TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for June, 2004

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Bill Clinton’s My Life is already being pirated. So reports Blackmask, one of my favorite e-bookstore sites. Very possibly the piracy is happening from an edition in Microsoft Reader or Adobe Reader or Palm/eReader, all listed on the Random House/Knopf site and all very hackable.

But guess what. All the Digital Rights Management in the cosmos won’t do a bit of good in preventing the usual suspects from scanning the paper version. Piece of cake. Let the publishers use DRM if they want to try to keep honest people honest–that’ll be the OpenReader approach–but don’t ever expect perfect DRM. Software companies have conned the publishers royally. No way that even Draconian protection will work completely.

Main effect of DRM: Lost sales

DRM’s main effect is to drive down sales, since readers hate the hassles. Along with the Tower of eBabel, resulting from the e-book format wars, DRM is a big reason why global e-book sales are just $20-$30 million a year. Yes, I know. Larger publishers say they want to protect their big, valuable properties such as the Clinton book. But those are the very works most promising as candidates for scanning from the paper editions.

The best solution? Fair prices, convenient distribution and a willingness to modernize business models. TeleRead-style national digital libraries in the States and elsewhere could at least reduce the incentive for piracy by putting many thousands of free books on the Net–with provisions for fair compensation to content owners. And, yes, I favor aggressive prosecution of big-time pirates. But let’s not destroy America’s high-tech prowess by confusing crooks with the technology they use, especially when so many are overseas.

Update, 5:12 p.m. Eastern Daylight: I see that the Clinton book is also available in Microsoft, Adobe and Mobipocket formats via RandomHouse.com’s e-commerce operation. The price? A whopping $28, just $7 less than the $35 list price for the hard cover. So far–I haven’t looked in all the logical places–the lowest price is $22.40 at ebooks.com, which offers the book in the same formats.

I mean e-book prices, of course. As I write this, you can patronize an Amazon partner and buy a hardcover in new condition for just $9.75 except for shipping. No DRM, either–or proprietary format to worry about! That means you can keep the dead-tree book forever without worrying about a software vendor going out of business or sticking you with an eventually obsolete format. See why I don’t buy DRMed e-books? Much prefer the used p-variety for obvious economic reasons.

Others, of course, rather understandably, prefer to read pirated editions. Bottom line? All too often publishers’ prices make suckers of honest e-book buyers, and if this keeps up, you’ll just see more piracy. Gouges are a great way to train customers to be pirates rather than grow e-bookdom from the present $20-$30 million in global sales.

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Yo, Brian Levine! Yes, you, the Kerry policy aide. You who would not answer my copyright-related questions even after I left messages twice after talking to you!

I’d greatly appreciate your cooperating now even if you wouldn’t several months ago. You and your colleagues will ideally get your man to do right by the schools and libraries. Will Sen. Kerry agree to work toward repeal or mitigation of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, the DMCA and other anti-child, anti-Net measures? I’m a lifelong liberal Democrat. I’d like the Party to leave Bill Clinton’s copyright messes behind so I can hold my head high again. This is a time for a fresh start. As disappointed as I am by your past silence, Brian, I’m more interested in the future and will have a very short memory of earlier frustrations.

Closing the gap between copyright policy and populist rhetoric

Republicans are hardly copyright paragons, as shown by the name of the Bono act, but we Democrats have a special responsibility to move our copyright policies a bit closer to populist rhetoric. Over the years the Bono act alone will funnel billions from schools, libraries and society at large to Hollywood fatcats and other members of the copyright elite, as well as Time Warner and other huge conglomerates. If it weren’t for Bono, U.S. students by now could legally download The Great Gatsby and 1984 for free off the Net. Nothing wild advocated here–just a more balanced approach that respects property rights, but also the needs of ordinary Americans who don’t happen to be heirs of F. Scott Fitzgerald or the CEO of Time Warner.

