TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for August, 2009

By Paul Biba

I just received the following email from Laura McDonald of Girlebooks about Amazon blocking one of her public domain books.  It seems to me to be another example of Amazon inexperience in the ebook area and a case of making a foolish marketing decision without thinking the facts through.  The correspondence is below and it has been reprinted with Laura’s permission.

Hi Paul,

I’ve recently encountered an interesting situation when selling my ebooks through the Amazon Kindle Store. I thought you might find it interesting too.

The ebooks I sell are 99% public domain. The difference in our ebooks is that we read each one we post and correct errors in the text, hand format them, and create new covers. They are free on our website http://girlebooks.com and I also post them for a minimal fee in the Kindle Store and some other ebook outlets.

I’ve found that people do appreciate the extra effort we put into creating the ebooks, making the covers, and reviewing the books. People who want the ease of using whispernet to put ebooks on their Kindles don’t seem to mind the fee we charge for them in the Kindle store. And I’m sure a lot of people buy our ebooks in the Kindle store because they looked nicer than the other ones available, whether they knew the ebooks were also available for free on our site or not.

The point is that Amazon apparently is starting to block our ebooks from sale in the Kindle store because they are public domain. Whether they will also do this for big publishers who sell public domain books remains to be seen. I’m thinking not. I don’t have the whole story of course, but you can see correspondence I have had from them below. Thanks!

Laura

–

Dear Publisher,

We’re working on a policy and procedure change to fix a customer experience problem caused by multiple copies of public domain titles being uploaded by a multitude of publishers.  For an example of this problem, do a search on “Pride and Prejudice” in the Kindle Store.  The current situation is very confusing for customers as it makes it difficult to decide which “Pride and Prejudice” to choose from.  As a result, at this time we are not accepting additional public domain titles through DTP, including the following:

Whose Body? (Girlebooks Classics) by Dorothy Sayers

If you believe that we have wrongly identified this title as a public domain title, and you are the copyright holder or are authorized to sell it by the copyright holder, then please reply to title-submission@amazon.com with appropriate documentation of your e-book rights.

Thank you,

Please note: This e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.  If you have any questions or concerns, please write to us at dtp-feedback@amazon.com

Best regards,

Muruganandham Malayalam
http://www.amazon.com
=============================

—- Original message: —-

Hi,

Just looking at my backend books list and I see that Whose Body? has been blocked. Can you let me know why? This text is public domain and freely available at Project Gutenberg, so it can’t be a copyright problem. If there is another problem, please let me know.
http://www.amazon.com/Whose-Body-Girlebooks-Classics-ebook/dp/B001FSK4TI

Thanks,
Laura

By Paul Biba

Is this a lot or a little?  According to Publishing Perspectives nobody really knows:

The GfK (Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung), a market research and consumer insight agency, recently announced that 65,000 e-books were sold in Germany in the first half of 2009. Boersenblatt editor Michael Roesler-Graichen analyzes the significance of this figure, stating that most industry insiders are agnostic as to whether this should be seen as a success or a failure.  The Google translation of the article is after the break.

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By Paul Biba

One of my favorite sites on the web,  bookofjoe, has a series of pictures of beautiful libraries that will just take  your breath away.  Go over and take a look.  I’d happily read my Kindle in any of them.  The one pictured here is the Suzzallo Librare in Seattle, Washington, USA.

By Chris Meadows

Baen author Dave Freer and his family are emigrating from South Africa to Australia. However, they have run into a slight problem: shifts in the exchange rate have decimated the funds they had budgeted for paying for the necessary quarantine of their pets.

So Freer is putting out the Storyteller’s Bowl (which TeleRead previously discussed here), and serializing his latest novel, Save the Dragons, in return for donations. He has posted the first chapter free. For each $400 he receives in donations, he will post a new chapter, until all 25 chapters + epilogue have been posted.

As with the Sharon Lee & Steve Miller Fledgling and Saltation projects, those who donate more than $25 in total will get a signed copy of the hardcover (or next most expensive format if the book does not come out in hardcover) when the book is actually published.

So, go Save the Dragons. You’ll also be saving Dave Freer’s family pets.

