TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for January, 2005

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From the Fictionwise list:

Today is the very last day for the $99.95 special. The price of the ebookwise-1150 goes to $129.95 after midnight tonight. The $20 content credit will remain in effect, however, for a while.

eBay Department: Current price on my RCA REB1200 color eBook is just $112.50 with a 128M memory card and spare battery, and the auction ends tomorrow, sob, sob. Go ahead. Exploit me!

By David Rothman

“The founder and chairman of the MIT Media Lab wants to create a $100 portable computer for the developing world. Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital and the Wiesner Professor of Media Technology at MIT, says he has obtained promises of support from a number of major companies, including Advanced Micro Devices, Google, Motorola, Samsung, and News Corp.” – The hundred-buck PC, in Red Herring (links added to quote).

The TeleRead take: That’s good news not just for the Third World and Silicon Valley but also for the e-book industry and consumers. The Red Herring article says: “Mr. Negroponte’s idea is to develop educational software and have the portable personal computer replace textbooks in schools in much the same way that France’s Minitel videotext terminal, which was developed by France Telecom in the 1980s, became a substitute for phone books.” The greater the e-book market, significantly, the lower should be consumer costs since publishers can charge lower prices and still profit. Here’s to volume! I suspect that the first versions of the $100 machine might use CRTs, but if so, let’s hope that e-book-optimized devicds with LCDs or even E Ink will follow. Given the power situation in rural villages, let’s hope that LCD is standard from the start–and that people remember that tech is not a panacea.

The OpenReader angle: The econo PC is one more reason to come up with a standard e-book format and an open source e-book reader, given the need to slash costs. If Negroponte cares about literacy without a Tower of eBabel, he should give OpenReader a good look.

Related: The TeleRead plan as originally published in Computerworld in 1992, as well as The Electronic Peace Corps: Take a look, candidates. Also see, natch, the requisite discussion at Slashdot.

Update, July 7, 2005: The project will use LCDs or another another CRT alternative. See other TeleBlog entries.

By David Rothman

OK. Jon Noring and I have made it clear. We’ll have DRM in OpenReader for interested publishers–and let the marketplace sort out the issue. Many smaller publishers actually hate it. But if Random House loves DRM, we’ll allow it and do our best with the implementation–just so book-buyers can vote in the end. We’ve got a top network security expert ready to work on this.

In this blog today, guest contributor Scott Redford, owner of Diesel eBooks, eloquently passes on a retailer’s perspective on the complexities here, and we want to be responsive.

At the same time, it’s important to remember the anti-consumer potential of the technology–the subject of lawyer Michael Geist’s column in the Toronto Star. The title is “‘TPMs’: A perfect storm for consumers,” with TPM standing for “Technological Protection.” But whose protection?

HP among the hoods

Especially scary is Hewlett Packard’s use of DRMish tech to regionalize printer cartridges so they work only on printers sold in the States but not elsewhere–or perhaps vice versa. A little “divide and conquer” to gouge consumers with? Perhaps one more way for CEO Carly Fiorina to make up for the botched Compaq merger?

John Edwards, for all his pro-consumer, pro-populist rhetoric, never would take a stand on the the DRM-linked DMCA even though he sat on just the right Senate committees. Did campaign contributions shut him up? Anti-competitive DRM could cost the U.S. public billions.

Coming: A Canadian DMCA?

Oh, and then there’s the possibility of a Canadian version of the DMCA. Meanwhile the usual nasty free speech issues arise from DRM. CBS, for example, as part of Rathergate, released a DRMed document that would not let Net users electronically copy and paste sentences.

