TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for March, 2009

By Chris Meadows

In a new column he has penned for the Guardian, Cory Doctorow suggests that the Authors Guild has “lost the plot” in their fight against the Kindle’s text-to-speech function.

After laying out why that function is not an infringement, or even if it is Amazon is the wrong one to complain about, Doctorow explains that the legality of read-aloud is irrelevant and what authors should be worrying about is Amazon’s ability to turn off features in the Kindle (that is, changing their mind and allowing publishers to choose to disable read-aloud for their books) after it has been shipped.

Writes Doctorow:

If I were running the Authors Guild, this would be my number one issue: we can’t afford to allow our books to be used to lure readers into purchasing devices that can turn against them. Because whatever bad feelings arise from this, some of them will surely be visited upon us.

While Doctorow writes with his usual cheerfully blatant hyperbole, he does point out an issue that readers of all DRM-locked e-books should bear in mind: the e-book seller, or the company that manages the e-book format if they’re not one and the same, can potentially do bad things to you after you invest in their product.

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By Paul Biba

Picked this up from Bookfutures. Maybe one of our British readers can fill us in after the event.

Date/Time: 19 Apr 2009
13:00-18:00
Location: Earls Court One, Level 1, Cromwell Room
To book a place CLICK HERE

For American book publishers these are challenging times. The economic downturn is hitting hard an industry once thought by many to be recession-proof. Bookstores are reporting sharp declines in sales and traditional channels for books are shrinking and consolidating. Consumer confidence is low, reading skills and literacy levels are falling, and readers have more competing distractions than ever before.

*
While they confront today some of the toughest trading conditions they have ever known, American publishers have not forgotten tomorrow. Many are actively investing for the future with innovative and experimental programs focused on building tomorrow’s book industry. Central to these innovations is an understanding that America’s readers are changing and that a generation of consumers is emerging with radically different expectations about how content should be published, consumed, priced, and protected.
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By Chris Meadows

Wired’s Epicenter blog seems to think they are. Steven Levy writes about how one of the law firms interested in filing an amicus curae (“friend of the court”) brief in the Authors Guild vs. Google case has received funding from Microsoft, and that its chief investigator is a former Microsoft employee. Levy points out that Microsoft has nudged the government toward taking anti-trust action against Google before, and could well be doing so again.

It is puzzling what to make of this article. Beyond rumor and innuendo, there is not a great deal there. As one commenter points out, it does not even state what the law firm’s objections to the Google settlement might be. In short, the article takes a molehill of facts and build a mountain of supposition onto them.

Still, it might be worth keeping an eye on how the settlement proceedings go and what Microsoft might be about.

By Stephen Windwalker

I don’t bring any special credibility to the table here at TeleRead. I’m a working author, a believer in the potential of and vision behind the Kindle both for readers and authors, and I have acquired a bit of expertise about Amazon’s underlying business strategies over a decade of writing about the company’s innovations and practices.

I care about Digital Rights Management (DRM) issues, but I am not doctrinaire about them. My inclination is to believe that these issues will be sorted out at certain critical times in the future development of the book business, and that it may be counterproductive to try to resolve them too early in the process. With a few notable exceptions, the publishing companies that ought to have figured out the most about the importance of electronic publishing to their futures seem to know the least. The process by which they learn – as for all of us in any way connected with the book trades – is likely to be somewhat Darwinian.

Just as a time came when Apple was able to locate its corporate self-interest in allowing customers to remove DRM from their iTunes store audio purchases for a price, a similar time will probably come for Amazon with respect to customers’ Kindle Store purchases. In both cases, the timing seems to require that some critical mass of the applicable publishers reach a certain nuanced understanding of and experience with the changing revenue streams and marketing channels that digital publishing and distribution allow. It’s not exactly dialectical materialism, but it is a world in which changes in politics must be driven by, rather than be the drivers of, changes in economic relationships.

We can’t all be Lawrence Lessig or Cory Doctorow, and neither Amazon nor Apple will ever be Google, Creative Commons, or Project Gutenberg. Most publishers possess little understanding of Lessig or Doctorow or anyone else who has discovered the viral (and, often, easily monetized) marketing power of setting one’s words free in selected venues, and many probably label them as the “free books crowd” and shut down reflexively in the face of any opportunity to listen to them or learn from them. Call me Pollyanna, but I believe that Jeff Bezos does possess some nuanced understanding of these issues, and in time, armed with the larger and larger payments his company’s Kindle division is making to publishers, will be in a better position to bring them along into a future where there is a wide acceptance of DRM-free electronic publishing standards. But on the Darwinian path to that future, it would be very uncharacteristic of Amazon not to continue to consolidate and strengthen its position. (more…)

By Paul Biba

David Nygren has just published a short story, Under the Table, in Excel spreadsheet format. You can find it here. I don’t know what to say – what can come after this?

