TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘David Rothman: Getting local’ Category

By David Rothman

The Solomon Scandals, the only Washington newspaper novel that ends with a talking Afghan Hound doing a Harry Truman send-up at the Cosmos Club, has made the popular GalleyCat blog.

Hey, thanks, Cat. Thackeray II, unlike many canines, is a big feline fan.

The "Get a dog" lowdown

Now some more news, especially for writers of media-related novels.

In Thackeray II’s Truman act, my favorite line is, "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog." The only problem is that Truman never said those words, if a book of quotes is right, despite a bunch of references in the press.

I discovered the above today while double-checking Scandals via Google Book Search.

Accuracy, accuracy!

So in the cause of accuracy I’m leaving Thack’s gem in Scandals while adding an essential footnote to Prof. Rebecca Kitiona-Fenton’s epilogue, written in the late 21st century:

"Even Thackeray’s omniscience has its limits. As determined by my researchers at the Institute for Previrtual Studies, the actual quote was: ‘You want a friend in life, get a dog.’ Worse, the words seem to have been put in Truman’s mouth by Samuel Gallu for his play Give ‘Em Hell, Harry! (1975). Source of this information is The Quote Verifier (Macmillan, 2006), by Ralph Keyes, who relied on archivists at the Truman Library. I have asked Thackeray to modify his act and have suggested to the New York Times that it correct old references."

Returning to ‘08

Now back to the year 2008. Just to be sure, I’m going to phone the Truman Library. People ranging from New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd to former president Bill Clinton will be wrong if Keyes is right. Hey, I enjoy Dowd’s work and hope she gets a funny column out of the Truman quote, whatever he really said or didn’t. With most any blog, vexingly bereft of copy editors, we’re in sausage factory territory, so I won’t claim infallibility at this end.

Meanwhile, if nothing else, my little discovery is a great testimonial to the power of Google Book Search and all the more reason to hope that a TeleRead-style national digital library system can exist someday to carry digitization to the max. Too bad e-books can’t reliably link to specific places within each other; it’s time for the e-book standards setters to take these matters more seriously, while clueful librarians keep plugging away. Another lesson is the need for Google, publishers and authors to make peace in the copyright wars, so it’s easier for writers and talking Afghan Hounds to get their facts right.

Usual disclaimer: I’m a very small Google shareholder.

Related: Google Book Search: A powerful tool for investigating phrase origins and two other TeleBlog items by Garson O’Toole.

By David Rothman

It’s official now. This fall, Twilight Times Books, a small literary publisher, will publish The Solomon Scandals as both a nonDRMed e-book and a trade paperback.

My Scandals might be the only Washington newspaper novel that ends with a talking Afghan Hound named Thackeray II doing a Harry Truman send-up at the Cosmos Club. I frame the main plot, set around the 1980s, with a foreword and epilogue written in the late 21st century. I’m just a time-warpy kind of guy—warped, too?—having started the novel back in the 1970s on an electric typewriter. Scandals blends Suspense with Quirky, Washington, lots of Newspaper, some Science Fiction of course, and a few other stray genres.

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By David Rothman

Even Borders & Noble faces its share of financial challenges these days. But across the Potomac River from me in Washington, D.C., an independent bookstore called Politics and Prose remains a thriving local institution, as you can see from this photo of a crowd gathered for Rabbi Arthur Blecher’s talk on his book The New American Judaism.

Click and pick up

"We kept one step ahead of the competition," Carla Cohen, a cofounder, told a Wall Street Journal blogger. "We opened a coffeehouse before Starbucks was on the scene. The model for us was Kramerbooks. We’re a much better venue for  authors so we’ve never competed with Barnes & Noble on that. We can always do a better job keeping in touch with our customers and keeping publicity out about the events, so we’ve never had to compete. I think our biggest competition is with Amazon.com. Amazon makes it easy when people are sitting at their desks—which most of us are during the day—and you read something and go online and order it. You have to be an old-fashioned book-lover to say ‘I’ll wait until the weekend.’ We do get a fair amount of Internet ordering on our Web site with people who are going to pick it up later" (links added). From blogs to Flickr-posted book signings, this store understand the Net—something that any savvy store could do, even without VIPs such as Al Gore showing up to promote their books (photo).

