Is OverDrive's Content Reserve distribution unit slowing down payments to e-book publishers to free up money for expansion in areas such as library services? Or just to be greedy? Or because-- I don't know the reasons. I'd just caution the librarians to be careful, lest they eventually suffer the same treatment from OverDrive that the publishers are. Isn't it possible that OverDrive could dramatically jack up charges to the librarians once it dominates that market?

Whatever is going on, a just-received message from Mary Z. Wolf at the Hard Shell Word Factory makes it clear that OverDrive boss Steve Potash has even more explaining to do than I thought about his cashflow situation.

Here's what Mary wrote me with permission to quote her. And yes, Steve, as noted earlier, she also isn't thrilled by 55 percent discounts--or the storage fee.

I was planning to write you about the Content Reserve situation after I saw your late January posting about Overdrive dropping conversion services (which we didn't use anyway) but got busy as usual and didn't get around to it. This week's events are unconscionable, and I am glad Salvo Press brought this to your attention.

Hard Shell Word Factory was also with Content Reserve from near the beginning. They got off to such a slow start sales-wise that I didn't complain about them not paying per contract (monthly) for the first few months. But then a year went by with no payment. Then another quarter, and another. After numerous emails, phone messages left on voice mail because I couldn't get accounting on the phone, in March 2003, I was promised full payments due, and that they were at going to be paying quarterly from then on. In April 2003, I received payment for 1-1/4 years of sales. However, I haven't received a cent since then. I've sent emails, snail mail, voice mail messages, actual voice calls, and even emailed Steve Potash about the non-payments with absolutely no response. Early last week I finally got accounts payable on the line, and the best promise I could get was payment "by March 15th for sure" of only 2 of the 4 quarters owed us. (Less than half of $3000 they owe to date)  After reminding them again that my contract says I get paid monthly, I was also told there are new terms announcements being made soon that would clear this all up.

What a laugh! The new terms (if we were stupid enough to pay them, which we are not!) would cost Hard Shell Word Factory $1,125 a quarter(!) on top of already paying 55% distribution discount on the approx. 400 titles we have.

IMO, 55% discount was already outrageous (and I feel the same way about paying Lightning Source that large a discount too!). One of my staff and I myself spent many hours inputting the necessary metadata into their system and uploading the ebook files and covers. This is something that should have been able to be done much more efficiently and less expensively with spreadsheets and FTP uploads.

These are not only not the acts of someone small publisher friendly, I personally feel this is an attempt to get us out of their program, since they have to know very few of us will not, nor can we afford to, pay these outrageous sums for the "privilege" of waiting years for our money.

I, for one, have had my fill of the "few high and mighty" trying to control the epublishing industry and putting up any barriers they can to keep out "the little guys."

You can quote me on any of this.

"$300 per year?" asks writer Mary Ezzell on the eBook Community List, commenting on the storage fees that OverDrive/Content Reserve wants to slap on one-book publishers. "I'll certainly drop out if it's over $50 per account, one time." Big houses would pay fees, too, albeit not quite as outrageous.

Intrigued by Jon Noring's proposal for a nonprofit distribution cooperative, she says, "Good idea. How can we help, other than everyone plugging it in our Websites, sigs, etc?"

From GLB Publishers, W. L. (Bill) Warner adds his own twist--a "central no-storage approach, because there could easily be a counter indicator activated whenever the central distributor accessed a file from the publisher's stock to download. At the end of the month the two accounts should tally." Further thoughts on the gouge and his favorite remedy:

This is more of the same stuff again, the middle man taking the gravy to leave the crumbs (somewhat mixed metaphor there) for the publisher and author. Our idea for distribution of e-books has always been a low-cost centralized system where the e-books are maintained at the publisher's site and the download ordered at the distributor is actually performed by linking to the publisher's site. Without storage fees the distributor is only a link for transfer and money collection, and should be able to operate on 10-15% of list, collected from the buyer."

I'm not sure why Content Reserve--which has always been wonderful to work with--is doing this at this stage. Perhaps they overextended in reaching for the library market? Perhaps e-book sales have grown more slowly than they expected, and this has impacted their long-term business model? Or perhaps they simply have too many small publishers (like us) and need to reduce the number of business entities they deal with.

