TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for August, 2006

By David Rothman

So far Liviu seems to be able to read Google PDFs on his Nokia 770. I haven’t been so lucky. Ironically, I got only some irritating legalese when I tried to display Bleak House on my Palm TX using Documents to Go, and the TX rendered the pages too small when I resorted to PalmPDF.

Bill Janssen, who’s far more enthusiastic about Google’s PDFish approach than I am, says Google is using an image compression scheme that many PDF viewers can’t understand yet. Nonproprietary e-book standards, anyone? Meanwhile I’d welcome other people’s observations and advice on the issue of reading downloaded Google files on PDAs, especially Palms.

I’m also curious if anyone can find a fully viewable PDF download of Around the World in Eighty Days on Google. Just curious. I might be overlooking something. If the Jules Verne novel isn’t there, however, what does this say about Google’s priorities? (Update, 12:34 p.m.: Found—but only after an advanced search, and with the title The Tour of the World in Eighty Days. For the typical searcher, the book might as well not be there. My big point remains.) (more…)

By David Rothman

Google’s horrendous treatment of the classics makes me all the happier to learn that Blackmask’s David Moynihan has several hundred books back online, via boysbooks.org, a Wiki-based site.

He and an attorney representing Conde Nast are still at odds and are awaiting a ruling from a federal judge. But my hunch is that Blackmask will be back in full, except for the disputed Doc Savage and Shadow titles. Best of luck, David. I, too, would like to see a restored Blackmask available in time for the school year. May you and Conde Nast reach an agreement soon.

For now, Washington, D.C., lawyer David E. Mills says his client Conde Nast fears that David Moynihan “would be creating a ‘back door’ through which the public could, once again, gain access the infringing materials.”

David Moynihan’s side is that he’d like a six-hour period during which his server would be available. I say: Grant it! Hundreds and probabably thousands of CDs and DVDs with the disputed material are floating around anyway. (more…)

By David Rothman

Amid all the elation over Google allowing PDF downloads, keep in mind that the company is watermarking its name on every public-domain page. Bleak House, shown here, is among the targets of this corporate graffiti. (more…)

By David Rothman

Planet PDF and the TeleBlog obviously see PDF in different ways, but I know their hearts are in the right place. Here are concerns that Planet PDF has about Google’s treatment of PDF:

If you haven’t heard yet, Google has just announced that a bunch of the books it has been scanning for its Google Books Library Program are now available for free download as PDFs. There’s no doubt Google needs to be applauded for the idea, but the execution (i.e. the books they’ve produced) could definitely do with some work. The PDF books are difficult to download, large in size, of such low resolution they’re difficult to read, unsearchable, and do not allow the user to copy text from them. It’s left me wondering what Google expects people to do with the books.

Delighted to see Planet PDF on the job. But look, guys, what do you expect from Google? So far Google seems to be of the E-Book Museum mindset.

By David Rothman

U.S. writers, beware. If the robotic competition doesn’t impoverish you, maybe outsourcing will.

That’s an exaggeration, but in the future, yes, I think we’ll see robotically written e-books—a variant on the novel-writing machines in 1984.

Of course, some critics of mass culture would argue that robots have long dominated the best-seller lists.

(Via Wired News and LISNews.)

By David Rothman

The first eight chapters of Variable Star, the last Robert Heinlein novel, finished by Spider Robinson, are going online over the next few weeks. From the book’s related site:

In 1955, Robert Heinlein began work on Variable Star, a powerful and passionate science fiction book about two young lovers driven apart by pride, power and the vastness of interstellar time and space, only to set it aside to focus on other sci-fi novels.

The detailed outline and notes Heinlein created for the project lay forgotten for decades, only to be rediscovered almost half a century later.

Now the Heinlein estate has authorized Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science fiction author Spider Robinson to expand the outline into a full-length sci-fi novel

In the best of worlds, of course, the whole book would go online in a variety of formats via a Creative Commons license. Still, this is progress, given that Heinlein was among the biggest sci-fi stars, and I hope that generous online excerpts will rapidly become the norm for all new books. Often a chapter is not enough to get a true feel for a novel.

Even better, wouldn’t it be cool if a publisher could release the preview files in a format that allowed fan communities to arise via annotations? (more…)

By Robert Nagle

Today’s question: can you recommend an ebook that is well designed or laid out? What is a well-designed e-book anyway? Where can one find a well-designed e-book?

For normal books, you can browse at a bookstore or at a library. But where can you browse e-books to appreciate good functional design? (My city library lets patrons view some e-books through Net Library, but the result is not pretty). Mainstream publishing has its own notions of what constitutes good design: good cover, typography, organization and graphics. And some of these same principles carry over to e-books (not to mention websites). But how can one view examples of well-designed e-books without buying the book outright?

(more…)

By David Rothman

It’s Now Officially 2B1: The Children’s Machine (via DailyTech). Grrr! As a booster of the project, I wish the OLPC people would make up their minds.

Related: 2B1 Camera: VGA 640×480 (via One Laptop Per Child News). Imagine all the photos and perhaps videos that the kids will create—among other things, providing fodder for illustrated e-books on topics of interest of them.

Well, maybe. I’d like to know more about the focus range and confirm that moving video is definitely planned, not just stills. The term “video” in a computer content doesn’t necessarly suggest moving pictures. Meanwhile here are a few details being discussed.

