TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

A DRM-hater’s E Ink machine: Naeb Cybooks moving quickly (just 200 left in first 1,000)

By David Rothman

Pamela Gadsden is a 60-year-old researcher in the Bronx who builds her own PCs and hates DRM. She wanted a decent e-book reader that could do justice to regular HTML and other nonDRM-infested formats.

From her efforts and others’ came the Naeb project—the initials standing for Not Another E-Book. Naeb carries out the hopes of the late Jim Baen, the beloved founder of Baen Books, the sci-fi publishing house bearing his name. He was famous for his loathing of DRM, a ‘tude that I share even though the damn stuff is impossible for readers to avoid if they want to enjoy books from most large publishers. DRM, as I’ve written in my Publishers Weekly blog, is both a sales and lit toxin; and Baen has actually made its e-book line successful by avoiding it.

The power of community

Fellow DRM-haters in a forum called the Baen Bar shared their expertise with Pamela, who’d never been a retailer before. Talk about the positive powers of community! Pamela learned all kinds of details such as that the Greater Rochester International Airport can clear machines past Customs faster than New York and Newark can.

Now here’s some great news. Pam, Naeb’s CEO, tells me that 800 of the first 1,000 machines are spoken for. They’re Cybook Gen3s, and Naeb is essentially acting as a buyer’s club. The regular Cybooks, sold by the Paris-based Bookeen, go for $350. But if you want a USB charger, a leather cover, a 2 GB SD memory card and stereo earphones, then it’ll be well worth your money to buy the $375 Naeb machine instead and enjoy the volume discount that Naeb is getting from Bookeen (costs exclude shipping and handling). Just the leather cover ($40 normally) alone would make it worth it. Another benefit is that you’ll pay only U.S. postage to Webster, N.Y., if you need to have your Naeb machine repaired, rather than postage to France. Naeb will forward the units to Paris for repair.

Pam will open a store front later this month, and she warns the impatient to order now, first come first serve, lest they have to wait until next year to receive their Cybooks. Those receiving the first 1,000 will have their units shipped out within four days or so.

Here are further details:

–Sign-up page here.

–NAEB specs.

–Full Cybook deluxe from Bookeen. The NAEB deal includes everything but the extra battery even though the $375 is $75 less than what Bookeen is charging.

–Bookeen’s manual for the Cybook.

–Mobipocket software reader that supports the Cybook. Yes, you can easily arrange to be able to read DRMed books if you want to. But unlike the Sony Reader the device isn’t built to promote the sales of DRMed titles (Sony can read nonDRMed books but every title in its online store is encrypted as far as I know). Even without Mobi, you could still read nonDRMed formats. Currently supported are Mobi’s PRC, HTML, RTF, TXT, nonDRMed PDF and nonDRMed Palm.

"If you’re not running a PC," Pamela says, "the Cybook has a Mobipocket PID which means that you can register it with Fictionwise, or any other store that uses the secure Mobipocket reader, and simply transfer the e-books to it that way.

"What won’t work, for now at least, are digital library books from the public library.

"The ones from the New York Public Library will not open in the Cybook and, going by posts on MobileRead, Boston Public Library digital books present the same problem. I hope this is fixed soon.

"We will be notifying everyone who’s signed up the instant the store goes live," Pamela says.

"At the moment we do have a slots open but it’s a first come, first served thing and once we have 1000 buyers that will end.

"We will be paying Bookeen just as soon as possible and they’ll be shipping us the readers as soon as the bank clears the funds transfer.

"As for the shipping once we get the readers, I quote Jim Franks (Penty) who will be running it:

"’The current plan is for everything to be shipped to me here in Webster, NY.  Naeb’s store is tied into both UPS and USPS; this will allow us to pre-print all the shipping labels. Additionally I will pre-prep all the shipping boxes. When the units arrive I will unpack and rebox all of them. They will then go out with my daily USPS and UPS pickups.  I anticipate 3-4 working days to ship everything, less if the shipment arrives before a weekend. If things fall behind I’ll hire some temporary help from my co-workers.’

"When we’ve done the initial order and taken a break," says Pamela, "we will turn around and do it all over again…

"I’ve sometimes wondered if, despite the occasional lip service, publishers aren’t just waiting for e-book readers to go away. Publishers and authors don’t need to fear us and they don’t need to act like the recorded music industry."

Besides Pamela and Jim (into technical  details, not just shipping), others involved are Derek Benner of Citrus Heights, California, (also into the tech aspects) and Robert Mitchell of Bremerton, Washington (focusing along with Pamela on usability matters). Helpful advice came from Nate Anderson at MobileRead and Jane Litte of DearAuthor.com.

While Naeb is just a buyer’s club, Bookeen appears to have benefited significantly from feedback in terms of software, features and capabilities. Speaking of which: Did you know the Bookeen machine will let you pick up TrueType fonts and, yes, display them in a variety of sizes? What a contrast to the limited font capabilities of the Sony Reader, even the new model! Hint, hint, Sony. Can the next firmware update show mercy toward current owners?

To save money, no NAEB nameplates will go on the Cybooks available from Naeb.

Good luck to all!