TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for July, 2009

By Paul Biba

A couple of days ago we reported on the iPhone SMS bug that would allow your iPhone to be taken over by a hacker. Today Apple has released a patch for the bug. Update your phone as soon as you can. It never hurts to be safe.

By Paul Biba

The Millions’ has a collaborative atlas of book stores and literary places. This Atlas is open to anyone and everyone to edit. Aside from the atlas the mashup also includes book blogger locations. The creator says: add the general location … of where you live. In the next year, I will be notifying you about authors who are coming to your area!

It’s fun to poke around the map and see what bookstores are where. The most unusual one is in the Antartic:

CSEC Library, Antarctic
Last Updated by Max on May 15

The Crary Science & Engineering Center (CSEC), McMurdo Station, Ross Island, Antarctica (77.8475S, 166.6576W ,45m, or about 2200 miles due south of New Zealand) houses a library with views of glaciers and the Transantarctic Mountains

Thanks to BookofJoe for the link.

By Paul Biba

This is not a good time to raise capital. That’s why that fact that LibreDigital was able to secure $15M in a second round financing is impressive. LibreDigital is an ebook distributor, and the venture sharks wouldn’t give them money if they didn’t smell more money in the water. And that money is coming from ebooks.

VentureBeat quotes on of the partners who financed LibreDigital as saying: “Demand for books & newspapers in digital formats is out-pacing supply.”

By Paul Biba

Google Books engineering director Dan Clancy was interviewed recently and he talked about Google’s vision of the future. He said that that the settlement was looking at the past, but in the future Google had other ideas. Here’s an excerpt from the interview as published by the BayNewser:

… But right now the physical bookstores are a critical part of our book ecosystem. And in fact a huge amount of books are bought because people go into a physical bookstore and say, hey I want this, I want that. And I think it’s a mistake if we think of our future digital world as digital means online and physical means offline. Because if that happens and 10 percent of the world goes digital, that’s going to be really hard for all the bookstores to sustain their business model.

So part of our model is to figure out we’re going to syndicate for our partner program all of the books we sell that are new, so that any bookstore can sell a Google edition and find a way that people can buy them in bricks and mortar stores as well.

And then finally, our model is you should be able to read on any device…. Our model is some people will read [our books] on a laptop, some will read them on the phone, some people will read on their netbook, and some people will read on their e-reader. And we’ll work with any reader provider that wants to make it so they can get their books from the Google cloud….

So the principles of our future world is trying to build this world where there’s lots of retail players, read on any device, but it’s still stored in the cloud. And as we talk with publishers and booksellers, I think this is the right model, because we’re trying to make what would be an open model that encourages competition. …

Thanks to ResourceShelf for the link.

By Paul Biba

Maria Bonn is the Director of the University of Michigan’s Scholarly Publishing Office. She is responsible for the production of electronic books and journals and for broadly developing the role of the Library in scholarly communication. In an interview by Mary Minnow of the Stanford Copyright and Fair Use website she discussed how the University determines whether a book is under copyright:

On determining copyright status: right now we are being fairly conservative in our copyright judgments. Keep in mind that these volumes are only for sale in the United States, so we are guided by U.S. copyright law. We run an automated analysis on the MARC records to identify all volumes published prior to 1923 and most U.S. government publications. After this analysis, he bibliographic information is sorted by publication date and undergoes a quick manual review to check for obvious errors or bibliographic oddities (such as a record for a book that asserted it had been published in 1099). These volumes are removed from the POD (Print On Demand) stream. There is a wealth of material that is relatively easy for us to identify as public domain, and these are the books that we are currently working on getting out into the world. There are many other books that are probably also public domain but we’ll need to do a more nuanced analysis in order to make that determination.

If we extend our arrangements with POD printers and distributors to allow for sale of books in other countries (we already have that option for the U.K and Germany, but have not acted on it), we will need to construct a similar process of analysis taking into account the copyright laws of the countries in which we are selling the books.

