TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for February, 2008

By David Rothman

“Evan Schnittman, head of biz dev at 35,000-title textbook publisher Oxford University Press, says a pal at one of the ‘biggest trade publishers in the world’ called him this week, shocked at how well Kindle-formatted books had sold in December, just after the Kindle’s launch.” – Richard McRoskey, Silicon Alley Insider

The TeleRead take: That’s not all. SAI further reports that Evan looked at royalty statements “which he said ’stunned’ him: He had expected to sell up to 200 Kindle titles in December, but says the real numbers were ‘an order of magnitude’ more than that.” What he isn’t sure about is if the roll will go on. Also, keep in mind that Oxford in the past was doing digital sales only to libraries (although, yes, Oxford also supplies some terrific books to the ad-supported Wowio service, such as a first-rate Mencken bio).

While I’m displeased by Amazon’s use of a special Kindle format, actually just tweaked Mobipocket, I am delighted over the success of the machine—since other brands will bask in its glow. In fact, Oxford seems likely to get books into Sony format. Now wouldn’t it be great if the IDPF’s .epub format were around as a standard. In fact, ideally, the forthcoming Adobe software for the Sony PRS-505 firmware update will be able to read .epub, as we currently expect—not just the proprietary BBeB format.

(Thanks to Peter Brantley.)

By Joe Wikert

Moderator’s note: For another perspective on the Kindle and rivals, check out Benjamin Higginbotham’s Tech Evangelist video shown here. – D.R.

Microsoft Senior Program Manager and Wiley author Scott Hanselman is a former Sony Reader user who is now a Kindle convert. In this blog post Scott covers everything he loves about his new Kindle. He’s so right about the one reason the Kindle exists: “To extract money from my wallet.”

I find it interesting that Scott has grown tired of his iPod and leans more towards XM Radio, particularly since I’m heading in the opposite direction. I’ve had XM for a couple of years now and find that the old cable line is true: There are 500 channels and nothing is on! (Or in the case of XM, only about 170 channels.) I recently bought an 80-gig Zune and am rapidly drifting away from XM Radio. I’d rather use randomize and the fast forward button to listen to what I want to, not what some satellite DJ wants to play.

Be sure to read Scott’s entire review of the Kindle; he covers the pros and cons quite effectively.

By Prof. Peter Kerry Powers, English Dept. Chair, Messiah College

Prof. Powers is chair of Messiah College’s English Department. We’ll follow him as he befriends—or gives up on?—various forms of book-related technology.

A colleague who is a librarian and shares a lot of my interests in writing and reading sent me the following from a friend’s blog:

“In a previous post my daughter blew me away with her use of eLocker to access her school files from home. Last night my son used MyAccess [link added] to write an essay online. Big whoop—right? Get this—it analyzed and graded it in an instant. Took about 3 seconds tops and he was looking at a score that broke out scoring elements not only in spelling and grammar (Word can do that)—things like content and delivery, organization, completeness of development. It was like having my 5th grade English teacher right there—red pen in hand. It saves all of his essays and projects and graphs out a cumulative progression over time, showing improvements and areas to work on. Incredible.”

The ballyhoo

“With MY Access!®,” the blog quotes the company, “students are motivated to write more and attain higher scores on statewide writing assessments. By using MY Access! in the classroom, teachers can provide students with the practice they need to improve their writing skills. The program’s powerful scoring engine grades students’ essays instantly and provides targeted feedback, freeing teachers from grading thousands of papers by hand and giving them more time to conduct differentiated instruction and curriculum planning.”

I wish I could share the enthusiasm, but I am more than a little skeptical. It may be the science/humanities divide in play, but there is no getting past the fact that a lot of this represents some of the absolutely worst things that are happening with writing in our secondary schools. And we continue to wonder why our kids can’t write and prefer to do anything but read?

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By David Rothman

I’m about to post Peter Kerry Powers’ perspicacious essay “Writing by the numbers: Who needs an audience?” So what is the best way to learn writing? How about reading—of narrative works, not just exposition alone? This is no small part of the rationale behind the TeleRead plan for a well-stocked national digital library system blended in with local schools and libraries.

Yes, formal instruction in writing can help, but it’s no replacement. Below I’ll highlight a just-received comment from a TeleBlog reader named William—titled “How an interest in narrative helped my career”:

“I write sales copy for several multi-million dollar Internet businesses. When I applied for my position I needed to submit a writing sample. To differentiate myself I submitted the first few pages of an unpublished novel I’m finishing up rather than sales copy. It got me in for an interview and I got the job.

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By David Rothman

Neil Gaiman’s American Gods wil be available for a month for viewing online, although, alas, it can’t be downloaded (HarperCollins page and Gaiman blog entry, via Mobile Read). It’s s-l-o-w browsing. Perhaps Harper would do better to make a downloadable copy available for a limited time. Even a DRMed copy would be better than the current arrangement.

