TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘e-books and other digipubs’ Category

By Joe Wikert, a VP in the Professional/Trade division of John Wiley & Sons

The Silicon Alley Insider is speculating that Amazon is currently selling about 48,000 Kindles per month. For the record, even though I’m in the publishing industry, I have no insider knowledge about the device’s sales rate. That said, 48K/month sounds extremely high to me.

Why? I’m pretty sure I’m tracking all the Kindle-related blogs and message boards, and I’m just not seeing any significant up-tick in postings, traffic or buzz. Although the Kindle has been back in stock and shipping for at least a couple of weeks now, I’m seeing roughly the same number of weekly posts/comments on the Kindle Forum and Kindle Korner as there were when it was out of stock.

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By David Rothman

Don’t want water in your automobile’s gasoline tank? Then fuel up at a busy gas station.

And the same’s true with Wikipedia. Generally, not always, entries on popular topics are more reliable than those on more arcane ones. Just be careful about entries which could draw a steady stream of partisan edits.

Such thoughts came to me while I was reading a Wikipedia-related column from Paul Gilster, an author, blogger and contributor to the Raleigh News  & Observer, who pointed out the popularity-reliability correlation. Originally he was a Wikipedia skeptic, but he has since come around around—while, appropriately, warning that you still need to be wary. Paul also suggests going to the source sites mentioned in citations.

At the same time, as the author of Centauri Dreams, a blog on deep space, Paul points to the value of Wikipedia for keeping up to date on arcane scientific subject—on which it can be more timely than, say, the Britannica.

Related: Free subscriptions and widgets for bloggers—from Encyclopedia Britannica.

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By David Rothman

“You can tell that no progress has really been made in changing cultural expectations when the same arguments that were trotted out a decade ago continue to be pursued. A Slashdot thread reprises the same debates about e-books that we’ve been having forever…’prefer real books,’ ‘turning pages is nice,’ ‘price of e-books is too high,’ ‘nothing compares to paper,’ ‘but free e-books are cool,’ ‘I read on my palm V etc etc.’” - Sherman Young, author of The Book Is Dead.

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By David Rothman

Q. What do the RIAA techies have in common with so many Washington bureaucrats?

A. Job preservation is Job Number One. The head of RIAA’s tech unit “made a list of the 22 ways to sell music, and 20 of them still require DRM.” 

Q. So what else are the RIAA and the rest of Washington doing to shaft the consumer?

A. Aggravating Cyber Prohibition, of course—or at least trying to, via a new bill.

DRM Alternatives—in an e-book/library context: Library books you can KEEP forever—and other ideas to help public libraries survive the digital era. No, libraries and e-bookstores can’t get rid of DRM overnight. But they can significantly reduce e-books’ reliance on this sales and lit toxin.

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By David Rothman

“The questions posed run a wide gamut, including patron complaints about the weight of books to why do large print titles go out of print so quickly, to criteria used for weeding large print to where to shelve them…” - From Library Journal summary of large-print seminar.

Related: Older adults and e-books—and how E could be the new ‘large print’  and E-books as the new large ‘print’: An eye doctor speaks out. In the first piece, librarian Isabelle Fetherston noted that “large-print books tend to be too heavy and unwieldy for many older people with arthritis to hold.”

Library image: CC-licensed photo from Michael K. Pate showing large-print collection from Laurens County, S.C., library.

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By David Rothman

The Internet Archive, a major source of e-books, had to fight off an FBI request demanding information on a library user under the Patriot Act.

No, I don’t know if the information was e-book related. But you get the point. I’m just happy the Archive prevailed.

Related: Will the FBI monitor your e-book reading on the Kindle and other machines SOMEDAY? Or help censor you?

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By Wayan Vota, Editor of the unofficial OLPC News

If you are in Boston on May 20th, may I strongly suggest you crash the invite-only “State of the State” event at One Laptop Per Child headquarters at 1 Cambridge Circle. Starting at 10 am the event sounds like its going to be a watershed moment in OLPC history. Just listen to the breathless press invite:

“Selected invitees will have the opportunity to hear Nicholas Negroponte give a “State of the State” address on the One Laptop per Child project to date and the evolution of the XO laptop. In addition, attendees will be privy to a discussion on the product roadmap for the XO along with the exclusive unveiling of the next generation of the XO.