By Paul Biba

From a Europa press release.  For an earlier article on the copyright disagreements in the European Commission going on in see our article linked here.

4.6 million digitised books, maps, photographs, film clips and newspapers can now be accessed by internet users on Europeana, Europe’s multilingual digital library ( www.europeana.eu ). The collection of Europeana has more than doubled since it was launched in November 2008 ( IP/08/1747 ). Today the European Commission, in a policy document declared as its target to bring the number of digitised objects to 10 million by 2010. The Commission also opened a public debate on the future challenges for book digitisation in Europe: the potential of the public and private sector to team up and the need to reform Europe’s too fragmented copyright framework.

By Paul Biba

So says an article in the Financial Times (registration required).

Hardback books could be killed off if Amazon’s e-books and Google’s digital library force publishers to slash prices, Arnaud Nourry, chief executive of French publishing group Hachette, has warned.

Mr Nourry said unilateral pricing by Google, Amazon and other e-book retailers such as Barnes & Noble could destroy publishers’ profits.

He said publishers were “very hostile” to Amazon’s pricing strategy – over which the online retailer failed to consult publishers – to charge $9.99 for all its e-books in the US. He also pointed to plans by Google to put millions of out-of-copyright books online for public use.

On the other hand, the same article states that some publishers feel that the lower production cost of ebooks can end up resulting in higher profits even if lower prices for print books result. No unanimity yet. However, Hachette is the world’s second largest publisher of books, by sales, so we have to take Nourry seriously.

Note: TeleRead has covered this issue in the past, most recently here.

By David Rothman

Will children fare better as readers if they can pick their own books?  Yes, say Nancie Atwell and some other reading gurus.

The New York Times has the details. The key, as I see it as an ex-child, is balance—between the compulsory assignments and the joy-of-it books that can build the reading habit.

A little Jules Verne to go along with Jane Austen, please.

I know: Austen books may be more “literary.” But Verne himself excels as a story-teller. Good teachers can introduce students to both kinds of writing and try to point out the difference. Some sprawling major literary classics—masterpieces by today’s definitions, such as Moby-Dick—would probably have appalled Austen. (Update, 11 a.n.: No anti-Austen slam intended. Here’s to variety!)

One justification for the TeleRead vision of a well-stocked national digital library system is that it would put online a greater variety of books to match students’ precise needs and interests. TeleRead would be in line with S.R. Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science, including “Every reader his book” and “Every book its reader.”

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By David Rothman

Links of interest this morning:

• Lost or stolen Kindle? Amazon says you’re out of luck—from Ars Technica.
• When the Apple tablet comes out, are you in?—from CNET News.
• Tablets computers are coming soon, says Nvidia—from the New York Times.
• Google’s plan for world’s  biggest library: Philanthropy or act of piracy—from the Guardian.
• All a cub reporter needs is a scoop and an iPhone—from the New York Times.

OK, the hot one here is the Kindle item. What do you think, gang? Should Amazon change its ways and work to make lost or stolen machines easier for owners to track down? Meanwhile DRM strikes again. From Ars:

… the other downside to losing a Kindle (besides unsuccessfully trying to frustrate the person who now has it) is the fact that users can no longer access their purchased Kindle books unless they use the Kindle iPhone app or purchase another Kindle. "Not only could I not read them if I had them due to their DRM," Smith told us, "but my purchased content is not even available to me through the Amazon site so long as I do not have a Kindle registered—I confirmed this to be the case with one of the two first-level customer service people."

By Ficbot

What are e-book buyers thinking when they shop?

I can’t speak for all buyers, but if you want to know why I buy or don’t buy from various sites—well, here’s the lowdown. No ESP needed. I hope this is useful to retailers and aspiring self-publishers of e-books, although most of the sites named here don’t accept titles from the latter group.

Self-publishers face a daunting learning curve these days. So many stores, so many formats, what to do? Many novices begin with Amazon—Amazon makes it easy, and enjoys a large market share. But the company’s Kindle side officially focuses just on the United States, leaving out me and many other voracious readers (I’m Canadian). Sorry, Amazon. Here’s where I am buying e-books.

