TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for February, 2004

By David Rothman

You needn’t be an Evil Genius to hate onerous Digital Rights Management, but it helps. Dave Slusher has laudably kicked the habit of buying DRMed e-books. His original skepticism of DRM was a little more at the abstract level. Dave had worked as a software engineering team leader for the server side of Intertrust’s PDF publishing system, and he obviously knew how messy the technology could often be.

But now Dave has a more practical and personal reason: his own pain and suffering as a past buyer of DRMed books. Technology marches on, but you may be stuck with beloved e-books locked in a nasty, proprietary shell–mere detritus left behind by a megaconglomerate with other suckers to reel in. I’ll let Dave tell his story, as he did so nicely in his blog today after deciding to buy a Linux PDA:

As I’ve made the decision to get a Sharp Zaurus for the next PDA, I can’t use my typical PalmOS apps anymore. For all the multiformat books and magazines I have purchased from Fictionwise, I’m OK. I can redownload them in another format that is usable on the Zaurus. However, I have a few (not a whole lot, but some) Palm Reader/Peanut Press books that I actually purchased. Every one of these is no longer usable by me.

There is no Palm Reader for Zaurus so the money that I paid Palm is essentially gone and there is nothing I can do about it, save either trying to crack the books myself or someone releasing a Palm Reader port for the Zaurus. Theory moves into practice as I now find myself a burned customer, who is rewarded for paying my money and downloading legitimate copies of things by not being able to read them any more.

Thanks Palm/Peanut! Hope you enjoy the $50 or so I have spent for your books that I can’t read anymore.

A bad part is that I can’t refer back to books for which I paid good money–in most cases a similar amount to what one would pay for the paper copy.

“Even worse,” Dave says, are the books that “I haven’t read yet.” One is Conscience of a Liberal by the late Sen. Paul Wellstore, just the first chapter of which the Evil Genius has gotten through. Dave goes on:

I paid $10 to get the annotated Fire Upon the Deep, in which I’ll never be able to dig through the annotations again. With this situation comes a bit of resolve from me. I will never again spend one cent on any e-book that involves a form of DRM that leaves me at risk for not being able to read it later. I will happily pay for electronic reading–I plan on retaining my electronic subscriptions to F&SF and Asimov’s SF–but never again will I pay for DRM books. I’m not putting my cash at risk to ease publisher nerves. If you think I as your customer can’t be trusted and must be treated like a criminal under house arrest with an ankle bracelet, you can kiss my ass. I’ll keep my money in my pocket and not give it to you. I’ll give it instead to your competitors who don’t treat me that way. God forbid, I might even read more Baen books! I love how they do business, if only they published more books I wanted to read.

Ironically, this moment of resolve comes at a point where I really am trying to purge the enormity of paper books from my life. I continue to try to reduce them, knowing that we have at least one more move in our lives in the next few years. I’m the absolute perfect consumer for e-books–you might find someone equally close to the ideal target demographic but you will not find someone closer.

I love to read. I love to hoard, but I’ve hit the limits of my physical space. I enjoy the act of reading on a small device. As a geek I have no problems with the weaknesses of e-text. I love the ubiquity of having a library in my pocket at all times. I have disposable cash and the willingness to spend it on this product line. E-publishers couldn’t hope for more. However, because of their business practices a significant number of them have lost access to me and my money that I will be spending somewhere, just not with them. What a shame for them, what a boon for the publishers who are trusting enough not to lock up their documents in proprietary DRM and who understand that the risks of unauthorized file trading are far lower than the risks of not making the money in the first place.

Yo, Open eBook Forum? Got that? Although I’ve been writing about e-books for years, I myself have yet to buy my first DRMed e-book in a “secure” proprietary format. Download a freebie? Sure. Borrow from KnowBetter.com’s library? No problem! But I’m not gonna let the industry shaft me with a book to which I may be denied access someday because of a situation like Dave’s. I want to own books for real.

