TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for October, 2004

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From eBook Culture:

The Hyperliterature Exchange (found via Tenebris): “Somehow, though, a novel on a computer screen seems much less readable than the same novel in book form. In order to challenge the supremacy of print, an e-text needs to offer something extra”…Continue reading this entry…

The TeleRead take: Interbook linking–even from sentence to sentence–is among my own favorite extras. OpenReader would allow this capability.

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If thousands of American ever die in another domestic attack by terrorists–I’ll optimistically use the “if”–one of the culprits will be the Washington bureaucracy created to spare us further grief.

Dimwits in D.C. have turned the Homeland Security Department loose on so-called intellectual property offenders. Doesn’t “Security” have more pressing things to do? How wacky are the priorities of the Bush White House, or at least their people running “Security”! Even John Kerry, beneficiary of millions in political donations from the IP interests, probably wouldn’t be this stupid. Whether or not the toystore infringed, is the department the one to safeguard patents, trademarks and copyrights?

Here are details from AP via the Miami Herald:

So far as she knows, Pufferbelly Toys owner Stephanie Cox hasn’t been passing any state secrets to sinister foreign governments, or violating obscure clauses in the Patriot Act.

So she was taken aback by a mysterious phone call from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to her small store in this quiet Columbia River town just north of Portland.

“I was shaking in my shoes,” Cox said of the September phone call. “My first thought was the government can shut your business down on a whim, in my opinion. If I’m closed even for a day that would cause undue stress.”

When the two agents arrived at the store, the lead agent asked Cox whether she carried a toy called the Magic Cube, which he said was an illegal copy of the Rubik’s Cube, one of the most popular toys of all time.

He told her to remove the Magic Cube from her shelves, and he watched to make sure she complied.

After the agents left, Cox called the manufacturer of the Magic Cube, the Toysmith Group, which is based in Auburn, Wash. A representative told her that Rubik’s Cube patent had expired, and the Magic Cube did not infringe on the rival toy’s trademark…

Reminder: TeleRead is a news and advocacy site for well-stocked national digital libraries, not a pro- or anti-Bush site. I’m hoping that loyal Bush supporters will protest the above stupidies. Since when is IP within Homeland Security’s logical mission? Perhaps the laws setting up the department will allow threats against toyshops, at least when patents, trademarks and copyrights are actually infringed against. But that doesn’t make it right. IP is worth protecting, but is the department the bureaucracy to do it?

Related: Homeland Security enforces trademark laws for expired trademark, in LISNews.

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Despite some tough challenges ahead, I’m rooting for the proposal to Wi-Fi up the entire city of Philadelphia by summer 2006. What a way to help spread around not only e-books, but also much else ranging from neighborhood forums to blogs and PODcasts–while helping small businesses go broadband!

Within the e-book area, faster downloads will help, along with greater portability, but those advantages are just the start. Wi-Fi can be “on” all the time without hogging the phone lines, so people will be able to browse e-book collections more easily and better take advantage of future innovations such as exact linking from spot to spot within books.

Beyond the e-book angle

Remember, those are just the e-book angles. Imagine the many others such as easier use of Internet telephony and innumerable library and K-12 apps.

Admittedly, many questions remain. For example, TechDirt notes that greedy patent holders want a piece of the action via sleazy claims that they waited to make until Wi-Fi really caught on. The blog also says that a wait for more advanced technologies could be worth it. And what about the risk of stringent filtering of Web content?

Ideally, however, solutions will be found.

Solutions

Perhaps when cities understand the price of having such a backwards U.S. Patent Office, for example, Philly congress members and others can pressure the Office to institute reforms to be friendlier to consumers and competition.

As for the costs, analysis might show that WiFi might be inexpensive enough, given the benefits, for Philadelphia and other cities to go ahead even with other alternatives on the way. Or perhaps the solution would be to do a scaled-down verison of WiFi and expand services when the improved technologies arrive. Might one solution even be a Wi-Fi/Wi-Max hybrid?

Filtering? That can be solved, ideally, through proper education of policymakers, so that they realize that a strict approach would provide to be a disaster for interactivity.

Meanwhie thanks to Rochelle at LISNews for providing links from AP and WiFi Planet.

