TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for August, 2004

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“To keep the certified librarians, library hours were reduced in the school libraries and the public library, staff hours were cut and the book budgets were cut…” – Budget cuts slam school librarians in South of Boston.com, via LISNews.

The TeleRead take: So if the voters and politicians are going to be miserly, maybe e-books can help at least somewhat through their greater efficiencies.

The Valenti connection: Remember all the billions that Valenti-esque copyright laws will add to school and library budgets over time. Nice going, Hollywood Jack. With liberals like MPAA’s, who needs conservatives?

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In the The Willful Blindness of Jack Valenti in Copyfight, Ernest Miller analyzes a recent Valenti interview by J.D. Lasica and serves up delicious examples suggesting that Mr. MPAA:

–Is “Unclear on How Cryptography Works.”

–”Has Never Heard of 17 USC 107.”

–”Doesn’t Realize that the MPAA Opposed TiVo to Go.”

–”Thinks Digital Things Last Forever”

OK, so maybe Mr. MPAA could actually be more of a spin artist than a total idiot, but the Miller and Lasica items are still fun reads.

Related: Richard Stallman, you light-hearted optimist you!, Branko Collin’s item on the relationship between copyright and freedom of speech. He doesn’t mention Valenti, but he might as well have. You might think of Jack as Hollywood’s Accidental John Ashcroft, given all the nasty implications of the DMCA and the like.

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Time’s slowly running out for Sony–creator of the DRM-hobbled Librie, the E-Ink-based tablet released in a test version in Japan. So far, I’ve heard no news of a possible U.S. Librie, hopefully with less Big Bro inside. Meanwhile Mobileread.com carries this report:

…Juicebox shows us how cool an E-Ink device can be if not manufactured by Sony. It is small (50×56x3.7mm), has a multimedia card interface, includes a MP3 decoder, and of course features the wonderful E-Ink panel. The great thing about this project is that it gives the schematic and source code (alas excluding the confidential sources for the E-Ink display) for download. Btw, the smart guy behind the project, Holly Gates, has actually worked for E-Ink since 1998. Why on earth did they make E-Ink technology exclusive for Sony until now?

Do Sony and Philips have exclusive rights to use E-Ink technology? I don’t know; there’s a difference between an insider like Gates doing something and E-Ink’s letting an outside vendor act. But rival technologies or better could well be on the way in the near future–ideally without DRM used on the hardware. The librie email list with 183 members in the States, Europe and elsewhere is hardly large enough to be a source of definitive polls, but here are the results of a recent one:

–Existing Librie owner: 3 or 11.11 percent

–Expect to buy one soon: 3

–Only if DRM problem is solved: 20 or 74.07 percent

–Want some other e-ink display: 1 or 3.7 percent

The good news for Sony is that if it will compromise on DRM, then there might be a market. So what’s up? Could Sony address the DRM issue in a more conventional, less harsh way by coming out with a version that ran, say, Mobipocket–hardly an ideal solution but far better than the worse-than-Gemstar-ish approach in the Japanese test model? And meanwhile just what does Philips have up its sleeves?

Related: Prose and Cons: Sony’s New E-Book, by Peter Lewis, in Fortune, and Slashdot’s discussion of handhelds, some of which might be of interest to e-bookers even they are not as promising as a Librie would be without vanishing books and similar fun. In the hardware area, also see a tidbit about a PDA rumored to be on the way from Dell with a 3.7-inch screen of VGA quality.

By David Rothman

Why haven’t we heard more about AudioBooksForFree.com, based in Scotland? You can download free MP3 audios of dozens of classics ranging from 20,000 Leagues under the Sea to Enchanted Typewriter (a machine described in a summary as being able to “communicate with Hell”). I can’t wait to see if in some way I can make this work with my Dell Axim PDA. For further details on the service, see the FAQ. At least to this sighted person, the UK site appears to be blind-friendly, with a text-only mode for screen readers. Perhaps David Faucheux can add his thoughts.

How long it’ll take: With high-speed cable modem service, I downloaded Treasure Island (9 hours of listening time) in less than ten minutes. I put all the files in one folder on my PC and let WinAmp take off–reading them without my having to pause to reload. Nice!

Details: AudioForFree.com uses human readers–skillful ones at that. For high-quality audio, you must pay extra. Fair enough. Ideally, of course, a business model can be found to make even high-quality reproductions free. AudioBooksForFree also sells CDs, DVDs and MP3 machines preloaded with recordings. Librarians and others should check out the copyright page. Alas, there are few American authors compared to UK ones, but this is, after all, a Scottish site.

(Note: Blogger messed up. The above is a restored post, complete with the right headline.)

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I’ve done more and more links to Wikipedia–and I’ll continue to do so, despite criticism of this open-content gem.

