TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for May, 2009

By Chris Meadows

I am in St. Louis this weekend, along with my parents, for a visit to my brother, sister-in-law, and four nieces and nephews. I am away from my own desktop computer, and am having to make do with a slightly flaky Ubuntu laptop—and do not quite have either the energy or the facilities to write the in-depth examination of how the PRS-700 deals with different e-book formats that I had intended.

However, I have brought along the PRS-700 (as well as my iPod Touch) and have observed a few possibly-unexpected uses of the Sony Reader—and another flaw or two—along the way.

(Update: See update to this article at the end.)

Display in Sunlight

First, an amendment to my prior entry, in which I talked about how the glare-prone, low-contrast, unevenly-backlit screen of the PRS-700 was harder to read than my high-contrast, well-lit iPod Touch’s screen. I have since discovered one important exception to this rule: direct sunlight. In direct sunlight that entirely washes out the iPod Touch’s screen, the E-ink screen of the PRS-700 is as clear as day.

Of course, how important this is to you as a reader depends on how often you would expect to be reading in direct sunlight. I try to avoid situations where I would have to read in direct sun, so it might not be as useful to me as to someone who was out in the sun all the time.

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By Paul Biba

I’m at the show this morning and I stopped by the Ingram booth to say hello.  They told me that, from their viewpoint, the show has been very successful on the digital end.  They said that last year people were asking them to explain what all this digital stuff was, but this year people seem to know all that and are talking about implementation.  They said that they are getting a lot of interest from hardware manufacturers, so Amazon may be seeing some competition in the future.

Update:  As I was leaving I ran into the CEO of Overdrive and told him about the Ingram comment.  He pretty much agreed and said that people are finally starting to ask the right questions.  He said that there is a sense of urgency with people wanting to convert all their books now and they still need some education on formats, ecomerce models etc.  He also said that there is a lot of interest from international publishers.

I also ran into a small publisher, who must remain nameless, who would like to do some innovative things with ebooks. They told me that even though there is a lot of publisher interest in ebooks, once you get a way from the main stream or want to do something different that does not include full text with DRM, publishers are shying away, not knowing what to make of something that is not plain vanilla.

By Paul Biba

Here’s a shot of Sarah Wendell (left) from Smart Bitches, and Jessica Kennedy from Books Reviews by Jess. I’ll be at the Net Galley booth #4077 at noon on Sunday.

The final panel I attended was on, and by, book review bloggers.

The panel included Stephanie Coleman-Chan of Stephanie’s Written Word, Jennifer Hart of Book Club Girl, Candace Levy of Beth Fish Reads, Natasha Maw of Maw Books, Julie Peterson of Booking Mama, Amy Riley of My Friend Amuy and Dawn Rennert of She is Too Fond of Books. It was given in one of the largest rooms and it was packed. Standing room only. They gave out a list of some book blogger directories to help publishers and marketers find target blogs. The panel was also recorded. If you keep your eye on Book Club Girl they will post the recording and also links to the directories, as they didn’t have enough handouts. Keep checking here.

By Paul Biba

Here’s the view from the ferry that I take from New Jersey over the Hudson to New York.  The ferry terminal is only 2 blocks away from the Javits Center so it makes for a pretty good commute.

Not only are books on display, but also book accessories.  Here is a booth from Periscope, who makes a book light for the Kindle and regular books as well. You can find it here, by the way.

Downstairs is another floor that is composed of primarily children’s book publishers.  Very strangely, it is also the venue for contract publishers, primarily from India, China and Korea.  These poor guys are all intermixed with the children’s book people, so you see, for example, a rather lost looking group of contract publishers from India in their booth surrounded on one side by a Barbie booth and on the other side by a booth full of kids’ puppets.  It’s funny and sad, and if I were them I’d want my registration money back.

Yesterday I posted from a table down on the floor that had an Ethernet cable – not from the press room which has now lost its air conditioning, if it ever had any, and is hot as hell.  When I packed up I left my Logitech Bluetooth mouse on the table and didn’t realize it ‘till I got home.  Just for fun I went back to the table, which is in a high traffic area, and much to my surprise it was still there.  I guess book people are pretty honest.  It wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds at CES.