Before I’ll plunk down money…

Mind you, I would be open to compromise. What if the industry could do a nonproprietary form of an easy-to-live-with DRM Lite, as I’ll call it, and included buyer protection either through a consortium or a partnerships with librarians–ideally through a TeleReadish approach. Then I might actually plunk down money.

Until then, at least as a buyer rather than a borrower or freebie-downloader, I’ll do my best to boycott “protected” books in proprietary formats. Way to go, Dave! Glad to see you feel the same! If the e-book industry wants to grow worldwide revenue from a pathetic $10-$20 million a year, it should kick the proprietary DRM habit–because otherwise you and I and zillions of others will keep saying “No” to unadulterated consumer abuse.

More details from the Evil Genius on his Evil past with Intertrust: “All the key exchange and credential redemption stuff was what I did for them, and we did it well, but Intertrust imploded without ever understanding the value of what we delivered. 6 months after bringing the project in on time and under budget, we were all laid off.

“Somewhere in the time after that, I had my Saul of Tarses to the Apostle Paul conversion and realized the many ways in which DRM subtracts value. Today is the first day where that realization actually translated into a real-world situation that cost me money, which is what I write about.”

In fairness to Palm Digital Media–before I strike again, which I’ll do in most of this paragraph: Palm Digital Media’s DRM is actually gentler than for the industry as a whole since it’s keyed to credit card numbers rather than individual machines. And who knows? Maybe PDM will eventually come out with a version of its reader for the Zaurus and other Linux PDAs. But meanwhile both human readers and Sharp, the maker of the Zaurus, will pay the penalty. If I were a PDA or tablet hardware vendor, I’d be screaming-angry at the DRM lobby for holding back technological progress.

To give another example, last I knew, Palm Digital Media wasn’t coming out with another version of its reader for the Microsoft Smartphone–not unless enough of a market developed. For that matter, even Microsoft wasn’t going to do a Reader for the Smartphone. Just what does that tell you about those DRM stalwarts’ concerns for the consumer? Plenty, and it isn’t flattering.

The library angle: Librarians, beware of commitments to books in formats that may become obsolete–perhaps much sooner than you’d think! Make sure the vendor can and will update and change proprietary formats as needed. And never, never stop reminding vendors of the need for a Universal Consumer Format–with nonproprietary DRM Lite for publishers insisting on copy-protection–to rid the e-book industry of its growth-stunting Tower of eBabel. Here’s to a UCF as soon as possible!

Update, 2:03 p.m. on March 1: More from Dave Slusher’s blog: “I placed the Zaurus order yesterday. I was dawdling around and got this horrible feeling that I was about to replay my Clie fiasco by waiting too long. It would really have sucked if either the 5600 was sold out or not available at the $330 price (a third off of the nominal $500 list price) so I just did it. I’m a ditherer by nature, so I had to get active. It took me 15 minutes to figure out how to use the Amazon gift certificate (the code number was in invisible white-on-white HTML text just to piss me off) but the order is in.” The EG also says:

David, it actually gets better. For unencrypted Fictionwise books my format of choice was iSilo, which isn’t on Zaurus and has a closed format. For similar reasons, I’ll be dropping that as well. A while back the guys at FW were asking if there was any interest in Plucker formatted books from FW. I liked Plucker on the Palm and would be happy for it to be my primary ebook/web page reader on the Zaurus.

I’m a little weirded out by being the spokesmodel for this transition of dumping the closed (Clie/PalmOS/Palm Reader/iSilo) for the open (Zaurus/OpenZaurus/Plucker) but [the TeleBlog] posts are an accurate summation of what I’m doing and why. Although I can’t say I’m dying to fart around with the OS layer or the rendering code or file formats for my books (and in fact I hope that I never do), it makes a world of difference to me between having that option and not having that option.

The last closed app that I’m really going to miss: Vindigo. On a webpage I heard a whisper of a rumor that someone is working on a Zaurus Vindigo solution. Man, I hope so. I’m still paid up through July.

Hey, Dave, best of luck with your transition, and keep us posted!

Update, March 1, 10 p.m.: I see Dave just did another item, carefully making clear how he ended up at Intertrust and exactly what he did there.