Some other links

–Philadelphia Considers Free Citywide Wireless Access, via Slashdot.

–Philadelphia goes wireless, via VOA.

–San Francisco to expand free WiFi, community computers, via the Philadelphia Inquirer.

–More areas connnect to Internet ‘hot spots’, via the Newark Star-Ledger.

–New Mexico City Hopes for WiFi Access by Christmas, via eWeek.

–Now Taiwan wants to be the biggest WiFi hotspot, via engadget.

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I’m not against video games, but I do wonder about their effects on brain development, just as I would feel the same about TV. Not everyone agrees with me. Below is another perspective from my friend Billy Barron. Other opinions welcomed.

Just read that blog entry. I’ve been playing video games since Pong and been an avid book reader at the same time. In fact, I think my love of reading came after my love of video games. They are not necessarily in conflict. Everything needs to be done in moderation.

By the way, I’d rather my child play video games over TV. Most video games do teach problem solving and a few other skills.

You may not know this, but they now sell movies that play on the Game Boy Advance. If that can be done, books could easily be ported to the platform. The big issue is that you can’t fit much text on the screen due to its size.

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So how much attention is the e-book industry paying to video games–a major competitor for time and money–and just what will the games’ effect be on the young? Here’s an excerpt from Weaned on Video Games in today’s New York Times:

“We have been looking at data that shows that kids at an earlier and earlier age are starting to play video games,” said Julia Fitzgerald, vice president for marketing at VTech Electronics North America. “We wanted to know how we could make this phenomenon work for Mom” – and make it educational.

It is unclear whether video games teach preschool children more about phonics and problem solving than about simply how to tool around in a virtual playground. But everyone seems to agree that the ranks of young video gamers are substantial.

A report last fall by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy research organization, found that half of all 4- to 6-year-old children have played video games – on hand-held devices, computers or consoles – and one in four played several times a week. Of children 3 or younger, 14 percent have played video games.

Will young video games players have the same patience to read books–having accustomed themselves to fast action? And how might this influence the content of the books themelves? Will multimedia books become the norm? I can see the virtues of them for explaining math or science–but do we really want to see the typical virtual novel dependent on, say, animated graphics?

Cash for games vs. e-books

Oh, and here’s the real question at the end of the day, beyond the effect on children’s brain development and the issue of stealing time that parents might spend on reading aloud to Jane or Johnny:

Will a family lavishing several hundred dollars on a child’s games be as inclinded to buy that same child books?

And is there a way for e-books for children to show up on style on video games consoles–perhaps even old-fashioned versions with text and restrained and maybe even stationary graphics?

Yet another big question

Wait. It isn’t as the e-book business has that many books for children anyway, in the grand scheme of things; at least that’s been a problem in the past. Ideally that has been changing. One way or another, e-bookers should be as keen on developing their market among the young as the video games people are.

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Digitized libraries are one of the best revenges against practitioners of genocide. They might even help discourage future Hitlers.

If books and other forms of art can be preserved in digital form throughout the world, mass-murderers will not be able to wipe out the culture of a people. Books, paintings, statues, and other art can live on forever in redundant digital archives across the planet, from Melbourne to New York. Not that haters are rational; but perhaps a few would-be Hitlers will understand the limits of even the most complete Final Solution.

So, in reading Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, I was pleased to learn that author Aaron Lansky has looked beyond the brick-and-mortar incarnation of the National Yiddish Book Center and entered the digital era. He and his colleagues have not just founded a home for slowly disintegrating paper books given away by aging immigrants whose sons and daughters are ignorant of Yiddish. They have also established a Virtual Digital Library Project, and let’s hope that many, many other ethnic groups follow.

Much-needed start

Led by a Lansky associate named Gabe Hamilton, the Project has already digitized 3.5 million pages of Yiddish books, making available print-on-demand versions of the works of such greats as Sholem Aleichem and I.J. Singer, older brother of Isaac Bashevis Singer. That’s most Yiddish books–masterfully saved from oblivion. “Modern Yiddish literature,” Lansky writes in his readable memoirs from Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, “holds the dubious distinction of being 100 percent acidic: printed on inexpensive, wood-pulp paper, which, because of its high acidity, gradually breaks down, turning yellow and brittle and, eventually, crumbling into fragments and dust.”

