Could ad-supported books on the Net help promote movies like Van Helsing? Or maybe Canon printers or Budweiser beer?

Might ads be an alternative to DRM overkill and the other fun to which publishers have treated readers?

I myself don't see advertising as a panacea. In fact, some "how-to" books intended to promote get-rich-quickers have been worse than worthless. Still, we need experimentation with a variety of business models, and the ad-support kind might work for some books and writers if (1) the content itself can be compelling and (2) the ads fit the books and don't overpower the writing.

The Pan Macmillan experiment

In the case of best-selling Australian writer Matthew Reilly, those two conditions just might apply. Sensibly he and his publisher aren't expecting advertising alone to justify their giveaway on the Net; they also want to whet readers' appetite for his work. But along the way, they have lined up sponsors. Details from the New Zealand Herald:

He is a writer of best-selling thriller novels but Matthew Reilly is committing what on the face of it would appear to be commercial suicide with his latest book - he is giving it away on the internet.

Reilly's publisher, Pan Macmillan, says the Sydney-based writer with five previous novels under his belt, is the first mainstream writer to freely release an entire manuscript online.

After being turned away by every publisher in Sydney, Reilly self-published his first novel, Contest. Now he is taking a calculated punt with the web release of Hover Car Racer, a thriller that is being published in eight online instalments, two of which have so far been released.

The chapters of the book are downloadable in PDF file format, a file viewer for which is free for download at www.adobe.com.

So far, the first two instalments of the book have notched up 27,000 downloads.

The motivation is not purely charitable, Reilly freely admits. He wants to broaden his readership with a view to selling more print books in the future.

"I'm trying to get to those people who don't go into bookstores. People in the office who are online all day. It's really to reach out beyond my existing readers," the 29-year-old writer said.

It's an experiment that has the seeds of a new business model for the release of popular fiction online because Reilly intends to make money out of Hover Car Racer in the long-term. Initially, the revenue is already flowing in the form of sponsorship.

Reilly said printer and camera maker Canon jumped at the chance to sponsor the book because it fits with their agenda of encouraging people to print more web documents.

United International Pictures also bought space at the top of the book's pages to push their upcoming movie Van Helsing.

Hover Car Racer will be released in print before Christmas.

In the meantime, the author is encouraging readers to distribute it - in marked contrast to the current trend of cracking down on the sharing of copyright material.

"I'm encouraging people to forward it on. For every one book I sell, I reckon four people read it. If you show some goodwill the market will come back and buy the books," says Reilly...

Stinky homeless men staring at porn on library computers. Unzipped flies. Threats against female patrons. A slew of thefts. 117 police calls in 12 months. That's life at Dallas's downtown library palace, if you go by an article in the Dallas Observer. If the story is accurate, library bureaucrats have tolerated this mess far more than they should. At the same time the 'crats have tried to impress the library world with a Declaration of Independence exhibit, a Shakespearean one and ambitions to create "a highly respected research library" amid the chaos.

Don't children and the public at large suffer, though, when bureaucrats and politicians fixate on downtown library palaces at the expense of neighborhood branches within walking distance of many students? And might an additional emphasis on e-books and other electronic items be part of the solution, especially for the homeless? Before making up your mind, read Billy Barron's observations below from the Dallas area. Most are not about electronic libraries directly. But they are rather relevant since e-books must be considered in the context of the here and now, the paper world. Billy compares several Texas library systems and essentially concludes that except in small towns, libraries are most effective with a strong emphasis on the branch approach. I'll have more to say at the end of this TeleBlog item. But first, abridged, here are Billy's thoughts on library systems in Dallas, Garland, Richardson and Plano.

* * *

DALLAS: Population 1.2M, spread out, centralized palace library with neighborhood branches

Dallas built its library palace in the downtown area. Downtown Dallas is a dirty place where nobody feels safe at night. Parking is terrible during the day. On top of that, homeless people from what I have read invade the library during the day because they have nowhere else to go to get out of the heat. Martha Brown, a principal of a charter school in Dallas, is scared of going alone to the central library to check out the materials there. According to the Dallas Observer:

Brown says she is familiar with the homeless at the library from many years of working downtown and is wary of the building because of them. She says she will not go to the downtown library alone and wouldn't bring children there either. She'd take children to a neighborhood library instead, she says.

"That was one of the things that steered me away," Brown says. "I didn't feel like dealing with that."

A library activist group called Libri warns that public libraries in the U.K. may be dead in 20 years. In A minute's silence, please, for the late public library, the Independent spells out the details from Libri's report and elsewhere.

