TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for December, 2008

By Joe Wikert

Dear Jeff,

As 2008 comes to a close I find I’m less of a Kindle advocate than I was earlier in the year. My new iPhone is partially to blame. After all, it’s one of the reasons I wrote this critical post on my other blog yesterday. It’s not just about the iPhone though. Amazon is uniquely positioned to run away with the e-reader market, but the Kindle appears to be hampered by a lack of strategy and vision.

I’m not talking about the poor physical design; I’m way past the point of being critical there. No, what I’m talking about are five key issues that have caused me to abandon plans for a Kindle 2.0 purchase in 2009 (or whenever it comes out):

1. Proprietary Model — Come on, Jeff. It’s almost 2009 and you’re locked in with this non-industry standard content format. Have you asked any publishers how hard it is for them to convert their content to your format, especially the books with illustrations, maps, code, etc.? Would it kill you to support the EPUB format?

2. Lack of an Innovative Content Pricing Model — This one bugs me the most. OK, you’ve taken the bold step of offering most titles for $9.99. Hooray. That happened more than a year ago though and it’s way past time to come up with some new, creative pricing models. How about a monthly all-you-can-eat program? Or a discount on the device if I promise to buy x books in the first 12 months? Have you considered bundling magazines or newspapers with books? What about all those physical books I’ve bought from you over the years? Why can’t I get a discount on the Kindle editions of those titles? What about bundling Kindle editions with print books? The possibilities are endless but the offerings have been non-existent. Where’s the vision here?

(more…)

By Paul Biba

Recently I discussed my power problems with using my iPhone as an e-book reader. Today I’ll discuss a couple of add-on power sources that I use and have previously reviewed at other websites.

Perhaps the most cost-effective, especially if used with rechargeable batteries, solution is the Turbo Charge, pictured above. The unit sells for $29.95 and is powered by 2 AA batteries. Just plug it into your iPhone/Touch/iPod and it will fully charge the batteries. It is not really convenient to use in real time with the iPhone, as it dangles in a rather inconvenient manner. There are two real plusses to this unit. First, you can order individual adapters for various portable machines. I use this with my Treo, Palm TX, Nokia cellphone and Windows mobile phones. Their website lists adapters for bluetooth headsets, TomTom GPS units, and almost any phone you can think of. Second, since it uses plain old AA batteries you can find them anywhere and thus you are not limited to one “recharge” of the unit.

(more…)

By David Rothman

An iPod tablet with a seven- or nine-inch screen may show up in fall 2009, according to a Michael Arrington’s report in Tech Crunch.

In the past we’ve had our hearts broken by rumors that didn’t pan out. But could it be that Apple has simply been delaying the device for commercial reasons—that such a gizmo has indeed been around in prototype for two or three years? Just a guess. But oh how in character it would be for the oft-secretive Steve Jobs, who, for all I know, has a pile of ‘em stashed away in Hangar 18, Area 51.

So what do you think, gang? Will it be good or bad if Apple comes out with the tablet and maybe even dominates the e-book industry? We’ve seen how Amazon has tried to inflict the Kindle format on the world. Will Apple try to do the same with its own creation or with a DRM ally such as ScrollMotion? Might Apple try to lock out third-party products like Stanza that combine e-reading and distribution infrastructure? And about Apple’s censorship of Knife Music?

Meanwhile here are a few more details from TechCrunch’s Arrington:

Prototypes have been seen and handled by one of our sources, and Apple is talking to OEMs in Asia now about mass production.

Apple has been experimenting internally with large form tablet devices for years, one source says, but there was concern that users wouldn’t like the device. The difference now is the iTunes app store, which has thousands of games and other applications that are perfect for a touch screen device with an accelerometer. Apple says more than 300 million applications have been downloaded since the App Store launched in July 2008. Combine the App Store, iTunes and a browser and you have one heck of a device.”

In the post, Arrington says he expects the price to be “significantly higher” than the current $399 for the 32G iPod Touch.

(more…)

By David Rothman

Over at Twilight Times Books, publisher Lida Quillen recently came out with “advance promo” editions of The Solomon Scandals in both E and P.

I can’t tell you how much of a bother it’s been to get Scandals properly into different formats, such as ePub, HTML and PDF. Imagine having to worry about corrections as they’ll show up in half a dozen or so formats, each with its own rude surprises. Even now the job still isn’t done. Tech complexities are no small reason why we call the existing files “advance promo copies.”

Today’s e-publishing tools, including pricey ones selling for hundreds of dollars, just don’t work that well or fail to include enough capabilities.