As valuable as the scans and print-on-demand books are–you can even buy the PODs online, directly from the center–much else might be done with the proper resources. For example:

1. With e-books in mind, the center’s books could be OCRed and converted by enthusiastic volunteers into a high-quality digital text format and made more searchable than they would be with the emphasis on mere images of the books.

Compared to images, the resultant text would also be more readable on the screens of computers, especially handhelds and tablets. One must remember that millions of children are now growing up accustomed more to reading off computer screen than off printed material. For Yiddish books and others to live on in young people’s minds, not just in databases, it might be helpful to go the next step with a gracefully evolving universal consumer format like OpenReader with all the typographical niceties.

OpenReader also would allow conversions into many other formats optimized for readers’ PDAs and other devices. But OpenReader is intended to be easily updatable to allow for improved machines in the future.

2. Regardless of the final format, an OCR approach producing computer text would if nothing else make machine translation possible.

Current translation software isn’t as good as human translators and surely will never be the equal of one of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s first English-language translators, Saul Bellow. But in the future, it might be hard to distinguish between human and machine translation.

3. With a format allowing links, even sentences within individual e-books could be linked to those within other books. OpenReader will allow this. What a boon to scholars.

4. If a text approach were used, especially OpenReader with powerful linking capabilities, it would be easier to build online communities around individual books. Participants could precisely annotate books. Needless to say, they also could voice-chat and blog in Yiddish and English.

Whatever the form, digital preservation is essential for other cultures, too, not Yiddish alone. Think, for example, of the Taliban’s jihad against the folk music of Afghanistan and the role that audio has already played in helping to keep it and oral histories alive. Archivists should go the next step and electronically preserve great Afghani works in a permanent and consumer-usable text format, as opposed to the ephemeral formats that so often show up in the world of e-books. Luckily some good efforts are already underway to preserve Afghanistan’s culture despite the limitations of current technology.

Luck of the Yiddish

But let’s not forget Yiddish; Lansky’s book makes a cogent and poignant case for keeping the language alive through technology and otherwise. His title comes from a quote from Max Weinreich, a Yiddish scholar who was lucky enough to be lecturing in Finland when the Nazis invaded Poland. Skeptics wondered why Yiddish should be preserved since Hitler had already killed half the speakers of the language. “Because,” Weinreich said, “Yiddish has magic, it will outwit history.” Certainly technology can and should be part of the outwitting process, and it is good to know that Steven Spielberg and the MacArthur Foundation have been so supportive of Lansky’s work in various media. If you yourself want to contribute–much else needs to be done–you can visit a donations page.

Details: I’m among the ringleaders in the OpenReader project and have the usual prejudices, but, objectively, society needs a universal format if e-books are to be regarded as a permanent medium at the consumer level, as opposed to an electric equivalent of acidic paper. Adobe and the other owners of proprietary formats can change them whenever they want. As for a third-party effort to produce an archival form of Adobe PDF, the format lacks the compactness and versatility of the XML-based OpenReader. It also is missing OR’s multimedia capabilities.

The format mess, the Tower of eBabel, is not the happiest situation for archivists trying to preserve Yiddish or another language/culture. Furthermore, “consumer” counts. E-books should reach the machines and minds of millions of users, not just be preserved in big archives for scholarly use.

Not directly e-book-related but still mentionable: Please note that the digital library is just one detail in a book that is undeniably a bibliophile’s delight despite the horrors recounted in such chapters as “The Great Newark Book Heist.” “The library,” writes Lansky, “had been in disarray since 1969, when, in the aftermath of the Newark riots, a newly elected administration targeted it as an elitist white institution and tried to shut it down.” The horror continued into the ’80s when a young library worker tipped off Lansky that several thousand Yiddish books were about to be tossed out. Almost one third of the collection was already gone.

Come to think of it, this detail is e-book related after all, for it shows the need not to tie all library matters to geography alone. “There are few Jews left in Newark,” a library administrator told Lansky or a colleague, “and the Yiddish books are rarely read. That’s why we phoned you. We have to work quickly and quietly. We have a very big job ahead.” Under a TeleRead approach, old books would not be destroyed, but rather lovingly preserved in appreciative research institutions, and meanwhile, no matter where library patrons lived, they could access the material electronically in the highly readable OpenReader format.