By David Rothman

E-book readers, writers and publishers aren’t the only victims of the Tower of eBabel. Retailers suffer, too. Below, L. Scott Redford, president of Diesel eBooks, a 35,000-title virtual store based in Richmond, Virginia, speaks out on the need for standards in DRM and formats. He hopes that the marketplace will create them; and that’s our wish at OpenReader, too. We believe that a XML/CSSish consumer standard, carefuly crafted with input from stakeholders ranging from librarians to e-bookstores, will prevail in the natural course of things. – David Rothman

Just how do we make the “e” in e-books stand for “easier”? Well, how about this? Let’s scrap the existing digital rights management. Instead everybody in charge of administering DRM would be re-trained overnight as digital priests. They would certify “trustworthiness” to those seeking to download a e-books.

Before downloads, customers would be visited by digital priests of their respective religious persuasions. With great pomp and circumstance, they would “pledge” not to forward their books to everybody in the world without compensating the authors and publishers. Break the pledge, and you’d find yourself in purgatory, hand-copying old encyclopedias.

Or maybe a totalitarian law would work instead. First-offenders guilty of unlawful content reproduction would have to wear a scratchy wool eye patch for one year. For a second crime, the patch would be now a mask. We could set up toll-free hot-lines and reward people for spying on their neighbors.

The Real Point

See my real point here? No easy way exists to loosen the DRM grip–this complicated issue can’t be addressed with good old-fashioned guilt and fear. But e-book standards for DRM and formats would help. I am counting on the laws of capitalism, which always prevail. A demand will eventually be met with supply, and I’m hoping that the right set of standard will break from the pack and simplify the digital content landscape. That will be a blessed day. Microsoft, Adobe and Palm and the others now have their own special technology fee tacked on to the price of e-books. And that complicates merchandising. We e-book merchants would rather not have multiple cost structures for the same e-book.

Nor do we like consumers to be limited to books published in their chosen format or suffer multiple technologies just to enjoy a story. Nothing is more frustrating than having three different libraries on your handheld and forgetting where your recent fiction resides. I don’t just hear customers complaints–I myself own a handheld.

Villains not

Who’s to blame? I’m thinking nobody. Many authors and publishers break out in a cold sweat at just the mention of the word “Napster” and can you blame them? Their livelihood is at stake. They should, however, strive to better satisfy consumers desire for more content in digital form.

If a publisher has faith in their work, it’s now accepted that expanding to e-book will deliver extra profit and drive hardback sales. Not all understand this. I still hear some authors express misguided fear that e-books will cannibalize their hardback sales. Publishing is not a zero-sum game, however–and that actually can be good. E-books add incremental value to the equation. Granted, companies tasked with encrypting content for them are an easy target, for they create the hoops through which we must jump. But the DRM heavyweights like Microsoft, Adobe and eReader are simply business people satisfying a need with existing technology.

No glass chin

Let there be no mistake, the future is bright for e-books–sales are on a steady rise. The industry took a couple of jabs during the Internet correction, but you’ll find no glass chin here. More students are beginning to see e-books as an alternative for those pricey hardback textbooks. The computer savvy are learning the ease in pasting code directly from their favorite Java e-book manual, and there’s even speculation that men are reading more romance as they no longer fear being seen with a floral book cover. Moreover, the Tablet PC is maturing, and the publishers are slowly but surely putting even more content in digital form. It takes courage, but we’re getting there. Though it is a word often used in excuses, “patience” is needed by digital downloaders, me included.

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David Faucheux, a TeleRead volunteer, normally reviews books and other forms of cultural from the perspective of a blind MLIS. But today’s post in his Blind Chance blog is on different and especially urgent topic: The blind-hostile DMV: Blind pedestrian safety questions scarce on drivers tests. Check it out. Any journalists out there care to write on this? Its importance will grow as America ages and the number of the blind increases–along with elderly drivers in need of training to cope with less-than-youthful coordination and vision.

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I can’t help expressing my joy that AT&T will vanish into the maw of SBC.

What a loathsome outfit. AT&T’s VoIP service, contrary to the advertising, didn’t offer three-way capability when I used it. I cancelled and went through billing hell, with AT&T at one point unable to tote up the exact amount owed–but still threatening my credit rating when I refused to pay without a trustworthy figure. I was hardly the first victim of AT&T’s mix of sleaze and incompetence. Believe me, the smile on that lady in the ad is most misleading, at least as applied to my experiences.

