TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for January, 2004

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Storage cards have been on the minds of plenty of PDA users lately, especially owners of the Dell Axim. They may want to check out some information from San Disk. To keep up with this and other issues, why not subscribe to the Axim X5 list?

Meanwhile Mobipocket acknowledges that some people with Version 4.8 may have problems transferring information from their PCs directly to the storages card on their PDAs. No hassles. Just go to My Software within the My Mobipocket section of the Mobipocket site and download a newer version of 4.8. Worked fine for me.

A few more thoughts on Mobipocket: While I remain gung ho on a Universal Consumer Format, I continue to think that Mobipocket is the best of the proprietary-format readers I’ve used. Delighted to hear from Steve Potash of Overdrive that his company is still keen on the format and will indeed be offering it more frequently in both the retail and library markets.

Now–if only Mobipocket will work with a UCF. I remain impressed by the usability of the interface and the abundance of useful features. Microsoft and Adobe and Palm are has-beens compared to this one. Psst! Spread the word. Perhaps the market will eventually reward Mobipocket for putting out a superior product.

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“The Public Interest Research Group goes further, recommending that new books and new editions should be published entirely online to save on printing costs.” – The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The TeleRead take: Triggering these sentiments is a rise in student spending on textbooks. The National Association of College Stores says it rocketed from $619 in the 99-2000 school year to $807 in 2002-2003–or 30 percent in just three years. As reported in the PI:

The Public Interest Research Group, a national consumer and government watchdog organization, pins much of the blame for the high cost of books on publishers “producing new editions like clockwork” and “including expensive bells and whistles, such as CD-ROMs, that professors rarely find useful.”

The research group’s California and Oregon chapters surveyed 156 faculty members and 521 students at 10 colleges in those states…

Tom Engel, a [University of Washington] chemistry professor who has led his department’s textbook-selection process, said a new edition every five years would be plenty.

“In my bookshelf in front of me, I see books in the seventh and eighth editions,” he said. “Hardly any of the changes they have made led to a substantial improvement in the book.”

Some professors say students can be spared some of the financial burden if new information for a book is posted on the Web or published separately as a low-cost update. Other critics say publishers need to create “no-frills” books that stick to the core subject matter and leave out the full-color illustrations and other options.

The Public Interest Research Group goes further, recommending that new books and new editions should be published entirely online to save on printing costs.

I myself love e-books but would hate to see the above scenario applied to all textbooks until tablet technology is cheaper and better. Some texts woud work out fine on PDAs right now. But at least some may be too complex visually even without the frills, and I’d rather not see students forced to read off desktop machines, which aren’t as comfortable to work with hour after hour. Needless to say, a coordinated TeleRead-style approach at the national level could expand the market by encouraging the production of low-cost tablet machines for students in K-12, not just higher education.

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Tiny eBook Reader version 2.0–available for the Pocket PC, though not yet the Smartphone–now can read unencrypted or unlocked e-books in the Microsoft .lit format. It also does ASCII files, including zipped versions.

I haven’t tried the new flavor yet–but intend to. If you want a fast, no-frills reader, this $12 program may be It, based on my experience with Version 1. One negative: No HTML. But perhaps that’ll be on the way in Version 3.0.

For .lit books in the public domain, check out such sites as manybooks.net, the University of Virginia etext collection and one of my favorite multiformat sites, Blackmask (both commercial and public domain).

And don’t forget the unencrypted .lit books on e-bookstore sites such as Fictionwise and our linking partner eBookAd.

Update, 5:45 p.m.: Golden Crater Developer Jim Koornneef says HTML will show up in 2.5 in a basic form without attributes such as bold and italics. The attributes will come in 3.0. For a future version, too, he’ll also investigate the possibility of letting users import desktop fonts, just as can happen with Mobipocket. Way to go, Jim!

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A fascinating item from Trudy W. Schuett, author of the e-book pictured here:

I’ve had several books published in e-book form since late 1999/early 2000, and I thought I’d give the blog form a try for one of the early novels. I’ve been serializing Sweethearts and Monsters, a couple of pages at a time, since November of last year. We’re getting close to the end of it, but as far as I can tell, I’ve got about 15,000 readers.