So I’ve done it. Here is the first draft of my short storyspreadsheet “Under the Table” (I hope I don’t need to point out the double entendre). Other formats are available at the end of the post. Read it. I swear it’s not horrible (how’s that for a blurb?). …

The first worksheet of the Excel file has the “raw data,” the story itself (8 columns x 30 rows). The easiest way to read it is to click on the first cell and then use the arrow keys to move to the next cell you want to read. The second sheet has a line graph that gives graphical representation to the “Character Intensity of Thought Units” (CIT Units) for each “Action Segment” in the story.

The raw data is formatted to print nicely, if that’s your thing. However, I encourage everyone to read the story in its electronic format. I’ve turned on “Track Changes,” thereby cordially inviting you to collaborate with me on this short storyspreadsheet. Make any changes you feel are appropriate, and then send your version of the short storyspreadsheet back to me at david [at] theurbanelitist [dot] com. I’ll be able to highlight any changes you made. In particular, I’d like help with the language of each character’s thoughts. I was not sure how best to handle this (Joycean stream of consciousness or ???).

By Chris Meadows

The idea of print-on-demand has long been associated with books. But now it is beginning to rub off on other media.

From the Warner Archive

Last week, Warner announced its new “Warner Archive” program, in which classic Warner movies that were not yet getting a full commercial DVD release could be ordered for $14.95 as a DRM-encumbered digital download, or $19.95 as a DVD.

Upon order, a disc would be created featuring the movie in its original aspect ratio and its trailer if available, then shipped out to the consumer, The disc would be fairly bare-bones, with no customization or “extras” of the sort found on most commercial releases.

Just as publishers do with print-on-demand for books, Warner is using the print-on-demand method to offer copies of movies for which there might not be enough demand to merit the expense of producing a full-fledged commercial DVD. In this uncertain economy, this is definitely a smart move.

Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze

As it happened, one of the available titles was the 1975 George Pál film Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, a highly campy adaptation of the first novel of the classic pulp series. Although $20 was kind of a high price to pay for such a film, I had been given $25 by my grandmother as a birthday present, and felt I might as well spend it on this as anything. So I placed my order, and a week later Doc Savage showed up at my door.

The DVD case was slick and professional-looking; it even had a UPC code on the back. (Also on the back was the somewhat ominous notice “This disc is expected to play back in DVD video ‘play only’ devices, and may not play back in other DVD devices including recorders and PC drives.” Given that a computer is ordinarily my only means of watching DVDs, you could have told me that before I ordered, guys! However, I had no problems playing the movie back on my own computer.)

There was no insert in the case; just a DVD—again, with a professional-looking (if somewhat nondescript) label. When I played it, after the (unskippable) FBI warning was a (skippable) trailer for the Warner Archive film collection.

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By David Rothman

Kindle owners and others can now download books in the nonDRMed Mobipocket format from Project Gutenberg. I checked out several PG books, and they all had Mobi editions. This apparently is for all titles, just like Gutenberg’s ePub. The conversions are not perfect, but, still, it’s definite progress. Now—how long until the Kindle can read ePub, the industry standard? (Via MobileRead.)

Related: 500,000 public domain titles in ePub, from Google-Sony partnership. Readable on a PC—no Sony Reader needed. You can read the Google books on a Kindle, even, with the right arrangements.

By David Rothman

Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II was a dream patient for his American dentist, during World War I, in at least one way.

He showed a extremely high tolerance of pain, at least if you go by the start of The Kaiser as I Know Him, which I read on my Sony Reader this morning on a walk down Howard St. and Jordan in Alexandria, VA.

"’The ladies like an anesthetic, no doubt, Davis,’" the Kaiser would tell tell the Dr. Arthur Davis, "but I can stand it without. Go ahead!"

"And I may say at this point," Davis recalls, "that in all my experience I never observed him to flinch while in the chair. He was the best patient in that respect I had ever treated. It often occurred to me, after the war started, that in his own callousness to pain lay the secret of his disregard for the pain and suffering he was responsible for in others."