Oh how Lida and colleagues must hate the hassles of dealing with Word and RTF files so that paragraph breaks show up in the right places. And then there are other joys—sarcasm alert!—such as distinguishing between neutral quotes and the directional variety. Lida and colleagues are not at fault. It’s the damn technology, which is still far, far more difficult and time-consuming to use than it should be.

A challenge to the open source community

With the above in mind, I wonder if the time hasn’t come for the OpenOffice crowd or others in the open source community to consider designing a multilingual program from scratch for ePub creation and other publishing activities. The OpenDocument format has its purposes, but book publishing shouldn’t be regarded as a major one.

ePubWriter, as I’ll call the proposed app, would offer all the capabilities of Writer but also output smoothly into ePub and HTML and, for printers, PDF. Ideally ePubWriter could even help deal with the inherent conflict between ePub (reflowable) and PDF (nonreflowable). Let there be an easy way to see exactly what the finished p-book will look even if the ePub version will be reflowable. And let writers be able to tweak to their heart’s content while seeing the final results of their changes.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

A couple of days ago, someone suggested David write a retrospective about the different e-reading devices he had used through the years. It seemed like a marvelous idea to me, and there certainly is room for more than one such article.

So here is mine.

1. Palm IIIe

I had long wanted a Palm Pilot, ever since reading articles in Salon Magazine and elsewhere about how cool it was to read books on them. Finally, with the 2-megabyte Palm IIIe being particularly cheap, I took the plunge and bought one in August, 1999.

Also in August, 1999, I bought my first e-book: Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, from Peanut Press—the first of many I would buy from them. At 450K, it took up almost 1/4 of my Palm’s 2-megabyte non-expandable on-board memory, and the display on a 160 x 160 screen was a little…pixelly—but I was happy. I read all sorts of books on that thing.

The main software I used back then—beginning relationships that would last through my next three PDAs—were the Peanut Reader (now known as eReader) and iSilo—with a side order of CSpotRun (for Embiid-encrypted books). I had tried Mobipocket and hadn’t liked it (it wasted too much screen real-estate with ludicrously wide left and right margins). Loading it with content was just a matter of double-clicking the PDB file and hitting the “sync” button. (Ah, those were the days.)

Beyond that, the other apps I used were largely AvantGo for making some favored web content portable, and a little freebie check-register app called MicroMoney that subsequently got bought and turned into the for-pay-only Pocket Quicken. I also used the calendar function to remind me of the upcoming birthdays of all my friends and family. On the whole, I liked the Palm IIIe a lot, and was not at all sorry I had bought it.

But I hadn’t had it very long at all before my eye was turned by another contender.

(more…)

By David Rothman

Novelists, Inc. wants used bookstores to pay fees to publishers. The group frets that novelists are missing out on royalties.

And now the shocker of the day! A study cited in Parade Magazine says a family of four can save up to $2,500 a year by borrowing just 10 items a month from the public library. That’s 120 items a year, averaging $20.83 each.

Significantly, public libraries are godsends to students and job-hunters. But Philadelphia and San Diego may shut down some branches, and library budgets are tight in many other cities.

So what would Novelists, Inc. think of that. Cheery news? Probably not, but it’s still something for the group to ponder as it continues its war against used bookstores. Will libraries be its next targets?

Background: Used books blamed in NYT for slump, as well as Chris Meadows’ Should second-hand book stores pay royalties? 

In a related vein…

Also see America’s Most Literate Cities (top three: Minneapolis, shown in photo, Seattle and Washington, D.C.). The study found that both libraries and bookstores were more numerous in high-literacy areas, even those with heavy Internet use. Might literary be leading to more literacy?

(more…)

By David Rothman

If you want a Kindle but can’t find a decent price on eBay, don’t forget Craig’s List—especially local listings for states where the cost of living is lower than in New York or California.

A “brand-new sealed” Kindle was on sale on Dec. 21 in the Minneapolis area for “just” $299.

That’s still a high price for a gizmo that lists for $359 new, but much less than $500 or $600 or more that you might find on eBay.

Of course, the real solution for the economy-minded is to wait for the Kindle 2, the existence of which will bring down used Kindle prices to a sander level.

Meanwhile thanks to the resourceful Joe Wikert for the Craig’s List idea.