Wikipedia is no substitute for demon research, but is a superb way to get a quick overview of a topic. As a blogger linking in, I can devote more space to my main points and less space to the basics. Granted, Wikipedia could use more input from librarians, and fixed-in-time versions could aid citing and otherwise help; it is not infallible. Still, neither are commercial sources, many of which undergo less review than the wiki-based encyclopedia and are less up to date. At least on topics familiar to me, Wikipedia has been on target. TechDirt, in Who Do You Trust, The Wiki Or The Reporter?, has done a pretty good job of putting matters in perspective in the wake of doubts from a librarian and a newspaper columnist.

Related: Wikipedia–can open source be a good source? in LISNews. Also see Slashdot interview with Wikipedia’s founder, along with Wikipedia: Replies to common objections.

Tip: You can often find information in Wikipedia just by typing into Google the searchwords and yes Wikipedia. Sounds obvious, but not everyone thinks of that. Also consider an Internet Explorer add-on.

Gladly made correction: Looks as if certain Wikipedia critics have unwittingly distorted the facts. Branko Collin tells me that Wikipedia already lets you link to fixed-in-time versions. However, he finds that except in the case of articles likely to be the subject of controversy, the latest version is often the best. Yet another confirmation of the potential of open content for reference works! To see past versions of the Wikipedia article you’re reading, just click on the “History” tab near the top of the page. Excellent.

The old articles, by the way, include mentions of IP numbers or links to user pages of the editors. In the future one can imagine optional filters that would, say, limit you to pages vetted by well-identified librarians and other experts with credentials listed in detail. You might even be able to choose a filter that restricted the stable editions to those edited by full professors, for example. Or the filters could reflect the opinions of third parties such as private companies (something possible now if you include the material repostioned on other servers). For all I know, maybe those filtering features exist in reality or in the mind of a Wiki nerd. If not I suspect they could be added easily enough.

Can you imagine paper encyclopedias updated so systematically, so promptly, and in such helpful detail as filter-enhanced versions that I’ve discussed? You bet I’m impatient for influential people in the library and academic worlds to understand the possibilities here. Instead of fearing the Wikipedia, professional librarians should be jumping right in, joining the fun, and discouraging readers from being too trusting of outdated information in paper encyclopedias.

Update, Aug. 29: Further tweaks of the filter concept.

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“An international treaty to give broadcasters the right to control who may record, transmit, or distribute their signals is reaching a crucial stage of negotiation by the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. The current draft (PDF) incorporates many proposals, but the main ones most countries agree on give broadcasters 50 years’ worth of legal control over the recording, retransmission, and reproduction of their broadcast signals. These rights are separate from those of the owners of the actual content being broadcast.” – Wired.

The TeleRead take: Oh, great. This is just what we need for the public domain and fair use. Whenever I see the initals “WIPO,” I think “wipe out”–as in to “wipe out” individual rights. The frustrating thing is that WIPO’s actions will harm the developing countries that control so many of the organization’s votes. Do you really think that Hollywood is itching to buy and distribute that many Sudanese movies? Dr. Kamil Idris, the WIPO director shown above, hails from Sudan, for which one survey listed 0 screenwriters and 4 novelists. Needless to say, WIPO won’t be that great for us here in the States, either. Why is Senator and vice presidential candidate John Edwards so resolutely silent on copyright despite his seat on the Senate Judiciary Committe and the threat to individual rights and to affordability of content? Campaign donations? And what about other politicians, including Ralph Nader? I don’t know why Ralph’s silent on DMCAism–just that his famous courage may have its limits.

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In Distrusted systems in the Inquirer, writer Wendy M. Grossman tells why the Europeans are so rational in their fear of the acquisition of ContentGuard by Microsoft and Time Warner.

“It’s not just another case of ‘Oh, let’s Get Microsoft,’” she writes. “What few outside of the digital rights management arena have realized yet is that ContentGuard holds very significant patents that could have a very broad impact if the use of digital rights management takes off.”

ContentGuard’s patents, she says, are “impressive. They cover using markup languages to attach machine-readable rights to content; they cover incorporating charging mechanisms. In fact, they cover much of what we’d describe as digital rights management.”

Lurking in the background, of course, is one of the great hazards of DRM, the replacement of ordinary copyright law with contract law that does not provide sufficiently for fair use.

Related: Microsoft, Time Warner Face In-Depth EU Probe on ContentGuard from Bloomberg.

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I don’t agree entirely with comments below–since e-book sales are a disaster compared to what they should be. Still, Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow is right on the money about DRM as a sales-killer. – David Rothman.

CNet reports that ebook sales topped 3 million last year, and that publishers are slowly coming around to rejecting DRM. The best part is that famous writers like JK Rowling are rejecting ebooks, a courtesy that leaves the field open for struggling midlist writers (ahem).

