TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for September, 2004

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From an 3 Myths About the Recording Industry Debunked by Alec Hanley Bemis in the LA Weekly:

MYTH NO. 1: The prevalence of file-trading services and free music on the Internet indicates that recorded music may no longer be an economically viable business.

MYTH NO. 2: Record sales are down. The situation is only growing worse.

MYTH NO. 3: Musicians no longer need the record industry. The Internet and other new technologies make this a new era of “do it yourself.”

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Tom Clancy has made millions off gadget-loving fans caught up in his technothrillers like the NetForce series, but when it comes to e-books, he’s a Luddite.

He is so paranoid of piracy that he won’t let his novels go electronic despite the huge global market this could help open up in time.

Clancy’s income vs. the industry’s

Along with heavy-handed DRM, the Tower of eBabel and the usual hardware challenges, lack of content is one reason why worldwide e-book sales have been just a fraction of Clancy’s income in some recent years.

“Customers of eReader.com are always requesting titles by J.K. Rowling, John Grisham, Tom Clancy, and others which remain, by their choice, ‘not available in ebook form,’” says Mike Violano, vice president and general manager at eReader.com, owned by PowerByHand, in an article in LocalTechWire.com.

Time for readers to speak up? Perhaps e-bookstores like Violano’s should publish “Ten Most Wanted” lists of Luddites and encourage customers to pester the AWOL authors. These Ludds need to understand the truth. If e-Luddites don’t wise up, pirates will simply scan in paper copies, a trend that’s likely to grow as display technology improves. Get it, Tom? All you’ll do by withholding your books is to train e-book-loving fans to download you illegally since there’s no other alternative. Perhaps as Mr. Net Force, you’ll eventually be enough of a technomaven to understand this.

Beyond the issue of piracy arising to meet unmet needs, honest tech-hip readers may simply say learn to say “No” to e-Luddites like Clancy. The e-book industry can help by aggressively promoting “born digital” talents who respect the medium more than Mr. Net Force does.

eReader VP on DRM

Elsewhere in the article Violano talks about the need for publishers to compromise between reader convenience and the effectiveness of copyright protection. True! eReader’s protection scheme is easier on customers than most. “Every ebook is encrypted,” he writes, “and the unlock key is the credit card number the customer uses to purchase the title. This has proven to be a simple, elegent approach to the protection of content–and it is mighty effective since customers are not prone to post their credit card numbers on the message boards.” As Jenny Levine of the Shifted Librarian blog discovered, this method still can be murder on readers who, say, have moved on to different credit cards and no longer have the old numbers handy. Still, it is better than, say, Microsoft’s DRM atrocities.

Ideally Violano someday will see the light and go for a more refined and nonproprietary DRM scheme and an open format like OpenReader–a strategy that could help build confidence among buyers of e-books. His article, however, does a good job of pointing out some of the complexities of the DRM debate as acknowledged by the more enlightened participants from both sides.

Detail: Anyone know of a really good official Tom Clancy Web site? Does one exist? If not, how strange that Mr. Net Force should be so disdainful toward his fans. I did check out the sites mentioned in Wikipedia but could find none more helpful than the unofficial Tom Clancy FAQ.

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Washington, D.C., has a fifth-rate library system, at least from the perspective of the smarter people in the ‘hoods. Mayor Anthony Williams, alas, is hardly a gung-ho library booster. Now, adding to the insult, the city wants to fritter away a fortune on baseball while the libraries suffer.

Check out Marc Fisher’s column in the Washington Post today. Fisher is a baseball fan but is correctly outraged at the prospect of the city approving what the front page describes as a $440 million financing package. I don’t know what the net costs to the taxpayers would be, but this is clearly a case of socialism for rich baseball types at the expense of library users and the rest of society. Outrages like this are why the residents of D.C.’s Eighth Ward want to bring the scandal-tainted Marion Barry back to City Council. The baseball stadium is simply a more genteel form of scandal.

“‘In his l998 position paper entitled ‘Vision for the D.C. Public Library,’” Ralph Nader has said, “the Mayor stated explicitly that: ‘Libraries are a main source of information and central repositories for community history and for information on programs and places for children to learn, expand their minds, and provide a foundation for their growth.’

“‘How can these visionary ideas be accomplished when the District’s libraries are understaffed, under-stocked and closed during peak usage hours?’” Nader has asked. True.

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A newcomer to e-books complains: “My main problem is that it’s not as easy to reread something as it is with print, when the autoscroll is on. This is something I do a lot, since I’m a very fast reader.