"There were 377 million loans recorded from British libraries in 2003," says writer Ian Herbert, "down from a reported 480 million in 1999." U.K. libraries are spending just nine percent of their budgets on books, many of which are now outdated.

It's a lesson for all librarians, especially here in the States where short-sighted cities are squandering money on contruction or maintenance of library palaces downtown at the expense of hours and collections in neighborhood branches.

Even well-off cities such as Seattle, site of the new palace shown here, can't do everything when times are tough. Priorities, please. As it happens, just a fraction of U.S. library spending goes for books and other text. Let's learn from the mess across the pond, which is apparently is even worse than ours.

Net vs. books

Given the U.K. book crisis, is it any wonder that schoolchildren at many libraries now beeline for the computers--to visit Web sites full of questionable information--rather than reading books as their predecessors did?

"In the past," the Independent quotes one librarian, "we'd have a rush of book inquiries when children came out of school with their homework at four o'clock. "Now it's only the Internet. It's been the biggest change in my 30 years here."

A far cry from the past

Compare that statement with the reflections of a British writer quoted as saying: "I used to go to the library so much it made my mother cry. I practically lived at the local library I visited...I withdrew 10 books a week and went once during the week and twice on Saturdays."

Yes, that's a writer speaking. But clearly more books and newer books would help--and not just the young:

Stewart Fawcett, 65, has long since exhausted the library's supplies of travel books on Crete, something of specialist genre for him. His Heald Green borrowing record on the subject includes the 1890 tome Travels in Crete , which he obtained on order, but the most modern guide he can find today is dated 1993. "The Crete books are way outdated," he grumbled, settling for a James Herbert paperback instead. "I can't find anything of interest."

"In Forney, Texas, a fast-growing suburb of Dallas, 10- and 11-year-old schoolkids are set to cross a technology divide to an area many adults won't venture into--electronic books." - Reuters, via Forbes.

The TeleRead take: Considering the many prejudices that adults have against e-books, it should be easier for the fifth and sixth graders to adjust. Details:

Starting in August, more than 100 students in the fifth and sixth grades of the Forney Independent School District will receive notebook computers that contain as many textbooks as the school can muster the rights for, as well as thousands of classic works of art and literature.

Instead of opening books, the children will log onto school-supplied laptops to access their math and science textbooks or read American literary classics such as Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" or Stephen Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage" about the Civil War.

"Our generation didn't learn to read on a computer screen, so most parents have an issue with that," said Mike Smith, Superintendent of the Forney school district. But today's fifth and sixth graders don't see it the same way.

"They just operate differently than we do. They're digital kids," Smith said.

The Denver Public library is playing up e-books to the hilt and has a spiffy-looking new area powered by OverDrive, complete with offerings in the Mobipocket format. It's a welcome change from the increasingly outdated Palm Digital Media alternative that OD had been featuring. Adobe, as usual, is also a choice. Details via an OverDrive press release:

The Library's eBook collection includes bestsellers and classics, fiction and non-fiction, from popular authors and leading publishers such as HarperCollins, McGraw-Hill, Zondervan, and John Wiley and Sons. Patrons download free reader software and then use their Denver Public Library cards to check out and download eBooks.

What's the future of the audiobooks--for "adults, children, the visually impaired, the learning disabled, and more"?

That's the theme of Audio E-Book Expo: Exploring DigitalBooks and Content” on Friday, October 29 at Alliance Library System, East Peoria." Details:

Experts will share the latest in web-based ebook management systems, handheld players, and collaborative projects.

Key-note speakers include: Tom Peters of TAP Information Systems, Steve Potash, CEO of Overdrive, Inc., and Jenny Levine, “the Shifted Librarian”, Suburban Library System.

Other speakers include Jane amberlain, Adult Services Manager at Bloomington Public Library, Lori Bell, Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center, Sharon Ruda, Illinois State Library Talking Book and Braille Service, and Diana Sussman of Southern Illinois Talking Book Center. There will also be time for exhibits and ideas!

Cost for the day is only $25.00 which includes lunch.

Sony's Librie reportedly has debuted in Japan with a library of just 400 books. That's not all. Your purchase, er, your rental, will vanish in 60 days after you've plunked down your $5 or so.

The "moldy list of books," as one early Librie buyer describes it, includes some public domain titles that normally would be free and yours to keep forever.

While the $375 Librie is officially available only in Japan, this is an insult to readers all over the cosmos, especially since you can't even use the machine right now to read newspaper and magazines.

Gouge bad for Sony's hip image

Simply put, the Librie crew makes the old Gemstar greedsters look like Mother Teresa. Invidividually I suspect they're nice people. But the end result is ugly and will do little for Sony's image as a consumer-hip corporation.

