TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘audiobooks’ Category

By David Rothman

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who should know better, proposes a five percent cut in library financing for the city—with, says a New York Times writer, three percent further slashes “on the table.”

Nice going, Michael. Aren’t you the same self-made billionaire who in ‘04 was talking up the benefits of school libraries, at the very least? Remember the headline? “City to to Restore 25 libraries in schools by Fall 2006.” Now school kids will be among the New Yorkers paying for the mistakes of politicians and Wall Street Geckos that have reduced tax revenue.

So will the NYLP’s e-book and audiobook collection—which is open to out-of-towners who pay $100 fees for cards—suffer? And is it possible that wider use of E could help stretch library dollars?

Good case for P services, too

Regardless, the Times’ Susan Dominus makes a good case for not cutting back on paper books and other services, either, and avoiding shuts in library hours.

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By David Rothman

Cultural Amnesia—critic Clive James‘ essays on major thinkers, doers and artists of the 20th century—is now available in a special e-book edition without any apparent DRM infestation.

What a great example from a major publisher,  Pan Macmillan in the U.K. Hello, Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and others? Care to follow through in a major way? Random actually has experimented in the past with unshackled books and more recently offered a full-text preview of Charles’ Bock’s Beautiful Children without any DRM to take away the fun. Similarly TOR Books, an arm of Holzbrinck, the real owner of Pan Macmillian, has endeared itself to readers with DRMless releases of complete SF novels that it hopes will build interest in paper editions and other books.

“With three new essays and an introduction to the extras from the author, the special edition eBook adds new depth to an already absorbing book,” Pan Macmillan says of Cultural Amnesia (link added).

E-formats for Amnesia are Adobe, Microsoft Reader and Mobipocket, and of course you can still buy audio CD and trade-paperback and hardcover editions.

Major kudos to Pan Macmillan’s Pacador imprint and the Australian-born James—also a poet, memoirist, talk show host and travel writer, among other incarnations—who approved the avoidance of DRM in Amnesia. Any loopholes here? I’m going by the promo, which calls the book “DRM free.” From afar, I see nothing hinted to the contrary.

100 essays with subjects as varied as Freud and Louis Armstrong

“A lifetime in the making, Cultural Amnesia is the book Clive James has always wanted to write,” the promo says. “Organized from A through to Z, and containing over 100 essays, it’s the ultimate guide to the twentieth-century, illuminating the careers of many of its greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists and philosophers. From Louis Armstrong to Ludwig Wittgenstein, via Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, it’s a book for our times — and, indeed, for all time.” See a widget to look through part of the book yourself and hear beautifully read audio.

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By David Rothman

In ‘06 major publishing houses individually offered 1,000-3,000 e-book titles and 250-3,000 e-audio ones, and the whole e-book market was $12-$15M, says Publishing Trends, a well - regarded newsletter for industry insiders.

And now? “Many of these numbers have more than doubled,” PT’s April issue reports, “and publishers are increasingly providing digital content in a variety of forms.”

You already know the wholesale revenue stats for e-books of 12-15 trade publishers, provided directly from the International Digital Publishing Forum. Now—beyond the newsletter’s chart reproduced here, showing percentages of March 28 New York Times bestsellers in different formats—here are some other gems from the diligent numbers-crunchers at PT:

• Wiley leads in the number of e-titles now available, 7K, according to PT’s March survey. Other publishers: Random House, close to 7K; S&S and HarperCollins, around 4K; Penguin, a bit under 3K; Harlequin, somewhat over 2K; Hachette, 1K. I suspect that with .epub in use at Hachette as the sole distribution format, the number of e-titles will soon be much closer to those from other majors. Even with Holtzbrinck not included, it’s clear that big-time commercial publishers have a long way to go before they catch up with the public domain total. PD titles exceed more than 1.5 million if you include total scans (even if not all are online right now now, and even if a scan isn’t as usable as a book in, say, .epub). Not to mention all the titles already online from smaller commercial e-publishers! Aren’t the big boys undertaking mass digitization of backlists? Just when will these efforts show in in the stats? I want to see modern classics galore online, not just works published before 1923.
• Random House is the e-audio leader by far with almost 7K titles. Others: S&S, 2K; HarperCollins, 1K; Hachette, fewer than 500; Penguin and Harlequin, probably no more than 200. As with the other stats, I’m working from PT’s bar charts.
• Wiley is the print-on-demand champ with 7K titles. Others: S&S, 3K; Random House, a little over 2K; Hachette, 1,000. Given Wiley’s heavy focus on tech books, where speed is imperative, I’m not surprised.
• Kindle fiction titles from “the extended New York Times bestseller list” for March 30 are cheapest, at $10. Others—averages: Sony, $15; Mobipocket, Microsoft, Adobe and Palm/eReader, all in upper teens or lower twenties. Prices are from the Kindle Store, Sony’s e-book store, eBooks.com (Mobi, Microsoft, Adobe) and the Palm eBook store. In fairness to the nonKindle and nonSony formats, let me point out that some independent retailers are pricing more aggressively than those mentioned as sources.
• Kindle and Sony lead in the number of fiction and nonfiction bestsellers available by format—both around 80 percent. See chart for other formats.

