TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for June, 2006

By Jon Noring

Jim Baen’s legacy lives on — not just in the realm of e- and p-books, but also related issues such as copyright and DRM.

Eric Flint (picture at right), an associate of Jim’s, has written the first in a planned series of articles lambasting recent copyright law expansion and digital rights management. For this July 4th here in the States, it’s something to ponder. (more…)

By David Rothman

“Several years ago, Andrea and I had dinner with Jim, and one of the things she did was to thank him for unencrypted e-books, because, mostly by reading Baen science fiction and fantasy, she was able to raise her reading level from second grade to college in a matter of about four years. She’s very bright, but very dyslexic, you see. Jim, by providing electronic books, unencrypted, and Webscriptions’ Arnold Bailey, his main minion for ebooks, by providing a source for a text-to-speech program we could afford, made it possible for her to succeed in anything she wants to do. Reading well, thanks to Baen, has given her the confidence to succeed.” – Bananaslug’s tribute to Jim Baen (via Pond’s note).

Related: Baen news release. and Keith Ferrell and Cory Doctorow.

By Branko Collin

Bill Tozier, a prolific supplier of page-scans to Distributed Proofreaders and Teleblog commenter whom we wrote about before, has decided to start auctioning off the physical books he scanned in for Project Gutenberg. The proceeds will go to the Distributed Proofreaders Foundation.

The first of the books Bill is selling is Stories of Later American History, Project Gutenberg e-text #18618. Bidding starts at four cents. If you ever wanted to support Distributed Proofreaders financially, here’s one way to do so while getting a memento in return.

By David Rothman

I live in Virginia, one of the nastier states toward e-mail spammers.

Now I want to see if we can get some heavy-duty laws against blog-spammers. And then why not some test cases? Same concept could apply eventually to interactive e-books. Do you really want V@i$a^g(r*a ads to sneak into the novel you may be reading?

I’d love to hear from big law firms or anyone else with the resources for the job, including media organizations with an interest in interactivity. Spam “ads”–in the form of self-promoting comments and links–will increasingly steal money and time from legitimate media, not just time from independent bloggers. Can we get some serious jail time for U.S.-based comment-spammers? (more…)

By David Rothman

Here, from Gal Oestreicher-Singer and Arun Sundararajanat of New York Business School.

Excerpt from abstract: “…the threat of piracy limits the extent to which digital rights should be granted: the value of digital rights is determined not only by their direct effect on the quality of legal digital goods, but by a differential piracy effect that can lower a seller’s pricing power.”

Suggestion: Maybe the NYU folks would do well to study the late Jim Baen and see what happens when publishers worry less about “protection” and more about “goodwill” and “community.”

By Quinn Anya Carey

When you think of the people adamantly opposed to digitization, and their motivation for that position, who comes to mind? Greedy corporate executives, perhaps?

Talking with people at the Hilandar Research Library at The Ohio State University about attitudes among curators, however, I have learned of a surprising group of people just as staunchly opposed to digitization, on very different grounds.

Unlike most in their profession, some librarians in Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe are opposed not only to digitization of medieval Slavic manuscripts, but any form of distribution. (more…)

By David Rothman

Latest specs from Sony plainly allow for TXT, RTF and Microsoft Word on the Sony Reader, in addition to BBeB and non-encrypted PDF. Info follows from TaKiR (thanks!). (more…)

By David Rothman

“You’ve got to write my obituary, you know,” Jim Baen, the SF publisher well known for his smart marketing of p- and e-books, told writer David Drake.

Drake laughed. “Sure, if I’m around–but remember, I’m the one who rides the motorcycle.”

Jim Baen died yesterday at age 62, following a series of strokes; and Drake has kept his promise. Excerpt:

While e-publishing has been a costly waste of effort for others, Baen Books quickly began earning more from electronic sales than it did from Canada ($6,000/month). By the time of Jim’s death, the figure had risen to ten times that.

Quick! 10 X 6K = 60K a month or $720,000 a year. Whether in revenue or earnings, that’s a impresive part of the pint-sized U.S. e-book industry. (more…)

By David Rothman

Here’s something for the romance-lovin’ ladies at Dear Author to chew over. What if e-books were sold like Tupperware, with parties to explain the reader hardware and maybe even loan out units with sample titles loaded on them?

