Some library users are editing the books they check out. Talk about the desire for wiki-style interactivity! Meanwhile wiki fans can check out wikis of Free Culture and Smart Genes. (Library-related examples found via LISNews.)
posted by David Rothman at 10:21 AM | permanent link

The Librie mailing list gained a bunch of new members after mentions on the eBook Community list and in this blog. Please join the list to free the Librie. Your membership will be a vote against Orwellian DRM and vanishing e-books. Meanwhile here are observations from Mark Hill, a Librie owner in the United Kingdom--follow by an example of the hardware hacking that very likely will follow.

The unit is very slick, the screen quality is awesome, I cannot use it for anything, I do not speak Japanese, and I really bought it because I think if we can bypass the DRM, it would be a wonderful device. This was a brave move, I think, and without a lot of skilled people working on it, I am unsure that we can do anything with it.

There are two options. We either get ahold of the software used to create the BBEB format and author our own documents from Project Gutenberg, etc., or we hack the device to bypass DRM and/or provide it with the functions to read txt files and html.

I have shown it to a few guys here, and everybody would buy one to a man, if the DRM issues are solved.

I think Sony is being very very short-sighted with its approach here.

They have made major mistakes like this before and continue to make them

I have a blog entry which outlines my thoughts overall.

Meanwhile, over at Sven Neuhaus's mailing list devoting to the Librie, the good works go on. Here in the U.S., since computer makers and buyers are still suffering from laws that Hollywood purchased with massive campaign donations in Washington, the goal can't legally be a DRM bypass per se. But, if nothing else, Americans would like to be able to load programs to read HTML, PDF and other common e-book formats. To show the eagerness of those in the Librie Liberation Movement, here's a recent exchange btween Mark and another member of the Neuhaus list.

It ships with a number of books in memory, I am guessing these are taking up the space on the flash NAND.

Some of these will be bulky as they contain audio.

Mark

[Other member's name]

> Hi!
> After looking at the pictures again, I have a few more
> speculations to offer about the system architecture:
> The main CPU (Dragonball, IC1001) seems to be equipped with
> 64MByte
> SDRAM (16 or 32bit wide, 7ns, IC1201 + IC1202),
> 4MByte NOR flash (16 or 32bit wide, 90ns, IC1203 + IC1204)
> from which program code can be directly executed without loading
> into SDRAM first, and 48MByte (32MB (IC1106) + 16MB (IC1108))
> sectored NAND flash (works like a harddisk, no direct code
> execution from flash possible).
> The 4MB NOR flash is big enough to hold a bootloader and also a
> small Linux system in a compressed R/O filesystem (cramfs).
> What seems odd is that from the 48MByte NAND flash only 10MB are
> available for internal eBook data storage (if I remember it
> right).
> What did Sony fill the other 38MByte with?
> The display controller (IC1610, found no info about this one,
> yet)comes with 1MByte SRAM (16 or 32bit wide, 70ns, IC1612 + IC1613)
> and 512KByte NOR flash (8 or 16bit wide, 90ns, IC1611).
> This seems a resonable amount of memory for a controller driving
> a 800x600 grayscale display.

Detail: If you're not on the eBook Community list already, why not join that as well?
posted by David Rothman at 8:56 AM | permanent link

NewsAloud can now read from RSS-enabled blogs such as this one--not just sections of commercial news sites like Yahoo's. The current price from NextUp.com, which offers a variety of other text-to-speech products, is $19.95. Despite its flaws, NewsAloud could be just the ticket for creating MP3 or .wav files for you to enjoy while you jog. And remember, blogs and news sites are just some examples of RSS-reading fodder--for example, Yahoo-based mailing lists are now reachable via RSS.

Pros: You can set up NewsAloud for a variety of sites to read from in one swoop, rather than having to call up each one individually.

Cons: The immediately available voices are less than natural despite all ballyhoo to the contrary. I'm not the biggest booster of the sound of Microsoft Sam and friends. You can pay extra for a tolerable alternative from AT&T or another vendor or install additional "free" voices. As for the interface, I don't know how well a blind person would take to it. Might be better to use your existing reader if you're blind. Plus, NewsAloud is Windows only.

