuses to classify electronic books as real books. Here I carry around Dickens and Trollope, Wharton and Cather, in a PDA smaller than a typical paperback; and yet poor Mash in effect is telling me I am not reading real literature. Since when are e-books less rich in eloquence, facts and insights than the equivalent p-books? Does ink confer wisdom? Does paper assure that the ideas will be more fleshed out than on television? Does a cardboard spine with golden letters guarantee accuracy and integrity? Does a paper Mein Kampf end up as more uplifting than an electronic Bible? No, books are words, not cardboard, ink and paper, and it is downright Orwellian to say or even imply otherwise, or suggest that e-books are less valuable. An online dictionary, based in part on The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, would appear to back me up with a definition alluding to “A printed or written literary work.” Books can be written in bits and bytes, not just ink. “Write” can mean to “compose and set down,” and the U.S. Copyright Office qualifies electronic books as a fixed form of expression eligible for copyright. End of story. Luddites and friends, however stubborn they often are on definitions, should just give up on this one.

To move on to the implications of the article’s title, just what’s this malarkey about e-books being at odds with academic freedom and presumably other forms of free expression? If anything, by lowering the costs of publication, the medium will add to, not lessen, freedom. Last week at little or no extra cost for Web hosting, TeleRead put online the full text of The Brass Check, Upton Sinclair’s expose of corporate journalism. I’d never seen The Brass Check at my local public library, and many decades earlier, in fact, when Sinclair had self-published his work, sellers of paper had withheld some of the supplies he needed for reprints.

Now, however, thanks to TeleRead and some helpful volunteers in Indiana and Maine, every English-language reader on planet Earth can read Sinclair’s message if a Net connection is at hand. And that is even before the Project Gutenberg spreads our edition of The Brass Check to hundreds of servers throughout the world. I am delighted that the University of Illinois recently came out with its own version of The Brass Check, but it is the free electronic editions that will provide the ultimate rebuke to the would-be censors. Yes, oppressive Digital Rights Management and the shrinking of the public domain might somewhat crimp access to e-books in the long run, but even with the most nightmarish of scenario, I doubt that The Brass Check and other uppity works will vanish from Gutenberg’s global network of servers.

A few of Mash’s other gems appear below:

Mash: E-books are to be discussed in the same paragraphs as the old hype for educational TV. He cites The Problem with Pulcifer, a book about a future in which librarians steer children from books to television. In fact, Mash tells of a real-life institution of higher learning–Eastern Michigan University–that replaced some bookshelves with computers, TV and the rest.

TeleRead: Yes, if it is electronic it must be evil (sarcasm alert). Actually, months ago, in a rant against the displacement of p-books by media centers, TeleRead was already on the case. We oppose bookless libraries—unless students can read the same material by way of e-books. That’s what TeleRead is all about: making it happen, not immediately but slowly over time, without instantly killing off every paper book. But some academic hacks are more interested in formulaically defending p-books than in looking ahead to a TeleReaderish era when people in the most remote areas of the world could read everything from Kant to Clancy. Even then p-books would survive. The charm is and will be there. May p-books live on like horse-and-buggy rides in Central Park. Just don’t cheat the world–especially the world beyond the privileged inhabitants of academia–of e-books.

Over the years, in books, in p-articles and on this Web site, I’ve told how children could grow up reading a rich collection of the classics and other books in electronic form. This vision won’t be reality to the fullest if we kill off or crimp public libraries and those in schools; we must not limit books–paper and electronic–to the elite. But if the worst happens, the villains will be the humans, not the machines.

Mash: E-books must be a failure because they haven’t caught on by now. “In early 2002,” Mash writes, “less than three years after it founded the ambitious Frankfurt eBook Awards, Microsoft withdrew financing and discontinued the related annual event.”

TeleRead: Wow. Imagine this man’s historical perspective. Was television doomed just because the masses didn’t buy sets from Day One? Point is, some people have cared enough about e-books to read them even without optimal technology. Not everyone feels this way, of course; we have not yet reached the era of electronic ink, where e-books will be similar to p-books, complete with flappable pages. But we are getting there. Meanwhile I find myself actually preferring to read books on my Dell Axim, which has a sharp screen and type that I can blow up to any size I want, using the Tiny eBook Reader program.