By David Rothman

I’m not sure if the Sony e-reader app, in the eBook Libary, can replicate this view in ePub.

But oh how nice it looks with The Gate House, a book in Sony’s proprietary BBeB format. The reader needs to treat ePub the same if it doesn’t already.

Notice the efficient use of the landscape-oriented screen on my desktop. Software developers should consider similar arrangements for netbooks, especially those you can’t use in a tablet mode.

For desktops, please show mercy and add scrolling via a mouse wheel, a little detail that Sony apparently forget. Click on the image for a detailed view.

By Paul Biba

You can find a 15 minute interview with me over at the Kindle Chronicles.  It was fun to do it and Len Edgerly is a really nice guy.  Here’s Len’s blurb:

Paul Biba, co-editor of TeleRead and a way-early adopter of eBooks, back when he was a globe-trotting corporate lawyer.  He explains why he considers these early days of the eBook revolution so exciting, and why he and TeleRead owner David Rothman disagree on whether we should be afraid that Amazon will gain monopolistic power over the eBook industry.

By David Rothman

Road Show, a Hollywood comedy directed by the legendary Hal Roach, is a free public domain movie these days—with a little twist. One of the three screenwriters was Arnold Belgard (1907-1967), a distant relative on my late mother’s side of the family.

Three “Bonanza” and nine “Lassie” episodes were also among Belgard’s many scripts. What’s more, he wrote some dialogue for The Fabulous Joe, a talking dog movie, which is fitting since The Solomon Scandals is the only D.C. newspaper novel that ends with a talking Afghan Hound doing a Truman send up at the Cosmos Club. No copyright jokes, please. Belgard’s Hollywood lucre stayed a long way from us. I don’t know how Road Show reached the public domain in the U.S., just that it’s in the PD category according to the Internet Archive.

For Road Show, based on a novel by Eric Hatch, here’s a synopsis accompanying the free Flash and download at the Archive: “Millionaire playboy Drogo Gaines (John Hubbard) gets cold feet at the altar and his gold digging bride gets him committed to an asylum. While there he meets Col. Carleton Carroway (Adolphe Menjou) who’s another millionaire there for a rest cure from his grabby family. The two make an escape and wind up in a carnival owned by Penguin Moore (Carole Landis) and from then on it’s one mad plot situation after another.”

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By David Rothman

For some months now, we’ve written of the plight of the Yahoo 360 bloggers—an illustration of how “corporate” and “permanent” often don’t jibe with each other. No ideology commentary here. That’s just the way it is.

In the grand scheme of things—yes, I’m exaggerating a little for effect—your posts may have the lives of fruit flies.

Now Yahoo has announced that “Your blog on Yahoo 360 will no longer be available to you.” Not just for new posts for continued access? The good news—kudos to Yahoo!—is that you can move your blog to another Yahoo site or even to WordPress.com. And the bad news? Well, I can’t say for sure, but I doubt that Yahoo will redirect every bleepin’ URL from your old posts.

Speaking of the permanence issue, I still can’t get Odeo to retrieve the audios that David Faucheux, a blind librarian blogging for TeleRead, recorded over the years.

Fruitfly image: CC-licensed by Mo Kaiwen.

Related: DataPortability Project. Not sure if Yahoo is a participant. If not, it urgently needs to be.

By Paul Biba

At BookExpo I attended a workshop on copyright enforcement. It was a joint presentation by the Association of American Publishers and the U.K. Publishers Association. They presented a whole bunch of info on how much infringement there was, how many evil sites there are and gave some plain misinformation about the Pirate Bay case. I was going to write it up and give you the details, but something about it kept nagging at me and I realized, today, what a sorry thing it was.

The thrust of the presentations was how good they were in issuing, and getting compliance with, take down notices. The U.K. Publishers Association is developing a portal, which members pay for, to make issuing these notices easier. It seems like a good idea, actually. But they miss the point completely.

What all of this does is simply try to overlay the already failed model into the future and convince people (paying members, of course) that by doing this thrashing around they are actually accomplishing something. It is so sad that the industry doesn’t recognize this for the failure it really is.

