TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for June, 2008

By David Rothman

While some publishers act as if the Kindle will be the iPod of e-books, Amazon is smartly hedging its bets with a version of Mobipocket for Java phones.

The public alpha is here.

Meanwhile you’ll recall that Mobipocket is also headed for the iPhone.

What’s more, the open source FBReader, which can handle Mobi, not just ePub, is to run on Google Android phone platform.

(Via MobileRead.)

By David Rothman

Guess what. As soon as I wrote this sentence and pressed Ctrl-S, presenting my creation in fixed form, it was copyrighted under my Creative Commons License. Well, maybe it took a Web post. I’ll let the lawyers argue that one. The real point here is that without registration, I still won’t enjoy full protection.

In the past I’d have had to struggle with paper forms if I wanted to do that. But no more.

Hooks for local apps someday?

"On Tuesday, the Copyright Office will throw the switch on a system called, creatively, the ‘electronic Copyright Office,’ or eCO," reports Ars Technica. "The system has been in beta for months, and it allows creators to submit copyright registrations and even some actual works directly through the tubes." The e-filing fee will be $35 rather than $45, and in some cases you may even be able to submit your actual work via the Net. Here’s the Copyright Office’s eCO link. Who knows what’s ahead for e-book authors and others? Perhaps local software with hooks into the Copyright Office’s systems? Perhaps even in e-book creation programs? Let’s all dream in unison.

Thanks and congrats, Marybeth!

Meanwhile congratulations to Marybeth Peters, copyright register, and her staff. Next step? Can we get her reading e-books if she isn’t already. Last I knew, she didn’t even own a home PC. Her personal use of technology, I suspect, would make her more empathetic toward consumers on issues such as DRM.

Meanwhile does anyone outside the U.S. care to enlighten us on whether there’s online registration locally?

Photo: Shot shows the the James Madison Memorial Building housing the Copyright Office along with other government activities.

(Thanks to Peter Brantley.)

By David Rothman

"We all love e-books because you can take that one download and send it to all your friends—so you have twenty of them instead of just one, and the publisher can’t track you down or do anything about it.”

Did a librarian from Baytown, Texas, in fact say the above at a "Sci-Fi Fantasy Convention in Houston"? If so, what’s the full context, and might she want to apologize?

The quote comes to us by way of Cornelia Amiri, a fifty-one-year-old novelist with 5,580 friends on MySpace. I don’t know Cornelia, aka the Celtic Romance Queen. But I doubt she’d go out of her way to alienate librarians or fans. If anything, she strikes me as more tolerant of pass-alongs than would be most writers and publishers.

Cornelia: Treat E like P

"I told her it’s fine to pass a copy of a downloaded book to a friend when you’ve finished it the same way you might do with a paperback or hardback book," Cornelia recalls in a TeleBlog comment. "But per etiquette and as a legal issue you are supposed to delete the copy you have. I had to say something, I just had to. The comment made on a panel like that made me feel she was encouraging or endorsing people to do that.

"I knew she knew it was wrong," Cornelia tells us. After all, the librarian had talked about publishers not being able to hunt down the offenders.

Wonders about other librarians

"For a librarian to say that at a convention about books with authors in the audience is crazy to me," the novelist says. "Are other librarians encouraging readers to do this? She was a librarian at the Baytown, Texas, Library."

I looked up Baytown, an oil city of some 60,000 in the Houston area—with a median family income of $40,449, hardly stratospheric but still enough to buy some books.

Baytown’s site for the Sterling Municipal Library is well-done for a small city, and I notice that the system belongs to a consortium offering OverDrive audio and e-books. You can burn copies of audios in some cases. But OverDrive’s e-books are DRMed. Does this mean people are cracking the DRM? Or more likely, if piracy is going on, might the nonDRMed works of small publishers be targets—perhaps books not even offered by the library system?

I’m going to e-mail Baytown City Librarian Katherine Brown and see what gives here. Will Ms. Twenty Copies—not the same person as Ms. Brown, I’d hope—come forward without my bothering to do any detective work by talking to people who attended the SF conference? Does Baytown have any specific policies on e-book piracy by librarians, during or outside business hours? If not, will it consider them?

Not calling for firing of librarian

No, I do not want the apparently offending librarian fired, nor the library system punished. But Ms. Twenty Copies should still fess up and give us the full story. Was she simply telling the truth and using "we" in a loose sense? Or is she herself pirating in a major way?

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By Joe Wikert

In an effort to stick by my previously-stated philosophy of limiting my dud purchases, I read the sample material for Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation. This book is a bit of an instant classic, so it was easy to pull the trigger on it.