Related: NextUp press release, as well as TextAloud MP3, an earlier product that can read from e-books in ASCII and other appropriate formats and create audio files if you'd like. Imagine--roll-your-own audio books for MP3 players or CDs (burning software required). Remember, however, this is a separate product from NewsAloud. What's more, as with NewsAloud, you'll need to pay extra for decent voices.
posted by David Rothman at 8:49 AM | permanent link

"Search engine giant Google is preparing to publicly release some of its underlying software code only months before it undertakes a multibillion-dollar stock-exchange float." - The Age, in Australia.

The TeleRead take: This is a Good Thing, of course, as long as a meaningful amount of code does go public. See related Slashdot item.
posted by David Rothman at 10:52 AM | permanent link

The free Skype telephony service works in Linux as well as Windows and supposedly is spyware free. You can reach me personally via the username of davidrothman.
posted by David Rothman at 5:19 AM | permanent link

Intel, Sun Microsystems, Verizon Communications, SBC and other tech heavyweights are worried that U.S. copyright law is too skewed in favor of Hollywood. So they're creating a new organization called the Personal Technology Freedom Coalition. Among other efforts, it will support Rep. Rick Boucher's efforts to mitigate the damage from the DMCA. Perhaps the new group, in turn, can support a concept such as the Digitial Media Users Association. (CNet, via Techdirt.)

Related: Rx for Washington's bullying: An NRA-size group for all digital media users.
posted by David Rothman at 5:06 AM | permanent link

Those hoping for relief from the Tower of eBabel--the oodles of proprietary e-book formats--will be pleased to find that the OpenReader Consortium is gaining traction.

"I was...happy to see that your roadmap includes MathML in 1.0.," writes Paul Topping, president and CEO at Design Science, a MathML-hip company. "I look forward to hearing more about your project. Perhaps we can help with the MathML part somehow." Much appreciated!

Meanwhlie, following up on the favorable reaction in O'Reilly editor Andy Oram's personal Web log, items have also appeared in the Software Documentation Weblog, the blog for XML.org, the Semantic Wave Blog and the Digital Library.

"Note to myself," writes Software Documentation's Lars Trieloff. "I have to take a look at OpenReader, which is an standards-based attempt to create an XML format and some software to offer an open alternative to DRM-crippled e-book solutions." Exactly, Lars!
posted by David Rothman at 4:01 AM | permanent link

See the latest in the New York Times on libraries vs. Google and other online searching. We've mentioned this question before via an item headlined Web-oriented students avoiding university library--and proud of it. If libraries don't want to be Googled and Amazoned away, they'll get serious about e-books and the rest--not just search engines. (Thanks for the link, Alev. Google will never replace you!)

Related: The Infodiet: How Libraries Can Offer an Appetizing Alternative to Google, from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
posted by David Rothman at 5:37 PM | permanent link

You can now enjoy an online recording of an eBookWorm discussion with Michael Moodie, Deputy Director of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS), a division of the Library of Congress. Last Thursday he discussed the future of digital books for the blind and others with disabilities. The audio file is in WMA (Windows Media Audio) format.

Also online is an Audio Avenue Meeting of the Minds discussion about Bruce J. Schulman's book The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. Here's the WMA audio link for discussion of the '70s book.

Due to a medical emergency--my mother broke her hip--I couldn't tune in real time but I look forward to hearing both recordings.

Coming up:

July 14, 7-9 p.m. Central Daylight Time: A Meeting of the Minds discussion will take place about The Collected Short Stories of Isaac Bashevic Singer, published in 1982 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

July 22 at 3 CDT: The featured guest on eBookWorm will be Geoff Freed, Project Manager of the Beyond the Text Project at the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM).

"The book discussions we will hold on Saturday, Sept. 11 should be interesting, too," says Tom Peters, the moderator for eBookWorm and Meeting of the Minds. "We'll get to discuss another of my favorite books, Huck Finn." Huck should be especiallly meaningful in a 9/11 context. What a contrast between him and the medieval mindsets of the terrorists.

All of the online programs are scheduled for the "OPAL Auditorium" which can be accessed through the following URL:

http://www.tcconference.com/lib/?auditorium&nopass_field=1

A small, safe chat program will end up on your computer if you haven't visited the site before. Just type in your name when asked, and you're all set as long as you have a sound card (and a mike if you want to speak out, not just type).

