TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for December, 2008

By Joe Wikert

Dear Jeff,

As 2008 comes to a close I find I’m less of a Kindle advocate than I was earlier in the year. My new iPhone is partially to blame. After all, it’s one of the reasons I wrote this critical post on my other blog yesterday. It’s not just about the iPhone though. Amazon is uniquely positioned to run away with the e-reader market, but the Kindle appears to be hampered by a lack of strategy and vision.

I’m not talking about the poor physical design; I’m way past the point of being critical there. No, what I’m talking about are five key issues that have caused me to abandon plans for a Kindle 2.0 purchase in 2009 (or whenever it comes out):

1. Proprietary Model — Come on, Jeff. It’s almost 2009 and you’re locked in with this non-industry standard content format. Have you asked any publishers how hard it is for them to convert their content to your format, especially the books with illustrations, maps, code, etc.? Would it kill you to support the EPUB format?

2. Lack of an Innovative Content Pricing Model — This one bugs me the most. OK, you’ve taken the bold step of offering most titles for $9.99. Hooray. That happened more than a year ago though and it’s way past time to come up with some new, creative pricing models. How about a monthly all-you-can-eat program? Or a discount on the device if I promise to buy x books in the first 12 months? Have you considered bundling magazines or newspapers with books? What about all those physical books I’ve bought from you over the years? Why can’t I get a discount on the Kindle editions of those titles? What about bundling Kindle editions with print books? The possibilities are endless but the offerings have been non-existent. Where’s the vision here?

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By Paul Biba

Recently I discussed my power problems with using my iPhone as an e-book reader. Today I’ll discuss a couple of add-on power sources that I use and have previously reviewed at other websites.

Perhaps the most cost-effective, especially if used with rechargeable batteries, solution is the Turbo Charge, pictured above. The unit sells for $29.95 and is powered by 2 AA batteries. Just plug it into your iPhone/Touch/iPod and it will fully charge the batteries. It is not really convenient to use in real time with the iPhone, as it dangles in a rather inconvenient manner. There are two real plusses to this unit. First, you can order individual adapters for various portable machines. I use this with my Treo, Palm TX, Nokia cellphone and Windows mobile phones. Their website lists adapters for bluetooth headsets, TomTom GPS units, and almost any phone you can think of. Second, since it uses plain old AA batteries you can find them anywhere and thus you are not limited to one “recharge” of the unit.

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By David Rothman

An iPod tablet with a seven- or nine-inch screen may show up in fall 2009, according to a Michael Arrington’s report in Tech Crunch.

In the past we’ve had our hearts broken by rumors that didn’t pan out. But could it be that Apple has simply been delaying the device for commercial reasons—that such a gizmo has indeed been around in prototype for two or three years? Just a guess. But oh how in character it would be for the oft-secretive Steve Jobs, who, for all I know, has a pile of ‘em stashed away in Hangar 18, Area 51.

So what do you think, gang? Will it be good or bad if Apple comes out with the tablet and maybe even dominates the e-book industry? We’ve seen how Amazon has tried to inflict the Kindle format on the world. Will Apple try to do the same with its own creation or with a DRM ally such as ScrollMotion? Might Apple try to lock out third-party products like Stanza that combine e-reading and distribution infrastructure? And about Apple’s censorship of Knife Music?

Meanwhile here are a few more details from TechCrunch’s Arrington:

Prototypes have been seen and handled by one of our sources, and Apple is talking to OEMs in Asia now about mass production.

Apple has been experimenting internally with large form tablet devices for years, one source says, but there was concern that users wouldn’t like the device. The difference now is the iTunes app store, which has thousands of games and other applications that are perfect for a touch screen device with an accelerometer. Apple says more than 300 million applications have been downloaded since the App Store launched in July 2008. Combine the App Store, iTunes and a browser and you have one heck of a device.”

In the post, Arrington says he expects the price to be “significantly higher” than the current $399 for the 32G iPod Touch.

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By David Rothman

Over at Twilight Times Books, publisher Lida Quillen recently came out with “advance promo” editions of The Solomon Scandals in both E and P.

I can’t tell you how much of a bother it’s been to get Scandals properly into different formats, such as ePub, HTML and PDF. Imagine having to worry about corrections as they’ll show up in half a dozen or so formats, each with its own rude surprises. Even now the job still isn’t done. Tech complexities are no small reason why we call the existing files “advance promo copies.”

Today’s e-publishing tools, including pricey ones selling for hundreds of dollars, just don’t work that well or fail to include enough capabilities.

Oh how Lida and colleagues must hate the hassles of dealing with Word and RTF files so that paragraph breaks show up in the right places. And then there are other joys—sarcasm alert!—such as distinguishing between neutral quotes and the directional variety. Lida and colleagues are not at fault. It’s the damn technology, which is still far, far more difficult and time-consuming to use than it should be.