Tips for e-walkers

You can catch up with the book directly on Google Book Search or via the Sony-Google connection. Meanwhile here are a few more tips for reader-walkers—including maybe even members of the Authors Guild who’d disagree with me on the text-to-speech issue and want to remain "pure" in the use of their Kindles IIs:

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By Chris Meadows

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” —John Gilmore

This saying has long been true in the Internet world, but it was a shock to many when it first came true in the real world.

Banned in France

I was recently reading through my copy of Dear Valued Customer, You Are a Loser by Rick Broadhead, a collection of anecdotes about great technological blunders, and one that caught my eye was this story from 1996.

There had been a great deal of controversy surrounding the late French President François Mitterrand’s health during his final years in office. After his death, his physician published a tell-all book, Le Grand Secret (in English, The Big Secret) claiming that Mitterrand had secretly suffered greatly from cancer all through his term of office.

After the first printing of 40,000 copies sold out in a single day, Mitterrand’s family convinced the French court to ban further sales of the book on the grounds that it violated doctor-patient confidentiality.

(Gubler would later receive a four-month suspended prison sentence and apparently lose his medical license (the translation of the French Wikipedia page is hard to understand) for breach of secrecy, and be ordered (along with the publisher) to pay 340,000 francs restitution to Mitterrand’s family.)

The book would remain banned in France until 2004, when the European Court of Human Rights condemned France for not lifting the ban after a few months in the name of freedom of expression. It was republished by a French publisher in 2005.

Routing Around the Damage

But back in 1996, an Internet café owner named Pascal Barbraud decided to scan and post the entire book on the fledgling World Wide Web. And so he did, in the form of huge page scans that were somewhat unwieldy to read and download. The media attention this brought to him soon led to his arrest on unrelated child-support charges. However, the seed had been planted.

Others (including Internet gadfly Declan McCullagh) were soon able to download those pages, convert them to ASCII text, and repost them in easier-to-download form. Volunteers began to translate the work into English. By April, 1996 the translation was complete, and it still exists on the Internet to this day.

The Internet interpreted France’s censorship as damage, and routed around it.

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By David Rothman

“In a poll hosted on the flight search engine’s site, ‘a good book’ received 24% of the vote, followed by an MP3 player with 22%, perfume or deodorant with 14% and a laptop or PDA with 10%.” – TravelDailyNews.com.

The TeleRead take: Just wait until the prices of readers come down, and ideally the costs of e-books from big publishers, too. Since many travelers must deal with less-than-ideal lighting conditions, this could be good news for makers of book lights, the side-lit Sony PRS-700, and LCD-based gizmos such as iPhones and Touches.

Speaking of prices and bargains: My $170 used Sony PRS-505 reader is working great, except, natch, on DRM-tainted books, just a fraction of my collection. The previous owner says she’s found the right person at Sony to help “deauthorize” the 505, and I’m optimistic. My test book on the Sony is The Kaiser as I Knew Him—by his dentist. Something for a traveler to download for a trip to Berlin? No prob with carry-on size or weight limits, eh?

And speaking of e-reading and travel: Anyone care to update us on the regulation-related challenges of taking e-book-related devices aloft? How’s the TSA treating your Kindle or Sony? Less of a bureaucratic hassle for you than toting a laptop?

By David Rothman

"Through a series of studies, we have discovered that fiction at its best isn’t just enjoyable. It measurably enhances our abilities to empathize with other people and connect with something larger than ourselves." – Keith Oatley, novelist and psychologist—writing in Greater Good Magazine (via Readerville).

The TeleRead take: So what about distinctions within fiction? Will a Tom Clancy novel improve you as much as, say, one by Philip Roth? Of course, I’d hope that people wouldn’t read fiction just for improvement, but also for sheer enjoyment. Meanwhile here’s one issue I’d hope wouldn’t come up—e-book vs. p-books, in terms of self-improvement. Text is text.

By Court Merrigan

A book is forever. A screen of text is not.

So says Stephen Carter (photo) in a Daily Beast post titled Where’s the Bailout for Publishing?

I would say he has it backwards: online is forever. Books are made of glue and paper, mostly of the high-acid type that quickly turns into so much dust and pulp. I have whole shelves doing so before my eyes, particularly the ones I owned in Thailand, where the climate is particularly merciless to cheaply-made books. They’re churned out by a publishing industry mostly concerned with this quarter’s bottom line, not eternity. Pulp that quickly returns to pulp.