By David Rothman

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Web site is pointing to my Publishers Weekly article on the Tower of eBabel. Great. Academics might also be interested in a standards-related article that OpenReader founder Jon Noring recently co-authored with Prof. Terje Hillesund for a peer-reviewed journal. In addition, an OpenReader-related piece has appeared in Innovate, a journal devoted to distance education.

By David Rothman

Attention, book publishers: P-magazines for young people are on the way out. What does that say from a book perspective? On top of that, a TechDirt fan tells of loving the New York Times without having ever bought a paper copy—just fished one out of a recycling bin. Time for carefully done ads in appropriate e-books? This model might be especially appropriate in countries such as China, without copyright enforcement as strict as here in the States.

By David Rothman

Just when you thought it was safe to buy a new E Ink machine, Philips is teasing the blogosphere with promos about the READUS E-Reader with a roll-up screen.

See jkOnTheRun, the TechEBlog and Gizmodo, including a video viewable via the latter site. Prototype has a five-inch screen with 320X240 pixels.

Details: Actually you may still want to buy the iLiad or Sony Reader–not everyone wants to make do with a mere five-inch screen. On another matter, I wonder if the spelling of the READUS is new and improved; see earlier mentions with an i before the u.

Other hardware news: Cut the hype and get us working e-reader devices! in MobileRead. Wait! Maybe I don’t need the “other.” Depends on how soon the miracle roll-ups actually show up. If nothing else, note that this is not the newest of stories, going back a year or so.

By David Rothman

“Although many worried that piracy would be a major issue online, as bigger portions of books are published, it has emerged as a major problem with print copies of books in China and other developing countries.” – Wall Street Journal, via MobileRead. And DRM is supposed to be a solution? P-books = scanner fodder. Meanwhile good luck to HarperCollins with the China initiative discussed in the Journal.

By David Rothman

As grumpy as I am about PDF’s reflowability problem and the rest, it’s the format that I hate—not Adobe or the users.

I’ll do whatever I can to help people mitigate the pain, such as through use of Documents to Go software.

In that spirit, meet the Foxit series of programs for PDF—everything from a free reader to the more fully featured Foxit Reader Pro ($39).

You can also download a Windows Mobile PC Beta, a desktop Linux version or one for embedded Linux or U3 (”walk to any PC and open a PDF file, without worrying about whether the huge Adobe Reader is installed.”). Foxit offers a PDF editor, too, and other creation-related tools.

Major caveat: I have not tried any of the Foxit programs but intend to. Your own impressions welcomed! I just wish a Palm version were available. (more…)

By David Rothman

Here, from jkOnTheRun, one of my favorite mobile sites, MobileRead being another.

JK, I can answer one question. DotReader’s price for end users, as now planned, should be $0. Instead OSoft will get revenue from other sources—for example, from customizing its open source reader for publishers and others deploying it. Meanwhile imagine all the unofficial customizations.
Perhaps Jane at DearAuthor can lobby for a pink-dominated interface or one color-coordinated with her purse.

Suggestions cherished from all! The PDA version will be out later this year or early next. That’s one I’m most impatient to use.

For latecomers: I’m among the ringleaders of the OpenReader Consortium, and dotReader is the first software to use our e-book format standard.

By David Rothman

In hopes of once more being able to read PDFed books from Wowio via the Documents to Go program, I wiped the regular Adobe Reader off my Palm TX.

Maybe that would also get rid of a possible DRM-related file that the Fairfax County Public Library’s system might have placed on my Palm. No luck. DTG had stopped working on Wowio files after I tried it on a DRMed Adobe book from the good folks at FCPL, my favorite library system. (more…)

By David Rothman

Randy Stross, a freelance business columnist writing regularly for the New York Times, is an accuracy guy, if you go by his past attack on Wikipedia. “Wasn’t yesterday’s practice of attaching ‘Albert Einstein’ to an article on ‘Space-Time’ a bit more helpful than today’s ‘71.240.205.101′?” Stross asked. Oddly, however, he himself has virtually no biographical information on his Web site despite a friendly suggestion last year from the TeleBlog.

Worse, if you factor in his sloppy reportage on Freeload Press in the paid-textbook controversy, you may not want to trust Stross in the future.

Badly sourced dreck

Freeload CEO Tom Doran—D-o-r-a-n, Randy, not the way your NYT column spelled it, D-u-r-a-n—has compiled a detailed list of Stross’s distortions and errors. For example, in writing about a University of Michigan course, Stross said: “Most class members found reading the dense pages on the computer monitor to be a strain and resorted to buying a softbound printed version of the book.” In Hey, New York Times misspelled my name, however, Doran reveals that Freeload received just two orders from the University’s students asking for the paperback. He says his company was “the only place these students could buy the softbound printed version of the book.” On top of everything else, as I’ve already observed, Stross did not quote a single student in the article, including the cash-strapped variety, the most common kind; and as you’ll see, Doran’s reply points out some other serious shortcomings in the source department.

Mind you, the blogosphere is hardly a hotbed of perfect accuracy. I know of at least one blogger who briefly misspelled Tom’s name online until someone pointed out the error. Yep. That was me. I foolishly trusted a New York Times columnist. (more…)

By David Rothman

Hey, Fritz, I’m glad too. Thanks for the update. Doesn’t it say something about U.S. copyright law when a valuable public domain site goes down, and people almost instantly start thinking, “DMCA”? Unlike Blackmask’s David Moynihan, Matt McClintock, the manybooks.net guy, is running a by-the-book operation. Meanwhile, no, I haven’t heard anything new on David M. Has anyone else? I still hope that Blackmask can somehow make peace with Conde Nast and return with its much-missed multiformat collection.