What’s more, I am laughing at Mash’s silly belief that e-books are a failure because Microsoft is not pushing them as ardently as in the past. Far from throwing in the towel, Microsoft simply decided that the quick money was not there. It’s not as if Microsoft has given up on the medium. If anything, as the Open eBook Forum and the Association of American Publishes have documented, use of e-books is growing far, far more rapidly than that of p-books–the sales of which in recent years have been rather disappointing on the whole.

Mash: “…in September 2002 the Chronicle of Higher Education reported the results of an e-book study conducted with students at Ball State University. The study, supported by a $20 million grant from the Eli Lilly and Company Foundation, found that college students are not yet willing to replace textbooks with e-books. In fact, ’several students said that they thought e-books adversely affected the amount of information that they absorbed.’”

TeleRead: Look, this TeleBlog is just the Web log of a small Net-based group, not the august and presumably peer-reviewed Academe. Just the same, thanks to the nefarious electronic medium known as the Web, I have actually been able to read certain source material from Ball State—the 2002 study, The Usability of eBook Technology: Practical Issues of an Application of Electronic Textbooks In a Learning Environment. The researchers were Richard F. Bellaver, Associate Director Center for Information & Communication Studies, and Dr. Jay Gillette, Director Human Factors Institute, Ball State University. And even though most of the students were uncomfortable with e-books, I saw conclusions in the Bellaver-Gillette document that raise pesky questions about Mash’s summary.

The two researchers, while acknowledging the unpopularity of the technology actually used by the students, even wrapped up their paper with the following paragraph: “It appears that the current dumb eBook output device could be viable as a full screen storage medium for students. As an easy to carry, relatively inexpensive and completely reusable storage device, the eBook could fit into the hardware/software spectrum between the full personal computer and the PDA.” Why didn’t Mash at least acknowledge this sentence? And how come he left out the fact that the researchers were working with already-obsolete technology? Jayson Blair territory. Bear in mind, too, that the students were reading textbooks, and that linear reading, such as novels, would not require cross-references as often. At any rate, devices with larger and sharper screens at affordable prices should help immeasurably. Such tablet-style computers will be on the way.

Alas, in summing up the Ball State study, even the Chronicle hardly distinguished itself. The headline said: “Students Complain About Devices for Reading E-Books, Study Finds.” But far down in the story, the Chronicle at least had the decency to report that “whatever the complaints about the performance of the devices, there seemed to be little difference between the performance of e-book users and textbook users. Several quizzes were administered during the study, each with a maximum score of 50. The textbook users earned an average of 29 points per quiz, while the black-and-white and color e-book users earned average scores of 28.9 and 28.5, respectively.”

On top of that, studies from two Midwestern schools and the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University suggest that students can be rather enthusiastic about e-books. Only 20 students took part in the later study, but 100 percent said they would recommended e-books to a friend for use in college courses. An amazing 84 percent answered “Yes” to the question: “If you knew that every one of 4 courses that you were taking next semester had the option of an e-book, would you be willing to spend $200, in addition to any textbook costs, to purchase one?”

Mash: The Web is inadequate as a research medium, and students rely heavily on traditional libraries.

TeleRead: Of course, the Web could be better, much better. Mightn’t part of the reason be that people like S. David Mash are too busy repeating the old Luddite platitudes (sucking up to a dissertation advisor, perhaps?) to come up with solutions to the problem? Such as well-stocked national digital library systems in the States and elsewhere? Meanwhile, like it or not, research commissioned by the Pew Foundation shows that young people are relying on the Net in a massive way. Let’s start addressing their needs by improving the quality and range of online information, especially from academia–and by improving linking and archiving and otherwise adding to stability. Or would universities rather take pride in withholding the goodies and not caring about a good online enviroment for serious research?

I could move on to Mash’s other lapses of fact, logic and honesty, but I think it’s already clear how Blairish the AAUP-published essay is. I am tempted to send the editors of Academe the Web address of this TeleBlog posting—which is not a formal response, just my immediate thoughts—and demand that the magazine let me publish a full-length rebuttal of the Blair article if the organization really does care about “freedom” and open-mindedness. If nothing else, the AAUP should correct Blair’s, er, Mash’s, egregious misrepresentation of the researchers’ conclusions at Ball State.