Stolen from today’s public domain: One Great Gatsby

Neither George Bush signed the Bono Act. Bill Clinton did, thereby helping to deprive the public domain–as it exists today–of The Great Gatsby. Will John Kerry be different? Will he place schools ahead of elite interests?

Brian, I’m going to see if you’re still at the Kerry campaign and will respond. Another Kerry aide assured me earlier that you’re could speak with authority. Maybe that’s true. Maybe not. I don’t know. However, I did poke around the Kerry site just now and saw on a Young Voters for Kerry page that you’re 22 years old.

Whatever your age, I’ll respectfully appreciate a written reply–substantive and with Kerry’s personal authorization–on Bono and the DMCA. It would be especially helpful in the wake of those new millions your guy’s gotten from Hollywood. Thanks! Let’s get John Kerry to act in the spirit of Profiles in Courage. Just might help at the polls, too. Young people and soccer moms may not be aware of the Bono Act and the rest now; but sooner or later the truth will catch up. If nothing else, students are fed up with high textbook prices that Draconian copyright policies encourage. Moreover, what happens if the Republicans reverse course and listen to Glenn Reynolds? There is one thing Karl Rove and friends on the Bush campaign side value more than big donations. Votes. In a close election, an enlightened intellectual property policy could help the candidate who latched on to the issue first. Copyright is far, far more complicated than simply going after foreign pirates as the Kerry campaign has pledged to do. It also requires careful balances at home and abroad between the rights of consumers and content owners. Thanks to proprietary formats and restrictive DRM today, U.S. book buyers can’t even own e-books for real–not when software vendors may go out of business.

(Photo shows Brian Levine with Kerry Policy Director Sara Bianchi, left, and Deputy Policy Director Heather Higginbottom, to Ms. Bianchi’s right.)

Related: Copyright excesses worry teachers, scholars, from eSchool News. For a good overview of the issues, Brian Levine and friends would also do well to read Stanford Law Prof. Larry Lessig’s Free Culture, available both on paper and electronically. In fact, if the Kerry campaign, is hurting for cash, even after all those Hollywood millions, Brian can even legally download the book for free.

Update, 11:55 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time and later: Softened the language somewhat. Honey vs. vinegar and all that. Let’s see if the Kerryians can respond constructively and helpfully.

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Right near the battery rack at the local Safeway, across the aisle from the ice cream bars, I perused the pages of My Life–the new book by Bill Clinton. Something inside me balked at the prospect of paying for this thing. Other writers could better use the money; I’d wait for a library copy.

Years ago I had differed with the Clinton White House over copyright policy and the Internet, and I was curious what the word “Copyright” might conjure up from the index. Zilch. I looked for the word “Internet” in the index. Nothing. Actually in the text itself I found a quick mention of the eRate for schools and libraries, of which I approved. But guess what Clinton wanted us to remember him for–the V-Chip. That’s right: it showed up five times in the index. Monica Lewisky’s lover praised the chip as an upholder of American values.

Left out: Clinton on copyright and the Net

The big question is what Clinton left out about copyright and the Net. Just what political bargains did he and his boys strike with Jack Valenti and the rest of Hollywood crew at the expense of schools and libraries. The damage lingers. Clinton, after all, signed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act which ultimately will cost the schools and libraries billions while enriching the copyright elite.

Will we learn? I’m not sure. I admire Larry Lessig for his legal talents, and Ralph Nader, too; but why oh why are Lessig and Nader so keen on John Edwards as John Kerry’s running mate, when so many questions linger about Edwards and copyright. Just why is the Senator–a member of a copyright-related committee–not rendered accountable for the million dollars that an Edwards PAC received from just one Hollywood producer early on in the Presidential race? And what about the five million that John Kerry and other Dems raked in recently at a single Hollywood affair? Can’t law professors and Net journalists show more curiosity and follow up on items here and in another patch of the blogsphere? On copyright matters, will the very possible team of Kerry and Edwards screw the Net with the dedication that Clinton’s boys did regardless of positives such as the eRate? Just what will the Presidential memoirs of John Kerry not say?

