TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for February, 2006

By Branko Collin

Photo: Douglas Adams by Chris Ogle.

Some golden oldies: Douglas Adams on how we lost interactivity a hundred years ago, and how we have finally gotten it back, and how that is a good thing (1999); and on electronic publishing (1998). These two essays contain one good idea after another, so it would be hard to summarize them here. Nevertheless, a few quotes:

What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make.

…

Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.

By David Rothman

Elizabeth Mackey is the new vice president and general manager of the Motricity’s eReader division. From a news release:

Mackey brings a wealth of experience as a former executive of several leading publishers and media companies, including audio-book leader Audible, Inc. and Franklin Electronic Publishers. Her appointment is directly related to Motricity’s ongoing investment in strengthening its business-to-consumer market channel…

By David Rothman

The Sony Reader now has a $350 price tag at the SonyStyle store–the same as the earlier figure on the store site, the number the company temporarily took down. (Via Engadget.)

By David Rothman

The Origami rumors are heating up. CNet reports:

With a screen bigger than that of a handheld but smaller than a notebook PC screen, Origami devices won’t fit in the pocket, but they’ll make it into purses and even the smallest of backpacks, sources said.

Microsoft’s goal is to create a blueprint for devices that could sell for $600 or less, although the actual prices will depend greatly on what manufacturers decide to include. Origami is capable of supporting features like GPS, Bluetooth, 3G cellular technology and Wi-Fi, though each of these adds to the cost of the device.

I wonder how low the price might be with volume discounts. Could the Origami be a serious possibilty for schools and libraries in the near future? And I continue to be curious about screen quality. Are we deep in e-book territory?

Related: Microsoft wireless tablet rumored: Boost for e-books on the way? Other links–including Mitch Ratliff’s post. Also videos, plus the Syncing Apple’s warning to Nokia about the Nokia 770–and rumors of a forthcoming 880.

By David Rothman

Talk of the Nation audio–from NPR, via the Free Range Librarian. Guests came from the Denver and Charlotte, N.C., Libraries, as well as from the future-oriented DaVinci Institute.

Jo Haight-Sarling, a Denver staffer, said users of e-books and audio books were still relying on in-library services. Meanwhile DaVinci Director Thomas Frey, shown here, predicted searches based even on smells.

My big question: Will there be a major divergence between the institutional preservation and libraries’ traditional mission as encouragers of literacy and written culture? I’m all for multimedia in libraries. But if they don’t watch out for the written word, or, yes, the electronic equivalent, who will? Ideally, when libraries offer films remotely or on site, there will also be real-world or Web pointers to relevant p- and e-books.

Related: ‘Library will be the first in the nation to offer downloadable films, concert videos’ and the OCLC Perceptions report.

By David Rothman

I begged. I phoned. I e-mailed. I blogged. But with a few much-appreciated exceptions, supposedly progressive Chapel Hill is letting Law Prof. John Edwards off the hook on matters of copyright law. This possible Presidential candidate remains stubbornly mute on such issues as the anti-culture Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act despite his having served on a copyright-related Senate committee.

Down at the University of Florida, Gavin Baker (left), photographed with another student and Larry Lessig, might provide a good role model for the University of North Carolina and many other campuses. Cyber rights is a major issue of his campaign for the student Senate–the election will be today and tomorrow. Thanks to the Florida university’s RIAA-friendly policies, students can’t share even free software programs from their dorm rooms. So Gavin, president of Florida Free Culture and subject of a recent Boing Boing post, has responded. He tells me via e-mail: “Digital libraries are involved: read on.” (more…)

By David Rothman

News release:

Advanced Reader Copies, those unproofed bound copies that used to be called galley proofs, sell for hot prices on eBay. Jim Baen, the legendary science fiction and fantasy publisher, has been selling electronic Advanced Reader Copies of his new fiction offerings through his Webscriptions service for over a year.

Using the same idea, members of the Jim Baen’s Universe readers’ club, the Universe Club, will be receiving electronic advanced reader copies (eARCs) of the first issue (June 2006) of the magazine beginning March 1st. The eARC version will be essentially the same as the magazine, but three months early, and with some unproofed stories. Each issue will be preceded by an eARC.