Despite my unhappiness with the essay as a whole, I’ll acknowledge that Mash did serve up some quotes with which I’d agree:

With uncanny prescience, Henry David Thoreau opined in Walden that “men have become the tools of their tools.” But we do have a choice and we must exercise it. As Eric Ormsby, professor of Islamic intellectual history, wrote in the October 2001 issue of The New Criterion: “If the past twenty-five years have proved anything, it is that, for the survival of culture, we need all the help we can get, whether in words baked on ancient tablets, set in cold type, or amid the pixels of the scanner and the computer screen.”

But of course! If only Mash could apply those words sensibly to e-books! Indeed, elsewhere, in The Death of the Book, an article for a religious publication called The Mars Hill Review, he does impress me as far more balanced about the usefulness and survival of both p- and e-books. And now–here’s the kicker. Turns out that this second article identifies Mash as “Administrative Dean of Information” for Columbia International University in Columbia, South Carolina. Dean of Information? If Mash is a “Dean of Information,” then what are the other deans thinking about e-books and “academic freedom”?

By David Rothman

Librarians don’t just cheer when a best-seller sends eager readers their way. They also groan. How many copies to buy to accommodate the crowd? E-books, needless to say, could help get the best-sellers to library users in a hurry. And a TeleRead-style approach could offer a variety of lending models for to suit the needs of libraries and publishers.

Meanwhile the latest example of the challenge–let’s call it that, rather than a problem–appears in yesterday’s New Zealand Herald:

There are 504 requests for the latest J.K. Rowling bestseller at Auckland City’s libraries, which have 106 copies checked out

…the borrowing list for the title began at the city’s 17 libraries six months ago.

Those at the end of the waiting list are unlikely to get the book for six months.

Granted, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is an extraordinary case. But to a lesser extent, other best-sellers raise the same issue–what to do about a wildly popular book for which demand may eventually fall off? How much better to spend a higher percentage of library money on actual words, as opposed to paper, cardboard and ink.

Meanwhile publishers can help not just by working out electronic lending arrangements with libraries–directly or through distributors–but also by getting the books into e-editions from the start. Except for pirated versions, you can’t find the new Potter online.

Given the fiscal woes of many library systems–even amid record demand for their services in many cases–it will be increasingly irresponsible forAmerica’s library system not to use a TeleRead-style approach. Ideally acquistions at the national level could add to the efficiencies that the e-book medium offers from the start. At the same time, local systems would still be free to make independent deals with publishers.

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Online piracy of e-books is not yet causing a major dent in the profits of publishers, but it could eventually–as book-reading technology improves. Along with the rest of the e-book biz, it’s growing. For a preview of the future, see Welcome to the worldwide web of on-line book piracy, from newindpress.com in South India. An excerpt:

The seven books of Frank Herbert’s science fiction series Dune, Michael Crichton’s out-of-print Andromeda Strain and My view of the Flat Universe, an unreleased lecture of physicist Stephen Hawking, which Hawking delivered to select students at Gonville and Caius College, are only few of the reading materials that Sudharshan Venkatesh, an engineering graduate preparing for his MBA here, has got for free from the Internet, besides all his course material.

‘‘I read off the monitor all the time. I’ve read Crichton’s Timeline four times on my computer,’’ Venkatesh says, adding that he has no problem sitting up and staring at the monitor. He has good reasons for this also – one, there’s nothing except Tamil music that he has not found via the peer-to-peer file sharing services he uses and two, it saves him lots of money (Recently, he downloaded a 10 MB Java tutorial that saved him Rs 1,400).

Whether these have been legally put on the Internet or not is not of concern to him and his ilk. It’s all about generosity and sharing and nothing else matters, they hold. One user spends in buying and scanning the original text and uploads it on a public or niche site and then it’s free for all. Especially via software like kazaa, morpheus and grokster.

How to fight online piracy? Intrusive DRM and other forms of electronic protection are hardly a panacea, given the ease of scanning paper editions, which, in the case of best-sellers, will be worth the while. Far more good could happen through a TeleRead-style library model, which would reduce the incentive for ripping off writers and publishers–while awarding them payments based on the number of accesses.

Meanwhile, The InfamousJ’s Blog has sensible advice for big publishers in the here and now:

If you don’t want there to be internet trade in particular materials, don’t release it in only some countries and not others. Furthermore, don’t release it in only some languages and not others.

