TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for October, 2003

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Will the NIH Syndrome apply? Harvard has just received a $600K grant from the MacArthur Foundation to continue fleshing out copyright scenarios. It’ll be interesting to see what if anything is said about a TeleRead-style national digital library system.

About the only time we’ve heard from a Berkman Center type–well, actually it was probably just a hanger-on instead–was when a blogger apparently from that circle took after TeleRead for relying on users for voluntary payments to copyright owners. Wrong, as he admitted later. Payments actually would be from a national digital library fund (a mix of public and private money) and reflect works’ popularity (although standards woud be in place to prevent “Make Money Fast” books from ripping off the national digitial library system). The guy also couldn’t understand the need to adjust the proposal as the technology changed, which it, ugh, has since the Gopher era. I at one point invited him to phone me, but that, of course, would never do for someone from such a rarified circle.

If TeleRead gets the standard Harvard treatment, I predict either a knock or, “Hey, we invented it”–just like the old Soviets or Chinese. This’ll be fun. In case you’re curious, the TeleRead proposal first appeared in print in 1992 in ComputerWorld and later was a chapter in Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier published in 1996 by the MIT Press/ASIS, as well as a 1996 op-ed in the Washington Post, as well as a column in U.S. News & World Report. Lately the Carnegie Reporter from the Carnegie Corporation of New York has published a favorable reference to TeleRead, in the Fall 2003 issue, calling the proposal “one of the most intriguing alternatives” to the existing business and legal models. Regardless, I predict that Harvard will minimize the idea or at the very least assiduously avoid contact with a grubby nonJD. Sorry for the skepticism, and I hope I’m wrong, but I can only go by the past.

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“U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher (D.-Va.), a longtime champion of fair use rights, said Thursday the Copyright Office’s ruling earlier this week denying consumers the right to make ‘fair use’ copies of digitally recorded material except in very narrowly defined cases, was a ‘misguided decision.’” – DC.Internet.com, via eBookAd.

The TeleRead take: The good news is that some corporate interests are in favor of Boucher’s proposal to mitigate the DMCA’s effects. The story says: “Boucher said the tech community now considers fair use rights to be ‘one of its highest priorities’ and pointed out that supporters of his legislation include Intel, Verizon, Philips Electronics North America Corp., Sun Microsystems, Gateway, the Consumer Electronics Association, Computer and Communications Industry Association, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Computer Research Association and a variety of trade associations representing technology companies. “

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“Just a week after Amazon.com introduced a tool that lets people search the entire text of many books it sells, the online retailer reported a boost in sales as a result of the feature.” – CNET.

The TeleRead take: Too early to say for sure. Also, it would be interesting to see what’s happening to individual titles such as reference books.

Update: An Amazon news release quotes customers, including one in Vancouver, Washington: “During the past weekend, I entered a search for a favorite author, Jean Pierre de Caussade, and was surprised to find that, instead of the usual thirteen listings I usually find, there were eighty-one listings. These listings included not only books authored by Caussade, but also books by other authors that reference him. I was able to access pages in these books that refer to Caussade. You could see all the pages on which his name appeared. I thought this was a wonderful innovation by Amazon.com. I was able to find three books, which I have already ordered, that I would not have found without this new searching capability.” Let’s hope that’s representative.

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Two for your money? – Via Tech Dirt.

Related: Dawn of the dual screen PDA, on CNET – Via eBookAd.

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“As of today, one of my country’s (Brazil’s) largest newspapers is totally dumping HTML in favor of PDF editions. According to their website, the HTML format ‘didn´t include important parts of the newspapers, such as graphics, images, stock quotes and classifieds.’” – A post to the Online-News list.