Silly me, though. I thought that when I buy a Kindle book after reading the sample the full version will automatically open up to where the sample ended. Is that asking too much? Apparently so, because when the full book hit my Kindle it opened at the start, as if I’d never read the sample. I had to go back into the sample to see where I left off and find that spot in the full version.

Is this a horrible flaw? No, but it’s one of those "nice little touches" you find with pretty much every product from Apple; it just shows how much attention was paid to the details.
Amazon could fix this down the road, but it’s too bad they didn’t consider it before the initial Kindle roll out.

By David Rothman

Again and again I’ve urged big publishers like Harlequin to drop DRM—both a sales and literary toxin. Yes, people do pirate, and I won’t cover that up. Still, what’s more important? Piracy prevention or making money? One reason I went with Twilight Times’ Books for The Solomon Scandals was that its publisher dislikes DRM as much as I do.

Now, from DearAuthor, comes a nice reminder of the perils of using DRM. Jane wonders if Ellora’s Cave and other successful e-publishers would have thrived if they’d insisted on locked books. She tells of the horrors that DRM has caused a sister of a friend of hers. This technology victim owned a Sony Reader and wanted to read books from Fictionwise. Jane futilely tried to educate her in the use of a conversion program that would strip the DRM away. Of course, that wouldn’t even have addressed another problem—namely, that the DMCA says it’s illegal to circumvent DRM in the first place.

Just when will publishers catch on? "It’s probably safe to say that epublished books, free of DRM, are pirated at a higher rate than other published books yet both sides parts of the publishing side of the equation are making money." Jane writes. "If there is one company that could undertake to experiment with DRM free ebooks, it would be Harlequin. It’s contracts, I believe, are all encompassing in terms of the rights it acquires when it buys a book. It could release some percentage of e-books with DRM and without and track the comparable sales. Harlequin is so innovative in other ways (releasing books early, digitizing its entire frontlist, enabling the one click bundles) that it could really be a leader in this regard." Exactly.

Related: Some earlier TeleBlog items mentioning Harlequin and DRM.

By David Rothman

The iPhone has a nice, sharp screen. With the right software, it could be perfect for stashing away a library in your pocket.

So how does it compare with other hardware for e-reading?

Palm Addicts explores the topic in iPhone as e-book reader, a natural trait or a forced add-on feature?

Perhaps the salient message here is the fact that PA cares so much about e-reading.

Hello, Palm? Why not pimp out the TX as a dedicated e-reader?

Meanwhile Palm itself is doing squat even though some firmware tweaks could turn the Palm TX into an incredible dedicated e-reader, especially with WiFi built in.

Guys, don’t you get it? Mobipocket will soon be running on the iPhone, not just on the TX. Do something.

What’s more, eReader itself—the former PalmReader—will eventually run on the iPhone platform.

Big R&D expenses, other costs already covered

I’m hardly the only one to see dedicated e-reader potential in the Palm TX.

Will someone from Palm kindly tell us why the company isn’t willing to make more thrifty use of R&D expenses and other money already invested in the TX?

If it’s so bleepin’ obsolete, why haven’t prices been slashed? Even discounted, new TXes seem to sell in the mid or upper 200s.

By David Rothman

Google’s one of my favorite companies. In fact, I own a tiny speck of it for retirement purposes.

So at least as a small shareholder, let me gripe—loudly—if a report in Library Stuff is on target. I suspect it is.

"One year ago today, Google Librarian Central blog was updated," LS’s Steve Cohen writes in How Google used librarians…and got away with it. "There hasn’t been another blog post since. That’s 365 days of no public communication with the librarian community. I’ve also asked around and found out that Google did not have an exhibit at ALA this year. The last Google Librarian Newsletter was in May of 2007."

I’d love to hear Google’s side—and see what if anything it’ll do in response to Steve’s gripes. Or did Google just enlist librarians’ support for its digitization schemes, then decide it could ignore them?

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By Joe Wikert

Up to now I’ve managed to fight the temptation to go crazy and buy every Kindle edition that looks appealing.

Every time I see that "Buy" button I tremble a bit, and then I scroll further up the screen and hit "Try a Sample" instead.

Yes, as of right this minute, I’ve only bought two Kindle editions but I’ve downloaded sample content from 15 other books. The only reason I bought those two is because they passed muster after I read their sample downloads.

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By David Rothman

Microsoft without Bill Gates as a full-timer might warm up eventually to open source. That’s what some optimists are speculating, especially with Steve Ballmer about to depart in the near future.

If Microsoft is less maniacal on proprietary vs. open, could that have e-book standards implications? Perhaps even to the point where Microsoft would rejoin the IDPF, the e-book standards group that it helped found? One can dream. An open source ePub reader bundled with Microsoft-distributed software?