Meanwhile TOR’s e-book giveaway continues, with Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin being the latest download available in PDF, HTML and Mobipocket. TOR says: “Within a day or so of sending us your address, you should receive an email with a download link for this week’s free book.” In addition, TOR will offer free wallpapers from “some of the best artists in science fiction and fantasy.”

Related: Gretchen Angelo’s Liberte, a free intro to French (via Ficbot’s freebie site). A Yale Ph.D. in French, she teaches the language and literature at California State University, and Ficbot praises the book as “complete and very polished-looking.” The TeleBlog draws its share of readers in France, and I’d welcome their opinions of the Angelo book. In honor of France and its people, perhaps the book can be made available not just as a PDF but also in the French-originated Mobipocket format—much easier to read on handhelds than the Adobe format is.

By David Rothman

A bespectacled party guest in The Great Gatsby marvels over the books in Jay Gatsby’s  library, perhaps a little sarcastically: “Absolutely real—have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard.” Holding up Volume One of the Stoddard Lectures, he “cries triumphantly”: “See! It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too—didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”

Now the Los Angeles Times is out with a story on home libraries and ways to show off titles—ideally real, though you can never be certain these days. Ah, books as decorations! Many of my favorite titles don’t exist in my personal library other than as electrons, and I’m too busy with writing projects to offer a reading list here or at a site like LibraryThing, even though I may in the future. I’d rather spend my limited spare time actually reading (now playing on my XO screen: Beautiful Children). Even so, I can understand the urge to let books serve as social objects, at least virtually, and I like LibraryThing’s use of books as ways to connect people with similar interests.

The big-screen TV angle

But how about Real Life, offline? What to do about friends who visit your home rather than running across you on the Net? Well, here’s a suggestion for both the publishing and consumer electronics industries. Suppose big-screen televisions could display covers of e-books you’ve read, and maybe p-books, too?

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By David Rothman

“…she weakens her argument by ranting with an elitist tone against modern life with its slang, informality and new gadgets. Having downloaded her book to my digital reader, I found her hostility to eBooks silly.” – USA Today reviewer Deirdre Donahue on Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason.

The TeleRead take: E-books can expand the range of books available and make them usable in new ways; that’s hardly a threat to the national IQ. The challenge is to blend them in well with local schools and libraries and encourage young people to love immersive reading—as opposed to simply flitting from link to link. I haven’t read the Jacoby book yet, but certainly would agree with many of the points she reportedly makes, and I hope she’ll reconsider her condemnation of E.

Related: Dumber and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?, in the New York Times.

By David Rothman

The iPhone is a big hit among TeleBlog readers if you go by a poll from some months back, which showed that half either owned a phone or were planning to buy one. Apple let people down, however, by not making the iPhone and the related iPod touch models very friendly to software from third-party developers.

Now that’s about to change with the March 6 release of an official software developers kit. Yep, Apple has actually set a definite date now. What a way—deliberately or not—to celebrate Read an E-Book Week!

By David Rothman

Could a better Kindle have come from a design student in Australia than from the Amazon pros?

Nedzad Mujcinovic, winner of a design award at Monash University, come up with the Livre, the e-book concept above. I actually prefer the Sony Reader’s looks. But I love the idea of a multitouch interface to simplify matters for users; just keep on mind that this would have significantly jacked up the Kindle’s $400 cost. Click here for a full-sized view. In Engadget’s words:

“The system uses an e-ink screen overlaid with a touch surface, thus forgoing the multitudinous buttons of the Kindle for an ultra-simple, gesture-based input scheme. Pages can be turned by sliding your finger from corner to corner, though double- and triple-finger gestures will advance the book by ten and 50 pages, respectively. Most notable for real book fans is the inclusion of a leather stitched cover, meant to evoke the look and feel of the device’s analog counterpart.”

So, gang, what do you think?

By David Rothman

Rita Toews, creator of Read An E-Book Week, was kind enough to explain the corrected dates. Thanks, Rita!  – David

As you mentioned, David, Read An E-Book Week is a different date each year because of the way the month starts.  In 2002 I originally registered it as the second full week of March, but over the years it has crept to the second week of March. I didn’t do the promoting last year, and this year when I made up the press release I used the second full week of March.

When the error was brought to my attention I tried to correct it, but a lot of press releases had gone out.  Mea culpa.

The Biff Mitchell dates were from a few years back when he promoted the week while I was out of the country.

I’ve redone the site with the correct days and had hoped that anyone interested in the week would visit the site and see that the dates runs from March 2 – 8th.

