TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for November, 2009

By Paul Biba

From the Smashwords press release:

Los Gatos, Calif. and Wellington, New Zealand – November 19, 2009 — Silicon Valley based Smashwords, Inc. has acquired Wellington New Zealand company BookHabit Limited, consolidating Smashwords’ position as the world’s premier ebook publishing and distribution platform for independent authors and publishers.

BookHabit was founded in 2008 as an ebook publishing platform for independent authors. During that time, BookHabit developed relationships with 340 authors who collectively published over 600 books.

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By Paul Biba

I just got it from Amazon at $7.99 for my Kindle and I understand that it has been released on the Sony platform as well.

Eoin Purcell raises an interesting question in his blog:

But riddle me this?

Why do they not just sell it direct? The multi-publisher bookstore provides just the platform, they have created an incredible audience and the property is a very, very good one. I cannot understand this decision. Sure the rest of Macmillan also avoids ebook sales listing instead other sellers on their site bit surely the selling of a digital download is not THAT difficult? Is it?

By Chris Meadows

Photo Note: My auto-focus digital camera had a little trouble getting good shots of the screen; no matter what I do, the shots tend to turn out slightly off-focus. The shots may look blurry, but suffice it to say that’s a problem with my camera—in person, the reader is quite as crisp and clear as printed text.

I’ve had more time to play around with the Astak, and the bloom is off the rose. Yes, the e-ink screen is truly amazing, and far clearer than the touch-sensitive Sony reader’s. However, it has certain other problems.

In Praise of Astak

Before I start talking about the Astak’s shortcomings, I should mention that the company itself has some astoundingly good customer service. For one thing, they monitor the Astak forums on MobileRead and pop up to answer questions.

Whenever I have posted a technical question on the forum, I have almost immediately been emailed by an Astak representative with suggestions and offers of advice. Now, granted, I do not know whether this is their default behavior toward all users, or just because they know I’m reviewing their product. I’d like to think the former is true.

Another nice thing about the device itself is that the firmware is remarkably easy to upgrade. Just put the firmware file on an SD card, slide the card in, and reboot into upgrade mode using a combination of keypresses.

My only complaint in this regard is that the instructions I found for upgrading on their website were not entirely clear. One of the buttons to be pressed is mentioned as the “increase volume key”. I assumed that meant the rocker switch on the right—but after that did not work and I searched some more, I learned that those instructions only applied to the 6” Astak reader devices; for the 5”, you press the page-forward button left of the screen instead. Just a little confusing.

Now let’s talk about some of those shortcomings.

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By Paul Biba

AudioLark, who hopes to go live in March of next year, is a new romance audio book publisher. The innovative thing about them is that their selections will be priced at $4.99, $7.99 or $12.99, which is way bellow the typical $35 audio book price.

AudioLark is being run by Jennifer Fedderson, a freelance editor who runs of the Best of the Best Ebook Contest at her website, along with Celia Kyle, a published author.

I wish them the best of luck and also note that they are hiring voice talent and audio editors.

By Paul Biba

The successor to Nokia’s line of internet tablets is now available on pre-order through Nokia’s Web site and through Amazon and others.

List price is $649, but Amazon is selling it for $560 after a $50 rebate.

The Linux-based N900 is able or soon should be able to run such e-book software as FBReader, which can read nonDRMed ePub. I checked the Maemo download site last night and found no e-reading software out yet, but it should only be a matter of time.

Specs: The Meomo 5 operating system (Linux), 3.5 inch touchscreen display, QWERTY slide-out keyboard, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss autofocus camers, 32 GB of internal memory and Mozilla-powered browser.

By David Rothman

Is ex-HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman about to change her mind on Digital Rights Management—and avoid it? Or maybe play it down in her new Open Read e-publishing operation?

“Do I really have to answer? I’m not sure,” Friedman told New York University publishing students after someone asked about Open’s position on DRM. “Initially, I was very against the idea of no-DRM. But now I’m not sure."

