TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for March, 2004

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“A House of Representatives panel has approved a sweeping new copyright bill that would boost penalties for peer-to-peer piracy and increase federal police powers against Internet copyright infringement.” – CNET

The TeleRead take: It’ll be easier than ever for the feds to demand information from Net providers. Where are we headed? Allow me to trot out the W word. Remember? Watergate. I predict that just as the Nixonians used national security as an excuse to snoop on political foes, a present or future administration will use copyright to do the same.

Could just as easily be a Democratic administration as a Republican, regardless of the fact that Republicans control. along with the rest of Congress, the House intellecutual property subcommittee that passed the bill. In fact, a Democratic president might be even more of a risk. Even more than with the Republicans, Hollywood is the Democrats’ sugardaddy; we even have Hilary Rosen on CNBC speaking as an explainer of the Democratic perspective, which, actually, is understandable, since Hollywood is increasingly the Democratic Party and vice versa. In an age where intellectual property matters so much–both access to it and the right to use it–the Democrats are acquiring solid Tory credentials.

When the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act (PDEA) was being voted on, at least some Dems, to their credit, did speak out, including Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who said: “I am sure (that its sponsor) does not mean to expand the powers of the FBI. The concern I have is that this is very ambiguous. The language itself could lead an aggressive FBI to a different conclusion.” But then fellow Democratic Howard Berman expressed certainty that the FBI wouldn’t abuse its power. Guess what. His district is next door to Hollywood. When it comes to Hollywood money vs. civil liberties, we know the winner.

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Small publishers aren’t the only ones who may feel grumpy about OverDrive, the besieged distributor and retailer that charges one-book publishers $300 a year in storage fees. Random House’s traffic rank for contentlinkinc.com, the domain associated with the ContentLink eBook Store which uses OverDrive-provided DRM and e-commerce-related services, isn’t even on Alexa’s list of the top 100,000 Web sites. ContentLink’s three-month average, as noted by an Alexa link from Blackmask Online, is a pathetic 576,691.

Mind, you OverDrive isn’t be the only reason here for the debacle, and, of course, the Random House part of the Bertelsmann conglomerate focuses on its own books rather than using a wider variety with other publishers included. But the DRM-stunted performance is still an utter disgrace compared to, say, Fictionwise, which comes in at 11,305–or eBooks.com at 18,873, Blackmask at 52,432 or eBookAd at 92,519. Ebooks.com appears to sell mostly DRMed titles, Fictionwise and eBooks.com carry a mix of DRMed and nonDRMed books, and Blackmask and eBookAd have none. Of the big distributions, I suspect that none except for OverDrive are really DRM fanatics. This is something pushed on them through the software interests and certain less than fully enlightened publishers. Many other houses know the score and perhaps can get the Open eBook Forum, run by OverDrive founder Steve Potash, to change direction.

Three-month figures: More TeleRead traffic than OverDrive retail traffic–even though our ad and promo budget is $0

OverDrive’s own retail operation, Ebookexpress.com, ranks 334,177 even though Yahoo redirected traffic to the OverDrive retail subsidiary after the Y people shut down their e-bookstore. Actually even TeleRead, a highly specialized site with no ad or promo budget and a rank of 299,380, does better than either ContentLink or Ebookexpress in the three-month Alexa rankings.

Yes, I know. To visit a site isn’t to buy books there (TeleRead doesn’t sell any), and profits count in the end, not just raw revenue–not to mention the fact that distribution activites won’t draw as many visitors as retail-oriented ones. But could it be that book buyers can smell the DRM a zillion miles away and choose to keep their distance? Not that DRM is all, as eBooks.com shows. But I suspect that the eBooks.com is doing enough other things right to compensate for the damage from the DRM. If nothing else, the name gives it a wonderful headstart over all rivals.

