TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for January, 2009

By Paul Biba

Yakov Shafranovich runs the interesting site publicdomainreprints.org. The aim of the site is: “This is an experimental project, which is focused on archiving and republishing public domain works. At this time, this service can take a book from any of the supported sites such as the the Internet Archive (books in public domain ONLY) and reprint it via print on demand techology.”

One of the sites he supports is Google Books, with about 3 million books available. However, according to his blog Google has changed its terms of service and he may no longer be able to offer these books. (more…)

By a TeleRead Contributor

Editor’s Note: I received the following email from reader Cliff Burns and found it so interesting I asked him if I could publish it as a Reader contribution.

Paul:

Read your comments in the Christian Science Monitor article with much interest.

The e-book format and digitization of publishing had accorded people like me, an indie writer with a strong distaste for the writing “biz”, a newly created and much cherished sense of freedom.

I’ve been a professional writer for 25 years and in that time–thanks, mainly, to the rise of corporate publishing–I’ve seen literary-quality fiction marginalized in favor of commercial, derivative crap.

I no longer submit my stories or novels anywhere, publish them directly on my site and I’ve never been happier. The sense of control, of preserving my artistic integrity and freedom is essential to my worldview.

Plus I have readers, tens of thousands of them, from around the world. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.

At the present time I am following the urgings of a good number of those readers and later this year will be producing print-on-demand versions of my novels.

The gate-keepers of publishing–the agents and editors–have seen their grip weakened, loosened and finally pried off the throats of writers; the humiliation of the submissions process, manuscripts revamped, gutted to meet the marketplace, those days are over.

I’ve written about these matters on my site–hope you’ll pop by for a look.

My best wishes to you–

Cliff Burns, Beautiful Desolation

By Paul Biba

This morning I noticed a comment on my comment about the publisher Everyman’s, posted in Recession and the Penguin way. The comment mentioned Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy. That reminded me that I had always wanted to read some of his stuff.

So I immediately went to Fictionwise, always my first choice, and, unfortunately, it was only available in secure Mobipocket format. After what Overdrive did to all those Mobipocket customers I am very confused about buying in secure Mobipocket. I would have thought Fictionwise would have removed all of these books. Well, they haven’t, but I’m not going to take the chance and I certainly won’t ever buy secure Mobipocket again because I’ll never know if Overdrive is lurking in the background. Also, I want to read on my large-screen Kindle, not on a small screen unit, like my Palm TX or iPhone – the Kindle won’t read secure Mobipocket.

So fire up the Kindle, go to Amazon and download the books in a minute or two, with no computer involved. Of course now I have to worry about Amazon cutting out my access, but that’s just the e-book world we are involved in right now. It will be great when Sony gets its connected reader out so we can have some competition. But the best thing would be for the publishers to wise up and let us buy the books without any of this DRM crud at all.

By David Rothman

Just now, Google scared us and a good part of the rest of the virtual world—with a kind of Halloween II, or maybe April Fool’s Day.

When I looked up something on TeleRead, I got a malware alert. For a time the Google-supplied link wouldn’t even let people into the site.

BUT guess what. A similar message appeared when I Googled up the New York Times, the Washington Post and a minor site in North Carolina. I doubt that an evil hacker would have infected all those places simultaneously.

For now, the message is gone. Whew! I wonder what caused it. Nothing like the joys of centalized information resources, eh? This is another reminder that even big companies well-stocked with Mensa-brilliant programmers are not error-free. In e-book terms, it’s why I’m so keen on the option of localized storage of prized books.

Update, 11:03 Washington time: TechCrunch item, complete with screen shots.

By Kat Meyer

Liza Daly is a software engineer and president of Threepress Consulting Inc., developing applications for publishing and education. Recent work includes online products for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), Oxford University Press, and O’Reilly Media.  She is a frequent writer and speaker on publishing technology issues and will be appearing on two panels at the O’Reilly Tools of Change 2009 conference. – K.M.

KM: You are the developer of Bookworm. Can you easily sum up exactly what Bookworm is and what it does for us? (No pressure!)

LD: As a project, Bookworm has two goals:

• Provide a place for users to store ePub-format books, read them online and download them to other devices.  iPhone users can transfer their books directly to Stanza’s software for the iPhone, for example.
• Demonstrate advanced features of the ePub format itself. When I launched Bookworm in July 2008, there were no other readers that fully supported e-book stylesheets,

And I wanted to show off some of the design possibilities available in electronic books.

KM: As a developer, you are committed to utilizing OpenSource software. Why?

LD: Although I’ve been involved in digital publishing since 2004, my background is really in general Web development.  I’ve been writing Web applications since 1995—about as far back as the industry goes—and the history of the Web as a whole has always been a push-pull between open source and commercial interests.

