TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for March, 2008

By David Rothman

The nurses and the social worker agreed. “Hearing,” they all more or less said, “is the last thing to go.” At 5:30 p.m. today my mother, always a good listener when my sister and I needed her, died at 94 of congestive heart failure in a rest home in Springfield, Virginia.

I don’t know what the final words she heard were, just that we encouraged her to let go when there was no more fighting to do. Dorothy and I, in fact, tried not speaking to her, despite our wishes to the contrary, so she wouldn’t linger on in pain—congestive heart failure isn’t as gentle a death as the medical gobbledygook might suggest to the ignorant—and within an hour my mother was dead. The intervals between the heaves of her chest grew longer, until at last the moaning stopped and she was still.

My mother had us late in life and would have been 95 in November. The Titanic had sunk only a year or so before her birth, and on Publishers Weekly’s bestseller list in 1913, Pollyanna was number eight in fiction—safe within even today’s abbreviated public domain.

Lessons from my favorite Luddite

However keen I am on e-books for the elderly, I could not win Mom over, but she enjoyed share of her paper books—from the best-sellers of Herman Wouk, years ago, to, more recently, Nicholas Sparks—along with tunes from Broadway musicals and trips to Nags Head and Fourth of July celebrations at the neighborhood swimming pool and German chocolate icebox, the recipe of which I’ll try to reproduce here in time. Is it really true that chocolate, gooey ladyfingers and whipped cream will prolong life, especially with cherries atop this phenomenon of a dessert? Well, it worked for Mom.

To tell you the truth, except for TV and a fondness for the telephone, almost a flesh-and-blood appendage for her, my mother was a bit of a Luddite. I think she prided herself on avoidance of gadgets and tech as much as—until her old age, when she had no choice—she did on her avoidance of doctors. The phone, moreover, was hardly a replacement for all the bridge games and PTA and garden club meetings and coffees klatches with temple friends.  She believed strongly in community and continuity in the old-fashioned senses and was also a regular at community potluck suppers in her younger days; what’s more, she and her food were always available to comfort the sick or those in mourning. Now her friends can return the favors.

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By David Rothman

Several hundred Sony Readers will soon reach Random House staffers, according to Publishers Weekly—this on top of other Reader-related adoptions at companies such as Hachette, S&S and St. Martin’s.

Manuscripts will get to Random’s out-of-town sales reps faster and without any paper for them to lug around. And that’s not all for publishers using the Reader. “We looked at how much we were spending on paper, postage, ink,” Phil Madens at Hachette is quoted. “A 400-page manuscript would cost $7 to print. In the first couple of seasons, the Reader will pay for itself.” Hachette is using readers in editorial and sales alike—also in the plans of S&S and St. Martin’s, which hasn’t done a full rollout but is optimistic. “We started this around last Thanksgiving,” Hachette’s Madens says. “I’ve been here 17 years, and I’ve never seen anything accepted so quickly.”

So if publishers are so gung ho on e-book readers for internal use, just when will they go all the way on E? How about experimenting with no DRM or with social DRM, so E is less Rube Goldbergish for consumers—and then ordinary mortals can get their books faster, including those outside the States? And if the publishers can lean on the IDPF to develop the promising but flawed .epub standard to the max and in a timely way, then so much the better.

In other e-gizmo news, Bookeen says a firmware upgrade for the Cybook Gen3 is due in the first week of April (via MobileRead).

By David Rothman

Over the weekend we published some eye-opening numbers from the Publishing Trends newsletter—check ‘em out if you haven’t already.

So how many e-books are major publishers in the U.S. really offering? Would you believe that at this point, even Random House has fewer than 7,000 e-titles available, a little short of Wiley’s number. And HarperCollins and S&S? Just 4,000 each. Penguin, Harlequin and Hachette? Even fewer, individually. While Holtzbrinck subsidiaries aren’t in the stats, I doubt their inclusion would change things that much. For perspective, remember that Amazon’s Kindle store carries more than 110,000 books, newspapers and blogs, meaning that just a minority of its offerings are probably coming from these majors, and of course the K-store’s entire inventory is minuscule compared to the millions of commercial p-books out there.

