TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for April, 2009

By Chris Meadows

George Santayana said “Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.” Certainly e-book history has been repeating—the iPhone/iPod Touch and the Kindle are standing in for the Palm PDA and the RocketBook as a new generation discovers e-books just as the early adopters did ten years ago (only a bit more successfully this time).

But the history that people have been forgetting (or perhaps not knowing to begin with) is that there was a thriving electronic fiction community years before even the earliest commercial e-books were around to be adopted.

Over the last four columns, I have looked at a number of the Internet fiction writing circles that made up this community. To wit:

• The Superguy Mailing List
• The Legion of Net.Heroes & rec.arts.comics.creative
• alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, alt.pub.dragons-inn, alt.pub.havens-rest
• Animé fanfic and Undocumented Features

These are the forums, filled mostly with college students, that were producing, distributing, and reading electronic literature in the late 1980s to early 1990s. Years before anyone caviled at the idea of reading from a handheld LCD, hundreds of people were thrilling to these tales on their amber and green CRTs, or those gigantic line printers that printed on green and white paper.

Today I’m going end this series with a look at a number of miscellaneous fiction archives and zines from that same era or even earlier. As the title suggests, I will be starting with some archives of collected fiction and nonfiction material, and closing out with zines.

“Zine” can be an abbreviation of “magazine”—but in the Internet sense, it is usually an abbreviation of “electronic magazine” or “e-zine” instead. E-zines were produced like the amateur “fanzines” that came about when Star Trek galvanized fandom in the 1960s—but using electronic distribution instead of the traditional fanzine mimeographs or photocopies. They could cover a variety of topics, but the ones I will be spotlighting here are mostly for original fiction.

But first, there are a few archives to go through.

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By Robert Nagle

Here’s Robert Lanham’s Internet-Age Writing Syllabus:

Students will analyze the publishing industry and learn how to be more innovative than the bards of yesteryear. They’ll be asked to consider, for instance, Thomas Pynchon. How much more successful would Gravity’s Rainbow have been if it were two paragraphs long and posted on a blog beneath a picture of scantily clad coeds? And why not add a Google search box? Or what if Susan Sontag had friended 10 million people on Facebook and then published a shorter version of The Volcano Lover as a status update: "Susan thinks a volcano is a great metaphor for primal passion. Also, streak of my hair turning white—d’oh!"

(By the way, I visited the McSweeney’s booth at SXSW last year. Apparently I had assumed that McSweeney’s was a net-only publisher. In fact, not only do they produce lots of print books, the books I saw  were some of the most beautiful and exquisitely designed books I had ever come across. I wanted to hold every one of them and buy the whole lot.  Unfortunately you can’t really appreciate the books as objects by looking at an online store).

Here’s a comic video about ebook business models . Produced by Mediocre Films.

More seriously, I just noticed that Blip.tv has the TOC 2009 panel videos.  See for example the video of  Rise of ebook panel, featuring David Rothman, Mark Coker, April Hamilton, Joe Wikert. These should be familiar names to people who follow this blog. Thanks to O’Reilly for posting these vids.

By Chris Meadows

Found via TechMeme, the PreThinking blog reports that Palm is looking for “Real Reviewers”—everyday people like you and me (who are US residents and at least 18 years old)—to hype the Palm Pre on their blogs and social networks. According to Palm’s official blog, they will provide selected reviewers with a “current-model phone” (confirmed by PreThinking to include the Palm Pre) and six months of a pre-paid data plan.

Applying (via the link to Palm’s blog, above) involves filling out a survey about what you do all day, what you are passionate about, what you use your current phone for, what social networks you use, and how you would describe yourself and your phone in one word each.

I’ve gotten my application in, and will be keeping my fingers crossed.

By David Rothman

Is a spiffy new icon for an e-book program—from Apple itself—about to join the ones you see here?

"A book reader application could allow the user to purchase and download new books," the iPhone 3.0 OS documentation reportedly says.

So, within the app, could you buy e-books via micropayments billed to your iTunes account? A member of the Reading 2.0 list is sensibly speculating that. Needless to say, what applies to the iPhone could apply to the Touch as well. And maybe even the rumored Apple tablet, the “Mediapad” or whatever.

Now for some other fun. What format or formats will the possible new Apple app use? ePub among them? I hope that the Apple community speaks up for ePub capability, as well as for Apple’s encouraging book publishers to avoid DRM, in line with Steve Jobs’s expressed sentiments about music. Don’t count on Apple listening. But we can dream, no?