I feel for the AT&T shareholders who over the years saw a widows-and-orphans stock shrink to a fraction of its value, and even more I feel for the employees who’ll lose their jobs. I rejoice, however, over the fate of the inept and arrogant management. This is creative destruction at its best. Changing technologies and lasting stupidity doomed the deserving.

No time for nostalgia

Meanwhile I would urge readers of this blog to have as little as possible to do with AT&T in personal or professional dealings, until the SBC deal goes through. Forget about nostalgia, regardless of AT&T’s past greatness, regardless of the well-deserved acclaim for the old Bell Labs. Normally I’d worry about lessened competition, but AT&T’s was so anti-consumer that I’m still happy to see this dino roll over.

The e-book angle: If even AT&T can fade away, what about Microsoft? No corporation survives forever–a point that even Bill Gates has made in another context. That is why we need a universal e-book standard if e-books are to be a durable, respected medium.

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The Last Time I Saw Paris, the 1954 Liz Taylor-Van Johnson movie, based on Babylon Revisisted, the classic short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is online for free via the Internet Archive. Did MGM slip up with the copyright? Whatever the explanation, the Archive lists the movie as being in the public domain. Enjoy. That’s what I intend to do. Comcast has just increased its download speed in my area from 3 to 4 mbps, and since QuickTime streaming from the Archive isn’t working on my system, I’ll download this as an MPEG4.

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The Toronto public library now offers 5,000 titles, directly or indirectly, and even lends out Rocket eBooks. (Via Anidada’s Live Journal.)

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Project Gutenberg has bombed in the library world–for two reasons beyond the usual fears of e-books.

First, Gutenberg in the past has not bothered with the requisite cataloging rituals. Second, while the texts are catnip for recreational readers who love the classics, many are worse than useless for scholars. They’re nuke-level career risks for academics. How can you cite e-texts when you don’t know which paper editions were used as sources? And what about the typos that mar scads of Gutenberg books not processed by the quality-minded folks at Distributed Proofreaders, the heart and soul of Gutenberg these days?

Well, to Gutenberg’s credit, founder Michael Hart is now addressing the cataloging issue at least. He has begun a MARC record-testing program to determine the level of library-related interest in suitably cataloged PG books. Best of luck to Gutenberg on this, and let’s hope that Michael will now think about redoing all the deficient texts, especially popular classics, to bring them up to academic standards.

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“Spotted in Japan: vending machines that sell software, ebooks, and games for Palms and Pocket PCs. You just pick the one you want, select your preferred memory card format (CompactFlash, SD, or Memory Stick), and out pops a card with your software loaded up on it. It seems they’re actually offering some compelling content, too–graphic novels, games and music that you may have actually heard of. These aren’t just random games and content, they’re Lupin, Appleseed, and Dominion, all big names in the manga world.” – Multi-format content vending machines get all growed up in Engadget.

The TeleRead take: In the era of the Internet, novels sold by vending machines might seem a primitive practice. But then consider the horrors of ActiveSync for e-book newbies. This could be A Good Thing to try in the States. Coming to CompUSA?

Meanwhile, a commenter tells Engadget: “Wake up Barnes and Noble! I hardly ever buy books on paper anymore and I don’t want to subscribe to another crappy eBook web site. This machine would get my attention, so long as it’s not DRM protected in a way that forces me to carry multiple cards around. I like to read and listen to music at the same time.”

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The Cybook and Librie are my hardware fixations of the moment, since they apparently have the best screens of the dedicated e-book machines that are already on the market. I’ll also track the Gemstar devices because of the revival by Fictionwise/eBookwise and eBoook Technologies, Inc., as well as the tricks that Steve Breen’s GEB eBook Librarian will make possible. Yes, Steve has more wrinkles on the way. Needless to say, I’ll welcome readers’ suggestions as to other here-and-now technologies in the e-book area that I should be tracking closely.

