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.

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Sounds basic. But many people–and I’m one–have not done it often enough. Instead of just raving on to a friend about the glories of e-books, why not give a demo?

“I showed my Palm Zire 71 to a friend last night at a party,” Brad writes in the ePublishing Blog, “and told him there were over 40 books on that device, many of them free. He was amazed and went and showed it to his wife. This despite the fact that I had been telling him about PDA’s and ebooks for months on an online forum. Like so much in the computer world, seeing a live demo can be worth a thousand words.” Advises Brad: “Take your PDA to your next party.”

If you’re really fanatical enough, send your old PDA to an out-of-town friend or acquaintance you’re trying to convert. That’s what I did. Worked like a charm. Now she expects to buy her own PDA, and meanwhile her youngest is enjoying the Blackmask version of Steal This Book and the Mobipocket edition of Aesop’s Fables. Oh, how eclectic a reader you can be in this medium.

Tip: Before lending a PDA to a prospective convert, ask him or her for a list of titles to include, and make certain beforehand that everything works smoothly.

Related: Brad correctly suggests that the PDA-makers should devote more energy to talking up PDAs as e-book readers. He’s also concerned about the Tower of eBabel and the DRM disgrace and the price gouging–all of which, I suspect, have helped reduce the popularity of e-books on PDAs and other platforms.

By David Rothman

Philip Roth once bemoaned the scarcity of American readers interested in truly serious literature.

I don’t remember what statistic he came up with–just that it might have been not much more than small-town-sized. E-book technology, of course, could help more of the right books reach more of the right readers.

Readable sample chapter

So can brilliant writing that is just plain good reading. And such is the case with Roth’s The Plot against America, a sample chapter of which I’ve just downloaded from National Public Radio–after taking in Robert Siegel’s audio interview with him, via a link on the same page. In the book Roth imagines what his life would have been like if Charles Lindbergh had won the presidency, kept us out of World War II, and have done a lower-key Third Reich Act at home.

The Plot looks fine when converted to Mobipocket. Unfortunately, however, I won’t be reading the rest of the book soon that way because of my problems with ephemeral formats locked up with proprietary DRM–I want to be able to own my books for real. Mobipocket won’t give me guaranteed future access to “protected” books. So I’ll just buy the hardback.

No Plot at online stores

Beyond that, I have not been able to find an e-book version at Amazon.com, ebooks.com, Fictionwise, eBook Express, and the Houghton Mifflin site, all of which I searched out of mere curiosity.

Too bad. So far the Plot impresses me as just the kind of literature with an international appeal–not to mention its social value!–that should be all over the Net and ownable forever. If nothing else, the timing of the book’s appearance is superb. The Plot appeared near the start of the Jewish New Year and reminds us of what life might have been like for Jews and the rest of us–I’m Jewish, albeit non-observant–if the darker side of Lindy had prevailed.

OpenReader will provide many satisfactions at the technical level, but at the gut level, nothing would please me more than to see OR help literature like The Plot endure. We can be thankful that this is only a novel, that Philip Roth survived World War II and went on to write his masterpieces. But suppose that e-books become the norm; and let’s say that for want of stable formats and reliable archiving in the library tradition, his novels vanish. How ironic that stubborn techies and short-sighted business people fond of proprietary formats might unwittingly obliterate the works of Jewish novelists–after the Nazis failed.

Lindbergh as remembered by his admirers: An online bio from the Lindbergh Foundation.

(Tweaked and updated with tags on March 16, 2006.)

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Just how obtuse can the High Lit world get? Here we are–in the era of E Ink, with e-books ahead that will have flippable pages, just like paper. And yet Anne Fadiman, the departing editor of The American Scholar and author of Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, is uttering such malarkey as:

I worry that electronic books will become increasingly sophisticated and therefore increasingly popular. The content may be the same, but there’s no substitute for actually holding a book in one’s hands and taking it to bed at night. The difference between an e-book and a book is like the difference between a picture of your lover and your lover herself.

Yes, I, too, like the feel of a book, but it’s the words that count. And via the economies of e-books, ordinary people will eventually have access to many more words than through the paper variety–especially in such narrow areas as Hmong culture, one of Ms. Fadiman’s own specialties. Just a fraction of the world’s literature has been digitized, alas. But that will slowly change, and meanwhile, via e-books, people miles from a library can already call up thousands of classics. Oh, the horror!