Stop One: Fictionwise

Fictionwise (screenshot), which normally does not deal with the self-published, is my preferred e-book store, for several reasons. Firstly, the Fictionwise site is the most pleasant of the big storefronts to navigate. I have checked out its main competitor, Books on Board, and can never seem to find things there when I just browse; I need to have a certain title in mind.

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By Chris Meadows

The recent post about book scanners that can process 3,000 pages per minute reminded me (and at least one other person) of the Vernor Vinge novel Rainbows End. Since it had been a while since I had read that novel, I decided to take another look.

For a while, the novel was posted free in its entirety on Vernor Vinge’s website. It has since been taken down; however, the Internet Archive still has it available in its entirety in the Wayback Machine’s archive of the page.

I’m actually surprised nobody reviewed it here back when it was newly published, but I can only find a few references to it on TeleRead. E-books—and some modern issues relating to e-books—actually play a pretty prominent part in the book’s plot, in a number of ways.

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By David Rothman

The $199 Sony Pocket Edition, aka the PRS-300 e-reader, gets a big knock from Mike Cane, who briefly tested one at a New York store.

From the page-changing speed to the “nauseating, vulgar pink” of the unit he tried, Mike wasn’t happy, at least not for the most part.

Sampled a PRS-300 yourself—whatever the color? Share your thoughts. No, the photo to the left isn’t of the reader that Mike tested and hated.

Related: Mike’s observations on borrowing e-books from the New York Public Library, which, like many, uses the OverDrive service. Agree or not?

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By Court Merrigan

Reminder: These are Court’s personal opinions. Furlong fans are welcome to speak up in the comments area. – D.R.

Today’s entry on the future of literature comes from Nicola Furlong, self-identified “shameless self-promoter” and Canadian writer of mysteries.

Furlong has produced a multimedia novel entitled Unnatural States.  It is certainly multimedia.  Whether it is a novel is debatable.  More on that later.  Navigating the simple site, you are immediately confronted with a “Trailer / Intro”, which features an buzzcut older woman in sunglasses performing YouTube-esque antics in lieu of of a book jacket.  It had me clicking desperately for the next page.  Readers, it went downhill from there.

Unnatural States is a linear progression of linked Web pages filled with text, pictures, sound effects and more video clips.  These are all meant to serve as the stuff of this “novel,” which apparently is a mystery about some latter-day John the Apostle and a terrier-like reporter named Virginia hot on his trail.  Or something.  It was hard to tell, what with all the noise and bad sentences.

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By Paul Biba

Here’s part of a post from Dear Author. I must say that I have to agree. It’s beyond me how anyone can say that they enjoy the feel and smell of a cheap paperback. Silliness.

… I don’t want to dismiss a person’s love for the feel of paper, the smell of paper, or even the look of a book. But for an avid reader of genre books, the mass market paperback is a disposable item. It’s print quality is fairly poor on thin paper housed behind lurid covers. The bindings are weak and can barely last more than a few readings. They don’t look good sitting on the shelf and any avid reader ends up storing piles of books everywhere, under cabinets, beds and tables. You have to make a conscious decision, because of the books numerosity, which books get shelf space and which books are tucked away. It’s hard to know exactly what you own.

I would go further to say that most books published today aren’t shelf worthy. Does the mass produced Dan Brown, Nora Roberts, Danielle Steele hardcover have any uniqueness? Is there anything memorable about these books? Aren’t the covers just as lurid, just as lacking in individuality as the mass markets. …

Maybe I’ll go even a step further. Given the large number of paperbacks I’ve thrown out over the years, only to buy them again when I want to re-read them, isn’t this a common enough practice to be a form of DRM? There’s no way I could possibly keep all the books I’ve bought in my lifetime and I’ve spent a fair amount replacing them. What’s so different about that with DRM on ebooks? Of course storage isn’t a problem, but I can’t get too excited about DRM on a $4 ebook from Amazon. 90% of those I’d never re-read anyway. As to the expensive ones – that a horse of a different color, I just won’t buy them if they have DRM.