All book-related Web traffic: Just a speck of N.Y. Times’

Certainly the low traffic numbers for e-book sites are in keeping with the industry’s pigmy-sized sales of only $20-$25 million a year. Within newspapers, the New York Time by itself ranked 78. I don’t expect bookstores and the like to do as well as the world’s leading newspaper–even RandomHouse.com, RH’s site playing up p-books, is a mere 8,190–but I think the discrepancies still say something. If Random House and the other biggies know what’s good for ‘em, they’ll stop letting the big software companies, DRM zealots and other proprietary formatters set the tone for the e-book business. A Universal Consumer Format, less fixation on Draconian DRM and more on reader-friendly business models could go a long way toward reviving the sick e-book industry. The endlessly hyped growth figures for e-books are laughable. It’s like keeping track of the division of bacteria.

In fairness to OverDrive: The one-week average for OverDrive’s retail side was 198,697, an impressive improvement, and I see that ContentLink’s weekly rank is now at 332,501. But those two are still miles away from the top 100,000 ranking.

(Big thanks to Blackmask for jogging me to check up on these fun numbers–via David Moynihan’s well-done take on OverDrive.)

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“A collection of rare Christian manuscripts—some dating to the fifth and sixth centuries—will soon be accessible to scholars worldwide, thanks to a first-time collaboration between Brigham Young University, the Vatican Library and the Assyrian Church of the East.” – BYU News. (Via eBookAd.)

By David Rothman

A friend of mine owns a library of 10,000 dead-tree books, but many if not most of them are in storage. He is no Luddite, but would rather not mess around with all the fuss of downloading e-books. Just how to convert people like him to e-books, at least the public domain variety?

Until this week my answer for classics-lovers would have been, “Just go to Blackmask Online, the easiest-to-use site for public domain books. All the major formats are available.” In fact, Blackmask remains an attractive option, especially for PDA owners. But now there is another good choice for many people like my friend–yBook, written by Simon Haynes, an idealistic Australian writer who created it to help Gutenberg and promote his sci-fi writings along the way.

An easy five-minute install

yBook, a Windows program for desktops and laptops and Tablet PCs, not PDAs, is almost AOL-simple for the most part. My friend had it going in five minutes, and another e-book holdout was downloading and reading books in just about the same time. You see, yBook is an easy and handy Swiss Army knife. With just this one program you can pick a Gutenberg title, download it, read it and even print it. My own preference is to read Gutenberg books off my PDAs or my old Gemstar, but if I were using a desktop or laptop instead, I’d be crazy not to try yBook. Because of yBook’s general simplicity and its being free–though Pal Pay donations are welcome–it could be a godsend for schools and libraries. They can give it out to teachers and students.

What’s more, schools and libraries can use yBook to print books on demand. True, Gutenberg titles won’t look quite as spiffy as the commercial variety or contain pictures, but they’ll be far, far better than the alternative–no books at all. Now even the most cash-strapped schools can have access to thousands of classics. yBook will run on a 200mhz antique, and if I were Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart, I’d be aggressively talking up yBook, especially once PG dealt with serious and related problems that are not the slightest fault of Simon Haynes.

Project Chaos

Did I say problems? Yes, plenty. Thanks to the chaos that has dogged Project Gutenberg despite its importance to the Net and the cosmos in general–I can’t think of life without it!–many a title doesn’t show up in Gutenberg’s main file database as yBook displays it. Why? Sloppiness. PG has not used consistent formats in the entries for the database. In fact, scads of the titles promised on the yReader-presented list do not even materialize when you request them, thanks to flaws at Gutenberg’s end. What’s more, yBook is also the victim of Gutenberg’s inconsistent uses of the ASCII format in the texts themselves, causing some lines, for example, to break in bizarre ways.

What a contrast to the newer and more orderly Gutenberg project in Australia, where Simon says a machine-readable catalogue meshes perfectly with yReader, and where I suspect that the locally produced texts do the same. But–and this is a big but!–the American Gutenberg ideally will be addressing these problems in the very near future. Alev Akman, cataloguer extraordinaire for Gutenberg, whose commonsense, alas, has all too often been ignored in the past by techies, will be taking up this cause after having corresponded with Simon at my suggestion. And meanwhile you can either stomach the serious inconsistencies of the GUTINDEX.ALLcatalogue file or download PG books the old-fashioned way and still enjoy a stellar reading experience that few other reading programs would give you.