Meanwhile here’s more on the Cybook in a library environment, from the helpful Thomas Brevik in Norway:

Great to hear from you! I have read TeleRead for a long time (old fan so to speak:-))

I just posted a reply on Tinfoil + Raccoon which addresses most of what you ask:

Since my library is a small military and academic library (Royal Norwegian Naval Academy) with 500 users that have high tech skills we could probably just let the Cybooks out as is, but I have a very special service in mind that the Cybooks will address. A lot of our material is on PDF. Cytale is currently developing a PDF reader that we’ll use as soon as it gets ready. Usually we have to print things out in the library if people have to bring the stuff with them. This is time cosuming, expensive and repetitive. What I plan to do is pre-load the Cybooks with most of the stuff I know is in demand (varies with which part of the term we are in) and just add stuff that the user request specially. We’ll probably use the memory cards that Cytale sent with the e-books to avoid messing around with the active-sync stuff. I have a very nice Fujitsu-Siemens Stylistic tablet-PC with memory card reader that I can download the needed files and just add to the Cybook as needed. So I guess we will have a combination of pre-loaded and requested material on all four. I’m debating if I should have the same material on all four or differentiate.

If more libraries start using Cybooks I think that a forum of some kind should be started. I really like your blogpost on Cybook and will follow this as we proceed. I will of course keep you both posted on our experiences. Incidentally my Tablet PC is a great e-book reader.

Looking forward to sharing our experiences (and I’m really interested in what you have to say about the Librie, David!).

Thanks, Thomas! Meanwhile I’ll be asking the gang at Bookeen, which took over from Cytale, for news of other library-related apps. Especially I’m interested in coping tips for and from libraries–whether about the Cybook or other e-book machines, or e-books in general.

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Rochelle Hartman, the Raccoon of the Tinfoil+Raccoon blog, is trying out a Cybook, and she can easily read Bob Dylan’s new autobiography off the screen.

So much for Prof. Geoffrey Nunberg’s silly comparison between e-book reading and touring Normandy by looking through a bombsight. Reading off a computer screen, Rochelle says, “um, like you’re doing now,” is not “unnatural.” My friend, a librarian in the Midwest, writes: “I didn’t even give a second thought to the medium once I launched into one of the best-written, most compelling books I’ve picked up in a long time.”

The bad news

OK. I figured I’d be gentle and break Rochelle’s good news first. The main point of her post, with which I agree, is that today’s e-book technology can often scare off civilians. In a related vein, my Cybook review recommended the machine for “serious readers” but not necessarily the whole universe.

Gemstar-style devices, at least, would be easier for novices. In allowing users to try different programs to cope with the Tower of eBabelor just find the software they liked best, the Cybook’s makers pleased me. But they complicated life for e-book novices. The best machines for David–and, yes, I still love the Cybook–aren’t necessarily the best for Rochelle right now.

DRM horrors galore

Rochelle especially hated the hassles of DRM even though she got started with Mobipocket, which, compared to Microsoft and Adobe counterparts, is far gentler on users. I doubt that the DRM of Mobipocket on the Cybook is worse than on other machines. Either way, though, you have to type in an all-too-long string of numbers and put up with other nonsense in homage to the DRM gods.

“I spoke with IT-savvy, totally wired folks about ebooks,” Rochelle recalls from an ALA conference, “and was surprised when they shrugged their shoulders and dismissed the possibililty that ebooks had a shot at becoming an ubiquitous medium. When I asked why, their main answer was ‘DRM.’”

ActiveSync joys

The joys of the ever-changing ActiveSync (sarcasm alert), which Cybook uses must download for the latest version, also didn’t agree with the Raccoon.

“Cybook is a multi-format, book-sized reader, which is good,” Rochelle said, “but it takes a tech contortionist to wiggle the content into the hardware. Hot sync, mobipocket reader, USB cables, blah blah blah.”

