Sven Neuhaus and other public-spirited programmers opened up the Librie tablet earlier this year to Project Gutenberg books and others in nonSony-blessed formats. The company itself is now sensible enought to offer its own conversion tools as well, although the Neuhaus-related offerings would continue to be worth paying attention to. See his mailing list and wiki. Meanwhile, from Tokyo, here is the happy news about the Librie from Andreas Bovens' blog:

In April 2004, I reported about Sony’s Librié, an e-book reader only capable of displaying e-books in Sony’s proprietary BBeB file format--BBeB e-books are sold at Timebook Town and have terrible DRM inside, which limits their lifespan to only 60 days. After that, the e-books (and sometimes even your own annotations) expire and have to be purchased again.

Probably only to Sony’s surprise, neither the Librié nor Timebook Town has been a success so far. There may be several reasons for this, but it seems the Librié’s way too restrictive DRM may have something to do with it. Apparently Sony understands this, too--since November 1st, the Librié download section offers a set of conversion tools that allow users to convert their own Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF, (X)HTML documents or even RSS news items to the Librié’s BBeB format. Note: as the conversion process apparently turns your documents into a graphic BBeB file, text-zoom or text-selection won’t work. The (X)HTML2BBeB filter in the Librié IE toolbar doesn’t have this problem, meaning that you can download books for free from Project Gutenberg or its Japanese counterpart, Aozora Bunko, and read them on your Librié!

For more info, tips and screenshots, check Librie Templates.

Here's a follow-up to our Cybook post--a message from Laurent Picard of Bookeen, the company behind the machine:

We recently heard from a 97-year-old grandmother (she was 96 when her granddaughter bought it for her), in the south of France, who is now able to read novels in large print. Though we also designed the Cybook to meet this need, it always impresses and comforts us to receive such feedbacks. In fact, a not so small fraction of our customers are vision-impaired people. We develop special "Vision" graphical interfaces for them.

Remember the C word from the dotcom boom--the convergence of different media? Well, how about the convergence of books and the Net, in ways going far beyond Gutenberg and similar efforts? Just out from the Associated Press: and spotted via the lib-license-l list:

Google Inc. is trying to establish an online reading room for five major libraries by scanning stacks of hard-to-find books into its widely used Internet search engine.

The ambitious initiative announced late Monday gives Mountain View, Calif.-based Google the right to index material from the New York public library as well as libraries at four universities--Harvard, Stanford, Michigan and Oxford in England.

The Michigan and Stanford libraries are the only two so far to agree to submit all their material to Google's scanners...

...In the coming months, Google will collaborate with Harvard's libraries on a pilot project to digitize a substantial number of the 15 million volumes held in the University's extensive library system. Google will provide online access to the full text of those works that are in the public domain. In related agreements, Google will launch similar projects with Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library. As of 9 am on December 14, an FAQ detailing the Harvard pilot program with Google will be available at http://hul.harvard.edu.

The Harvard pilot will provide the information and experience on which the University can base a decision to launch a large-scale digitization program. Any such decision will reflect the fact that Harvard's library holdings are among the University's core assets, that the magnitude of those holdings is unique among university libraries anywhere in the world, and that the stewardship of these holdings is of paramount importance. If the pilot is deemed successful, Harvard will explore a long-term program with Google through which the vast majority of the University's library books would be digitized and included in Google's searchable database. Google will bear the direct costs of digitization in the pilot project.

By combining the skills and library collections of Harvard University with the innovative search skills and capacity of Google, a long-term program has the potential to create an important public good. According to Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers, "Harvard has the greatest university library in the world. If this experiment is successful, we have the potential to provide the world's greatest system for dissemination as well."

In addition, there would be special benefits to the Harvard community.

Plans call for the eventual development of a link allowing Google users at Harvard to connect directly to the online HOLLIS (Harvard Online Library Information System) catalog for information on the location and availability at Harvard of works identified through a Google search. This would merge the search capacity of the Internet with the deep research collections at Harvard into one seamless resource-a development especially important for undergraduates who often see the library and the Internet as alternative and perhaps rival sources of information.

Eventually, Harvard users would benefit from far better access to the 5 million books located at the Harvard Depository (HD). If the University undertakes the long-term program, Harvard users would gain online access to the full text of out-of-copyright books stored at HD. For books still in copyright, Harvard users could gain the ability to search for small snippets of text and, possibly, to view tables of contents. In short, the Harvard student or faculty member would gain some of the advantages of browsing that remote storage of books at HD cannot currently provide.