Clearly a shortage of content from big publishers remains an issue in the E vs. P debate, in spite of the number of small e-press titles out there and in spite of hefty increases in recent years.

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By David Rothman

The 4G Win XP version of the Asus Eee PC will apparently go on sale April 9 at Best Buy in the States for $399. At all BB stores? Not sure.

Big pro from an e-book perspective: You can use the same gizmo to download and read your e-books and run Mobipocket and the others to read DRM-infested bestsellers—beyond which the Eee can do much more than the similarly priced Kindle.

Con: The res of the 7-inch screen is 800 x 480. Some folks might want to wait until a pricier model comes out with a bigger, better screen of 8.9 inches with 1024 x 600 res.

Meanwhile you can read a hands-on that from Laptop magazine, source of the above info, and watch Laptop’s related videos.

Related: Ubergizmo and Techmeme roundup. Also see Tiger ad for $299 linux version of the basic Eee.

By David Rothman

Jeeze. When will e-textbook publishers stop hurting themselves and experiment more widely with no DRM, social DRM and other alternatives—including textbooks bundled with courses, thereby reducing the incentive for piracy?

What is especially infuriating about DRM for textbooks is that students would prefer to be able to read the same book on cellphones as on laptops. DRM’s inherent eBabel makes this harder.

Yes, some publishers can put books online without DRM and use timed, browser-based viewing. But then the student can’t keep the material for later reference. And even with precautions in place, nothing is copy-proof anyway. Not to mention the need for reliable WiFi connections.

For the latest account of textbook publishers’ obstinacy—would that they pay more attention to the music industry!— read Keith Regan’s piece in Mass Tech.

I know. Students are supposed to be more likely to pirate than the population at large. But I wonder if the publishers have truly investigated alternatives such as social DRM, along with other forms of watermarking.

The bright side: McGraw-Hill says E versions are available for 95 percent of the titles in its catalog.

By Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti shared with us a moving remembrance of Steven T. Florio, ex-CEO of Condé Naste, who mentored her. Both were the first in their families to reach college, and among other things, Sadi benefited from his book recommendations. Here’s an MP3 of Sadi’s podcast of “Losing Steve”—well worth your time even if you earlier read the essay.

If you haven’t already, why not subscribe to our podcasts, mostly from Sadi?

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

“Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits,” Albert Einstein said in a quotation I picked up from by jan on freedom.

“Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.”

Einstein lived in a different age from ours, that’s for sure. I’m more worried that my students’ lives are so frantic and busy—like mine—that they hardly have time to read and reflect. I have to schedule the time in my calendar. Reading as a task. Indeed, people who manage to find time for reading may be the most industrious among us. Seriously, though, I have a big sense that the so-called reading crisis has less to do with television and the Internet than it does with our frantic American sense of having to get things done.

Or, given the realities of workplace “efficiency”—a code for fewer people doing more work—it’s not just the frantic sense;  it’s the frantic reality of having to get stuff done. Or else. At the end of the day, who has the energy for the work reading requires? Much easier to curl up with American Idol.

Moderator: One advantage of E, of course, as many e-book boosters have noted, is that you can whip out your cellphone or PDA and read in the grocery line or a doctor’s waiting room. So you can carve out time for reading that you might otherwise lack. Granted, you might not be able to do as much justice to your book as you could by focusing on it at your armchair. But that’s better than no reading.

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By Joe Wikert

As a publisher focusing on the professional IT sector, I ask myself this question a lot: What does the technology add?  Is this new tool or release measurably different from the others?  Will it enable users to create products faster, less expensively, with more useful features—or all of the above?

I found myself asking the same question when I recently read about this project, The 21 Steps, by Charles Cumming, which is part of Penguin’s We Tell Stories initiative.  In The 21 Steps, Cumming uses Google’s satellite imagery to help tell the story.  Different?  Yes.  Functional use of the technology to enhance the reading experience?  I’m not so sure.