An e-book reader fit for a monk–complete with a parchment background, if you want it

With yBook, even “raw” Gutenberg books can end up looking like paperback books on parchment, without the glare of a white background, even though you can make the background white if you want. Some friends and I hope to get monks at a small college interested in e-books. How fitting that the yBook will be able to give the old classics a parchment look! You see two pages at once on your screen, although, via a tap on the Shift-1 you can switch in a flash to a single-column view and vary the size of the window to change the column width (you may also need to adjust the background, whether pseudo-parchment or a plain color). Shift-2 returns you to the double-column mode.

Here’s a list of the main features, as accurately described by Simon Haynes with one little exception–pertaining to the mess at Gutenberg:

–Runs on Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP and Linux (using Wine)
–Displays text and html files on side-by-side pages.
–Resize the pages, adjust the margins, set text and paper colour.
–Search for words or phrases.
–Automatic bookmarks.
–Text sizes from tiny to HUGE.
–No zooming, panning or scrolling.
–Direct download of all Gutenberg titles, with index [at least once Gutenberg gets its database act together!].
–Espa?ol, Deutsch, Portugu?s, Nederlands, more to come.
–Completely Free: No registration, no adware, nothing.

That’s not all. You can even decide whether you want a space between paragraphs, and you can tell the program to change standard quotes to left and right quotes, or “smart quotes” as they’re called. In addition, where the Gutenberg texts specify underlining, yBook can turn it into italics.

Nice! I find it ironic that so many freeware programmers talk up Gutenberg, yet here, for the first time, is an e-book reader I can truly regard as “Gutenbergware,” because it sends people to the PG books of their choice without having to mess with URLs and the intricacies of .zip and format conversations and other such fun. Well, maybe not. The GEB eBook Librarian does that if your hardware is right–and also includes links to other neat sites–and I’m probably overlooking more possibilities. Still, this integration isn’t nearly as common as it should be. Many programmers, including some very good ones, shrug it off. But I don’t. Civilians care about such issues, and Simon Haynes understand this.

At some point after you see his program for the first time–it was an uneventful install in Windows XP on my Dell Optiplex P-IV–you click the right mouse button. You’ll see menu with setup info in areas ranging from font choices (whatever you have on your machine!) to the menu bar (I prefer the “on” mode since I can then click on a little circle near the bottom of the screen to bring up a navigation bar that lets me see how far along I am in a book).

Perhaps eight items down on the menu, you see the biggest glory of yBook–the opportunity to call up Gutenberg books directly from the program. You start by downloading a catalogue, then putting your cursor over the desired title and clicking on Download and Read.

With a three-megabit broadband connection, I downloaded a long Dreiser novel in less than 15 seconds, and automatic formatting took no more than perhaps 20. I cannot even recall if Gutenberg’s version of The Financier, at least the one I downloaded, was in ASCII or HTML. That’s how effortless Simon Haynes has made the process. What’s more, via Load command on the menu bar at the bottom, you can switch back and forth between titles–and end up either at the start of a book or where you were last reading. Alas, you can’t do multiple bookmarks, but Simon tells me it wouldn’t be difficult to add them.

Once the book is on your screen, you can go forward by clicking the right page and backwards by clicking the page on the left. Or you can use the right arrow to move ahead or the left one to go back. From the File menu, you can go to such submenus as Print (obvious), Export (to send the file to a different part of your disk), Load (bring up a different book on your screen) or Delete (zipping the present book).

Simon set up the printing for people who want a formal-looking book and will mess with double-sided printing and perhaps cutting and the rest. Printing is an area where this generally easy program could be simpler. I was impatient and used the following settings within the print menu to get no-fills pages with the page numbers at the bottom. Letter-sized paper. Single Side. Full Page. Fit to Page. Justified. Portrait. Worked fine on a Tom Swift book, but I’m not certain about others. Of course, seeing Tom on paper reminded me of another problem with PG books–the fact they’re cluttered with legal notices and other awesomely distracting verbiage in the front, when it most likely would be fine just to point people either to the end of the book or to a Web address for the fine print. Here’s to the gods of usability!

Having already given you some highlights of the yBook interface, I won’t bother paraphrasing the instruction manual. On to an email Q&A I had with Simon, which I’ll abridge!