I’ve encouraged Rochelle to buy a memory card reader to ease the pain from ActiveSync transfers, and beyond that, I believe that she’ll eventually appreciate the advantages of the Cybook for seasoned e-book nuts. Still, her point remains; there’s just too much complexity here for novices. You’ve got to be a newbie, alas, before the seasoning seeps in.

Earth to Microsoft

Hello, Microsoft? When will you start designing your ActiveSync software for Earthlings? It’s a shame that innocents like Rochelle and the Cybook people must suffer because of the built-in horrors of Windows CE and the rest. Worred about embedded Linux? Then, Softies, please fix ActiveSync. As a usuable program for civilians, it is totally broken.

On top of everything else, the Cybook still can’t run Microsoft Reader even though the Windows CE operating system is billg-holy. Far from clueless, the folks at Bookeen, home of the Cybook, know what’s going on, and they are vigrous supporters of OpenReader. What’s more, they are in negotiations with Microsoft to remedy the Microsoft Reader problem. Bookeen is working to get Adobe on the Cybook (apparently not with DRM), and a Cybook review from ZDnet says: “The company also tells us that a version of eReader, which can read DRMd PDB format files, is being developed for the Cybook.” That’s great. Let’s help readers cope with the Here Now while awaiting the OpenReader solution.

One answer to the sync problem: f I have my druthers, the OpenReader Consortium will address the download problem to reduce the cortortionist requirement. Perhaps by encouraging the development of alternatives to ActiveSync and HotSync for Windows and other operating systems? Or maybe integrating downloading into the actual reader program? No promises! That’s just my opinion. What do you think? Email me. If there’s enough demand for this feature, then, yes, it just might well show up.

Latest on OpenReader: An accomplished network security expert is joining our effort and will be especially helpful in the DRM Department. While Jon Noring and I and other ringleaders are not the biggest fans of DRM, we’re prepared to be as Raccoon-friendly with it as we can in OpenReader.

Update, 12:50, Jan. 29: From Norway, Thomas Brevik wrote Rochelle earlier today: “We have just purchased four Cybooks for our library and are in the first stages of setting them up before we start lending them out to our users. I’m really looking forward to your experiences and opinions on the Cybook. Personally I’m quite happy with the reading experience, and our IT-department will do most of the tech stuff anyway so hopefully we’ll avoid the problems you had. Good luck!”

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A Google employee didn’t like the pay and griped it about in his blog. The posts vanished. But guess what? Yahoo’s cache came to the rescue. (Found via John Battelle Searchblog.)

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The Rothman Librie is due to arrive next week. The cost in Japan was 29,800 JPY, around $290, and at that price I couldn’t care less whether the E-Ink marvel is new or a refurb. Good thing, too–for the latest scuttlebutt, via my new pal Morpheus at MobileRead, is that 29,800 is what a refurb seems to cost. Is that what I’m getting? Just why the R word–and I don’t mean “Rothman”? Could Sony be about to intro a new model without such heinous DRM? Alexander, a MobileRead contributor, is thinking that, and he could be on to something.

Also from Morpheus: Word that apparently “someone managed to write some code to read e-books (in .jpg format) on a Sony Playstation Portable.”

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If you enjoy corporate Newspeak, you’ll love an interview with Adobe COO Shantanu Narayan, complete with a few musings related to the U word. Oh, this is just what we need–proprietary craziness and the Tower of eBabel as the eternal norm on portable devices. Heck, Adobe can’t even get PDAs right. (Via NewsScan as spotted by Rick Barry.)

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Don’t believe that Adobe is poison for the e-book industry? Well, check out this Gothic-intense nightmare from Beth Young, which is just one of many Adobe-related horror stories. She writes:

I needed Robert’s Rules of Order in order to deal with a problem on a faculty senate committee. My copy was at home, I was in the office, and I didn’t have time to travel to the library or bookstore, obtain a copy, travel back to my office, and deal with the RRO problem before my meeting. No problem, I thought, I’ll buy an e-copy. I’m sure I can find one and download it in minutes..

