TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for August, 2003

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“An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When we wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.” – Ambrose Bierce’s definition of a politician, from The Devil’s Dictionary.

The TeleRead take: Applicable to the copyright debate? Sorry, couldn’t resist.

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MIT’s free courses are a hit with geeks–some as far off as Ho Chi Min City, according to a recent Wired article.

Lam Vi Quoc negotiates his scooter through Ho Chi Minh City’s relentless stream of pedal traffic and hangs a right down a crowded alley. He climbs the steep wooden stairs of the tiny house he shares with nine family members, passing by his mother, who is stooped on the floor of the second level preparing lunch. He ascends another set of even steeper steps to the third level and settles on a stool at a small desk, pushing aside the rolled-up mat he sleeps on with one of his brothers. To the smell of a chicken roasting on a grill in the alley and the clang of the next-door neighbor’s metalworking operation, Lam turns on his Pentium 4 PC, and soon the screen displays Lecture 2 of Laboratory in Software Engineering, a course taught each semester on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Here,” he says, pointing at the screen. “This is where I got the idea to use decoupling as a way of integrating two programs.”

Earlier I suggested that publishers offer e-books at discounts to people in developing countries. MIT, however, is making online versions of 2,000 courses free via the Net–to everyone, no matter where they live. Perhaps publishers can try this with at least older books. O’Reilly, in fact, is experimenting with accelerated release of books into the public domain without geographical restrictions.

Good efforts. Now imagine the benefits of genuine national digital libraries in the TeleRead vein in the States and even developing countries–with provisions for compensation for writers and publishers of new books.

(Wired piece spotted via Boing Boing.)

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Big deal. As of this writing, Microsoft is offering Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as part of the campaign to bribe you into using a Reader program with stronger DRM. An unencumbered Leaves is free, however, at Project Gutenberg. Just click here.

You can even download Leaves in Microsoft Reader format, without payment or DRM complications, from one of Abacci eBooks‘ convenient links to the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center.

And meanwhile a few apropos lines from Leaves…

Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking,To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning,Tickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never once going,Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment    receiving,A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming.

Perhaps Bill Gates can digest the above when he’s not reading one of his several early copies of The Great Gatsby in his $50-million mansion–yes, his so-called favorite novel that he refuses to buy for the Net as part of his electronic Carnegie act.

Additional thoughts–while we’re on the subject of commercial versions of public domain classics: Commercial publishers indeed add value by including modern introductions to public domain works. But in the electronic medium the intros should be apart from the books themselves.

Idea: Why not publish the classics as free e-books and make the money from the introductions offered separately–texts that could be far more in-depth than the present intros?

That way, publishers would be offering true value and deserve every penny.

Publishers can also add value through editions that are more accurate than previous ones, in which case it would also seem fine to charge. But even then, publishers should try to decouple introductions from the public material itself–for those readers who want this, at least.

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Just what would Henry Adams have thought about the copyright controversy–to be exact, copyright’s sometimes-harmful effect on the spread of uppity ideas or muck about politicians and bureaucrats? Here’s a little clue from The Education of Henry Adams, where he recalled his struggle to place an important business-and-political expose:

…Any expression in an English review attracted ten times the attention in America that the same article would attract in The North American. Habitually the American dailies reprinted such articles in full. Adams wanted to escape the terrors of copyright, his highest ambition was to be pirated and advertised free of charge, since in any case, his pay was nothing.

Methinks Adams might have heartily approved of Creative Commons. While I’m pro-copyright, and while writers need to be paid for work on which they depend for their livelihoods, there should also be provisions for situations such as Adams’ when he was writing about the conspiracy of Jay Gould and Jim Fisk to take over the gold market.

How I empathize with Adams in his eagerness to communicate heart-felt ideas and subversive information–for free, if need be. In most cases, our media monopolies aren’t exactly panging for detailed looks at copyright gouges and the related campaign finances of Hollywood-owned politicians. As far as I know, the Detroit papers never picked up my little TeleBlog item about the entertainment industry’s $49,859 investment in Detroit Rep. John Conyers for the 2002 election cycle–which I mentioned in the context of the bill he cosponsored to provide a possible $250K penalty or five years in prison for sharing a single file. I even phoned a Washington political writer for the Detroit News and gave her the email address of a nationally recognized legal expert at Wayne State.