A challenge to the open source community

With the above in mind, I wonder if the time hasn’t come for the OpenOffice crowd or others in the open source community to consider designing a multilingual program from scratch for ePub creation and other publishing activities. The OpenDocument format has its purposes, but book publishing shouldn’t be regarded as a major one.

ePubWriter, as I’ll call the proposed app, would offer all the capabilities of Writer but also output smoothly into ePub and HTML and, for printers, PDF. Ideally ePubWriter could even help deal with the inherent conflict between ePub (reflowable) and PDF (nonreflowable). Let there be an easy way to see exactly what the finished p-book will look even if the ePub version will be reflowable. And let writers be able to tweak to their heart’s content while seeing the final results of their changes.

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By Chris Meadows

A couple of days ago, someone suggested David write a retrospective about the different e-reading devices he had used through the years. It seemed like a marvelous idea to me, and there certainly is room for more than one such article.

So here is mine.

1. Palm IIIe

I had long wanted a Palm Pilot, ever since reading articles in Salon Magazine and elsewhere about how cool it was to read books on them. Finally, with the 2-megabyte Palm IIIe being particularly cheap, I took the plunge and bought one in August, 1999.

Also in August, 1999, I bought my first e-book: Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, from Peanut Press—the first of many I would buy from them. At 450K, it took up almost 1/4 of my Palm’s 2-megabyte non-expandable on-board memory, and the display on a 160 x 160 screen was a little…pixelly—but I was happy. I read all sorts of books on that thing.

The main software I used back then—beginning relationships that would last through my next three PDAs—were the Peanut Reader (now known as eReader) and iSilo—with a side order of CSpotRun (for Embiid-encrypted books). I had tried Mobipocket and hadn’t liked it (it wasted too much screen real-estate with ludicrously wide left and right margins). Loading it with content was just a matter of double-clicking the PDB file and hitting the “sync” button. (Ah, those were the days.)

Beyond that, the other apps I used were largely AvantGo for making some favored web content portable, and a little freebie check-register app called MicroMoney that subsequently got bought and turned into the for-pay-only Pocket Quicken. I also used the calendar function to remind me of the upcoming birthdays of all my friends and family. On the whole, I liked the Palm IIIe a lot, and was not at all sorry I had bought it.

But I hadn’t had it very long at all before my eye was turned by another contender.

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By David Rothman

Novelists, Inc. wants used bookstores to pay fees to publishers. The group frets that novelists are missing out on royalties.

And now the shocker of the day! A study cited in Parade Magazine says a family of four can save up to $2,500 a year by borrowing just 10 items a month from the public library. That’s 120 items a year, averaging $20.83 each.

Significantly, public libraries are godsends to students and job-hunters. But Philadelphia and San Diego may shut down some branches, and library budgets are tight in many other cities.

So what would Novelists, Inc. think of that. Cheery news? Probably not, but it’s still something for the group to ponder as it continues its war against used bookstores. Will libraries be its next targets?

Background: Used books blamed in NYT for slump, as well as Chris Meadows’ Should second-hand book stores pay royalties? 

In a related vein…

Also see America’s Most Literate Cities (top three: Minneapolis, shown in photo, Seattle and Washington, D.C.). The study found that both libraries and bookstores were more numerous in high-literacy areas, even those with heavy Internet use. Might literary be leading to more literacy?

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By David Rothman

If you want a Kindle but can’t find a decent price on eBay, don’t forget Craig’s List—especially local listings for states where the cost of living is lower than in New York or California.

A “brand-new sealed” Kindle was on sale on Dec. 21 in the Minneapolis area for “just” $299.

That’s still a high price for a gizmo that lists for $359 new, but much less than $500 or $600 or more that you might find on eBay.

Of course, the real solution for the economy-minded is to wait for the Kindle 2, the existence of which will bring down used Kindle prices to a sander level.

Meanwhile thanks to the resourceful Joe Wikert for the Craig’s List idea.

By Paul Biba

Many people don’t realize that their cell phone is always transmitting. It is constantly sending out a signal to the surrounding towers saying “I am here”. That’s how a cell tower knows to send a phone call your way. Well, the strength of the signal the phone puts out will vary depending on the reception conditions. If you are close to a tower the phone can power down and send out a lower strength signal. If you are far away, or in poor reception conditions like inside a building, the phone has to boost its power to get a signal through. Of course, the higher the signal strength your phone is putting out, the more power is being drained from your battery. You may have noticed that sometimes your phone battery seems depleted for no apparent reason. This is probably because you spent a significant amount of time in a low signal area.

How does this relate to the iPhone and e-books? Well, the iPhone is a cell phone and is subject to the effect I mentioned above. Recently I decided to put my Kindle aside for a week or so and finish off reading a number of eReader-format e-books I have in my Fictionwise library. This has not worked out as well as I hoped.
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