TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Chris Meadows’ Category

By Chris Meadows

I am delighted to announce that on Sunday, January 27th at 4 p.m. Eastern/1 p.m. Pacific/10 p.m. Universal (GMT), I will I will be conducting a live call-in talk radio interview with Phil and Kaja Foglio on my podcast The Biblio File.

The interview will focus on the Foglios’ decision to cease publishing print issues of their popular comic book Girl Genius in favor of posting it for free as a webcomic: why they did it, and what effect it has had on the comic’s popularity. Also covered will be such general questions about the Foglios’ other body of work, including Buck Godot and What’s New With Phil and Dixie, as the Foglios have time to answer.

After I finish my prepared questions, I will open the lines to callers to ask their questions.

Anyone who wishes to call in to the show to listen or participate will be welcome to do so. Questions do not need to be only about the Girl Genius webcomic, but can cover anything about their career that you’d like to ask (though I can’t guarantee I’ll get to everybody’s question).

I’ve written a comprehensive page on the various methods of connecting to TalkShoe at http://terrania.us/talkshoe/ that covers in detail all the ways to listen or participate, but I will summarize after the jump:

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By David Rothman

Way to go, Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America—doing an RIAA act on your members’ fans!

I won’t repeat the details from Chris Meadows, except to say I wouldn’t want to ride a rocket with fuel mixed up by Andrew Burt, the culprit within the SFWA.

RIAA’s blow-up

Here’s another example of the perils of copyright zealotry.

While lawsuits may deter some from copying, even a well-financed outfit like the RIAA can barely make a little ripple in the sea—while CD sales continue to drop, harmed in part by some fans’ hatred of the big studios, not just the switch to digital technology.

As a villain, RIAA is inept. It apparently can sue just 6,000 people a year, even while using an approach that often can be as sloppy as Burt’s; and evil fans can normally slash the risk by avoiding a FastTrack client in the style of Kazaa’s.

The number 6,000 comes from a punk copyright lawyer named Nilay Patel, writing in Engadget. He goes on to say that “generally” the victims “have been unknowingly sharing files,” and that the 6K is “a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated nine million people who use P2P software every month.”

Pitfalls of a hawkish approach

Talk about the pitfalls of the hawkish approach!

For e-books, then, the solution in many cases could be social DRM (fostering ease of use) along with epub logos that truly signify compatibility (another way to promote convenience), rather than a hawkish DCMA-oriented approach.

The easier it is for readers to rely on legal books, the less of a chance they’ll go illegal.

If DRM is to be used, and I hope not, it needs to be genuinely interoperable.

Rx: More trust, fewer threats

Perhaps just as importantly if not more, publishers and writers should try to get closer to readers, though interactive e-books and otherwise. (more…)

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By Chris Meadows

A few weeks ago, a DMCA takedown notice was issued by Andrew Burt in his capacity as Vice President of SFWA, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Association. The notice concerned many documents on Scribd.com, a site where people can post documents much as they might post photographs to Flickr. The notice alleged broad infringement of copyrights, and resulted in the standard 10-day takedown mandated by the pertinent provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The DMCA’s takedown provision protects Internet service providers such as websites from being sued for copyright violation provided that they act right away to remove infringing material when it is called to their attention with a notice. This means that websites do not have to check everything that is uploaded to make sure it does not violate copyright, which in turn means that infringing material (such as a scanned copy of an Isaac Asimov novel, for instance) could easily be uploaded there. In this case, removing the material is certainly warranted.

The problem is that the notice resulted in the removal of many works that were uploaded by their own authors, such as bibliographies and works of criticism that only mentioned Isaac Asimov books, and the electronic edition of an SF magazine called Ray Gun Revival—and Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which was released under a Creative Commons license that expressly permitted such distribution. It also targeted many works allegedly by authors whom SFWA had no authority to represent.

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By Chris Meadows

At GenCon last weekend, I encountered a couple of independent paper role-playing game publishers who are making an interesting use of PDF versions of their books. Not simply selling them as additional versions, these publishers are actually using the PDFs in conjunction with the paper versions.