Oh, well. This is why people blog without financial rewards–and why we need to protect fair use, pre-authorized reproduction in noncommercial situations, and other concepts that go along with “free” in both the economic and political senses of the word.

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Deliberately or accidentally, AOL is blocking links from LiveJournal, according to a Slashdot post.

Hmm. Doesn’t the parent company, AOL Time Warner, do a little book publishing? Just what will this mean for the future when–at least in theory–books will be able to easily and reliably link to each other? Will AOL and other large conglomerates discriminate against competitors? Another argument for a TeleRead-style library.

Even if the AOL block is accidental–and for the moment I’ll be skeptical that it is–this shows how corporate priorities can differ from those associated with the general good. The problem should have been fixed immediately.

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Here’s a heretical idea, which I’ve expressed before. What if publishers of e-books and other providers of intellectual property charged lower prices in countries where standards of living were dramatically lower than here in the States?

I don’t think profits would suffer that much. In fact, the reverse would happen. People in Swaziland (flag shown above) or Bangladesh would grow more accustomed to the publishers’ wares and keep buying them as incomes rose–perhaps eventually reaching the point where prices could be the same as in the States. With developing countries in mind, I’ve long advocated a global network of national digital libraries, the infrastructure for which the U.S. could help create. They of course would also nurture indigenous writers and publishers, not just serve as conduits for American best-sellers. Crazy? Not quite. Reuters reports from Geneva:

An African plea to fellow World Trade Organization nations seemed to have been heard on Friday, with envoys seeing overwhelming support for a deal to let poor states import life-saving drugs against AIDS and other scourges.

Granted, a break on, say, e-textbooks prices won’t count as much as a break on AIDS drugs, but the same basic concept, to one extent or another, ought to apply.

I can hear the usual arguments–that e-books are advanced technology, too expensive and so on. But that’s going to change. Meanwhile look at the proliferation of cell phones in many developing countries. They have not reached the Los Angeles level, of course, but you get the point. So isn’t it possible that without other alternatives, some phone could eventually be used for reading e-books as affordable technology improves, complete with somewhat larger screens? To your left you can see Tiny Reader in action in its cell phone incarnation. We’re not talking science fiction here.

Simply put, we should look ahead–given the power of knowledge to help raise living standards, including those in the public health area.

Meanwhile, if any book publishers or database providers are offering discount rates for developing countries–and some just might be a little heretical on this issue already–I’d love to hear how those arrangements are working out.

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Color e-ink for electronic books–could it end up as a practical reality far ahead of time?

A New York Times article this week discusses Magink Display Technologies mainly in the context of billboards. But the impression also arises that E Ink and rivals just might have some serious competition breathing down their necks in a varietary of additional areas, too, including e-books and home entertainment products. From the Times:

By creating a paste made of tiny helix-shaped particles that can be minutely manipulated with electric charges to reflect light in highly specific ways, Magink can produce surfaces that look like paper but behave like electronic screens, rendering high-resolution, full-color images without ink–or, as Magink executives like to refer to the process, with digital ink.

Ran Poliakine, chief executive of Magink, said the idea was to create visually compelling ads that could be replaced frequently – perhaps hourly, based on consumer response – and could be controlled remotely, all with far less energy and at a far lower cost than a video billboard…

“Now, he added, his three-year-old company is also studying ways to expand the application of its core technology to personal electronics, including cellular telephones, cameras, hand-held computers and general video displays for laptops and televisions…

Both Gyricon and E Ink products are monochrome, meaning that text and images can be shown in black and white, or two contrasting colors like blue and gray. Spokesmen for both companies said they were conducting research on various approaches to bringing more color to future products.

But so far Magink is claiming the lead in bringing full-color digital ink out of the laboratory.

So what happens when e-books appear with flippable pages and even inexpensive color that will be far cheaper than the color in paper books? That’ll be yet another blow to the Luddites whose idea of an e-book is always five years behind.