Close to home: Eons ago P&P gave a book party for my first book, The Silicon Jungle (Ballantine), and I can vouch for the store as a good venue for writers.

Top image: CC-licensed photo from Runneralan2004. Gore photo by P&P customer Bruce Guthrie (used with the store’s permission).

(WSJ item via former Bowker president Michael Cairnes’ blog, PersonaNonData.)

By David Rothman

Should you date or marry someone whose reading list doesn’t jibe closely with yours? What if your potential beloved hasn’t even heard of this guy—Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin?

Oh, the horrors related in a New York Times essay today, It’s Not You, It’s Your Books! I’ll side with those who don’t filter out possible mates by their reading tastes, however revealing they might be. “After all,” Rachel Donadio points out, “a couple may love ‘The Portrait of a Lady,’ but if one half identifies with Gilbert Osmond and the other with Isabel Archer, they may have radically different ideas about the relationship.” True.

Close to home

Here in the TeleBlog’s inner sanctum, my wife loves Jane Austen even if she’s hardly at the Republic of Pemberley level; I don’t, and I’ll be damned if I pretend I to. Thank you, Carly, for standing me.

Lately, gasp, as a reader unhappy with the less-than-perfect contrast between the background and text on E Ink displays and as simply a longtime fan of P, Carly has even reverted back to paper books. On top of that, she has always been more of a video and pop culture person than I am. But guess what? I couldn’t think of a woman more tolerant of my faults or more eager to alert me when she does run across something I should read, watch or listen to, and in the bargain I get someone bright and curious, in her own way, who often enjoys reading software documentation. I’ll take Carly over a Pushkin-loving Luddite, especially since I’m hardly a fan of his works in the first place. If you want to find a wired Pushkin lover, as opposed to a lover in the SO sense, that’s what LibraryThing or Facebook might be for. Not to mention interactive e-books! I’d rather read Dickens, Gissing, Fitzgerald, Roth or my other favorites in solitude, but for those who think otherwise—well, check out BookGlutton, one of whose owners, Aaron Miller, has just written a cogent essay on the need for the International Digital Publishing Forum to get serious about standards for annotations.

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By Jon Noring

Moderator’s note: Great timing, Jon. I’ve just posted The Triumph of social sites: Publishers, listen up! Annotation-style capabilities, of course, will make in-book communities possible. - D.R.

David Rothman recently called on IDPF to develop an open standard, third-party annotation and linking format. I’ve previously written about the need for such a standard in two TeleRead articles [1, 2]. Hopefully the third time will be a charm!

The need for such a standard is pretty obvious. Various companies are already implementing their own proprietary standards for third-party annotation of, and linking between, digital media such as books, music, video, etc. Annotation and linking of content (no matter the type of content) is rapidly becoming a vital and fundamental component of interactivity with content, being of great value to business, academia, education, libraries and archives, social networking, etc.

Thus it is important for interoperability (that is, to prevent another Tower of eBabel) to have a single, well-designed, open standard format for third-party annotation and linking. From my research in this area, I have not yet found a developed standard suitable for this purpose (but if one exists, let me know, please!)

“Real-World” example: Annotating an e-book

Because the above introduction is a tad theoretical, let me give a fun “real-world” example to better illustrate what I’m discussing:

Mary is sitting on the beach reading a steamy romance novel on her e-book reading device (e.g., laptop computer, or dedicated e-book reader.) In a particular scene of the story, she is introduced to a character named “Charles,” about whom she really would like to share her thoughts with others. For example, she might want to share something relatively academic like “Charles reminds me of a character right out of a 19th century English novel,” or maybe something a little more earthy and personal like “Wow, Charles is a real hunk!” (I’m not sure if “Charles” can be both!)

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By David Rothman

Millions of elderly people suffer from fading vision. And large-print books are not always nirvana—not when many retirees also have arthritis, which makes it hard for them to hold the books and flip pages.

With the above in mind, the TeleBlog will soon publish an important essay from Isabelle Fetherston, the reference librarian behind Senior Friendly Libraries, who shares my enthusiasm for e-books as potential life-enrichers for the elderly. May library-related sites and senior citizens’ groups spread Isabelle’s message! Read on, and you’ll see that my own interest in these issues is personal, not just professional. [Update, Dec. 12, 2007: Isabelle's essay is now here.]

The bottom line: Patron choice—and people ahead of medium!