If I were E Ink, I would be screaming about Sony's tainting this wonderful new technology with such an anti-reader business model. At least in the U.S., the Japanese conglomerate's PR people have not explained the company's logic despite calls to East and West Coast offices. This could change. I've just been given the name of a key planner of Sony's e-book strategy and will follow through--hoping he'll be responsive to the well-intended criticism here. Sony has not settled on the business model for a U.S. version, assuming that it does offer the Librie here. I fervently hope this happens. But today's Librie just isn't ready.

No, I haven't tried a Librie myself for a possible purchase, but as I learn more about the machine in its present form, I'm far less inclined to. Yes, I know. Much more content will be available later on. But how about the problem of the vaporized books? Or the fixation on a such a Sonycentric approach? Sony needs to go on record ASAP with a statement that it will support HTML and ASCII and the like, as well as proprietary formats from other companies. As much as I love the idea of a Universal Consumer Format, it's important for readers to be comfortable in the here and now.

Beware of journalists in rave mode

While certain journalists went into rave mode about the Librie, the true e-book lovers are finally getting out the ugly truth about the machine in its present form. Even the New York Times, which was aggressively blithe about the vaporbook issue, will eventually catch up--given how the salient facts are.

In First Look at the Sony EBR-1000 Librie eBook Reader, appearing in the dottocomu blog, a buyer named Kakyou understandably pays tribute to the high-res display and long battery life. But then he devotes more than half his review to "The Bad" and "The Ugly"--and understandably so, especially when you read the U section.

"The bad"

"The page turning buttons," Kayyou says, "are the biggest disappointment...too small, awkwardly placed...and not very responsive." What's more, he complains: "I feel I have to wait almost a full-second between screen presses while the screen refreshes." That's "OK for page turning, but murder" when typing text into the dictionary and waiting for the results to appear.

On top of the other problems, you can't get your PC to talk to the Librie if you aren't lugging around the e-book reader's power supply to supply the requisite juice.

"The Ugly"

Why am I beating up so hard on Sony for the Librie's inability to read HTML and other common formats? Well maybe some tough love just might be the solution here. I'm just stunned that the company is so blind to readers' needs, in the States and maybe even in Japan.

Now, in its entirety, here is "The Ugly":

So the rumors have been around and the details available for a few weeks now. Sony has opted for a DRM and distribution system for the Librie that must have been designed by the same guy who made up the guidelines for NetMD's DRM. In other words, some dinosaur in SonyHQ who still doesn't read his own e-mail since he can't use a keyboard.

As of launch day, Sony's new book rental program contains a whopping 400 books. That's it. The convenience store down the street from my apartment has a wider and more current selection. Also, the innovative (read as idiotic) new 60-day-and-it-evaporates download service has no periodicals! No magazines, no newspapers. The only types of documents that would lend themselves to a rental system aren't even offered. Instead we end up with a moldy list of books that would be public domain if it weren't for the fact that Japan doesn't believe in giving away information for free, even if no one would want it.

As for permanent content, well there ain't any! Not yet anyway. So right now, if you don't keep buyin' the crappy book, you have 60 days to finish it, or you gotta buy it again. Oooo, that will be a popular concept. So distribution sucks. Well, how about the Rights Management system? Well in a word, "Customers can go and bite me in the a$$". At least I think that 's the message Sony is trying to get across. Yet another proprietary format, with a heavy emphasis on not actually selling things to customers. All valid documents couple with a license document. The entire purpose of the license file is to cut you off after a certain date. So Sony is not selling you anything. They are "loaning" it to you. Well, after 60 days, let's see if they will return that money I "loaned" them! This new format was supposed to offer advanced compression so that hundreds of books can be stored on your eBook (this many books would cost I estimate 5.2 million dollars). The amazing compression created a single comic book file size of 24 MB. That's only 2 and a half times the size of the built in storage area. Want to keep more than a dozen or so books and you better start hoarding MemorySticks. Lord knows using an Open eBook format or even PDF format would give you the same level of functionality and portability but also give you the problems of ease in handling and widespread compatibility. Wouldn't want that would you?

So for an investment of a few thousand dollars, you can have a crappy collection of books no one reads that will evaporate in a couple of months. Well, at least it's safer than burning money. After all you could burn a finger. Still, the fire sounds more fun than this book.

So the end analysis is that this is a great first step device that showcases some cutting edge technology as well as pointing out that genetically altered monkeys should not be allowed to submit marketing plans for Sony. Until there is a hack out there for personal published documents (like there is for the Rocket Book) this product will go down in Sony's vault for stupid expensive ideas. At least it's so small it should fit. It's getting crowded down there lately.