TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for May, 2007

By David Rothman

Google’s new desktop RSS reader, seamlessly tied in with the online version via IE or Firefox, can store thousands of items for your reading offline, and not just headlines alone. You’ll see the new wrinkle as an option in your existing Google Reader after a short, easy installation process.

The improved reading system comes with a few catches. For example, you can’t read an entire blog post or news story if the whole thing isn’t included in the feed—a sin that too many media sites are eager to commit. Silly. The TeleBlog just may be reaching more people via RSS than the old-fashioned way. Of course, that means that updated, better-proofed versions of posts won’t catch up immediately with people reading the TeleBlog offline—say, while they’re 25,000 feet above the Atlantic in a jet without WiFi. So be it. Practicality ahead of vanity!

Part of Google Gears tech to bridge online and offline

The caching is part of Google Gears technology, and I like it. Google’s Reader, running from my desktop, is a zillion times faster than the online version alone. One reason could be that the Reader leaves out images; I myself would rather that Google gave people a choice of whether to include them, and under what conditions. At any rate, I’m looking forward to Geared-up word-processing, Gmailing and the rest, now that I’ve gotten a quick sample of the technology.

The e-book angle

Gven the hefty caching capacity, this baby just might a way to make heavily networked books usable offline. Nice going, Google! Hey, this is one way to help reconcile the e-book visions of Bill J (deeply into online networked books) and me (online’s fine but I’d prefer to own books for real—to store them locally). (more…)

By Robert Nagle

This is not the best indicator of ebook piracy, but I thought you might enjoy the screencaptures I did of recent ebook torrents found on pirate bay. I’m not linking to piratebay (because of the malware and suggestive ads), but here are worksafe screencaptures on flickr.

• Most popular ebook downloads of two random days: Day One and Day Two. See a pattern? (Compare to the most popular downloads on manybooks).
• Ebook torrents listed by size. Can you guess what the biggest ebook torrent would be? (Chris Meadows probably knows!).

By Robert Nagle

Myth: When a company wants to undermine consumer-based research about the high price of textbooks, the most effective way to do so is to portray the findings as a bunch of myths.

Fact: The research they are trying to debunk comes from surveys of readers and consumers. Although the data may have methodological shortcomings, they nonetheless represent the voice of the people who feel the brunt of textbook prices. (more…)

By Robert Nagle

Every year for the last three years, I have manually cut and pasted the responses from the Edge’s World Question Center into an e-book. In the question for 2006 (What’s your dangerous idea?), the number of responses totaled 75,000 words…hey, that’s the size of a book! For the 2007 Question (what are you optimistic about?), the number of words is 110,000!

These are excellent short essays (my fave is Geoffrey Miller’s about why we haven’t met space aliens yet). The Miller link is interesting not only because of the content but because it is a print view of all the 2006 essays on a single page. That makes for easy conversion into an e-book. In 2007, this print view has apparently disappeared. I spent a good 10 minutes to produce a barely passable Mobipocket file without hyperlinks.

Here’s my question: how much would you pay for a correctly formatted e-book version of this discussion? (The raw text file is about 650K, with my Mobipocket version being 354 KB).

By David Rothman

In the wake of highly negative publicity questioning the value of laptops in K-12, boosters are pointing to study out of Maine showing clear benefits. As reported in the Portland Press Herald:

“…a new study due out this summer by the Maine Education Policy.Research Institute at USM shows that the machines can improve student performance, said David Silvernail, institute director.

Hundreds of classrooms in study

“Funded by a U.S. Department of Education grant, the study looked at 240 mathematics classrooms in 45 middle schools across the state. In half of the classrooms, the teachers were given two years of training to help them adapt the laptops to their teaching. The students in those classrooms tested up to four months ahead in mathematics skills compared to students with teachers who had no professional training.

“Silvernail said an analysis of last year’s MEA writing scores showed a similar improvement when teachers know how to use the laptops as a tool for editing and revising, and not just as a typewriter. (more…)

By David Rothman

Gmail, Docs and Spreadsheets are among the apps tht Google wants to popularize on the desktop, not just online, says the New York Times. So how soon until Google feels the same about an e-reader app? Of course, there’s a little detail here: no reader now exists other than viewing arrangements for use on the Web.