(more…)

By David Rothman

Earlier I summed up my 2009 e-book predictions for Publishing Trends. Now you can read them in full. One modification: The Plastic Logic E Ink machine, one of the biggest threats to the Kindle, won’t be on sale in ‘09—but almost. It’s now supposed to slip out in early 2010. Subscription info for Publishing Trends: Here.

By David Rothman

Refurbished Dell Mini 9 netbooks have dipped as low as $178—alas, they’re not that cheap right now—but Android netbooks are on the way.

Could we see the $99 netbook in time without any need for a wireless contract?

Let’s hope that Stanza or another slick e-book app can come on the netbooks or at least be available.

And if Android tablets or tablet-convertible netbooks can appear, then so much the better.

By David Rothman

First-hand I’ve witnessed the pain that eBabel and other complexities can inflict on small publishers like Lida Quillen who are trying to do both E and P. Many can’t afford to farm out conversion and other duties to specialists.

But in some ways the little guys actually enjoy an edge. They lack the big corpocracies where people so often feud over when and how to take e-books seriously. Luddites still shape policy at some large houses.

In a related vein, the Christian Science Monitor notes progress that some respected small presses are making with e-books:

Last month, in a much-trumpeted example, New York’s Soft Skull Press announced it would begin to move its entire catalog online. Richard Nash, Soft Skull’s publisher, tells the Monitor, "The aim is to have every one of our front- and back-list books available [digitally] by the end of the year." (Heavily illustrated books, which are very expensive and unwieldy to convert, will likely be the exception.) If successful, it would be a feat unmatched by any corporate publisher.

Meanwhile, Johnny Temple, the publisher of Akashic Books in Brooklyn, says he is in talks with Amazon and Sony, which produces its own digital reader, and hopes to begin making a swath of e-book content available as early as February.

"Right now, we’re at the turning point," Mr. Temple says. "There are lots of reasons to get excited: economic reasons and environmental reasons. People are realizing digitization is inevitable."

Quoted in the Monitor, our own Paul Biba weighs in with some astute observations:

"In general, I’d say the big publishers tend to be really dinosaurs, intrigued by e-books but afraid of them," says Paul Biba, the coeditor of Teleread, a leading e-book blog. "[Younger readers] have grown up with a whole different way of looking at the world, and I don’t think many publishers understand this. They think people are just sitting down in leather chairs and reading hardcopy books."

By David Rothman

Is this some backpeddling or a failure to be clear in the first place—or maybe a reflection of a battle between factions within Amazon?

One way or another, the latest from Amazon is that it isn’t banishing all nonKindle and nonMobi publications from its store, contrary to the impression left in its original comments as reported in Publishers Weekly.

"This does not apply to eDocs because they are not DRM-protected," Amazon is quoted in O’Reilly’s Tools of Change blog. "This only applies to DRM-protected eBooks."

TOC blogger Andrew Savikas adds:

A follow-up question about Kindle support of EPUB resulted in a polite but firm redirect to "the Kindle team."

I know Amazon is a big company, and I know all too well how difficult intra-office communication can be even at a much smaller company like O’Reilly, but with Amazon in particular it’s really easy to get the sense that the left hand has very little idea what the right hand is doing (or perhaps "third left tentacle doesn’t know what the right tentacle is doing" is more appropriate).

Exactly!

Related: Printing the New York Times costs twice as much as sending every subscriber a free Kindle, in Silicon Alley Insider.

By Paul Biba

From BookGlutton’s Travis Alber. I can’t say it any better than the email she sent me:

BookGlutton has just pushed some major updates, some of which I think
you might be interested in.

BookGlutton now supports non-DRMed ePub uploads. We’ve released a
suite of new upload features, including direct URL imports for HTML
and ePub files, as well as the ability to upload ePubs from your
desktop.

We’ve also released private sharing – something we’ve been working on
for quite some time. Now users can upload their private work and
invite others to share it, without having it appear in the catalog.
Features like this are great for writer’s: workshops can have a
private upload with shared annotations and real-time feedback without
showing it to the rest of the world.

Sharing Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBOB1cOkS7M
Upload Page: http://www.bookglutton.com/book/importnew.html

By David Rothman

"if Penguin was successful making good books available cheaply and everywhere in the 1930s, now is the time to think about doing the same thing with e-books." – Hugh McGuire in the Book Oven blog.

By Paul Biba

We received the following from the firm charged with making notice of the Google Book Settlement and post it here as a convenience to any of our readers who might have an interest. The notice, itself, is too long for us to publish.

The process of notifying authors and publishers about the settlement has begun. If you would like to update your readers with the court-approved Notice, which summarizes the settlement, important terms, claims process, and key dates, it is available at http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/notice.html. Rightsholders may now claim their works at http://www.googlebooksettlement.com.

By Chris Meadows

Found on Slashdot: India is soon to unveil the prototype of its 500-rupee ($10) "nano laptop." According to the Indian secretary for higher education, “At this stage, the price is working out to be $20 but with mass production it is bound to come down.” Not much is known about the capabilities or stats of this device. Slashdot claims "it will be small and portable, will feature Wi-Fi, LAN, and expandable memory, and will operate on 2 watts of power." However, the article to which they link in the statement does not contain anything substantiating it.