“Maybe,” she says, “there is a way to retrain myself to slow down? But, I always read right before bed, in bed, and tend to drop off while I sleep–not as easy to pick up where I left off, since I can’t tell how much has scrolled.”

This is indeed a problem. Depends on the machine, but the auto-shutoff feature may not work properly when autoscrolling is in use. So what’s the fix–a possible wrinkle to add to the specs for OpenReader? Here’s what I wrote her:

What if the auto-scroll feature would not move you forward unless every X number of minutes you gave the machine a little tap to say, “Yes, keep going ahead”? And suppose a feature existed to move you back by 1, 2, 3 or 4 minutes or longer, depending on where you tapped a little line.

Needless to say, this feature could be toggled on and off.

Anyone out there with another, better approach to the above problem? Write in and I’ll share the info.

Now–what bugs you about the usability of existing e-book software? Let me know. No promises, but perhaps OpenReader can address your issues.

No problem for me on the Dell Axim: Back to the autoscroll issue. On my Dell Axim but not on my Sony PDAs, the auto shutoff works fine with autoscroll. To remind the Axim that I’m still awake, I can use the lever on the left to speed or up or slow down the scrolling. In Mobipocket, an upward press scrolls faster, and a downward press does the reverse. Since I rely on the speed control anyway, depending on the complexity of the paragraph I’m reading, this remind business is not an intrusion.

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Check out No-Guilt Downloads: Free Books, Music, and Movies, from PC World.

Missing: A pointer to Blackmask, the most convenient place for public domain e-books in multiple formats.

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SF writer James Patrick Kelly, skeptical in the past, is now happily e-booking away on his PDA.

I should say here that I have long been one of those saurians who disliked reading for pleasure from a computer screen. But a couple of months ago, for reasons too boring to mention, I popped for a personal digital assistant (PDA) , mostly to keep track of appointments and addresses when I was away from my desk.

As it happened, shortly after I made the buy, I went to Florida to attend the International Conference on the Fantastic and to soak up some rays. On a whim, I
loaded some ebooks into my new gadget. By the time I got off the plane in Fort Lauderdale I’d fallen in love with my PDA as a reading device. Yes, the screen is smallish but I can change the font at will. Maybe it isn’t exactly ideal for the beach because direct light washes out the backlit screen, but my days of sunbathing are over and this thing is made in the shade. Often as not it’s my book of choice for bedtime reading. And if my wife wants to turn in, we can douse all the lights and I can read from that cheerily lit screen.

At the same time Kelly is interested in the digital rights situation:

If in fact ebooks are our future, then we readers are about to step onto the roller coaster that music fans have been riding for the past few years. When you buy an ebook, what rights are you acquiring? You can lend your paper copy of Asimov’s to your brother-in-law when you’re finished with it, but are you allowed to lend him your ebook version of this magazine?

He’s pointing people to Cory Doctorow’s essay on copyright and other e-book issues.

(Via Asimov’s, Boing Boing and ePublishing Blog.)

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“Reading as a primary activity varied greatly by age. The oldest age group averaged an hour of reading per day, while the youngest averaged about 8 minutes.” – News release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics., via Bill Janssen’s post to the eBook Community List.

The TeleRead take: Keep in mind that the stats are for recreational reading and do not include school-related time. Regardless, the 8 minutes is shockingly low.

Based on the above, I’d say the real battle isn’t between e-books and p-books. It’s getting kids to read, period. The 8 minute figure is for both sexes in the 15-to-24 range. In case you’re curious, the category of “Playing games and computer use for leisure” is 48 minutes for teenaged boys and around 25 minutes for the girls.

TeleRead, anyone? Putting thousands of free copyrighted books online–with fair compensaiton for writers and publishers–could go a long way. What’s the point of trying to maximize profits, through copyright gouges when books for recreational reading are in such little demand anyway among typical young people?

