TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Correction: Dr. Peter Watts not guilty of assault but felony obstruction

By Chris Meadows

Since the original news reports on Dr. Peter Watts’s conviction for “assault”, it has come out that the charge actually was not assault, and that charge was never offered to the jury. In a comment on a Port Huron Times-Herald’s article’s comment thread, one of the actual jurors writes:

Assault was never one of the charges. We were given one option… felony obstruction/resisting. I don’t know if the prosecutor dropped the assault prior to the jury convening, but it was never presented to us.

and in a different post (quoted by one of Dr. Watts’s friends in his own blog about the affair):

As a member of the jury that convicted Mr. Watts today, I have a few comments to make. The jury’s task was not to decide who we liked better. The job of the jury was to decide whether Mr. Watts "obstructed/resisted" the custom officials. Assault was not one of the charges. What it boiled down to was Mr. Watts did not follow the instructions of the customs agents. Period. He was not violent, he was not intimidating, he was not stopping them from searching his car. He did, however, refuse to follow the commands by his non compliance. He’s not a bad man by any stretch of the imagination. The customs agents escalated the situation with sarcasm and miscommunication. Unfortunately, we were not asked to convict those agents with a crime, although, in my opinion, they did commit offenses against Mr. Watts. Two wrongs don’t make a right, so we had to follow the instructions as set forth to us by the judge.

I am correcting the previous TeleRead story accordingly.

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Tim Carmody: E-books may have bright future on iPad

By Chris Meadows

Where the iPhone conquered your pocket, the iPad will conquer your backpack.

So says Tim Carmody on the Snarkmarket blog, where he puts down his thoughts about why e-books on the iPad will be more successful than some people think.

Carmody starts with five common reasons skeptics give that e-books won’t take off on the iPad, and notes that most of them aren’t all that new. (Though he does not address the oft-heard complaint that people will not want to read from LCD screens.)

He points out that those who buy the least expensive, 16-gig wifi-only iPad model will, unless they are somewhere with wifi, be limited to what they can carry on the device to read or watch—and 16 gigs will not hold a lot of movies but will hold plenty of e-books. He adds:

(This is actually why I suspect plain-jane, text-only books are going to have a long life as the de facto default for a while. Dedicated reading machines like the Kindle or Nook can’t support anything else, and more versatile portables like the iPad don’t have the built-in memory or everywhere-internet to support a whole library of these things. Add our inertial devotion to document formats like PDF and it may be a very long time before multimedia books or magazines become main­stream items.)

Carmody uses video games as another example of why people might try e-books. He writes that he had never been a mobile video gamer before he bought the iPhone, and indeed bought it mainly as a phone and portable Internet device. But since he already had the device and they were available, he eventually went ahead and bought some iPhone games, too.

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Palm’s future looks bleak

By Chris Meadows

Fifteen years ago, the device that singlehandedly created the PDA market, and also probably did the most to start the e-book ball rolling, was the humble Palm Pilot. It was truly a marvel for its time—which is why it is so sad to see Palm floundering today, an also-ran in the smartphone market behind Apple and Android-powered devices.

Palm’s stock prices hit a 52-week low on Friday after a lackluster earnings announcement, and analysts have downgraded their opinion of the stock to “sell”—with two analysts even lowering their price target to $0 (meaning that they think Palm’s stock prices will eventually hit that amount).

Gizmodo, who comes right out and says “You’d Be Crazy to Buy a Palm Now,” lays the blame largely at the feet of Palm’s lack of development partners, noting the new Palm device only has 2,000 apps available as opposed to Android’s 30,000 and iPhone’s 150,000. The devices are nifty, but simply do not have the same appeal as competing devices.

Engadget goes farther, listing an extremely comprehensive litany of mistakes Palm made in releasing and marketing the Pre, such as announcing the device significantly earlier than they were able to release it (so that all the excitement had died away by the launch date) and a lackluster ad campaign. It makes some suggestions for things Palm could do to try to pull out of it.

The question is, can anything save Palm now that the iPhone and Android are so well-entrenched—and now that everybody is going gaga over the iPad tablet?

Update: Ars Technica has another great Palm post-mortem.

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Ebook market exploding, says new iDPF survey

By Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords

The ebook market is growing faster as it grows larger.

The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) on Friday reported U.S. wholesale ebook sales for January, 2010 were $31.9 million, up 261 percent from the same month a year earlier.

To put this in perspective, I created the chart at left. The chart compiles annual ebook sales data from the Association of American Publishers. For 2010, I took the latest IDPF January data and annualized it.