When you are faced with an overwhelming paradigm change the proper thing to do is to adapt to it and try to find new ways to deal with it. I had hoped that these groups would have come up with some creative solutions. But no go. Just keep plodding on with the old failed model.

I’ll give you a good example of what could be done. Instead of spending lots of money hiring a major international law firm to prosecute take down notices (which they did), why not spend the same amount of money with a high powered software house to help develop filters that companies like Scirbd or Wattpad could use to screen out copyrighted material. No, they won’t do that. They talked about the stuff that those sites have done so far – talked about it with some disdain by the way – but took that attitude that it was those sites’ complete responsibility, rather than it being a shared effort. Why this old school attitude?

For three reasons. First, because it might put them out of business if a new model worked. Second, to justify membership fees they need numbers. They can point to the hard numbers of the take down notices they issue and this can be used to drive membership. (Hey, I was counsel to a trade association once and I’m familiar with this game.) But they can’t get any hard numbers out of a software program. But the real reason is next.

Three, that organizations like this are still mired in the old paradigm and can’t see that the world is changing around them. They keep fighting the old fight, but don’t realize that they don’t even know who the enemy is any more.

By Paul Biba

Here is the Dover books.  They don’t do ebooks, and don’t plan to (I asked), but I love their books so I couldn’t resist posting this picture.

Here’s one of the main entrances to the exhibit hall

People are lining up all over to get books signed.  There are even separate book signing venues.  Also, if anyone is offering a free book the table is mobbed, almost like hyenas attacking a downed animal.  Don’t get in the way of someone heading for a free book!

Marketing here is pretty staid compared to other shows I’ve been to.  Not much glitz except for the Cool-ER people who seem to have a sense of showmanship.  I passed by their booth this afternoon and this is what I saw:

The looks on the spectators’ faces were comical.  Clearly they aren’t used to this here.  You should have seen the looks, also, of the people who were running the very staid stand right next to them.  Clearly they never expected anything like this.

By Paul Biba

Here’s Kat Meyer from Follow the Reader (left) and Natasha Maw from Maw Books at the “”Meet the Bloggers’” booth:

Kat was followed by Jason Boog (left) of GalleyCat and Andrew Savikas of Tools of Change

The Amazon booth is nothing special and the Sony booth looks exactly the same except for a Sony sign.  They are directly across from each other. Actually, they are both pretty crummy compared to most of the booths at the show.

By Paul Biba

Here are a few shots to give you a feel of what is going on here.  There are booths from the biggest publishers as well as booths from university presses and tiny publishers.  A friend who works for a small publisher, who has a booth here, tells me that in years past the major attendees were book buyers.  This has dropped off a lot, she says, in the last few years and now there is a huge media contingent who prowls around looking to find out what is new and trendy.  Also, she says that rights buyers are making up a large part of the attendance – looking to buy foreign or overseas rights.

There is a large part of the floor devoted to Arabic publishing, with booths from such places as Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, UAE, Tunisia and others.  On an aesthetic basis they are the most attractive displays at the show.  Clearly a lot of thought has gone into the presentations.

I am a huge Moleskine fan and so I just had to include a shot of their booth.  The Moleskine Reporter is travelling with me throughout the show.

Some of the display areas, such as this one by Harlequin, are too large to get a decent picture, but this gives you a bit of an idea.

More later.

By Chris Meadows

PC World has a report on the screens from Pixel Qi, the company founded by former OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen. (See pictures of the screens in this TeleRead story.) The article promises that Pixel Qi’s new three-mode, low-power-consumption displays will be in netbooks by the end of the year, magically turning them into e-book readers fit to compete with Kindle, Sony, and others.

"What you’re looking at is a screen that’s entirely reflective," said [John Ryan, chief operating officer at Pixel Qi], at Pixel Qi’s temporary office in Taipei. "It’s just running like e-paper so that it’s running on the ambient light. It’s not fighting the office light , it’s not fighting the sunlight. That makes it better for reading but it also cuts the power consumption. The backlight in the screen is typically the largest power drain in any notebook computer."

Pixel Qi suggests that netbooks designed to take advantage of this will have the familiar OLPC-style display that swivels around and caps the keyboard for an e-book capable tablet mode.