Granted, many in the library community fear that E will drive out P. I myself doubt that will happen soon. Whether it does or not, something counts more than cardboard and ink and glue—and that’s the words, the stories, the facts, the emotions, in books.

Without E available, millions of seniors will be left out of the world of text, given the limits of large-print books, ranging from price to scarcity to their challenges for people with arthritis.

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By David Rothman

The Web site of Publishers Weekly, the powerful 135-year-old bible of book publishing, has started running news and views I adapt from the TeleBlog.

I’ll also write some PW-first items, online and offline, and will welcome suggestions from the e-book community.

PW’s home page will spotlight my E-Book Report blog at least 2-3 times a week, and I hope that TeleBlog regulars will drop by to enrich my posts with their own insights. Commenters don’t have to work in publishing or agree with me. The only musts are civility and fairness.

P-E bridges

Also known as the TeleRead Web Log, we draw tens of thousands of e-book lovers each month and are read not just in the public domain and open source communities but also at major companies such as Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Oxford University Press. Not to mention our much-appreciated participants from smaller houses such as Books for a Buck and Drollerie Press. So the PW alliance is natural one. Meanwhile thanks to Robert Nagle, Branko Collin, Garson O’Toole, Jon Noring and others whose posts—sometimes in line with mine, sometimes fervently not—have helped us reach our present level.

My own personal vision over the years has been to build bridges between E and P. Despite my years-long campaign for free e-books via well-stocked libraries, I’ve always cared about the little detail of fair compensation for writers and publishers (as well as about e-stores—to assure the widest-possible choice of books). The PW gig is a paid one.

Same TeleTude

These past few days, I’ve been busy seeding E-Book Report with posts for you to comment on. My ‘tude in PW is the same as here, especially on DRM matters.

I hope you’ll jump in while keeping in mind PW’s different, less technical audience and the need to explain tech terms. That’s A Good Thing. Let’s share our enthusiasm with e-book newsbies in publishing. Be tactful and patient with them, DRM boosters included. Ideally all sides in the debate will learn from each other.

My PW posts so far:

–Parts I and II of “Feed Ed’s e-cats? Best-sellers out of tested ’slush’?”—complete with a photo of Ed Howdershelt with “Muffin” and “Bear.” The post is pro-Ed. As a successful E writer with crossover potential, he deserves a chance in P. Later I’ll mention other candidates for Big New York Publishers, or BNYPs as they say on the eBook Community list.

–The joys of e-book ownership. I did the library-in-your-hand routine and shared a few choice words about the anti-ownership technology known as DRM. I’d welcome some positive e-book stories in your comments—and why it’s better if  you can own books for real. Would you like to be able to pass on all your e-titles to your children, for example? I’m not saying that ownership should be the only option. But if we’re going to take e-books seriously as a medium, it had better be one.

-Parts I and II of “Why you should care about E–even if e-books now disappoint us.” No miracles promised, but I give four reasons for long-term financial growth–Topic A for publishers, even though I remain just as interested as ever in the social benefits of e-books. (more…)

By David Rothman

Scott Sigler, the novelist-podcaster whom TeleBlog helped discover, will reportedly take home $500K plus from his three-book deal with Random House.

No question: there’s big money in plenty of other creators and creations online.

So why couldn’t smart publishers of paper books watch the best-seller lists at Fictionwise and other e-bookstores, then just bid away? Might e-books sales be an excellent indicator of p-book potential?

Well, read on. It isn’t quite that simple. But first—some pro-correlation arguments.

Correlation in Japan—among cellphone novels

In a post to the eBook Community list, novelist Ed Howdershelt, whose sci-fi novel is now Number #3 at Fictionwise, suggests that e-book best-seller lists would “be a logical way” for publishers “to preview possible new paper book offerings. They could bypass slush piles and even the use of agents and simply make offers to those who make the best scores on e-book sales charts.” In fact, writing on the cellphone novel phenomenon in Japan, a Wall Street Journal reporter observed: “The novels with the most online readers also tend to sell well in the bookstores.”

And yet there’s little interest by big New York publishers in actually snapping up the best-selling E originals showcased in online stores. Similarly I doubt they’re exactly falling all over themselves to bid on print-on-demand books featured on sites such as Manybooks.net in their free online Creative Commons incarnations.

Low volume reducing value of online stats for P purposes?