The TeleRead take: The message didn’t give the name of the paper. I certainly agree with the poster’s observation that “to completely dump HTML in favor of PDF is a little bit of overkill.” Actually a lot of it. Do newspapers really want to entrust their destiny to Adobe? No telling where the format is headed. Remember, it’s proprietary. Oh, and there are little issues such as easy, seamless linking. Is the wet dream of newspaperdom to destroy the Web? Regressive strategies like the Brazilian newspaper’s bring out the paranoid in most all of us who love the Net. Let’s hope such worries are unwarranted.

Further thoughts: Jon Noring writes: “Another option the Brazilian newspaper should have considered is to stick with HTML/XHTML for their online newspaper, and use SVG for the more complex layout requirements.

“SVG (Scaleable Vector Graphics) is an open standards, XML-based, W3C specification which replaces much of the rendering capabilities provided by PDF and Macromedia Flash. There now exist quite good browser plug-ins for displaying SVG markup–Adobe has one of the better ones. So, with SVG, one can have their cake, and eat it to. For an online newspaper, SVG makes a whole lot of sense, as it does for more complex ebooks.”

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Still wondering why we keep ranting about the DMCA? Check out Ed Foster’s post on Diebold’s campaign to hush up critics of its buggy electronic voting machines. The Copyfight blog aptly quoted Foster’s nifty rewrite of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of the speech, or of the press … except as needed to allow trademark and copyright holders complete power to control discussions about their brands.

Remember, Bill Clinton signed off on the DMCA. Does your silence, Governor Blogger, mean you may well do the same on similar bills? Same question for other Dem candidates. Is free speech advocate Bruce Lehman gonna be your IP Czar, too? And continue his actual attempted rewriting of Constitution? Oh, well, Dems, when it comes to media conglomerates, you’ll get what you deserve.

But back to Ed Foster. Also read what he said about Microsoft-style DRM.

Update, 10:06 a.m.: Copyfight points to links dissecting the less-than-perfect reporting of the DMCA ruling from the Copyright Office

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“…I think…Americans are dying for…someone who’ll listen to what they say, respond honestly and directly, and if he disagrees he’ll say why. I’ve heard him do that–I went to a fundraising party for him in Chicago a couple of months ago. The amazing thing about that was that I thought I’d go see a lot of my friends, and there were 500 people there and I didn’t know a single person. This is a movement.” – In These Times founder James Weinstein as quoted in Salon on Howard Dean.

The TeleRead take: OK, Governor Blogger, now show us that you have the guts to live up to the expectations of Weinstein. I’m skeptical. Howard Dean has used the Net to woo supporters, but after months and months, he has yet to denounce the DCMA and related horrors that threaten the medium and the First Amendment. The longer Dean waits, the less regard he seems to have for either. Like Wesley Clark’s campaign site, the Dean site leaves out mention of contact information for key advisors–and in fact doesn’t even list them by name. You really think the MPAA doesn’t know the main players? This is democracy in the best Lashmar tradition.

Memo to the League of Women Voters and the rest: Anyone care about the advisor issue? For all I know, Howard Dean’s think tank could be meeting daily in the Time Warner executive dining room. Same for advisors of Wesley Clark, my own favorite (at least he hasn’t had a chance to wimp out for as long on the DMCA and copyright-term extension). Whether the advisors are official or just a campaign Kitchen Cabinet, I want the full story. I know that the League proudly “encourages the informed and active participation of citizens in government” and “works to increase understanding of major public policy.” Time for some action on the I word in regard to the posting of advisors’ names? If nothing else, it would be fascinating to see how much overlap existed between the list of advisors and big campaign contributors.

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Google to its credit has so far rejected a merger proposal from Microsoft, but it would be nice if it said unequivocally that one won’t happen in the future, either. Just imagine–the world’s largest software monopoly controlling the Web’s largest search engine, with all those listings of uppity sites. Better back up your bookmark file more meaningfully than the Redmond goblins want you to be able to back up e-books in the .lit format.

Related: A Slashdot item, as well as To Place Ads, Google Searches For Best Bidders, in the Washington Post.