One of these is Evil Hat Productions’ Spirit of the Century, a role-playing game of the pulp adventure genre. Spirit of the Century uses the FATE system, loosely based on FUDGE, and has won a number of awards, including the Independent Game Awards’ Indie Game of the Year and the Ennies’ Best Rules. It is available at a cost of $15 for the PDF, $30 for the trade paperback—or $35 for both. The PDF file is actually two non-encrypted PDFs—one featuring each single page in portrait orientation, and another featuring facing pages in landscape for easier screen reading. As the book is trade-paperback-sized rather than the 8 1/2 x 11 inch size of many gaming books, even the landscape version can be read without undue eyestrain on a decent-sized screen.

Spirit of the Century is released under the Open Gaming License (OGL). Under the terms of the license, permission is granted for “perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive” use of the system’s mechanics—everything except for the text of the introduction, examples, characters, scenarios, and setting material—by anyone who wishes to build a new game around it. A System Reference Document containing this material is available on-line in HTML, and will also make a good reference for players who haven’t picked up the book.

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By David Rothman

The $130 brand-new Nokia 770s may vanish from Woot.com within hours, so check this out now. Roger Sperberg, a TeleBlog contributor, has written many a post extolling the Nokia 770 as an e-book machine when used with FBReader. Just remember that the Web browser is slow. Buy the 770 with realistic expectations. But for $130? You probably can’t go wrong. Thanks to Chris Meadows for the tip. Specs follow.

Update, 8:50 a.m., June 16: Sure enough, the one-day deal is gone. Anyone manage to snag the 770 at $130? (more…)

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By Chris Meadows

Not too long ago, author John Scalzi posted on his blog about a new website he was helping to launch: ficlets.com. (See my earlier TeleRead post about it.) The purpose of ficlets.com is similar to a well-known writing exercise in which one person writes part of a story, and then someone else gets to continue it. Ficlets uses a content management system to extend and expand this exercise: each ficlet is a maximum of 1024 characters in length, anyone can write a sequel or prequel to any ficlet, and any ficlet can have as many prequels or sequels as people want to write. All ficlets are released under a creative commons license to make sure that people have the right to continue what is written or make use of it in other venues.

Since the site’s launch, there have been literally thousands of ficlets, and many interesting and amusing stories that have come out of them. I have even taken advantage of the creative commons license to read some of these ficlets aloud as podcasts.

Now, I am delighted to announce that on Saturday, June 9th at 7:30 p.m. Eastern/4:30 p.m. Pacific, I will be conducting a live call-in talk radio interview with ficlets.com site administrator Kevin Lawver on my books-and-writing-related talk show, The Biblio File. The topic of the interview will be what ficlets.com is, where the idea came from, and how it has been doing so far. After I finish my prepared questions, I will bring in any callers for a panel discussion.

Anyone who wishes to call in to the show to listen or participate will be welcome to do so. Here’s how.

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By Chris Meadows

The next edition of The Biblio File will be this Sunday, June 3rd, at 2 p.m. Eastern Time. We’ll talk for an hour or two about recent developments in the world of books and ebooks. Scheduled topics for discussion include

And callers are free to propose discussion of topics of interest to
them as well.

http://terrania.us/biblio/ to call in.
http://terrania.us/talkshoe/ for advice on how to do it.

Hope I’ll see you there!

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By Chris Meadows

Earlier today, on my podcast The Biblio File, I hosted a two and one half hour interview with Dave Howell, the founder of early commercial e-book site Alexandria Digital Literature. We covered a great deal of territory, but here is a summary of some of the more interesting points.

Dave originally had the idea for the Alexlit book recommender application while in high school, but shelved it when he couldn’t think of a way to get enough people around the same PC. Over a decade later, the Internet and the music-recommendation site that later became Firefly inspired him to revisit the idea in conjunction with a business venture of some kind. After the idea of selling paper books on-line was pre-empted by Amazon.com, Dave turned to the “futuristic” idea of selling books electronically and founded Alexlit.

Alexlit originally sold its stories without DRM encryption largely because there were no forms of DRM available at the time; MobiPocket and Peanut Press had yet to come along. Instead, the site featured a “copyright quiz” that prospective customers had to pass successfully in order to be allowed to purchase, and also watermarked downloaded files with the purchaser’s name. Howell noted that over Alexlit’s entire history, he never found any examples of an Alexlit work that was subsequently “pirated.”

