TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for December, 2005

By David Rothman

Here, from Robert X. Cringely.

By David Rothman

The TeleBlog for the most part is a hyperspecialized read. Earthquakes happen, government tumble, thousands starve, or die in wars, but our focus remains on e-books, libraries, copyright and related topics. Still, we can’t consider even specialities in a vacuum. Here, on the cusp of the New Year in the States, is a cheery set of predictions from futurist and urban affairs expert Joel Garreau at the Washington Post–who, I hope, is writing with tongue at least partly in cheek:

Our Washington area of 2030 is so much smaller than that of 2005 that it is sometimes hard to understand how our ancestors made such laughably wrong growth projections 25 years ago. They ignored three vital forces: the rising water, advances in communications technology and the crumbling of the federal government.

The good news has been the way the major world powers, China and India, have competed to expend some tiny fraction of their vast wealth and technological expertise on preserving the quaint historic districts of Washington. (more…)

By David Rothman

So says a headline at CIO.com, referring to open source efforts on Massachusetts. Some concerns about OpenOffice and the like: (more…)

By David Rothman

Not my favorite format–but better than Sony’s own proprietary alternative. Details from BusinessWeek Online. I’ve mentioned the machine before, but in fairness to Sony I did want to highlight the PDF possibility. What Sony does have going for it: Many people will buy first and ask questions later. Meanwhile a BW excerpt: (more…)

By David Rothman

The Times in the U.K. via if:book. Excerpt:

Wikipedia, which started in 2001, will notch up around 2.5 billion page impressions this month. According to Mr Wales, its traffic volumes are doubling every four months.

The combination of ultra-low overheads and massive readership would excite any media executive. And while the site does not carry any advertising, Wales admits it might. “There is a great deal of resistance to the idea, both from the community and from me. But at some point questions are going to be raised over the amount of money we are turning down,” he says.

By David Rothman

Piers Anthony, one of the grand old men of sci-fi and fantasy, maintains a long list of publishers of e- and p-books–and identifies the winners and sinners from a writer’s perspective. He focuses on small presses, a useful approach, given the waning interest of big mainstream publishers in the works of nonVIPs.

Among the winners: Double Dragon (”small company composed of three people dedicated to bringing quality books to the Internet”) and Lulu (which has pleased many a self-publisher with its publishing services). Among the sinners: Yes, eBookAd (not a publisher in the usual sense, but a distributor, infrastructure provider and bookseller with an impressive Web site and attractive business model for writers and publishers). Oh, how I hope that Dustin Revin can finally get his act together and be more reponsive to the many complaints of slow payment. Right now PA’s advice is to steer clear of eBookAd (”sems to be a fraudulent outfit that uses income from sales to pay off a few squeaky wheels while ignoring the majority”). Agree or disagree with that assessment? Please go to the section of the TeleBlog reserved for the eBookAd payments issue.

By David Rothman

Here, from MobileRead. Also from MR: CHM eBook Reader 2.5 for PPC.

By David Rothman

Video of a talk here–via Slashdot. Excerpt from summary of his comments:

The key to churning out these cheap educational devices is volume — and the more countries that join the bandwagon, the sleeker and less expensive the computers are likely to be. Negroponte casts a wary eye on the potential grey market appeal of the machines, and is determined to make them so distinctive as a government-distributed, educational tool that taking one would “be like stealing a post office truck.” Negroponte concludes, “Changing education on the planet is a monumental challenge,” taking decades. But OLPC [One Laptop per Child] will “seed the change,” and help “invent the future.”

By Branko Collin

Tomorrow is the last day of the year that remembered the death of French sci-fi pioneer Jules Verne a hundred years ago, in 1905. Distributed Proofreaders and Ebooks Libres et Gratuites joined in the activities and have been working on Dutch, Icelandic and French texts.

When you are looking for electronic versions of classic etexts, visiting Project Gutenberg or the Online Books Page is a good idea. But sometimes authors are present on the internet without being listed at these large catalogues. Author’s societies, or the sites of fans or of estates may be of help then. For instance, for stories of Jacques Futrelle’s The Thinking Machine, I shop at futrelle.com, so to speak. And a large collection of digitized Jules Verne stories can be found at the Jules Verne Virtual Library, which gets its books amongst others from Ebooks Gratuites, Project Gutenberg, and Russian Text.

By Roger Sperberg

Sony’s e-reader announcement next week means e-books have reached the bottom and after five long years the swing upward has begun. And maybe this time around e-books will realize the predictions of five and ten years ago.

Only this time, I think electronic books will be more about motion than words (more so in 2007 and ‘08, than in 2006). Static books are not the future of e-books. There’ll be more color, more photos, more graphic novels — manga, that is, already big among our grade-schoolers. There’ll be sound, too. (Well, none of these on the Sony, except manga, I expect.)