Meanwhile, one of Dave’s human readers notes that there is a PalmReader for OS X (that’s a Rothman-supplied link). But, hey, Dave wants to read e-books on a Linux PDA, and in that respect he is still out of luck. As the EG puts it: “I paid my money to be able to read these books away from the computer on the small ubiquitous device I keep on my person. If the option was ‘Pay $10 for FIRE UPON THE DEEP and you can only read it sitting at your Mac,’ I would have kept my money. I want the open solution. I went with the Zaurus ultimately because it was more open than a Clie, and I want the same from my documents. I want to be able to do with them what I see fit and that includes moving them from device to device in the future, on OSes that haven’t yet been invented and in uses I haven’t yet dreamed of.” Amen.

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A young film-maker from Dallas went to the Sundance festival this year and won the Grand Jury Prize for the best drama by writing, directing and acting in his own film. Shane Carruth edited the 16-millimeter film digitally on a home computer. Meanwhile other film-makers were shooting digitally to begin with. In fact, this year almost half the film-makers at Sundance used digital video cameras to shoot films, far more than the 12 percent of three years ago. They enjoyed good technical quality at a fraction of previous costs.

So what does this mean in the context of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act? Plenty.

Imagine all the adaptations that could be made from modern classic novels, or obscure works whose owners now can’t be located, if Bono did not exist and young film-makers didn’t have to worry about royalties paid to heirs and megaconglomerates–as opposed to living writers. While Carruth wrote script from scratch, Hollywood has a long and honorable tradition of adaptations from novels, and the new technology could reinvigorate it. What’s more, young film-makers could use digital editing techniques inexpensively to create films from old archives. Furthermore, film-makers could use digital editing techniques inexpensively to create films from old archives.

In fact, the time may even come when scenes and actors could be created digitally at next to no cost–a prospect that scares old men like Jack Valenti and the rest of the Hollywood establishment, but excites those more comfortable with the new technology.

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An interesting new blog editor called BlogJet, now in beta, offers the ability to include .wav files with posts so visitors can hear bloggers. Apparently either I’m messing up or the voice feature isn’t enabled–I can’t get the “Listen” link at the bottom of this item to function. Still, the potential is there for Lori Bell, Tom Peters and others working with the blind and the visually impaired. And if the blind/VI folks themselves can master this software, then so much the better.

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“Getting books scanned quickly is not a problem for us since we can outsource it. Our major problem is creating the five different ebook editions of the book, MS Reader, PDF, PalmDoc, HieBook and Mobi. This takes time and effort by highly skilled people who require the knowledge to mark up the text properly, create the required files and then put it through the ebook convertors to create the final ebook editions. This currently takes us three to four hours per book which is far too long and costly.” – Chad Sichello of Second Chance Publishers, posting to the eBook Community List.

The TeleRead take: Don’t believe that the Tower of eBabel is a tax on publishers, among others? What better illustration than the example above? In fact, I suspect that the “three to four hours” is rather brief compared to the ordeal that other publishers suffer.

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A reminder: Got news of genuine interest to the e-book world? Or views? Want to comment on an item we ran? E-mail dr@teleread.org.

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Stanford University intends to scan millions of books–a worthy project, just so the results will be accessible and affordable for ordinary people, not just the usual suspects in academia and corporate R&D.

But even a well-funded institution like Stanford can do only so much on its own.

So I was pleased that Stanford librarian Michael Keller said the following to The Book and Computer:

We’re talking about gargantuan-sized memories and massively parallel supercomputers to whiz through this stuff. Not many institutions in this country have that kind of capacity. Maybe it will require a national effort to really do this.

Exactly–like TeleRead, which could pool and coordinate distributed efforts from a number of institutions. What’s more, as was just suggested on the eBook Community list, all new books should be submitted in digitized format to the Library of Congress–same thing we’ve been saying for years!

Just please make sure tht the format is XML-based like the proposed Universal Consumer Format.

(B&C article originally found via Bowerbird on a Project Gutenberg list.)

