TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for October, 2007

By Robert Nagle

A short personal announcement: I have decided to participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month (NANOWRIMO) competition. I’ll be a writing a novel called Fascinating Screwdrivers (the life story of a man who collects crazy things). I’ll also be keeping a weblog diary of my writing progress throughout the month. I’ll be writing it under a pseudonym, Thurston Borgraves.

Nanowrimo, if you recall,  is a “fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing.” You have 30 days to write a 50,000 page in the month of November. (Here’s a podcast interview on the Writing Show with Nanowrimo founder Chris Baty) . In 2006 they had 80,000 participants with 13,000 people writing 50,000 words. Of course, the contest is a little absurd and no one verifies anything; and even if you complete 50,000 words, all you receive is a lousy certificate. Still, there is a feeling of accomplishment, plus bragging rights at cocktail parties.

Although the Nanowrimo forums is agonizingly slow, I was able to discover a mini-community of nanowrimo contestants from Houston. Judging from the number of social events planned for my city alone, one would think that these people are either fulltime socialites, members of a religious cult or Alcoholics Anonymous members making sure you haven’t fallen off the wagon. Truthfully, although I’ll be busy with my own novel, curiosity compels me to attend at least one get-together, if only to see how a nanowrimo cult member behaves in everyday social interactions. (more…)

By David Rothman

Tim Bajarin, a well-known industry analyst, tested the new Sony on a European trip and liked the results even though he cautions that e-book tech is still at the early-adopter stage. Here’s his PC Mag writeup.

In a nutshell, he sees four obstacles for the Sony. First, reluctance to shift from paper, at least among aging baby boomers, the very people who could benefit from the large-font option. Second, the cost of $299. Third, lack of color, which could hurt the Reader in the education market. Fourth, not enough digitized. That said, Bajarin believes that e-books are here to stay.

Meanwhile I hope that IDPF standard-setters will read between the lines and hurry up with format-validation and the .epub logos it could make possible—to simplify e-books, with those boomers in mind. Elimination of DRM would help as well. But if not—I won’t dream—the IDPF should press hard for DRM standards. “DRM is still a tough nut,” Adobe’s Bill McCoy recently blogged, “but with epub providing the open standard complement to PDF for reflow-centric text-based content, we are well on our way.” I hope so, Bill.

Related: Bill’s thoughts on the future of the iTunes store. Will we see many iTunes stores in time? And what are the lessons for e-books? I’m slightly less optimistic than Bill, in terms of avoidance of onerous centralization. Amazon is already acting like a nasty monopolist in casting out the PDF option in favor of its own Mobipocket. Yet one more argument for standards!

And speaking of Amazon, Sony’s rival: Oh, the arrogance of Amazon when it comes to my obtaining a review unit of the Kindle—even for a venerable publication like Publishers Weekly! Faithful to the official script from above, an Amazon guy acted as if the Kindle didn’t exist. I’m not going to let this influence my opinion of the machine, which seems to have many promising features, such as word-search. It will influence my opinion of Amazon—in terms of its publisher-friendliness or lack thereof—if these games continue.

Technorati Tags: Sony Reader , Tim Bajarin , PRS-505 , Sony Reader PRS-505

By Joseph Gray

Moderator’s note: We welcome Joseph Gray, a super-helpful TeleBlog commenter and a standards-loving IT guy, as our latest contributor. This is Part I of a two-part series. – DR

With the recent finalization by the IDPF of the three specifications that comprise an epub, I thought I would see exactly what this new ebook format was capable of. For testing purposes, I created an epub using the information in the IDPF specifications. To the best of my knowledge, the only commercial software currently available for creating an epub is Adobe InDesign. I took the low tech approach and used a text editor.

In this article, I will detail the steps necessary to create an epub using a text editor and a program like WinZip or 7Zip. In the second installment, I will describe some of my experiences with the epub reading software currently available. These are FBReader, Adobe Digital Editions and the Openberg Lector plugin for Firefox.

I initially found information about the process of creating an epub detailed on a few other web sites. Although very helpful, some of the information on these other sites was written before the IDPF specifications were finalized, so it was no longer completely accurate. I will provide an updated example here. Note that any information provided in this article is my interpretation of the specifications and may also be in error. You should check the specification documents yourself to ensure accuracy. (more…)

By Prof. Richard Bellaver

During the past year my Ball State University students have been researching the literature (that’s academic talk for “trying to find out”) on e-book devices.

They have tried to see if there is evidence that the use of the devices is of value to grade school students.

They have not found a great deal of evidence, but what they have found is discouraging to us who think that e-book devices can be useful.

Most of the studies have been short term with few students participating.

There are also many caveats that imply that if we knew more about usability of the devices we might get better (not necessarily positive) results.