Lasted just three chapters…

To be fair, I only got through the first three chapters before I lost interest.  Perhaps it’s because I’m not into fiction, but I found the text and imagery integration lacking as well.  I didn’t see the benefit to having the animated movements on the satellite images.  I also got pretty tired of clicking again and again, just to read the next sentence or two.  In short, if technology is added to the formula for something like this, I feel it should improve the overall experience; in this case, it seemed to weigh it down.

I’m also not the sort of person who thinks in terms of satellite views.  I’m more of a street level guy, and I suspect I’m not alone.  After all, we see and experience things from a street-view view, not an overhead one, so it forces you to constantly adjust your perspective as you’re reading through the screens.

…but love Penguin’s experimentation

Before anyone jumps down my throat on this, please realize that I absolutely love the fact that Penguin is experimenting with technology on this project. If I published into the fiction area, I’d be jealous that I didn’t think of this approach.  The lessons that can be learned from the pioneers like Penguin will help benefit everyone in the long run.

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By David Rothman

Should you date or marry someone whose reading list doesn’t jibe closely with yours? What if your potential beloved hasn’t even heard of this guy—Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin?

Oh, the horrors related in a New York Times essay today, It’s Not You, It’s Your Books! I’ll side with those who don’t filter out possible mates by their reading tastes, however revealing they might be. “After all,” Rachel Donadio points out, “a couple may love ‘The Portrait of a Lady,’ but if one half identifies with Gilbert Osmond and the other with Isabel Archer, they may have radically different ideas about the relationship.” True.

Close to home

Here in the TeleBlog’s inner sanctum, my wife loves Jane Austen even if she’s hardly at the Republic of Pemberley level; I don’t, and I’ll be damned if I pretend I to. Thank you, Carly, for standing me.

Lately, gasp, as a reader unhappy with the less-than-perfect contrast between the background and text on E Ink displays and as simply a longtime fan of P, Carly has even reverted back to paper books. On top of that, she has always been more of a video and pop culture person than I am. But guess what? I couldn’t think of a woman more tolerant of my faults or more eager to alert me when she does run across something I should read, watch or listen to, and in the bargain I get someone bright and curious, in her own way, who often enjoys reading software documentation. I’ll take Carly over a Pushkin-loving Luddite, especially since I’m hardly a fan of his works in the first place. If you want to find a wired Pushkin lover, as opposed to a lover in the SO sense, that’s what LibraryThing or Facebook might be for. Not to mention interactive e-books! I’d rather read Dickens, Gissing, Fitzgerald, Roth or my other favorites in solitude, but for those who think otherwise—well, check out BookGlutton, one of whose owners, Aaron Miller, has just written a cogent essay on the need for the International Digital Publishing Forum to get serious about standards for annotations.

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By David Rothman

Could your GPS gizmo not only display e-books on a nice LCD someday, but also let you shop for them, via a wireless connection?

And how about geo-tied pointers that would automatically come up to show local books of interest or highlight literary landmarks? What’s more, suppose you could even search for p-book stores in the area and, in some cases, even peruse their stocks from your car if the inventories were online?

Check out TeleBlog regular Paul Biba’s GPS Passion review of Dash Express (larger photo here), and tell us what you think. Hey, Paul, you gave me a softball question in challenging me to come up with an e-book angle. Thanks for the heads-up.

Another angle: The Kindle itself as a possible GPS gizmo.

By David Rothman

In ‘06 major publishing houses individually offered 1,000-3,000 e-book titles and 250-3,000 e-audio ones, and the whole e-book market was $12-$15M, says Publishing Trends, a well – regarded newsletter for industry insiders.

And now? “Many of these numbers have more than doubled,” PT’s April issue reports, “and publishers are increasingly providing digital content in a variety of forms.”