By David Rothman

I hate the fonts on most E Ink readers. They don’t stand apart sufficiently from the background.

But the Sony PRS-600—discussed earlier—just might offer bolder fonts than typical models.

Let hope that the impressions from this screen shot, picked up from the Kindle 2 Review, will hold up in real life. Improved screen contrast would also help.

 PRS-600 specs: Touch screen of six inches,  maybe flexible, SD and Memory Stick support, size of just 4.87 by 4.87 inches, weight of ten ounces, ePub capability, and possibly MP3 audio recording rather than just a player.

The big question is whether there’ll be WiFi, as opposed to Kindle-style wireless dependent on phone companies. Use of WiFi rather than cellular would be one way of dealing with the complexities of an international rollout.

Sony will also offer the PRS-300, with a five-inch nontouch screen and audio or card slots. That’s the 300 on the left; the 600 on the right.

Homework assignment: Look over the manuals for the 300 and 600 and share your insights from them.

By David Rothman

“The Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has won its court case against The Pirate Bay. The Amsterdam court today ruled that the site must cease all operations in The Netherlands within 10 days, or else pay penalties of 30,000 euros ($42,300) a person, per day.” – TorrentFreak.

The TeleRead take: See Techmeme roundup for further details. The defendants will face a 30,000-Euro-a-day fine if they don’t shut down. A few issues have popped up. Were the defendants AWOL because they failed to receive a summons? Also, can Dutch authorities really block the site?

By David Rothman

Details in Engadget—source of the dog-ate-my-homework  image.

Meanwhile a news release from a law firm involved with the homework case says:

The suit is being brought by Justin D. Gawronski, a 17-year-old high school student who had purchased Orwell’s 1984 to complete a summer homework assignment.

When Amazon deleted the book from his Kindle, it rendered the electronic notes he had taken worthless.

The law firm hopes to turn this into a class action suit.

Related: PDF of complaint.

By Paul Biba

That is from a market research report by Simba Information. Unfortunately the full report is fee based, but the Simba press release does contain some hard information:

In July 2008, the top 25 titles on Amazon’s bestseller list for the four weeks averaged $9.25 and the top 25 in June 2009 averaged $8.04 after decreasing fairly steadily during the interim. For Sony, after starting at $10.13 in July 2008 then increasing to $11.68 in November thanks to a few well selling bundles, the average price of the top 25 fell to $9.97 in June. …

According to “Trade E-Book Publishing 2009,” about 8% of the U.S. adult population purchased at least one e-book during 2008; a figure undoubtedly on the rise.

Again, thanks to Resource Shelf for the link.

(Time stamp changed from 1:05 p.m. Eastern to give this item more prominence. – D.R.)

By David Rothman

“The New New York Times, or NNYT, would have a writing staff of say 50 people. These are among the best journalists in the world, and lets say they wanted to pay themselves $200,000/year, a top salary for a reporter of that stature. That’s just $10 million a year in payroll expenses. Call it $12 million with benefits. Plus, they all have stock options in the new comapny.”

So writes TechCrunch founder J. Michael Arrington—complete with the “lets say” and the “new comapny.” A publication of any size can use copy editors (a job description I dearly wish we had at TeleRead).

TechCrunch has its merits, and, yes, Michael is semi-joking when he says that the Times could follow the example of The Politico and slim down. He says the latter has a news room of just “100 strong,” with star writers recruited from the established newspapers. And yet the Politico now draws seven million visitors a month.

Trouble is, the Politico doesn’t really cover government in depth in the genuine sense—just politics, more or less, in an upscale version of the Gawker act. For the fun of it, I’ll list a few headlines in The Politico:

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By Paul Biba

That’s the title of my daughter’s feature article in Wired Magazine this month. Erin Biba is a Wired Correspondent and you can find her article on line here. The picture is from the article.

Isn’t it great to be able to crow about your daughter to a semi-captive audience. Now to hit all those suckers who follow me on Twitter.