According to Sidney Verba, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library, "The possibility of a large-scale digitization of Harvard's library books does not in any way diminish the University's commitment to the collection and preservation of books as physical objects. The digital copy will not be a substitute for the books themselves. We will continue actively to acquire materials in all formats and we will continue to conserve them. In fact, as part of the pilot we are developing criteria for identifying books that are too fragile for digitizing and for selecting them out of the project.

"It is clear," Verba continued, "that the new century presents unparalleled challenges and opportunities to Harvard's libraries. Our pilot program with Google can prove to be a vital and revealing first step in a lengthy and rewarding process that will benefit generations of scholars and others."

OpenReader's features will include the abilty to link precisely from one book to another--and from blogs to books--via XLink and Xpointer. People are starting to wake up to the possibilities of removing e-books from their present straitjackets. Now check out eBooks on mobile phones, a fascinating post that Read/Write Web did on the Mobdex service. Some details from R/WW:

One thing that wasn't in the demo Russ showed me a couple of months ago, that he's just now added, is paragraph-level hyperlinks for books. Excellent! This is something I discussed with Tim O'Reilly a few weeks ago. Here's how Russ describes it:

"One of the ideas I liked was per paragraph permalinks so that people can discuss books and sections in their weblogs. So I added that in tonight by ripping off some JavaScript from Simon Willison and there you have it. Books online with permalinks."

Very cool. In my interview with Tim, I talked about this sort of functionality enabling a "social networking experience". For example - I'm currently in the middle of reading Tom Wolfe's new novel, I am Charlotte Simmons. Imagine if I blogged my thoughts on it while I was reading it, with the ability to quote extracts and link directly to those extracts. With the likes of Google and Feedster indexing my posts as I go, it's possible that a discussion about the book would ensue and I can swap notes and opinions with other people - all while in the middle of reading the book. That's the sort of thing I mean by a "social networking experience" for eBooks.

Exactly! By the way, RW/W is now running e-book-related posts, among others--the kind formerly appeared in eBook Culture. The best of luck to Richard MacManus with his consolidated approach.

In Graphic novels, e-books and the literacy crisis, I suggested that there was a future for the electronic form of the graphic genre as literacy tool--within bounds. I'd hate to see graphic novels displace conventional novels.

Rochelle and LISNews today pointed me to a relevant article in the Washington Post: Schools Turn to Comics as Trial Balloon Novel Md. Program Uses Genre to Encourage Reluctant Readers. Also of interest: librarians' thoughts, including Rochelle's own as a parent:

Just because it's graphic doesn't mean...

...that it will be particularly engaging. I was trying to find a graphic novel that dealt with the civil war, since my 8th grader has very low interest in history. I found one title that was marketed as a "graphic novel" about the civil war, but it was just a badly drawn comic with a crappy story line. I'm not so much worried about offensive stuff getting into the classroom as I am about school districts getting hornswaggled into buying slick-marketed, buzzword crud that won't be any more effective or compelling than a textbook. I mean, read the ad copy for this one. Yuck!

Uh-oh! None other than Microsoft's own techies are among the victims of the company's bungled approach to e-books, at least if the corporate library is any clue. Today's DRM tech for books is so Rube Goldbergish that even MSFT can't get it right. Check out A Digital Jaunt to the Library, a post from Microsoft employee Ken Hiatt:

Among the many resources I have at my disposal as a Microsoft employee is access to the Microsoft Library. As you might imagine for a company that spends billions of dollars each year in research and development, the Microsoft Library is a pretty good one. Without fail, every time I've gone looking for a book on a subject for work, the MS Library has something for me.

So today I went looking for a book. A quick search identified not only regular books, but some eBooks as well. While I prefer the feel of a "real" book, the information I needed was minimal so I decided that I would go with the eBook. The process for "checking out" an eBook from the MS Library took me over 15 minutes. Quite a bit of this time was due to the site being a bit misleading (IMHO) about what I needed to do to get to the "just let me read the book" step.

I won't bother you with the details of my clicking back and forth, nor with the number of times I managed to open a picture of the cover in a separate window. Overall, this was a fairly simple task, it should have been fairly simple to accomplish quickly. I have a technical background and understand how the web site should work from the electrons to the user interface. If it confused me a bit, I shudder to think what would have happened if someone non-technical needed to use it.

While this portion of the MS Library web site is outsourced (most likely to allow someone else the headache of dealing with the DRM issues involved), it would not take me too long to find similar examples of the problem in our (Microsoft) products. The problem? The site was not geared toward the task at hand. There was not a logical progression from locating a title to getting the title up in whatever reader was necessary. As the world continues along it's both of making computing more and more accessible to everyone, common tasks (I want to find and read an eBook) must evolve. I suspect that if I could look through a time lens into the twenty second century, I would find that most common tasks will have evolved to the point that movement through it will be as simple as browsing through a magazine...