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In late 2002 I wrote a TeleRead item called “The Backwards West?”–noting how our medieval-minded politicians are jeopardizing America’s superiority in areas such as biotech. Meanwhile countries like China are avoiding such stupidity and creating a reverse brain drain from the U.S. with some cutting-edge researchers fleeing our so-called enlightenment. Might the day come when the real progress happens in non-Western cultures, as when the Moslems led in such areas as science and math–and, in Spain, even the treatment of Jews? There is always hope, though. Even Nancy Reagan, indeed especially Nancy Reagan, is speaking out nowadays for stem cell research. The tide may be turning amid the realization that Washington’s stupidity could be delaying the development of successful treatments of Alzheimer’s Disease and other conditions.

Needed: A Nancy Reagan of high tech

Now we need a Nancy Reagan of high tech. If legislation like the INDUCE Act passes, would a Senator’s spouse please get jailed and fined? Then maybe the bozos across the Potomac from me can finally grasp the dangers of letting Hollywood control American technology.

Tired of the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which limit your ability to crack DRM and make backups of DVDs and e-books and the like? You ain’t seen nothing yet, according to Ernest Miller, one of the most prolific and cogent contributors to the Yale LawMeme and other authoritative legal blogs. He has torn apart Sen. Orrin Hatch’s defense of the INDUCE act, which, among other things, is Hollywood’s nasty way of banning P2P technology or at least making its use far, far more problematic legally than it is now. From iPODs to VCRs, technologies could be harmed in one way or another. INDUCE makes it easier than ever to hold software and hardware developers responsible for copyright-related actions of users. On top of everything else, by creating new legal threats to cash-starved competitors, INDUCE in some ways would make it easier for companies such as Microsoft to sustain monopolies. Even an attorney for a descendant of the old Bell monopolies, however, Verizon, is up in arms over INDUCE. Of course, INDUCE could be catnip for U.S. rivals overseas, not just in Asia but in Europe.

The child-porn excuse

In case you’re wondering about the name of the proposed law, it alludes to the idea that the mere availability of technology can contribute to violations–and along the way lure children to iniquitous porn. But of course! Protect the children. Never mind that P2P could drive down the cost of educational technology and enrich life on the Net in new ways for all generations. Consider Net telephony. Not so coincidentally, Skype, my Net telephone service, which offers better-than-phone quality, uses P2P techniques developed originally for the KaZaA music-sharing service. Needless to say, P2B can be used for distribution of public domain books–in fact, copyrighted ones, too. Ernie Miller isn’t the biggest fan of DRM, and I’m not either, but one possibility is the use of accessible sample chapters combined with either (1) locked files that a credit card number or library card number or something else would open or (2) links to e-bookstores. Project Gutenberg is already encouraging file-swapping of its public domain editions. Imagine, too, the potential of P2P for distributing multimedia files associated with education. Those are just a few examples of the promise of P2P as an enlightener of children and the rest of us. But politicians apparently care far more about campaign money from Hollywood, even if the end result is really to be anti-child.

Hatch’s P2P-bashing legislation, alas, is on the fast track, with such influential friends as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Minority Leader Tom Daschle; and if you care about technological progress, you really should be writing or phoning your congress member now and attaching the Miller analysis of the Act. If you’re with a library or school, send it to your employer’s counsel and tell how useful P2B is or could be to you.

Other links:

–The INDUCE Act and the Right to Prepare Derivative Works, Supporting the INDUCE Act, Crawford on the INUDUCE Act: Not with a Sledgehammer, But a Stiletto, Pirate Act + Induce Act=???, EFF’s Mock INDUCE Act Lawsuit–in The Importance of…, the Miller blog.