You already know the wholesale revenue stats for e-books of 12-15 trade publishers, provided directly from the International Digital Publishing Forum. Now—beyond the newsletter’s chart reproduced here, showing percentages of March 28 New York Times bestsellers in different formats—here are some other gems from the diligent numbers-crunchers at PT:

• Wiley leads in the number of e-titles now available, 7K, according to PT’s March survey. Other publishers: Random House, close to 7K; S&S and HarperCollins, around 4K; Penguin, a bit under 3K; Harlequin, somewhat over 2K; Hachette, 1K. I suspect that with .epub in use at Hachette as the sole distribution format, the number of e-titles will soon be much closer to those from other majors. Even with Holtzbrinck not included, it’s clear that big-time commercial publishers have a long way to go before they catch up with the public domain total. PD titles exceed more than 1.5 million if you include total scans (even if not all are online right now now, and even if a scan isn’t as usable as a book in, say, .epub). Not to mention all the titles already online from smaller commercial e-publishers! Aren’t the big boys undertaking mass digitization of backlists? Just when will these efforts show in in the stats? I want to see modern classics galore online, not just works published before 1923.
• Random House is the e-audio leader by far with almost 7K titles. Others: S&S, 2K; HarperCollins, 1K; Hachette, fewer than 500; Penguin and Harlequin, probably no more than 200. As with the other stats, I’m working from PT’s bar charts.
• Wiley is the print-on-demand champ with 7K titles. Others: S&S, 3K; Random House, a little over 2K; Hachette, 1,000. Given Wiley’s heavy focus on tech books, where speed is imperative, I’m not surprised.
• Kindle fiction titles from “the extended New York Times bestseller list” for March 30 are cheapest, at $10. Others—averages: Sony, $15; Mobipocket, Microsoft, Adobe and Palm/eReader, all in upper teens or lower twenties. Prices are from the Kindle Store, Sony’s e-book store, eBooks.com (Mobi, Microsoft, Adobe) and the Palm eBook store. In fairness to the nonKindle and nonSony formats, let me point out that some independent retailers are pricing more aggressively than those mentioned as sources.
• Kindle and Sony lead in the number of fiction and nonfiction bestsellers available by format—both around 80 percent. See chart for other formats.

Useful stats, PT, thanks! Yep, there are more numbers in the actual newsletter—for example, nonfiction price comparisons for different formats, as well as statistics related to e-audio, plus numbers telling how generous publishers are with e-book excerpts on sites. Subscription info is here.

Also of interest in PT: Int’l Bestsellers: Fairs! Frauds! Florence!, Industry Ink Slingers (the TeleBlog’s mentioned), Storytelling at South by Southwest 2008, and Search Gets Richer, and Harder.

Detail: I want to check with PT about the 250-3,000 audio titles in ‘06. A typo? Was that actually 2,500-3,000? I don’t know.

Update, April 1: PT had it right. Those were numbers for individual publishers, with the 250 being at the low end. I’ve changed the lead of the present post to make that clear.

Technorati Tags: Publishing Trends,IDPF,International Digital Publishing Forum

By David Rothman

“Here is my major problem with the situation—their insistence on dictating to us, and everyone else, these new terms over the phone in a high-pressure manner. The fact that they were unwilling to put anything in writing seem to me to suggest that, at a minimum, they knew what they were doing was questionable. Moreover, we are not Amazon’s customers. Lightning Source is their customer. That is who they have the relationship with to distribute our books. They stepped over that business relationship to pit us against Lightning Source. I consider that unethical.” – Post from Booklocker co-owner Richard Hoy to pod_publishers list.

Details: That’s me, not the BL guy, alluding to the Standard Oil comparison made in the TeleBlog post headlined Of oil lamps, Print on Demand, and e-book machines. Furthermore, I’ll not accuse Amazon of violating restraint of trade laws, Rockefeller fashion, or of any other crimes. That’s for lawyers to determine. But in the ethics department, Jeff Bezos is getting deeper and deeper into Standard territory.

In fairness to Amazon: The arm-twisting, while deplorable, might be limited in reach at this point. So far the real pressure seems to be against subsidy-book publishers, according to a list post by Pete Masterson, a publishing expert—as opposed to single book publishers or smaller publishers. True? And what about larger publishers? Comments welcome.