As you can imagine, this is way more than the number that purchased the original e-book. But I’m one of those writers who is more concerned with getting my work read by people than anything else, not to mention this is fun to do.

Just figured you’d like a heads-up on another kind of e-publishing. As far as I know, nobody else is doing this. The blog is here: http://trudywschuett.tblog.com/.

I may be doing this with other books, since I’ve left my publisher, which renders all my books “out of print.” This way they’d at least be read, rather than just sitting on my hard drive. I’m thinking of this as a way for authors of multiple books to showcase their work without any committment on the part of potential readers–there’s nothing to buy, or even download. Readers can get the book in bits and pieces, which is the way most people read anyway.

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Idea: Maybe Trudy needs to put an order form on her home page for people who’d like to purchase S&M as either an e-book or a print-on-demand book. Might work this time as an e-book, assuming there aren’t any contractual obstacles.

Remember, Dickens and many other famous novelists tried the serialization form, enjoyed immediate attention, and paved the way for the sale of actual books. Her blog just may have provided S&M the exposure it lacked before.

So Trudy really should try the order form before it’s too late. If 15,000 people have read even parts of her work, that suggests that perhaps a few would be game to fork out money for it. Good luck, Trudy!

By David Rothman

More details in the New Scientist:

The most flexible electronic display yet developed has been revealed by researchers at electronics giant Philips. The company says it plans to begin mass producing such displays within a few years.

There are many projects aiming to develop “electronic paper”. Such a display could, for example, be used create a fully updatable newspaper which could rolled up into a coat pocket. Flexible displays could also be used to create new mobile phones and other easily collapsible gadgets.

Philips’s new display was made possible by the development of a way to print organic electronics onto a thin plastic film – previously, it was only possible to print these components on glass. However, after experimenting with various different plastics, Philips now has a technique that works on polyimide film.

Precise details of the fabrication method have not been revealed due to their commercially sensitive nature, says the company. But the process has enabled the company to produce a screen that can be rolled into a tube just two centimetres in diameter – the most flexible electronic display ever made. The use of organic electronics should also make the device cheap.

The square display measures 12 centimetres diagonally and consists of 80,000 pixels. It produces a greyscale image and can refresh in about a second – far too slow to display moving images…

Via Matthew J. McBride of CInC, Inc. and Gizmodo.com. Also see earlier info.

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Is the Open eBook Forum going to do the right thing–both for the public and the e-book industry–and get serious about a Universal Consumer Format? And maybe even give us a schedule for UCF development? This morning via Google I ran across the following in the Guardian in the UK:

Nick Rogaty suggests that compatible file formats and a good ebook reading device, something as desirable as one of Apple’s iPods, would help e-publishing break out of the geeky male ghetto. Improvements in digital rights management (DRM) are also needed.

Actually that’s Nick B-o-g-a-t-y who’s exec director of the OeBF, and I’ll hope that the paraphrase and context are more accurate than the spelling. As quoted, he uses “formats”–the plural–but maybe he’s at least pointing toward an e-book equivalent of the RTF format for word-processors, which at least would help. In effect that might be a UCF. Let’s just hope it wouldn’t simply involve a multiformat reader, which could be a real kludge.

Way to go, Nick–just so you’re talking compatibility in more meaningful ways and we can see some timely action. Even the big boys in the OeBF, such as Adobe and Microsoft, could come out ahead with compatiblity in ways beyond just a multiformat reader. E-books should sell many times more than the current $10-$20 million a year, and it will happen much faster if the industry gets serious about format compatibility and more convenient DRM.

Other excerpts:

Unlike music, the book business’s core demographic is older and female and not drawn to piracy. But the fear of “Napsterisation” has led to rather stringent DRM measures in e- publishing. Rogaty suggests things are beginning to settle down, with companies recognising that the right to use ebooks in certain ways is important to consumers.