By Tom Peters

Big conglomerates would be able to claim some new rights even on public domain works–just by transmitting them. The bad guys have had the audacity to include that proposal in a new international treaty. Will the treaty enjoy the blessing of copyright ‘crats at the international level like Kamil Idris, pictured to the left (more on him below)? Don’t be surprised.

Maybe it’s time for a fresh term. You’ve heard of vanity laws like the DMCA–bought by and written for members of specific industries. How about “vanity treaty”? Yoo-hoo, John Dean and you other Presidential candidates? Guess you’re taking your usual snoozes.

Below is a warning from James Love at the Consumer Project on Technology, with italics added by us:

From November 3 to 5, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) will meet in Geneva to decide how to proceed on proposals for a new global intellectual property treaty. The proposed treaty concerns a system of ownership for material transmitted over wireless means such as television, radio and satellite, as well as wired communications over cable networks, and also over Internet computer networks.

This proposal expands or gives new rights to transmitters of information, even if they are not the creators of that information. Rights that are normally reserved to creators and performers would be afforded to organizations that merely transmit creations and performances–even if those works are in the public domain, or if those works’ authors wish to have the works distributed without restriction.

There are proposals to extend coverage to broadcast, cablecast, and webcasting technologies, and the treaty will be referred to here as the “casting” treaty…

Oh, well. This is DMCAism in action. All bytes must be owned and DRMed to turn the Multitudes into jailbait if they dislike corporately optimized theft.

I’d be curious to know how Kamil Idris, WIPO’s director general, stands on the treaty proposal. Is he siding with the bad guys? I do see more than a trace of greedster-speak in his statement below from the WIPO Web site:

In today’s economy, a country’s success is measured more and more by its possession and exploitation of such assets; and our increasingly interlinked world gives heightened importance and worth to inventive ideas, discoveries and artistic expression, particularly when they are turned into currencies of value through the use of the intellectual property system.”

So giving the big entertainment conglomerate even more rights will improve the planet? I went on to Idris’s book, Intellectual Property – A Power Tool for Economic Growth–which contains the following gem in Chapter 6:

The multinational recording companies are vitally concerned with the discovery, nurturing, development, exposure, and commercialization of new talent, new songwriters, new singers, new musicians, new groups , and new music. This process is ultimately their lifeblood, and one way they can secure their future is to keep a constant and large flow of new talent moving through their systems…

And letting the greedsters steal free access to the public domain is supposed to accomplish this? Oh, well. The Idris book is subversively free and, in this case, worth all of what you pay for it.

Adding to the fun, just consider where Kamil Idris comes from–Sudan. I ventured over to the Contemporary Africa Database and looked up his country under literature. I found these statistics:

Children’s Writers (0)
Editors (0)
Folklorists (0)
Novelists (4)
Playwrights (0)
Poets (3)
Screenwriters (0)
Other Literature (4)

Not exactly a place to be confused with Manhattan. But presumably Time Warner and the rest will pay big bucks to the locals to make up for the money Sudan spends in the future on U.S. entertainment transmitted through the Net. I mean, U.S. publishers and megachains are crying for Sudanese writers’ works, right?

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You already know: Presidential candidates’ Web sites excel in hiding contact info to reach influential advisors. Jack Valenti and crew have the open-Sesame information. You don’t. How to articulate the philosophy behind this not-so-accidental little omission on many a campaign site? Well, the protagonist in Our Friend the Charlatan, a novel that the British writer George Gissing published in 1901, does a preternatural job of expressing the elitist DC mindset that permeates the Website-creation philosophy of Dems and Republicans alike, even if they won’t fess up to it. Influenced by–wait, more or less plagiarizing from–an obsure French philosophical work, the title character says:

No true sociology could be established before the facts of biology were known, as the one results from the other. In both, the ruling principle is that of association, with the evolution of a directing power. An animal is an association of cells. Every association implies division of labour. Now, progress in organic development means the slow constitution of an organ–the brain–which shall direct the body. So in society–an association of individuals, with slow constitution of a directing organ, called the Government. The problem of civilisation is to establish government on scientific principles–to pick out the fit for rule–to distinguish between the Multitude and the Select, and at the same time to balance their working. It is nonsense to talk about Equality. Evolution is engaged in cephalising the political aggregate–as it did the aggregate of cells in the animal organism. It makes for the differentiation of the Select and of the Crowd–that is to say, towards Inequality.