If you are going to hype a book like Harry Potter and Whatever He is Up to Now to the point that you have thousands of fans lined up to get a copy when they go on sale around the world, do not be surprised that the folks who you left out in Spain and Portugal go immediatley running to their computers to try and get a lead on where they can find a copy in their language so they, like their British neighbors to the north, can shell out $30.00 equivalent.

And if you have the excuse that there wasn’t enough time to translate and proof a book into spanish [or whatever other language] in time for the release date, I’d just like to remind you that there are eBrarians out there who can put out a translated and fully proofed text within a week of its appearance on the market.

If nothing else, consider the Harry Potter translation effort that arose out of nowhere in Germany. As already suggested in this TeleBlog, perhaps there’s a way publishers could tap the enthusiasm of fans in smaller markets–and turn a nice buck while interest in a best-seller was peaking. The old international borders just don’t count as much in the Net era, and the pirates know it. Just when will the publishers catch on?

(Newindpress.com article found via eBookAd. InfamousJ via Feedster.)

By David Rothman

While I loathe Adobe PDF for e-books, I love Planet PDF, an independent Web site devoted to the format. If I were Adobe, I’d fire the whole PR department and replace ‘em with the Planet’s chief inhabitants.

In character, Planet Editor Kurt Foss just emailed me the following:

Thanks for the recent Teleread references to several of our recent news items at Planet PDF. Wanted to let you know that I’ve long shared your disgust over the way some eBook publishers have chosen to apply permissions restrictions to public domain books.If you’d like a version of Huck Finn in PDF–but not secured with the Adobe Content Server, and thus no such restrictions–we have been building up a collection of freebies on our site.

The other 35 unencumbered books range from A Tale of Two Cities to The Red Badge of Courage and The Time Machine.

I sampled The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and found that the crew at Planet PDF had done a beautiful job. Mark Twain, aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who mastered the art of printing and who as a gung-ho typewriter user was a 19th-century gadget freak, would have been pleased.

Granted, I myself would prefer an ASCII version, which looks great when viewed in the customized format for which I’ve set up the Tiny eBook Reader program. A Zip file, digestible by Tiny Reader, comes in at 221K (578K uncompressed), compared to 880K for the untagged Adobe version from the Planet (for desktops) and 1.3MB for the tagged version (for PDAs).

Just the same, I commend Planet PDF for doing better than the control-minded greedsters at Adobe and caring about the availability of public domain classics without DRM restrictions. Can a book be like a human? Then let us remember one of Tom Sawyer’s lines in Huck Finn, spoken about “Nigger Jim”: “Turn him loose! he ain’t no slave; he’s as free as any cretur that walks this earth!”

Interesting but hardly surprising detail: Planet PDF is based in Australia.

Update, August 3: Kurt has emailed me: “Just a point of interest: the bulk of the Planet PDF staff is indeed based in Melbourne, Australia; but I am based in the US (Madison, WI), and most editorial content is generated by me. The eBooks are, however, produced in Melbourne by my colleague Richard Crocker. So Rich deserves all the credit regarding our growing eBooks collection. I’m actually in Melbourne right now and for the next couple weeks.”

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Japan’s e-book market reached a billion yen last year and is expanding by 40-60 percent a year, according to the 160-page “eBook business survey report for 2003″ from Impress Corp. A billion yen is $8 million. In the States in January 2003, net sales of e-books were $3.3 million as reported by the Association of Amerian Publishers.

Reminder to e-book publishers and retailers: Help the industry by participating in the statistics program of the Open eBook Forum. You don’t have to be a member. Current deadline is July 31, with results expected by September 15.

(Japanese stats from Kyodo News, via Pocket PC eBooks Watch.)

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Australia isn’t just a country with more sensible copyright terms than those in the States. It’s also a hotspot for Project Gutenberg. Michael Hart, PG’s founder, just sent out the item below to volunteers.

Today Project Gutenberg of Australia released their 250th eBook, and a couple more, 8 days before they complete their second year. Australia is a country big on volunteerism, but doesn’t even rank in the top 50 countries in population. . .Amazing!!!