“Another thing we need is a really good retail experience,” he adds. “What Apple has done with the iPod, the iTunes software and the iTunes store is amazingly good. We need an equivalent in the ebook industry.” …

It is still early days, but Rogaty says public libraries, and ultimately schools, could be the interim home for the ebook. The OeBF is organising a conference in March to discuss the idea. Electronic publishers may not get the vast profits they anticipated last decade, but they might stay alive and help out libraries in the process.

“In the age of Google, libraries are trying to find their space as 24-hour providers of information to communities,” says Rogaty. “Providing ebooks in a service that is open 24 hours a day, that’s accessible from home, could be a tremendous improvement on what we have now. The libraries of the future could be based around ebooks.”

Indeed! We’ve been saying the same thing since 1991. If industry can get its act together about compatibility and DRM–and if the hardware improves, as we all expect–then dreams will become reality.

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What Cory Doctorow writes about music certainly applies to e-books in many ways. I still have yet to buy a book with proprietary DRM. Freebies, gifts, books from the KnowBetter.com library–well, I’ll put up with DRM in those cases. And maybe there’ll be a special case where I just can’t live without a specific title. But so far, when I want copyrighted books, I order the good old-fashioned paper variety if I can’t find non-”protected” titles. You can bet that would change with the introduction of a Universal Consumer Format and sensible DRM. Meanwhile I’ll do the wallet-vote act and hope that you will, too. When you depend on proprietary formats, you might as well think of yourself as renting instead of owning books. /s Cory says: “Protect your investment: buy open.”

Related: In Solving and creating captchas with free porn, Cory shows how ingenious people can be in bypassing protection schemes. Of course, if you try to anticipate every possibility, then the DRM becomes clumsy to the extent that it inconveniences users and saps away revenue. The best solution remains a mix of DRM Lite and a realistic business model with appropriate pricing.

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People are still spending just seven hours a week on books, magazines and newspapers–the same as in ‘96. The good news is that the Net might be stealing time from TV instead of books and the rest. More at LISNews.

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Should people in developing countries pay less for e-books than do readers in the States? I’ve made that argument before. Without some price discrimination, many in, say, Bangladesh may never catch up with the books in a meaningful way at all except through piracy. Needless to say, I’ve also suggested the solution of well-stocked national digital libraries, which, by increasing the audience for books, could help lower the prices for everyone. Perhaps in the end, then we could have universal global prices for e-books.

Now, in the latest Wired, Larry Lessig writes about drug pricing, and some of the same issues come into play. He suggest that if drug prices are to be uniform, then perhaps the financing of drugs needs to happen in new ways. Ditto for e-books. E-books aren’t as urgently needed as drugs for saving lives in the short run. But the long run is somewhat of a different issue, given their potential for health-related education (along with education in general).

Related: It will be interesting to see what happens between Microsoft and the United Nations Development Program, which will work together on computer literacy and traditional kinds. Let’s hope this isn’t just Windows Promotion at Work. My own hunch is that Microsoft has a mix of altruistic and philanthropic motives. Too bad Linus T can’t follow up. But then again, in certain places in the developing world, Linux seems to be doing fine even without big-time marketers or UN alliances.

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“There aren’t enough trees in China to make enough schoolbooks for their kids. And kids are trudging around in their 40-lbs. backpacks here.” – Michael McCreary, vice president of advanced research at E Ink, as quoted in a UPI article on the latest in flexible displays. (Via Pocket PC eBooks Watch.)

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Yo, Steve Potash and the Open eBook Forum! Care about e-books globally? Then check out a generally upbeat article from Australian Personal Computing, which, however, says on its Web site: “The sadder side of the story is that there’s no standard ebook format, even on a single platform.” I know. The purists will pick that one apart, but the point is that e-books are a far cry from video tapes or audio CDs, and it’s the industry’s fault.