Sure enough, the blowhard charlatan, Dyce Lashmar, runs for Parliament as a Liberal. Oh, to imagine the Web site he’d have done to con the grubby “Multitude.”

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation is one of our favorite groups. But how to amplify its voice and those of similar organizations? Several times we’ve called for the creation of a Digital Media Users Association. A little tidbit from The Register–on the disappointingly limited DMCA ruling from the U.S. Copyright Office–really makes the case in effect:

…both the original DMCA and the state-centric “super DMCAs” have sailed onto the statute books without adequate lobbying in DC, without the public being aware of the implications and, in the case of the super DMCAs, without the EFF even noticing.

The EFF renewed its call for “legislative reform” of the DMCA yesterday. But San Francisco, where the EFF is based, is a long way from the dogfights of Washington DC; the EFF lacks the funds or the philosophical inclination to fight a populist campaign that would remind Senators of their obligations; and key outreach staff are permanently absent on blogging duty.

With so many good folk keeping themselves so far from the battlefield, it’s hard to see how the next round of legislation is going to be anything but worse than what we have now. The ruthless entertainment industry, whose lobbyists effectively wrote the DMCA, have no such qualms.

Justifying EFF’s move from DC, a 1995 statement said: “We are now moving to California to get closer to a major center of our natural constituency–net-aware people–and further away from Washington Beltway-centric thinking. There is now a sizable contingent of Net-aware people and organizations in Washington–including most notably the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Progress and Freedom Foundation.” Still, isn’t it time for a populist, consumer-oriented group–reaching TV and DVD watchers in the Joe Beer Belly vein, not just Netfolks–to be formed as a megaphone for the white hats at the national and state levels? Net companies die if they don’t evolve. Time for the good guys to rethink their strategies and use a more populist and consumerist approach?

Sort of related: A Reuters story noting how feeble is the Copyright Office’s ruling on DMCA exemptions.

(Illustration via ArtToday.)

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Over at PalmDigitalMedia, Lee Fyock objects to an item we picked up earlier on the new Palm Reader Pro 2.2.9’s fix for the Tungsten T3. The post said, “The program was not originally designed to work with the Virtual Writing Area, and as a result it would not allow you to see the text correctly with the slider closed.” Lee writes:

You’re mixing up a couple of things. The Virtual Writing Area, actually called the Dynamic Input Area by PalmSource, is the Graffiti writing area that can slide up and down. Separately, the T3 has a hardware slider that exposes more screen to go from 320×320 to 320×480.

We assumed when we added support for the T3 a few months ago that everyone would read using the full screen, with the slider open. That turns out not to be the case, so the latest version of Palm Reader adjusts the page size when you move the slider open or closed.

The Dynamic Input Area is a separate thing. If you expose the input area, we don’t resize the page, because there’s no place on the book page to enter text. If you create a note or something, we automatically bring up the input area for you to use in writing the note.

OK, glad to see that PDM recognized its own mistake and responded accordingly. Now if we can only bring Lee and the other nice folks at PDM around on the need for a universal consumer format!

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Research Buzz has a great little mini-guide. Also see Search Engine Watch’s helpful tips–perhaps more accurately described as an overview–from contributor Gary Price.

Meanwhile the Seattle Times has run a piece quoting reference-book authors worried about readers cherry-picking the information most relevant to them. Over on the eBook Community list, a member muses: “Maybe TeleRead has (sorta) arrived.” Well, there’s a difference. TeleRead as a pubic-private partnership would have more sensitivity to the needs of readers, authors and publishers–as opposed just to shareholders–and could arrive at fair business models.

