TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘doctorow’ Category

By Chris Meadows

About a month ago, Cory Doctorow released the text of his latest book, Content, on-line for free, as he usually does. Unlike prior books, this is a nonfiction collection, gathering together the text of speeches, presentations, and essays he has written, as well as all of his Forbes and other magazine articles. Most of them will already be familiar to those who follow Doctorow’s on-line writings, but it is nice to have them collected in one place.

The book makes a nice collection of essays, arranged by thematic content rather than date. They are interesting articles written in Doctorow’s usual ebullient style, but since they were not written with the intention of being collected together and discuss overlapping subjects, a number of them cover the same ground as others quite repeatedly.

Also, many of the essays as originally written (most notably, the Forbes articles) contained hypertext links to referenced or supporting material. In the book, these are naturally missing. (more…)

By Branko Collin

Author and e-book expert Cory Doctorow published an article in Locus Magazine today in which he explores the economic realities of producing dedicated e-book readers. If Nintendo, he muses, cannot even cajole Chinese manufacturers into ramping up production for their incredibly popular Wii game computer, what chance does Amazon have of getting enough Kindles out the door?

Frankly, book reading just isn’t important enough to qualify for priority treatment in that marketplace. E-book readers to date have been either badly made, expensive, out-of-stock or some combination of all three. No one’s making dedicated e-book readers in such quantity that the price drops to the cost of a paperback — the cost at which the average occasional reader may be tempted to take a flutter on one. Certainly, these things aren’t being made in such quantity that they’re being folded in as freebies with the Sunday paper or given away at the turnstiles at a ballgame to the majority of people who are non-book-readers.

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I’m skeptical about selling ebooks as a business model (see my earlier column "You DO like reading off a screen" for more about this), but if I had to bet on a future for e-books, I would take long odds against a hardware reader catching on in any meaningful way.

Moderator’s note: Also see Cellphones vs. dedicated readers: Why Cory’s PARTLY right, my just-made TeleBlog post. - D.R.

By Branko Collin

- Geek.com lists the 10 lessons to be learned from the OLPC project, and why it will revolutionize the laptop world, although it’s more like six actual lessons, and four for padding the list to ten. Ils sont fous ces Americains… #1: the laptop is the type of computer that is most prone to physical abuse and theft; OLPC shows price matters for a laptop. #5: energy consumption need not be as high as that of a traditional laptop if you are willing to let go of preconceptions of what a laptop should be. And so on. Via Slashdot.

- FON is a company that sells Wi-Fi routers with a twist; any member can use the Wi-Fi of any other member. It has now struck a deal with BT that will create hundreds of thousands of FON hotspots in the UK, according to BoingBoing. The advantage for members with OLPC XOs and Irex Iliads could be considerable. Cory Doctorow seems to be a fan of this scheme, although a scheme he suggests in his novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town differs a bit. (Yes, go read the novel. It’s not bad.)

- In September Slashdot celebrated its tenth birthday. Slashdot is a website for technical news that has sported numerous blog like features from even before blogs were invented. It has had a journal like structure from its beginning, as well as the opportunity for anyone to comment. The Slashdot software is Free Software, and is used among others by the library news site Lisnews.org. Slashdot became very popular very quickly; so popular, in fact, that a link posted at the site would often cause the linked website to crash or stall, so heavy would the traffic from Slashdot be — a phenomenon called “the Slashdot Effect”. Now Network Performance Daily has an interview with founder Rob Malda. Via BoingBoing.

By Deena Fisher

Everyone knows that POD means vanity press, right? Say that to any reputable indie publisher and you just might end up with a black eye.

I’m holding a trade paperback POD in my right hand—well, I put it down to type, but I had it in my hand; and it looks to me indistinguishable from the offset printed book I had in my left hand except for the price, which is about a dollar higher. I’m sure that’s a red flag for some right there, but bear with me.

The same book, published electronically, sells for half the retail price online, a significant difference. That’s not always the case. Purchase an e-book copy of a hardback bestseller still on the NY Times list and you’re going to pay the same price.

The P/E price mystery

Why? Just why is an e-book the same price as a hardback? I was first annoyed and then amused when I read a comment posted to Engadget’s recent report about Amazon’s Kindle. The gist of it was: (more…)