By Aaron S. Miller, CTO of BookGlutton, a Web-based community of readers

Moderator: Aaron Miller is CTO of BookGlutton.com, a Web-based community for e-book readers. He has 11 years of experience building Web sites for startups and established clients, including WellsFargo.com, Playstation.com, and Macys.com. Welcome to the ranks of TeleBlog contributors, Aaron, and keep the ePub criticism coming! Let’s hope that the IDPF will listen to all sides. Also see Tamas Simon’s essay. – D.R.

Links, bookmarks and annotations all depend on one important thing: the ability to uniquely identify a specific passage or point in a book. And it’s easy with paper. We put daggers and numbers where our notes belong. We highlight, clip, underline. Sometimes we just gesture at a page. But with a digital book, it’s not so easy. A digital book, materially, is something less—so we expect more. Go figure.

Humans need a computer to understand our paper-bound notions of footnotes and margin-notes so that a computer can do what computers are good at. Then we can share those notes, add our own, hide them, rearrange them, count them, abstract them into graphs, delete them. Moreover, we want pica-perfect pointers into texts, maybe even pixel-pointers, so that we have no doubts about where we left off, which syllable we’re analyzing, or where we want to jump next. To a computer, a book is a model, an abstraction of what it really is, and the more computers agree on that abstraction and how to interact with it, the better off we bookish humans will be. Too bad it’s easier said than done.

Key revelations

Smart folks of the digital book world have figured out some key things lately:

1. XML is a book’s best friend. It’s extensible, document-centric, thriving. It’s being used for .mobi, .lit, .epub and more generalized things like DocBook, ODT, and Docx. It can be criticized for bloat, but it’s open, extensible and a kind parent to XHTML. It happens to be more perfect for books than plain text.
2. Books are going Web. They’ve been on-line for awhile, in huge numbers, but until now, no one has taken the time or spent the money to care for them. By “care” I mean care in presentation, due diligence in cataloging, and measurement of the benefits and drawbacks of various technologies.
3. E-books will be cool. Right now, they’re not. At least not iTunes cool. Right now, they’re in the position the MP3 was in 1997. This was when audiophiles scoffed at the format as inferior. Half of them observed that CDs sounded better, and the other half said vinyl sounded best, and then proceeded to make fun of the ones who preferred CDs. Now, it seems, music fans realize that we can all co-exist, and that MP3s are cool in their own right. Book-loving groups aren’t so unified.

Whiffs of potential

Still, we can sense the potential. People are realizing there’s more possibility than the miles of typography-bereft scrolling and the various shopping-cart sites hawking trade at twice the price of paper. Amazon, a web company, is scrambling to figure out how to bridge worlds, extending the tradition of PHB (Proprietary Hardware for Books) while simultaneously trying to leverage their Web properties. Meanwhile publishers can be overheard babbling about widgets and blogs, and when they actually figure out what they’re saying, we’ll see an A-ha moment about DRM.

From a development angle, browser technology is quickly approaching a tipping point where typography and presentation will rival that of print and E Ink. Unlike E Ink, Web technologies are based on software, and this creates freedom and speed. And unlike print, which seems to get cheapened and not cheaper everyday, they’ll allow more at a lower cost. Someday we’ll all use something like E Ink, but not many of us will ever use E Ink as it is now.

More people can be seen firing up their MacBooks in Panera and Starbucks to get their dose of blogs and news. Younger generations, as any newspaper publisher will tell you, no longer read any news on paper.

Take note

This is all positive news. But in all this activity, no one has given much lip-service to a fundamental technology here: annotation. Granted, it’s not for everyone. But it rests upon the ability to point to fragments of documents, even as those fragments change.

The Web can be seen as an example of the perfect space to solve this problem, or a sad example of how annotation has been ignored, depending on one’s camp. Those in the Berners-Lee camp, if there is such a place, would look to the Semantic Web for standards and solutions. But those who look to Ted Nelson will tell you we didn’t implement everything we needed when we invented the Web. Nelson’s original concept included annotations and unbreakable links as part of the fabric of hypermedia. Now, we’re stuck improvising these things on top of a core infrastructure that was never intended for them. And we’re faced with the perplexing question: What happens to metadata when a resource disappears—or worse, when it changes?

