MIT's free courses are a hit with geeks--some as far off as Ho Chi Min City, according to a recent Wired article.

Lam Vi Quoc negotiates his scooter through Ho Chi Minh City's relentless stream of pedal traffic and hangs a right down a crowded alley. He climbs the steep wooden stairs of the tiny house he shares with nine family members, passing by his mother, who is stooped on the floor of the second level preparing lunch. He ascends another set of even steeper steps to the third level and settles on a stool at a small desk, pushing aside the rolled-up mat he sleeps on with one of his brothers. To the smell of a chicken roasting on a grill in the alley and the clang of the next-door neighbor's metalworking operation, Lam turns on his Pentium 4 PC, and soon the screen displays Lecture 2 of Laboratory in Software Engineering, a course taught each semester on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Here," he says, pointing at the screen. "This is where I got the idea to use decoupling as a way of integrating two programs."

Big deal. As of this writing, Microsoft is offering Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass as part of the campaign to bribe you into using a Reader program with stronger DRM. An unencumbered Leaves is free, however, at Project Gutenberg. Just click here.

You can even download Leaves in Microsoft Reader format, without payment or DRM complications, from one of Abacci eBooks' convenient links to the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center.

And meanwhile a few apropos lines from Leaves...

Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking,
To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning,
Tickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never once going,
Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment
    receiving,
A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming.

Just what would Henry Adams have thought about the copyright controversy--to be exact, copyright's sometimes-harmful effect on the spread of uppity ideas or muck about politicians and bureaucrats? Here's a little clue from The Education of Henry Adams, where he recalled his struggle to place an important business-and-political expose:

...Any expression in an English review attracted ten times the attention in America that the same article would attract in The North American. Habitually the American dailies reprinted such articles in full. Adams wanted to escape the terrors of copyright, his highest ambition was to be pirated and advertised free of charge, since in any case, his pay was nothing.

Here's a heretical idea, which I've expressed before. What if publishers of e-books and other providers of intellectual property charged lower prices in countries where standards of living were dramatically lower than here in the States?

I don't think profits would suffer that much. In fact, the reverse would happen. People in Swaziland (flag shown above) or Bangladesh would grow more accustomed to the publishers' wares and keep buying them as incomes rose--perhaps eventually reaching the point where prices could be the same as in the States. With developing countries in mind, I've long advocated a global network of national digital libraries, the infrastructure for which the U.S. could help create. They of course would also nurture indigenous writers and publishers, not just serve as conduits for American best-sellers. Crazy? Not quite. Reuters reports from Geneva:

An African plea to fellow World Trade Organization nations seemed to have been heard on Friday, with envoys seeing overwhelming support for a deal to let poor states import life-saving drugs against AIDS and other scourges.

Color e-ink for electronic books--could it end up as a practical reality far ahead of time?

A New York Times article this week discusses Magink Display Technologies mainly in the context of billboards. But the impression also arises that E Ink and rivals just might have some serious competition breathing down their necks in a varietary of additional areas, too, including e-books and home entertainment products. From the Times:

By creating a paste made of tiny helix-shaped particles that can be minutely manipulated with electric charges to reflect light in highly specific ways, Magink can produce surfaces that look like paper but behave like electronic screens, rendering high-resolution, full-color images without ink--or, as Magink executives like to refer to the process, with digital ink.

Ran Poliakine, chief executive of Magink, said the idea was to create visually compelling ads that could be replaced frequently - perhaps hourly, based on consumer response - and could be controlled remotely, all with far less energy and at a far lower cost than a video billboard...

"Now, he added, his three-year-old company is also studying ways to expand the application of its core technology to personal electronics, including cellular telephones, cameras, hand-held computers and general video displays for laptops and televisions...

Both Gyricon and E Ink products are monochrome, meaning that text and images can be shown in black and white, or two contrasting colors like blue and gray. Spokesmen for both companies said they were conducting research on various approaches to bringing more color to future products.

But so far Magink is claiming the lead in bringing full-color digital ink out of the laboratory.

The spiffy machine to the left was not dreamed up in Peoria.

Where? Try China. And we're talking about sophisticated technological development--not merely routine manufacturing.

Mainland China just could be the next E-Book Central, especially considering Washington's less-than-full enthusiasm about national digital libraries and nonmilitary high-tech R&D in general.

Zillions of e-books in the hands of ordinary Chinese? This is more of a "why not" than "why."

With millions of students to educate, China must worry more than the rest of the world about the costs of printed textbooks.

And given all the complexities of reproducing Chinese characters, the electronic medium will make sense.

So it's no surprise that China's central planners and businesses are greenlighting e-books in a big way--and that the latter are working on projects with Taiwan (long a leader in e-books and other portable technology).

The China Digital Library Project will spend the equivalent of more than $137 million dollars over five years. The National Library of China now has text, audio-visual or image versions of almost 200,000 books, according to Zhang Yanbo, the NLC's vice director.

And it would seem very likely that many of the NLC's items will reach Chinese homes, not just library computers. Consider the number of Chinese Net users--more than 56 million according to a study from last year. That's just a tiny fraction of the Chinese population; imagine what happens when both e-books and the Net go mainstream in China.