Amazon by contrast is a very smart but still profit-driven corporation looking out for Number One. It will do a Google and use e-books searches as bait for ads for everything from razors to routers. I regard Amazon as considerably more benign than Microsoft–Jeff Bezos is doing much of what I would in his place–but let’s remember why it exists.

Oh well, perhaps one day Amazon will be a TeleRead contractor just as GE is a Defense contractor. Better a smart contractor than a dumb one.

Memo to librarians: You could have been Amazon. TeleRead has been on the public record for years. If public libraries become buggy whips, don’t say you weren’t given a “how-to” years ago for building your own horseless carriage. Amusingly the usual gurus were saying search engines wouldn’t be powerful enough. No telling what excuses they’ll think up now–beyond “Amazon has beaten us to it.” Wait. Actually there are excuses. Read on.

Memo to Nichole’s Auxiliary Storage”: TeleRead offered specific library-related commentary from Day One on the Amazon fuss–and it wasn’t just a paragraph. The core of our concerns: “Then again, one wonders if the Amazon collection is using open standards and a nonproprietary approach, ideally XML-based–which is what a real library ought to do. If I were Amazon, I would lobby hard for a universal consumer format based on the standards that Microsoft promised in announcing the Open eBook Forum. Needless to say, I’ll be very grouchy if Amazon tries to push a dreckish proprietary standard on the world’s library systems.”

Those are the issues. Why, now, are librarians fixating on little details such as the idea of Amazon picking up indexes from books? Here Amazon is well on the way to making public libraries obsolete–unless librarians break out of their coma–and this is the best the profession can do? About Amazon’s new search capability, one librarian even commented in Nichole’s Auxiliary Storage: “It might allow location of something especially obscure, and it might do for idiots like me who hear about books they want to read but forget to write down title/author. But that’s about it, really. And that doesn’t strike me as earthshaking.” A little jealous of the commercial competition? Or just plain unimaginative?

I find her ‘tude to be pretty much in character for the profession. Librarians are deniers. One library blog even removed a link to TeleRead saying: “You have a great weblog, but I think it was a bit out of my league/genre. Not that you were getting many referrals from my little blog.” Am I POed? Not entirely This blogger is just reflecting the mindset of the profession.

The more I deal with librarians, the more I see them as preservers of the status quo, which, in terms of a national digital library, would be far, far better than a company driven by quarterly reports. But it is a problem in terms of winning librarians over to TeleRead to begin with. Although sounding revolutionary, TeleRead is really nothing more than an effort to preserve the Carnegie model of free libraries while fairly paying content creators. I’m actually rather grateful to Amazon for raising issues like the one discussed in the Seattle paper–a question that TeleRead could address through appropriate payment models for writers and publishers.

Perhaps part of the problem is that certain librarians and academics ape the private side and think of the immediate efficiency of the information system rather than long-term educational and social benefits that help distinguish 21st century America from medieval Europe.

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Americans public schools spent a mere $9.5 million on mobile gizmos out of $5.1 billion in tech spending in the 2001-2002 school year. But handheld makers, especially PalmOne, would like to change that in a big way, according to a CNET story.

The TeleRead take: Bigger screens would help plenty. Also it should be criminal in most cases to give PDAs to students–at least older ones–if the units lack keyboards.

But back to screens. Some children may fare better reading off tablets or, gasp, p-books, than handhelds. Here’s to education coming ahead of technology! I love reading off my Dell Axim, but my screen needs aren’t going to be the same as third graders’.

The positive: Imagine how much money the schools can save buying PDAs for every student when budgets prevent the purchase of alternatives. And if more computers in the school can help the cause of e-books in general and a TeleRead-style library in particular–well, that would be nice.