Update, Nov. 3: Gabe Hamilton tells me that “one million” referred to the number of physical books, not the number of titles. In having digitized 10,000 or 15,000 books–the exact number escapes me–the center has actually preserved most of Yiddish literature. A great example for the English language! I’ve tweaked the original post to reflect the new information.

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Even without the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, the copyright on the book Gone With the Wind wouldn’t have expired until 2011. The act extended the book’s term for 20 more years–to 2031.

That’s the word from Terry Carroll, an intellectual property attorney who also teaches Copyright Law at Santa Clara University School of Law, and who, like me, opposes Bono.

Contrary to a detail in my first GWTW post, he says, Bono itself is not the actual reason why Gone With the Wind isn’t in the public domain today.

Part of a nasty pattern

However, as Terry would certainly agree, Bono is part of a nasty pattern repeated again and again. He says: “Under the 1909 Copyright Act, the law that was in place in 1936 when the book was published, the publisher was entitled to two 28-year terms, which would have had the work expire after 56 years, i.e., in 1992.” A 1976 law pushed back that date to 2011, and then Bono did two decades of further damage.

Regardless of the technicalities here, of course, a major point remains. Bono did extend the Gone With the Wind term for 20 years, increasing the legal risks to Project Gutenberg and other fine endeavors.

All the nuances

Meanwhile a big thanks to Terry for filling us in with all the nuances. I’m kicking myself. I should have remembered that, as he writes, “only works created on or after January 1, 1978 have their copyright terms determined by a term of years after the author’s death.” Oh, well, that’s a major glory of blogging–the chance to benefit from constructive feedback like Terry’s.

Terry’s take on Bono: “I’m no defender of long copyright terms. I personally believe that the 1909 Act had a lot of copyright policy done right. A 28-year term, plus a second 28-year term free for the asking. Requiring a copyright notice. Those were good policy provisions that led to a rich public domain. The first Copyright Act, in 1789, had a 14-year term, extendable for a second 14-year term. That gives you a pretty good idea what the framers of the Constitution meant by ‘Limited Times.’ I’m sure they’d be rolling over in their graves if they saw copyright terms of 95 years or life+70.”

Housekeeping note: I just had the stitches removed from my finger cut of two weeks ago, so I’m gonna try to lay off on more typing for the TeleBlog today.

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Why are Margaret Mitchell’s heirs so eager to scare Project Gutenberg of Australia into taking down Gone With the Wind? Won’t the new Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. lengthen copyright terms anyway?”

Well, despite all the talk from the Australian government, the treaty is far from a totally done deal. Here is an Oct. 28 story, Disputes defer FTA deadline–a day “ahead,” courtesy the time differences–from the Australian:

AUSTRALIA will miss a critical deadline implementing its landmark free trade deal with the US, with the Trade Minister Mark Vaile yesterday conceding it was unlikely Australia and the US would exchange memos on October 31.

Mr Vaile told The Australian yesterday “we might not make” the October 31 deadline because of a number of outstanding disputes between Canberra and Washington on pharmaceuticals and copyright issues.

“But this is not the end of the world. Both Australia and the US are confident the agreement will start up as planned on January 1,” Mr Vaile said.

The FTA process requires Canberra and Washington to exchange letters certifying that they have implemented the principles of the FTA 60 days before the deal comes formally into effect, in this case on January 1, 2005.

Among other things, one dispute revolves over Australia’s treatment of piracy of TV signals and software.

So what’s the lowdown? Could there be enough uncertainty about the treaty–despite the Australian government’s protests–for the Mitchell estate to want to take actions that would stick regardless? Is there a “risk,” even small, that the Aussies might not really want those long terms? Or let’s consider something else. Could the New York law firm representing the estate be waging a jihad against the public domain movement or Gutenberg in particular? Just why the devil does the firm care about taking down Gutenberg of Australia content that the treat would ban anyway?