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By David Rothman

The independent OLPC News has taken aim at an OLPC copycat computer selling for $195: One Elonex Copycat Per Laptop Company. The $195 is about what the OLPC charges governments. Under the recently expired Give One Get One program, individuals could pay $400 to buy a  laptop for themselves and a child in a developing country.

Also just out is the Aware A-Book AW-300, shown here. Meanwhile VirtualHosting.com has written up the Top 5 Sub-$300 Laptops—that’s VH’s wordings. First one mentioned is the Intel Classmate.

By David Rothman

William F. Buckley, Jr., my political opposite but a gung-ho booster of e-books and the TeleRead proposal, calling for a well-stocked national digital library system, blended in with local libraries and schools, is dead at the age of 82. RIP, Bill. From a USA Today blog:

“National Review Online, an outgrowth of the magazine Buckley founded, describes his death at The Corner: I’m devastated to report that our dear friend, mentor, leader, and founder William F. Buckley Jr., died overnight in his study in Stamford, Connecticut. After year of illness, he died while at work; if he had been given a choice on how to depart this world, I suspect that would have been exactly it. At home, still devoted to the war of ideas.”

Even while fighting his wars, however, WFB had his share of liberal friends, among them John Kenneth Galbraith, and he could be surprisingly open-minded on matters ranging from marijuana use to, yes, TeleRead, about which he said:

“Andrew Carnegie, if he were alive, would probably buy TeleRead from Mr. Rothman for $1, develop the whole idea at his own expense, and then make a gift of it to the American people.”

“Bracing idea”

WFB was talking up TeleRead as early as the the 1990s, recommending it in a syndicated column to presidential candidates.

In another column, written in 1993, he said, “It is a bracing idea, the notion that a student can go to the public library and read via TeleRead any book he wished to read, or any magazine. That a few years down the line the young people would have TeleRead computers of their own, even as everyone now has a television set.”

Gates as Carnegie?

Bill Gates, alas, though often likened to Carnegie, has yet to act. And if he did, I’d worry about the use of proprietary formats and other gotchas. May he someday prove my concerns wrong!

I myself an open to a variety of business models, but would favor a mix of public and private approaches. That’s the best way to encourage widespread access to e-books, full diversity of content, intellectual freedom and fair compensation for writers and publishers, for whom TeleRead mustn’t be the only alternative. TeleRead calls not just for online libraries but also full and systematic integration of them with Real World schools and libraries. Yes, that means close attention to issues such as hardware and proper preparation of teachers and libraries. You can read an early version of the TeleRead idea—it’s evolved over the years—in the last chapter of Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier.

Meanwhile Wikipedia, which many would consider an e-book, has already updated its Buckley entry—one more vindication of Bill’s belief in the technology.

Technorati Tags: William F. Buckley,Buckley,WFB,National Review

By David Rothman

Here’s the mystery of the week—about a Week, cap W: “Read an E-book Week” or however you spell it. Does anyone know what days it really covers? Possibilities:

–March 9-15 (starting on a Sunday). Those are the dates in a post we published February 17 based on a news release from Canadian writer Rita Toews. Yep, we used exactly the information Rita gave us, which jibes with the lowdown she gave us in 2003.

–March 2-8 (again, a Sunday start)). Those are her current dates. Why the correction? Her site says, “Rita Toews created Read an E-book Week in 2002.” Shouldn’t she know the dates? Why didn’t she stick to March 9-15? Any legalities involved? One Robin Whitman—I don’t know who he or she is—has just sent us a “correction” mentioning March 2-8. Doe Robin have a trademark on the term? At any rate Robin just said, “Read an ebook week.” No TM mentioned and no caps, even though I’d expect them. So maybe not.

–March 6-12 (starting on Tuesday). That’s in a Feb. 6 press release from writer Biff Mitchell, described as a “Canadian Spokesperson” for the e-book week. It refers to Rita and says, “According to Chase’s Calendar of Events, this March 6 to 12 is Read an eBook Week.” Notice the spelling? And why the Tuesday start and those particular dates?

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By David Rothman

Was Random House really giving away free PDFs of Beautiful Children, the much-talked-about bestseller by Charles Brock, at least through midnight on Friday? Must be. The TeleBlog’s Paul Biba obtained the book for himself that way. Way to go, Paul! But right now I can’t get through to the download address. Anyone else having problems? The beautifulchildren.net domain seems unreachable as I write this (update: not everyone is having problems; meanwhle here’s an AP story).

But wait! An Amazon page works fine—scroll down for the download link, which might change. You may want to use Mobipocket Desktop to turn the PDF into a format fit for a handheld. In the future, I’d hope, Random will use the IDPF’s .epub standard to eliminate the need for such hassles.

The Book Itself

Read the reviews in the New York Times, Washington Post and Publisher’s Weekly about this coming-of-age novel written by a pawnbroker’s son.