The idea comes to mind from a headline in today’s Wall Street Journal–Selling TV Like Tupperware, a tactic that AT&T is using against the cable companies. With Tupperware, novices would at least know the basics such as how to turn a page. Sounds duhish, but it’s better to err in this direction, given all the technophobes out there. (more…)

By David Rothman

A smart, clueful consultant, tracking the global e-book industry, tells me that many publishers are still in love with the idea of books accessible via browsers–rather than as downloadable files.

Amazon and Google are among those targeting naive publishers with this mindset.

In an era when sleazy pirates can scan and OCR paper books or do screenshots of those in e-book museums, I’m perplexed. I’d love to see Jon Jermey debunk e-book museums in his new blog called The Museum of Just Not Getting It. E-book museums could go on the same page as his write-up of the Franklin BookMan, shown here.

Any TeleBloggers care to speak up about publishers’ continued love affair with e-book museums? Point is, people want to download books and own them for real. I can well understand browser-based books for purposes such as reference or research; I’m not saying there’s no place for them. But for enjoying a good novel–please, let me escape my desk and desktop and curl up with a download file on a tablet or PDA. (more…)

By David Rothman

I’ve been reflecting some more on Adobe e-booker Bill McCoy’s post extolling the use of Flash in e-books. Check out his defense of the post. Not very convincing. It’s more of an attack on OpenReader than a cogent justification of Flashy e-books. I’ve replied.

Very possibly we’re seeing a Chinese box or Matryoshka doll strategy from Adobe. The metaphor isn’t perfect, but certainly comes close. My continued fear is that Adobe wants to use formats within formats–in other words, add-on formats like Flash’s–to prop up the Tower of eBabel. If Bill wants to allay such concerns, then he would do well to ask the IDPF to move standards work to an OASIS technical committee. (more…)

By David Rothman

…you might try an out-of-town system. (Cool Tools.)

By David Rothman

Could proprietary formatters keep giving us the Tower of eBabel by leaning on e-book publishers to use proprietary add-ons such as Flash? Beware, publishers. For good or for bad, add-ons could matter increasingly as books grow more interactive.

Those are Complex Issues. What to do in terms of fall-back choices, for example, for people whose systems can’t cope with the add-ons? I’ve got enough problems with Flash even in a Web-browsing context. Issues like this are one more reason to move standards development out of a frog pond like the IDPF and into an OASIS-style mainstream with enough top-level techies involved.

Already Adobe’s Bill McCoy is dreaming of Flash becoming a major foundation for interactive books. But can this genuinely jibe with the concepts of openness and interoperability? (more…)

By David Rothman

Here, from MobileRead. “The PDA is capable of reading printed materials, convert its readings into audio for its owner to listen through a headphone jack.”

Update: Apologies to Branko. Yep, he Teleblogged this a few months ago.

By Robert Nagle

Three short things.

First, the W3 Mobile Best Practices guide 1.0 has officially been made a recommendation today. (Useful reference for designing pages for the web. Also renders great in FBReader!)

Second, here’s a great comic book describing copyright conundrums and the public domain by Law professors Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins. Familiar stuff to TeleRead readers, but it was cleverly done plus had some interesting points. For instance: did you know Terry Gilliam didn’t bother to get clearance for any of his Monty Python animation graphics?

Third, looking for web textbooks to convert to simple e-books (a la Plucker)? Try these great introductory psychology textbooks or consult The Assayer’s catalog of free books.

By David Rothman

Details from Roland. In other hardware news, check out five new design concepts for e-book machines based on Plastic Logic technology (via Alex at MobileRead).

By Branko Collin

Scanned public domain books lately to be read as a PDF or DJVU file on your PDA? Why not share them through The Internet Archive? TIA will take any book it can legally distribute. I wrote a small how-to for Distributed Proofreaders volunteers who wish to (pre-)publish high-quality scans of the books they are processing, and this how-to might be useful to others too.

In the USA, where The Internet Archive is based, a work is generally understood to be in the public domain if it was published before 1923.