TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for November, 2007

By David Rothman

Rumored is an almost-done deal between iRex and a major online bookstore, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes reality. Amazon is selling the Kindle as a convenient, all-in-one e-book system for consumers. So it truly makes sense for closer ties between rival e-bookstores and hardware makers.

iRex’s iLiad would be especially interesting since it comes with wireless capabilities—the better to download e-books directly, even if you must be within range of a WiFi signal. Could we see a bunch of iPoddish approaches in time, not just Amazon’s? That would pour a little cold water on Amazon’s plans and give publishers somewhat more leverage than if Jeff Bezos ruled the e-book roost. Who knows? Might the right alliances help wean independent bookstores off Amazon-owned Mobipocket and move them toward .epub and interoperable DRM—to the cheers of customers fed up with proprietary formats?

Other fun thoughts

Anther interesting thing to ponder is that the iLiad, which I’ve played with, is one helluva piece of hardware that could benefit from easier-to-use software. With bookstore allies, iRex could receive helpful feedback from a variety of sources and maybe other assistance. To return to format issues, perhaps a multistore alliance could work with iRex and other hardware vendors to do a stellar reader for .epub.

If the iRex-bookstore deal closes, it’ll be interesting to see if a hardware-tied book club plan will be part of it, either immediately or in the future. You know—get an iLiad and pay for it over time. That would be in keeping with iRex’s hopes of having newspapers bundle the machine with subscriptions.

Beyond iRex-related deals, I wonder about possible ones for eBook Technologies Inc., which has been more or less silent lately. ETI has a close relationship with Fictionwise and played a leading role in the creation of the .epub standard. So how about Bookeen, home of the Cybook Gen3  machine? Hard to tell. Bookeen’s Laurent Pickard seems pretty confident about his relations with Mobipocket, but then he’s an open standards guy. A happy solution for him would be for Mobi itself to embrace .epub all the way.

The Sony angle

Oh, and do you really think this item would be complete without mention of Sony? It already has an alliance with Borders. Will a WiFi equipped Sony Reader soon have the Connect store or a Borders-related etailer built into it, helping Sony catch up with Amazon? As for the title count, about which Amazon is so proud, keep in mind that indie stories, Borders, Sony and other hardware vendors could all work together to encourage publishers to accelerate their .epub plans.

Major disclaimer: This is fun speculation inspired by one bleepin’ rumor. But if I’ve planted a few ideas in the minds of some of the players, hey, fine.

By David Rothman

“The Kindle has three surefire selling points—title selection, pricing and Amazon’s nifty Whispernet wireless network—that give it an advantage over devices like the Sony Reader and the iLiad.” – Publishers Weekly’s home-page summary of its overwhelmingly favorable review headlined Amazon’s Kindle: Very Cool, Really Easy.

By Branko Collin

Andrew Burt has been reinstated as chairman of the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Electronic Piracy Committee, though the SFWA’s board listened to advice that the committee should be called differently, and has therefore rechristened it “Copyright Committee.” Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross and to a lesser extent John Scalzi are not amused. For one thing, Andrew Burt is seen by many as the root of the problems with the old committee, and should therefore not be allowed to return, and for another the SFWA is careless in claiming that the Scalzi-headed advisory committee recommended that “the former Electronic Piracy Committee be revived in toto under the new name »Copyright Committee« with the same members and chair as when it was disbanded,” which it did not.

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By David Rothman

Oh, the frustrations of the blog format, sometimes! Right now we’ve got three great contributions that I wish could all be at the top.

 Hey, TeleReaders; this Kindle’s for my sister-in-law, not you—a well-crafted essay by Evan Schnittman, VP of business development and rights at Oxford University Press, New York—argues that the ease and convenience of the Kindle outweigh any DRM-related negatives. I disagree, but I am delighted to present another viewpoint and am eager for more pro-Kindle contributions. Meanwhile feel free to write civil comments no matter what your opinion.

Graduating to e-books: Many publishing students still clueless is an important alarum for both educators and publishers and comes from Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti, a TeleBlog contributing editor who formerly worked as an editor with the well-regarded David R. Godne and founded her own house. Shockingly, when Sadi asked for a show of hands, she learned that no student in her class owned a PDA, downloaded e-books or understood the practicality of the technology even today.

E-books and the young doctor on the go, by Dr. Karina Descartin, tells what it was like to be a young doctor reading digitized medial information in the Philippines. Karina now lives in the States and is still using E—to prepare for the exams she must pass to practice in the U.S. “Medical e-books predate the specific definition of Medicine 2.0, but now they’re among its most promising tools and in the future will be still more important,” Karina tells us.

By Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

Moderator’s note: Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti is a writer-poet and publishing veteran who worked as an editor and publicity director at David R. Godine and also founded her own publishing house. An MP3 version of this essay is now online. – DR

I teach a publishing course at one of the finest graduate schools for publishing.

Recently I asked for a show of hands of those students who own palm devices, have downloaded e-books or even know that the technology is now practical.

Not a single hand went up at a time when HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and other giants were digitizing books by the thousands, and when the Kindle would soon make the cover of Newsweek.

Ideally this essay can help enlighten both the publishing industry and educators on the need for aspiring editors to understand the new realities, not just e-book technology but also its impact on the important area of subrights, a topic that I’ll also explore below.

What the students and educators need to know

E-books, electronic rights and handhelds and readers are hardly new to the publishing world now. No longer are e-books and audio books so novel. Most major publishers have become savvy enough to hold on to electronic rights in boilerplate contracts and think beyond audio books alone.

In the past, under the subrights clause of most contracts, author could easily retain electronic rights. Other sub-rights were negotiated—translation rights in particular (usually an 80/20 split or 70/30, with the higher percentage going to the author) and film rights. The author received the subrights except for certain books; think The DaVinci Code or The Devil Wears Prada, and pity the editor who failed to keep film rights or electronic rights on either book, which is precisely why young editors need to be taught subrights.

The perils of “sleepers”—including the E variety

Then, as now, editors needed to think strategically. Woe unto the editor who had acquired the book that seemed like a “sleeper” and suddenly took off, becoming enough of a phenomenon to draw serious money from Hollywood. Perhaps it seemed unlikely that Patricia Highsmith’s older work, The Talented Mr. Ripley would be made into a film twice-over now—once, as Plein Soleil by director Michael Clement in the French and another version; more recently, as The Talented Mr. Ripley with stars Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Matt Damon and direction by Anthony Minghella. Film rights seemed to the unseasoned editor, or even the seasoned author sometimes, to be a remote possibility.

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By Evan Schnittman

Think DRM is a necessary evil? Love the iPod model for e-books—built around Amazon’s Kindle? Today’s your day. I’m very pleased to publish some pro-Kindle commentary from Evan Schnittman, vice president of business development and rights at Oxford University Press (photo). Discussion’s more fun with different viewpoints included, and given all my skepticism about DRM and an Amazon – dominated iPoddish model for the book industry, I encourage other defenders to submit their own essays to the TeleBlog. Meanwhile thanks to Evan for taking time to present his side! – David Rothman.

David kindly linked on November 21 to my Kindle review on the OUP blog and called me out on a major area of disagreement between us; DRM. One of my basic points is that Amazon has made a huge play taken right out of Apple’s iPod playbook and, if Amazon fails, I fear the world of e-books might forever fail. David’s response was that if Kindle fails, it will be the death of DRM and not the e-book. David’s view is that the restrictive DRM has kept the e-book limited and the only solution is a world of DRM-free content. My position has always been that the iPod, with its 75% market share and pretty much invisible yet omnipresent DRM, is the only model of hope for e-books.

I have been playing with my Kindle and watching others as I demonstrate it. The Kindle comes with the New Oxford American Dictionary preloaded, so I was fortunate enough to attend the Amazon press conference and receive my Kindle the first day it was available. Using the Kindle and showing it to others has helped firm up my position on DRM and on what it takes to be a reading device.

The best quote on how the Kindle does as a reading device belongs to Jeff Bezos. I believe he said something like, “The device disappears after a bit and one is left with a reading experience.” This is exactly what is right about the Kindle–it’s clearly designed by readers for readers. The Kindle is supposed to be a device that disappears, not one that inspires techno-envy. Kindle has one job, and one job only–to create a seamless digital reading experience from purchase through immersive reading.

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By Karina Descartin

Moderator’s note: Please welcome Dr. Karina Descartin as the newest contributor to the TeleBlog—see her bio at the end of this post. Check out her own blog, The story of healing. – DR

I’ve been reading e-books for years, almost as soon as PDAs came out, even if I haven’t always been wild about them.

No, I didn’t need the biggest, sharpest screen, just the right information in my textbooks when I was a medical student in the Philippines. I felt secure. In my pocket I could carry hundreds of thousands of words of medical advice—well beyond what I could hold in my head—and maybe use this wisdom someday to save a life.

E still key

Today e-books remain very much a part of my life as I prepare for my U.S. Medical Licensing Examination, needed to practice here in the United States. When I travel, I can’t tote a portable library of paper books. So instead I carry a MacBook, which contains seven medical review books, among others, and can play video lectures, too. My first-generation iPod Nano stores audio (MP3) lectures.