Questions? Contact Tom Peters (chatcast moderator) or Lori Bell for details on particpating in the discussions. While mainly for the blind, they're open to all and are free.
posted by David Rothman at 3:48 PM | permanent link

Walt Crawford, past president of the ALA's Library and Information Technology Association, is bashing e-books again in his "Empire strikes back" mode. Darth's newest rant is more or less the same old same old with fresh examples to distort. Especially I'm charmed by the way he cites an Australian e-book study that does not even tell the kind of hardware used to read off the screen. Walt himself is proud, proud, proud that he doesn't own a PDA. That's understandable. Shudder, what if he gave the technology an honest try and liked it? And to think of Walt owning a tablet. That could be dangerous.

Those inconvenient findings from BSU

Wittingly or not, moreover, Walt omits mention of a recent Ball State University study documenting the benefits of e-books for schoolchildren. Bear in mind that the BSU study used rather antiquated technology, and even then the students liked e-books and comprehended material at virtually the same level they did p-books. The displays on my two Sony Clies could be larger, but are still adequate for recreational reading; in fact, with Mobipocket's best font in use I can't even see the dots in the letters. And things are only going to improve from here, especially as e-ink and tablets become affordable. Hmm. I believe the Aussie study didn't even say if the test subjects read off desktops or laptops or handhelds. I'd hate to have to sit and read e-books hour after hour off a desktop. But if you're an ALA tech biggy, you needn't worry about such nuances.

Too bad that people like Walt are impervious to the possibilities of e-books, which could give schoolchildren and the taxpayers a much better deal. Even Walt appears to concede that many paper books go unread. In a 1994 paper, Stephen Bates, senior Fellow with the Annenberg Washington Program, noted the inefficiencies of paper libraries. "Recently at a small public library in New Jersey," he wrote, "about 12 percent of books were checked out; at a large university library in Washington, D.C., 3 percent of books were checked out." I doubt much has changed. Anyone care for a well-stocked national digital library system with a pay-per-access approach so libraries don't spend a fortune on slow-moving titles? If librarians don't want to be Googled and Amazoned away, they'd better show more of an open mind than Walt does. Sooner or later the public and pols will catch on to the dismal stats.

Why Walt and the Proprietary Formatters deserve each other

All in all, I truly believe that Walt and the Proprietary Formatters Association deserve each other. The OeBF--with its beloved Tower of eBabel and its fondness for DRM overkill--has done a brilliant job of making commercial e-books harder to love. Walt is a useful part of the ecosystem. I often nodded when I read his criticisms of e-books as they exist now in their DRMed commercial form. Unless you count the Mobipocket dictionary I bought, I have yet to purchase a DRMed e-book. Yes, Walt, some people would like to be able to own e-books for real.

Detail: Walt told me some months back that he didn't want to mention TeleRead because I'm "too negative." He himself, of course, is brimming with sunshine. My own theory about his silence on TeleRead is a little different. Much of TeleRead is about the A word--access. That's not the easiest argument for Walt to counter. Other than defending the right to read p-books, he's pretty helpless.

A hater, not just a "skeptic": Walt has depicted himself as a mere skeptic toward e-books. Wrong. I know he'll concede the value of e-books on geeky topics, but as shown by his slant, he's going far beyond healthy skepticism. The Librie, with its almost book-quality reproduction, gets just a few lines from him. Horror of horrors, what if someone did readability studies comparing the Librie with paper? Then, assuming that readers could control the size and font style, the Librie might even score higher than paper did.

The bottom line: The "anti" side can dream up fiction after fiction about e-books, but the point is that they will be much cheaper for libraries to spread around than the paper variety, especially when the world wises up about eBabel and Doberman-level DRM. OpenReader is a positive response to the botch that the usual suspects have made of e-books. Librarians could make a world of difference if, instead of showing Crawford-style negativity toward the new, they took control and boycotted vendors that insisted on joys like Draconian DRM and expensive format wars. Last week, in joining me in my complaints against Sony's horridly proprietary approach for its Librie, a Japanese reader of this blog sent me some messages with a wonderful signature line quoting Mahatma Gandhi: "Be the change you wish to see in the world." Yo, librarians? Time to cut out the Luddite noises, appreciate the nuances and tell the e-book industry to reform or kiss off the library market?

Related: Pop-up books, in Caveat Lector.
posted by David Rothman at 2:11 AM | permanent link