Q. Could you make the navigation bar appear constantly at the bottom of the screen–so there’d be a nice visual way of the reader tracking his progress through the book? Page numbers are nice, but can’t there be more?

A. It doesn’t yet (space reasons), but I’ll bear that in mind.

Q. Also, would it be possible to set things up so that rolling the mouse wheel could move the two-page view either forward or backwards?

A. Unfortunately Visual Basic 6 doesn’t have anything to interact with the mousewheel. I think mousewheeels came out a few years after VB, which hasn’t had an update in donkey’s years. I mentioned Linux–my eventually goal is to rewriite yBook in a platform-independent matter, probably using something like wxWidgets. I’ve got 12 years or more of VB experience, though, so it’s a lot of unlearning.

Q. I like the program very much so far, and I can see why an old friend, a laptop owner, is so fond of it.

A. I use it on a 200-mhz Pentium laptop. It’s slow to load a book but usable after that. I was forced to use my laptop for a week last year, on holiday, and that’s when I wrote the page-caching code. See the green-orange-red LED on the menu bar. It’s orange when you turn a page, because the program is drawing the next page on a hidden screen

I’ve read a handful of full-length books on my laptop, and I certainly don’t find it a nuisance or unpleasant. In fact, trying to hold open some of the thick fantasy books they publish these days is much more of a nuisance than reading off the screen.

Q. Would welcome bio and other background info. Happy to do a pointer to your magazine. Very Net friendly way of promoting it.

A. Andromedia Spaceways? http://www.andromediaspaceways.com. We’re a non-profit, co-opt, about to print issue 12. There’s some background info on the site or I can send more if you need it.

The yBook page is the most visited on my site. Possibly because it supports TXT and HTML, which the other readers often ignore.

As an aside, I use the print engine in yBook to lay out and print my novels on a duplex laser, two up side-by-side, ready for binding and cropping. I self-published the Hal Spacejock series in Australia as a way of keeping myself writing while seeking a ‘real’ publisher for the books. There’s an annual con here in Perth, Western Australia, and last year I promised a handful of Hal fans that I could have the next book ready for April 9. It went to the binders yesterday.

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Other thoughts from Simon:

I wrote the thing specifically to reformat and display Gutenberg books properly, and I don’t think it’s a bad program. I’ve read a number of books on my laptop with it, and I also use it to print my novels. (I built in a printing routine for duplex lasers–you can print off the loaded book in booklet mode, two-sided, then crop and bind. Also does two-up, I just printed 105 copies of my third novel over the weekend in an 18-hour session

What I’d really like is a machine-readable catalog file, zipped. E.g.

subfolder,title,author,comments,filename
etext99,”This is a book title, you see”, “Author, A.N.”,”Revision 2.1 multiple versions”,abcfeff.zip etext04,”This is another book”, “Author2, A.N.”,”Revision 1A”,abcfg.zip

That would make my life really easy, I could display the list properly and ensure people got the right book when they clicked ‘download’. I was using pgwhole.zip, but now it seems to be GUTINDEX.ALL so I spent a couple of hours last night changing things around to parse that file instead. (The 1.3.76 version of yBook uses this newer file.)

I don’t know how easy it is for you to correlate the file list from the server with the catalogue file.

It will be interesting to see if the main Project Gutenberg follows the example of the Australian PG and does a yBook-compatible index. I’ll be returning to this issue in the future and trust that Gutenberg will be more responsive on format matters than, say, the Open eBook Forum. The real solution for Gutenberg is an XML-based conversation engine spitting out perfect copy in many formats, and James Linden, a key PG volunteer as well as TeleRead’s technical consultant, has been among those working just such a creature. What’s more, yBook is not by any means a substitute for the much-needed Universal Consumer Format for dealing with, say, textbooks with complicated formats and otherwise serving the needs of schools, high ed, various professions and large publishers. But yBook is much-needed PGware. For the moment, yBook, although not part of the American Gutenberg itself, is one of the best things that the original PG has going. With it, Alev will have a new QC tool to try to persuade the stubborn to stick to consistent formats in catalogues and text.