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Wouldn’t it make more sense for OverDrive to focus on distribution and retail operations and wind down the one in format conversion? I’ve said so before, and now it looks as if the company has quietly been doing exactly that. Good move!

I asked OverDrive head Steve Potash, also president of the Open eBook Forum, for comment on Dorothea’s Salo’s recent blog item about format conversion. Too, I requested a report on the financial well-being of his company–on which so many small publishers depend. Here’s the lowdown from Steve directly:

Winding down of our conversion business has been ongoing for nearly a year. We were losing accounts due to our pricing model which relied mostly on our US staff and could not compete on price with Asian sources.

We have been growing dramatically in library, distribution and retail services and determined we would apply our data services team to support the growth of Content Reserve with new sources of materials including audio.

We have an in-house conversion team supporting our catalog and metadata services, protyping periodicals and new eDocs, and setting up production for audio book encoding. 4 years ago publishers needed a local partner for OeBF and PDF eBook production and workflow. Now, most larger publishers have automated their eBook production or found the cheapest sources offshore.

We are proud of the quality and inventory and workflow we designed. I expect we will always have a few folks fixing titles, scanning covers, meeting deadlines, etc. But we determined to focus and invest in our distribution-based services where we are in constant demand.

Revenues are growing and we are doing fine.

Good to know. With just $10-$20 million in global revenue, the e-book business has lots of room to grow, and OverDrive has its share of contributions to make, especially since Steve seems to be showing more flexibility on the format front.

By David Rothman

We’ve always been keen on The Memory Thing–putting local news archives, genealogical information and similar items online. Who says a TeleRead-style library effort should involve e-books alone, as important as they are? For a hint of the possibilities, check out NewspaperARCHIVE.com. Self-description of topics covered:

What made the news in the 1700’s? What about world events on your birthday? Was your great-grandparents’ wedding announcement posted in their home town news? How about your ancestors’ obituaries?

Monthly membership is $12.95, and the yearly amount is $79.95. For your money you get access to a collection of small-town papers and some from larger cities, and that’s the catch–far from universal coverage. I’m baffled why, right on up front on the site, the company does not offer a link to a listing of items in their collection. Perhaps this will change as the archive grows. To the credit of the archive, it at least posts the complaints of readers, not just the positives, and that’s a plus.

All in all, I found this site to be a real trip–back to the past. I saw item after item of references to some old friends of mine from the newspaper business, and similarly I can see political junkies and civic activists using these archives for both practical and nostalgic reasons. Not to mention the K-12 potential for history classes and others! Want children to know how The Great Depression affected people locally? This just could be the place for them to go. Remember, we’re talking about searchable text here, not just the usual, hard-to-use microfilm collection. Suffering those horridly obsolete machines does not build character–just impatience with both the private and public sectors for not replacing them more quickly with a digital approach.

But back to NewspaperARCHIVE.com. Just please give the search box a good workout on sample words, especially the name of your city, to make certain you’ll get your money’s worth before you sign up for acess to the full text rather than just little preview snippets.

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A $10,000 grant from ALA will go to create a project called “E-Books Open Up the World of Print to Visually Impaired Readers.”

The one-year effort will help determine how e-books can aid the blind, visually impaired, the dyslexic and the physically challenged–a topic thoroughly worth exploring, since e-books can help special-needs people even more than the population at large.

Coordinating the project for the Mid Illinois Talking Book Center will be Tom Peters of TAP Information Services. He’ll work with staff from the center (especially Lori Bell, another e-book-hip librarian) as well as OverDrive, the distributor-retailer which is fast making a name for itself with attractive library-related sites for e-books, such as the collaboration with the Cleveland Public Library. Check out the fine work that OverDrive and partners are already doing on the Web for the Illinois project for the print-impaired.

Significantly, Tom coauthored a book on e-book usability, and he and Lori have engaged in earlier studies on e-books for the sighted. We need more efforts like this. E-books have their share of myths floating about, and there is no substitute for actual hands-on work.

The full name of the award is the ALA SIRSI Library Leader in Technology Grant. A 24K gold-framed citation be given at American Library Association Conference in Orlando on June 29 at 5:45 p.m.