If Apple does things right, maybe the possible e-reading app will offer an interface as slick as Stanza’s. Of course, compared to today’s Stanza, I doubt that Apple will make it so easy for books from sites like Gutenberg, Feedbooks or Smashwords.

Stanza, for now, allows easy access to public domain works and those from innovative new startups. But for any Apple app, iTunes will be the show here.

Needless to say, the possible Apple e-reading app would cut into the revenues that Amazon was expecting from the current Kindle app for the iPhone—and from a Kindle-ized Stanza.

Update, 5:50 a.m.: Adam Hodgin notes that an Apple launch presentation played up third-party developers’ products. But, hey, since when has Apple been stopped that much by the needs of smallfry? The e-reading app may not happen immediately, but as noted, the OS documentation points to that possibility in time. Is this really just a friendly nudge to developers to come up with e-reading apps?

By David Rothman

“Built on the Intel® Atom™ processor, the PeeWee Pivot PC is an Intel-powered Classmate PC which features durable, drop and spill resistant construction with a sturdy plastic case and removable carrying handle to withstand demanding everyday use at school, in the house, on the job or when traveling.” – PeeWee PC site (via jkOnTheRun).

The TeleRead take: Priced at $599—no, this isn’t an econo machine—the “tablet laptop”  uses the Windows XP operating system. So it presumably can run Adobe, eReader and Mobipocket software, as well as other common e-reading apps. Before you go with Adobe Reader, however, read about the security issues—I’d welcome comment from Adobe.

By Paul Biba

I want one of these!! From the BeBook blog:

Introducing the ‘mini’ BeBook (5″)

The BeBook mini, all the features of the large version and more, but a slightly smaller screen (1″ / 2,5cm smaller). Perfect for travelling, this reader fits in any pocket. Full specs and a very competitave price level will follow shortly.

By Paul Biba

I was in New York today for a press event that had nothing to do with TeleRead. While there I passed by the booth from the OLED Association. Since OLED displays are absolutely gorgeous, I asked the representative about using them for ebook readers.

He said that given the current way ebooks are presented OLED would not be an optimal technology. While OLED is extremely battery efficient compared to LED screens, it wouldn’t work well for ebooks. This is because OLED’s battery efficiency comes from the fact that only the driven leds require power. Black pixels, for example, draw absolutely zero current. So, since people like to read on a white background, all those white pixels will be drawing current to produce the background, and the relatively little space devoted to the black text would draw no current. Not very efficient. He said that if people wanted to read white text on a black background then OLED technology would be just perfect in terms of battery life.

By Chris Meadows

This series, “Paleo E-books,” looks at groups who were writing Internet literature in the late 1980s and early 1990s—well before most people had any idea what an “e-book” was.

Prior “Paleo E-books” columns cover:

• The Superguy Mailing List
• The Legion of Net.Heroes & rec.arts.comics.creative
• alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, alt.pub.dragons-inn, alt.pub.havens-rest

In this entry I will be looking at fan-written fiction, or “fanfic”—and in particular one of the more famous early Internet fanfic series: Undocumented Features.

Today, there is nothing unusual about Internet fanfic; it’s just one of those things that people do on the Internet. It’s gotten so you can barely research Harry Potter without coming across a dozen “Harry + Luna” (or even “Harry + Draco”!) fanfics.

But in the early 1990s, Internet fan fiction was rare enough that those few people writing it became fairly well-known in their fandom communities. There are a number of reasons for this—there was no World Wide Web yet, and the Internet was completely unheard of outside of colleges and big businesses, so there were fewer people to write or read it.

To those familiar with how the Internet grew, it should come as no surprise that some of the first fanfic to appear was based on Japanese animation, or animé. If anything, it should be surprising that it took as long as it did to happen.

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By Robert Nagle

A milestone of sorts was reached on my idiotprogrammer  blog recently. I noticed that wordpress has caught over 1,300,000 spam comments on my blog so far!  This merits an appreciatory post at least.

I’ve been blogging since 2001, and I think I switched over to wordpress in 2003 (or was it 2004?). I think I started using akismet spam fighter in late 2005 or early 2006. Until  until then I was completely unprotected–and in a state of constant panic–always dreading the need to weed through the barrage of comments.  Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete! (next page). Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete ! Akismet works like a charm, though it is still tedious to manage.   It is harder to tell the difference between comment spam and real comments.