The Aussie article in effect serves up an example of how the e-book industry is living up or down to the worst anti-American stereotypes. A supposedly international group is carrying the water for Microsoft, Adobe and Palm Digital Media, all based in Country U. That’ll be plain until the OeBF has the guts to come out with a schedule for development of a Universal Consumer Format.

Any wonder that many overseas e-bookers have turned their backs on the OeBF, which, of course, in giving its stats on global e-book sales, didn’t mention how incomplete the numbers are–the result of the group’s inability to pull in the Japanese in a meaningful way? While the international factor isn’t mentioned in the new article, I’d be amazed if the Aussies are or will be oblivious to it. This is the stuff of which trade wars are made, except, thanks in part to lack of standards, e-bookdom may be small enough to be under the radar of negotiators. Granted, Mobipocket is in the OeBF, is proprietary and is French. But its infuence on the group is tiny compared to that of the big three, the real pillars of the Tower of eBabel.

Meanwhile, on the positive on about e-books, the APC article says:

Sitting at the train station, standing in line at the bank, waiting for your appointment. . . if only you had something to read! But if you have a PDA, the problem becomes which book to read. The latest Stephen King thriller, a Patricia Cornwell mystery, some classic Shakespeare or Dickens, or a mega-dose of sci-fi? That?s just a sample of the ebooks you can enjoy on your Palm or Pocket PC.

Sure, you don?t get any of the familiar tactile sensations associated with reading a hardcopy book, but you can change the font size, look up definitions on-the-fly, quickly search for specific words, and even use your handheld?s backlight as a built-in book light. And how else could you fit an entire library onto a memory card the size of a postage stamp?

Exactly! The above comments may be old news to most TeleBlog readers, but why not share Jenneth Orantia’s excellent little e-book tutorial with friends who haven’t kept up with all the advances that e-books have made–even with the major annoyances of oppressive DRM and the Tower of eBabel.

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With PDAs so important to e-bookdom, here’s some good news for the season. CNET reports:

“The worldwide market for handheld devices totaled 3.4 million units in the fourth quarter of 2003, an increase of 3.2 percent year-over-year and a whopping 52.7 percent sequential jump from the third quarter, IDC said in the report, released on Tuesday.

Cameras built into the very latest PDAs made them hot items during the Christmas season. Would that better e-book standards and more interest in our favorite medium have been Sales Booster Number One instead! Moreover, yearly PDA shipments in 2003 actually slipped to 10.4 million from 12.6 million in ‘02. Also of interest:

During the fourth quarter, PalmOne maintained its market share lead, shipping about 4 million units worldwide. HP was next, with about 2.3 million iPaqs shipped, and Sony moved about 1.4 million Clie handhelds. Dell, which ranked fourth, sold about 611,000 Axims. Toshiba delivered just under 307,000 handhelds to round out the top five for the quarter

That’s the here and now, kinda. It’ll be interesting to see how PalmOne and the others fare against Linux PDA-phone combos. Will PalmOne finally get the embedded Linux religion in the end–or try to buck the trend with an aging, proprietary OS that, despite its popularity of the moment, isn’t necessarily immortal? Meanwhile, in Q4 of 2003, Europeans reportedly were shipped over a million PDAs–but two million Smartphones. E-book vendors of all kinds will be crazy not to think of e-books in a phone context. If nothing else, phones will be a handy tranfer device and foster file-sharing. Let’s hope that publishers can think more about “viral marketing” opps and a TeleRead approach–where pass-alongs would boost revenue–and less about “piracy threats.”

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Wanna know why Washington gives us stupidities like Bono and the DMCA? Turns out that while in office Bill Clinton sent just two emails. Not to pick on Clinton. George Bush isn’t that with it, either. No, not every supporter of Net-hostile legislation is a Lud, but the Clinton tidbit is a pretty good example of the problem.

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OK, let’s see how the Luddites respond to this item from CNET:

The Dutch firm Philips Electronics said on Monday that it is preparing to mass-produce a slim, book-size display panel, onto which consumers could download newspapers and magazines–then roll up and put away. The 5-inch display can show detailed images and be rolled up into a pen-size holder. If connected to a mobile phone, it can also be used to download Web pages, a book or e-mail.