As for the Australian Gutenberg, I know one of the very best ways of all to lobby against copyright term extension. Just go from office to office of various MPs–after having had the software certified as virus free–and offer to install it on their machines. Then the MPs can see public domain books in their full glory. Remember, as in the States, public domain relies on the kindness of powerful strangers. If made aware of the direct benefits of the PD, via yBooks, MPs might be that much less inclined to roll over for Disney executives, Jack Valenti and the other members of the U.S. copyright elite.

Recommended project for Simon or friends: A freeware dictionary that could work when one clicked on a word. Perhaps this won’t be possbile. But, especially for school and library use, it would be good to have for a future version of yBook. Yo, Simon? Any possibilities here.

Tip: Check Simon’s site for other freeware programs ranging from text-to-speech software to a reminder program and a yBook-focused e-book compiler and email software. He also sells low-cost software, including FCharts Pro–stock-charting software, of which he also offers a free version.

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yBook is a little-known but important program in the e-book world. It lets even nontechies enjoy Project Gutenberg books. Via yBook, you can find, download, read and even print them. What’s more, in the spirit of Gutenberg, yBook is free unless you want to make a donation via PayPal. I’ll be posting the review by 5 p.m. Washington, DC, time.

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Project Gutenberg of Australia has posted a sample letter to protest copyright-term extension Down Under, as provided in a rather problematic Free Trade Treaty. A laudable cause for Australians.

In addition, Americans might want to write very polite letters to Australian politicians telling them that our shameful Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act is at odds with even U.S. traditions. Mention how Congress passed it by stealth in the middle of the Clinton impeachment controversy–without the normal procedures used to record votes.

You can get a list of Members of Parliament in Australia and even email the office of Prime Minister John Howard. The sample letter contains excellent points, and there are others to be made as well. Simply put, does Australia really want to deprive its own children of the right to read Gutenberg editions of the classics most relevant to them–the most recent ones?

Recommended reading for Australian politicians: The ‘Free Culture’ book

If nothing else, encourage Australian politicians to read Prof. Lessig’s Free Culture: How the Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, which they can download for free in a variety of formats. Far from protecting culture, copyright term extension hurts it, as the Lessig book makes abundantly clear. So whatever you do, include the download link.

Also go into the specifics. Thanks to our Sonny Bono Act, for example, it will be years before American schoolchildren can read for free such works as The Great Gatsby, often called The Great American Novel. Gatsby would be in the U.S. public domain now if campaign donations from Disney and the rest hadn’t bought the Bono Act. Sonny Bono, the entertainer turned legislator, once told the Washington Post how he hoped that a Hollywood-friendly Congress would bring in more campaign donations for the Republican party. Democratic (big D) President Bill Clinton, who counted Hollywood millionaires among his leading supporters, signed Bono into law. This was a bipartisan outrage. It would be a shame if Australia repeated our mistake.

If Australians can resist term extension, this will give new comfort to public domain defenders in the States and aid the cause of the Public Domain Enhancement Act.

Detail: If nonAmericans and nonAustralians want to join the protest against Bono Down Under, so much the better! Let’s get copyright “harmonization” started in the right direction.

For old time’s sake: Below is a Web item I posted in ‘95 when Sonny was still alive:

Sonny Bono, Cher’s ex–a California Republican–[has] been described as one of the dimmest bulbs on the Hill. Notice? No public e-mail address in the government listing to which I’ve linked. Who needs to mess with miserly Netfolks? Sonny’s too busy pleasing potential campaign contributors. He’s Point Man for the Congressional Entertainment Task Force. Jealous of the Democrats for collecting so much campaign loot from the copyright interests, some Republicans are trying to outpander them. As reported by the Washington Post of October 25, Bono “wants Hollywood’s leaders to ‘write your own legislation and bring it to us’” on certain key issues such as, gasp, copyright protection. The Post says “Bono isn’t promising passage, just serious consideration.” Such a relief. What’s next, a Congressional School and Internet Task Force for those whom Hollywood-written copyright law might harm? Don’t count on it. The campaign money just isn’t there. We need good copyright legislation (as author of more than half a dozen books I’m hardly anti-copyright), but not a “highest-bidder” ethos.

