TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for March, 2007

By a TeleBlog Contributor

Powercast and low-power displays such E Ink could be a logical match. See CNN/Biz 2.0 for details, as well as Wikipedia item.

By David Rothman

Microsoft’s new Deepfish browser is supposed to show Web sites well—or at least better than before—on little mobile phones even if the sites weren’t designed for them. See link list from Microsoft, including a preview for prospective beta users.

DOS fun on JVM-capable browsers

In other software news, check out Garson O’Toole’s interesting little comment on a way to run DOS on a browser using Java. “Classic DOS games such as Space Invaders, Lemmings. Commander Keen, and Prince of Persia can be played,” Garson notes. “This means that DOS programs will be executable on even weakly-powered e-books in the future.” Remember, as Bill Janssen would be quick to point out, most any machine with a browser can display e-books.

Free gems for e-publishers and e-authors

Finally, cash-strapped e-authors and e-publishers might investigate CNET-recommended free alternatives to Adobe’s $2,500 Creative Suite 3. Among the recs: Paint.NET, The GIMP, Inkscape, the Foxit PDF Reader, which I use, PrimoPDF, letting you create PDF from Firefox and a bunch other programs, and a Dreamweaver Web editor replacement called KompoZer. Don’t forget to check out the second part of the rec list.

(Deepfish info spotted via MobileRead.)

By a TeleBlog Contributor

Beware. If you choose the wrong blog host, you may not be able to move elsewhere—at least not easily. Check out Lorelle’s invaluable wisdom.

And speaking of control and content: We encourage TeleBlog contributors to use their articles in their own blogs as well. That way, they can better justify the time and come up with better posts. What’s more, contributors can benefit from TeleBlog-created headlines and editorial tweaks, not to mention the additional exposure (our daily readership often surpasses libraryjournal.com’s). New contributors welcome!

Related: New Yahoo Group for writers who blog.

By David Rothman

“Though Delaware libraries have more than twice as many computers as a few years ago—163 in 2000 versus 351 in 2005—they simply can’t keep up with demand. At Rehoboth Beach in the summertime, lines get so long that librarians pass out receipts with a printed time to return to use the computer.” – Delaware Online.

The TeleRead take: I hope more libraries will grow up and not expect everyone to pass through the turnstile. Time for a TeleRead-style approach to help drive down the cost of hardware domestically for schoolchildren and other library users, not just abroad? Alas, the Digital Divide is alive and well.

Photo: CC-licensed, from Striatic in Vermont.

Related: Read e-books on $200 OLPC-style laptop by end of ‘07? Bargains for e-bookers in U.S., other developed countries?

By Chris Meadows

On marketing guru Seth Godin’s blog today, Godin talks about giving away e-books for free, and how it helped him sell his paper book Unleashing the Ideavirus. He explains that his publisher passed on publishing the book after hearing he wanted to give it away free on the net—so he decided to give it away free anyway and see what happened.

A Google search finds more than 200,000 matches for the word ‘ideavirus’, which I made up. Some will ask, “how much money did you make?” And I think a better question is, “how much did it cost you?” How much did it cost you to write the most popular e-book ever and to reach those millions of people and to do a promotion that drove an expensive hardcover to #5 on Amazon and #4 in Japan and led to translation deals in dozens of countries and plenty of speaking gigs?

It cost nothing.

Although Godin does not mention Baen or Cory Doctorow in his entry, this is yet another example of the philosophy of giving away the ebook to sell the p-book proving out—and not just another author, but a man whose entire career is based on an expert understanding of the marketing field saying so. Wouldn’t you think publishers should start listening by now?

By David Rothman

Remember the argument that hardware companies don’t want to make a low-cost e-book reader? Well, I wonder what the skeptics will say now. Quanta, the maker of the e-book-friendly OLPC laptop with the high-res screen, “will ship with its own XO-like laptops,” according to Ars Technica, with a price in the $200 range. That’s the start. Costs will only go down, a lot. And apparently the hardware will be sold in developed countries this year or next—including, I would at least hope, the States.

So does this mean that by the end of 2007, I could be happily running FBReader or another good reading program on a bargain-priced laptop-tablet? And that within five years a better machine will cost $75? From a TeleRead perspective, I’m in seventh heaven. Check out the crazy things I was saying in ‘92 about hardware specs.

The $35 e-book reader

Of course, if you want to talk about just e-book reading, not full-fledged computing, we could well be seeing $35 readers on the shelves at Walmart in the next five or ten years.

