TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Author Archive

By Branko Collin

Bruce Bartlett had an interesting piece in Forbes two weeks ago called Recycling Books in which he describes the process that allowed him to slowly wean himself from print, and move on to reading digital. For him it started with journals:

I even bought a house twice as large as I needed just to have space for book and journal storage. But I didn’t mind, because my books and journals were an important part of my human capital. When people hired me they were also hiring access to my library, which eventually grew to 30,000 volumes or more.

But over the last few years, the Internet has radically reduced my need for a large private library. Now virtually every important academic journal is available online. My local library in Fairfax County, Va., has free online access to many journals I was spending good money for. The state library in Richmond has remote access to many more.

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By Branko Collin

Engadget links to a video interview with Endless Ideas CEO Johan Hagenbeuk in which he confirms (in Dutch) that the price for the Bebook Mini will be 199 euro. The 5 inch Mini will be almost exactly the same model as the classic 300 euro model, but will have a smaller screen, faster processor, more memory and more levels of greyscale. Endless Ideas hopes it can start shipping Minis in August.

The company mentions it has “easily” sold more than 25,000 units of the Bebook, and that the countries it sells the most units in are the UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands.

By Branko Collin

I have been walking around with this idea for quite some time, but simply lack the technical skills to make it happen—a high-speed book scanner made from stuff you’ve probably got lying around the house. Now Daniel Reetz has gone and done it, and his instructions can be found at instructables.com:

I’ve built two of these things now, and this instructable covers the best parts of both of them. You can build a book scanner using only hand tools plus a drill. I realized that not everyone is comfortable with using all the different hand tools you might need to make it. So I scanned a book on using hand tools that should answer all your questions.

So next time you don’t have to wait forever until a Tolkien estate gives you the opportunity to create your own Lord of the Rings concordance, you just scan the books yourselves . Tip: Abbyy from time to time gives older versions of its very good OCR program Finereader away with computer mags, so keep an eye out for those.

BoingBoing says the cost of these machines are about 300 USD. Atiz sells them ready-made, but then you should add at least one zero to that sum, and possibly double the result.

By Branko Collin

Ultra-portables have arrived when … you can purchase them at the DIY store. A little over a year ago I pointed out that light and cheap laptops with a small energy footprint were about to enter the market. Because of their minimalist features these laptops might double as e-book readers. Although the promise of low energy usage has never materialized, these ultra-portable or ultra-mobile “netbooks”—a name coined by Intel—have been a hit from the start. So much so, that even Dutch low-cost hardware chain Gamma is now offering netbooks among its rows of hammers and paint and what have you.

Unlike for instance the Asus EEE the Medion Akyoa Mini, quickly identified on the web as an MSI Wind, sports a hard drive (80 GB), which makes it both heavier and more powerful. Further features: Intel Atom 1.6 GHz, 1GB RAM, 10″ LCD (1024 x 600), 1.2 KG, webcam, microphone, Windows XP, 802-11n, 400 euro.

Click the thumbnail for an enlargement: a scan of last week’s Gamma product folder.

See also: Roger Sperberg’s 2006: The year of the e-book?

By Branko Collin

A friend lent me his Sony Reader for a couple of weeks. He wasn’t using it as much as he used to, so he wouldn’t miss it.

I received the device with a power adaptor and a minimum of instructions. There’s a school of thought that says that reading instructions is a waste of time anyway, and that interfaces should be intuitive and easy to grasp. I don’t subscribe to that philosophy, and not just because it displays a woeful lack of understanding of the way humans and interfaces work. There’s no such thing as “intuitive,” the best thing you can hope for is that an interface is analogous to interfaces you’ve used in the past.

The Sony Reader has no problems on that score. For me it was incredibly straight forward to operate. My friend had told me how to work the power button, and the rest I figured out by myself. I was up and reading within minutes.

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By Branko Collin

Help wanted from some fellow sleuths-archeologists:

Recent reports suggest that a Russian OCR tool called Cuneiform has been released as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The unfortunate part, for me, is that all the news seems to sit on the Russian side of the web, and I don’t speak Russian.

The matter becomes extra confusing when you notice that there is an American site that presents itself as the manufacturer of Cuneiform OCR (called Cognitive Enterprises), that still sells the package (albeit a much earlier version), and that keeps remarkably mum about the whole open sourcing its flagship product thing. Does anyone know what’s going on here? Is this open source release legit?

Easily beats two other FOSS OCR offerings

Why is this at all important? Well, I took a gamble and downloaded the software, and my test results with Cuneiform are so far easily superior to those of the other two FOSS OCR offerings, Tesseract and GOCR/JOCR. Without me telling it that it had to recognize Dutch (remember, I don’t know how to tell it that as I don’t speak Russian) it managed to OCR several pages almost perfectly, leaving only 3 or 4 errors per page. The other two averaged more than one error per line, admittedly mostly because of their inability to recognize where a line started and ended. (Language recognition software, be it speech recognition or OCR, tends to pass the annoyance test if it leaves in less than 1 error per sentence.) Good OCR software is hard to produce, and is therefore invariably expensive. A cheap (read FOSS) version of a quality OCR tool has the potential to emancipate the long tail of printed text.