Update, 1:45 a.m., October 28: Okay, here’s an exaplantion from Chris Gray, a Gutenberg volunteer Down Under: “In Australia us Gutenbergers have been reading up on the FTA, and from what we can ascertain the day it is signed is the day of life+70. Everything before the date of signing applies to the old rules. So the FTA is not the end of GWTW, yet still quite nasty for all the texts it will exclude.” Thanks, Chris. I’ll be delighted if Australians can still access the book even if the treaty goes into effect. Let’s hope it doesn’t!

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Project Gutenberg has many texts in its collection which are public domain in the U.S. but still under copyright in other countries. So what happens if people download or distribute them in the places where unauthorized e-versions are banned? If the U.S. legal system insists that foreigners with direct or indirect Gutenberg connections can get into trouble by violating our copyright laws, then what about the reverse? So if the greedy Margaret Mitchell heirs decide to sue and are successful in both the States and Australia, the precedent could be rather nasty. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen, however.

Update: Thanks to Dan Gillmor at the San Jose Mercury News for his coverage on this issue. May other media people and bloggers–Dan is both–follow. Like me, he worries over the possibilty that “the most restrictive political regimes will end up telling everyone what to do. If the most repressive governments and laws determine Internet governance globally, we’re all in deep trouble.” Many public domain works may end up gone with the wind, so to speak, or at least be less common online.

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With PDA sales slumping, it’s great to learn that eBooks.com has just signed “a five-year distribution agreement with Nokia Corporation of Finland to distribute a growing range of popular books via a new generation of Nokia smart phones.

“The deal means that users of Nokia mobile devices will be able to find, buy, download and read books directly from their handsets.

“Under the agreement, Ebooks Corporation will supply a range of book excerpts that will be installed on Nokia phones. The phones will also include key elements of the eBooks.com web site.”

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A Librie List poster with the pseudonym of Scythic says he has just created a demo file for the format-and-DRM-hobbled Librie. Meaning? Perhaps you’ll soon be able to use the Librie to download Gutenberg-type books and others of your choice–rather than limit yourself to Sony-blessed rent-a-book collections and other such fun. Some details:

I have generated an LRF file from user content, and uploaded that to the files section.

And, I’ve done one better, and uploaded the (Windows commandline) binary and source code as well. (For best results, you’ll probably want to use ‘textify’ or similar on the PG files).

Now, there are some problems still – the “paging” is by chapter instead of real pages, the rendering seems a bit slower than it should, possibly because each “paragraph” is so long.

On the librie (but not on the PC) there are a bunch of boxes after the end of the chapter – but I think I can fix that.

As far as the source code.. its ugly.. it may cause permanent damageif you look at it too long. There’s lot of “magic” there, and half-formed guesses. Should be lots of fun if anyone wants to play with it — maybe figure out formatting, or the real meanings of tags which I’ve guessed at, or explore the potentials of the different fonts.

And a little note, which I shouldn’t need to do, but I will – this program is for personal use. It is NOT public domain, it is NOT GPL (at least not yet). And I’m utterly positive that I’ll regret writing it when I see people selling CD’s of project gutenberg titles for the librie on ebay.

Interesting stuff, but ideally Sony will make all the hard work obsolete by allowing the Librie to display users’ own books and other content without fuss. I suspect that nothing would please Scythic more.

Update, 10:13 p.m., Oct. 26: I’ve tweaked the above post after receiving the the following message from Scythic:

Just as a follow-up–the demonstration I uploaded to the group is a complete Project Gutenberg title.

While there are minor warts (the small image doesn’t work, boxes at the end of the chapter, and the rendering might be slightly slower), the book is definitely readable.

And as far as I can tell, I’m not breaking any US laws. The free titles aren’t protected by an access control device. Generating user content is covered under interoperability exceptions. If you know otherwise, please let me know.

I hope Scythic is right–that’s how it would seem to me as a layman–but I cannot be sure. Check with your own lawyer.

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“Static Control has won its appeal against Lexmark, allowing them once again to sell their printer-cartridge chips,” says a poster to the Law & Policy of Computer Communiations list.

That’s great news for consumers since Lexmark was threatening the replacement cartridge-maker via the DMCA. This Hollywood-bought law, alas, is now a tool for monopolists in areas far beyond entertainment. More at LawGeek.

Related: Lexmark ruling: Chock Full O’ Nuggets, via Copyright, and Court Slaps Down Lexmark For DMCA Misuse in Tech Dirt.