No, if anything stands a chance of being "forever" (which I take to mean "lasting a long time in many places", not an ubiquitous eternity), it is an online posting. Like Carter’s. (Or this.) Disseminated across thousand servers and countless hard drives around the globe, once you hit that “publish” button, there’s no calling it back.

And a book, once out there, cannot be recalled. The author who changes his mind cannot just take down the page.

He can, however, prevent new copies from being printed. Good luck with that on the Internet. Barring some global catastrophe that causes an eternal blackout, everything that has ever been up on the Internet is being copied, every day, by servers all over the planet, such as at the Internet Archive, and will be preserved indefinitely. There’s no getting it back: if you put it on the Internet, you give it away.

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By David Rothman

Where to go to create XML files—so even old backlist books can be available in ePub and other formats, with less fuss in the long run? In a lengthy article by Teri Tan, Publishers Weekly looks at XML-related services in India.

TeleRead is an international blog, but I can’t help but ask: "Why is so much of the American publishing infrastructure half a planet away?" I won’t blame the Indians; rather, the short-sightedness of domestic companies and policymakers. While so many in U.S. publishing were dissing e-books, Indians were preparing for the new era. I’m also curious what this says about education in the U.S., in terms of workforce development.

If American publishers are similarly short-sighted about content, then a similar phenomenon will occur, and fewer and fewer global bestsellers will come from U.S. writers. But then again, what’s an "American" publisher anyway—with so much of the American industry owned by companies outside U.S. borders?

By Paul Biba

Floss manuals, mentioned here before, is putting on a push to get a manual done for PureData. The Sprint, as they call it, will take place simultaneously in New York City and Berlin from Saturday 4 April to Monday 6 April. You can find the details here. I fully intend to participate in one of these Sprints, but it’s a bit too close to tax time for me to take part in this one. I first heard about them at the O’Reilly conference, and I think it is a wonderful thing to participate in.

PureData? Here’s the blurb:

Pure Data (or Pd) is a real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing. Because all of these types of media are handled as data in the program, many fascinating opportunities for cross-synthesis between them exist. Sound can be used to manipulate video, which could then be streamed over the internet to another computer which might analyze that video and use it to control a motor-driven installation. Pd is commonly used for live music performance, VeeJaying, sound effects composition, interfacing with sensors, cameras and robots or even interacting with websites.

By Paul Biba

From the MSN Encarta site:

On October 31, 2009, MSN® Encarta® Web sites worldwide will be discontinued, with the exception of Encarta Japan, which will be discontinued on December 31, 2009. Additionally, Microsoft will cease to sell Microsoft Student and Encarta Premium software products worldwide by June 2009. We understand that Encarta users may have questions regarding this announcement so we have prepared this list of questions and answers below. Please keep reading if you would like more information about these changes to Encarta. …

Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years. However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past. As part of Microsoft’s goal to deliver the most effective and engaging resources for today’s consumer, it has made the decision to exit the Encarta business.

By David Rothman

The Detroit newspapers will show up this year on the Kindle and the new big-screen Plastic Logic reader. Subscribers will be able to buy or lease the devices. See detroitnews.com, as well as a Google news roundup.

If newspapers follow in other large cities, this could be a major boost for e-books—both the for-sale and library varieties—which could piggyback on the newspaper-related promo campaigns.

There’s even a digital divide angle. According to the Detroit papers, they will start "An extensive outreach program to reach senior citizens and others who might potentially be left behind in the new emphasis on digital delivery.  This includes offering classes in basic computer use and accessing the electronic editions, and expanding the availability of single copy sales at senior centers and senior living communities." Let’s hope the program will be well run and adequately financed, not just lipservice.

Ahead are news releases that I’ve just received via PlasticLogic.

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By David Rothman

"Clearly e-books aren’t free—they are perhaps as expensive or in some cases more expensive than print—yet they do not create large, short term cash flow to cover their costs. E-books, if successful, will sink the trade publishing industry." – Evan Schnittman, Oxford University Press executive, expressing his personal views in his new blog, Black Plastic Glasses. (Via Reading 2.0 list.)

Update, March 31, 4:30 a.m.: Let me add that Evan, a big Kindle fan, is not saying that publishers should avoid e-books. Rather he wants them to modernize their ways of doing business. See Logan Kennelly’s comments.