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By David Rothman

Reading the TeleBlog, you’re in Niche Land. Whether the Iranians nuke D.C. or the Devil appears as a winged Afghan Hound in Times Square, you can bet we’ll try to find an e-book angle.

But what about big book-publishers? Even when they think E, too many of them still mess up on the details of the niche approach. For example, they promote their general URLs rather than directing people to in-house niche sites for baseball fans or origami enthusiasts. Small publishers, especially the specialized ones, can actually outperform the big boys in many cases.

Clueful comments from a major industry guru

With the above in mind, I nodded as I read some recent speeches by Mike Shatzkin, a  publishing guru who has pounded the table for both e-books and  the need for a niche approach. “Every book should be an e-book,” he said, “and just about every book should be loaded for print-on-demand. POD is not just for end of life; for many books, it can be critical during mid-life.” Right now, it would appear that Hachette is the only major publisher releasing all titles in E—partly, I myself suspect, because it’s standardized on ePUB as a distribution format and can enjoy its economies.

I also liked Mike’s interest in the elderly as a market for POD, although I wish he’d really played up pure-E for them as the best approach to take, despite the need for format choices.

Free wisdom from Mike

Via the PersonaNonData blog of Michael Cairnes, another outspoken consultant and also the ex-president of R.R. Bowker, I ran across links to the Shatzkin speeches. Even with some repetition among them, they’re well worth a read, whether you’re a big publisher who needs shaking up, or a small, niche-hip guy or gal who would enjoy a little vindication, or a writer pondering whether to self-publish or go the traditional route:

• End of general trade publishing (completely retold), Jan. 22, 2008—delivered for Random House’s Digital Day
• Publishing in the Digital Age panel remarks, March 10, 2008, for the Book Business Conference and Expo.
• The digital state of play in the U.S., April 16, for U.K. publishers at the London Book Fair.
• The Future for Publishers and Booksellers, May 7, for Danish publishers and booksellers in Copenhagen.

Another good point Mike makes: The fact that use of e-books within the industry—for sales reps “carrying” around many manuscripts, for example—will help led to general use of e-books.

On dedicated e-devices and formats: “When research I did…demonstrated pretty convincingly that most e-books sold in the US are not read on devices, but are Adobe files that are most likely read on PCs,” Mike said, “I was surprised. Only about a third of sales are of Palm, Mobi, or Microsoft dot lit formats that we’d expect to be read on a handheld. The emergence of the Kindle and the vitality of Sony Reader may change that balance soon, but that’s what it has been.”

A related aside: I’ve queried a Sony PR rep for the latest on Adobe Digital Editions for the Sony Reader—just when will we see it available? Digital Editions is to let people read DRMed PDFs, not just Sony’s proprietary BBeB format. Let’s hope that ePub is also still on tap.

Detail: Unlike Mike, I continue to believe that cellphones will matter far, far more as e-readers than will Kindle-style devices, and I also wish he’d pay more attention to the eBabel crisis and the damage that the DRM mess has done to the book industry. But, hey, he’s entitled. Furthermore, I agree with him that the Kindle has done e-books a service in encouraging more publishers to digitize. It’s just that the real action, as I see it, will be on cellphones as they improve and rollout E Ink displays become common. Wireless, as an easy way for people to get books, can in effect be built in.

Image: CC licensed from Kapungo.

Technorati Tags: Mike Shatzkin,pubishing,book-pubishing,Michael Cairnes,PersonaNonData

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By David Rothman

For e-book lovers, the tiny OLPC XO-1 endearingly offers a tablet mode. At seven inches, its screen might actually be better for certain people’s recreational e-reading than the much-larger displays of some Tablet PCs.

So what would a rich man’s version of the XO-1 be like?