Let us honor the memory of Bono as a comedian, not a politician.

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Bill Gates is an odd bird. He’s made tens of billions off us because he wants to sock away cash and own everything. Love of ownership is strong. Why else are people so POed about e-books that end up unreadable–because the supposedly trustworthy vendors went kaput?

Now Billg plans to offer some new delights from Microsoft for his friends in the music industry–songs that expire, via clocked DRM, if you don’t keep your music subscription current. A brand-new Pocket PC Thoughts article has inspired a flood of anti-Microsoft diatribes from PPCT readers.

Already, of course, the library world has used the clocked DRM approach. It’s a necessary evil there if libraries want to avoid the “permanent checkout” model I suggested for library e-books.

But enough’s enough. Now Gates and friends seem intent on turning us from a nation of CD owners into mere renters. The plan is for songs to reach you via a subscription and electronically disembowel themselves, even on your portable devices, not just your desktop, if your subscription expires. The best-case scenario for Gates, I suspect, is to have everything rented, books and music alike. William Gates, lord of the manor–presiding over us landless serfs from his $50 million lakeside mansion, where the library books are on paper and won’t expire.

It’s almost surrealistic when Bill’s father talks about the evils of inherited wealth and the need for estate taxes. What’s to inherit when Microsoft and the rest have sucked the rest of the world dry with content-rental schemes? Hyperbole, of course. But the clocked DRM is another attack on fair use, which Microsoft and similar outfits all too often seem intent on coding out of existence to serve business partners in Hollywood.

(Thanks to Mike Cane for spotting the PPCT item.)

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E-books could get a boost if an experimental $645 tablet/PDA hybrid from NEC takes off.

The specs as reported in the Japanese-language PC Watch and translated for Tech Japan: the Linux OS, an 8.4-inch 640X480 touchscreen LCD and a CD-ROM.

NEC will make just 4,000 of the Linux tablets the first year, so don’t count on seeing one at your local CompUSA, but, as a Slashdot contributor observes, the new machine is a helpful start by a major Japanese company

Meanwhile Sun’s Linux will be reaching Wal-Mart via Microtel machines, raising the intriguing possibility that perhaps Sun or partners like Microtel will get into the low-cost tablet business.

E-book benefits

Ramifications for the e-book business, assuming that NEC and the Sun/Microtel /Wal-Mart combo can succeed with tablets? Plenty. Many buyers might find the tablets to be easier to read from than the usual PDAs, especially as screen resolutions improve, and the low-cost systems might be especiallly attractive to school systems as textbook replacements when loaded with e-books.

The result, combined with other trends, might be that a whole generation of young people will grow up accustomed to reading off e-books off the screen.

Also, If Linux fares well on low-cost machines, Microsoft and its Tablet PC partners may have to think twice about the prices they are charging. What’s more, with Linux counting for more, Microsoft, Adobe and the like may not be quite as successful at imposing their DRMish visions on the whole planet. All this could be good news for e-books.

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Bill Gates is now predicting “almost free computers” within a decade–and within reason I’d agree.

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A fuel cell powers an experimental PDA from Hitachi, and NEC’s in the FC game, too, along with Toshiba. NEC plans to stretch battery life to 40 hours and put its PDA on sale in ‘05. (Via Slashdot.)

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E-books as tax-money-savers? You bet–in Texas, at least if you go by a news story about a Dallas-area school, where e-books are said to have replaced the paper kind completely. From the WISH TV Web site in Indianapolis:

It’s not just high-tech for the sake of it. Laptops will replace an armload of textbooks, making students’ loads lighter. News 8 found out about a school down in Texas that is trying to make the switch from heavy to high tech.

At Johnson Elementary School in Forney, just outside of Dallas, Texas, students have been reading “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” They’re trading in their hard covers for hard drives. Administrators at the school feel they’re ahead of a wave that was sure to come.

“It wasn’t a matter of if we were going to get electronic textbooks. It was a question of when we were going to get electronic textbooks,” said Mike Smith, Forney superintendent.

While kids at Forney are now testing laptops, next fall each fifth and sixth grader will be issued a PC. Their IBM Thinkpads are pre-loaded with Vital Source Technologies software that contains more than 2,000 books.