In any case, we already do a distributor discount of 55%, and adding a yearly maintenance fee of hundreds or thousands of dollars on top of that seems unreasonable. I don't mind the 55%; CR provides a number of valuable services, and in any case they only keep 15% (say) and forward the remainder of the discount (nominally 40%) to the retail outlets.

I wrote to Pam Turner when the new terms arrived in e-mail, but haven't received any reply in return. Probably she is snowed under with complaints. I know that she reads her e-mail; I've written to her in the past and have always received fast and courteous replies.

The short answer is that many of our titles sell fewer than twenty copies a year. It's not cost-effective for us to maintain them in our distribution inventory at CR and we may go to direct retail through Fictionwise, as we already do with Palm.

Personally, I think the library sales through CR are the wave of the future for e-books, and I'll be sorry to lose that. In current figures, however, our sales through Fictionwise (at the moment through a distribution agreement with CR) and Palm (direct) aggregate several times our sales through all other CR retailers combined. We really don't have the option to stay with CR, if these rates hold.

Someone from CR may want to comment on the situation.

Jon Noring, moderator of the 2,039-member eBook Community list and a small publisher himself, says many publishers may flee Overdrive. He himself might join the exodus--in the wake of the distributor-retailer's questionable charges for storage of books. In fact, Jon says it may be time for stores and publishers to band together in a nonprofit e-book-distribution cooperative that could be spun off from OverDrive.

Meanwhile, answering my request for comments from publishers, Jon says OverDrive was late in some payments to him--just as it was to Scott Schmidt of Salvo Press--in violation of a contract. Anyone else having' problems? Or got other thoughts on the gouge? Email me.

Here, shortened, is Jon's post to the list:

This fee will especially hit hard the smaller ebook publisher and self-published author. The self-published author with one title will pay over 50 times what a large publisher with 2500 titles will pay per title. Fortunately, Lightning Source (which supplies Amazon) does not have such a storage fee, nor do independent retail outlets such as eBookAd.

David is asking for feedback from ebook publishers who use the Content Reserve system [CR is an OverDrive branch], including about whether they have been paid on time per the contract, which is an issue I experienced (and have documented well) along with Scott Schmidt, owner of Salvo Press, who alerted David Rothman to the publisher fees as well as the fact he wasn't paid for over a year when his contract stipulated monthly.

Some commentary on the Content Reserve Publisher Fee

Should Content Reserve go ahead with charging the publisher storage fees, it would not surprise me to see an exodus of a significant number of smaller publishers from the Content Reserve system (I'm considering withdrawing myself.) Were I a Content Reserve retailer, I would ask some very serious questions of Content Reserve as to the wisdom of this move. The Content Reserve retailers have paid big $$$ to join the system, and maybe not an insignificant number of titles will no longer be available for sale--it can only reduce ebook sales, hurting retailers.

Additionally, the promise of ebooks is that smaller publishers and self-published authors will flourish, thereby re-energizing the entire book publishing industry in general, which will benefit everyone, including the large established publishers (who, for example, will find gems published by the "indies" and license to republish them for the more traditional "blockbuster" paper book market which still dominates today's book publishing.) This planned storage fee will put a huge damper on this great promise of the future.

Contrary to what Content Reserve states in their cover letter, I do not believe they have done the more obvious things to cut costs such as going to a fully automated, electronic deposit system to pay publishers for sales. (For example, I'm still surprised to receive the publisher payment by paper check in a hand-addressed envelope along with a paper copy of the statement! This process can be fully automated by emailing the statement, or a link on how to obtain it, and electronically depositing the funds into my publishing company's checking account!)

As I think about it, there should be little incremental cost to handle one more publisher and one more ebook once the system is in place--their arguments do not sway me in the slightest. I can only assume that either: 1) they are in severe fiscal crisis and need a quick infusion of cash (and then they should admit it--I'd probably keep my two ebooks *in* Content Reserve if paying the $300/year fee will help them get through the crisis--I still believe in their system) or 2) simply getting greedy.

(To be constructive, as an alternative to the publisher fee, I would support a very small one-time fee for each new ebook edition introduced into the system, like $15 or so--that should cover whatever human interaction is necessary to evaluate the book for integrity, minimum quality and appropriateness--it should take no more than 10-15 minutes per ebook file to do this human evaluation, and would make an excellent job for smart college students, better and more interesting than flipping burgers at Mac and Don's for $8.00 an hour.)