–Stop INDUCE: action web site story on P2Pnet.net (source of the wicket graphic at the top of this blog posting).

–EFF Demonstrates How To Use New Law Against Apple, iPod, from The Mac Observer.

–INDUCE Act is Free Speech Killer, from Copyfight: the politics of IP.

Detail: Alas, Blogger accidentally killed off the link to the “Backwards West,” but you can see an excerpt in Jerry Justiango’s blog (scroll down to the entry for December 19, 2002).

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Yale LawMeme contributor Ernest Miller points to TeleRead’s reference to 1984 as a popular book that should be in the public domain by now. In Australia you can legally download 1984 for free amd keep it forever–but not in the States, thanks to special-interest legislation pushed by Disney and the rest.

Fascinatingly, 1984 is the tenth most borrowed title on a library-related list of best-sellers. Simply put, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act will cost society big bucks over the long run. It’s an efficient redistribution of wealth from consumers, schools and libraries to members of the copyright elite in Hollywood and elsewhere.

When will John Kerry and possible running mate John Edwards–the so-called populist, who sits on a copyright-related Senate committee–have the guts to speak out on this? Or is Hollywood money keeping them mute? An Edwards PAC received a million dollars from just one Hollywood producer, and neither the Senator’s office nor the producer would disclose to me the reasons for this generosity.

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Hollywood is full of baby-killers–smug, greedy mediocrities who often can see only threats in new technologies, as the outrageous treatment of Net radio illustrates. Now it turns out that Warren Lieberfarb, “father of the DVD,” was frequently viewed as a disruptive pest in his efforts to popularize DVDs and come up with standards. He prevailed, however, and today DVDs are a $9-billion-plus business for Hollywood.

A lesson here for e-bookers? Ideally the industry will be smarter than many in Hollywood, where originally the movie tycoons even tried to resist VCR technology. From One Man’s Flight of Fancy in Newsweek:

Putting movies on a disc wasn’t Lieberfarb’s idea. The glitch-prone DiscoVision from MCA and Selectavision from RCA came and went in the early 1980s. The pricey album-size laser discs appealed mostly to videophiles. At Warner, Lieberfarb collaborated on disc projects with Philips in the late 1980s. Little came of it, though. By the early 1990s, his gut was telling him that if movie discs were the size of CDs, were priced right and offered a better picture and sound than video, people would collect movies like books. The key was to make the discs cheaply, based on a universal standard.

Time Warner agreed early on to team up with Toshiba to develop the DVD. Toshiba had a crucial stake in new technology to compress a two-hour movie onto a single side of a disc. The partners launched a DVD project code named “Taz” (for Warner’s Tasmanian Devil character). Later at a secret meeting in London’s swank Dorchester Hotel, says Lieberfarb, they recruited Philips to the team. But in a stunning move, Philips soon left to jointly develop a DVD with Sony. Philips and Sony were natural allies, since they each owned and licensed aspects of the compact disc’s technology. Their DVD would share much of the CD’s DNA, so they assumed they could reap new royalty rewards together.

The divided camps were heading toward a format war, like Sony’s Beta debacle versus VHS. Neither wanted that for DVD, especially Lieberfarb. He traveled the world to broker compromises. He got his trump card by wooing the computer industry, which was looking for a medium that stored more data. If computers could use the same disc that stored movies, it could stoke demand and drive down manufacturing costs. Dan Sullivan, a former IBM executive, says Lieberfarb’s role was crucial in closing the deal. “He’s very convincing,” says Sullivan. Lieberfarb now had the leverage he needed to win agreement on a single standard.

The technical solution was only half the battle, though. Not all the studios embraced the idea. Three majors—Disney, Paramount and Fox—balked, expressing concerns about piracy…

Oh, the parallels! What a debacle e-books have been with consumer gouges, the Tower of eBabel and Draconian and even Orwellian DRM! OpenReader, anyone?

(DVD article found via Slashdot.)