By David Rothman

“If you write and publish eBooks, sooner or later you will probably be faced with a dilemma–should you create your eBooks as .exe files or .pdf files?” e-booker Michael Southon asked last year.

But, look, isn’t it possible you should not use either format?

As even some PDF boosters will admit, typical readers may find it difficult to get to the customization features to adjust the on-screen appearance of the text to their liking. Plus, PDF documents can be slow going on some PDAs, assuming that they have the capability to use the format in the first place. PDF, if you must use it, is better suited for desktops and printed-out books.

EXE is worse. It won’t work on Macs and Linux machines and certain others. What’s more, especially in this era of viruses, the last thing you want to do is scare off readers. Far better to use nonthreatening standard formats like TXT and HTML or (without Digital Rights Management) PDF and other proprietary formats if your heart is really set on them.

Interestingly, in Southon’s case, we’re not talking solely about real books. Judging from his Ezine Writer home page, many in his audience are more into books as marketing vehicles than into books as books. (I’d just hope that the EXE books don’t include spyware. No accusations against Southon himself–I’m just wondering about his customers.)

Still, since these distinctions blur in the minds of many readers and even many small publishers of “real” books, I’ll take his column seriously and warn people of the weaknesses of both EXE and PDF.

Of course, while we’re on the topic of nonbooks disguised as books, I’m reminded of one advantage of a TeleRead-style library model. The default settings in library catalogues could steer people away from nonbooks of the kind that Southon is apparently teaching some readers to write for their multilevel marketing schemes.

A lengthly aside–away from e-books: Not to be down on Southon about everything. Toward the bottom of a column last year, he told readers of a gem of a way of dealing with spam from China.

“The Chinese government,” Southon wrote, “recently ordered all ISPs in China to start monitoring email for subversive phrases. This anti-spammer replies to Chinese spam with a message that includes subversive phrases, such as ‘weapons and ammunition’, ‘Falung Gong’ and ‘Free Tibet’.” Alas, Southon suggested avoiding this technique since it could result in spammer being sent to labor camps.

I myself doubt that would happen–even the most zealous government officials would understand what was going on. But if nothing else, the officials and Chinese ISPs would be POed at the spammers for wasting the time of the People’s Republic and hard-working techies, and then China might take the spam problem more seriously.

So next time a Chinese spam sneaks past SpamKiller, I’ll do the weapons-and-ammo act for sure.

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If you want your computer to read aloud to you, a forthcoming spec from an Open eBook Forum working group may help you in the future–by making it easier to move around in the e-book you’re listening to.

The spec, scheduled to appear sometime in 2004, will also allow your e-book to link precisely to material in another e-book.

“First of all, we are currently planning to greatly improve the representation of the navigational structure of e-book documents,” Jon Noring, acting vice chair of the OeBF’s Publication Structure Working Group, tells me about the navigational capabilities of Version 2.0.

“Better navigational structure will benefit both visual readers and those listening via text-to-speech,” he says.

“An OEBPS Reading System which fully employs the advanced navigational features we currently envision will allow the end-user to navigate through the e-book in very advanced ways that are difficult to do in the paper realm. It will be much more than just a stodgy, linear table of contents.”

Much of the improved navigational capability will likely be inspired by the ‘Navigation Control’ component of the Digital Talking Book (DTBook) standard, developed by the accessibility community.

“I can even foresee that speech-recognition will be built into some OEBPS Reading Systems and the voice commands of the reader will interface with the navigational structure of the e-book to allow the reader, by voice, the ability to move anywhere in the e-book,” Jon says.

“This will happen in very powerful and intelligent ways, at least for those Publications where the publisher fully takes advantage of the new navigational features.”

In addition, the new spec is planned to make it easier to link precisely from one e-book to another e-book. This could help pave the way for works of nonfiction to link to specific paragraphs within each other–making e-books a more serious medium.

Plus, Version 2.0 may improve upon fallbacks, so OEBPS Publications will more easily “scale-down” to older, less powerful reading devices. So even in the future an OEBPS 2.0 Publication will have an even wider range of viewability on present-day and future devices.