By Branko Collin

Next week Margaret Atwood will be signing books at the London Book Fair … from the comfort of her Canadian home. That’s London, United Kingdom; not London, Ontario. So says Mobuzz TV. Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale and of The Blind Assassin, will be using a telautograph, a device that sounds absolutely space age, but actually precedes the fax machine and was invented in the nineteenth century. Talk about steam punk!

By Rochelle Hartman

Scifi author and long-time blogger John Scalzi (Whatever) made my day with the announcement that his titles Old Man’s War and Ghost Brigades will soon be released as e-books from Tor. I’ve been waiting for my paper copy of Ghost Brigades at the library, but think I’ll wait for the e-version. Why? Because Tor gets e-books in the way that Baen does, and I want to give hearty support to clueful publishers. Scalzi quotes Tor’s Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

We’ve tested a lot of e-book waters, including various cockamamie schemes involving overpriced e-books laden with DRM.Oddly enough, a lot of those “books” didn’t even sell enough copies to pay for their file-conversion costs.

Meanwhile, it hasn’t escaped our notice that Jim Baen has been doing something that works, that people like, and that makes money. I’m delighted to be doing this pilot program; I think Jim has been clueful on this issue for a long time, while almost everyone else in publishing has been staggering around on stage hitting one another over the head with inflated pig bladders.

I have to include Scalzi’s sensible, choice quote as well:

My information does not want to be free; it wants to pay my mortgage. But slapping DRM onto an e-book doesn’t do a damn thing other than annoy people who buy the book online — i.e., one’s actual customers.

Despite their cluefulness, I can’t help but wonder at the lameness of the Tor website. Content is on the thin side, and it’s not particularly current. Did they move and not leave a forwarding address? (Updated 2/27/06: Posted on Scalzi’s site by Tor honcho Patrick Neilsen Hayden: “Don’t get me started about the Tor web site. Yes, we have an entirely new one almost ready to roll out.”)

By David Rothman

A yawner of a story about the Sony Reader. When will the newsies tire of the obvious?

“The Walkman in 1979 changed the way we listen to music, but it has lost out to Apple’s iPod,” says the Australian IT section of NEWS.com.au, “and now Sony wants to do for books what Apple did for music.” Oh, wow, does this mean that the noble-spirited Sir Howard is the new Mother Teresa or Andrew Carnegie?

By David Rothman

Is a handheld wireless tablet with a touch screen on the way from Microsoft? And if so, will it be e-books-capable, not just multi-media-capable? Links:

• John Markoff’s New York Times story.
• Speculation from Newsome.org.
• The inevitable Scobleizer tease.
• Tech.memeorandum.
• “Origami” Web site mentioned with rumors–shown above and correctly regarded as Space Odyssey Retro.

Some Big News is supposed to come on March 2. Hmm. If the rumors pan out, what might be the price and the impact on the market for the Nokia 770 or the Pepper Pad? And will a replacement or update of Microsoft Reader show up in the near future?

Oh Jeeze, that graphic plays right into the hands of Bill Gates’ marketers. Hey, guys, no bill for you or any other company–just a request that your tech side go for open e-book standards.

By David Rothman

If you’ve wondered about the need to get books optionally on computer screens–a major goal of the TeleRead plan–check out this UK-related BBC item.

Schools spend more than five times as much on computer-based resources as on books, an analysis suggests.

Primary schools spent £70m on books in 2004-05 and secondary schools £80m, whereas all schools spent £426.3m on ICT resources not including computers.

(Via LISNews.)

By David Rothman

So who posts the most comments in the TeleBlog–well, other than me, the blog’s main perp?

How many comments have you made? Wanna catch up with your golden oldies? Or get a list of the entire Teleblog’s last 50 posts and the same number of comments? Or discover the most-commented-upon posts on the main TeleBlog area?