About a year ago I eliminated the no-follow rule about comments in order to stop penalizing legitimate commenters. Ironically that meant having to read blog comments a lot closer than I normally would. In many cases, it was clear that a real live human was commenting–it wasn’t some automated script–but their comments were  irrelevant or mildly offtopic or too generic sounding. I ended up being a lot stricter  if the URL seemed too commercial in nature. But sometimes it’s impossible to tell. At heart, all Internet denizens are promoting SOMETHING.

I’m probably giving the impression that my personal  blog receives a lot of reader comments. It does not.  I have 2300 posts and 704 approved  comments, about one out of every 3 posts. That overlooks the fact that a small number of my posts receive lots of comments  while most  receive none at all.  In fact, maybe 1 out of every 8 or 10 posts receives an honest-to-god comment from a homo sapien.  Which is just as well. Blogs can be quiet and solitary places. And if nobody is around, you don’t want to make a spectacle of yourself  by being the first to write a comment.  It is almost like noticing someone peacefully asleep on a hammock and  tapping them on the shoulder to ask if they are really sleeping. As good as free discussions are, I try to avoid reading things with over 20 comments.   (Watch this collegehumor video We didn’t start the flame war to see why–warning: language!).

Despite the silence of my (nonexistent) blog readers, I do get enormous amounts of  aleatory  feedback . And that is my subject for today: Spam Poetry.

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By Paul Biba

Here we go again. Adobe, according to the Washington Post, has confirmed that there is a security flaw in Reader for Windows, Linux and the Mac platforms. There have been a lot of security problems with Reader and perhaps we should be switching over to a more secure platform According to the Post’s Brian Krebs in his Security Fix column:

As an alternative, I generally recommend the free and lightweight Foxit Reader (like Adobe’s Reader it now comes bundled with a toolbar that you may want to opt out of installing). But there are other free PDF readers, including Sumatra PDF and PDF-XChange Viewer.

Thanks to Michael Pastore for the link. Michael also has a discussion of alternatives to Adobe Reader on his website. Luckily I’m on a Mac so I can use Preview, which cones with the Mac, and so don’t need to bother with this security-problem-plagued product.

By David Rothman

“EPUBGen is a project that Peter Sorotokin has started—it’s a conversion utility for rtf files, word files, and FictionBook files. The output in each case is, of course, epub. The project is open source, and available for download.” – Adobe Digital Editions blog post.

Key detail: “Note that there is also a .jar file for rtf2epub and it should work, but the main intent of this project is to provide source code and examples of the way things could be done. In other words, there’s plenty of room for developers to improve and enhance the conversion.”

The TeleRead take: So, gang, what do you think? How well does the output quality currently stack up against alternatives, and what most needs to be done? Meanwhile kudos to Adobe and Peter for offering people open source alternatives that others can build on. Hint, hint, Amazon. Will you let Lexcycle programmers undertake similar projects, as well as contribute to standards work with general interests in mind, not just Amazon’s? And will this go on permanently, not just to counter skeptics? My mind’s open.

(Via prsync.)

By Court Merrigan

Stop the presses, as it were. The Espresso Book Machine “can print and bind books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait,” according to the Guardian. Currently it has access to 500,000 books, but the British bookseller Blackwell’s

hopes to increase this to over a million titles by the end of the summer—the equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space, or over 50 bookshops rolled into one. The majority of these books are currently out-of-copyright works, but Blackwell is working with publishers throughout the UK to increase access to in-copyright writings, and says the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

According to maker On Demand Books, the Espresso is “in essence, an ATM for books.”

No word on how U.S. publishers have reacted, but as the Espresso is the brainstorm of American publisher Jason Epstein, my guess is we’ll find out soon. I can imagine brick-and-mortar stores won’t be hopping for joy (according to Douglas A. Mcintyre, the bookseller Borders will be gone by the end of 2009), but Amazon will lap the news up.

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By David Rothman

Tweet-related links here (via BookSquare). NYT story here. Let’s hope that Amazon is next in Justice’s sights. Please!

No, I’m not saying Amazon is guilty of anti-trust violations. But enough strange things are happening for Jeff and friends to be begging for a fond look by the feds, whether Justice or the FTC. I mean, why can’t Kindle books show up reliably in the iPhone’s Safari browser when you use Amazon’s search engine? Why the false “unavailables”? Another example of Amazon tilting the table to favor the Kindle over Apple alternatives?

Meanwhile as a writer I’m thrilled that Justice is checking out the Google settlement.

Disclosure/Reminder: For retirement investment purposes, I’m a very small Google shareholder, but I try to call ‘em as I see ‘em.