Hopefully OverDrive will do the right thing and rescind this publisher fee. If not, I'm afraid for the long-term integrity of the Content Reserve system upon which many publishers and authors, large and small, and retailers as well, have come to rely on so heavily.

Maybe it is time for the ebook industry, retailers and publishers, to seriously begin discussion on setting up a non-profit cooperative organization to do what Content Reserve is now doing (to be the "back end" to supply the retail network for the publishers), and to enlist the open source movement to aid in writing the various applications to make this work. Content Reserve, for example, could be spun off into such a separate non-profit cooperative. Is there any reason why publishers and retailers need to rely on a for-profit company they have little control over to do this otherwise semi-automated, behind-the-scenes task?

Scott Schmidt, owner of Salvo Press, a small publisher of paper and electronic books in Bend, Oregon, was with OverDrive almost from the start. The Cleveland-based e-distributor had begged him to sign up several years ago.

Identical scenarios unfolded with scads of other tiny houses doing e-books. Steve Potash, President-CEO of OverDrive and currently president of the Open eBook Forum, the most influential e-book trade group with powerful sponsors such as Microsoft and Adobe, promised to be the little guys' friend.

Then OverDrive reached the point where it was dealing with Random House and other big boys, among its 705 publishers, not to mention 103 client libraries. Today Scott wonders if OverDrive, now a retailer as well as distributor, really wants his less-than-conglomerate-sized business.

You see, OverDrive's Content Reserve arm has just sent Scott and other smallfry some pricey new terms for "Secure Data Storage" including "archiving, metadata, covers, excerpts, etc."

Now Scott, who publishes well-regarded mysteries, thrillers and spy novels, plans to shift all his business to such OverDrive alternatives as ebooks.com, eBookAd and Lightning Source. Overdrive wanted to charge him $250 per quarter for storage--$1,000 a year, which doesn't seem like much but which is disaster when he's selling $7 e-books with thin margins.

Scott normally publishes just 4-8 books a year and has a backlist of 27 titles. "It's like Ingram expecting me to pay their warehouse costs until the books ship," Scott says, "and here we're just talking about bits and pixels."

$300 per year for single-title houses

The new OverDrive quarterly schedule for hosting books on its servers is: 1-10 books, $75; 11-25, $125; 26-50, $250; 51-100, $375; 101 to 250, $625; 251-500, $1,125; 501-1,000, $1,875; and 1,001-2,500, $3,375. Notice? A single-title publisher or self-published author would pay at least $300 annually for dealing with just one distributor on the sole title, never mind other costs. But the storage cost of a 2,500-e-book-per-year giant would apparently be all of $1.35 per book per quarter, or $5.40 for the year. That's less than two percent per title of the costs of the small guys. And what about the charges to publishers with more than 2,500 e-book titles? Whether or not big publishers are at the 2,500 level--Random House shows up with at least 1,500 titles at Fictionwise--should they get such breaks compared to the Scott Schmidts?

Hey, OverDrive, haven't storage costs come down, and isn't this the era of computerized accounts--meaning that small publishers should benefit? Are paperwork expenses that high, especially since Scott says he has hardly any human interaction with you? Has Bartleby, the Scrivener moved in from New York to keep records for you? OverDrive holds itself out as "the leading digital content solution provider for publishers, retailers and librarians." Is this the best the e-book industry can do on the automation front? No wonder global revenue is a mere $10-$20 million a year. Or is this just a plain, unadorned gouge? Perhaps Steve Potash needs to rethink the increase before other small guys join Scott in an exodus from OverDrive.

One wonders, too, how Random House and Simon & Schuster may feel, beyond less than ectasy at the thoughts of shelling out thousands more a year. They'll enjoy a great bottom-line bargain from Steve in sheer dollars alone compared to Scott Schmidt. In goodwill currency within the e-book industry, however, they'll pile up massive debt if they brook this discrimination against the Salvo Presses. And, of course, they may join Scott in wondering what the devil is going on at OverDrive. Is OverDrive squeezing publishers, forcing them to act as bankers, especially the small houses, to address the e-distributor's possible cashflow problems? Old contracts called for payments to publishers in 30 days, while the new contracts stretched it out to 90 days. Why the change? Isn't this harmful not just to publishers but also authors?