DRM as the Lysenkoism of big publishing

Ideally she soon will be sure—of the negatives of DRM for consumer trade publishing. Among big New York publishers, the DRM ideology is a little like the old Soviet genetics. If you were a geneticist and wanted to get ahead in the Stalin years, you toed the party line and favored Trofim Lysenko’s brilliance over the shaky, unproven theories of Mendel (sarcasm alert).

Like Lysenkoism, DRM is a laugh—since it’s so easy to scan paper editions of bestsellers and put them on P2P networks; and as for typical books, publisher Tim O’Reilly is right on the mark when he says obscurity is more of an obstacle than piracy. If you want to discourage pirates, the embedding of readers’ names in e-books would be far, far more effective than the usual DRM.

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By Paul Biba

The Opus is a 5″ ereader that supports EPUB, among other formats. It has 1G of internal memory along with a microSD slot. List price is $250, but Amazon, through Beach Camera, is selling it for $215.

Thanks to E-Reader-info for the link.

By Paul Biba

Eight leading textbook publishers, three e-book aggregator and ten universities are working together to test a range of business models for e-textbooks.

17 core textbooks have been selected by libraries for the trials. They cover a wide range of subject areas – from business and economics to law and medicine.

The overall objective of the trials is to identify realistic and sustainable e-textbook business models from the point of view of all key stakeholders. In addition to exploring issues of pricing and usage, the ease of implementation and management of each business model will also be monitored through the trials.

More information here at the JISC website. Thanks to Resource Shelf for the link.

By David Rothman

How to get books ready for the Sony Reader, the Nook and a multitude of other machines—and address such challenges as reproducing charts accurately in ePub from generic XML?

The newest entrant in this product-and-service category is eGen, from Aptara, which claims eGen “produces eBook-ready content faster and at a far lower cost than other available methods.” Press release here. Data sheet here. FAQ here.

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By Ficbot

School-supplied video.

A prep school in Massachusetts created an uproar by saying e-books would replace paper books in its library.

Now a private high school in Toronto says it is tossing out p-textbooks in favor of Sony e-book readers. The school has deployed at least 110 readers already and is ordering hundreds more.

“Our student survey shows that they are twice as likely to read a book available in an e-book format as in hard copy form," says Sam Blyth, chair at Blyth Academy.

Catnip for students raised on tech

There has been a growing emphasis among schools to engage student interest through technology, and this initiative appears to be, in part, a response to that. A comment from Sam Blyth is of special interest:

"When they were told they would be able to download books free, we asked them ‘Would you be more likely to read outside of school?’ they came back with a yes, and that clinched it."

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By Chris Meadows

That pesky E keeps sneaking in to replace P. The main point of this blog is e-books, of course, but a related e-versus-p dichotomy involving printed matter is e- versus p-mail.

E-mail has replaced paper mail for a lot of purposes. Now people who used to write long letters every week or month instead send short e-mails every day. The jury is still out as to whether this is actually an improvement.

But sometimes one does still have to send paper letters, and that can be a matter of some inconvenience—printing it out, addressing the envelope, going down to the post office. But Salon Magazine reports on a service called Snailmailr, which will print and mail paper mail anywhere. The price starts at 99 cents for 2 pages, including paper, envelope, and postage.

The only snailmail I have to send tends to be checks, so this service would not be for me—but for people who do have to send paper letters and wish it could be done with the convenience of e-mail, this could be a pretty good deal.

99 cents is twice the cost of a postage stamp—but as Salon points out, that might be a small price to pay for dodging the inconvenience of dealing with paper yourself.

By Chris Meadows

Perhaps it is appropriate that the author of this article from AllThingsD is named Peter Kafka, because the process it describes certainly seems like something Franz Kafka might have mentioned in one of his books.

It seems that Condé Nast has decided that the Apple Tablet will, in fact, exist—and is creating a version of Wired Magazine for use on such a tablet.