This is certainly a reason to get excited about the near future. If I were given the choice between a $400 Sony PRS-700, and a $400 netbook that was as easy or easier to read, I know which one I’d pick. (Assuming I had the $400 to spend, anyway.)

By Paul Biba

Stopped by their booth, which is certainly innovative, to take a look at the reader.  It is a nice unit.  Very light and feels good in the hand.  The tell me that EPUB is what they  are betting on for the future.  It is available in 8 colors, which is sort of fun, and will retail for $249.  They are now going into full production and units should be available in the first week of June.  Users can share books purchased from the Coolerbooks website with up to five other readers.  Here are a few shots:

By Ficbot

Related: Chris Meadows’ May 29 installment in his series evaluating the Sony PRS-700. – D.R.

I supervise an informal after-school program a few times a week, and had my Sony Reader PRS-505 out while the kids were at play.

My gadgets are a familiar sight to them—I use a netbook and iPod, among other things, in some of my actual teaching lessons—and the older children are fond of playing trivia games with me on the iPod from time to time. The other day, they were busy with their lego building and I thought I could finish off The Hound of the Baskervilles at last on my Sony Reader. I should know better than to try and use my own toys around inquisitive kids!

Their initial reactions to the Reader were quite favorable. I had a pretty cloth cover on mine, and it made the girls in the group especially interested. Kids this age do not have any preconceptions about gender and technology, thank goodness, and they’ll grow up knowing how to do these things. The girls were quite comfortable with the idea of a book reader once they figured it out, and the advantages of such a device (for example, being able to carry around more than one book) were readily apparent to them with no prompting from me. I got lots of wows and oohs over my pretty toy!

From a software standpoint, they were able with help to sort out the file system and use the categories to find the handful of kiddie titles I had on there. And they had no trouble at all figuring out the buttons and using them to choose a book and advance the screens as they explored. I think some of them were more interested in pressing the buttons than in doing actual reading, but of course depending on the age and reading level of the child, your mileage will vary on that one. One precocious little reader was interested in doing some actual work with me, so as the others wandered back to their toys, I got her started on some actual reading.

First pick: Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses

My first pick was Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. I have a beautiful free version from MobileRead, complete with illustrations, and it hit the spot for reading like this. Each poem was short, geared to children and could fit on one screen. So there was a nice sense of accomplishment when we got to the end of the page because we’d actually finished doing something! I can see a child getting a bit lost on a longer work if they don’t have the tactile feedback of physical pages to work with. If we ever get to the point where we have readers specifically designed for children, a more obvious page indicator—either tactile, or more prominent graphically—would definitely be a feature worth considering.

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By Chris Meadows

In this entry, I’m taking a closer look at what the device is like: what are its ergonomic factors, and how is the display? (As usual, click on any picture to see it full-size.)

Ergonomics

We’ll start with an ergonomic overview. The screen itself is about the size of a paperback book page, with a resolution of 800 vertical by 600 horizontal—167 pixels per inch, just slightly more than the iPhone’s 160 ppi density, or twice-and-change an ordinary monitor’s 72 pixels per inch. It’s not quite enough dots per inch to look just like a real printed sheet of paper (you would want to get into the 300 DPI range for that), but it’s enough to make nice fonts that don’t look completely horrible.

The tablet is pretty thin. All told, it’s about a centimeter thick, the same thickness that my Contour plastic case makes my iPod Touch. The left edge is curved outward, kind of like a book spine, and the right edge is beveled to suggest the curvature of the paper pages on a  hardcover  book with a curved spine. Cute little psychological touch, I suppose.

(Note: The above photo is only meant to show relative scale. It was taken using a flash, and ends up making the 700 look bright and the iPod Touch look washed out. In actuality, the Touch is a good deal brighter.)

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By David Rothman

TeleRead Co-Editor Paul Biba, while covering BookExpo America, landed a nice scoop—the news that a BE Book with E Ink will retail for a mere $199 or so.

And for around $30, you’ll be able to buy a wireless add-on. Kindle-level ease ahead for other e-book-shoppers?

Scroll down for these and other BEA posts from Paul.

Speaking of E Ink: Check out Chris Meadows’ continuing series on his Sony PRS-700 review unit.