By Branko Collin

Copyright is not fit for this digital age, and needs to be changed; so said two representatives of the Dutch national library in a letter to daily NRC yesterday. In their epistle (Dutch) Martin Bossenbroek and Hans Jansen, managers Collections & Service and E-strategy respectively of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Royal Library), the Dutch national library, explain how difficult it can be to run large-scale digitization programs when for a large number of books it simply is not clear whether they have returned to the public domain or not:

Copyright is a good thing, but the code that enshrines this right is too much of a good thing in its current form. In the digital age, it misses its targets. For hundreds of thousands of 20th century rights holders, it offers no protection, recognition and reward, but only the prospect of oblivion. An adaption of copyright law to the demands of the 21st century is needed urgently, otherwise the building of a digital library of any serious proportion will remain an illusion.

[Because of the difficulty of locating the heirs of long-dead authors, you cannot safely re-publish works that came out a 100 years ago.]

Both institutions and companies are keeping a safe distance from this copyright danger zone, and this will result in unbalanced digital collections. The digital library of the 21st century will have a gaping hole where works of that age should be. Hundreds of thousands of authors will never be found again. For them the chance of an epiphanous find followed by a second, digital life will definitely be gone.

This scenario can hardly be the meaning of a law that should protect an author’s rights. Before anything else, an author has the right to be read. That is why it is high time for an Internet exception for non-commercial use in the Dutch copyright law, one better thought through than the changes of 2004. Since then, heritage institutions are allowed to offer their collections electronically to the general public, but only from within their own building, using an intranet. That’s just not how the Internet works.

The authors continue discussing orphaned works, and how a mixture of Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon orphan works law could produce a best of both worlds: mixing extended collective licenses with the opt-out principle. Collective licenses, also known as levies, are funds paid by the public into one big pot, and redistributed to the copyright holders. In a lot of jurisdictions radio is paid for this way. This makes radio possible: if there were no collective licenses, each radio broadcaster would have to negotiate separate contracts with artists for each track they play. At least, so the theory goes. Opt-out means the author or their heirs has to state explicitly not to want to participate. Copyright law is opt-in by default, but stops functioning in areas where the rights holders cannot be traced, or only with immense difficulty. Something authors seem to have brought upon themselves with their support of the Berne Convention, which outlaws any sensible scheme for tracking authors and their works.

See also: The printed book as a preservation device.

Next week the Amsterdam public library will organise a conference on the meaning of copyright for libraries, where Ernst Hirsch Ballin, the Dutch Minister of Justice, will be one of the speakers.

(Entry first published at 24 Oranges.)

By Branko Collin

There’s a lot of talk about whether e-books will be able to mimic the physical qualities of p-books, but often this talk focuses on the “feel” of books. People like to rifle through pages, smell the paper, make notes in the margins, et cetera.

A p-book does not just act as a container of a book, but also as a preservation device. And it does this against heavy odds. Modern, “acid” paper deteriorates quickly, but it is still possible to preserve books printed on such paper for a long time—hundreds of years in some cases.

In theory, e-books can last much longer than that. By abstracting from a physical carrier, books no longer need to be threatened by the weaknesses of that layer. But there are other threats to e-books that are much more insidious.

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By Branko Collin

Almazán is a Spanish municipality covering an area of 166 km². You would have known this if you had looked up the Dutch Wikipedia article on the place. The entry was started by one of the many “bots” that roam Wikipedia. Ah well, you’ll say, there’s still room for the human factor—look at the article’s history, the entry has been edited 80 times. Yes, but—I’ll reply—all those edits were performed by robots too. The article has never been touched by human hands.

By Branko Collin

The New York Review of Books has a jealousy inducing piece on Wikipedia, it’s that well written. OK, technically it is a review of John Broughton’s “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual,” a book that describes how to write Wikipedia entries that last. But Nicholson Baker, author of Double Fold, talks mostly about Wikipedia itself, and his own experiences with the internet phenomenon.

Baker does not feel the need to attack or pre-emptively defend Wikipedia, and that—together with the appearance of books such as Broughton’s—seems to signal a turning point for the online encyclopaedia. Wikipedia is no longer in need of definition. You can still have very strong opinions about it but they won’t make Wikipedia go away, nor make it any less important. Today, Wikipedia just is.

Via Martin Wisse.

By Branko Collin

Philips spin-off Liquavista announced last week that it will start production of so-called electrowetting displays this year, having secured 8 million euro in investment money. Electrowetting is a member of a loosely knit family of energy efficient reflective display technologies. It works by manipulating layers of oil and water in a cell (pixel). Liquavista expects to produce small displays for use in mobile devices such as mobile phones and watches first. The Eindhoven-based company claims its ColorMatch FreeStyle platform will have more than twice the brightness of LCD displays.