Revenue vs. Profits

Recently Steve Potash told me: "Revenues are growing and we are doing fine." But how about the profits? Maybe they exist and are phenomenal, and OverDrive is thriving. But so far, I've received no answer from Steve to the profit question after several days. Without saying that OverDrive is going out of business--I have no indication of that!--I would urge him to come forward with the full story. Plus an explanation of the new storage cost increase. Without a storage fee, Scott was paying nothing but a percentage of sales.

"I can't believe they're doing this," Scott says of the storage fee. His letter to us--reproduced with permission--follows:

Your readers might like to know how Overdrive, the major DRM merchant and distributor for eBooks by most publishers, now wants to add huge hosting fees for the pleasure of holding our eBooks on their systems. I have attached a fee list I got yesterday from Content Reserve, the hosting arm of Overdrive.

These outrageous fees will surely drive the small press out of the eBook business. With more than 26 titles hosted there, Salvo Press would be required to give them $250 per Quarter. I could buy my own server for that price. Hmm.

Most disturbing is that the small press was first to sign up with Overdrive. Salvo Press was one of the first companies to have them host our titles. At the time, they were practically begging us to sign up. Now that they have established themselves with larger publishers, I guess we don't matter.

Even if Palm Digital Media doesn't do Linux, an important PDM partner might take the L word more seriously--palmOne, the hardware company that spun off PDM as a separate outfit, which PalmGear bought. Microsoft and Symbian operating systems are also possibilities for palmOne hardware. The lowdown from PDAStreet.com:

At a conference call to analysts this week, palmOne President and CEO Todd Bradley responded to a question as to whether the company would create a version of the Treo 600 based on Windows Mobile. He said, "One of the drivers to the separation was so that each company could optimize their products for their specific customers. That being said, we haven't announced any Microsoft-based products but there's nothing that would preclude us from building one, Microsoft, Symbian, Linux, anything."

While the thought of palmOne implementing another operating system in some manner may come as a shock, it is not completely surprising after its separation from PalmSource. As a hardware only vendor now, palmOne is free to pursue any avenue, including alternative operating systems, that would make its products more appealing, and therefore helping the bottom line, which in turn would make shareholders happy.

Nice roundup in Techdirt on laptops in the schools. Key observations:

The big fear, that students would mistreat, forget or lose their computers has proven to be untrue [in Michigan] (as was the case in Maine). One other interesting aspect of the Michigan study is they found that it actually seems to make the kids more excited about learning, to the point where disciplinary action has decreased. It certainly sounds like these programs are a step in the right direction, but more emphasis needs to be placed on better training for the teachers.

The print on demand business--the big guys and maybe even the small timers--may have to pay millions to the estate of a St. Louis inventor. Beyond a settlement, PODers might even have to pay a five-percent licensing fee in many cases on manufacturing costs if this unfortunate decision sticks. That's hardly glad tidings for POD customers, either, of course.

In an item headlined "Jury Rocks POD World," the Publishers Lunch newsletter reports:

The future course of nearly everything involving print-on-demand-based creation and selling of books is subject to potential change as the result of a jury verdict announced yesterday in a St. Louis federal district court. The jury found that Lightning Source (amusingly typed as Lightening Source in court papers) both infringed and induced the infringement of the 1995 Ross patent held by the On Demand Machine Corporation, and that Amazon.com also infringed the patent.

The total award was $15 million. Lightning Source, Ingram Industries, and Amazon were all judged to have infringed willfully as well, which reportedly means that the judge will now decide whether to increase the damages as a result. (By Lightning's own count, they have manufactured somewhat over 10 million books.)

Issued in late 1995 to Harvey Ross (who died three years ago), the patent covers a "System and method of manufacturing a single book copy." According to a U.S. Patent Office abstract, "A computer based book manufacturing, distributing and retailing system for the high speed reproduction of a single copy of a book is disclosed. The system is especially adapted for direct consumer sales since the manufacture of a selected book can take place at the point of sale. A master module includes a computer having a database of books to be selected, the books preferably being stored in a digital book-description format."

Expert witness for the defense Ken Brooks, president of Publishing Dimensions, says that the ruling could apply to "Anyone ordering a print-on-demand book." Though the patent has been the subject of research and discussion within the POD world for years, Brooks says, "I don't think anyone ever thought it would be this big. We were wrong." (Though On Demand Machine always maintained that its patent covered most uses of POD distribution in the book business, the ill-fated Sprout is apparently the only company that ever actually executed a license for the patent.)