More details at The Hand Held Librarian. Also see information from the project’s Web site.

Memo to software vendors, especially Mobipocket: If approached by the MITBC project, please give ‘em your full cooperation. Ultimately, of course, I hope that a standard XML-based format will be in use.

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Oh, I like this! North Carolina now wants Michael Eisner fired as boss of Disney–and has told state pension fund managers to vote against him. It joins funds in half a dozen other states, including California and New York, already committed to this noble cause.

Now, imagine the same tool used against the Sonny Bono Copyight Term Extension Act, which will send billions to the copyright elite over the years at the expense of schools, libraries and consumers in the Tar Heel state and elsewhere.

Time for state pension managers to pressure Disney and other big corporations into calling for a repeal or at least mitigation of Bono–for example, via the Public Domain Enhancement Act? Our schools and libraries don’t need to pay Hollywood an eternal tax! Reasonable fees for reasonable copyright terms? Sure. But not 20 years extra, forever!

Remember, lobbying by Eisner’s henchmen was among the major reasons why we got the Bono act in the first place.

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For as little as 25 cents in some cases, you can now buy audios of Project Gutenberg texts without onerous DRM (those two words go together all too often).

“New unabridged audiobooks are released every Friday in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats,” says TellTale Weekly. And you can copy them to your MP3 player, your PDA, your desktop, you name it, without worrying about brain-dead DRM schemes. A lesson for the big-timers in the e-book biz?

First titles released today are are:

–Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death by Patrick Henry
–Stories from Asheville vol 1 by Justin Meckes
–A Dog’s Tale by Mark Twain
–The Glove and the Lions by James Leigh Hunt

Hey, folks, nice timing! Fits in with TeleRead’s interest in the needs of the blind and vision-impaired.

(Via Boing Boing.)

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Our old friend David Faucheux, who has been blind since youth, dropped by the TeleBlog yesterday and said that he had trouble navigating it with his Jaws screen-reader–perhaps in part due to our three-column layout. Hey, that won’t do. So overnight, via a new RSS feed, we’ve created a special one-column version, which, as long as we’re at it, also offers large type for the vision-impaired. Could be that we won’t worry about the large type if enough VI folks write in and say, “Hey, my browser already takes care of that.” Speak up!

A major attraction of e-books, at least those that are ASCII/HTML/XML-based, is the ease with which speech synthesizers can deal with them. Know anyone with vision problems? Tell ‘em about the glories of a well-stocked national digital library system–the ultimate form of literary mainstreaming, so to speak. Feedback welcomed from all concerned!

The big question: Why didn’t David complain earlier? Easy, beyond his usual politeness. He was years behind in his Web use, having gone through LIS school at Louisiana State University without even enjoying convenient access to to a suitably equipped, up-to-date computer he could call his own. Linky sites like blogs are a particular challenge even today. Now, however, he’s finally partaking of the Web, thanks to a good-hearted Sara Laughlin, editor of the ALA’s Interface magazine, who donated a computer to the cause. Hey, David, speak up! We’ll do our best. Eventually–I don’t know when–this site will get a full makeover so that virtually every page is blind friendly!

Question for public libraries with blogs: Are you taking care to address the needs of the blind and VI folks?

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“Cyberschool educators say they would prefer to see more support from traditional textbook publishers, although they don’t expect that to happen anytime soon,” says BookTech Magazine. “They also want the electronic versatility that paper-based books can’t have.”

BookTech warns the e-book industry to catch up with the times, given all the competition possible from teachers themselves. The magazine says:

At CoolSchool (Cyber Oregon Online School), in Eugene, Ore., instructors electronically author their own courseware, which can run 400 pages or more. Teachers at Florida’s Virtual School are also developing their own multimedia courseware.

One reason teachers are authoring their own content is the dearth of quality electronic materials available from the major textbook publishers. E-books in general proved to be a false start.

E-books from major publishers often require proprietary readers, and have digital rights restrictions that encumber their use, such as limits on how many copies can be printed or shared.

That maintains the status quo among textbook publishers, but doesn’t sit well with cyberschool administrators and educators.

