TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for June, 2005

By David Rothman

Did Bill Gates invent the Amaya editor to make people appreciate FrontPage and stop caring about Web standards and freeware?

Amaya is the free WYSIWYG software from hell with an interface that only Rube Goldberg’s hacker grandson could love. Forget about Amaya in most cases if you want to do XHTML Web sites or e-books. It’s too sucky.

But now there’s a new kid on the block–the free Nvu editor, also WYSIWYG. It’s standards-compliant, includes an integrated CSS editor and is based on Mozilla’s Gecko layout engine. Nvu does both HTML and XHTML and comes in flavors for Windows, Linux and the Mac. Why, it even offers an inline spelling check with lines popping up to show typos. Hmm. If the ballyhoo is true, this just might be just the ticket when we do the long-overdue remake of the OpenReader site. Linspire is financing the Nvu project. Way to go, guys.

(Spotted via Bill Janssen’s post to the eBook Community list.)

By David Rothman

Scott McNealy, Sun’s CEO, is pushing the idea of free, open-source textbooks. Laudable. But let’s not see that as a panacea to reduce the urgent need for less-Hollywoodish copyright law–and for educating copyright wimps like John Edwards. Meanwhile here’s the lowdown from ZDNet via LISNews on an initiative that McNearly is pushing:

The effort, called the Global Education and Learning Community (GELC), produces curriculum materials such as online books for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. McNealy envisions the replacement of expensive and quickly out-of-date textbooks by shared online instructional materials, testing, grading and assessment tools, all created by experts. (more…)

By David Rothman

Just to tease people, here are screen captures from the actual Nokia 770, not the emulator. Example below. And here’s a first-person write-up of the 770 by someone who used it for more than an hour. Related: Nokia 770 full-screen mode revealed and the new 770 Fan blog. – Roger Sperberg

By David Rothman

Several publishers, including M.J. Acharya, author of BreakUp Workbook, now the number one best-seller at eBookAd, have separately complained that the firm has ignored correspondence on payment issues.

What’s going on? eBookAd had assured us that the situation was under control. (more…)

By David Rothman

Isn’t it interesting–the most recent choices of e-books at one pirate site–probably in Europe or the States: 1984 (apparently an audio edition), Brave New World and Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil? The site isn’t storing the books but rather linking to them elsewhere.

Regardless, might there be a message here? It’s one thing to pirate or encourage the piracy of ephemeral music. But what do you do when modern literary classics and other serious books become pirate fodder–including those on matters of human freedom such as 1984? (more…)

By David Rothman

Roger Sperberg, an author and e-book pioneer who has worked for Random House, Conde Nast Publications and the Electronic Directions consulting firm, is the newest contributor to the TeleRead blog.

He is an important and much-cherished addition. TeleRead has always advocated a smooth transition from paper to electronic books, and that means the participation of people with traditional publishing industry experience–not just them but also them. Beyond that, he brings a wealth of technical knowledge about e-book standards. And best of all, rather than fixating on the past, he is looking ahead–as shown by his just-posted article on the Plucker display capabilities of the Nokia 770.

Roger has written about publishing and computers since 1980, for such magazines as GQ, PC, PC Week, PC World and Datapro Reports. His book Web Publishing with QuarkImmedia (co-authored with photographer Martha Leinroth) was an editor’s choice at Amazon in both desktop publishing and multimedia; his children’s book, Real Soon, Raccoon! (What to say after ‘See you, later, alligator’ and ‘After while, crocodile’)reached the number-two best-selling e-book at Barnes & Noble online. (more…)

By Roger Sperberg

While the Nokia 770 won’t be released till Q3, e-book development has already begun.

Kernel Concepts, which ported the Plucker Viewer to the new platform, has added a full-screen mode to the software. Here are screen-captures of the Viewer running in the Maemo development platform’s virtual machine. These are the first shots of Plucker Viewer running in full-screen mode.

Using a sample section from the 9/11 Commission Report, the full-screen mode contains 216 words compared to 158 in the standard mode, considerably more text. The lines are longer, and typically a full-screen mode page displays 22 lines, compared to 19 in the standard display. (Obviously, the headlines and inter-paragraph spacing affect these counts.) This short sample of text averaged 10.6 words per line in the standard display and 12.4 in full-screen, right in the optimal reading range.
(more…)

By David Rothman

More from Jay Rosen, via the Huffington Post, which continues to have a much-better S/N ratio than I’d expected.

“Mailer’s first two tries at the Huffington Post I choose to call practice swings,” Rosen writes. “Mailer the blogger has not yet appeared with a bat in his hand. Of course he was correct in 2002: writing seriously for the Internet (and learning to think with a link) ‘would use up what I have left.’”

My take: Can one really write seriously for the Net when we don’t even have bleepin’ permanent links? I hope Mailer sticks with books. Needless to say, a well-stocked national digital library system in the TeleRead vein would help in the permanence department.

I’d write much more except it’s my wedding anniversary, and Carly and I need to go out and eat. If that makes me a blogger-manqué for the day, so be it.