What’s more, e-books are part of my husband’s life, too—he’s a Web designer for the Wowio e-book service.

Beyond just exploring

No, I’m not the ultimate fan, just an explorer, but I’m excited by the possibilities of e-books as a way to squeeze more out of education budgets in developing countries while increasing the number of enthusiastic readers.

In fact, maybe reading TeleRead has already made me more than just an explorer. Today e-books are not a necessary evil for me; rather, just a necessity.

More on my reading material and hardware

Just what was I reading in my PDA days in the late 1990s and early 2000s? Well, I carried around two volumes of Harrison’s Principles of Medicine and two volumes of Schwartz’ Textbook of Surgery—plus a whole gamut of other books, which I read through the magic of the iSilo reader.

Back then, I was using the Compaq Ipaq 3760. Sweet! But eventually, we had to part ways; the Compaq was so thick, it kept ripping the seams off the pocket of my smocks, and the battery life was pathetic, an hour to an hour and a half at the most. But it served a purpose during that time, with 64Mb of RAM, a Flash memory slot, and the ability to work with a Targus Portable Keyboard. I’m nostalgic about the keyboard and the student days, but not the iPaq’s specs.

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By David Rothman

“Amazon has nailed the electronic-book shopping experience. But it has a lot to learn about designing electronic devices.” – Walt Mossberg, the influential tech columnist of the Wall Street Journal.

Technorati Tags: Kindle,Amazon,Amazon Kindle,Walt Mossberg,Wall Street Journal

By Robert Nagle

In other non-Kindle news, I am happy to report that TeleRead now is serving full RSS feeds again. Apparently, during one of our WordPress upgrades, the More/Read Rest of Post hyperlink was preventing RSS readers from seeing entire articles—just the parts until the More tag. But with the Full Text Feeds plugin, we’ve solved the problem.

More site news: We recently installed the WP-Super Cache plugin. That improves site performance by offering cached versions of pages. Interestingly, readers who haven’t commented before are the ones most likely to see this speed boost.

Feel free to let us know about any problems you are having with the TeleRead site. We may not be able to fix it immediately, but it’s good to hear this kind of feedback.

By David Rothman

Want to protect your Kindle-format library by stripping the DRM and converting your books to an unencumbered format that won’t be obsolete in the distant future? Sorry, sucker. You’re out of luck.

In most cases in the United States you can’t legally circumvent the DRM–as if Amazon’s terms would let you do this anyway. You can thank the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In the world of best-sellers, alas, the DRM voodoo curse reigns supreme with help from Hollywood-friendly politicians in Washington, D.C.

A toxic American export

Alas, as reported in Ars Technical and elsewhere, Canada seems on the way to adopting its own DMCA, complete with a Draconian anti-circumvention provision. And it looks as if the Swiss DMCA variant will end up the same way.

Applicable to all DRMed formats, not just Kindle’s

The anti-circumvention concepts, of course, apply to DRMed versions of formats beyond the Kindle’s. If you buy Microsoft .lit books and use a certain software product to convert them to HTML, you could be breaking the DMCA in whatever form it exists in your country. Exemptions exist here in the States, but they won’t help the typical e-book buyer.

Oh, and anti-circumvention provisions aren’t the only treat in store for e-bookers in Canada. A prominent Canadian lawyer named Michael Geist reportedly says the new law will abolish fair use, making the Canadian DMCA worse than the U.S. variety. True?

What Kindle License Agreement and Terms of Use says: “In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.”

By David Rothman

The MSM isn’t fully hip yet to the Kindle’s risks as a  privacy Chernobyl.

Nope, don’t buy one if you’d rather that Amazon not track your reading habits and maybe even be forced to share them with the feds in the future.

Amazon servers will even save the annotations you make in K books.

Let’s hope that sooner or later the big media guys will connect the dots and see the long-term privacy ramifications. Will Bezos risk his billions if the heat is too intense from federal prosecutors, who recently sought the names of buyers of paper books? Even if Bezos wants to do the right thing in resisting snoops, which he has done in the past, can he beat the NSA if it wants to spy on his databases? If nothing else, I’m curious whether the Kindle’s wireless connections might result in new vulnerabilities. Maybe not. I’m just raising some healthy questions. Share your thoughts! And don’t just pick on Amazon alone. Google, for example, wants you to read your books online in many cases rather than downloading them. What about future G-related annotations?