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Dude, Where’s My Country? leads OverDrive’s list of the ten most borrowed library books if you go by the total stats from Cleveland, San Jose and other cities. In the e-book reader department: “PDF eBooks, read using popular Adobe Reader software, are the overwhelming format of choice for patrons and students while MobiPocket Reader is gaining ground among PDA and Smartphone users.”

The TeleRead take: The tenth most popular book was 1984. If we Americans were Aussies, we could download it legally for free off the Net and keep it forever. Alas, this could soon change because of Hollywood’s lobbying Down Under for longer copyright terms. As for PDF’s popularity, no surprise there. It’s simply because many people use Adobe Reader for reading short documents. But Adobe is an inferior solution for reading e-books, especially on PDAs. Good to see Mobipocket gaining in the world of handhelds and phones. It’s my favorite proprietary e-book reader by far and displays far, far better on small screens.

Related: Copyright costs under scrutiny in free trade deal with US, from the Australian ABC site. As for readers, although I hate Adobe for e-books, I knoiw that many people must use it in business. If you’re one, check out the free PDF Creator, which a PC World reviewer likes.

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John Kerry is raking in Hollywood dough. Copyright policy implications if he’s elected? The campaign was mum some months ago when I asked for meaningful statements on the Sony Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and repair of the DMCA. If Kerry wants to help tech, he’ll think about legal reforms, not just new federal programs. From the New York Times:

It could have been Oscar night, what with Billy Crystal cracking wise about movies and politics, money and baseball — just like in the old days when the Academy Awards ceremony was held across the street at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. But when Mr. Crystal tried a joke about former president Bill Clinton’s forthcoming children’s book — “It’s called `The Little Engine That Could Because It Could’ ” — it fell flat.

More business suit than ball gown, this audience of 2,000 Democratic donors at the Walt Disney Concert Hall had paid too much ($2,000 to $25,000) on Thursday night to laugh at itself.

Fun was to be had, sure, but at the Republicans’ expense.

And perhaps someday at the expense of the public domain, free speech and consumer rights?

Related: Congress Looks Out for Hollywood from Wired News and Senate Passes Toughened Copyright Laws from Reuters.

(Via N.Y. Times, reg. required.)

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Some library users are editing the books they check out. Talk about the desire for wiki-style interactivity! Meanwhile wiki fans can check out wikis of Free Culture and Smart Genes. (Library-related examples found via LISNews.)

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The Librie mailing list gained a bunch of new members after mentions on the eBook Community list and in this blog. Please join the list to free the Librie. Your membership will be a vote against Orwellian DRM and vanishing e-books. Meanwhile here are observations from Mark Hill, a Librie owner in the United Kingdom–follow by an example of the hardware hacking that very likely will follow.

The unit is very slick, the screen quality is awesome, I cannot use it for anything, I do not speak Japanese, and I really bought it because I think if we can bypass the DRM, it would be a wonderful device. This was a brave move, I think, and without a lot of skilled people working on it, I am unsure that we can do anything with it.

There are two options. We either get ahold of the software used to create the BBEB format and author our own documents from Project Gutenberg, etc., or we hack the device to bypass DRM and/or provide it with the functions to read txt files and html.

I have shown it to a few guys here, and everybody would buy one to a man, if the DRM issues are solved.

I think Sony is being very very short-sighted with its approach here.

They have made major mistakes like this before and continue to make them

I have a blog entry which outlines my thoughts overall.

Meanwhile, over at Sven Neuhaus’s mailing list devoting to the Librie, the good works go on. Here in the U.S., since computer makers and buyers are still suffering from laws that Hollywood purchased with massive campaign donations in Washington, the goal can’t legally be a DRM bypass per se. But, if nothing else, Americans would like to be able to load programs to read HTML, PDF and other common e-book formats. To show the eagerness of those in the Librie Liberation Movement, here’s a recent exchange btween Mark and another member of the Neuhaus list.