“E-books didn’t seem to change [the publisher's] operations or delivery as much as people thought it would,” [Class.com CEO Katherine] Endacott says. “There’s a vested interest in keeping things the way they are.”

The news is far from entirely bad, however. The magazine reports:

Not all traditional textbook publishers are sitting on the sidelines. Some are getting the religion. At a recent meeting of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), every publisher offered some form of online resource to accompany their books.

“Instead of textbooks with static information, they were, in some cases, multimedia-enriched,” says [Phyllis Lentz at Florida Virtual School].

Harcourt Interactive Technology, a subsidiary of Harcourt Inc., Roslyn Heights, N.Y., is among those offering augmentative electronic products tied to traditional textbooks. The publisher unveiled iLearningOnline Interactive, an Internet-based reading assessment system aligned with state standards.

The Web-based software provides a diagnostic tool that measures students’ reading comprehension. Teachers can also assess their educational effectiveness on the site.

Pearson Prentice Hall in Upper Saddle River, N.J., recently launched a pilot program with the state of Florida to help students in grades seven, nine, and 11 improve their reading comprehension. Students used Pearson’s iText, a computer-based interactive textbook, to improve their reading comprehension and grammar skills.

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“While widely available in English, something as simple as e-book conversion software is still unavailable for Arabic. In a region where print censorship remains widespread, e-books–produced and distributed online–are the simplest way to bypass authorities’ efforts to control their populations’ ideas and thoughts. A tiny fraction of Microsoft’s $1 billion could do wonders in creating a real information revolution in the Arab region by posting important and useful content in Arabic and other non-English languages on the net.” – Daoud Kuttab, in the Middle East Times.

The TeleRead take: The $1 billion is the size of an agreement Microsoft signed with the United Nations Development Program. Be interesting to see how much of it goes for e-books. TeleRead has long advocated that the U.S. government itself assist in the establishment of well-stocked national digital libraries in developing countries–with a healthy focus on local publishing, rather than simply imported books and other items. No panaceas, however. Even with e-books, censorship issues will arise, and for that we can partly thank the DMCAists, who, by encouraging privacy invasions in the name of copyright protection, have made life easier for snoopy and sometimes-murderous dictators.

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How to do DRM in a way that protects consumers’ rights, not just software companies’? InfoWorld columnist and blogger Ed Foster and his readers have some ideas.

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“It’s comforting to have a paper book. It’s more fixed in the mind than if you read it off a screen.” – Michael Jackson, vice president of fine-paper businesses at Weyerhaeuser Company, as quoted by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Bill Virgin.

The TeleRead take: Salting up the wounds, Virgin says: “Books and the paper that goes into them were supposed to be another victim of technology (I can recall writing several columns in 2000 on the subject of e-books and the potential for piracy). They may still someday supplant the paper version, but for now they’re still a very small niche product.”

Why “niche”

That’s what happens when the e-book industry–still toy-sized with only $10-$20 million in global sales–wages stupid format wars and tortures consumers with onerous DRM.

Meanwhile perhaps Bill Virgin can check out The DRM Maginot Line: Pirates using PDF images of paper books–without OCR needed.

XML as an anti-piracy weapon

Well-done books in screen-friendly XML formats, such as a consumer-level version of the Open eBook Publication Structure, would be one way to discourage the popularity of image-based PDF as a pirate’s tool. Yes, there is a danger of e-books being pirated. But nowadays p-books are pretty fair game and may actually be easier to spread around than digital books protected with DRM Lite.

(Found via eBookAd.)

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The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act will drain billions of dollars over the years from schools and libraries and consumers in general. Time for library advocate Bill Gates, Sr. to take a stand? And as someone who is pro-estate tax, mightn’t he just want to consider the injustices of further enriching the Gershwin heirs and other members of the copyright elite at the expense of ordinary Americans? Hey, Mr. Gates, that was an inspirational speech to the Public Library Association, but some pro-library lobbying against Bono–at the personal level, no need to involve the Gates Foundation–wouldn’t hurt, either.