By Paul Biba

Many people don’t realize that their cell phone is always transmitting. It is constantly sending out a signal to the surrounding towers saying “I am here”. That’s how a cell tower knows to send a phone call your way. Well, the strength of the signal the phone puts out will vary depending on the reception conditions. If you are close to a tower the phone can power down and send out a lower strength signal. If you are far away, or in poor reception conditions like inside a building, the phone has to boost its power to get a signal through. Of course, the higher the signal strength your phone is putting out, the more power is being drained from your battery. You may have noticed that sometimes your phone battery seems depleted for no apparent reason. This is probably because you spent a significant amount of time in a low signal area.

How does this relate to the iPhone and e-books? Well, the iPhone is a cell phone and is subject to the effect I mentioned above. Recently I decided to put my Kindle aside for a week or so and finish off reading a number of eReader-format e-books I have in my Fictionwise library. This has not worked out as well as I hoped.
(more…)

By Joe Wikert

Google Trends is one of my favorite analysis tools, and it’s totally free. It can tell you how popular a search term is and it’s particularly useful when comparing two or more related phrases.

Every so often I like to compare the phrase “Amazon Kindle” with “Sony Reader” to see who’s winning the search battle. You can see for yourself by either clicking the image to the left or clicking here to see the full results on Google Trends.

No matter how you look at it, you’ll notice two things. First, and it’s old news, but the Kindle took an early but short-lived lead in search activity when it first hit the scene 13 months ago.

(more…)

By David Rothman

Last night I bought a GPS device for $99 at Radio Shack, and it just worked.

I didn’t have to spend much time on the complexities, at least not for simple navigational needs. No wonder GPS devices are catching on among the masses. I’ll have more to say later in another post.

Now contrast my happy GPS experiences to complexities and horrors of e-book DRM. Mike Cane has a hilarious post comparing Adobe DRM documentation to the hassles of puzzling out instructions for a zero-gravity toilet. Guess which is worse. Natch. "Really," Mike concludes, "it turns out it’s easier to take a shit in space than to deal with Adobe DRMed ePub eBooks!" And to think that Adobe is hoping to help create a DRM standard for the IDPF.

Beware of "seamless" achieved the wrong way

That’s not all. The more companies involved, the great the risks of driving off shoppers. But then again the last thing the industry needs is to revolve around Mother Ship Amazon, just to keep things "seamless." The best solution to DRM complexities is to skip traditional "protection" in favor of none, or to use social DRM, which would be far, far more interoperable than DRM in the usual sense. DRM is a joke when it’s so easy to scan paper books and put them on P2P nets.

Why isn’t the IDPF encouraging experimentation with social DRM–the inclusion of names or other identifying information in e-book files—which would be far less of a technical challenge than the usual DRM? Didn’t Bill McCoy of Adobe push social DRM earlier? Have his bosses shut him up? Bill had a great idea—borrowed openly from the Pragmatic Programmers site—and I hope Adobe will encourage him to position the company as a leader in this area. Bill, it isn’t Adobe I’m against. It’s the Zero-Gravity Toilet Syndrome.

By David Rothman

Coming: An example of why DRM is a sales toxin…plus the difficulty that eBabel creates for small publishers. I’ll also tell you about my $99 GPS, with a 4-inch screen and the ability to read street names. Perhaps some e-book potential here?

By David Rothman

“The massive boost in App Store sales appears to be from a large influx of iPod Touch users. Amazon lists the 8GB and 16GB iPod Touch as the best selling MP3 players despite their relatively higher cost.” – MacRumors.com item.

The TeleRead take: Another obvious positive for e-books. The more iPod Touches out there, the more potential homes for copies of Stanza, eReader and the rest. Own a Touch? Are you as enthusiastic about the Touch as an e-reader as I am? What kinds of books are you reading on it? The Touch is hardly optimized for books with large, extra-detailed illustrations, but it’s oh so fitting for recreational reading. Although I buy few books in DRM—I want to own them for real—I couldn’t resist an eReader-format edition of Revolutionary Road, which I bought at Books On Board for about $10. A great read in Stanza on the Touch, not just on paper. I used Stanza’s desktop app to bring Road into my Touch via WiFi.

The Touch and the generation gap: Many and probably most older people in their 40s or above might prefer the larger “print” on the Kindle or a Sony Reader. E-readers are like hearing aids. One kind won’t fit all. I’m not recommending the Touch as a universal solution.

And speaking of commercial e-books: Fictionwise’s year-end sale will continue through December 31.

Related: Techmeme roundup on the Touch as a hit.

By David Rothman

You  already can read e-books on your GPS in some cases. Exvaxman vaguely recalls a model that can display files in the .txt format—anyone have further specifics?

