TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for September, 2006

By David Rothman

“Another year, another try at e-books. It’s a long-shot that Sony will succeed, although it’s a slightly better shot that Amazon will.” – David Haskin, a specialist in mobile and wireless issues, writing in Computerworld. His ultimate conclusion? Perhaps the Sony Reader will make it as a niche product. Exactly, David.

By David Rothman

Intel’s laptop for the Third World might sell in time for as little as $200 after probably starting at $250. It’ll compete with the OLPC machine, The $100 (Eventually) Laptop.

So which should be more promising for e-books? Resolution on the Intel machine’s seven-inch screen is 800 by 480. On the OLPC screen, a half inch larger, res will be as high as 1,200 horizontal by 900 vertical in monochrome and 800×600 in the color mode. Plus, the machine will work in a tablet mode.

My rather tentative vote is for OLPC’s baby, then, even if the Intel packs more computing power. Remember, the more comfortable it is for kids to read e-books, the more likely they’ll do so on their own without prodding. (more…)

By David Rothman

“Never give your manuscript to an editor/line editor who is under 50—the younger ones don’t know the difference between it’s and its, not to mention lie and lay.” – TeleBlog reader in the publishing industry.

The TeleRead take: Could this be one reason why e-book QC is so bad? The youth of the editors—and the allegedly related illiteracy? I’ve love to hear from both sides.

And speaking of literacy—and cause-effect: Check out Bill McCoy’s blog item on literacy, an MSNBC column and some musings on whether technology is eroding our ability to read. As far as I can determine, the people in the vidstore photo are not e-book line editors, but you never know. (more…)

By David Rothman

“Print-on-demand sites like Lulu allow you to create and publish your own book. If you’re primarily a writer, you might be tempted to hire a professional designer to create a cover for your book. Before you do that, consider creating a simple yet elegant book cover using the open source Kooka scanning software and the [Inkscape] vector drawing application.” – Linux.com, via Bill Janssen on the eBook Community List. Related: NewsForge article on designing a book with LyX, via Mary E. Tyler.

By David Rothman

“Personally, I would prefer if the pages were a little darker, or had a bit more black in them. Because of the screen size, it seems that the Reader would be better suited for hard black images with high-contrast, thicker lines. However, this didn’t diminish the manga reading experience for me.” – Tony Salvaggio in Comic Book Resources.

By David Rothman

Yes, I’ll get to the Sony Reader and if:book in time. But first some context—plenty:

Is reading a digital book like touring Normandy (photo) while gazing down through a bomb sight? Geoffrey Nunberg, a well-known linguist, has drawn that comparison. As he apparently sees it, you can’t wander blithely around and absorb the whole. If nothing else forget about tracking “the diminishing distance between our thumb and forefinger.”

Based on my experiences with the Cybook, PDAs, Gemstar machines and the rest, however, his arguments just don’t hold up. Cybook-style tablets can display several hundred words at once and let you instantly change pages. And via the Mobipocket program or the equivalent, I can gauge my progress by way of a line at the bottom of the screen. Search functions let me keep up better with characters’ names. I’ve actually found complex classics, such as Moby Dick and Crime and Punishment, to be easier to digest on the screen than on paper. I’m horrible at remembering Russian names and the rest; but with the right software, e-books can at least help.

Blunders on Sir Howard Stringer’s watch

But what if some meanie disabled or weakened the same search and navigation features that make me such a raving fan of e-books? As a matter of fact, Sir Howard Stringer has apparently done exactly that, in a sense—albeit quite unwittingly. He’s no meanie, just a well-intentioned guy who really should pay more attention to the people below him. Sir Howard, the CEO of Sony, isn’t running Sony’s e-book operation, but he may have been cheering on the Reader without using it as much as you would expect an Oxford-educated booster like him to be doing. And if Sir Howard is testing the Reader a lot, then he may have low expectations for e-books as a human reader’s friend. (more…)

By David Rothman

Publishers are a little more tolerant of fan fiction than before—a point the TeleBlog has noted. In other words, they’re a bit less likely to sue you for distributing a story based on a character in one of their books.

Now, here’s another angle.

Could fan fiction and other media-based writing—including efforts inspired by TV shows and video games—actually be good for kids in school, especially boys. Males often lag behind girls in reading and writing and are more visually oriented.

Also, assuming that educational benefits exist here, might advocates of looser copyright laws use this to their advantage?