For now, maybe I should be grateful that Gates retains various Microsoft ties. Maybe his old company can sway him and the Gates Foundation in the right direction.

The TeleRead angle: Grubby money-makers more clueful than Gates Foundation?

Interesting, wouldn’t that be? The grubby, money-making corporation ahead of the oh-so-staid nonprofit? The late William F. Buckley Jr. once suggested that Gates buy the TeleRead concept from me for $1. What a shame that Billg’s proprietary approach, especially his DRM fixation, gummed things up. I never could pursue this to the max. Not that the idea is "for sale." It’s in the public domain and builds on similar concepts.

The original TeleRead idea’s main distinction is the comprehensive approach–everything from hardware to the digital libraries to efforts to blend them in with local schools and libraries. OLPC, alas, still hasn’t gotten that right.

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By David Rothman

A cranky Texas oil millionaire named H.L. Hunt wrote a novel suggesting that taxpayers in the upper quarter should enjoy two extra votes. And so on. The American political system is getting there. Notice how well campaign finance reform has fared lately? Meanwhile even Barack Obama, despite all those small, Net-collected donation, is courting Wall Street and selling out on the telco-immunity issue.

But wait. Who says we need career politicians? Why not disintermediate them and elect billionaires directly to the White House? Of course we know about the past Bloomberg rumors. And now some are talking up Bill Gates as John McCain’s vice presidential running mate. Excellent! If we’re going to run the country for the rich, I see no need whatsoever for middle people. McCain himself, of course, is married to a beer heiress.

The e-book, library and copyright angles: If Bill Gates wants to do a Carnegie act for real, perhaps he can just stick to his knitting, so to speak, at the Gates Foundation and start getting real books on the Net. Perhaps he could start by buying up online rights to The Great Gatsby, of which he reportedly owns several rare editions.

In fairness to Gates, he has been progressive on many issues such as family planning. But I’m still awaiting for a similar good thoughts on, say, copyright term extension or even the modest little issue of e-book formats.

Billg’s father (left in photo with Nelson Mandela and Jimmy Carter), to his considerable credit, has been a staunch defender of estate taxes. It would be wonderful if both father and son showed similar enlightenment of intellectual property issues, as well as the availability of free library e-books.

A reminder: No knee-jerk Microsoft bashing. As an advocate of both mixed business models and competition, I still regret the withdraw of Microsoft from digitization efforts despite the negatives.

By David Rothman

Those new $99 Sony Readers from a year ago have long since sold out.

But at least as of this nanosecond, you can buy refurbished, first-gen Readers from Overstock.com for just $204.99. That’s quite a discount from the nearly $300 charged for the second-gen models.

Caveats: The controls of the PRS-500U2s aren’t as easy to use as the newest PRS-505s, and the screen contrast isn’t quite as good. But if you want a cheaper E Ink gimzo in place of the $360 Kindle, this is one option.

Even better—if you can find one: Sony itself was selling 500U2s for just $149.95, but they’re apparently out of stock now. (Spotted via Dr. Ellen Hage’s blog.)

Tower of eBabel angle: Read a buyer’s complaint about an insufficient variety of books available in the Sony format. Yes, you can do conversions. But you shouldn’t have to. Not to mention all the copyrighted books locked up with DRM–and thus illegal to convert in the U.S..

Also of interest: Blemished but refurbed Palm Z22 PDAs for $74.99 as of this writing. I suspect they’ll work fine with  Mobipocket e-reading software even if the resolution is only 160-by-160.

By David Rothman

A Harvard study, written up in Slashdot, questions the Long Tail, while Chris Anderson, originator of the theory, defends it.

Summary from Anita Elberse’s Harvard Business Review article: “It was a compelling idea: In the digitized world, there’s more money to be made  in niche offerings than in blockbusters. The data tell a different story.” Raising questions about the LT, Elberse notes the success that Grand Central Publishing has enjoyed by focusing on books with blockbuster potential.

The e-book angle: One of the joys of e-books is that it’s easier both to sell and buy Long Tail books—nonbestsellers. That’s still true. What’s more, when you read the Elberse article, keep in mind that one percent of all items at a large online store selling a million items can still mean 10,000 units. In the end the question, as Anderson sees it, boils down to calling something heads or tails.

Related: ePub post on some best-selling Grand Central authors appearing in the new IDPF format by way of Books on Board.

Technorati Tags: Anita Elberse,Chris Anderson,Harvard Business Review,Long Tail

By David Rothman

Did Harry S. Truman really say, "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog?"—a gem picked up by Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Bill Clinton and others?