New Kindle reviews

Meanwhile, minus the neglected privacy angle, some otherwise useful consumer reviews are appearing. Here’s a list with headlines included:

• USA Today columnist Edward C. Baig: “E-Readers by Sony, Amazon have their charms.”
• Salon tech guy Farhad Manjoo on the Kindle: “Amazon’s Kindle won’t spark your e-book fire. Too bad it’s so damned expensive” ($400). See video.
• Slate: “Can Amazon save the e-book?” Harry McCracken writes: “For now, I’m looking forward to spending time with a well-stocked Kindle on my next cross-country flight. The only downside: Unlike any book I’ve ever traveled with, it will need to stay stowed during takeoff and landing.” Hello, Harry? Read the Terms of Use and (Non)Privacy Notice and see if you want to do an update.

Just as significantly, a well-known tech author named Charles Petzold raises points similar to the ones I’ve been doing. He sensibly asks whether he’ll be able to revisit Kindle-format books 28 years from now—the way he re-read his paper copy of Philip Roth’s 1979 work, The Ghost Writer. Exactly! You could try to transfer your Kindle books to a nonDRMed format. But then you’ll be evil under the DMCA. Using a Big Bro-ish arrangements, built into the machine, Amazon might discover your crime and delete your entire library of Kindle books. Worse, if you go by Amazon’s past track record, Jeff Bezos isn’t the best guy to trust with your books. I’ll have more to say about that later on today or tomorrow. Meanwhile will Jeff kindly take a moment to promise he’ll do the industry .epub standard on the Kindle?

Oh, those protective paens!

In the meanwhile here’s the standard reminder that I’m not anti-Amazon and in fact see potential in the Kindle for novices, just so they know what’s happening. Maybe they can buy a paen or two to George Bush to balance out any subversive reading they may happen to do on Iraq.

(Thanks to Mike Cane for link to the Salon and Slate items and the Petzold blog.)

By David Rothman

(Thanks to Mike Cane for the link. Earlier Scoble video is here.)

By David Rothman

“eBooks may take off, but only when they are offered free. At present there is no notion of buying a player for books. There may be a market for mini-books running on ebook readers, offering extra content and special graphics.” – Views of Michael Rogers, the New York Times’ Futurist in Residence, as summed up by Sky News.

The TeleRead take: Ad-supported books would be helpful, given many surfers’ identification of E with “free.” But let there be traditional alternatives, too! Meanwhile I remain a big fan of the ad-supported Wowio service. If only I can talk ‘em into doing .epub soon!

Latest free Wowio discovery—actually among the top downloads right now: Mathematics and Sex, by Clio Cresswell.

By David Rothman

E-mail services like Gmail can be bad enough as potential snoop-enablers.

I agree with Tim O’Reilly that you’ve already lost your privacy in many other respects. Still, thousands of your emails could be there for federal spooks to see one day, at least in theory. D.C. says, Trust Us. I’m still Gmailing away, but with lower-than-ever privacy expectations.

So should you also Trust Us about electronic bookmarks and other details of your reading? Just when the Kindle is appearing with its own Trust Us approach—Amazon stores everything for itself and maybe unwittingly for Washington—D.C. comes along to remind us of the risk of Big Bro even without the Kindle. Via an AP story, we learn that federal prosecutors sought “the identities of thousands of people who bought used books through online retailer Amazon.com Inc.”

Avoiding ‘Orwellian’ rumors

The big news of the moment is that Federal Judge Stephen Crocker has derailed the snooping efforts and observed along the way: “Well-founded or not, rumors of an Orwellian federal criminal investigation into the reading habits of Amazon’s customers could frighten countless potential customers into canceling planned online book purchases.” At least as depicted by D.C., the snooping was part of a probe of fraud and tax evasion, involving a used bookseller, rather than for political reasons.

But long term, the real news is that the Bush Justice Department tried the snooping in the first place. Inevitably it will aim for more of the same—this in the wake of snooping into the reading habits of suspicious airline passengers.

Snoop-friendly terms of service

Meanwhile Jeff Bezos and friends will be playing do-it-yourself snoops through a TOS specifically authorizing them to poke around your machine to see if you’ve been a good boy or girl. Naughty, naughty, naughty you’ll seem if Jeff somehow finds you’ve been bypassing the DRM, and I doubt the punishment will be just a lump of coal. Away could go your Kindle service and book access—just read Amazon’s Terms of Use: “In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.”

The frustrating thing is that by killing off customer privacy, Jeff really could be hurting himself. The more snoop-friendly the Kindle is and the company’s policies are, the less attractive could be a machine that in many ways seems promising for novices. Yes, you can store your books on a memory card. But as far as I know, you’ll also have to leave them in a library online. (more…)

By David Rothman

Far from limiting itself to Amazon, Sony and other giants, Macmillan is eager to reach out to independent bookstores such as Fictionwise and BooksOnBoard.