By David Rothman

For e-reading, I’ve had good luck with my Acer Aspire One with a 120G hard disk, 1G of memory, WiFi, an 8.9-inch WSVGA display and Win XP.

But some e-bookers might prefer a more rugged XP model with a 16G solid-state drives. $199 for the reconditioned solid-state model at uBid isn’t an incredible price, but it certainly isn’t a gouge. You’ll be able to download books directly and read them with a variety of programs ranging from FBReader to Adobe Reader.

Of course, I’d rather go with a linux netbook, but thanks to the Tower of eBabel, I need to be able to run a variety of programs, and you may be in a similar situation.

By David Rothman

Press release follows. Good luck to Don and to Quartet, the new digital publishing house. – D.R.

Quartet Press has announced that Don Linn, Senior Vice President and Publisher at The Taunton Press, will be leaving Taunton to launch a digital publishing house, Quartet Press. Linn—who prior to his tenure at Taunton was owner and CEO of Consortium Book Sales and Distribution—will have principal responsibility for Quartet Press’ Finance, Administration and General Management.

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By David Rothman

Co-editor Paul Biba notes that Publishers Weekly and sister publications are for sale. With e-books taking off, maybe TeleRead can buy PW someday. That would be fun. Under our management, PW and the others wouldn’t run book reviews without information about e-formats—or lack thereof—and DRM limitations.

More seriously, best of luck to the PW crew at this difficult time.

Related: DRM, Orwellian book zaps and eBabel: When will the press TRULY grasp the importance of e-book ownership?

By Paul Biba

From the Publishers Weekly daily email:

Reed Business Information is putting Publishers Weekly and its affiliated publications, Library Journal and School Library Journal, up for sale. The sale of the group is part of RBI’s strategy to divest most of its trade magazines in the U.S. Last year, Reed Elsevier, parent company of RBI, tried to sell all of RBI but dropped the sale when it couldn’t get the price it wanted in a depressed market for media properties. In a related announcement, Tad Smith, CEO of RBI US, has resigned. John Poulin has been named acting CEO and he will head the sales process.

By Paul Biba

From Digital Koans:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $362,000 to the Open Annotation Collaboration to “build new digital annotation tools and define and demonstrate a framework for sharing annotations of digital content across the World Wide Web.”

Here’s an excerpt from the press release on JESSE:

The OAC includes humanities scholars, librarians, and information scientists from four universities—George Mason University, the University of Illinois, the University of Maryland, and the University of Queensland (Australia)—from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library, and from the Office of Advanced Technology Research at JSTOR, an integrated online archive of over five million items digitized from scholarly journals and primary source archives. . . .

The OAC effort will focus on annotation interoperability, creating data models, standards, and tools that allow scholars working in disparate locations to share and leverage annotations of digital resources across the boundaries of individual annotation applications and content collections.

You can find out more about the Open Annotation Collaboration here.

By Paul Biba

Clément Monjou, Rédacteur en chef de Ebouquin.fr, sent me an email to alert me to the news that details and pictures of the new Sony readers have leaked. Evidently their operating manuals were somehow released. The manuals, however, don’t have much technical information so we still don’t know if they have WiFi or wireless. Here’s what seems to be available:

PRS-300: 5″ screen, no touch screen, no audio output, no card slots, ~440MB user partition, 220g.

PRS-600: 6″ screen, touch screen, audio output, SD/MS slots, ~380MB user partition, 286g.

At both the IDPF conference, and the press conference introducing the 700, Sony execs unequivocally stated that they were working on a wireless unit. The Kindle still remains far in the lead if Sony doesn’t add wireless to its stable.

Here are the links that Clement provided to me:

http://forums.sonyinsider.com/index.php?showtopic=825

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=52303

http://www.ebouquin.fr/2009/07/30/les-nouveaux-readers-de-sony-le-prs-300-et-le-prs-600/