The $10 computer is being released as part of a mission to further higher education within India.

The mission launch would also see demonstration of e-classroom, virtual laboratory and a better ‘Sakshat’ portal that was launched more than two years ago. Sources also said that the ministry has entered into an agreement with four publishers — Macmillan, Tata McGraw Hill, Prentice-Hall and Vikas Publishing — to upload their textbooks on ‘Sakshat’. Five per cent of these books can be accessed free.

It is interesting to note that the price for the device is definitely given as the equivalent of $10 rather than the $100 to which it was "corrected" shortly after the initial announcement. The article does not mention whether it will be available outside of India.

It is hard to imagine anything like a laptop, or even a PDA, being made to sell at the equivalent of $10. Will it be suitable for reading e-books? Will it be available for purchase? Will the technology used in making it be available to other companies so we might perhaps see a $50 to $100 device with more durability and capabilities? It will be interesting to find out.

By Chris Meadows

Henry Melton, whose book Emperor Dad I have recently reviewed here, writes in his blog about one of the difficulties of converting his own books into e-book formats.

In this particular entry, he focuses on the problems presented by scene breaks. For print books, there are stylistic methods of conveying a scene break without interrupting the reader, such as the dropped capital—enlarging and shifting down the first letter of the first sentence. But e-books by and large do not yet offer that sort of finesse of control over the reading experience—and to make matters worse, different e-book formats or converters often have quite different requirements or capabilities.

So back to the scene break. How to give that subtle cue to the reader? Most of the automatic book converter tools I’ve tried end up stripping scene breaks. Unless you care about confusing the reader, you’ll have to wade through the converted text and page by page, fix up the scene break; possibly by putting back a variation of that ‘###’ that the manuscript had in the beginning  and hope the reader doesn’t stumble over it.

This is the sort of thing that people who make their own e-books often have to think about. Perhaps those who make e-book converting applications should keep it in mind.

By Robert Nagle

Scotto Moore’s Intangible Method, a video presentation of a 6 minute Twilight Zone-ish fairy tale he told at last year’s Etech conference.  The text-only version of the story is here but you really have to watch the video to get the full effect. It’s  a mysterious and provocative tale about Internet privacy and fame which raises question of self-identity.   Did the main character have an identity apart from the socially constructed identity thrust upon her?

He writes:

indeed, the comments tended to praise her for bravery in exposing so much of her inner life with her community – although she did not recognize the user names of the people posting comments. the most recent post was titled, "i believe i am disintegrating."

Moore doesn’t only capture the fleeting nature of Internet fame here.  It calls into question the nature of Net communities. If she doesn’t even recognize the user names of this community of admirers, is it really a community at all? Does the flesh-and-blood individual really have any connection to it?  What kind of loyalty can people have to avatars (or other social constructs like Paris Hilton, George W. Bush or Britney Spears)?

Moore’s website contains lots of free creative commons content. Here’s some  free PDF books and scripts. On the video page, there is Cherub, an online video drama which is described as an  homage to /satire of the Buffy the Vampire Series.

By Chris Meadows

The New York Times has an article looking at the growth of the self-publishing industry, and the diminishment of the stigma associated with the "vanity press" as self-publishing prices fall to a level where authors can have copies printed inexpensively enough to sell them at a reasonable price. This has been driven in part by publishing industry changes, such as the death of the mid-list.

As traditional publishers look to prune their booklists and rely increasingly on blockbuster best sellers, self-publishing companies are ramping up their title counts and making money on books that sell as few as five copies, in part because the author, rather than the publisher, pays for things like cover design and printing costs.

The article looks at the pros and cons of self-publishing, and the success stories of some authors whose self-published books were later picked up by traditional publishers. It also points out that such success stories are the exception, rather than the rule—the majority of self-published books are still "self-published" for good reason.

By Paul Biba

Bluefire Blog has an interesting article on the use of EPUB and rich media in a mobile context. Something I haven’t seen too much about elsewhere.

The EPUB file format is definitely taking off like a rocket for ebooks and text-based “packaged” web content (like RSS feeds). But what about rich media? Well, the format certainly can contain content that includes video, sound, animation, games, apps, etc. And, Adobe Digital Editions will render that kind of content (if it is Flash based) and Adobe Content Server 4 can apply copy protection to it (if you need that because you are a library, etc). Ah, but what about mobile you might ask…

Yes, today about the best thing one can say there is that with EPUB you certainly can (and should) provide alternative content for the mobile devices that don’t support rich media. Meaning if you have a travel book with a video tour of a hotel on a given page, you could have a photo appear in that page instead when read on a low functionality device. This is allowed for in the EPUB spec. Surely though, it would be better if all mobile devices supported rich media in EPUBs, or at least more of them…