You think I’m talking about multimedia, film or animation, but no, I mean books. Children’s books with a sound track. Maybe a dash of interactivity — click a word and the e-reader pronounces it (like the LeapPad — now there’s an electronic book format that didn’t fail). Guidebooks with animated maps. Or guidebooks that let you click on a map and a sightseeing route starting right there will be constructed.
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By David Rothman

Here, from MIT’s MediaPedia Wiki (via the eBookCommunity list).

By David Rothman

The traditional publishing industry targets mainly women these days–to hell with the literacy crisis among males. But e-books are different, with gadget-loving men being the main buyers. Could this change? Already Harlequin has started an e-book series for women, and now Deborah Fallows of the Pew Internet & American Life has just written an important report suggesting that women will soon surpass men in total Net usage. E-bookers, pay attention. The simpler the technology grows, the more attractive the technology will be to women. I myself hope that e-book use can go on to thrive among both sexes. Meanwhile the razing of the Tower of eBabel and an end to Draconian DRM, two of the main factors complicating e-books, could help especially in the growth of e-books among women.

Excerpt from the Pew report: “Younger women are more likely than younger men to be online; older men are more likely than older women to be online: 86% of women ages 18-29 are online, compared with 80% of men that age. On the other hand, 34% of men 65 and older use the internet, compared with 21% of women that age.”

By David Rothman

Boosters of proprietary formats love to say that the e-book business will do just fine if the hardware is right. Yes, better screens will help. But it also won’t hurt to tear down the Tower of eBabel and banish Draconian DRM.

If you want an eyewitness account from someone who witnessed the Gemstar e-book debacle, very much eBabel- and DRM-related, then I would heartily recommend an MIT Technology Review post from Wade Roush (photo). Yes, he’s the same guy who, along with Glenn Sanders, ran the late and lamented eBookWeb.

Read Wade and see why consumers, schools and libraries should steer clear of Sony’s forthcoming e-book machine unless those people can show they’ll use an open approach. Wade doesn’t really address the format issue head on. But he might as well have–with his mention of the need for economical and convenient reading. What’s more, do you really want to trust your DRM to Sony? (more…)

By David Rothman

What timing. Just when the U.S. Department of Education has bemoaned the declining literacy rate among college graduates, Audible has come out with a “Don’t Read” campaign.

Isn’t this wonderful Attention Getting? It’s in the best creative tradition of the Mao campaign for the Minneapolis public library. (Sarcasm Alert One.)

Audible also makes me nostalgic for the wonderful Gateway ads of several years ago, positioning home computers against public libraries. (Sarcasm Alert Two.)

Hello, Audible Marketing? For years, advocates of audio books for libraries have depicted them as ways to help drive people to text. I myself can see some possibilities here, at least for busy commuters who lack time for normal books. But now you’ve weakened the argument of your friends in the library community. (more…)

By Roger Sperberg

Sony apparently sees what we see — we Telereaders, the never-say-die e-text e-book believers — that there is a real market for electronic books. That’s how I read the company’s forthcoming announcement of an e-book reader for the U.S. market, as reported in today’s top story in BusinessWeek. Because after Sony’s release, four other companies are lined up in the wings with competitive devices.

I think that’s pretty strong evidence that the e-book comeback is about to start. That’s the good news from this release.
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By David Rothman

Sony did a pretty good job–unwittingly, of course–of setting back the cause of e-books when it released the Librie with a horrid, DRM-hobbled proprietary approach. The E Ink technology was sensational, but the company’s handling of it verged on the mean-spirited. Commercial books vanished after X number of weeks. And at first the Librie, shown here, did not even offer the ability to read nonDRMed books.

Now Sony is at it again, with talk of a new e-reader to be released with the iPod business model in mind and selling for $300-$500. Beware. Maybe the interface will be slick, but short of ample evidence to the contrary, don’t dare trust the company behind it–not after the DRM fiasco in the music area. I wonder if people will really be able to own Sony books for real. How much will they be at the mercy of Sony? The best approach remains a standards-based one of the OpenReader variety. I hope that competitors such as iRex–which in April will release an E Ink reader able to handle HTML and other common formats from the start–can crush Sony. It would also be a victory of consumers and publishers over Sony’s marketing department. Libraries, already stung by the Gemstar fiasco, should especially be wary of Sony unless it adopts truly open standards. The last thing the world needs is the Tower of eBabel approach.

As for the details of the Sony launch, they’re skimpy now, but some major publishers will be supplying content for the new machine, including HarperCollins and Simon and Schuster, which hope to digitize front and back lists–tens of thousands of books. The good news is that as long as this is happening, maybe the same content can also be positioned in OpenReader. That would reduce Sony’s clout with both readers and publishers, A Good Thing, considering the shocking irresponsibility that the DRM fiasco revealed at Sony. Meanwhile here’s a snippet from BusinessWeek via the Librie list: (more…)

By David Rothman

Here, via Wired News. The Writely program is only in beta, but based on a brief try that I gave it, there’s promise here. I did not experiment with the blog feature, which is to work with WordPress and other popular choices. Yes, it can do Word format.