Via Bright (Dutch).

By Branko Collin

Dear patron. The book you requested from this library, an HTML-version of Old People and the Things that Pass, is now available at the Internet Archive. Please accept our apologies for our tardiness; the transcription took a little longer than expected.

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By Branko Collin

“The Novelists Guild of America strike, now entering its fourth month, has had no impact on the nation at all,” the Onion reported last week.

Excerpt: “The publishing industry itself, which many believed to be most vulnerable, has nonetheless managed to weather the crisis. Publishers have reissued new editions of early, pre-union novelists—such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Jane Austen, both of whom have previously established successful track records—and have seen no no change in monthly sales.”

(Via Scalzi’s Whateverettes.)

Moderator’s note: A real hoot. Highly recommended. – D.R.

By Branko Collin

According to Bright.nl, Dutch quality daily NRC Handelsblad sold 500 Iliad + subscription combos last week. The Iliad is Irex’ E Ink based, A5-sized reading device with touch screen. Last week, NRC Handelsblad was the first Dutch newspaper to start selling Iliads combined with subscriptions. An Iliad with subscription costs 700 euro, but if you already have a subscription NRC will sell you an Iliad for 500 euro (Irex’ price: 650 without the newspaper subscription). A year’s subscription on the electronic paper costs 190 euro.

NRC had expected to sell the first 500 devices in a month, and delivery may be slowed down because of this unexpected success.

By Branko Collin

Today marks the start of the Boekenweek, the Dutch week to promote books. This year’s motto is “Of old people…,” named after Louis Couperus’ classic 1906 psychological novel Of Old People and the Things That Pass… The theme focuses on old age, both in people and books, and has already been criticised by those who feel that youngsters should be encouraged to read books, not discouraged.

More interesting for the TeleReaders may be that Alexander Teixeira de Mattos’ classic translation of Couperus’ masterpiece has recently become available in many formats at the Internet Archive. If anyone would like a version that is more accessible (plain text, HTML, PDF), let me know and I’ll try and post one at my other blog. The Dutch version is available from DBNL.org.

Of Old People follows a couple of murderers in their old age, and their children and grand children, and shows how one gruesome act committed many years ago is felt in the family today.

(Picture: Louis Couperus. This entry also published at 24 Oranges.)

By Branko Collin

Author and e-book expert Cory Doctorow published an article in Locus Magazine today in which he explores the economic realities of producing dedicated e-book readers. If Nintendo, he muses, cannot even cajole Chinese manufacturers into ramping up production for their incredibly popular Wii game computer, what chance does Amazon have of getting enough Kindles out the door?

Frankly, book reading just isn’t important enough to qualify for priority treatment in that marketplace. E-book readers to date have been either badly made, expensive, out-of-stock or some combination of all three. No one’s making dedicated e-book readers in such quantity that the price drops to the cost of a paperback — the cost at which the average occasional reader may be tempted to take a flutter on one. Certainly, these things aren’t being made in such quantity that they’re being folded in as freebies with the Sunday paper or given away at the turnstiles at a ballgame to the majority of people who are non-book-readers.

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I’m skeptical about selling ebooks as a business model (see my earlier column "You DO like reading off a screen" for more about this), but if I had to bet on a future for e-books, I would take long odds against a hardware reader catching on in any meaningful way.

Moderator’s note: Also see Cellphones vs. dedicated readers: Why Cory’s PARTLY right, my just-made TeleBlog post. – D.R.

By Branko Collin

The organisation of (UNESCO’s) Amsterdam World Book Capital will hold a symposium called “The Book in the Internet Era: Copyright and the Future for Authors, Publishers and Libraries” on the 21st and 22nd of April 2008 at the new central Public Library of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The language of the symposium will be English. The entrance fee will be 350 euro, though some authors, and some citizens from economically disadvantaged countries are eligible for a discount.

Among the invited speakers are Dr. Ernst Hirsch Ballin (Dutch Minister of Justice), Paul Goldstein (Professor of Law at Stanford University), Richard Charkin (thief), and James Boyle (Professor of Law at Duke University).

Of these I find Hirsch Ballin and James Boyle the most remarkable. The Dutch Department of Justice rarely concerns itself with copyright (mostly only with the Windows-CDs-from-car-boots stuff); what is a cop doing in a kindergarten? James Boyle is one of those rare copyright scholars who believe that there must be actual reasons for having a copyright law, and that the effects of copyright should be measured where possible. I know—what a nutter!

Moderator’s note: Fascinating post. But the above reference to Richard Charkin is Branko’s personal opinion and might even be even libelous if presented as a fact without the full background. Richard Charkin is a reputable publishing executive who “stole” Google laptops to make a point about copyright. See my comment. – David Rothman