By Chris Meadows

Over on Wired’s “Gadget Lab”, Dylan F. Tweney gushes about how great an app Instapaper Pro is for your iPhone: “It’s so useful that it just about justifies the phone’s purchase price all by itself.”

I would have to agree in principle, if not necessarily in degree; Instapaper—which allows you to sync on-line news articles for reading in a reformatted off-line version, sort of like a modern version of AvantGo—has been very useful to me for as long as I’ve used the free version.

Among other things, Tweney notes, the price for Instapaper Pro has just been cut from $10 to $5. Given this price drop, plus the fact that the most recent so-called “update” to the free version of Instapaper actually decreased its functionality (really lame, guys. Since then, I was holding off on downloading it and just downloading everything else manually), I figured I might as well upgrade.

I’m glad I did. The $5 pro version of Instapaper adds a number of useful features, including its own RSS reader that means I’ll probably stop using NetNewsWire altogether. The “tilt to scroll” function is cute, albeit I’m not sure how useful in the long run, and the way it automatically downloads articles in the background while you have it open is nice too.

If you haven’t tried Instapaper yet, it’s definitely worth a look.

By Paul Biba

This is a major problem if Chamber Four is correct. Sony proudly announced a Mac version of its library software at its press conference last week and many of us were delighted. Since I no longer have a working Sony Reader I downloaded the software to my Mac but I haven’t tried it out yet. Now, Chamber Four is reporting a major problem. If Adobe Digital Editions doesn’t work on the Mac. then all us Mac users are left out of a lot of the new stuff Sony announced. Here is the report from Chamber Four. Mac users should read the full report because Chamber Four had other major problems as well:

… In the 8 months between then and now, I’ve switched to a Mac laptop, and Sony’s had plenty of time to improve their software and finally, finally make a Mac version. So my first question is this: is it better? My second, more realistic question: is it even usable?

The short answers are no, and not really. Even worse, Adobe Digital Editions doesn’t recognize the Reader, so Sony’s newly hyped library ebooks won’t work on Macs. The long and the short of it is that Mac users should think long and hard about getting a Reader.

Let’s get into the details.

Library eBook support: F- Does not work on Macs

Adobe Digital Editions, which enables the DRM on PDF and ePub library ebooks, doesn’t recognize the Reader at all. This isn’t a bug, or an oversight; this is a known issue, as Adobe said when I started a support thread on it.

This is slightly shocking, seeing as library ebook support was the issue of the day at Sony’s big announcement Tuesday. You’d think they’d at least mention somewhere that it won’t be available on Macs.

It also means that Sony’s vaunted content “relationships” are unavailable for Mac users. Without ADE, you can’t buy books from any store but Sony’s.

Can any of our readers help clarify this situation?

By David Rothman

HotStuff 2.0, written by Dave Pattern in the U.K., searches hundreds of  library-related blogs “to discover new and/or interesting topics.”

Lo and behold we were recently among the trendies, thanks to our use of the word “giants” to describe Google and Amazon. Hardly the most novel word in that context—newspapers and public interest activist love to use “giant” to describe large corporations. But at least we used “giant” in good company.

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By David Rothman

When, just when, will E Ink be truly like white paper—with a high contrast between text and background? Ideally it’ll happen in the next few years. But until then, I’ll be very grumpy, as are Robert Kingett and Nicholson Baker.

“This was what they were calling e-paper?” Baker has written of his Kindle. “This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon? Where was paper white, or paper cream? Forget RGB or CMYK. Where were sharp black letters laid out like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth?”

Until we get decent contrast on the Kindle and other E Ink gizmos, the next best thing could be the ability to use boldface type on the full texts of even DRMed ebooks. The Cybook Gen 3 in the photo has that capability, a menu choice called embolden. Know of any others devices with embolden, and how do you feel about it?

Forward, not backwards, please

I just hope that people upgrading their Gen3s—for ePub or a newer Mobipocket—won’t lose the magical ability to make text stand out just a little more with E Ink. And if embolden can show up in other machines, then so much the better. Alas, with DRMed books, you can’t tweak the files to introduce bold.

Detail: I’ve heard that some publishers don’t want mere users to be able to do the boldface act on their own. If so, shame.