What’s going on, or not going on? Actually a bunch of explanations exist. For example, some best selling e-authors at Fictionwise may move just 1,000-2,000 or so of their hits, maybe even fewer, within a year. So the volume isn’t nearly as great as with the most successful of the Japanese cellphone novels, and the figures aren’t as meaningful. What’s more, despite some possible exceptions, the typical download counts at Manybooks.net aren’t that impressive. Even after weeks online, many works may enjoy fewer than 1,000 downloads. (more…)

By David Rothman

Michael Banks wants a darker green, and I myself agree. I’d also like the photos to be flush vertically with the text. CSS tweaks can restore certain things back to the old TeleBlog look, fortunately.

Encouragingly, Bill Janssen likes the way the comment boxes appear on his high-res monitor.

So what are your thoughts on the new look—pro and con. This is actually the WordPress Almost Spring theme in its original condition.

On the positive side for certain, we finally have a good WYSIWYG editor, plus the already-mentioned guidelines for contributors. Come on. Don’t just read us. Write for us and be part of the team. Yes, bylines above posts will return. Fame for the deserving!

Meanwhile, major thanks to Robert Nagle for all the hard work he put in on the site yesterday. Any CSS whizzes care to help out?

By David Rothman

Note that we have created a Submission Guideline for TeleRead. For future use, the link is in the upper right of the blog’s home page.

By David Rothman

Educators and librarians rejoiced. Harry Potter was driving kids back to books. But will the supposed good times go on, now that the series is winding down? To what extent has the Potter phenomenon really helped literacy among the young?

Well, perhaps not as much as hoped, if you go by the New York Times and Print is Dead—following up on a Boston Globe mention of a forthcoming study.

Net among the villains

The Internet is among the distractions driving the young from books, at least the paper variety; just consider the amount of time devoted to social sites, the usual IMs and, now, Twitter. It’s urgent to get real books online, including recreational reading, and ideally they can be integrated into social sites of both the profit and nonprofit varieties. While e-book technology abounds with flaws, it’s imperative for libraries to experiment in a serious way and not just offer e-books but also help patrons adjust to them.

Alas, many in the current library world—not all—are Luddites or technophobes or still doesn’t understand the connection between book-length recreational reading and the business variety, or the value of novels as novels. Yes, I’m talking about both media and content. The lower costs of e-books could help recreational reading. The less expense per novel, the more fiction possible—and the closer the match with a reader’s interests and needs.

K-12 Babbitts

Educators, too, not just certain librarians, can fail to connect the dots and can miss the potential of e-books, recreational reading, and the value of the two combined. (more…)

By Jon Noring

DigitalPulp Publishing (DPP), a member of IDPF, is the first publisher (as far as we know) to release an e-book in IDPF’s new “epub” format: My Ántonia by Willa S. Cather. This e-book is being freely distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

At present our e-book is only downloadable from IDPF’s web site, but will soon be available through DPP’s site. In addition, I’ve posted a message to the public IDPF Standards Forum summarizing, in gory detail, which features of OPS 2.0 are and are not supported (OPS 2.0 is the backbone specification underlying “epub” — currently OPS 2.0 is in the final Member and Public Review stage.)

There are currently two ways to read our epub:

1. Adobe Digital Editions (currently in beta), or

2. Use your browser to view the XML documents (which are XHTML 1.1) contained inside the epub.

For browser viewing (which will be nowhere near optimal compared to Adobe DE), extract the files using any zip application and view the “*.xml” files in the “OPS” folder. The main content document is the file “myantonia.xml”. For best results, use a current version of Firefox, Opera or IE, and keep the present folder structure so the links work and referenced CSS style sheets and images are used.

OSoft’s dotReader will also soon support “epub”.

DPP plans to issue and distribute most of the e-books it directly publishes for authors in the epub format once the OPS 2.0 standard is elevated to the final “Recommended” status. (Note: at David Rothman’s request I plan to post an article discussing the upcoming OPS 2.0 standard, as well as discuss the current status and future of OpenReader.)

Other publishers are welcome to “decompile” this epub publication and use it as an aid to learn the OPS 2.0 specification and as a template to build your own epub publications.

Happy reading!

The author of this article, Jon Noring, is VP of Development for DigitalPulp Publishing. He also contributed to the development of OPS 2.0.