Google Book Search led me to The Quote Verifier, which concluded: "An old saw put in Harry Truman’s mouth." I promised to contact the Harry S. Truman Library directly. Sure enough, it can’t find evidence of such a witticism coming from HST himself. The nearest thing is a line in a 1975 play by the late Samuel Gallu, who, being dead, is unavailable for comment. Gallu’s Truman said: "You want a friend in life, get a dog!" Then on March 10, 1989, Maureen Dowd gave us a variant: "If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog."

Guarding Thackeray II’s credibility as a talking Afghan Hound

So what’s the origin of the variant? I’ll try to reach Ms. Dowd, whose columns I like, and see if she can enlighten us. Let’s get this straight. In The Solomon Scandals, my forthcoming Washington newspaper novel, I’ll not have my talking Afghan Hound spreading misinformation when he does his Truman send-up at the Cosmos Club. Stay turned. Perhaps Ms. Dowd can surprise us. Or did a source give her a bum steer—and if so, who? Happens to us all. I just want to keep Thackeray II believable in his act on behalf of a previrtual literacy project for Anacostia.

Meanwhile, in full except for contact information, I’ll reproduce an e-mail from Randy Sowell, a helpful archivist at the HST Library. Thanks, HSTL!

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By David Rothman

Ficbot, a Toronto educator who spends hours and hours each week around kids, has weighed in with a not-so-positive assessment of the XO-1, the One Laptop Per Child machine. And I do mean weighed in, for one of her criticisms is that even at several pounds, it’s just plain too heavy.

Now, for a different perspective, you can also check out a long, thoughtful post that HeavyG has just made in defense of the XO-1. Excerpt: “I can certainly understand why the XO may not appeal to jaded, wealthy pc users with years of pc experience and ownership. Again, we are not the intended audience and anyone that can’t think outside of their box of experience will miss the beauty of the OLPC XO.”

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By David Rothman

ePub-format books from David Baldacci, Elizabeth Hoyt, James Patterson and other best-selling writers are among the titles now on sale at Books on Board.

The catch, of course, is that the books come with Adobe DRM.

So this is a long way from a nonproprietary nirvana. Social DRM, anyone—in place of infestation with traditional DRM?

Progress anyway

Still, Books on Board’s ePub tiles are a step forward, probably even the first time that mass-market books are on sale to consumers in ePub.

Hachette Group USA, home to the above writers through the Grand Central Publishing imprint, is already using ePub as a standard distribution format.

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By April Hamilton

The slick little Nintendo DS Lite has snared plenty of adult fans with games like Brain Age and New York Times Crosswords.

But this device has much more to offer than just game play.

You may already be aware of the Nintendo DS Browser, which brings textual web-surfing to the DS anywhere a WiFi connection is detected. But you can also listen to music, watch videos and read e-books on your DS Lite.

Enjoy thousands of literary classics and Creative Commons titles from sites such as Project Gutenberg and Manybooks.net.

From Charles Dickens to Cory Doctorow to science fiction writers, the works of famous authors are online for you—and your children. Kids can read on the same machines they play games with. Via a Kindle or your favorite PDA, you might even read some books at the same time as your children do, then discuss them. One way to encourage literacy! Wikipedia teems with items about specific books and authors, as well as links to specialized sites—some with colorful pictures that can help draw in young students.

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By David Rothman

The debate over e-freebies goes on—in the no-charge blogosphere. Victoria Strauss, a well-regarded fantasy author and Web mistress of the super-informative Writers Beware site, has written a nice summary of some freebie experiments.

Mostly the results are positive—not just from Baen, an old hand at this, but also from larger houses such as St. Martin’s and Tor.

HarperCollins, in fact, says the free online edition of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods boosted weekly sales of the p-edition at meatspace stores by 250 percent (not that Harper itself would say "meatspace").

"As difficult as it is to prognosticate about anything pertaining to the future of publishing," Strauss writes, "I’m betting that in the next few years the free download will become a standard promotional tool for publishers."

The caveats

Important caveats, however, come through. First, well-known writers seem to benefit more. How much good can a freebie do if people don’t know about it? A good book can help, but even that just might not be enough to overcome obscurity and boost p-sales noticeably.

Another caveat is the Tragedy of the Commons factor. If e-freebies promoting paper editions become as common as Victoria Strauss expects, then will they cancel each other out? A little overgrazing of mind share?

If nothing else, might too many freebies devalue e-books, especially when the technology improves and they’re easier to read. And once again, would free E work for all books?

In The Solomon Scandals, my forthcoming Washington newspaper novel from Twilight Times Books, the main action takes place decades ago and in the late 21st century. Will Scandals live on for eons in E and maybe even P? Damned if I know. But because I’ve written the book so it might, a freebie of the full text just wouldn’t make sense—as much as I’d love to post one. You’re already reading my freebie for the Net, the TeleBlog, which I hope that reasonably priced editions of Scandals can help subsidize.

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