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By David Rothman

John Updike was POed enough at the prospect of techies snippetizing his novels. Now imagine whole books written in snippets, with Digg-style ratings of newly added sentences, which can be voted up or down. Penguin Books UK and others have experimented with more primitive, wiki-style novels, but the LiveBook project takes such efforts to a new level, technically. Artistically? No threat to Updike, I’m sure.

Marshall “The Mediu is the Message” McLuhan just might like this. LiveBook’s app on FaceBook is called Helen and her Facebook, and it’s about a social net newbie. On the Bebo service, meanwhlie, LiveBook has started up the similar Brian from Bebo, featuring a male character.

You can read more details about LiveBook and other crowdsourced fiction in a terrific little round-up from ReadWrite Web. So, gang, what do you think about the broader ramifications here? I love experimentation, but in terms of self improvement, at least, as opposed to recreation, might the typical reader be better off reading a good, old-fashioned novel with carefully developed characters? Will a whole generation grow up creating books without learning from the great writers of the past? Or will young people still read the classics and other great literature and actually use the new medium to sharpen their skills? Here’s my take. Participating in a crowdsourced novels, although fun for some, is like filling in the dotted lines, as opposed to creating art or first-rate entertainment from scratch.

By David Rothman

“For about $150 anyone can access the United States’ multi-billion dollar GPS program. GPS Outdoors: A Practical Guide for Outdoor Enthusiasts shows readers how to plug in and enhance most any outdoor experience.” – Wowio, an ad-supported company that offer the Guide for free.

More details: The Guide is for outdoor people ranging from hikers to “a climber pre-scouting the routes up Mount Shasta.” GPS just might save your life. Amazon reviews of the book are here. Paul Biba, a TeleBlog regular, is a GPS expert, and I’d welcome his thought on the guide. Alas, people outside the States can’t download Wowio books. But the company says that’ll change soon.

Other freebie spottings:

–David Drake’s fantasy novel Lord of the Isles, in PDF, HTML and Mobi from TOR’s weekly freebie program. Not sure if this is available to newcomers to the program, but sign up and give it a try.

–Wikipedia in Tome Raider format (found via MobileRead) and Scott Sigler’s novel Infected (MobileRead).

–Dictionary program for Sony E Ink machines (MobileRead).

By Tamas Simon

I’ve tried Sophie 1.0, and here’s the news: It’s more exciting to me than either E Ink machines or the IDPF’s .epub standard.

Ever since I heard about E Ink, I’ve been a big fan of it. But although I own a Sony Reader and read a lot, I don’t use the Sony. Let me explain why. The main benefit of E Ink is readability. Unfortunately this resulted in slow page-refresh times.

Negatives of today’s E Ink

Current E Ink devices:

• Are monochrome black and white.
• Offer slow page turns and screen refreshes—no video.
• Have slow CPUs – no interactivity.
• Essentially exist just offline offline, for all practical purposes.

Advancements will be coming out of the labs but practically that’s what we have today. 

This makes E Ink devices great for reading long “books” such as novels and lengthy collections of poetry—things that I’d classify classical literature. Unfortunately for E Ink devices, however,  the trend in reading or literacy if you like is quite the opposite.

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By David Rothman

How can Amazon bully publishers? In the wake of Jeff Bezos’s POD power grab, here are four ways listed by Andrew Savikas of O’Reilly Media—a publishing tech expert and general manager of O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference. Would the International Digital Publishing Forum and the Association of American Publishers kindly take notice?

All four ways would apply to one extent or another to e-book publishers—if not now, then in the future—and consumers, too, could suffer. Okay, here are the four:

1. “Data-driven lock-in”—for example, reader reviews. As Andrew notes, that can be good for end users. I’ll not quarrel with that. In fact, while I’m not an Amazon affiliate, I regularly link to Amazon pages because the interests of my readers come first. I’ll not play games. Credit where credit’s due!

2. “Format lock-in.” eBabel territory! Actually this would apply especially to e-books, as shown by Amazon’s refusal to let the Kindle render the IDPF .epub standard natively. Publishers may not get excited, until, as, as Andew notes, this “leads to…

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