Educational Leadership article praises derivative writing

Well, if nothing else, an article in an educational journal certainly sides with advocates of derivative writing. In the September issue of Educational Leadership, from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Thomas Newkirk writes: (more…)

By David Rothman

I’ve got to hand it to Sony—the way the company has played the dating game to the hilt.

Sony has been selling a limited number of Sony Readers for the impatient, perhaps as few as 130. And so the company, which was supposed to offer the Reader last spring, can technically say it’s at last shipped out the $350 units.

The big catch

But here’s the biggest catch. A message on the Reader site says, “Due to overwhelming demand, new Sony® Portable Reader orders will ship mid November.” Love it—a hyped-up shortage, created by Sony’s lateness!

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By David Rothman

More than a few TeleBlog regulars love to put quote marks inside periods—like “this”. Granted, that’s the established usage in some countries, but if you prefer American-style punctuation, then the book to consult is the Chicago Manual of Style, which favors “another approach.” As noted by the New York Times (reg. required), the Manual can even enlighten you about e.e. cummings vs. E.E. Cummings.

Effective tomorrow, American-English purists can get definitive answers from the Manual by way of an online edition ($25 intro for individuals, permanent price $30, institutional price dependent on size of organization). Here’s the site’s home page. Given the need of most e-book publishers for better copy-editing—yes, hypocrisy alert!—I’ll hope that the e-manual thrives. E-book publishers as a group are notoriously in need of the site’s offerings. (more…)

By David Rothman

I agree with MR’s Alex. Some informal first-day stats for early buyers of the Sony Reader could be too low—maybe way too low. But how much will they pick up later on, after the trendies have ordered? I still think, “OK niche product but not a runaway.”

ArsTechnia’s take is more pessimistic. It alludes to possible competition from Amazon’s rumored “e-book gadget with the more bookish Amazon brand name behind it” (prototype shown in photo). Amazon is also more bookish in a more important way: its Mobipocket format will leave Sony behind in the dust in terms of the number of available titles. What’s more, I know that at least one person at Amazon is concerned about the jokes about the Kindle Reader’s clunky retro look. And just speculating, I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon responded in either the first release of a Kindle or a subsequent one. (more…)

By David Rothman

OK, now it’s iRex’s turn for some loving attention from the TeleBlog. Over at MobileRead, Roland “CommanderROR” is calling for iRex to offer DRM capabilities for the iLiad—a “must” if people are to read books from “protection”-minded publishers such as Random House, Simon & Schuster and the other biggies. MR’s Alex Turcic is backing Roland to the hilt. Nice going, guys!

Whatever the DRM solution is—Mobipocket, Adobe, Microsoft Reader, Mobiadobe, you name it—iRex needs to do something and do it now, or at least very quickly. The Sony Reader sells for half the price of the iLiad, and Sony is even reimbursing publishers to get books into BBeB format. Does iRex want to be a corporate kamikaze? I won’t buy the argument that iRex wants to focus on the B2B market. It needs to serve consumers as well, and the inclusion of DRM will be key, as much as I personally hate it.

Of course, as everyone knows, OSoft is eager to oblige by way of the DRM-capable dotReader. In a poll done within the iRex forum, an impressive 93 percent of the respondents have asked for dotReader to go on the iLiad. (more…)

By David Rothman

I married Carly in no small part because of her b.s. detector, which, yes, works just great with e-book hardware. Carly does not care a whit about news releases and reviews—she just wants to know how well a machine can display her Austen.

So here’s the deal for Sony and Bennett Kleinberg at the Goodman Media PR agency. FedEx me a Sony Reader ASAP for a day’s use, that’s all, and Carly can give us the definitive word. If the screen’s as good as some keep insisting, she’ll tell us and I’ll post an audio from her. Does Sony have the guts to do a Carly Test? As an incurable e-book booster, I hope the Reader passes.

Meanwhile I myself would love to see how the Sony Reader compares with the Librie, which I used to own, and which lacked sufficient screen contrast for me, at least. Now I’d like to use the Sony Reader in the same surroundings, the Rothman E-Book Ranch. My views on the Sony’s format limitations—no DRMed books except in the BBeB format—are no secret. I pledge to be objective about the rest; I actually do have high hopes about other ergonomic aspects. and maybe even the screen will surprise me. So, Sony, lend Carly and me a Reader. And while you’re at it, you can share the official screen-contrast specs for both the Reader and the Libries. (more…)

By David Rothman

“Gutenberg” isn’t just the name of the printing-press guy and the public domain collection.