New studies would help

It appears that in order to get to the bottom of questions in the literature, research is necessary into whether there is any learning value to using electronic devices and how the devices can be fit into the classroom environment. New studies need to look at small components of both learning and usability over time with larger and more demographically representative subjects.

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By David Rothman

“A group that was set up to promote the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) is abandoning its support of that file format in favor of a set of specifications developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).” – Computerworld.

More info: The OpenDocument Foundation is said to believes that W3C’s Compound Document Formats would be a better, more open choice,  due to Sun Microsoft’s growing ties with Microsoft and the resultant effect on ODF development. Update: Not everyone likes the foundation’s new direction. Cerebus and some participants in a Slashdot discussion are suspicious about the foundation.

So what might be the impact on the IDPF, the e-book trade and standards group, which adopted ODF as a container format for .epub files? Any informed opinions on how easily the IDPF could bounce back from this? Or should the IDPF just ignore the change? Hachette Book Group USA is already gearing up to distribute e-books in .epub.

Important detail: The IDPF’s container format was intended to merge with the ODF Container in the near future.

Update, 6:21 a.m. : Peter Sorotokin at Adobe says the IDPF can move smoothly to the new arrangement.

Technorati Tags: IDPF , container format , Open Document Format , ODF , OCF , Compound Document Formats , CDF

By David Rothman

So how’s the Eee laptop as a Web browswer and e-book reader?

1. “Webpages look great,” comes the word from a poster at eeeuser.com. No problems. PDF’s look great, I would say no problems at all if you have 1 page across. If you open a book style 2 page across PDF it gets a little crowded and you may have to zoom in and look at one page at a time. Might be a nice ebook reader for those interested. I’ll get back to you on the eyestrain about 12 hours from now- i don’t think it will be a problem though.” What’s more, Mike Cane, who’s eager to get his own Eee, has learned that it comes with a real Adobe reader, 7.0. See photo showing double pages.

2. What’s more, FBReader, which can read .epub, HTML, ASCII, and a bunch of other formats, is also supplied, according to a MobileRead post from Alan Wallcraft.

Related: Allasus.com site, where prices start at $259. Also see Wikipedia item on company.

Technorati Tags: Asustek

By David Rothman

Joseph Gray spotted this just now on the Bookeen site:

"Due to overwhelming demand, all orders from now on will ship between December 5 and December 13, 2007."

By David Rothman

Here’s a challenge for The New Yorker. Can its contributors write up e-libraries without droning on about how we’ll always need paper books? Is every e-book lover an arson-minded Visigoth eager to burn down the great paper collections or rob them of funding? And do we all hate the idea of paper backups—or, for that matter, Main Street bookstores?

In Future Reading: Digitization and its Discontents, the latest e-skepticism from the magazine, the famed scholar Anthony Grafton wisely points out the shortcoming of existing digitization projects, such as the gaps even in the planned collections. But he barely mentions the Internet Archive’s Open Content Alliance and refers not once by name to Brewster Kahle, the brilliant MIT-educated founder of the archive who for years has been addressing the “Can we do it?” details of a universal library. The questions Grafton raises, in the magazine’s November 5 issue, should matter to e-publishers and others in E, not just librarians and archivists. Books are the ultimate long-term medium. Without trustworthy storage and the ability to enjoy digital books reliably in the future—major reasons why proprietary formats and DRM worry me—how can we take e-books as seriously as literature as we do paper books? I, too, am an e-skeptic, but, I hope, more open to the possibilities than Grafton is.

Not just helter-skelter, please

I want to see every book, every other document of importance, digitized someday—not just the texts but the full images. It’s an elusive goal, but we can at least strive for well-stocked national digital libraries and cheer on government-related international efforts as well as Brewster Kahle’s. I want master indexing and comprehensive, typo-proof searches, and I don’t want the preservation—on paper or in bits and bytes—to happen helter-skelter. We’re talking about far, far more than navigation and discovery issues.

The social rewards of a universal library, complete with attention paid to reading devices and integration with existing libraries and schools, could be substantial. As Brewster has observed, the attitude of young people today is, “If it doesn’t exist on the Internet, it doesn’t exist.” Despite all the high-minded talk of encouraging students to use the library in person, a laudable goal, should we stake the future of books to this? We should worry not just about physical preservation of books but about preservation of society’s interest in them.

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By David Rothman

Why does the Cybook Gen3 cost more in Europe than in the States? Will this new E Ink machine (price $US350) work with Macs? What can the HTML viewer do? Below are answers that Michael Dehan of Bookeen kindly supplied to those and other questions. Thanks, Michael! Subheads are mine.

The NAEB machine

Concerning NAEB, we haven’t set all the details with them right now (due mainly to us). More to come very soon.

Currency issues

Concerning Euro-Dollar, don’t forget VAT, taxes and shipment price. If we compare with standard practices in the Consumer Electronics industry, Apple proposes higher model prices in Euro than in US dollars on their Apple store, Sony does the same with the PS3, Archos (a French company) proposes the same model price in Euros and USD for their MPEG4 players.