The data is collected from only 12-15 U.S. trade publishers. This means it dramatically understates what’s really happening in ebooks, because thousands of large and small publishers, as well as tens of thousands of independent authors, aren’t reporting their data. The data also doesn’t capture ebooks sold outside traditional retail channels.

The above omissions in no way invalidate the data, because as an indicator of direction and momentum, the AAP/IDPF data provides the best publicly available trending information I’m aware of.

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Wired Magazine iPad edition to restrict outbound link functionality?

By Chris Meadows

Mac Slocum at O’Reilly Radar points out something interesting about Wired Magazine’s new iPad format.

According to an analysis on a Reuters blog, Wired is taking a closed-sandbox approach to outbound links with the magazine pieces—rather than calling the iPad’s Mobile Safari to open them, it will open them in a pop-up window within the Wired app itself—so that when it is closed, users will still be in the Wired app.

On the one hand, it is understandable that Wired might not want to chance dumping readers out of its app—especially given that this will mean their app closes due to the iPad’s presumed inability to multitask.

But on the other hand, as Slocum points out, this sort of arbitrary crippling of web usability does not make sense for a device as capable as the iPad. In fact, it sounds downright annoying.

On the gripping hand, the comment thread with Slocum’s article points out that iPhone Twitter clients do much the same thing already—opening URLs in a window within the client, with options to pop them out to Safari or send them to InstaPaper—so it is possible the iPad Wired will do the same.

In which case this really is a tempest in a teacup.

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Holcombe Publishing, new etextbook publisher in the UK

By Paul Biba

From a press release I received today:

Academic eBook publisher Holcombe Publishing has released its first publication, a book identifying how social systems shape current society. Holcombe Publishing aims to provide academic books at affordable prices, as well as providing a platform for academic authors to distribute and sell their work.

Colin Asquith, Holcombe Publishing’s Technical Director, said: “Holcombe Publishing was created with the aim of creating academic books which are both high quality and affordable. Many current academic books are expensive due to high publishing costs for low volumes, so starting with an eBook avoids us keeping our books out of the hands of interested readers.

You can find out more about the company and its first book, Systems, not People, Make Society Happen, by Michael King, here.

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Read and save your Kindle blogs with Kindle for the Mac, PC or other Kindle apps

By Stephen Windwalker, editor of The Kindle Nation

Originally posted at Kindle Nation Daily 3.18.2010

The new Kindle for Mac App, like earlier apps for the PC and other devices, allows you to download the latest edition of any Kindle edition blog to which you are a subscriber so that you can read it on your computer and keep it there as long as you like. This is a great way to save blog posts for future reference or research — or simply, in the case of blogs other than this one, because of their great literary quality. It can also be useful if there is a blog post that is full of useful links to which you want to return from time to time, because using Kindle for Mac or the other apps to click on any link in a blog, periodical or ebook will seamlessly take you to the destination web page without closing the Kindle App.

Ordinarily a Kindle edition blog is updated with each new blog so that you have a revolving snapshot of (up to) the 25 latest posts, but when you download a blog’s snapshot to your Kindle for Mac or PC you get to keep that snapshot with your Kindle for Mac or PC Home screen for as long as you wish, and even maintain multiple snapshots of any given blog.

It’s an easy process, and here are the steps. (Unfortunately, for those of you who are thinking along with me at home, this feature is not yet available for Kindle subscriptions to newspapers and magazines.)

Editor’s Note: the remaining part of the article is an illustrated summary of how to go through the steps. Unfortunately, it doesn’t reproduce well in the TeleRead blog format. Please see the original article if you need to follow Stephen’s instructions. PB.

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Publishers of children’s books important to survival of publishing

By Paul Biba

Resource Shelf picked up a good article from the Washington Post. Here is part of their their summary:

Michael Norris, an analyst for the media research firm Simba Information, said publishers of children’s books are “unbelievably important” to the survival of publishing as a whole. “If you think about the long-term future of the industry, the people who are reading ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ today will hopefully be reading a thick piece of literature in a few years.”

[Snip]

Children’s publishing is often viewed as a stable segment of the industry, thanks to reliable sales to parents and school libraries.

[Snip]

Nielsen BookScan reported that sales of juvenile books were the strongest of any category in 2008, rising 6 percent from 2007. In 2009, Nielsen reported, sales held mostly even. By contrast, last year adult hardcover and mass market paperbacks both declined nearly 4 percent, and trade paperbacks fell 2 percent.