Condé Nast  is telling Apple exactly what it’s doing. But Apple is still not telling anybody whether the company is eplanning a tablet, let alone what software it will support.

What’s more, the planned version of Wired will run on Adobe AIR—which is not even available for the iPhone or iPod Touch. So if the Apple Tablet runs the iPhone OS as some are expecting, it won’t even work to begin with!

(Not that a special version is actually even needed—Wired offers its content via RSS, which means it can be read by a number of solutions that already work on the iPhone—Stanza or NetNewsWire, to name just two.)

Of course, some of the tablets under consideration by various companies probably will run AIR, so the effort may not entirely be wasted. But it still seems a trifle premature to make plans for a hardware platform that may end up vaporware.

Adding to the fun, there’s talk of an OLED model of the Apple Tablet with 9.7-inch screen (see video of rival OLED tech from Sony).

By Chris Meadows

According to Bloomberg, Sony says that sales of its Reader Touch Edition e-book reader have “exceeded expectations”. They are increasing available supply for the holiday shopping season. Even with these exceeded expectations, Amazon’s Kindle still holds 60% of the dedicated-reader market.

“The big shift over from analog to digital is happening in the reading space,” Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading unit, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television.

While this may be true, we reported yesterday that more people still use smartphones, PDAs, and other multi-purpose devices to read e-books at the moment.

By Paul Biba

It’s time again for the update. I’m posting the actual articles after the break because it’s sort of ugly to put them on the front page.

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By Paul Biba

Here are the notes that I’m taking during the lecture. No particular order or format. Healy’s slides will be made available at Publishing Point. Since most of what he said has already been reported I only note those things that captured my interest:

Lawsuit filed in October, 2005. Google believed that digitizing the books and making digital snippets was “fair use”, and that belief was never actually tested because of settlement. Journals, periodicals, letters, manuscripts, music, lyrics excluded. Google’s use of books is limited to the geographic limits of the US. For in-print books the rights holder must opt in and reverse for out of print books.
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By Paul Biba

Got an email from Michael Pastore, author of 50 Benefits of Ebooks, and he says:

I needed some reference information about images and ebooks — and I couldn’t find it on the Net. So I thought that I would gather this
information in one place.

I’m now seeking help to get this ready: can TeleRead announce this project?

I call it the == Preparing Images For Ebooks Project (PIFEP) ==

The tables he needs help with are here. He needs image file formats and info for stuff such as DPI and aspect ratio for a whole slew of equipment. Michael promises to make the final info freely available to all of us. Please leave any info you have as a comment.

By Chris Meadows

There are some articles whose subject matter is far from new, but which are still interesting because they show more people are taking notice. One of these is the piece the New York Times is currently running on the popularity of reading e-books on smartphones.

We’ve known for a long time that a lot more people read e-books on multi-purpose than dedicated devices—they’re cheaper, they do more, they’re easier to pocket.

And more people have them. It is estimated 1.7 million people own a dedicated e-reader, and that number may rise to 4 million by the end of the holidays. But Apple has sold over 50 million iPhones and iPod Touches.

“The iPod Touch is always at hand,” Shannon Stacey, who has written several romance e-novels, said. “It’s my calendar, it’s my everything, so my books are always with me.” Ms. Stacey, who also owns an early Sony Reader model, said she had now bought twice as many e-books for her iPod Touch as for her Sony.

But others are still dubious:

“The Kindle is for people who love to read,” [Ian Freed, vice president for the Kindle division at Amazon] said. “People use phones for lots of things. Most often they use them to make phone calls. Second most often, they use them to send text messages or e-mail. Way down on the list, there’s reading.”

Of course, we know that people who read e-books have been in love with their small screens for more than ten years. E-books were one of the first big “killer app” uses for the Palm, and e-book vendors eReader and Fictionwise have been in business ever since.

Some have even gone so far as to predict “the end of single-purpose devices,” but that is probably still premature.