Vye’s stylish Mini-v S41, weighing just 2.75 pound and featuring a screen about the same size as the XO-1’s, just might qualify as such as machine. Price is $1,499—actually $300 less than the listed one for Apple’s MacBook Air—from Dynamism. Vye’s company motto is “Living life to the full,” a cheery line appearing on the home page with a beach scene.

As long as OLPC’s less in love with Linux…

The Vye Mini runs Vista Premium, a distinct negative for Linux fans. But, heck, we keep hearing that the XO-1 people are destined for XPdom, at least as an option on new machines.

Back to the Mini. There’s the expected trackpad. Plus, you get a seven-inch touch screen with at least an adequate res of 1024 x 600 pixels as well as built-in WiFi and an Intel Intel A110 800 MHz chip cruising at 800Mhz.

A bit skimpy in the RAM Department

RAM, alas, is a mere 1G, with just 2G max ($179 for the upgrade), a way to keep you in touch with your eco-budgeted buddies. But at least storage is 80G and presumably you can read your Project Gutenberg DVDs with a Super Multi drive. Oh, and the keyboard is said in the  New York Times to be “standard,” whatever that means.

Dynamism is now accepting “preorders.”

Also sold by Dynamism: The ASUS  Eee PC  900: “8.9″ WSVGA, 2.18 lbs, 12GB Solid State or 20gb HD, WiFi, Webcam.” Cost: $550 with your choice of Linux or XP. Shipping is said to be set for mid-May.

Note: I’ve lightened up the photos so the details will be more visible.

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By David Rothman

“Three months after acknowledging multiple vulnerabilities in its popular Reader software and then patching the program, Adobe Systems Inc. yesterday finally provided some details about the bugs.” -  Adobe breaks silence on February’s PDF bugs: Flaws’ severity may have prompted silence, researcher speculates, in Computerworld.

The TeleRead take:  Go here for downloads to address Reader and Acrobat 7 and 8 problems if you haven’t already.

Question: Do you think open source readers are better or worse from a security perspective than the usual commercial products are? And might Adobe’s security problems be one reason why the IDPF should encourage the creation and development of open-source ePUB readers—whose tires can be kicked from the start, to at least reduce the possibility of surprises later on? I want to see both open source and commercial models (in this case, Adobe’s ePUB-compatible Digital Editions) thrive.

Update, 2:03 p.m.: John Dowell at Adobe offered a helpful, unofficial response to the CW article.

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By David Rothman

Could reading newspapers online be harder on the environment than enjoying them the old-fashioned way—on paper?

Perhaps in some respects, if you rely on a desktop computer rather than a little PDA or a dedicated E Ink reader such as a Kindle, Sony or iLiad.

“Reading online on a desktop computer for 10 minutes produces the same load on the environment as reading an e-book for half an hour, and reading online for 30 minutes has the same overall effect as reading a print newspaper.”

So says Would you like that book in paper or plastic?—an article in Environmental Science & Technology—in summing up some recent research.

E-book angle

Now, what are the implications for people (1) reading the newspaper online longer than half an hour on a desktop or (2) reading an entire book? Check out ES&T.

Oh, the variables to consider, and I don’t just mean disposal of old computers or whether you use an LCD or cathode ray tube monitor! Remember, many people like to leave their desktops on constantly to download podcasts or for other reasons, such as avoidance of boot-up delays. If so, that would reduce the extra eco-strain from actual reading—since the equipment would have been humming away regardless. Then again, some might say: “Does your desktop really need to be on all the time?” Power saving tips, welcomed! Your thoughts on power management and the rest, in an e-book context?

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By David Rothman

Yes, the actual book—the paper and cardboard—accounts for just part of what you pay at the store.

But new hikes in paper and fuel costs may make e-books more competitive with P than before. And of course we know which approach is greener.

Related: P-books as global warmers: Another argument for E. Paper books are a speck of paper consumption, but e-book readers can also display newspapers, far more villainous as polluters in P format.

And speaking of the p-to-e transition: Reluctantly, a daily stops its presses, living online, the New York Times’ write-up on the Capital Times in Madison,Wisconsin. Also see Wikipedia item.

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