Bad experiences with heavy-handed DRM have soured many potential customers on e-books, said Mike Violano, vice president and general manager of eReader, which equips its titles with a security key based on the credit card number used to purchase it. The approach give wide latitude to the original buyer while effectively thwarting illegal copying, he said.

“There are far too many standards and ways of doing things now, and that’s a source of frustration for customers,” Violano said. “If they have a bad e-book experience the first time, where they have trouble reading something they’ve paid for, it’s hard to get them back.”

Analyst Bedford said nervous publishers have emphasized security over opening new markets.

“There’s no good DRM, period,” she said. “Publishers all want heavy-duty DRM, but the problem is that anything you do gets in the way of buying and using e-books. My bias is to use a lot of psychological DRM. You put a price on it; you have statements…making it very clear you can use this as you would a print book, and you rely on the fact that by and large, most people aren’t out to break the law.”

Link.

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The TeleRead take: To be exact, the CNET article says sales were $3.23 million for the first quarter of ‘04. That’s just a speck of the amount for paper books and still embarrassingly miniscule despite the 28 percent rise from the same period in ‘03. Less use of obnoxious DRM has helped. But the real explanations could be lowered prices of PDAs and some improvements in the typical users’ LCDs. I do agree with Cory’s skepticism of DRM. The avoidance of Draconian flavors of DRM, along with the popularization of OpenReader, could help immensely. While mild DRM may be appropriate in some cases, “protection” normally is toxic to sales.

(Thanks, Alev.)

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Don’t think that cell phones will be important to e-books? Just take a look at the latest from PalmOne. A forthcoming Treo, apparently called the Ace/650, has 320X320 res instead of the mediocre 160×160 on the 600.

While it’s hardly a perfect e-book machine–I much prefer 320X480–it’s a step in the right direction. Would be fun to try the new Trep with Mobipocket.

The “great news, according to Mike Cane, is the mix of high-res, bluetooth, a new keyboard backlighting system, a built-in video recorder and the 1.3-megapixel camera.

And the “bad”? “Total incompatibility with all accessories” except for the universal headset. Not even the cradle and charger will work.

For more: The Next Thing In Treo Is Outted, from PDABuzz.

Related: During a chatcast yesterday, George Kersher, chairman of the Open eBook Forum, noted the potential of cell phones for e-books.

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Why is it that so many citations in scholarly articles are mangled? And couldn’t a unified linking system in the TeleRead vein help? From Peter Jacso’s Linking on Steroids in Information Today:

Sadly, a significant proportion of the cited references have typos in their titles and/or page numbers as well as in the names of authors, journals, volumes, and issues. Abstracting-and-indexing services add their own typos and inconsistencies (and sometimes correct the erroneous ones in the source, as H.W. Wilson does so well). Humans can cope with most of the errors and find the cited works (often with a little help from librarians), but link-resolver programs (as with most other software) are hypersensitive to accurate syntax. They often fail to find the cited items even if they’re right under their noses in the same archive/database.

Although DOIs could be the best tools for fighting the consequences of citation errors, only a few A&I services add the DOI to their bibliographic records. Even if they do add them, the host services may not retain them. CSA, OCLC, and EBSCO deserve kudos for retaining and displaying the DOIs. Not accidentally, they have the best built-in link-related features—and not just for common citation linking. Citation sloppiness backfires in linking and occasionally defeats even the smartest systems.

Besides the article, you might want to see a detailed PowerPoint presentation in .ppt format.

(Thanks, Alev. Oh, and we see you’re interested in standards issues within the world of grapes, too–not just e-text.)

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Will bloggers pay for promotion and other services to elevate their profiles? That’s among the details in The devil you don’t know: The unexpected future of Open Access publishing, an Open Monday article by publishing expert Joseph J. Esposito. He is a traditionalist and warns that open access could prove costly to authors and their institutions. We’re pro-OA but would agree with him on the need to consider the negatives as well. The obvious reponse: Good research will eventually find an audience, especially as others link to it. (Via eBookAd.)

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Today’s accessibility chatcast featuring George Kersher is now available as a large WMA file from the Opal-Online archive. Just click here.

I was delighted to hear him talk about a maximum amount of mainstreaming of content from books and other media. Exactly! The blind and others with special needs should be able to download the latest e-books and other goodies without waits. I also like the idea of the DAISY standards he’s been pushing over the years. Imagine the same book available as text, as synthesized speech, as a dramatic performance from a human reader, as braille–as, you name it! Oh, the wonders of XML and the navigation techniques that Kersher and collegues have been working on.

The sponsor of the chatcasts is the Mid-Illinois Talking Books Center, and the moderator is Tom Peters.

Related: Paperback Digital launches new ‘e-book’ line (via eBook Ad).