Brooks predicts that, "It's going to have very significant impact within the industry. I think most people are viewing it as being Lightning Source's problem, or the printer's problem, or Baker & Taylor's problem." But with patent licensing fees being proposed by On Demand Machine at approximately 5 percent of manufacturing cost, Brooks expects that "This will be the excuse to drive a general 5% increase" almost immediately. Certainly "Publishers should expect a price increase, and should expect that that will indemnify and cover them."

Remember the movie On the Beach? When radioactivity was on the brink of enveloping the entire world, but considerately waited a bit before totally poisoning Australia--thereby allowing Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner to act out some awesomely sexy beach scenes, while Waltzing Matilda played over and over again?

Oh, the inevitable parallel between the deadly clouds in the movie and U.S. intellectual property law, which looks ready to invade a pristine land! No deaths expected. But this Hollywood-produced cloud from Washington should take its toll on Australian creativity and freedom of access to information--not to mention the harm done to the Australian Gutenberg site, which has thrived amid Australia's shorter copyright terms.

Reflecting U.S. bullying and Hollywood lobbyist Jack Valenti's wishes, a proposed Free Trade Pact with the States would extend copyright terms, Bono fashion with life+70. It would even give Australia its own DMCAish laws--bad news for programmers and consumers alike.

But some plucky Aussies are speaking out against the parts of the FTA related to intellectual property. No guarantees of success here. But their arguments ought to make sense. From a report from Australia's ABC broadcast network--not to be confused with the Yank ABC:

A leading Australian expert on intellectual property law, Professor Peter Drahos, says the deal benefits US companies at the expense of Australian business.

"This particular balance struck in this bilateral agreement favours foreign intellectual property owners," he said.

He says it could drive up costs for schools and universities and damage Australia's emerging biotechnology sector.

While Yahoo is tainting its search results by selling out, Google and presumbly other search engines are suffering from another problem--fake links. Unscrupulous site owners create them to bump sites higher in the Google rankings. An item from journalist Steve Yelvington's blog:

A lot of the slimeball activity on the Web these days amounts to poisoning the town well. I got to thinking about that today when I happened to look at "referrer" log data for my Web site. I noticed a couple of hits that suggested somebody with a weblog discussing the Paris Hilton video was linking to my site. Why on earth would that be true? It wasn't, of course; it's trivial for a programmer to fake the HTTP_REFERER value by tinkering with the HTTP request, and the answer to the obvious question of "why would you do that?" leads us to the poisoned well.

The village well of the World Wide Web these days is Google, whose search technology holds the village together. Google's PageRank algorithm "bubbles up" a Web site if a lot of others link to it. The reasoning is: If a lot of people think it's worth linking to, it's probably worth looking at. A great idea, but it's being exploited...

The Evil Genius was about to buy a Sony PDA with a Palm OS, but instead settled on a Sharp Zaurus PDA with Linux--in part because Linux is open source. That, in turn, meant he would ditch the highly proprietary PalmReader, which doesn't even come in a Linux flavor. A trend here?

Perhaps the forthcoming Palm OS 6 and a future PalmReader app will be so good that not the slightest question will exist about the long-term success of Palm Digital Media in those areas. Then again, maybe not. Oodles of techies like the EG favor an open-source approach that is the antithesis of everything that Palm stands for. Stupidities such as Palm's narrow-minded decision not to let the included Palm Desktop or a PDM equivalent support Mac OS X--a negative of the forthcoming Palm OS--are making a lot programmers rethink their commitment to the Palm OS.

And guess where many programmers will go, bringing consumers in tow? You bet--to the Land of the Killer Penguins. Embedded Linux will have claws. Its interface will be increasingly slick and please not just the usual geeks but also civilians who don't want to be locked into a PDM way of doing things. Palm OS is the biggest PDA OS right now. But so what? That just means it has all the more room to tumble.

The mainstream media smell blood, and the Feb. 23 Fortune has zeroed in on the Palm OS as one of the products to which Linux could do grave harm. Quote:

Marc Andreessen, who led development of the first web browser, says open source will have the biggest and fastest impact on products "with broad horizontal appeal, where a lot of people use them in the same way." He means programs like Windows, Microsoft Office, low-end Oracle databases, and the Palm OS.