“The improved fallback mechanisms will make OEBPS even friendlier in incorporating advanced markup such as MathML and SVG,” Jon says, “which I personally believe is necessary for OEBPS to become truly universal in digitally representing books.”

Besides better navigation, inter-publication linking capability, and improved fallback mechanisms, an important final goal of PS 2.0 development is to put the spec on firmer ground so forward and backward compatibility is achieved for future versions of the specification–both on the publication and reading-system sides.

“That means architecturing the specification to allow this,” Jon says. “In reality, we probably will not achieve complete and perfect two-way compatibility between future spec versions and associated Reading Systems–probably no one can. But we’ll do our best to get most of the way there.”

Currently publishers are using the spec only as an exchange standard for moving text back and forth between different formats, as opposed to being an actual distribution format standard at the consumer level.

The hope of many e-book boosters is that the OeBF Publication Structure will become an official distribution standard and will then allow files to be displayed on all machines, ranging from desktops to PDAs and dedicated e-book readers–just as CDs and video tapes use standard formats with ability to work on a large range of playback devices.

Noting the usual caveat in standards work, Jon says: “Of course, the final version of OEBPS 2.0 may end up being different than currently envisioned. So the new planned features may not appear or may be substantially different, and there could also be other changes and additions. But what I’ve discussed is a glimpse into our current development ‘road map.’”

For the full annual report of the Publication Structure Working Group, as well as other reports from working groups, visit the presentations section of the OeBF site.

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“‘At Tamuning Elementary, our library is not well supplied and private school libraries are probably better equipped,’ Duenas said. ‘They don’t give so much to us because they know their kids are taken care of, and our kids are lacking books and stuff.’” – Guam Pacific Daily News article on the education of politicians’ children vs. the schooling of ordinary citizens’.

The TeleRead take: Ah, the info gap at the local level! Same idea applies to national digital libraries. Many in the elite don’t care; the plebes do, or at least should.

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You may already know of the risks of upgrading to the new version of Microsoft Reader.

If you do want to go ahead to enjoy the e-book freebies, however, you can check out tips from Jim Karpen, a columnist with Pocket PC Magazine. Actually you’ll find the real meat in an accompanying forum.

Do keep in mind the purpose of the “free” e-books–not to promote literature but to encourage you to switch to a version of Reader with “improved” Digital Rights Management.

Good to see Karpen remind people of no-strings alternatives to Microsoft-style freebies–to be exact, the Abacci eBooks site with free classics in .lit format, Memoware, and uBook, a free reader that works with ASCII, HTML and other popular formats for public domain titles.

By David Rothman

The spiffy machine to the left was not dreamed up in Peoria.

Where? Try China. And we’re talking about sophisticated technological development–not merely routine manufacturing.

Mainland China just could be the next E-Book Central, especially considering Washington’s less-than-full enthusiasm about national digital libraries and nonmilitary high-tech R&D in general.

Zillions of e-books in the hands of ordinary Chinese? This is more of a “why not” than “why.”

With millions of students to educate, China must worry more than the rest of the world about the costs of printed textbooks.

And given all the complexities of reproducing Chinese characters, the electronic medium will make sense.

So it’s no surprise that China’s central planners and businesses are greenlighting e-books in a big way–and that the latter are working on projects with Taiwan (long a leader in e-books and other portable technology).

The China Digital Library Project will spend the equivalent of more than $137 million dollars over five years. The National Library of China now has text, audio-visual or image versions of almost 200,000 books, according to Zhang Yanbo, the NLC’s vice director.

And it would seem very likely that many of the NLC’s items will reach Chinese homes, not just library computers. Consider the number of Chinese Net users–more than 56 million according to a study from last year. That’s just a tiny fraction of the Chinese population; imagine what happens when both e-books and the Net go mainstream in China.

Meanwhile hardware makers are gearing up.

–Many dedicated e-book devices from companies such as Taiwan’s Argosy Research, as noted this past spring in the TeleBlog, are going on sale or about to. “Using e-books in schools with local government cooperation can resolve copyright issues and create volume demand,” Argosy vice president George Wang was quoted in Global Sources. TeleRead territory for sure!