If we could just get something like Project Gutenberg of Australia started in just 40 of the 240 countries of the world, they would produce 10,000 eBooks in just their first two years!!! We would love the opportunity to do eBooks from more cultures and more languages!!! We currently have eBooks in ~20 languages, and would love to add at least one new language every year! Huge Congratulations to PG of Oz and all who helped them!!!!!!!Many Many Thanks!!!

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So what anti-reader tricks might the big software companies try to pull off in the future? Just what DRM schemes might they use to help businesses gouge readers or invade their privacy? A nasty omen may be here already in the form of eBook Pro Viewer, a product mentioned earlier this year by Web Advantage:

Another, even more restrictive DRM solutions provider is eBook Pro Viewer. The combination of their software and site administration gives you the power to control such things as activating or de-activating copies of your ebook, limiting the number of times users can view it, the copying and pasting of your content, enabling/disabling the printing of your ebook, and exactly what personal information you require from your customers in order for them to even gain access to your content. Furthermore, a reader may only access the file on the computer to which it’s originally downloaded.

Is eBook Pro Viewer really as awful as that? Indeed so–based on what I saw on the home page:

A first-time visitor to your web site might not be ready to buy when they read your salesletter or product information… but when they download and register your FREE eBook you will automatically be sent ALL of their personal information!

(All eBooks compiled using eBook Pro must be “registered” before they can be opened. I will explain this in greater detail shortly.)

This means that you can follow up with these potential customers time and time again… and all the while they have your product information installed on their computer!

Do not underestimate the power of this! These are your best potential customers! They could not be any more targeted. Think about it–not only did they take the time to visit your web site, they actually downloaded and read your eBook! This creates credibility and builds a relationship that will make selling to them in the future much easier!

Is DRM potentially a spammer’s best friend and perhaps a blackmailer’s, too, if the product is sexual? You bet. While eBookPro may make pious noises, you know what those guys are really thinking about the spam market. I already can anticipate the excuses, “So what’s wrong with e-mailing our readers if they already said they want information?”

eBookPro is a tiny little outfit. But one wonders if this operation will serve in effect as a stalkinghorse for larger companies, especially now that the Federal Trade Commission is cracking down on phone spams and Corporate America is looking for alternatives. “Larger companies” just might include book publishers.

Yes, I can see some roles for DRM. But isn’t there such a thing as overdoing it? Beyond the spam potential here, do we really want pay-per-read and corporate snooping at such a microscopic level? Instead of just worrying about Total Information Awareness-style threats, as essential as the alarums happen to be, librarians and civil libertarians should also be worrying about the privacy threat from spyware-enabled software for e-books.

The term “Big Brother,” by the way, fits well here even if restricted to governments. I suspect we may be talking in the future about sales of e-bookware to publishers in totalitarian lands, not just snoopy pubishers and marketers at home. Orwellian dictators almost surely will love products like eBook Pro Viewer, given the chance to monitor their citizens’ reading habits. North Korea’s president has already released his autobiography in Adobe format (presumably without copying restrictions). In the future, should relations improve with the States, don’t be surprised if certain sellers of e-book-ware companies swoop in to make a buck.

Of course, I’d welcome Microsoft and Adobe proving me wrong. Will they go on record as refusing to sell any spywarish products to publishers in totalitarian countries? Or will they be to modern dictators what IBM was to the Third Reich? “It’s very important to have a very high regard for ethics in business and keeping integrity in business,” Adobe Chairman John Warnock has said. “It’s very easy to slip down a very slippery slope and make bad decisions that will do somebody in.” Isn’t it time for Warnock to walk the walk–especially when a “do in” of the North Korean ilk could mean a bullet, not just a shafted customer or supplier? Just as importantly, I would welcome Adobe and the others saying flatly, “We’ll never sell a product as obnoxious as eBook Pro’s–not to nondictators, either.”

Meanwhile we can thank our Republicrats for the DRM horrors from Adobe, Microsoft and the like. Remember, as shown by security weaknesses and the Adobe-instigated prosecution of a Russian encryption expert, the former company seems far more comfortable investing in DMCA-oriented lawyers than in programmers. Washington gave us this delightful situation and others by way of the DMCA and similar atrocities against the commonweal. Yoo-hoo, Congressman Conyers? Next time you correctly warn about oppression of minorities, shouldn’t you also remember the new tools that the Conyers-cosponsored DMCA handed the bad guys for future use?