You needn't be an Evil Genius to hate onerous Digital Rights Management, but it helps. Dave Slusher has laudably kicked the habit of buying DRMed e-books. His original skepticism of DRM was a little more at the abstract level. Dave had worked as a software engineering team leader for the server side of Intertrust's PDF publishing system, and he obviously knew how messy the technology could often be.

But now Dave has a more practical and personal reason: his own pain and suffering as a past buyer of DRMed books. Technology marches on, but you may be stuck with beloved e-books locked in a nasty, proprietary shell--mere detritus left behind by a megaconglomerate with other suckers to reel in. I'll let Dave tell his story, as he did so nicely in his blog today after deciding to buy a Linux PDA:

As I've made the decision to get a Sharp Zaurus for the next PDA, I can't use my typical PalmOS apps anymore. For all the multiformat books and magazines I have purchased from Fictionwise, I'm OK. I can redownload them in another format that is usable on the Zaurus. However, I have a few (not a whole lot, but some) Palm Reader/Peanut Press books that I actually purchased. Every one of these is no longer usable by me.

There is no Palm Reader for Zaurus so the money that I paid Palm is essentially gone and there is nothing I can do about it, save either trying to crack the books myself or someone releasing a Palm Reader port for the Zaurus. Theory moves into practice as I now find myself a burned customer, who is rewarded for paying my money and downloading legitimate copies of things by not being able to read them any more.

Thanks Palm/Peanut! Hope you enjoy the $50 or so I have spent for your books that I can't read anymore.

A bad part is that I can't refer back to books for which I paid good money--in most cases a similar amount to what one would pay for the paper copy.

I paid $10 to get the annotated Fire Upon the Deep, in which I'll never be able to dig through the annotations again. With this situation comes a bit of resolve from me. I will never again spend one cent on any e-book that involves a form of DRM that leaves me at risk for not being able to read it later. I will happily pay for electronic reading--I plan on retaining my electronic subscriptions to F&SF and Asimov's SF--but never again will I pay for DRM books. I'm not putting my cash at risk to ease publisher nerves. If you think I as your customer can't be trusted and must be treated like a criminal under house arrest with an ankle bracelet, you can kiss my ass. I'll keep my money in my pocket and not give it to you. I'll give it instead to your competitors who don't treat me that way. God forbid, I might even read more Baen books! I love how they do business, if only they published more books I wanted to read.

Ironically, this moment of resolve comes at a point where I really am trying to purge the enormity of paper books from my life. I continue to try to reduce them, knowing that we have at least one more move in our lives in the next few years. I'm the absolute perfect consumer for e-books--you might find someone equally close to the ideal target demographic but you will not find someone closer.

I love to read. I love to hoard, but I've hit the limits of my physical space. I enjoy the act of reading on a small device. As a geek I have no problems with the weaknesses of e-text. I love the ubiquity of having a library in my pocket at all times. I have disposable cash and the willingness to spend it on this product line. E-publishers couldn't hope for more. However, because of their business practices a significant number of them have lost access to me and my money that I will be spending somewhere, just not with them. What a shame for them, what a boon for the publishers who are trusting enough not to lock up their documents in proprietary DRM and who understand that the risks of unauthorized file trading are far lower than the risks of not making the money in the first place.

David, it actually gets better. For unencrypted Fictionwise books my format of choice was iSilo, which isn't on Zaurus and has a closed format. For similar reasons, I'll be dropping that as well. A while back the guys at FW were asking if there was any interest in Plucker formatted books from FW. I liked Plucker on the Palm and would be happy for it to be my primary ebook/web page reader on the Zaurus.

I'm a little weirded out by being the spokesmodel for this transition of dumping the closed (Clie/PalmOS/Palm Reader/iSilo) for the open (Zaurus/OpenZaurus/Plucker) but [the TeleBlog] posts are an accurate summation of what I'm doing and why. Although I can't say I'm dying to fart around with the OS layer or the rendering code or file formats for my books (and in fact I hope that I never do), it makes a world of difference to me between having that option and not having that option.

The last closed app that I'm really going to miss: Vindigo. On a webpage I heard a whisper of a rumor that someone is working on a Zaurus Vindigo solution. Man, I hope so. I'm still paid up through July.