E-books and stories purchased from Alexlit could be downloaded in HTML, “Rocket flavored” HTML, Palm AportisDoc, and PDF (in varieties formatted for printing or formatted for screen reading). Howell noted that downloads were pretty evenly distributed among all four formats. This was made possible by the Rosetta Machine, an application which used a single HTML-like parent format (”Nile”) to create alternate versions on the fly. This avoided the time and effort that could potentially be spent converting each new work into every different flavor. And as future-proofing, it could easily be extended to convert into any new format that might come along.

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By Chris Meadows

As a reminder, today, Sunday, May 27th at 1 p.m. Eastern/10 a.m. Pacific, I will be conducting a live call-in talk radio interview with Alexandria Digital Literature founder Dave Howell on my book-related talk show, The Biblio File. The topic of the interview will be primarily Alexlit’s original founding and imminent return, but I will also talk about the ebook industry in general and how it has changed since Alexlit was founded. After I finish my prepared questions, I will bring in any callers for a panel discussion.

Anyone who wishes to call in to the show to listen or participate will be welcome to do so.

I’ve written a comprehensive page on the various methods of connecting to TalkShoe at that covers in detail all the ways to listen or participate, but I will summarize below.

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By Chris Meadows

In Internet time, the late 1990s might as well be 2,000 BC. Thus, it is singularly appropriate that a particular ebook website founded in those days had an Ancient Egyptian motif. Alexandria Digital Literature, or Alexlit for short, started by former Wizards of the Coast employee Dave Howell, was one of the first commercial ebookstores on the Internet. It focused mostly on short stories and novellas, and it was selling books and stories at reasonable prices in unencrypted formats months before Baen started its Webscriptions program. It also kept items on a user’s purchased bookshelf permanently accessible once they had been purchased.

Alexlit subsequently purchased Mind’s Eye, another unencrypted ebook vendor, before it reorganized itself into the Seattle Book Company. (The Seattle Book Company since reorganized into a subsidiary of RosettaSolutions, an e-publishing company meant to leverage the ebook conversion engine that powered Alexlit’s e-sales.)

Unlike other ebook vendors, Alexlit had a unique gimmick to get people to come to the site in the first place: a collaborative filtering automatic book recommender named (by user vote) Hypatia. When you started using it, Hypatia would ask you what books you had read, and how much you had liked or disliked them. (more…)

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By Chris Meadows

I am delighted to announce that tonight, Monday, April 23rd at 10 p.m. Eastern/7 p.m. Pacific, I will be conducting a live call-in talk radio interview with prolific fantasy author Mercedes Lackey and her “Secret World Chronicle” writing partner Steve Libbey on my book-related talk show, The Biblio File. The topic of the interview will be primarily the “Secret World Chronicle” podiobook series, but I will also ask some more generalized questions about Misty’s career and points of view. After I finish my prepared questions, Misty will take questions from the audience.

Anyone who wishes to call in to the show to listen or participate will be welcome to do so.

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By Chris Meadows

Nate Anderson writes on Ars Technica about English professor Carol Shloss’s successful lawsuit against the estate of author James Joyce over the ability to quote from primary materials in works of Joyce scholarship. She filed suit pre-emptively seeking a declaratory judgment that she had the right to use the quotations, and the estate subsequently settled and the court dismissed the case.

The Joyce estate has a history of such threats, including one made against a choral production that featured 18 words from Joyce’s writing. In this case, Stephen Joyce and the estate simply dismissed Shloss’ arguments about “fair use” and claimed to have complete control over what could and could not be quoted. “When it was explained that that fair use protected Shloss’ right to use the materials in this context, Joyce and the estate dismissed fair use as ‘wishful thinking’,” writes Shloss’ lawyers. “But once confronted with a proper legal dispute that tested the validity of their assertions, Joyce and the Estate abandoned the fight. This revealed that their decades of threats were empty, designed not to articulate defensible principles, but simply to scare and intimidate.”

Now, though Shloss was largely represented pro bono, she is going after legal fees for reasons that boil down to “bullies need to be taught a lesson.”

Whether she obtains those fees or not, Shloss has won a decent victory for the power of fair use. It would have been stronger had a court actually ruled in her favor, of course.

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