Meanwhile, if we’re talking about “real computers,” keep in mind that the OLPC machine is designed for networking, and that it should be easier than ever for books to be social objects in the virtual world. I suspect that younger people will care increasingly about book-sharing and -displaying in the virtual sense. That should address yet other concerns about the viability of e-books. Who needs to visit friends and admire stuffed bookcases when their libraries can be on display online? Yes, the p-world has its attractions, and the joys of comparing p-libraries won’t go away soon. But the e-world is catching up, or at least can if the legal and business details can be worked out. Bruce Lehman’s retreat from the DMCA just might be major progress in that regard.

More on the $200 possibility: Slashdot.

Other hardware news: The iLiad’s improving prospects as a B2B machine (MobileRead).

By a TeleBlog Contributor

“Two pro-euthanasia doctors burned their own banned books, but revived the texts by giving them away for free on the Internet.” – Banned Magazine via eBook Community list post. Related: Union Web censorship controversy.

By David Rothman

FBReader 0.8.1b info here. New release includes Pepper Pad capability, in addition to rendering OpenReader, albeit without CSS and other trimmings. Meanwhile background on the newest OpenOffice is here. I understand kerning is now a default. Related: Anyone tried FBReader on the OLPC laptop?

By David Rothman

So what are the options for turning blogs into p-books? Tamas has just pointed to the Blurb site, which I’d mentioned earlier in a different context, along with Lulu. Any other options of interest, and why? Blurb works with Blogger, LiveJournal.com, TypePad, and WordPress.com blogs (independently hosted WordPress, too?).

Related—for WordPress fans: Top 30 Wordpress Plug-ins in Blogosphere, via Digg. Check out No Ping Wait, which so far seems to be working with the TeleBlog’s WP 2.0.9.

Housekeeping: I’m out of time and will wait until later this week to do my list of ways the e-book industry can address Charles Stross’s concerns.

By David Rothman

E-book fans can appreciate the pluses of easy switching between, say, a book, a word-processor and a browser. You don’t just want to read. You want to be able, if you’re a student or a professional, to act on the information you pick up.

Now suppose even the $100 laptop—yes, that’ll be the price eventually—offered smooth multitasking. And so I read with interest the news of a beefed-up OLPC machine that actually uses less power.

Other wrinkles—and why e-bookers should care

Better video conferencing and more potential as an XP machine are among the other possibilities discussed by the independent OLPC News. And I can think of two more as well—Sophie and dotReader (especially if OSoft will get behind OpenReader for real). Granted, the OLPC machine was developed for the Third World. But now that the low-cost technology exists, it should also be of interest to those of us in developed countries—check out the latest news from Greece, hardly to be confused with Libya. With OLPC’s advanced screen technology, we’re indeed talking about an e-book reader in disguise at a fraction of the cost of, say, the Sony Reader. Let’s hope we’ll eventually see improved OLPC-style machines on sale at Walmart—ready to help bridge both the educational and digital divides and serve even well-off e-book readers.

Elsewhere on the hardware scene: The Zune has been turned into an e-book reader with limited capabilities, it may be possible for batteries to appear in front of e-book display via see-through plastic, and there’s a new video of the Polymer Vision Readius (via MobileRead).

By David Rothman

Reading about e-libraries, I feel as if I’m in Stalinist Russia and every Comrade wants to surpass the quota for pork or tractor production. So much talk of numbers!

I understand. Just a fraction of the world’s books are digitized at this point, and more e-books will mean a greater chance of discovering a quirky 19th century memoirist—or enjoying digital editions of Saul Bellow’s novels, which, last time I checked, were still not available in electronic format at Fictionwise, Amazon/Mobipocket or eBooks.com, anyway. Still, I mostly agree with a blog post from Andrew Pace, an information technologist at the N.C. State University Libraries and a contributor to major ALA publications:

It’s not a “more digital books” position, but what I like to call “books more digital.” That is, the more digital the book is, the more options publishers, libraries, patrons, and shoppers will have for consuming them and building services upon them. (more…)

By Jane Litte

While perusing the deals today in Publishers Marketplace, I came across a sale by agent Bob Diforio to HarperCollins for three erotic novellas penned by Delilah Devlin. The wording of the deal was so different that I wondered if it meant what I thought it meant.

Delilah Devlin’s three erotic novellas, again to May Chen at Harper, for immediate e-book publication, in a nice deal, by Bob Diforio at D4EO Literary Agency (World).

After a confirmation e-mail from Mr. Diforio, it comes to light that HarperCollins is indeed going to offer these books as e-books first, with print options to come later. This makes a ton of sense because e-book publication overhead is so much lower than a print publication. I advocated for this back in November. Dave Rothman, of this blog, has also been a proponent of the e-book to print workflow. An author can build on an online following, like Lora Leigh’s, that can be leveraged into large print sales.