Now there’s a New York show, Gutenberg! The Musical!. And a short Gutenberg bio shows up in Characters of the Information and Communication Industry, a new book.

The author is Prof. Richard Bellaver, a communications and human factors expert at Ball State University. You may recall his e-book-related articles. Excerpted from the new book, Prof. Bellaver’s Gutenberg material follows. (more…)

By Branko Collin

Top: when wrapping plain text, Microsoft’s text editor Notepad displays jagged edges. Bottom: an HTML version of Anna Karenina in Microsoft IE.

Last week I demonstrated how to remake Project Gutenberg’s (PG) e-texts into well laid-out p-texts or e-paper texts by converting an HTML document from the project into a PDF file using a word processor. But what if the e-text is only available in PG’s much maligned text format (what I call PVT: Plain Vanilla Text)? In that case you need to put in an extra conversion step, from PVT to HTML.

Such a conversion step can also be handy if you just want to read the book on your PC, handheld, or phone, because unlike PVT, HTML wraps lines to the width of the screen or window.

First, don’t make things harder than they need to be. There are several projects on the web that already have performed the PVT to HTML step for you.

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By David Rothman

Sony is among the worst of the copyright and DRM trogs nowadays, despite the good work it did eons ago in the Betamax case. If the company hates two new calls for copyright reform, I’ll hardly be surprised. Take the Librie, the predecessor of the Sony Reader. It debuted along with Sony-supplied books that expired after only two months. You couldn’t own them for real—just one example of Sony’s oft-consumer-hostile ways.

But what if the Sony Reader defies my expectations and is a wild success, not just a niche gizmo? Could the Reader accidentally help the fight against the Hollywood-bought Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and other copyright-related atrocities so beloved by many entertainment lawyers? I’ll elaborate later in this post.

Better for kids’ minds: Gatsby or Sonny and Cher reruns?

For those outside the U.S. who don’t know, Sonny is the late singer and congress guy who wanted copyright terms to last forever, who skied into a tree, and who then got immortalized with a legislative tribute to his worst side—a law extending the terms by decades. Thanks to Sonny The Law, U.S. high school students can’t, say, download The Great Gatsby from the Net for free. Better that they spend their time watching old Sonny and Cher reruns, right? (more…)

By David Rothman

The ladies at Dear Author read a lot of books, so I can imagine why Jane worries about the Sony Reader pausing even a second or so between pages. Check out a You Tube video review for yourself and see if you agree with her.

I read my own share of books and would rather not suffer the delay, but could live with it; my beef is over the screen contrast. Ayrkain sees the contrast issue as “over-exaggerated.” A poster on a Librie list reports that the background is a “bit” lighter than on the Librie, which I once owned. Sorry—that’s still probably a deal-breaker for me. I’ll do the Borders routine, however, when I can, and behold the production version of the Reader for myself. The $350 machine is supposed to be out in the next few weeks. Here and here, TeleBlog commenters discuss the nasty format situation—the Reader can read DRMed books only in Sony’s BBeB format.

Meanwhile Gizmodo continues its earlier Sonyfest with an item on the Dock Night Light and Magnetic Suede Cases, and MobileRead serves up a Sony GPL sources download link. (more…)

By David Rothman

In Peggy Sue Got Married, the Kathleen Turner character ridicules her dad for driving an Edsel.

Wikipedia describes the Edsel, unveiled for the 1958 model year, as “one of the most spectacular failures in the history of the United States automobile industry.” What can you say about a car where the automatic transmission controls replaced the horn doodad in the middle of the steering wheel? People kept shifting gears when they wanted to honk.

Monochrome Sony vs. colorful rivals

So will the endlessly touted Sony Reader be the Edsel of E-Ink? Or are rivals such as the iLiad doomed—a conclusion some might make, based on sheer publicity?

I myself see the $350 Sony Reader as a potentially successful niche product that iLiad variants and some dark horses could still rout in the mainstream marketplace if their sellers got their acts together. Oh, and don’t count out Panasonic, which is targeting the Japanese market with the forthcoming Words Gear, whose 5.6-inch color LCD display offers 1024×600 resolution. If the Words Gear goes into high gear in Japan, do you think Panasonic will obligingly keep it out of the States to help the black-and-white Sony Reader? On top of that, the b&w iLiad and Jinke machines are hardly Sony’s only threats in the U.S. I’ll tell about a low-cost, color-capable display technology that in time might wreak havoc on Reader sales, before color E Ink appears and maybe even afterwards as well. (more…)