TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Penguin e-book experiment continues

By Paul Biba

Received the following email from Penguin. Unfortunately the email does not include a link.

E-BOOK EXPERIMENT CONTINUES WITH THE RELEASE OF THE PENGUIN ENRICHED E-BOOK CLASSIC EDITION OF JOSEPH CONRAD’S THE HEART OF DARKNESS ON OCTOBER 7, 2008

Penguin Enriched eBook Classics Features:

* Character Sketches
* Diagram of a typical Congo steamer, ca. 1890
* Images of the Congo
* Telling Africa’s Story Today: Recent Films About Africa
* Filmography of Heart of Darkness
* Contemporary Reviews of Heart of Darkness
* Further Reading
* Enriched eBook Notes
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Alphabet Soup: The Basics of E and P Book Publishing - Part 1

By Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

Editors note: This is the first part of a two part article by our long-time contributor Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti. The second part of the article will be published here on Wednesday. PB]

Years I have worked in publishing – in fact, my whole career. I have worked in every capacity you can think of in the field and I wear that as a badge of pride because it is fully clear to me that in order to ever become an Editorial Director and run a successful house or imprint, as I did with Lumen Editions (an imprint I founded to publish works in translation as well as the work of new, up and coming authors – first time authors), you truly need to know every aspect of publishing from stuffing jiffy bags to hardcore line-editing to street-pounding publicity. It’s a tough road to hoe, but the rewards can be great.

Lumen was, I was told, a “risky venture”. I was also told that it would never work. That our books (which I published in matte-laminate softcover with a notch-binding with photo images by Ralph Gibson) would never be reviewed because, “Only hardcover books are taken seriously.” This, of course, was, as I had always known, not the case.

I can tell you with absolute honesty that every single Lumen Editions book received a review in the New York Times. Sometimes a full-page, sometimes a half, sometimes a smaller space, but regardless, not once did we miss. We never published e-books then, but e-books were not an option in publishing at that time, not in the popular community, and we would not have benefited in any way. In fact, e-book sales would have hurt our print book sales.

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Hospitalized

By Chris Meadows

[Editors' note: I took the liberty of inserting a picture of Chris. PB]I’m sure this will seem funny in retrospect.

Friday morning, I was riding in to work on my scooter. As a lot of my route takes me eastword, that means the sun is right in my eyes.

So, I couldn’t see the road clearly, and I clipped a parked car about about 20 or 30 miles per hour. I laid down the bike (think I may have totalled it, but I’ll hope not) and hit the road on my left knee.

An ambulance ride and some X-rays later, it came out that I had really done a number on the knee. Shattered the bone below the knee into several pieces, so they were going to have to operate to put those pieces back together.

They did so that afternoon, and I’ve been recovering from it ever since.
Prognosis is that I get to stay in the hospital for a few days, then I get to go home and be very careful not to put any weight at all on that foot for the next six to eight weeks.

For those who care, I’m in Cox South hospital in Springfield, MO, room 806 on the East wing.

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Ingram Digital announces new collection

By Paul Biba

I received the following press release and thought it would be of interest to our readers:

Ingram Digital SM, an Ingram content company focused on solutions for digital content management, hosting, distribution and promotion, today announced that it is launching three collections of Information Technology (IT) titles by leading IT publisher IGI Global on the MyiLibrary™ e-content aggregation platform.
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A New Kindle Pops Up

By Jane Litte

There were rumors this summer that a new Kindle would be released in October/November. Then Amazon doused that rumor. Now we have pictures of a slightly less fugly NEW Kindle. (Note to Amazon, hire a new designer, seriously).

Photo via Gizmodo. More pictures available through BoyGenius.

Sony unveiled it’s newest device, the PRS 700, complete with a touchscreen and integrated front light (click link for picture). Read Paul’s account of the new Sony. It’s like a battle between form and function. Want wireless, got to go with Kindle. What style and an integrated front light, then Sony is your choice.

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New Sony Reader - and a renewed commitment

By Paul Biba

Yesterday I attended the Sony press event announcing the release of their new PRS700 ebook reader, to be priced at $399. Pictured above is Steve Haber, President of the Digital Reading Business Division, who made the presentation.

There has been a lot of talk about the new hardware on the net, and I’ll speak about it in a bit, but there was far more important news that came out of the event. It is now clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Sony is committed to ebooks and the Reader platform. This gives all us ebook mavens a reason to contemplate the future with optimism.
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More on e-Reading on the iPod Touch

By Ficbot

(See also: Ficbot’s early impressions on iPod Touch).

Now that I’ve had my iPod Touch for almost a week, and had a chance to enjoy reading on it, I am even more glad I made this purchase.