Having a giant like HarperCollins enter the e-book publishing industry makes me wonder what will happen to e-publishers such as Ellora’s Cave and Samhain. My hope is that it raises the standard of what is going to be published while not diminishing the diversity of offerings.

This can be a win-win-win for readers, authors and publishers. Kudos to Harper Collins for taking a bigger step forward into the digital age.

By Chris Meadows

SF novelist Charlie Stross has written an insightful commentary looking at the reasons why the commercial e-book market has not taken off, and suggesting that the threat of “piracy” is greatly overestimated. He points out that many of the reasons traditionally given for the failure of e-books (such as people not wanting to read off a screen) don’t hold a lot of water. Instead, he suggests, people want books for the sake of having a “cultural artefact”—something that can be bought “in signed, slipcased, limited editions.”

Stross draws the following conclusions:

• Most current e-books are grossly overpriced relative to their utility to the reader. eBooks are actually disposable literature, like mass-market paperbacks only more so.
• We are not going to see cheap e-book readers any time soon because publishers need them, but consumer electronics manufacturers don’t.
• Readers won’t buy expensive e-book readers because they’re reluctant to pay over $25 for a novel at the best of times. Only bundling a metric shitload of high-value content with a reader will make it attractive.
• Insofar as there are no lending libraries or second-hand bookstores for e-books, e-book piracy is the equivalent niche to those traditionally tolerated outlets.
• The pirates are not motivated by profit but by a poorly-understood social phenomenon connected to status in a gift-giving forum.
• We do not know what e-books are worth to readers, but the relative lack of Baen product in the usual places suggests that if unencrypted e-books are readily available at an affordable price (i.e. less than an MMPB) then demand for the pirate edition will be reduced.

I suspect he is very close to the mark in his conclusions—depressingly so, in some cases. The idea that the electronics industry does not see a profit in creating cheap e-book readers sounds very gloomily accurate.

By David Rothman

Followers of print-on-demand tech might check out this item from PC Magazine on inkjet technology.

No, book-oriented inkjets won’t go for $200 tomorrow. But look beyond that, and consider ordinary people being able to print out best-sellers for instant reading on paper—maybe bound, maybe not.

E-book purist will hate the idea, of course, but the true judge will be the marketplace.

Related: Stealth Inkjet Printer Startup Could Rock Industry.

Photo: Laser-created POD books distributed in Uganda.

By Branko Collin

If you are an American used to borrowing books from libraries all over the country, or indeed all over the world, you may be surprised to know that there is a very real cost associated with Inter-Library Loans (ILL), and that the bill is usually not footed by the patron, but by the library. The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an interesting first-hand perspective on these hidden costs, and on how ILL is a democratizing influence.

The e-book angle is obvious: with electronic versions of books freely available, the cost of just browsing books goes down, and people will only borrow them when needed. An unusual perspective on how often a book may be downloaded just to browse is given by Cory Doctorow in his 2004 essay “E books: neither E nor Books“:

(more…)

By David Rothman

So far commercial genres—for example, romance novels—are dominating e-books even more than in the p-book world.

Just what are the prospects, however, for e-books written primarily as literature, not just targeted to meet commercial formulas? Yes, the very best genre books can be literary, but I doubt that traditional small preses like David R. Godine are interested in bodice-rippers.

Small press gaining influence

With those distinctions made clear, small presses, including those with a literary bent, might find a little encouragement in a Publishers Weekly poll that asked readers: “Compared with ten years ago, how much influence do small presses have on the American literary scene?” The answers as of this writing are: 48.98 percent more, 26.53 percent less and 24.49 percent the same. PW keyed the poll to Small Press Month.

If e-books can take off and offer excellent presentation, they could eventually be an important way for the current paper-only small presses to promote new books and new writers. (more…)

By David Rothman

“While most are 500 to 600 years old, many are even older, and are in danger of disintegrating. In addition, large numbers are lost to fire or other natural calamities, while others are ravaged by insects or succumb to moisture. Their only hope of preservation many lie in microfilming and digitalisation.” – The Sunday Times in Sri Lanka on endangered palm-leaf manuscripts.

The TeleRead take: What if the Internet Archive or Distributed Proofreaders could come to the rescue? Suppose locals got inexpensive scanners and lessons in nondestructive scanning. Ironically, Sri Lanka is home to none other than Arthur C. Clarke (photo), who envisioned the Newspad.