Euro warranties vs. U.S. ones

European warranty is one year, but there is a European directive which describes “the principle of the conformity of the product with the contract” which is not linked to defects or malfunctions which is covered by a standard guarantee. According to the directive: “The seller is liable to the consumer for any lack of conformity which exists when the goods are delivered to the consumer and which becomes apparent within a period of two years.”

Let’s take an example, I say on my notice that my device supports PDF, but when I deliver it, it appears that PDF is not supported and I release no software upgrade to correct the issue. Then there is a lack of conformity between the device and its description; the customer can ask to get a device which works in conformity with the notice and this during two years.

For info our device does support PDF. As written in our website and packaging.

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By David Rothman

NaNoWriMo, aka national National Writing Month, is almost here, and Robert Nagle will be along with the details. The idea is to get something on paper even if you rush the job. Meanwhile I’ve been reading, on my Sony PRS-505, one of the fiction’s most famous procrastinators. Yes, that’s Franz Kafka to the left.

Kakfa wrote his share of finished short stories. But novels? Even The Trial was incomplete, missing certain chapter numbers and parts of some chapters.

What he did write might come out in paragraphs of Faulknerian length, and Sony-style machines are better than PDAs at coping with this. The sharp E Ink on the six-inch screen can display several hundred words at once—far more than on a typical PDA.

Kafka’s hypothetical machine and Ellison’s real Osborne

So how would Kafka have fared in the era of computers and word-processors? As in Ralph Ellison’s case, where we’re talking reality in the form of an Osborne 1, scholars might hold a debate. Would Kafka the perfectionist have procrastinated even more while he lingered on minor details and used the Osborne to address them? Or would computers have made it possible for him to shuffle words around more easily and give us more completed-works?

Returning to the negative, could someone as obsessed and nerdish as Kafka have actually forsaken novel-writing for programming? He actually loved doing corporate annual reports or at least was proud of his output.

Franz as a techie: The Hard Hat connection 

In his own way and in his own time, Kafka was actually a techie—having invented the civilian hard hat. Oh, the connections to be made, trivial or not! I remember the Nixon propaganda machine’s fondness for Hard Hats, the human variety, the Silent Minority members. And then from there, yes, we think of the Kafkaesque qualities of the Patriot Act and today’s Nixon, George Bush, who makes Tricky look like Clarence Darrow. W. is right out of The Trial, considering his love of bureaucracy and secretive "justice" and lack of government accountability.

The tip jar angle

Finally, here’s another Kafka-related question. Would tip jars have helped Kafka if he’d had the nerve to share his works more widely through the Net and otherwise. Robert thinks so, and I can see certain possibilities here, given the quality of Kafka’s writing and the passion of his few but ardent fans. But my guess is that Kafka would still have been at work at day job like his insurance company gig—leaving it up to more commercial geniuses like Philip Roth to capitalize eventually on, say, the concept behind The Metamorphosis.

By David Rothman

Good-bye hard disks? Hello, your own Library of Congress? Well, we’re not there yet. But in the next few years, a new technology could lead to thumb-sized solid state drives storing a terabyte each. Power consumption might be one-thousandth of flash memory and costs perhaps one-tenth. Just the ticket for multimedia e-books, eh? Or even high-res movies inside them?

In between his CSSing for the TeleBlog, Jon Noring took time out for some calculations. He figured that 20 million books exist in the world and that 18,000 of these drives would do the trick for high-res images of them.

If nothing else, imagine the benefits for the One Laptop Per Child project. Even without WiFi, kids in mountains and remote jungles could enjoy immediate access to huge collections of knowledge—well, budgets and copyright gods permitting. Perhaps the already-available info would be the equivalent of a cache, reducing the need for new downloading when WiFi was available.

The gobbledygook for the technology is programmable metallization cell (PMC), and Wired News has the details, inspiring the inevitable Slashdotting.

By David Rothman

Yes, we’re experimenting with a new WordPress theme. Bear with us. We know the type is too small, and we may also adjust colors. Keep the feedback coming. Meanwhile thanks to Jon Noring for his ongoing CSS work and for serving as a second part of eyes! – DR

Technorati Tags: TeleRead

By Branko Collin

Last week Jeroen Brouwers (67), author of the book Sunken Red, refused Dutch/Flemish literary award Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren. Apparently he thought that the prize money, 16,000 euro, was a mere tip, a pittance. The Verbal Jam blog sarcastically acknowledges (Dutch) that perhaps the prize is indeed a little meagre compared to the AKO Literatuurprijs (50,000 euro), the Librisprijs (50,000 euro) and the Gouden Uil (25.000 euro), two of which the author won previously. I guess we won’t see Brouwers experiment with tip jars anytime soon.