Useful stats, PT, thanks! Yep, there are more numbers in the actual newsletter—for example, nonfiction price comparisons for different formats, as well as statistics related to e-audio, plus numbers telling how generous publishers are with e-book excerpts on sites. Subscription info is here.

Also of interest in PT: Int’l Bestsellers: Fairs! Frauds! Florence!, Industry Ink Slingers (the TeleBlog’s mentioned), Storytelling at South by Southwest 2008, and Search Gets Richer, and Harder.

Detail: I want to check with PT about the 250-3,000 audio titles in ‘06. A typo? Was that actually 2,500-3,000? I don’t know.

Update, April 1: PT had it right. Those were numbers for individual publishers, with the 250 being at the low end. I’ve changed the lead of the present post to make that clear.

Technorati Tags: Publishing Trends,IDPF,International Digital Publishing Forum

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By Jeff Scott, Director of the City of Casa Grande Public Library in Arizona

Moderator: Welcome to our latest contributor, Jeff Scott, library director in Casa Grande, Arizona! His bio is at the end. An aside: We’re also eager to run balanced write-ups of library e-offerings from companies besides Overdrive. - D.R.

Double-click for Jeff’s audiobook video in greater detail. May other library systems create their own! - D.R.

Find free audiobooks on the Web. Libraries can use hooks like this to help advertise their downloads of audiobooks, e-books, movies, and music.

Some libraries team up in consortia to have better selection. The Greater Phoenix Digital Library in Phoenix, Arizona, is among the bigger ones and is an example of what Overdrive-style services can provide.

The allure of audio

Audio books are the most popular items for download. Many libraries with less buying power will purchase the Overdrive service with audiobooks only. Audiobooks are popular because they are the easiest and most ubiquitous of formats—easier to use in most cases than e-books, which have far more problems with clashing formats. 

Most people have an MP3 player or something similar to use. The availability of titles is quite amazing. Go over to the Phoenix site and click on Audiobooks, click on Browse all, and you will find more than 10,500 titles available to you. Certain audiobooks are by the most popular authors or may even be pre-releases—as fresh as, yes, September 2008! So just imagine, having the ability to download the latest audio-book from the comfort of your own home whenever you wanted it! This is a great service.

The negatives: Long hold lists for hit titles and less-than-perfect searching

While the OverDrive audio books are a hit, with all those thousands of titles available, people may have to wait too long for the ones they want. Overdrive needs to provide more “Maximum Access” titles—those without a wait list. Let’s hope for a more liberal rights agreement between Overdrive and the publishing industry.

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By David Rothman

“Starting in August 2008, the Digital Bookmobile will host hands-on, interactive training events at public libraries in cities around the United States, including Boston, Cleveland, New York City, Phoenix, Seattle, and Washington, DC.” - OverDrive news release.

The TeleRead take: As much as I dislike the DRM-and-eBabel approach that OverDrive and other vendors use, I’m all in favor of people getting training for the here and now. The more they know about e-books, the more likely they’ll be open to innovations such as social DRM, no DRM, and .epub. Meanwhile I’d like to see more open-source efforts such as FBReader and OpenBerg to provide alternatives—both reading and creation apps.

Coming up in the TeleBlog later today or tomorrow: Librarian Jeff Scott’s tips for libraries and patrons using OverDrive’s audiobooks.

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By Garson O'Toole

Moderator’s note: Garson’s essay is timely, given that Publishers Weekly is zapping online archives of E-Book Report and two other blogs. E-text is like Silly Putty—endlessly malleable. You can even go beyond that and delete it.  - D.R.

While listening to an audiobook of a well-known multi-award winning novel I was surprised to find that the story seemed different from the story that I read many years ago. Major events in the book that critically defined the mental state of the main character had somehow been significantly altered. I wondered how my memory of the plot and settings could be so faulty, and I was surprised when I discovered the truth. The text of the book had been altered substantially by the author, and the narrator was reading the revised novel.

Curious provisos on cover

The Amazon Web site displays the cover of the book which is emblazoned with the words “Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel of the Year”. But the cover has another curious proviso, “The Author’s Preferred Edition of the Seminal SF Classic for All Times”. However these two statements are contradictory. The prestigious awards were not given to the “author’s preferred edition”. The awards were given to the edition that was actually originally published. The science fiction fans who voted for the Hugo award might have loved or hated the author’s preferred edition, but that is impossible to say because they never saw it before the balloting had ended.

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By David Rothman

Kudos to OverDrive for offering DRM-free audiobooks in MP3 through its partnership with Borders. Sales start in May.

Let’s hope that experimentation with DRMless e-books follows—and not just at Borders. OverDrive is a leading provider of library e-books, and I hope it will look beyond retailers, with adjustments in library business models if need be.

DRM vs. none

Might some library e-books be available for “permanent” checkout and use social DRM and digital watermarks to discourage posting to P2P networks? DRM makes library e-books a nightmare for many readers to enjoy, especially if they use more than one device. The technology also means that taxpayers must spend more money—directly or indirectly—on tech support.