–A $99 e-book device from Argosy Research–reviewed in depth by Blackmask–is on the way. Several hundred thousand may be sold next year. The Argosy machine will be using technology from China’s CultureCom, which itself is producing the Easyread e-book reader shown at the start of this TeleBlog item.

–These machines are benefitting from the efforts of Professor Chu Bong Foo to enable the easier entry of Chinese characters into computers. In a related vein, CultureCom, his company, says a $25 chip can generate “approximately 32,000 Chinese characters in several fonts and in various sizes, using no more than 256KB of memory (as opposed to 20 to 30GB of memory needed for existing coding systems, not available in a single chip).”

–A Chinese company will use AMD chips in a Student PC webpad designed mainly with e-books in mind.

This is interesting trade-magazinish news, but the true consequences could be far greater. Remember, the e-libraries and the mushrooming number of users with advanced hardware will build on each other. Nice, well-deserved synergy. Then think about what it all means internationally. As one Chinese librarian has noted in The Development of the China Digital Library, the Chinese want to use e-libraries to share knowledge with other countries, and not just those with large Chinese populations:

Besides Chinese language, there are many other languages online…China, with its rich culture of 5000 years, is one of the largest countries in the world. We have the duty to do our best to share our information resources with the world and make the world we live in smaller and smaller.

That’s something for Washington to consider. Could it be that the Chinese will achieve greater future success in international relations by not just investing in technology but by also reaching out with it to the rest of the world?

If nothing else, the more influential the Chinese grow in e-books, the less power could be enjoyed in Asia by the American-dominated Open eBook Forum–especially if it keeps ignoring such issues as the need for a nonproprietary consumer e-book format and the elimination of DRM gouges.

Perhaps the National Institute of Standards and Technology should take more of an interest in e-books as national and international resources–and consider more than the immediate interests of Adobe, Microsoft, PalmDigital Media and Overdrive, the biggest financial supporters of the OeBF.

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Again and we’ve railed against pricey and oppressive Digital Rights Management schemes based on proprietary tech. Yes, an improved nonproprietary variety would help. But meanwhile the e-book industry has a big problem.

Via the eBook Community List, one enraged reader wrote about DRM: “I can’t afford it. I live entirely on Social Security. I can’t pay the extra price for inconvenienced books. Unless it’s something I really want and can’t get any other way. And I consider waiting a year or two or three to be another way.”

In response, Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, came up with a laundry list of DRM’s negatives

1. You can’t read the material in your favorite reader.

2. You can’t search the material in your favorite search program.

3. You can’t try various other programs to see what works best.

4. There have been hellish problems with migrating to new hardware.

5. Factory upgrades have turned out to be be factory downgrades!!!

These are only a handful of the problems when someone forces you into to any proprietary monopolistic system of rights protection.

What about consumer rights?

Hello, Open eBook Forum? Time to address these questions and lower the cost–and increase the ease–of e-reading?

Meanwhile, separately, Networker, another eBook Community list member, has written:

Judging from other messages, it would appear that the actual cost of DRM from Palm Digital Media is closer to 60+%. Because the DRM cost is a percentage, you can’t just add the percentage to the list price of the e-book and make it work. In fact, assuming [Blackmask publisher David Moynihan] wants to pay an author $.70 for each book, and keep $.30 for himself, at 60% for DRM he would have to charge $2.50 per book, a rather whopping price increase of 250%.

Here’s my suggestion. We all know that DRM is of absolutely no value to the consumer, and its value to the author/publisher is primarily psychological. So let’s make the author bear the cost of the DRM. Mr. Moynihan could simply say to his authors, “I will sell books at $1.00 each. If you want your book protected by PDM’s DRM I will pay you $.10 royalty per copy sold. If your book is in an open format I will pay you $.70 royalty per copy sold.” This way an author can decide for him/herself just what the value of the emotional security blanket really is.