What’s more, cleverly designed PDA-phone combos could themselves include such displays.

According to Philips, this flat-display tech will reach stores later this year and a million displays will be made in ‘05.

Related: Philips unit unveils ‘rollable’ displays, from CommsDesign.

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“Linux may become the preferred operating system in a full-featured mobile device and handset market in which ‘there is no economic reason to question why growth will not be explosive,’ according to Seamus McAteer, senior analyst and managing partner, Zelos Group. ‘The mass adoption of full-featured handsets will be disruptive,’ adds McAteer.” – LinuxDevices.com.

The TeleRead take: Will e-books hit it off on full-featured phones–that is, those with relatively powerful operating systems. I see hope here. Multifunction devices will appear that are comfortable to read from. And, with technologies like OLED displays on the way, battery life won’t be the problem it is today. According to the Zelos Group, sales of full-featured phones by 2008 will exceed 290 million a year, or 43 percent of the total global headset market. Are the numbers to be believed? And will Linux–shown here running on a Sharp Zarus PDA, not a phone-equipped combo–be the OS of choice?

Who knows at this point? Ideally, however, OEMs and telecom carriers will agree with Zelos’s observation that they especially value openness and low-cost, and that the Linux operating system has it all over Microsoft products in those areas. If so, that wouldn’t be the best of news for programs such as Microsoft Reader unless Microsoft can adjust with some platform sacrilege and look beyond Redmond-blessed OSes while lowering margins if need be. My hunch is that it can.

Also of interest is the Zelos Group’s observation that piracy will be a major problem with the new devices. Light, restrained DRM, along with decent business models, could go a long way here to help content providers. With the right kind of file sharing, content providers could benefit from the viral marketing opportunities that PDA-phone combos could open up. Let’s hope that the usual suspects don’t blow it with a repetition of the reader-hostile DRM of today.

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Early on, Gov. Blogger somehow pushed my BS detector into at least the borderline zone. Here was a guy depicted as A Friend of the Net, as well he should be–given his heavy reliance on money from Netfolks. But not a word came from him against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act or the DMCA. And now it looks as if Howard Dean could be still worse a disappointment. Despite all his noise about privacy, Dean in the past has proposed that ID cards must be inserted into computers before their users can log on the Net. Yo, Kerry? Yo, Edwards? Yo, Clark? Time to take a pro-Net stance on privacy and copyright matters?

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“Justice Department looks into whether group collaborated to quell competing next-generation tech,” reads part of a headline on the CNN site this morning. Familiar? A reference to the failure of the e-book business to finish up up work on a consumer-level format to avoid VHS vs. Beta–making use of XML technology? Or support or at least tolerate standards efforts elsewhere? No, the headline isn’t about the Open eBook Forum or any of its members, and I’ll not assert law-breaking.

Just the same, consider the possible implications if “Gold Sponsors” Microsoft, Adobe, and Palm Digital Media won’t let the OeBF do what should come naturally and develop consumer-level standards in a timely way. The proprietary kind means that different software vendors can’t compete to develop the best e-book readers for a universal format. Result? Less consumer choice. I am not a lawyer and won’t pass judgments here. Just the same, given the extent to which the OeBF has deviated from the original promises touted by Microsoft, it would do well to consider that the DVD industry has raised the suspicions of even a Republican Justice Department.

And if existing laws or fear of them won’t do the trick to persuade software publishers to show flexibility here? Well, there’s always the possibility of future laws. Besides, Congress already has pushed the publishing industry toward a National File Format for the access community, and it wouldn’t be such a major leap from there to a Universal Consumer Format for e-bookdom.

One way or another, even for software publishers, the proprietary approach carries its share of risks. The biggest one already is evident, of course–pathetic e-book sales of just $10-$20 million a year, just a speck of a speck of total book sales despite the hype of the past. Meanwhile, as noted yesterday, book publishers will face risks of their own if the proprietary boys somehow prevail.