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What good will Microsoft’s free e-books do if you install Reader 2.2.2 and then can’t even read your existing collection? Only a minority of users will suffer. But before upgrading, it’s best to check first with the maker of your PDA. The owner of a Viewsonic Pocket PC V37 has written:

Now, when I try to open a book, Reader just hangs with the rotating pie “wait” symbol.

This device is running Pocket PC 2002 and Reader was preinstalled in ROM…Now I can’t use this device to read MS e-books at all.

Marc Zimmermann, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Reader questions, is looking into the issue.

Unrelated Microsoft tip: Check out some freeware to get the most out of Microsoft’s ClearType capabilities for your Pocket PC. But here, too, be careful. Who knows what will happen with the new operating system?

(Reader and ClearType items found via Pocket PC eBooks Watch.)

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“Far Eastern Economic Review Malaysian correspondent S. Jayasankaran said the sale of electronic versions of books through the Internet had in fact pushed sales of printed books in places like the United States. ‘I would think it is impossible for the Internet to replace a book,’ he said.” – The Star Online, Malaysia.

The TeleRead take: Wrong! Granted, we are talking about evolution, not the immediate death of p-books, which I hope will always be around in limited form–just like horse-and-buggy rides in places such as Central Park. Still, Jayasankaran is extrapolating from present technology rather than looking ahead to popularization of, say, E Ink. I doubt he even knows that it exists–and that e-books with flippable pages won’t be that different from the conventional variety. Deane Barker once felt like Jayasankaran, but now is of a different mind:

Prompted by Microsoft’s generosity, I’ve started reading e-books, and I think I’m addicted. I read a book last year called “The Social Life of Information” which put forth all sorts of reasons why e-books weren’t going to work. I agreed with it then, but after actually trying it, I’m hooked.

I started out with Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything.” I read it in Microsoft Reader, mostly sitting on the couch with my trusty Toshiba Satellite in my lap. I’d even take my computer to bed, resting it on my chest. It was much more natural than you’d think. After a few pages, I mentally slipped into the book just as if it was a hardcover. Before I knew it, 600 pages had zipped by. (Phenomenal book, by the way.)

Reading a book on a laptop is much, much more natural than I imagined for one important reason: a laptop sits up by itself. You don’t have to hold it like you hold a book. On the couch, I’d slouch down with the laptop out on my knees, one arm holding a drink, and the other arm draped over a cushion. Every once in a while, I’d reach out and hit the space bar to “turn” the page. It was almost… luxurious.

I’ve gotten in the habit of reading over breakfast. I’ll sit the laptop on the counter, eat a bowl of cereal, and stop only to turn the page. When I’m done for the moment, I just close the laptop and it suspends itself until I “open” the book again. Because of this, my supposed need for an e-book reader or a Tablet PC has evaporated. Neither of those would keep themselves upright like my Toshiba.

I myself find Tiny Reader vastly superior to Microsoft Reader or Adobe Reader for my purposes–and, of course, I believe that a love of DRM and Passport, not a love of literature, led Microsoft to come up with The Offer. Too, for me at least, a tablet computer or PDA is much better for e-books than a laptop is. Still, Deane Barker’s heart is in the right place, and who knows, maybe S. Jayasankaran will someday catch up.

Still more on the joys of e-books: The Iron Monkey blog comes up with its own favorites–including the high-res Sony Clie. Jenny Levine also uses a Clie for e-book reading, although actually I believe she owns an earlier model.

Meanwhile a progress report on An Autobiography, by Anthony Trollope, as read via Project Gutenberg: Again and again he alludes to the mediocrity of his youth. With exaggeration? I don’t know. But given all the reading he did to catch up as an adult, his autobiography serves as a great argument for e-books, especially as a medium for the classics.

Of course, I suspect that Trollope had easier access to them than many people in 20th-century America do to the best p-books. Another part of the case against Jayasankaran? Rather than simply replacing p-books, the “e” variety can reach people without conventional alternatives. Amazon.com is no replacement for Gutenberg (for classics) or the proposed TeleRead (for classics and contemporary books). Gutenberg offers the ultimate in browsability. You can instantly take a chance on a book–and on being drawn in–without any cash transaction. Priceless.

(Central Park photo via ArtToday.)