Some big questions—going by the reviews: Why would a 12-year-old in a Las Vegas suburb run away from his loving parents? And what does the book say about generational wars? Or another theme, the sexual landscape today? No, this is family-type fare. For what it’s worth, however, as of now, Amazon readers are rating the book three-and-a-half stars out of five.

The DRM angle

Meanwhile kudos to Random House. I hope that Random will next think about experimenting again with sales of DRMless books, perhaps with watermarking–just anything to get around the present mess. Yes, I meant “experiment again.” In a past Fictionwise experiment, Random House did try sales of DRMless books by new writers. Never did find out what happened.

Here’s another idea. The current freebie of Beautiful Children isn’t DRMed, and perhaps one possibility would be to sell nonDRMed versions for a longer time than Random is offering the free B.C. samples. Either way, Random would be creating buzz for the book online.

Now that Random is dropping DRM for most audio books—the company is still keeping watermarking—it truly would be timely to try the same approach for e-books. Go by Real Life, not what the DRM peddlers claim.

Reminder: Download before midnight on Friday. If you don’t, you can find DRMed versions on sale for Mobipocket, Microsoft Reader and Adobe Reader 7 and perhaps other formats. Yep, I see there’s a for-sale Kindle version. Oh, for the days when .epub’s the norm and I don’t have to worry about these details!

Technorati Tags: Random House,Fictionwise,Beautiful Children,Charles Brock

By Paul Biba

I guess going to the O’Reilly conference got me on some new mailing lists because the following came in just a few minutes ago from Random House:

Building on the momentum created by the publication of Charles Bock’s debut novel BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN—a novel Newsweek recently called “the book of the moment”–the Random House Publishing Group will offer the entire book as a free PDF download from 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, February 27 until midnight on Friday, February 29.  The free download, which can be shared, emailed or printed, will be available on www.beautifulchildren.net/read.

In a unique collaboration, Random House has also invited both chain and independent online retailers to participate.  Thus far, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com, Bordersstores.com; Booksamillion.com, Powells.com and Northshire.com have agreed to make the file available to their customers.

Actually the book is available now, I just downloaded it.  I then going to use pdflrfwin to convert the PDF to a lrf for my Sony Reader.  This great freeware utility works really well.  More on it later.

Does this mean that publishers are finally getting the message?

By David Rothman

The Cybook Gen3 E Ink machine sold out again, according to Bookeen, but the company says a new batch will start reaching customers in March—first come, first served. Meanwhile the company has announced the $249 “Epaper Art frame.”

The aluminum frame “merges” with the Cybook to become an “objet d’art’” and let you “view and share your pictures, photos and digital works of art. Each frame is unique, and numbered on the back. They are made to order and delivered after four weeks. Once the Cybook has been slid into the back, the frame becomes the best means to appreciate the beauty of the fine images on Epaper.” More details are here.

So, gang, what do you think? Is anyone ordering this? Why or why not? And does anybody frequent an art-oriented forum? It might be fascinating to get some reaction from the image-oriented.

By David Rothman

E-Book tech, back-list digitization, copyright and social media, DRM lessons from the music industry—those were a few of the dozens of topics at O’Reilly’s recent Tools of Change conference. Didn’t go? Well, now you can at least check out the Web-posted presentations.

An entertainment media expert’s PDF, on music and DRM from an e-book perspective, serves up a snappy reply to a quote from the RIAA’s lawsuit against the Diamond Rio.

“We filed this lawsuit because unchecked piracy on the Internet threatens the development of a legitimate marketplace that consumers want,” said the RIAA. And then, on the next page, comes a pithy observation from the author of the PDF, Medialoper contributor Kirk Biglione, a consultant with Oxford Media Works: “Actually consumers wanted portable MP3.”

The Kindle and the music biz

Applicable to e-books? You bet—in fact, even more so. People don’t want to read e-books just on their Kindles, however portable the tablets are. Readers also would like to be able to display the same Amazon e-books on cellphones and PDAs and desktops. Biglione noted that fifty percent of Fictionwise’s gross revenue comes from non-DRMed books. And his presentation also took a jab at eBabel, a blight that DRM of course worsens since the DMCA prevents you from converting books from one encrypted format to another (that’s my opinion and wording: I wasn’t at the Biglione talk).

Warning to Amazon worshippers

Publishers dreaming of a nice, orderly Amazon-centric industry, meanwhile, might ponder a quote Biglione dug up from Douglas Morris, CEO of Universal Music Group: “We were just grateful that someone was selling online. The problem is, he [Steve Jobs] became the gatekeeper. We make a lot of money from him, and suddenly you’re wearing golden handcuffs.” Why would Amazon’s Jeff Bezos be any different?

The bottom line according to Biglione: Consumers value “reasonable pricing,” “wide selection” and “interoperability, preferably DRM free.”

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