Meanwhile, another TeleBlog regular, Rob Preece, writes: “I received a Garmin GPS unit for Christmas and was able to use RasterBook, along with a SD memory card, to read eBooks. I’m planning on writing a tutorial on this. Image quality is really pretty good–definitely workable although not as sharp as ePaper.” See a tutorial that Rob wrote about RasterBook in a cellphone context.

Talk about the knowledge, ingenuity and resourcefulness of our readers! Thanks to both Exvaxman and Rob!

GPS buying tip: Look for a model that reads off street names, rather than just saying, “Turn left a quarter mile away.” My impression is that the $100 Tom Tom lacks this capability. Some more expensive Tom Toms and Garmins have it.

And speaking of the practical: Check out Part I of DearAuthor’s two-part series on using the Calibre program for e-book management and file conversion. Among other things, Calibre can convert to ePub, which, via Stanza, is readable on the iPhone.

By David Rothman

“Don’t blame” carnage in the book industry “on the recession or any of the usual suspects, including increased competition for the reader’s time or diminished attention spans,” says David Streitfeld, a New Yok Time staff writer, in an opinion piece. “What’s undermining the book industry is not the absence of casual readers but the changing habits of devoted readers.” Particularly the buying of used books, he believes. Excerpt:

“Andy Ross, the former owner of Cody’s, told me that buying books online ‘was not morally dubious, but it is tragic. It has a lot of unintended consequences for communities.’

“Mr. Ross said he realized that Cody’s was doomed when he noticed that in the last year he hadn’t sold a single copy of that old-reliable for undergraduates, Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason.’ Students presumably were buying it online. Sales of classics and other backlist titles used to be the financial engine of publishers and bookstores as well, allowing them to take chances on new authors. Clearly that model is breaking. Simon & Schuster, which laid off staffers this month, cited backlist sales as a particularly troubled area.”

Unwitting harm to literacy cause

Novelists, Inc., of course, the aptly named outfit behind the proposal to forced used bookstores to pay “Secondary sale” fees to publishers and writers, will love Streitfeld’s thoughts. Much of the rest of world, as TeleRead’s Chris Meadows makes clear, might not. Used books are protected under the first sale doctrine—the right to sell copies of books you acquire. It’s a tricky matter, this business of deciding how perfect copies of digital books would fit in. But Novelists, Inc. wants fees paid even on paper books. So much for helping literacy, eh? Or for enabling readers to limit their their gamble on just-discovered writer, so that can later buy the authors’ works new?

(more…)

By David Rothman

Hardware failure knocked Feedbooks offline. But co-founder Hadrien Gardeur reports Feed is back.

Blame Murphy’s Law. The problem happened at the worst time, between Christmas and New Year’s, when Hadrien was out of town and it was harder to round up techies.

Feed offers free books and other items and even lets you publish your own

Related: Easy-to-learn publishing tool from Feedbooks: Reach Kindles, Sony Readers, iPhones—and help the ePub standard.

By Paul Biba

For the first time, more Americans are getting their news online than from traditional ink and paper, although the popularity of television still eclipses all other forms of media.

In an apparently sharp shift in habits, the Washington-based Pew Research Centre found that the number of consumers using the web as a main news source surged from 24% to 40% in a year, overtaking the 35% who rely on newspapers. Television slipped from 74% to 70%.

Younger people are migrating towards the web quickly. Among the under-29s, the web leaped from 34% to 59% as the leading source of news, tying with television, with newspapers lagging at 28%.

The above from The Guardian. When I come across a story such as this I check a number of sources before I decide which version to take a quote from. If The Guardian has a version of the story I find that I almost always prefer The Guardian’s version to any other. Of course my doing this proves the outcome of the study, because I’m getting this news online, not from a hard copy newspaper.

Do you know what killed my hard copy newspaper reading? Mandatory recycling. It is just too much trouble to bundle them up and take them out to the curb. For us non-city readers I wonder how much recycling has contributed to the newspaper’s demise.

By David Rothman

Circuit City, Amazon and Tiger Direct here in the States are selling Tom Tom GPS systems for just $100 or so. Anyone familiar with the Tom Tom? I also wonder if, like cell phones, GPS systems could be platforms for e-books—for travels? Screens may well get larger. Are any existing models capable of doubling as e-book readers?

Related: Sales video from Tiger Direct. and Wikipedia entries on Tom Tom and GPS and automotive navigation systems.

Note: TeleRead’s Paul Biba is rather knowledgeable on GPSes, and I’ve suggested that he do a separate post if he has time, which he may or may not during the holidays.