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“Infants, toddlers and preschoolers are spending far more time watching DVDs and clicking TV remote controls and computer mice than with books, according to a Kaiser Foundation study released yesterday. The effect of such high-intensity media exposure is unclear, researchers said, but what is clear is that the under-6 set is becoming far more media-savvy than anyone expected. ‘We are pushing all these media further and further down to the crib,’ said Matthew Melmed, executive director of the Washington-based children’s advocacy group Zero to Three: National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families. Melmed and a host of other children’s advocates, educational experts and children’s TV producers were on hand yesterday to discuss the Kaiser findings at the foundation’s Barbara Jordan Conference Center downtown.’ – Today’s Washington Post:

The TeleRead take: Sad to say, but books are going to be like radio. If we want to reach the masses with the good ones, we need to think in terms of the library model rather than simply the bookstore one alone. Books need an NPR equivalanet, a well-stocked national digital library system with provisions for fair payments to writers and publishers. Time for some judgments here. Books are worth the extra effort to spread around. That’s the really heinous aspect of the DMCA and the oppressive DRM it encourages. Bill Gates, with his Draconian DRM, has been an anti-Carnegie.

Isn’t it interesting that the American elite is getting in the way of Winston Smith’s self-improvement? Here’s an unemployed high school dropout who’d love to read book after book, but the miserly Gates refuses to pay to put free books on the Net–not even his supposedly beloved Great Gatsby, of which he bought several early copies for the library of his $50-million mansion?

Meanwhile, appropriately enough, you can read the full Kaiser study online for free.

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From Jerry Justianto of Pocket PC eBooks Watch and Beyond, our partner site:

I just purchased (and plan to give another chance) secured Adobe e-book, and I love it–but I lie. Bottom line: Don’t buy Adobe eBooks.

1. I download the book into my notebook, after long process of downloading the reader (15 MB) and activation process (15 minutes with a slow-speed Internet connection).

2. The e-book looks bad in Adobe reader, with awkward navigation and book marking processes.

3. I can’t read it with my Pocket PC.

4. Then I can’t download to my desktop from the e-book store, even after twice activating. I have to say, “I hate MS Reader DRM protection, but Adobe is the worst of the bad DRM.”

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The TeleRead take: I myself don’t mess with Adobe Reader on my Pocket PC, just on my desktop. For the moment, at least, the damn thing runs too slowly (Adobe may have improvements on the way). Still have yet to buy my first DRM-protected book. When I do, it most likely will be in Palm format, which is somewhat less obnoxious than the others. – DR

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The U.S. Copyright Office, part of the Library of Congress, has just offered four new exceptions to the DMCA–fair use-related. From Wired News:

Busting open a digital lock to get hold of copyright works normally is forbidden, but the Librarian of Congress ruled Tuesday that there are exceptions…

Those who are exempt from the rule are those who are “adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make non-infringing uses of that particular class of works,” according to the DMCA…

On Tuesday, the U.S. Copyright Office released the four “classes of works” exempted from the anti-circumvention rule. People may bypass a digital lock to access lists of websites blocked by commercial filtering companies, circumvent obsolete dongles to access computer programs, access computer programs and video games in obsolete formats, and access e-books where the text-to-speech function has been disabled.

Ideally the Copyright Office will someday officially apply the dongle logic in a very explicit way to e-book backup even when the formats are not yet obsolete.

For more details, especially in an e-book context, see the TeleBlog item immediately below, Convert Lit moves to Polish host to escape DMCAism.

Update, 10:14 a.m., Washington, DC, time: At IP Justice, you can read lawyer Robin Gross’s comments. Among other things, she says of the filtering and dongle exceptions: “The first two exemptions are very similar to the original two exemptions granted by the Librarian in the first DMCA Rulemaking in 2000. While the two new exemptions will be useful to a small handful of consumers, the Librarian’s ruling still leaves the vast majority of legitimate consumer uses of digital media illegal under the DMCA.”

Related: Tech Dirt item and CNET story on the ruling. More links available via Ernie the Attorney.