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Since the early ’90s TeleRead has been pushing for a well-stocked national digtal library system. It would be financed by tax money–at least in part–and would pay by the access. From a TeleRead perspective, I’m glad to see growing interest in approaches similar to the one I advocated in a 1992 Computerworld article. Here is an excerpt from the introduction of Promises to Keep, a new book by Harvard law professor William Fisher:

Chapter 6 outlines the best of the possible solutions to the crisis: an administrative compensation system that would provide an alternative to the increasingly creaky copyright regime. In brief, here’s how such a system would work: The owner of the copyright in an audio or video recording who wished to be compensated when it was used by others would register it with the Copyright Office and would receive, in return, a unique file name, which then would be used to track its distribution, consumption, and modification. The government would raise the money necessary to compensate copyright owners through a tax – most likely, a tax on the devices and services that consumers use to gain access to digital entertainment. Using techniques pioneered by television rating services and performing rights organizations, a government agency would estimate the frequency with which each song and film was listened to or watched. The tax revenues would then be distributed to copyright owners in proportion to the rates with which their registered works were being consumed. Once this alternative regime were in place, copyright law would be reformed to eliminate most of the current prohibitions on the unauthorized reproduction and use of published recorded music and films. The social advantages of such a system, we will see, would be large: consumer convenience; radical expansion of the set of creators who could earn a livelihood from making their work available directly to the public; reduced transaction costs and associated cost savings; elimination of the economic inefficiency and social harms that result when intellectual products are priced above the costs of replicating them; reversal of the concentration of the entertainment industries; and a boost to consumer creativity caused by the abandonment of encryption. The system would certainly not be perfect. Some artists would try to manipulate it to their advantage, it would cause some distortions in consumer behavior, and the officials who administer it might abuse their power. But, on balance, it is the most promising solution of the three models. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of how a variant of this approach might be implemented on a voluntary basis–as either a prelude to or as an alternative to its creation and management by the government.

I have not yet seen the entire book, but look foward to reading it. Meanwhile here are the key words from my Computerworld article: “In all cases, TeleRead would pay fairly. If you wrote a book, for example, your earnings would depend on how often people dialed it up. Of course the network would not need to pay anyone for items already in the public domain–for example, government publications, statistics and old literary classics.” Also see 1994 and 1996 versions of TeleRead, which, of course, has evolved over the years.

Detail: For maximum freedom of expression, TeleRead has always favored private alternatives to government funding–not just tax money alone. At no level should government be able to tell citizens what to publish or read.

(Found via the Lessig blog.)

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Web creator Tim Berners-Lee, in an interview with Technology Review, explains the concept of the semantic Web. The article is yet another reminder of how primitive e-books are compared to the future and even the present Web. As long as publishers and software vendors have the ‘tude of “every book is an island,” the medium will never reach its full potenital. Needless to say, an OpenReaderish approach would help.

Related: Needed: An HTML-universal standard for e-books.

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“After weeks of negotiations, the U.S. Senate could take action this week on a bill that would make it easier to sue ‘peer-to-peer’ networks like Kazaa and LimeWire that allow users to copy music and movies over the Internet.” – Reuters.

The TeleRead take: Yes, that’s one of the questions here. But isn’t it possible that the real issue might be something else–massive entertainment conglomerates trying to strangle disruptive technology, with the help of campaign donations? Why is it that news stories rarely mention the political contributions to Sen. Hatch and other INDUCE boosters, or the Music of Orrin Hatch? The man is hardly a threat to Madonna but has enough of an ego to identify his commercial interests with those of big-time entertainers. Meanwhile check out Ernie Miller’s blog for the latest on this Bono-level outrage.

Detail: The Reuters piece does mention the opposition of copyright activists to INDUCE. But as you can see, the copying angle is right in the lead. The ideal lead would mention both the copying issue and the issue of Hollywood’s war on disruptive tech. P2P networks would love to do deals with Hollywood, and some deals are being made, but hardcare greedsters don’t want to derail the gravy train from more conventional distribution arrangements.

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Earlier we suggested wikis as a new kind of book club–as a way for librarians and patrons to interact in discussing books. Now here’s a new twist, from Jeremy Frumkin’s Digital Librarian Blog.

Suppose that “users could leave behind comments or annotations to a finding aid–providing additional information related to the materials located by the finding aid. It would open the door to sharing research experiences, allowing for collaborative research, and making it easier for future researchers to find the materials they need in a particular collection. Of course, it would also open up the possibility of allowing incorrect information to be added, but again, Wikis are amazingly good at allowing community correction of incorrect or inappropriate information.”

(Via LibraryStuff.)

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“Anywhere Books has piloted a digital bookmobile–a van outfitted with a laptop, laser printer, bookbinding machine and cutter–in remote areas of Uganda to print free books for children since November 2003.” – Rural Kids Print, Bind and Read, in Wired News, via ePublishing Blog

The TeleRead take: Print on demand is a terrific transitional technology, but ultimately, e-books will be the most cost-effective solution–and certainly the one capable of giving the kids the widest choice of reading material.