It ships with a number of books in memory, I am guessing these are taking up the space on the flash NAND.

Some of these will be bulky as they contain audio.

Mark

[Other member's name]

> Hi!
> After looking at the pictures again, I have a few more
> speculations to offer about the system architecture:
> The main CPU (Dragonball, IC1001) seems to be equipped with
> 64MByte
> SDRAM (16 or 32bit wide, 7ns, IC1201 + IC1202),
> 4MByte NOR flash (16 or 32bit wide, 90ns, IC1203 + IC1204)
> from which program code can be directly executed without loading
> into SDRAM first, and 48MByte (32MB (IC1106) + 16MB (IC1108))
> sectored NAND flash (works like a harddisk, no direct code
> execution from flash possible).
> The 4MB NOR flash is big enough to hold a bootloader and also a
> small Linux system in a compressed R/O filesystem (cramfs).
> What seems odd is that from the 48MByte NAND flash only 10MB are
> available for internal eBook data storage (if I remember it
> right).
> What did Sony fill the other 38MByte with?
> The display controller (IC1610, found no info about this one,
> yet)comes with 1MByte SRAM (16 or 32bit wide, 70ns, IC1612 + IC1613)
> and 512KByte NOR flash (8 or 16bit wide, 90ns, IC1611).
> This seems a resonable amount of memory for a controller driving
> a 800×600 grayscale display.

Detail: If you’re not on the eBook Community list already, why not join that as well?

By David Rothman

More and more people are echoing our sentiments against the darker side of the Sony Librie.

The new E Ink screen technology is awesome, but, alas, the Librie comes with Sony-stupid DRM. Books even vanish after 60 days. An anti-Librie mention in the TechDirt blog elicited such reader reactions as: “I feel sorry for the authors who will sell quite a few less of their e-books because of this kind of Orwellian technology.”

Now you can add the United Kingdom to the growing list of countries–including Japan itself–where angry e-book enthusiasts are speaking up. “Nice ebook, shame about the DRM,” reads a headline accompanying J. Mark Lytle’s article in the UK-based Personal Computer World.

An e-mail list membership as a vote against Draconian DRM

“Anything I can do to set up a group to put pressure on Sony, let me know,” Mark Hill, a member of a new international Librie list, wrote me from London. In line with Japanese blogger Yutaka Ohno’s wishes for a multinational protest against the Liebrie’s anti-consumer software, I would urge owners and prospective owners of the Librie to sign up for the list, which Sven Neuhaus started in April. Sven is in Germany–yet another market where Orwellian DRM may well be toxic to consumers.

Right now the Librie is officially sold only in Japan. Let Sony know that the exported Librie won’t be worth the trouble if company does not wise up.

Hardware hackers working to free Librie

Of course, list members already intend to give Sony a little help. The Librie is Linux-based with openly published source code, and they’re hoping that e-book readers for HTML and PDF can be flashed onto the Librie. They are publishing photos of the inside to help each other better understand the machine. Far from being anti-Sony, they’ll do the company a favor if they succeed. The list is key. Your membership on the list will be a vote against Orwellian DRM. The list also means–as a result of the exchange of knowledge–that the white hats will stand more of a chance of bypassing the anti-reader technology in use on the Librie.

Sony itself could help immensely by switching the Librie over to the cross-platform Mobipocket, which nicely imports HTML and is among the best of the proprietary e-book readers. Later Sony could move up to OpenReader, whose planned capabilities will leave Mobipocket and the other proprietary programs in the dust. Momentum is building for OR in the wake of a key O’Reilly editor’s enthusiasm for the nonproprietary approach to e-book formats.