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Laptop does a hands-on review of the Alex

By Paul Biba

The machine gets 3.5 out of 5 stars and the reviewer seems to like it a lot. One thing that interested me is that he says that Spring Design is working ewith 40 developers to create or modify apps for the device and a store should be available in June. He also includes a link to a Laptop Blog post on How to find Android Apps for your tablet, ereader or other large screen device.

All in all the review finds the machine a good experience, but questions whether its high price is worth it. The Alex has a $150 premium over the Kindle and the Nook, but, as the reviewer says, that premium buys you a true multitasking device that does both the basics and the extras well.

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Authors Guild warns members about Random House, HarperCollins e-royalty rate renegotiation

By Chris Meadows

Mediabistro’s Galleycat makes note of a two-page letter sent by the Authors Guild to its members in reference to letters that Random House and HarperCollins have sent its authors.

It seems that those two publishers are trying to get their writers to lock into 25% royalty rates on e-books. While this might look better than the 15% going rate on hardcovers, the Authors Guild warns that the terms may not be entirely desirable:

Authors and publishers have traditionally split the proceeds from book sales. Most sublicenses, for example, provide for a 50/50 split of proceeds, and the standard trade book royalty of 15% of the hardcover retail price, back in the days that industry standard was established, represented about 50% of the net proceeds of the sale of the book. We’re confident that the current practice of paying 25% of net on e-books will not, in the long run, prevail. Savvy agents are well aware of this. The only reason e-book royalty rates are so low right now is that so little attention has been paid to them: sales were simply too low to scrap over. That’s beginning to change.

The Guild advises authors try to retain the right to renegotiate terms after a couple of years, stipulate a “royalty floor” in their contract (such that the amount of money they get for each e-book sale is at minimum equivalent to the amount they would get from a print sale), make sure the terms do not adversely affect their reversion of rights clauses, make sure they are not signing away rights they already control—and if all else fails, wait for a better offer to come along as the market develops.

The royalty percentage increase was in part a reaction to the new agency pricing model that Apple and Amazon are going to, to give the writer a bigger chunk of the smaller monetary amount coming in. But it is still too early to tell whether this increase will really be enough.

Related: Authors Guild repudiates Random House e-book rights grab

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‘Piracy’: The terminology debate

By Chris Meadows

What’s in a name?

A lot, really. Take the issue of “piracy”—most commonly used in Internet circles to refer to unauthorized distribution of other peoples’ intellectual property. Its use in that sense actually pre-dates the Internet by a considerable length of time (see video at bottom). For a long time, a debate on whether this is an appropriate use of the term has raged.

Representing those who do not think the term is properly used, the Free Software Foundation has this to say:

Publishers often refer to copying they don’t approve of as “piracy.” In this way, they imply that it is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them. Based on such propaganda, they have procured laws in most of the world to forbid copying in most (or sometimes all) circumstances. (They are still pressuring to make these prohibitions more complete.)

If you don’t believe that copying not approved by the publisher is just like kidnapping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word “piracy” to describe it. Neutral terms such as “unauthorized copying” (or “prohibited copying” for the situation where it is illegal) are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as “sharing information with your neighbor.”

Of course, saying that the Free Software Foundation tends to think intellectual property is a bad idea in general is on the order of calling the Pacific Ocean “slightly damp,” but in a way this illustrates the point: those most inclined to protest the use of the word often tend to be those most inclined to favor the practice, or at least not believe it to be as bad as the content industry thinks. (Similar issues surround the word “theft”.)

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Two more potential iPad alternatives: WePad, Moby

By Chris Meadows

Earlier today, Paul mentioned that the HP slate might be a better device than an iPad. Here are another couple of devices that might make promising alternatives.

First, TechCrunch reports on German manufacturer Neofonie’s 11.6” 1366×768 (720P capable) WePad. (English datasheet PDF here.) Due next month, it has a larger multitouch screen, faster processor, USB, card reader, Flash, and even a webcam. It will run “a Linux derivate (sic) with Android on top,” meaning that it can install not only Android apps but also Adobe Air software from Neofonie.

The WePad is being pitched not only as a multimedia tablet, but also as an e-book reader that can read “all open standards” of e-book formats. Exact details about price are currently unavailable, but according to TechCrunch, Neofonie’s CEO claims it will be significantly cheaper than the iPad.

And speaking of significantly cheaper, Wired’s “Gadget Lab” blog reports semiconductor manufacturer Marvell has demonstrated a touch-sensitive 10” tablet at the unlikely price point of $99. The Moby would support Flash, could provide 1080P high-definition resolution, and could run Android or Windows Phone 7. It is aimed at students looking for an inexpensive way to access textbooks and the Internet.

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