Great idea! Some further thoughts from Networker:

Never purchase any e-book which is encumbered with DRM. Don’t use an e-book User Agent which requires, or even tolerates, any kind of DRM. Don’t use Micro$oft Reader, MobiPocket Reader, PalmReader, or iSilo Reader. There are lots of good alternatives to all of these products. Don’t support businesses which deal exclusively in DRMmed content. Do buy non-protected e-books from Blackmask, Fictionwise and Baen Books. Don’t buy products from Palm Digital Media or any other business that deals exclusively in DRM encumbered e-books. I don’t even buy paper books from Amazon.com anymore because they don’t deal in non-protected e-books.

Most importantly, share your opinions with those people around you that rely on you for advice. Be sure they know about all the great literature available from Project Gutenberg (especially our Australian bretheren) and the University of Virgnia eText Center…

Pehaps I’ll succumb, but I myself have yet to pay for a DRM-protected book. Freebies? Yes, I’ll download them. But I won’t pay.

As Networker has made clear, there are some interesting alternatives for foes of today’s DRM. Just wish there were more!

If you do want to read books in proprietary formats without DRM, by the way, keep in mind that Gutenberg in some cases may have them, and that the Virgnia etext center has a whole collection of books in Microsoft and Palm formats. Furthermore, be sure to check out public domain books at Memoware, which is rich in free Palm titles.

Close to Home Department: Alexandria, VA, where I live, escaped The Great Blackout, but sections of town, including mine, had their very own last night–during a thunderstorm. Out went the Gemstar 1100 readers, in this case his and hers. Carly and I curled up with each other and with Jane Austen and Henry Adams. As a Detroit News columnist has pointed out, you shouldn’t just prepare for emergencies with food and a full tank of gas. Keep that e-book reader charged and stocked with titles that you’d like to read but haven’t had time for.

Of course, this can happen more easily when you accustom yourself to nonDRMed books and don’t have to worry about gouges and budgeting. Get a memory card, stock up via public-domain sites and low-cost bookstores, and you’ll have books on hand to match your mood of the moment when the power goes kaput.

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Think that e-book formats are forever? Or that we should trust the private sector to archive books reliably? Especially when we don’t know which novel may be another late discovery like Melville’s Moby Dick? Then take a look at a little item just picked up on the Interesting People list. See if the parallel doesn’t apply to e-books. From the cdfreaks.com article mentioned on IP:

The Dutch PC-Active magazine has done an extensive CD-R quality test. For the test the magazine has taken a look at the readability of discs, thirty different CD-R brands, that were recorded twenty months ago. The results were quite shocking as a lot of the discs simply couldn’t be read anymore:

Roughly translated from Dutch:

The tests showed that a number of CD-Rs had become completely unreadable while others could only be read back partially. Data that was recorded 20 months ago had become unreadable. These included discs of well known and lesser known manufacturers.

It is presumed that CD-Rs are good for at least 10 years. Some manufacturers even claim that their CD-Rs will last up to a century. From our tests it’s concluded however that there is a lot of junk on the market. We came across CD-Rs that should never have been released to the market. It’s completely unacceptable that CD-Rs become unusable in less than two years…

I love the freedom of the better side of the capitalistic system and realize that many publishing houses do try to think in the long term. But reality, especially in the case of rickety little publishers, and certainly the software industry, as the Gemstar debacle shows, can be quite different. When it comes to archiving for the long term, libraries are the place to turn–and I don’t mean the corporate variety. Librarians with appropriate technology could constantly monitor the integrity of various mass-storage media and do transfers as needed. Not exactly a cost-effective operation for, say, Time Warner. We’re talking about economies of scale that a TeleRead-style approach could provide.

Similarly, when it comes to e-book formats, we need to grasp how ephemeral technology can be, even the kind that isn’t proprietary. Librarians, far better than profit-minded corporate types alone, can cope with the problem of changing formats. Even with a universal consumer format for e-books, some uncertainties will remain if we’re looking ahead for centuries rather than years or decades. The UCF will need to evolve. At least it would be just one format to keep up with, not a bunch of them.