Meanwhile hardware makers are gearing up.

--Many dedicated e-book devices from companies such as Taiwan's Argosy Research, as noted this past spring in the TeleBlog, are going on sale or about to. "Using e-books in schools with local government cooperation can resolve copyright issues and create volume demand," Argosy vice president George Wang was quoted in Global Sources. TeleRead territory for sure!

--A $99 e-book device from Argosy Research--reviewed in depth by Black Mask--is on the way. Several hundred thousand may be sold next year. The Argosy machine will be using technology from China's CultureCom, which itself is producing the Easyread e-book reader shown at the start of this TeleBlog item.

--These machines are benefitting from the efforts of Professor Chu Bong Foo to enable the easier entry of Chinese characters into computers. In a related vein, CultureCom, his company, says a $25 chip can generate "approximately 32,000 Chinese characters in several fonts and in various sizes, using no more than 256KB of memory (as opposed to 20 to 30GB of memory needed for existing coding systems, not available in a single chip)."

--A Chinese company will use AMD chips in a Student PC webpad designed mainly with e-books in mind.

This is interesting trade-magazinish news, but the true consequences could be far greater. Remember, the e-libraries and the mushrooming number of users with advanced hardware will build on each other. Nice, well-deserved synergy. Then think about what it all means internationally. As one Chinese librarian has noted in The Development of the China Digital Library, the Chinese want to use e-libraries to share knowledge with other countries, and not just those with large Chinese populations:

Besides Chinese language, there are many other languages online...China, with its rich culture of 5000 years, is one of the largest countries in the world. We have the duty to do our best to share our information resources with the world and make the world we live in smaller and smaller.

Again and we've railed against pricey and oppressive Digital Rights Management schemes based on proprietary tech. Yes, an improved nonproprietary variety would help. But meanwhile the e-book industry has a big problem.

Via the eBook Community List, one enraged reader wrote about DRM: "I can't afford it. I live entirely on Social Security. I can't pay the extra price for inconvenienced books. Unless it's something I really want and can't get any other way. And I consider waiting a year or two or three to be another way."

In response, Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, came up with a laundry list of DRM's negatives

1. You can't read the material in your favorite reader.

2. You can't search the material in your favorite search program.

3. You can't try various other programs to see what works best.

4. There have been hellish problems with migrating to new hardware.

5. Factory upgrades have turned out to be be factory downgrades!!!

These are only a handful of the problems when someone forces you into to any proprietary monopolistic system of rights protection.

What about consumer rights?

Judging from other messages, it would appear that the actual cost of DRM from Palm Digital Media is closer to 60+%. Because the DRM cost is a percentage, you can't just add the percentage to the list price of the e-book and make it work. In fact, assuming [Blackmask publisher David Moynihan] wants to pay an author $.70 for each book, and keep $.30 for himself, at 60% for DRM he would have to charge $2.50 per book, a rather whopping price increase of 250%.

Here's my suggestion. We all know that DRM is of absolutely no value to the consumer, and its value to the author/publisher is primarily psychological. So let's make the author bear the cost of the DRM. Mr. Moynihan could simply say to his authors, "I will sell books at $1.00 each. If you want your book protected by PDM's DRM I will pay you $.10 royalty per copy sold. If your book is in an open format I will pay you $.70 royalty per copy sold." This way an author can decide for him/herself just what the value of the emotional security blanket really is.

Never purchase any e-book which is encumbered with DRM. Don't use an e-book User Agent which requires, or even tolerates, any kind of DRM. Don't use Micro$oft Reader, MobiPocket Reader, PalmReader, or iSilo Reader. There are lots of good alternatives to all of these products. Don't support businesses which deal exclusively in DRMmed content. Do buy non-protected e-books from Blackmask, Fictionwise and Baen Books. Don't buy products from Palm Digital Media or any other business that deals exclusively in DRM encumbered e-books. I don't even buy paper books from Amazon.com anymore because they don't deal in non-protected e-books.

Most importantly, share your opinions with those people around you that rely on you for advice. Be sure they know about all the great literature available from Project Gutenberg (especially our Australian bretheren) and the University of Virgnia eText Center...

Think that e-book formats are forever? Or that we should trust the private sector to archive books reliably? Especially when we don't know which novel may be another late discovery like Melville's Moby Dick? Then take a look at a little item just picked up on the Interesting People list. See if the parallel doesn't apply to e-books. From the cdfreaks.com article mentioned on IP:

The Dutch PC-Active magazine has done an extensive CD-R quality test. For the test the magazine has taken a look at the readability of discs, thirty different CD-R brands, that were recorded twenty months ago. The results were quite shocking as a lot of the discs simply couldn't be read anymore:

Roughly translated from Dutch:

The tests showed that a number of CD-Rs had become completely unreadable while others could only be read back partially. Data that was recorded 20 months ago had become unreadable. These included discs of well known and lesser known manufacturers.