Psst! Without even consulting NSA, you can now get the above information and more via a link in the upper right corner of the TeleBlog–50 newest posts and TeleBlog community info. The secret WordPress 2.0 plug-in is WP-Stats.

In addition, you’ll see customized Technorati tags below each post, increasing the TeleBlog’s value as a research tool. The (t) in the tags at the top will also lead to Technorati items.

Bottom line: With tools like this, lines are blurring between blogs and bulletin boards.

By David Rothman

Here’s a hands-on review of the iLiad, mixed in with an essay on e-books.

In Trusted Reviews, Sandra Vogel sensibly vents against harsh DRM and proprietary e-book formats. She puts in a word for ASCII-focused Project Gutenberg.

Vogel is right–ASCII can be turned into a number of diffrent formats, athough it would be nice for readers not to have to worry about this.

So how does she feel about the iLiad, which apparently will now go on sale in April rather than March? Well, she appreciates the glories of the technology but is frustrated that the iLiad isn’t more of a full-fledged computer. I myself think that time and lower prices will take care of that–I am guessing that I’d vastly prefer reading e-books on it rather than a Tablet PC. Excerpts from her article:

The iLiad is about A5 in size, and is mostly screen. It has a limited number of buttons around the sides, including a rather clever long bar that you push to move from page to page. You can interact with it using a stylus too, and can write onto the screen, annotating documents or making your own drawings onto ‘blank paper’.`

The 1024 x 768 pixel screen is ideal for reading texts. It has a flat mat finish rather than a shiny bright one so that it doesn’t glare at you like PDA and smartphone screens can. Consequently it can be stared at for long periods of time. And it is graphically rich enough with 16 shades of grey to show enough colour gradation to give a good approximation of newspaper print… (more…)

By Roger Sperberg

What’s so open about OpenReader?

Is it David Rothman’s contention that every e-book should be able to be opened in more than one e-reader? Laudable as that is, without other incentives it may require divine intervention to prevent OpenReader’s becoming merely an Esperanto of e-book formats in the Tower of eBabel he jeremiads about.

And what’s so open about Jon Noring’s single-author OpenReader spec? Is it his acceptance of most every good idea anyone has proposed for e-books these last seven years? His open attitude to making others’ ideas fit in with his own firm notion of what is needed isn’t exactly the best way to create an industry-wide spec, a notion that he infuriatingly seems to be open to.

To my mind, there’s a different “open” in OpenReader worth pushing for. It’s like the “open” in open-source, and the “extensible” in XML. This open means open-ended.
(more…)

By David Rothman

A fascinating look at book-scanning technology appears in the Book Standard. Excerpt:

…there are essentially only two companies that sell the robotic equipment and hardware necessary to quickly scan and digitize large volumes of books: Kirtas Technologies and 4DigitalBooks. Not surprisingly, major players in the digitization game–Google, Amazon–often employ their own proprietary systems; a spokesman for Google, for instance, says the company uses “some really cool stuff we’ve developed.”

Detail re another kind of proprierty vs. nonproprietary: Will the same mindset at Google apply to e-book format standards? I can somewhat understand the use of proprietary scanners–Google needs something to distinguish it from the competition. Proprietary e-book standards I would not brook, however, given the damage to the flow of knowledge. As a very small shareholder in the company, I hope Google will “do no evil.” If Google is using its own proprietary approach for scanning systems, are library projects suffering? I’d welcome thoughts from others on this.

Related: Ruling May Undercut Google in Fight Over Its Book Scans, in the New York Times.

By David Rothman

“A standard–and open–file format would be a good start; today there are competing ’standards’ from Adobe, Microsoft, Mobipocket (probably the most popular), Palm, and Sony. Whatever format emerges as the winner will have to let me treat an e-book like a print one, making it free and easy to transfer ownership. If the publishers and the hardware and software vendors can get their act together, this market has a chance.” – Andrew Kantor, writing in USA Today.

The TeleRead take: Well, that’s progress. Now for USA Today to explain the need for an up-to-date standard that truly goes beyond the proprietary formats–and includes interactivity to distinguish e- from p-books. Yes, gentler and more flexible DRM would help as well.