Ipod Touch

I knew I would be happy with the music aspect—this is my third iPod, so I was ready to go in that respect. But I have been delighted to find that reading on this device can be a real treat. The screen is a little smaller than I would prefer, but the ease of use is just on such a different league to any device I have ever had that it is unbelievable. And it is so handy to not have to carry around a separate device to read on. Below are my comments on the two programs I’ve been using. When you compare either to the laborious uploading process for non-PC eBookwise owners (uploading to a remote server on their website, synccing the reader, downloading the content onto the reader, clearing the files off the server and repeating as needed) the iPod takes things to a level of simple that may just make e-books accessible to
everyone. It’s about time! [Read rest of post]

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Forbes: "IPhone steals lead over Kindle"

By Chris Meadows

We’ve mentioned before that the iPhone seems to be outpacing the Kindle in e-reading popularity. Now no less a publication than Forbes has taken notice.

Write Andy Greenberg and James Erik Abels:

Stanza, a book reading application offered in Apple’s (nasdaq: AAPL - news- people ) iPhone App Store since July, has been downloaded more than 395,000 times and continues to be installed at an average rate of about 5,000 copies a day, according to Portland, Ore.-based Lexcycle, the three-person start-up that created the reading software.

By comparison, Citigroup estimates Amazon will sell around 380,000 Kindles in 2008. Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey expects Sony’s (nyse:SNE - news - people ) Reader will sell only a fraction of that number. In other words, Apple may have inadvertently sold more e-readers than any other company in the nascent digital book market.

The article highlights the growing popularity of the iPhone platform compared to the Kindle, and it even-handedly points out the pros and cons of the iPhone’s smaller but faster-refreshing LCD screen compared to the Kindle’s e-ink. This is all to the good.

But in basing their comparison only on Stanza’s public-domain library of titles, with no mention at all of Fictionwise’s eReader or the Bookshelf/Baen Webscriptions collaboration, the Forbes writers are comparing, well, an Apple and oranges.

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Cory Doctorow’s free e-book "Content"

By Chris Meadows

About a month ago, Cory Doctorow released the text of his latest book, Content, on-line for free, as he usually does. Unlike prior books, this is a nonfiction collection, gathering together the text of speeches, presentations, and essays he has written, as well as all of his Forbes and other magazine articles. Most of them will already be familiar to those who follow Doctorow’s on-line writings, but it is nice to have them collected in one place.

The book makes a nice collection of essays, arranged by thematic content rather than date. They are interesting articles written in Doctorow’s usual ebullient style, but since they were not written with the intention of being collected together and discuss overlapping subjects, a number of them cover the same ground as others quite repeatedly.

Also, many of the essays as originally written (most notably, the Forbes articles) contained hypertext links to referenced or supporting material. In the book, these are naturally missing. [Read rest of post]

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Sony Offers Up eBook Plus Content

By Jane Litte

I immediately thought of David when Sony’s new promotion arrived in my inbox.  (David, get well soon. It’s already been too long without you on the internet).  In conjunction with the book, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Sony is offering a free download of the movie script.  The ebook plus content has always been one way in which observers believe ebooks can leverage itself to be more attractive to readers.  Scripts are often traded online though piracy and fan sites, so giving it away is a method to attract the consumer

I’ve read Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and enjoyed it quite a bit and even though I own an ecopy, it’s tempting to take advantage of the Sony offer to see what the upcoming movie will look like.

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Review: Fictionwise, Overdrive e-book lending libraries

By Chris Meadows

One idea that libraries have been experimenting with for a while is lending a collection of e-books under the same kind of restrictions as paper books—no more than one patron using a given “copy” at one time, each copy being “returned” after a set checkout period. (For a while, eReader was owned by a company that offered e-book lending collections to libraries.)

I have learned that both Fictionwise and my local public library now offer e-book lending collections—Fictionwise through its Libwise division, and my library through Overdrive. Today, I decided to take a look at both e-libraries and see what they had to offer.

Similarities and Differences

Both of the libraries offer works in the Secure Mobipocket e-book format. This lets them deliver the books to you with a set expiration date enforced by Digital Rights Management (DRM), so that you cannot read them after they have expired. The library is then free to lend the books out again to you or someone else, knowing that only one person can be reading the same “virtual copy” at a time.

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Apple drops NDA on released iPhone software

By Chris Meadows

Apple has announced they have “decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.” This includes all released (i.e. non-beta) versions of the iPhone development SDK.

This removes the harshest of the metaphorical gags from iPhone developers’ mouths: they will at last be free to discuss among themselves the process of developing for the iPhone, helping each other find solutions to development issues in ways they could not have before. Those publishers who have had books on hold waiting for the NDA’s cancellation can go ahead with them. However, the NDA on unreleased software (presumably including rejection letters) will remain in place.

The released-software NDA has, historically, been one of the most disliked aspects of developing for the iPhone. Undoubtedly many developers will be breathing a sigh of relief at its departure.

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