Domain squatting alert: Apparently someone else has beaten Norman Mailer to normanmailer.com–an Aussie named Paul Holmes. Ugh, hello, Authors Guild? Here’s one case where I’d side with you! If Paul Holmes’ real name were Norman Mailer and he were running a business, I’d understand. Instead, however, Holmes apparently has bought up The Name to hold it for ransom.

By David Rothman

So you thought you were safe when you deleted cookies that snoopy online sites wanted? Guess again. From InternetWeek, via Mike Cane:

United Virtualities is offering online marketers and publishers technology that attempts to undermine the growing trend among consumers to delete cookies planted in their computers.

The New York company on Thursday unveiled what it calls PIE, or persistent identification element, a technology that’s uploaded to a browser and restores deleted cookies. In addition, PIE, which can’t be easily removed, can also act as a cookie backup, since it contains the same information.

Comments Mike: “Hey, wait til the RIAA and MPAA get a whiff of this!!”

By David Rothman

As wrong as Michael Gartenberg can be on DRM, he’s absolutely on the money about the significance of the new iTunes to podcasting.

By David Rothman

Why not use movie PR to tune children into e-books?

If nothing else, check out her just-made comments on the Juice Box (screenshot) and interactivity or lack thereof. – David Rothman

Ellen Hage’s e-book tips for mothers

With all the interactive activities out there such as video games, MP3 players, DVDs, etc., reading a book can seem awfully dull. Reading then becomes a dreaded chore. And yet we know that children will perform poorly in school if they cannot read. Just what to do? (more…)

By David Rothman

Now that War of the Worlds is invading movie theaters, why not read the free e-book from a site such as Gutenberg, Blackmask, Manybooks.net or GutenTalk? You can also use the Wikipedia to find out about H.G. Wells–a brilliant popular-level writer, plagiarism notwithstanding. Here’s the Internet trailer for the Spielberg film starring Tom Cruise and based on one of Wells’ scariest and most famous works. Oh, and speaking of Martians, don’t forget Edgar Rice Burroughs and A Princess of Mars.

For parents: What’s the lowdown here? Is it okay to tell your child, “Read the e-book and we’ll go to the movie for sure–and maybe a bonus film as well?” Or is it wrong to position fun e-books as something to wade through for a reward? Coments? (more…)

By David Rothman

I’ve kicked the Dems’ butts on copyright matters–especially John Edwards, the textile worker’s son whose populism so far isn’t making it into cyberspace. That said, here’s a P2P-related reminder that the Dems hardly have a monopoly on cluelessness and vulnerability to Hollywood donations. Without doubt, Sen. Orrin Hatch (photo) and his GOP ilk remain the greatest threats. The one bright spot is that, with the Supreme Court having pandered so much to Hollywood, Congress isn’t as hot to trot on Induce Act-style legislation. Jeeze. Not that long ago, I thought that cyberactivists were showing increasing optimism on D.C. and the Net. The Supremes let us down.

Related: The decision could have been much worse, according to cyberlaw expert Ernie Miller.

By David Rothman

Oh, how glad I was to see the Slashdot post on the Ham and Spam of Weblogs. “At times we see upwards of 90 percent of the traffic from Blogspot being spam,” says Feedster CTO Scott Johnson–while predicting still more trouble ahead. Feedster and the rest can’t solve the problem without admitting it. I applaud Scott’s honesty.

Within the “ebook” listings, Feedster is filtering out spam somewhat better than before in the wake of a complaint from the TeleBlog. But Technorati has yet to evict the BizboxSolutions blog, a prolific spamster, from the ebook tag category. Yo, Dave Sify (photo)? It’ll be great if Technorati can follow through with your promise as CEO to investigate the clutter in “ebooks.” BizboxSolutions is even ripping off RSS feeds from other sites and publishing them in a way that makes the causal reader think they’re original content. And of course, it’s done for Google placement–and perhaps Technorati placement, too, if the greedsters know of the WordPress-Technorati relationship and the role of category-generated tags. (more…)

By David Rothman

Bill Gates’ persistent cheerleading for the Tablet PC is good news for the e-book industry–even linux fans. No small number of high-tech journalists let business types do their trend-setting for them.

And the e-book angle? Obvious. Tablets are better than laptops for reading e-books–at least for many, including me. You don’t have to worry about the main part of the laptop getting between you and the screen. Meanwhile here are more Gates-related Tablet PC details via IDG News Service: (more…)

By David Rothman

More at Anildigital’s Blog and Yummy. The concept: Use social bookmarks to help fans of PDF e-books share their finds. And guess what? Behind the site is none other than a print-on-demand service named PrintFu (”Nipping at Kinko’s Heels, One PDF at a Time”). (more…)

By David Rothman

Check out $8,000 Collection From Amazon.com Conjures Memories of the Dot-Com Boom, in the Wall Street Journal Online, via Jon Noring’s post on the Book People List. Bottom line: almost $8,000 for a mere 1,082 paper classics from Penguin, compared to $0 from Gutenberg or Manybooks.net to read many more books. Of course, the Penguin collection includes modern greats such as Saul Bellow. Public domain e-book collections don’t. Oh, well, perhaps you could splurge the $8K instead on Kurzweil-blessed life extension products to outlive that problem.