Despite Google’s focus on online activities, however, I’ll be surprised if there isn’t one in the next few years—raising the inevitable question of standards. In the IDPF’s shoes, I’d spend a lot of time cultivating Google so that proprietary approaches from Mobipocket and Microsoft don’t prevail.

The airplane angle: Google is wondering about those away-from-WiFi moments. Exactly! But even with WiFi, I still maintain that people want to store books locally so they can feel they own them for real (or at least within the limits of DRM).

Photo: A Google nightclub, how neat would that be?—a CC-licensed Flickr shot. Hey, I figured everyone must be getting tired of just images of boxes and screen shots.

By David Rothman

“UMPC sales haven’t made a blip on the industry radar screen. ‘We are talking a fraction of a percent of the total PC market. Noise,’ says analyst Leslie Fiering of Gartner.” – BusinessWeek.

The TeleRead take: The additional power needed to run XP is one of the problems with the UMPC. At least the Linux-based Foleo (PR photo via Mobile Gazette story) avoids those hassles. Meanwhile here are some thoughts from Carol Jurd, source of the above link:

“I guess we have well and truly scooped them as we have been discussing UMPCs for some months. I wonder how long it will take for these journalists to see that a UMPC would make an ideal device for reading all those pages of reports that the average business person, lawyer or accountant has to wade through, along with two dozen law journals, newspapers and so on. And maybe even a few e-books to liven up the long plane trip after examining the case law of Grunch V Grunch 1987! Having the whole lot weigh in at less than your shaving/make-up bag is also a big plus.

“Back in the days of vinyl records I have no doubt there were people out there saying CDs would never take off because they were too small.”

Related: Darn! A laptop from Palm—not a tablet.

By David Rothman

The new Foleo laptop from Palm is a letdown from an e-book perspective even though it can view PDF files. A tablet would have been a much nicer form factor. Or how about an OLPC-style convertible? The new Linux-based laptop has Bluetooth capability and is designed to be used with a Treo phone. Battery life is five hours. The 1024×600 color display is ten inches, which means that some people may want to show two pages at once. Price is $500, not that different from far more powerful laptops. Bummer.

What is nice for e-bookers: The instant on and off, along with the use of Flash memory rather than a hard drive. Weight is two-and-a-half pounds.

Acknowledgment: Yes, I know: Palm is supposed to serve the mobile community as a whole, not just e-bookers. So be it. May the e-book industry do well enough for vendors to give it more respect in the future!

By David Rothman

Robert Nagle and I want to see if our anti-spam Dobermans are still gobbling up legitimate comments—in fact this actually happened today to Tamas Simon, a regular poster. Email Robert and cc me. Thanks.

By David Rothman

Who says Charles Dickens is the only guy who can do a good job with orphans? Ficbot, behind the The Best Media in Life is Free blog, likes The Dark House by Ida Alexa Ross Wylie.

She describes the book—available from Manybooks.net, one of her favorite sites and mine, too—as “a somewhat gloomy but well-written coming-of-age story about an orphan-type trying to make his way in the world.”

Ficbot sez: “While this may be ground that has been trod upon before, this obscure addition to the genre makes for a quick and satisfying read. I have not been able to dig up too much information on its author…other than that she was Australian and worked as a journalist. This seems to be one of those ‘obscure works rescued from the dust-piles of history by the internet’ type of books.”

Hello, scriptwriters? Any adaptation possibilities? The Aussies haven’t done too badly in the pub domain film-fodder department. Remember My Brilliant Career, based on another “dust-pile” book (miraculously discovered pre-Web)? Update, 9:35 a.m.: Actually some of Wylie’s books have already been adapted. More info on her via Google.

Related: Ficbot’s pointer to audios of a story story by H.P. Lovecraft.

By David Rothman

“eBook Searchr…searches only manually selected high quality eBook sites. No SPAM or irrelevant search results, just eBooks!” – Site.