Backing off on DRM would help address the issues that the Free Software Foundation is having with the Boston Library—see Defective by Design’s writeup. It would also whet people’s appetite for nonDRMed books from standard retail outlets, since libraries can’t buy everything.

Ahead is the OverDrive news release. Meanwhile major thanks to Ed Klopek for spotting it.

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By David Rothman

Now that audiobook publishers are backing off from DRM–Penguin appears ready to follow Random House—isn’t it time for this to happen on the e-book side? Just a few points:

1. The audiobook industry enjoys more than $923 million in annual sales, according to the Audio Publishers Association, as reported in the New York Times. It dwarfs e-bookdom. Why is a much-larger industry more adventurous than the e-book one?

2. Actually at least one major store,  Fictionwise, which now owns eReader.com, already is encouraging publishers to abandon DRM. "Protected" titles just don’t move as briskly as the nonprotected ones do. Hello, Amazon, Sony, Borders, and others? A lesson here?

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By David Rothman

Bookhabit, a spiffy new site connecting readers and new writers, will give you a break if you’re among the first to spot A Talent:

"The price of a book starts at USD2.50 and increases with its popularity, as indicated by the number of buyers. It is free for writers to post books on the site, and they receive 40% of the sale price – which compares well with the 5% to 12% writers receive on the shelf price of their books sold by retail book stores."

I myself would rather that the writer’s share be at lest 50 percent, but that’s still a good deal for authors and readers alike.

The top titles at 10:58 was Other People’s Children (10 downloads), and other featured titles were Susan in the Suburbs (1) and The Alchemist. Hey, check out the site. Keep in mind that it’s just getting started, the obvioius reason download numbers are so low. Your thoughts on the site, its biz model and the books there?

Format matters: Bookhabit offers audiobooks, too. As for e-book formats, I’ve made the heartfelt suggestion that PDF not be the sole option.

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By David Rothman

Random House is ditching DRM requirements for audiobooks in most cases.

The publisher has “not yet found a single instance of the eMusic watermarked titles being distributed illegally. We did find many copies of audiobook files available for free, but they did not originate from the eMusic test, but rather from copied CDs or from files whose DRM was hacked.”

That’s Random House’s statement as quoted in Boing Boing and the Travelin’ Librarian. The publisher will still provide for DRM for authors insisting on it, as well as in library situations.

The TeleRead take: Remember, Amazon has said it’ll remove DRM from Audible books if enough people squawk. Please do so! Same for e-books. When you contact Amazon’s support or affiliate side on other matters, speak your mind. All the DRM in the cosmos won’t make OCRs vanish to prevent piracy of p-books.

Related: Tech Radar item and my thoughts in Publishers Weekly.

Random House letter to publishing partners follows. To see the original, with its formatting intact, check out a PDF.

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By Prof. Peter Kerry Powers, English Dept. Chair, Messiah College

Prof. Powers is chair of Messiah College’s English Department. We’ll follow him as he befriends—or gives up on?—various forms of book-related technology. His bio is at the end of this post. Welcome, Pete! - D.R.

I still remember my shock and dismay a couple of years ago when I clicked on to the New York Times book page and found an advertisement of much a younger, more handsome and vaguely Mediterranean-looking young man who oozed sex appeal as he looked out at me from the screen with headphones on his ears.

“Why Read?” asked the caption.

Surely this was the demise of Western Civilization as we knew it, to say nothing of being a poor marketing strategy for a newspaper industry increasingly casting about in vain for new readers.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that audiobooks have developed a generally sexy and sophisticated cache for literary types that other shorthand ways to literature typically lack. As an English professor, I’ve been intrigued lately that a number of colleagues around and about have told me they listen to audiobooks to “keep up on their reading.” To some degree I’ve always imagined this as a slightly more sophisticated version of “I never read the book, but I watched the movie,” which has itself been about on a par with reading Sparknotes.

However, as I mentioned in a post in my Read, Write, Now blog, another colleague recently took issue with my general despairing sense that the reading of literature, at least, is on the decline, no matter the degree to which students may be now reading interactively on the web. “Yes,” she said, “but what about audiobooks?” She went on to cite the growth in sales over the past few years as evidence that interest in literature may not be waning after all.

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By David Rothman

“Putting the text and audio together, readers can learn spelling, punctuation and paragraph structure by listening and reading masterpieces of the written word. Read and listen via your web browser or on your mp3 player.” - LoudLit.

Details: The collection includes more than 30 public domain authors ranging from Jack London to the Brothers Grimm, shown here. I tried London’s To Build a Fire. A polished narrator read the first page, and I clicked on the right arrow to reach the next. No, you won’t see the cursor gliding over a word being read, but maybe this will be a routine feature of the site in time. If nothing else, given the quality of the London narration and perhaps others, as well as the ability to download the audio files for free, this is a valuable site. LiteralSystems and Librievox.org are other audio sources for LoudLit.

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