I figured it was worth owning an e-copy in addition to my print copy because I could keep RRO handy on my pda at every committee meeting and eventually become that crotchety faculty member who brings all business to a halt by saying things like, “No, no, no! You must not discuss that motion until it has been seconded!”

Sadly, the latest version of RRO is only available in Secure Adobe format. I hadn’t yet downloaded Adobe Reader (I hate cluttering up my pda memory), but I do get a slight discount here because I’m a member of the BuyWise club. Also, a former grad school prof has just written a book that’s available in Secure Adobe format, so maybe I would purchase that book, too.

Next step: download the software. I located the free Adobe Reader 2.0 software and tried to install it on my pda. After working for 5-10 minutes, the installer informed me that it had failed because I had Adobe Acrobat 1.0 already installed on my ppc. I was told to uninstall Acrobat using my ppc Remove Programs feature.

So, I ran Remove Programs, and Acrobat was quickly uninstalled except for a few files/folders that I was instructed to remove using File Explorer. I removed those files and folders, confirmed that Adobe Acrobat appeared in no menus whatsoever on my pda. Check. Tried again to install Adobe Reader.

This time I got a message telling me I had to UNinstall the Reader from my desktop, where had installed itself first before trying to go to my pda. OK–did that.

Then, again I tried to install Reader. Again, I got an error message because supposedly Acrobat was on my pda. Again, I checked for evidence of the program on my pda and found none.

People, this cycle happened THREE MORE TIMES. I never was able to solve it. Thank goodness I’d never actually purchased that e-book! I’d have wasted my $9.34.

Finally, in my remaining few desperate moments before my meeting, I called my husband, interrupting something important to make him search the house for my book and look up the information I needed. Fortunately he was able to rescue me . . . and my committee problem was eventually solved.

So there you have it. I recognized the ideal situation for an e-book, I readied my credit card to make the purchase, and instead all I got was a techno-hassle. Plus I no longer have Adobe Acrobat on my pda, so I will be cursing again when I need it and have to reinstall. Assuming that the installer doesn’t also insist it is still there…

What is Adobe trying to do–sabotage e-books with its installation horrors? Not to mention its PDA-hostile format and DRM. User-friendly standards could go a long way in both the format and related DRM areas. Standards would also open up more competition among creators of e-book readers, so products would improve, installation would be less of a chore, and stories like Beth’s would be less common.

Related: The riddles of Microsoft. Just where does Adobe hire its product managers? Obviously from the same Martian territories that Microsoft’s people do, at the expense of usability by earthlings.

By the way, if you click on Beth’s original item, you’ll also read about her pain with e-books in the Microsoft format. Any wonder that global revenue from e-books is under $40 or $50 million a year?

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A gem from Techdirt:

You may recall that we somehow got involved in a bizarre battle over Wikipedia, when I got into a discussion with a reporter who told me that Wikipedia was “outrageous,” “repugnant” and “dangerous,” mainly because it’s not reviewed by “professionals.” Despite a valiant effort, I was unable to ever convince the reporter, Al Fasoldt, that regular encyclopedias, complete with their experts, make mistakes too–and, in fact, the problem is that those encyclopedias can’t then be updated and fixed. In a story that was pretty much written to make Wikipedia fans gleeful, Many to Many points out that a 12-year-old boy has found a series of errors in the latest Encyclopedia Britannica. It may be wrong, but of course, it’s not “dangerous” because it’s been reviewed by experts. Apparently, certified false info is better than uncertified correct info.

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The TeleRead take: At least in print, the Encyclopedia Britannica is inherently inaccurate compared to the Wikipedia–simply because it can’t be updated as often as a distributed approach with volunteers. The best solution would be a mix of diligent, ever-vigilant amateurs and pros.