Anti-reader DRM’s rewards: $30M down the drain–and bankruptcy

The sentiment toward the Orwellian DRM of the Librie, however, is headed in the opposite direction. One TechDirt reader worked for Netactive, a DRM company that blew $30 million and went bankrupt because “consumers do not want DRM. They want free products, not ‘kinda free’ products. Or they want to pay for something and actually own it, not just ‘have a license to use, for a limited amount of time.’” Needless to say, the Netactive fiasco ought to be a lesson for the big companies behind the Open eBook Forum–DRM and the Tower of eBabel are no small reason why e-book sales are so puny. Can’t anyone learn from the past?

Lest Sony still be reluctant to ditch the Orwellian approach, here are some details from the Lytle article in Personal Computer World:

One of the buzz products of the first half of 2004 is Sony’s new…�210…electronic book reader called the Librie EBR-1000EP, seen by many as the first decent attempt to replicate the paper-based reading experience on an electronic device.

Its ‘charm point’, as Japanese girls like to say, is not a dazzling smile or a cute dimple, but a screen with amazing contrast produced in collaboration with America’s E Ink Corporation, among others.

Less than charming, however, is the digital rights management (DRM) used for the project. Fifteen of the biggest Japanese publishers (and Sony) put their heads together to figure out how to offer a compelling collection of novels and other material while protecting their own financial investments in the work and the interests of the authors.

What they came up with is a sad business model that ties downloaded ebooks to a maximum of four devices, which is reasonable enough, but also ensures that the titles purchased (with your money, remember) lock up after 60 days, which is far from reasonable. Sure, the books are cheaper than their real-world equivalents, but who in their right mind is going to buy books that simply evaporate after two months? Periodicals might be suitable for this protective scheme, but none are yet taking advantage of it on the Librie.

I can’t help but feel sorry for this terrific little device, as one of the first journalists to get to play with it, hamstrung as it is by misguided anti-piracy efforts. Tying software to specific hardware, as Microsoft is now doing, seems to be just about acceptable these days, but let’s not take the fun out of books while we’re at it.

Of course, as the Linux movement grows, Microsoft’s software-hardware approach many not seem so brilliant after all. And within e-books, its Windows-tied Microsoft Reader has already been a debacle. Sony could do very well for itself if it were among the early adopters of a more open approach in e-books and hopefully other areas as well. This would be in the pro-consumer tradition of Sony’s battle of yore against Hollywood for the right to sell VCRs to consumers–a fight whose results enriched the content-providers by many billions. Such is the good side of the old Sony, and a reader-friendly Librie would be a wonderful sign that the company is back in fine form.

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NewsAloud can now read from RSS-enabled blogs such as this one–not just sections of commercial news sites like Yahoo’s. The current price from NextUp.com, which offers a variety of other text-to-speech products, is $19.95. Despite its flaws, NewsAloud could be just the ticket for creating MP3 or .wav files for you to enjoy while you jog. And remember, blogs and news sites are just some examples of RSS-reading fodder–for example, Yahoo-based mailing lists are now reachable via RSS.

Pros: You can set up NewsAloud for a variety of sites to read from in one swoop, rather than having to call up each one individually.

Cons: The immediately available voices are less than natural despite all ballyhoo to the contrary. I’m not the biggest booster of the sound of Microsoft Sam and friends. You can pay extra for a tolerable alternative from AT&T or another vendor or install additional “free” voices. As for the interface, I don’t know how well a blind person would take to it. Might be better to use your existing reader if you’re blind. Plus, NewsAloud is Windows only.

Related: NextUp press release, as well as TextAloud MP3, an earlier product that can read from e-books in ASCII and other appropriate formats and create audio files if you’d like. Imagine–roll-your-own audio books for MP3 players or CDs (burning software required). Remember, however, this is a separate product from NewsAloud. What’s more, as with NewsAloud, you’ll need to pay extra for decent voices.

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“Search engine giant Google is preparing to publicly release some of its underlying software code only months before it undertakes a multibillion-dollar stock-exchange float.” – The Age, in Australia.