Though library-friendly on the archiving and format issues, I won’t get carried away. As I’ve discovered first hand as a nonlibrarian, the library world can be rather insular and prone to a Not Invented Here syndrome. Librarians can hardly excel as archivists without their share of help from the R&D folks over on the private side, so libraries can prepare for new formats, media-durablity challenges and other techno-changes.

Meanwhile, for more on the CR-R-longevity issue, see a Slashdot thread.

Remember, this isn’t theoretical. Suppose you’re a publisher and just happen to store or release data on the wrong brand? Certain CDs billed as century-safe may appear to do just fine at the start–in fact, perhaps last much longer than two years–but then give up the ghost in the next two or three decades.

Additional thought: No matter how you stand on the copyright extension question, good archiving would be good business. New books could more be better researched and include links to the older ones. The value of e-books as a serious medium would go up.

TeleBlog update: I’m out of time and but hope to do the Chinese-library item tomorrow.

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For the second part of the Morse-Rothman dialogue as posted here, see the update at the bottom of Matt rolls his hoovers–with a few thoughts on TeleRead.

Later today, perhaps very soon: New ammo for supporters of a universal consumer format for e-books–plus discussion of a Chinese e-book library.

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Is Microsoft turning colleges and universities into vocational-education schools by spending lavishly to encourage the use of its proprietary software? The Washington Post reports:

Microsoft has lavished $500 million over the past five years on research and teaching projects at 1,000 schools, funding efforts by 6,000 academics in computer science, electrical engineering, linguistics, biology, mathematics, graphic arts, music and other fields.

Yes, some good could come out of the gifts. But consider what happened at one MIT event:

At the three-day, expenses-paid event, the professors stayed at the Hyatt Regency, dined with Microsoft chairman Bill Gates on tables decorated with fresh peach lilies, and took boat cruise on Lake Washington.

It was part academic conference, part networking event. It was also a unique promotional opportunity for Microsoft.

At a question-and-answer session between the academics and Gates, one professor asked the Microsoft founder about his views about the study of information technology, a part of computer science that emphasizes on how documents, spreadsheets and other data should be handled. What kinds of technologies should students majoring in this subject be taught?

Gates replied quickly and with a smile: “Microsoft Office.”

Is it just possible that Microsoft has a special agenda in mind–discouraging the growth of Linux and open source in general, in favor of its proprietary products? Talk about greenback-covered Trojan horses.

Keep in mind that Microsoft has almost alway been focused laser-like on its own direct interests, as shown by its campaign to discourage the World Intellectual Property Organization and governments everywhere from considering open source software too seriously. A hoped-for WIPO meeting on open source apparently won’t happen–perhaps in part due to Microsoft lobbying.

Will Microsoft end up dominating the e-book scene in the same way, through activities on a wide range of fronts, ranging from school donations to lobbying? If I were Palm or Adobe, I wouldn’t be too smug about e-book standards at the consumer level, given the ambition and mindset that they’re up against. Microsoft isn’t at all running at full throttle on the e-book front, but if it does, then we indeed could end up with a consumer e-book standard–Microsoft Reader. Just ask the boys at WordPerfect what happened when the word-procesing market grew too big for Microsoft to be laid back about it.

By David Rothman

A BBC story provides details on an already-announced prototype of an e-book reader from HP:

“We’ve been looking at the power of the book as a way of consuming information,” said Hewlett Packard’s Huw Robson.

“We’ve been using them for so long that we’re very comfortable with the idea of paging through something”.

To keep page turners happy, Mr Robson and his team have fitted the e-book with a small but powerful computer that animates a turning page when the reader is ready to move on.

The pages are turned by running a finger along one of the strips. Stroking the strip at different speeds allows the reader to speed read or casually browse the book.

The display can also be used to read broadsheet newspapers. The reader scans the page for something of interest and then uses the touch pads to zoom in on the story.

You can turn pages with the flick of a finger
Particular pages can also be assigned a bookmark or an electronic finger allows you to flick between two chapters immediately.

The TeleRead take: This HP device could be interesting if the display is as good as billed. On the other hand, at least some veteran readers of e-books may find the new page-turning wrinkles to be a distraction and prefer alternatives. The feature I’d most appreciate is a low price.