It’s a shame that Ms. Fadiman’s famous father, Clifton, who constantly used the mass media to promote reading among average people, isn’t alive to enjoy today’s e-books and look ahead to still-better technology.

No dummy–the American Scholar is none other than the scholarly journal of the Phi Beta Kappa Society–Anne Fadiman ideally will be reasonable if given a chance to acquaint herself with the latest tech. Perhaps she can read or reread a widely circulated report showing that literary reading is in dramatic decline. E-books can help reverse the trend, especially when millions of children are growing up as accustomed to screens as to paper. What’s more, keep in mind that e-books will eventually be rather paperlike.

Books and lovers: Speaking of lovers, you can read an e-book more easily in the dark while your lover is asleep than you can a paper book. You needn’t mess with little penlights in bed, and less light is around to distract your mate. Can’t Anne Fadiman at least admit that e-books are useful in that respect? She might also remember that you can legally copy public domain e-books and share them with your SO–and both read these classics at the same time.

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Hurt by weak sales, Toshiba is leaving the U.S. market for PDAs, according to an article and accompanying editorial in Brighthand and a scoop in BargainPDA. Here’s another warning to e-book publishers not to bet everything on the PDA platform.

Among the biggest reasons for Toshiba’s departure, I suspect, is the trend toward PDA-cellphone combos–not to mention the fact that the market may simply be saturated right now. But the bungling of the e-book industry harmed Toshiba to at least a small extent and maybe much more. If it weren’t for clumsy DRM schemes and the Tower of eBabel, then e-books would be in far greater demand than they are today.

No new models in near future

Toshiba’s departure from the U.S. PDA scene–no new models to be released, at least in the near future–follows an earlier one by Sony. Given Toshiba’s interest in VGA screens for PDAs, clueful e-bookers will particularly miss its PDAs. They may have had their flaws, but I agree with those who saw Toshiba as one way to make HP less complacent.

Needless to say, ignorance of the usefulness of PDAs for e-book reading didn’t help Toshiba. It’s not that e-bookers should give up on this platform. But whatever the reason, ignorance or others, PDAs as e-book readers have not lived up to their promise so far.

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Blogger Glenn Reynolds wisely suggested to the Republicans that they could make an issue of the Democrats’ sellout to Hollywood–given all the millions of music downloaders. That hasn’t happened yet. However, the possibility has grown, now that the American Conservative Union has run a hard-hitting ad against INDUCE-style legislation. We see a movie threater marquee announcing:

NoW PLAYING
The S.2560 Horror
“Chilling!”

Here’s the remainder of the advertisement (PDF alert)–discussed on CNET and also by Dan Gillmor’s blog:

Hollywood is once again trying to crush innovation to maintain its entertainment distribution monopoly. And this time they’ve enlisted Republican lawmakers to help them do it. Their latest production, called S. 2560 (the “Induce Act”), could outlaw a wide range of hardware and software, including peer-to-peer.

S. 2560 not only attacks consumers’ right to use technologies,it attempts to make the intellectual property rights of Hollywood fat cats more important than the personal property rights of Americans.

S. 2560 will be a boon for Hollywood’s trial lawyer friends. It creates a new category of lawsuits designed to harass companies developing technologies and equipment that Hollywood deems unsuitable. Technologies that keep America competitive and deliver more diversity, efficiency and choice to consumers in a way unequaled by Hollywood’s entertainment distribution monopoly.

Compromising property rights and encouraging predatory, costly litigation is not a conservative position.

This is one bill that shouldn’t play anywhere.

The scary part is, it co-stars Republicans.

Vote “NO” on S. 2560

Hello, Kerry-Edwards? Seize the opportunity; consider the ad a warning to speak out on behalf of your so-called populism. Are you going to let the GOP beat you to this? If such a strategy can win the election and the White House perceives it this way, you can bet that Rove and friends will do it, regardless of Hatch’s identification with INDUCE. Remember, the Dems collect far more in Hollywood donations than the Republicans do. If nothing else, you’ll notice that the legislation is described as a “a boon for Hollywood’s trial lawyer friends.” Here’s a chance for Kerry-Edwards to show some independence of special interest groups. Goodness knows, trial lawyers have enough else to try and lawyer about. They would still support Kerry-Edwards even if the candidates opposed INDUCE.

Perhaps it’s also time for Ralph Nader, who remains mute on copyright matters despite some gutsy stands during the last presidential election, to speak up.