The TeleRead take: This is a Good Thing, of course, as long as a meaningful amount of code does go public. See related Slashdot item.

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TeleRead is keen on e-books for students–but should schools lean on parents to buy $1K iBook laptops for their children? Talk about the Digital Divide. Here’s part of a San Diego Union-Tribute story out of Carmel Valley, California:

Some parents who were encouraged to buy or rent laptop computers for their fifth-graders at Ashley Falls Elementary as part of a new technology program are fuming over a public school making the request.

Ashley Falls recently advised parents to purchase Macintosh iBook computers and certain accessories for about $1,080, or possibly rent them from the school for $435 a year.

The program is optional, and students who don’t have laptops in the fall can share one of the school’s computers.

Ashley Falls Principal Katie McNamara said the computers allow teachers to create more in-depth lessons, and the technology motivates kids.

However, some parents say that with all the accessories the equipment costs are closer to $1,500, and the optional program will create a culture of inequity.

Marjolein Grootenhuis, who has two children at Ashley Falls, said because most families in the Del Mar Union School District already have computers, as well as frequent access to their school’s computer lab, she doesn’t see the justification for such an expensive investment. She thinks it’s inappropriate for fifth-graders to tote computers that can be lost or damaged.

Hmm. I could understand a purchase program if the costs were reasonable and better provisions were made for low-income students. But this one raises my eyebrows. You can buy a desktop for a fraction of the cost of an iBook laptop, including a PC with adequate graphics capabilities, especially if you go with a refurbished model. Besides, how about using software to achieve the same results on people’s existing desktops? Or a desktop program for budget-strapped parents–yes, the adjective is often redundant–who don’t want to rent?

If the explanation is that only Apple sells the right software-hardware mix, then maybe schools ought to team up in a consortium to encourage other companies to come out with equivalent programs that are not so brandcentric.

Detail: E-book-capable tablets, even now, could sell for perhaps $450 if the schools really made mass purchases. The cost should be a fraction of that in the future. As for PDAs? If a student feels comfortable with a PDA–great for reading classics, but not e-books with fancy tables, detailed photos and other trimmings–then $100 will buy a 320-by-320 resolution model on discount.

Related: Background on Ashley Falls School. The school is above average in a number of ways. But is it really necessary for parents to buy those $1K laptops?

Detail: I don’t know if the pictured model is the exact one to be in use at Ashley Falls.

(Via Educational Technology.)

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The free Skype telephony service works in Linux as well as Windows and supposedly is spyware free. You can reach me personally via the username of davidrothman.

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Intel, Sun Microsystems, Verizon Communications, SBC and other tech heavyweights are worried that U.S. copyright law is too skewed in favor of Hollywood. So they’re creating a new organization called the Personal Technology Freedom Coalition. Among other efforts, it will support Rep. Rick Boucher’s efforts to mitigate the damage from the DMCA. Perhaps the new group, in turn, can support a concept such as the Digitial Media Users Association. (CNet, via Techdirt.)

Related: Rx for Washington’s bullying: An NRA-size group for all digital media users.

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Those hoping for relief from the Tower of eBabel–the oodles of proprietary e-book formats–will be pleased to find that the OpenReader Consortium is gaining traction.

“I was…happy to see that your roadmap includes MathML in 1.0.,” writes Paul Topping, president and CEO at Design Science, a MathML-hip company. “I look forward to hearing more about your project. Perhaps we can help with the MathML part somehow.” Much appreciated!

Meanwhlie, following up on the favorable reaction in O’Reilly editor Andy Oram’s personal Web log, items have also appeared in the Software Documentation Weblog, the blog for XML.org, the Semantic Wave Blog and the Digital Library.

“Note to myself,” writes Software Documentation’s Lars Trieloff. “I have to take a look at OpenReader, which is an standards-based attempt to create an XML format and some software to offer an open alternative to DRM-crippled e-book solutions.” Exactly, Lars!