By David Rothman

Remember the good chuckle we all had over those $10 computers that India was to develop? Maybe in time, no?

But for now, India has ordered 250,000 OLPC XO machines, with millions more expected.

That’s a lot of potential e-book readers—the human kind. Will Western publishers catch on and offer freebies or extra-extra-low-priced editions?

(Thanks to Chris Meadows.)

By David Rothman

Coincidence? Just as Amazon is digesting Stanza, something long overdue has happened—the addition of ePub books to Fictionwise’s Multiformat option. Congrats both to FW and its parent company, Barnes & Noble. No DRM taints MultiFormat books, of course. Announcement follows:

“Today we began adding ePub files to Fictionwise (over 16,000 are already online) and the rest of our MultiFormat eBooks will be online by the end of the week. ePub is an eBook file format that is gaining popularity with both publishers and consumers. As part of our launch of unencrypted ePub eBooks, we are offering all our MultiFormat titles with a 50% discount. Shop your favorite format now!”

Cool! The Solomon Scandals, my own novel, is finally on sale in ePub at yet another major e-store (for $2.98 right now), in addition to Twilight Times Books. Best of all, an option that isn’t Kindle-only comes up on the Fictionwise search engine with the headline in big type without your having to include the “The” in the title. Do you think Amazon someday will be as advanced? Amazon’s search engine glitch continues at my expense.

Meanwhile MobileRead is reporting that a German version of the Cybook is to appear on Thursday with ePub and PDF capabilities (DRM capabilities included?). Will an English-language one follow from Bookeen? Maybe via Adobe Digital Editions? And will Bookeen make an upgrade available for existing users, so we’re not longer so dependent on the Amazon-owned Mobipocket format?

(Big thanks to Logan Kennelly for the pointer. And hats off to Kovid, too.)

By Chris Meadows

Prior columns in this series:

• The Superguy Mailing List
• The Legion of Net.Heroes & rec.arts.comics.creative

The Legion of Net.Heroes might be the oldest Usenet-based shared-world fiction setting still alive and kicking—but there are some defunct settings that pre-date it. Identifying them by the names of their newsgroups, these are mainly alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, alt.pub.dragons-inn, and alt.pub.havens-rest. Today we will look briefly at these groups where people were writing “e-books” before anybody ever knew what an “e-book” was.

The Chatsubo and the Pubs

When these groups are mentioned, they are often mentioned together, because they share more similarities than differences. Though they are based in different genres, all three of them are centered around a bar or pub—a place where characters can meet before heading on adventures, or simply hang out and pass the time. They all feature writers who control their own characters but share certain “non-player characters” in common.

The writing style was generally more serious than Superguy or the LNH, given that these were settings for writing original stories, not parodying something else. There were occasional touches of humor, however, such as a Dragon’s Inn character named Enn Piecy (after “NPC,” for “non-player character”—a roleplaying game term).

These fiction groups share their pub-based setting in common with a couple of non-fiction groups: alt.callahans and alt.pub.coffeehouse.amethyst. alt.callahans was the first pub-based chat group, founded in 1989, inspired by the Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon books by Spider Robinson.

alt.callahans is the Usenet equivalent of a chatroom: people would post about what they were doing and what was going on in their lives, and others would reply in kind. alt.pub.coffeehouse.amethyst (FAQ) came later, and was like an attempt to cross Callahan’s and the Chatsubo: a cyberpunk-themed meeting place, but for real people instead of fictitious characters.

Of all these groups, alt.callahans is the only one still going strong after all these years.

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By Robert Nagle

Some readers have reported problems with reading TeleRead on their feed reader.  TeleRead changed its URL structure slightly last February and although legacy RSS feeds still seemed to work, apparently some readers report that Bloglines has not been updating after April 20, 2009. 

The best URL for Teleread RSS is currently:

http://www.teleread.org/feed/

(In fact, this URL redirects you to a feedburner RSS feed, but this is more detail than you need to know).

Speaking of RSS feeds, here’s the mp3 for a great SXSW panel discussion I attended in March called Beyond Aggregation — Finding the Web’s Best Content (download mp3)  Description: RSS aggregation has reduced the massive ocean of Web content into something more manageable, but we are still left overloaded with information and manual searching. This panel will explore new avenues for finding the Web’s best content, and how this more intelligent Web will affect major media companies, online publishers and consumers. It included people from Techmeme, readwriteweb.  I found this panel one of the most informative at last month’s conference.

(I’ll try to give a longer wrapup about the other panels  for SXSW soon).