Related: Tamas Simon’s e-book-searcher.

Idea: I’m running out of time, but does anyone want to do some sample searches and objectively compare the two search pages?

By David Rothman

Latest versions for Intel and PPC. Related: Earlier TeleBlog items on FBReader.

By David Rothman

“…to compare the Reader to books is to miss the point. The device is particularly well suited to one thing: traveling. On a long journey, where packing light is required, it’s a no-brainer. And there’s a compelling case to pack a Reader on trans-oceanic flights or a trip to the beach, given that you’re not going to cram eight titles into your carry-on or beach bag. The fact is the Reader can mean the difference between reading a little and reading a lot. That’s something worth celebrating.” – Conde Nast Traveler blog.

The TeleRead take: As I’ve made amply clear, tastes in e-reading devices will vary. The Reader is great for lazing back in a beach chair amid bright sunshine, as I see it, but no so good for reading in a dim hotel room. Furthermore, the format issues linger. But, hey, if you like the Reader, go for it!

Related: Unofficial Sony Reader-iLiad comparison from medical researcher at Rutgers.

And speaking of hardware: Another comparison between the $100/$175 laptop from OLPC and Intel’s Classmate, in OLPC News.

By David Rothman

“iRex recently negotiated with Amazon.com, but the online bookseller decided to develop its own closed eBook system, to be introduced next month. ‘We couldn’t agree on a deal, because the iLiad uses open formats such as PDF and HTML, and Amazon wanted a solution that resembled Apple’s iTunes, which isn’t open either,’ a spokesman told The Register.” – Here, in an article also reporting on the use of iLiad as a newspaper reader in France. Photo is of Kindle prototype.

The TeleRead take: So the Kindle, or whatever it’s called, is apparently still on track? Great! Not-so-great is Amazon’s eagerness to herd the entire world into its proprietary Mobipocket format. You already know about the DRM-related fun I’ve had with Mobi. While I love the Mobipocket Reader’s ergonomics, I hope that the company will eventually switch to the IDPF standard. Publishers need to speak up. How ironic that competitors are successfully learning on Apple to use a less closed approach—while Amazon goes in the opposite direction on its e-book site. Time for Amazon’s e-book folks to pay heed to the company’s music side and drop use of DRM? If nothing else, Amazon should give customers the option of paying a little more for e-books in a standard, nonDRMed format so customers can buy books to own for real.

Related: Defective by Design (via MobileRead).

By David Rothman

“Can consumers be trusted to control their own music without pirating the record labels and the artists they produce right into the ground? The answer is yes. People have been buying and selling music for years without DRM, in a form you may have heard of called the compact disc. CDs have never had DRM attached. Off the record, most executives–on the technology side at least–will tell you that DRM is a dinosaur that’s waiting for the asteroid to hit. It’s just a matter of when the music industry will stop assuming its customers are all criminals.” – Lev Grossman in Time Magazine.

The TeleRead take: And the book industry? Here’s Rothman’s Law of DRM. If a book’s a loser, people normally won’t brother to scan it, and if it’s a best-seller, then what’s the point of DRM—since pirates will scan the paper edition? I’m not saying that the law universally holds up. But it does often enough to make me question the value of DRM for the vast majority of books.

By David Rothman

Details from DearAuthor, which in the past has wondered if Amazon is out of the loop at BookSense.com, the indie bookstore site. Last summer, DA notes, “Amazon refused to carry any ebooks distributed by Lightning Source, the Ingram e-distribution arm.” Meanwhile, notice the absence of BBeB from the list of BookSense-distributed formats? Sony should just give up on this-here format thing and go with the IDPF standard.

Note: The direct BookSense link doesn’t seem to be working for now.

By David Rothman

Here and here, from OLPC News.

I do know that for reading books hour after hour, the OLPC machine would wallop the Classmate—given the former’s ability to fold into a tablet.

The Classmate would win in terms of ability to run Windows-based, DRM-infested programs, most of which lack Linux versions.