That’s the word from Fritz Foy, senior vice president of strategic technology at Macmillan.

Earlier, at Macmillan’s request, Amazon had stopped the indies’ feeds for imprints such as St. Martin’s Press. The result was that top titles like Rhett Butler’s People appeared to be gone with the wind, at least for BooksOnBoard and others. But as related by Macmillan yesterday, the reasons were far from nefarious.

Territorial rights issues

Rather there were international rights issues with a number of complexities involved. Just who are the true right-holders, for example, of various books? Amazon’s e-systems, as I understand it, and Fritz can correct me if I’m wrong, didn’t provide for all the possibilities. Rights-holder can include authors, publishers, other corporations, you name it.

Macmillan has been working to correct this so the feeds can be restored.

In Macmillan’s own words

Meanwhile here’s the lowdown directly from Fritz: “We have no direct relationship with BooksOnBoard (nor with Fictionwise, also mentioned in your blog entry). BooksOnBoard had been getting its content from Amazon. As a result of problems relating to Amazon’s distribution of our content to unaffiliated third-party sites (problems not specific to BooksOnBoard), we asked Amazon to suspend all such distribution so we can review the situation.

“We are looking into the idea of direct relationships with BooksOnBoard and other Mobipocket distributors and look forward to being in conversation with them soon. It is certainly not our intent to limit our electronic content to select big players. Quite the contrary, our goal is to put in place the systems and agreements that will enable it to be distributed as widely as possible.”

Strong .epub supporter

OK, gang, that’s good news. On top of everything else, Fritz tells me Macmillan remain a strong supporter of the .epub standard and is also hoping for interoperable DRM to accompany it. While I’m hardly a fan of DRM, interoperable DRM is far, far better than today’s totally proprietary approach. As Macmillan’s situation shows, publishing is complicated enough without a zillion and one e-book formats.

Macmillan, by the way, is the new name for the U.S. arm of the global Holtzbrinck Group and, beyond St. Martin’s, includes such distinguished imprints as Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hey, let’s hope the time comes when FSG books from greats such as Philip Roth will easily be available all over e-bookdom!

A Kindle angle

Now here’s yet another angle. Keep in mind that under the Kindle model, the hardware is closely associated with content and an owner who lives in such and such country. And yes, you guessed it: as a result of the Kindle, territorial issues are now more on the minds of publishers than before, according to Fritz.

Technorati Tags: Fritz Foy , Holtzbrinck , Macmillan , Ficitonwise , BooksOnBoard

By Paul Biba

My daughter came in from San Francisco for Thanksgiving and I showed her my Sony reader and asked her opinion of the Kindle.

Background info: Erin is 27, an English major with a Masters in Journalism from Medil. She works for Wired Magazine and is about as tech-savvy as a person can get. With this background her opinion really surprised me.

She would never use a Sony Reader or a Kindle, or an independent ebook reader of any kind! Further, she stated, unequivocally, that no person in her age group would use one either.

Erin said that her generation is used to converged devices and has no interest in “another thing to lug around”. They are already carrying a phone and a laptop (desktop computers are definitely “out”) and that’s enough. There is no prejudice against ebooks, according to her. If, for example, the iPhone had a good ebook reader she would use that, but the current crop of dedicated readers is not for her generation.

I can’t make any comment other than to pass this on, but if she is right then the ebook reader companies may be missing a whole generation.

By Ficbot

Moderator’s note: Welcome to Ficbot, our latest TeleBlog contributor, who lives in Canada! Cory Doctorow is a fan of Ficbot’s blog The Best Media in Life is Free—devoted to e-book, audio and music freebies. – DR

What to do if you are searching for an ultra-light mobile laptop alternative and can’t afford the OLPC or Asus EeePC?

If all you want to do is play Solitaire, read e-books and type documents, the Alphasmart Dana may be an option for you. It retails for about $400, which is vastly over-priced for what you get (especially in light of the growing number of alternatives at a similar price point.) But there is a healthy secondary market on eBay. I was able to pick up one of these babies for about $75.

While I would not say it is worth anywhere near the actual retail price, I will definitely get my $75 worth, at least until the next generation of ultralights come out at cheaper prices.

Long battery life

The Dana is a computer keyboard with a built-in screen. It comes in different configurations: there is an 8MB model and a 16MB model, with WiFi and without. Both can be run on standard AA batteries, or a rechargeable battery pack which runs about 15-20 hours between charges. The Dana can be charged via USB in 8 hours, or via AC power in 4. The battery life on my unit was good. You could easily go one or two days on this without charging, unlike a standard laptop. That might be a real advantage for some users. (more…)