Folks at Vital Source say they can outfit each student with a laptop for under $1,000. The same textbooks would cost 13-hundred each. The real savings comes each following year.. When the only cost is a c-d-rom to upgrade the electronic text books…and the computer gets reused.

According to the article, e-books are already happening in some central Indiana schools. “This example from Texas is the first to toss the textbooks completely.”

Related: Board OKs Electronic Textbook Partnership with IBM & Vital Source (news release).

(Spotted via LISNews.)

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Info here about the forthcoming audio of Free Culture.

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Government wiretappers, rejoice. Ernie Miller’s blog tells of the pleasures ahead for snoops if a current anti-P2P proposal becomes law. Imagine the possibility of federal wiretaps for even alleged downloading. And for civil suits, even?

Hmm. J. Edgar Hoover was an amateur at this privacy invasion business, spying on Martin Luther King and scads of other Americans for the love of it. But the well-bought pols in DC are enthustiatic pros. Give enough campaign money to ‘em and they’ll turn federal snoops loose on alleged infringers, with the solons enjoying the fruits of the piracy invasions. Just my opinion, but the law in DC is too often: “If they can justify your paranoia, they will.”

Hypocrites on the Hill

Meanwhile, the EFF’s Donna Wentworth and other foes of Washington thuggery are noting the hypocrisy at work here. On one hand the recording industry greedsters don’t want a voluntary mass licensing scheme, lest this be seen as federal intervention in the blessed private sector. And yet under a new RIAA-friendly proposal, we taxpayers would pay millions for Washington to go after sharers.

That’s not the only fun. Looks as if Sen. Hatch and other copyright zealots, wittingly or not, would be protecting the copyright holders within the porn industry.

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“‘Consumption of music increases dramatically with the introduction of file-sharing, but not everybody who likes to listen to music was a music customer before, so it’s very important to separate the two,’ said Felix Oberholzer-Gee, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and one of the authors of the study. Oberholzer-Gee and his colleague, University of North Carolina’s Koleman Strumpf, also said that their ‘most pessimistic’ statistical model showed that illegal file-sharing would have accounted for only 2 million fewer compact discs sales in 2002, whereas CD sales declined by 139 million units between 2000 and 2002.’ – Washington Post.

The TeleRead take: A lesson for the e-book biz? Not sure. As e-book hardware grows better and better, then unauthorized file-sharing could be more of a problem. But the solutions are pretty obvious. Use viral marketing. Offer e-book files with both protected and unprotected sections, the latter of which could be unlocked with payment by either the the original buyer or the recipient. Subscription models also help. Of course, about one fact, there’s not the slightest doubt. Expensive and onerous DRM schemes are costing e-book publishers enough customers to offset any anti-piracy protections.

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I’m enjoying yBook. Got an e-book newbie going with it in five minutes. He almost immediately was downloading a Project Gutenberg book from within yBook. The paperback appearance should be a hit with people like him. I hate reading books hour after hours on a desktop–hey, each to his own!–but this software would be a nice addition to the hard disk of a laptop or tablet. More details on the way later this week. Please note that to be used in Linux, yBook requires Wine emultation (sorry–should have said so earlier).

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“While 18 to 34 year-olds comprise only 24% of the total U.S. population, they account for 38% of the total time spent online and 40% of the total pages viewed. This skew is even more pronounced among men in this age group.” – News release from the Online Publishers Association.

The TeleRead take: Full report is online in PDF. If I were a publisher not on the Net now, I’d take these stats as a pretty strong warning. The case for e-books gets stronger and stronger since technology is just going to get better and better, as the Librie shows.

(Found via The Shifted Librarian, which, by the way, also carries an interesting WiFi-related link. The more common WiFi is, the more sense it will make for e-books to carry Web links–including those to sites updating information in them.)

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…it’s the proper side for Japan. Amy Roos writes: “Just a reminder: in Japan many books are read ‘backwards’ from those in English and standard European languages. I presume a version designed for the western market would open in the direction we are used to expecting books to open.” Thanks for setting us straight, Amy.