It is presumed that CD-Rs are good for at least 10 years. Some manufacturers even claim that their CD-Rs will last up to a century. From our tests it's concluded however that there is a lot of junk on the market. We came across CD-Rs that should never have been released to the market. It's completely unacceptable that CD-Rs become unusable in less than two years…

Is Microsoft turning colleges and universities into vocational-education schools by spending lavishly to encourage the use of its proprietary software? The Washington Post reports:

Microsoft has lavished $500 million over the past five years on research and teaching projects at 1,000 schools, funding efforts by 6,000 academics in computer science, electrical engineering, linguistics, biology, mathematics, graphic arts, music and other fields.

At the three-day, expenses-paid event, the professors stayed at the Hyatt Regency, dined with Microsoft chairman Bill Gates on tables decorated with fresh peach lilies, and took boat cruise on Lake Washington.

It was part academic conference, part networking event. It was also a unique promotional opportunity for Microsoft.

At a question-and-answer session between the academics and Gates, one professor asked the Microsoft founder about his views about the study of information technology, a part of computer science that emphasizes on how documents, spreadsheets and other data should be handled. What kinds of technologies should students majoring in this subject be taught?

Gates replied quickly and with a smile: "Microsoft Office."

A BBC story provides details on an already-announced prototype of an e-book reader from HP:

"We've been looking at the power of the book as a way of consuming information," said Hewlett Packard's Huw Robson.

"We've been using them for so long that we're very comfortable with the idea of paging through something".

To keep page turners happy, Mr Robson and his team have fitted the e-book with a small but powerful computer that animates a turning page when the reader is ready to move on.

The pages are turned by running a finger along one of the strips. Stroking the strip at different speeds allows the reader to speed read or casually browse the book.

The display can also be used to read broadsheet newspapers. The reader scans the page for something of interest and then uses the touch pads to zoom in on the story.

You can turn pages with the flick of a finger
Particular pages can also be assigned a bookmark or an electronic finger allows you to flick between two chapters immediately.

The TeleRead plan, which I first inflicted on a friend back in November 1991, is almost a dozen years old. Oh, the memories. Back in the early '90s, some well-known net.librarians said library software couldn't be powerful enough for a TeleRead-style system. Maybe Google and friends took care of that insight. Then there was the Net whiz for a writers organization who had trouble imagining that affordable modems would someday speed along many times faster than 2,400 bits per second. Over at a publishers group, another tech maven refused to grasp that TeleRead could use tablets for e-books, as opposed to making everyone read off clunky desktops.

I'm grateful, however, for all feedback--on or off target. What better way to refine the TeleRead plan and the ways that I and others explain it?

The latest analysis of TeleRead comes from Matt Morse of Matt Rolls a Hoover. For the word buffs, small w, Matt points to Chris Locke's Web log and says "that rolling a hoover means doing something that you know is stupid without any clear sense of what the outcome will be, just to see what will happen." In some respects that's what radically revised U.S. copyright law has been like in recent years--rolling a hoover. It's a dumb, reckless experiment at the expense of our schools and libraries and especially our young people, millions of whom are now criminals in the eyes of the greedy Hollywood moguls who conned and pressured Washington into giving us the DMCA, copyright extension and the like, regardless of the many unknowns. Matt himself has rolled a hoover in a more positive way, bravely leaving his job in a toilet bowl of an economy "to try to start a business." I wish him luck at his try and at coming up with his own solutions to the copyright conundrum, a focus of his blog.

Below are replies to his criticisms and questions, the latter of which on the whole seem to have been asked in the best roll-a-hoover tradition--in the vein of: "Start dumb to make sure you get the basics" (my words). That's fine. Asking questions of others, I have rolled more than my share of hoovers.

Hoover One (written separately from the main analysis): "TeleRead relies on a paper to challenge the potential success of DRM and compulsory licensing. TeleRead concludes that the paper supports his arguments for voluntary payment schemes, but the paper doesn’t let voluntary schemes off the hook either."

Reply: Matt, I love your blog as a whole. But typing out the statement above, you just might have been rolling a strong reefer instead of a hoover--and smoking the former. Sure you're talking about the right national digital library proposal? Consider what the paper from Berkeley really said.

In A Framework for Evaluating Digital Rights Management Proposals, Rachna Dhamija and Fredrik Wallenberg refer to voluntary payments that readers would make a la shareware or Stephen King's tip system. Here are some specifics:

Finally there are those that suggest that voluntary payments may work. There are plenty of examples within the shareware industry of products that are made available for free (without any limitations on functionality) and of "contributions" that are sufficient enough to support the developers. Yet, there are examples where the "tips" were insufficient to pay for the development of the product. For example, Stephen King’s novel The Plant was originally offered under the "tip model" but the model failed to raise sufficient revenue and the book was withdrawn.

But how would perennial checkouts…allow publishers to make money, given the possibility of file-sharing? Well, suppose Reader A couldn't successfully pass on a book to Reader B unless Fair Use or one of two other situations existed. First of the two others: B lived in the same library-service area and could check out the books with the same provisions for payment to copyright holders as in A's case. The payment process could begin automatically, triggered by the file-sharing. In the second situation, A or B (or B's own library system) could pay the content-provider directly.