By David Rothman

The Cybook Gen3 E Ink reader is now on sale at the Bookeen Web site for US$350 with:

–A six-inch Vizplex E Ink screen. Vizplex has more screen contrast than the older E Ink technology.

–A weight of 6.13 ounces. That’s almost three ounces lighter than the new Sony Reader PRS-505.

–Advertised battery life of 8,000 page flips between charges.

–”RSS feeds and eNews.”

–Support of not just DRMed and nonDRMed Mobipocket but also “many open formats like HTML, Txt, PRC, PalmDoc and PDF. These formats are commonly found on Internet and can be easily generated by many text editors. All these files support font resizing except PDF files which can be zoomed.” The Cybook cannot read DRMed PDF. It’s been said that Mobipocket doesn’t allow other company’s DRM-capable software on dedicated e-book readers with built-in Mobipocket. True? Meanwhile, yes, Bookeen has said it wants an .epub reader on the Cybook. Among hardware vendors, Bookeen has been one of the staunchest backers of standards.

$100 more buys you a leather cover ($39.95 separately), a 2GB storage card ($24.95), earphones ($9.95) and an extra battery ($44.95). The full specs are here. I’m under the impression that actual shipping may start November 2.

Related: The first of three parts of DearAuthor’s Christmas Buying Guide for E-Book Readers. The consumer-oriented Jane accurately observes: “Because of the hated Digital Rights Management and nearly 10 different software platforms for e-books, deciding which device to buy can be more traumatizing than braving the 5 am Walmart Black Friday crowd.” Hello, IDPF? Time to expedite work on .epub validation and an official logo so people know they’re steering clear of eBabel? If you want e-books to hit big-time retail for real, then eBabel must go.

And speaking of DRM, the scourge of consumers and consumer-aware hardware vendors: See Dr. Ellen’s Hage discussion of the law-breaking that the technology drives e-book-lovers to. When Mobi’s server went down temporarily, some legal purchasers of Mobi used DRM bypass programs to maintain access to their books. Anyone have thoughts on that, one way or another?

Update, 12:24 p.m., Oct. 29: Engadget is also excited about the promise of the Cybook and has a pointer to this TeleBlog item. Thanks, guys. May the actual hardware live up to our expectations!

Technorati Tags: Cybook , Cybook Gen3 , Bookeen , E Ink , Mobipocket

By David Rothman

Starting in with books released in December, the Hachette Book USA Group will begin sending .epub files to stores and distributors—for consumer use in that e-book format or conversion to others.

How popular could .epub become among readers, so they don’t have to worry about books being available only in Adobe or Mobi or whatever?

A so-far-small poll at MobileRead suggests very popular. The catch is that major software companies in the IDPF, creator of the standard, will need to live up to the group’s pro-standards rhetoric.

72 percent aiming for .epub use

Among the 32 participants so far, 23 are counting on using .epub when the right software is available for them. That’s a whopping 72 percent even without the IDPF having done any education at the consumer level. People hate the Tower of eBabel of clashing e-book formats.

I’ll repro the breakdown of the current stats and encourage more people, regardless of their opinions, to participate in the MobileRead poll. While the poll is small, by the way,  it does contain at least one minor inaccuracy that works against .epub: "I’m waiting till someone other than Adobe has a viewer." Actually, if you’re not insisting on DRM-capabilities, which aren’t part of the actual standard right now, you can already use FBReader and the OpenBerg Firefox add-on. Many small publishers hate DRM; let’s hope that .epub can soon be among their format choices.

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By David Rothman

Who says American politicians are the only pols who are megalomaniacs or on the cusp?

The Washington Post tells of "talk of creating a new Russian computer network—one that would be separate from the Internet at large and, potentially, much easier for the authorities to control." Could this extend to Russian e-libraries someday?

Meanwhile friends of Vladimir Putin, the, er, ambitious, president of the Russian Federation, are buying up independent sites. One mass media expert, Iosif Dzyaloshinsky at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, says: "The attractiveness of the Internet as a free platform for free people is already dimming."

For now, at least, Russia has at least one thriving equivalent of Gutenberg and Manybooks.net—in lib.ru. Let’s hope that continues.

By David Rothman

"…now I no longer need to have a memory, for I have Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia. Now if I need to know some fact about the world, I tap a few keys and reap the blessings of the external mind." – David Brooks writing in the New York Times.

The TeleRead take: Brooks’ intent is humorous, but I still wonder what will be the long-term effects on students growing up in a Googlized world. Will they be as quick with names as a certain blogger of my acquaintance? Actually we should all be grateful that Ted Nelson of hypertext fame confesses to having a less than perfect memory for the details. Perhaps with total recall he wouldn’t have been as inventive. So I recall. Maybe I need to Google this. Ah! Vindicated.