TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘e-books’ Category

By Paul Biba

If students become accustomed to e-books, then they will demand them in the future—when they have the economic clout to make a difference. Get them young!

So perhaps CourseSmart might do some good. Founded by six high-ed textbook publishers, including giants like Wiley, McGraw-Hill and Pearson, it will bring together thousands of text books on the same e-book platform. Inram’s VitalSource, which offers shared annotations, among other features, is the software in use. News release follows.

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By David Rothman

Has the ePub-capable Adobe Digital Editions been demoed with the Sony Reader PRS-505 at today’s IDPF conference?

“EPUB demo!!” Nate the Great posted at MobileRead. “He used the library functions of DE. DE recognized the 505. He sent ePub files to the 505. And now he is reading the ebook in ePub on the 505.” OK, but is DE running on the 505 itself? No.

The other issue is whether the 505 is natively reading the ePub—I get the impression from Nate’s post that it is. Has the 505 has that capability, in a hidden form, all the way along, or was it added via an update? My own 505 can’t read ePub. Despite Nate’s impressions, might there be some translation going on? I don’t know. [Update: No translation. Real ePub. Great!]

PDF reflowability ahead?

Meanwhile there’s also talk of PDF reflowability. No availability date, alas. And just what are the catches? We’ve heard this talk before. Must files still be tagged to be reflowable?

Don’t blame Nate for the sketchiness of the report, which he apparently typed out—between other activities—on a Kindle keyboard.

Digital Editions 1.5 released

Meanwhile, less exotically, Adobe has released Version 1.5 of Digital Editions (PDF, PDF/A and ePub support) for desktops and said that the DRM is more flexible. Partial screenshot is of 1.5 displaying a PDFed library book on my desktop machine.

More info is available via the DE blog and MR. If you have updating problems, go here.

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By David Rothman

Under $200 for the 5-inch E Ink reader and less than $350 for the 9.7-inch reader—that’s the latest pricing information from Astak. The 6-inch reader will be somewhere in between. Click on the image for a better view of the reader with the 9.7-inch display. It now seems that the biggest of the three models might not appear until October—I don’t know about the six-incher. See earlier post and a Techmeme roundup and another perspective from Mike Cane.

Ahead is a repro of a graphic with further details on all three products.

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By David Rothman

The TeleBlog’s overzealous anti-spam Dobermans are at it again. We’ve just recovered much-appreciated comments on paying writers, e-book prices and other topics—from  Bill Waldron (the shareware pay issue), Bob Russell of MobileRead (long, thoughtful essay on book prices), Dan Carey (self-publishing vs. the traditional kind) and Blaine Higgy (general-purpose computers vs. dedicated e-book devices). Click on their names to see the comments.

Always write us if your comments don’t appear in a day—normally they’ll show up instantly after you’ve established a track record as a commenter. We’re getting thousands and thousands of comment spams, and sometimes the good stuff gets lot in the dreck. We’re at the mercy of Akismet, our anti-spam service, but usually we can rescue lost comments. If you’d like, just to be sure, send along copies when you write us.

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By David Rothman

Astak’s rumored $150-so-so E Ink reader with a five-inch screen was unveiled at the IDPF conference today. It’s to go on sale next month in the States, with other models following in the next few months. [Update: Here.]

The actual price has not been set, according to Astak biz dev official Bob Barry, whom I interviewed a moment ago. I caught him via his mobile phone, in the thick of the excitement at the conference, so he could not pass on all the details. According to Bob, the final prices will be determined by the features included—something still under consideration, based on the most common user requests.

Related: Tech.blog post and Astak site with details on the five-, six- and 9.7-inch models, plus a MobileRead thread. A touch screen is among the options.

Supported formats: TXT, PDF, RTF, HTML/CHM. May an FBReader ports appear for the Astaks, so people can at least enjoy nonDRMed Mobipocket, as well as ePub, the standard of the future! And who knows? I wonder if old editions of Mobipocket’s own software might run on the six-inch and ten-inch Astaks (WIN CE5.0), even now. Unlikely but you never know. The five-incher runs Linux (QT environment). Any FBReader possibilities for that one even now?

(Thanks, Michael.)

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By David Rothman

Public WiFi and other wireless tech can be catnip for e-book fans—because you can shop and download when you’re on the go, and even read books via your browser, if you prefer.

So I’m sad to learn from Ars Technica that Philadelphia’s municipal WiFi net will shut down on June 12 due to differences with EarthLink.

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By David Rothman

Ficbot—proud owner of an Asus, an eBookwise and other gimzos with clashing e-book formats in use—isn’t the only one with opinions on the eBabel mess.

The Association of American Publishers took a helpful step with an open letter to the IDPF—supporting ePub as a distribution format.

“Many publishers already want to begin a transition process toward the use of the EPUB file format and hope that such a transition can be completed by October 2008,” said the letter signed by Ed McCoyd the association’s director of digital policy.

ePub’s current champ among the majors: Hachette, which is already using ePub for distribution. May this follow at the consumer level! Meanwhile, over in the U.K.,  HarperCollins (relevant link) and Penguin (link) will soon start using ePub as a consumer format in September.

What’s missing: from the AAP note: A focus on ePub as a consumer format. But I suspect that’ll come in time. Meanwhile, yes, while it’s nice to suggest that the IDPF work out quality standards for conversion into proprietary formats from ePub, that’s hardly the way to make e-books as easy to use as audio CDs.

Another caveat: AAP say that “for books that do not have reflowable text, publishers may still send another proprietary file format, most likely a PDF, in order to preserve pagination and layout.”

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By David Rothman

Hatchette, home to many best-sellers such as James Patterson’s, is distributing e-books via the ePub format. Can another progressive move, such as a back-off from DRMed e-books be ahead? Mix that with ePub and consumers would have a true standard without proprietary DRM to muck it up.

For fans of Patterson and other Hachette authors, some hope comes from Laura Dawson’s account from a Book Industry Study Group conference:

“Hachette spoke about their experiment with DRM-free audiobooks. Via E-music.com, Hachette released about 10% of their audiobook list in total, watermarking them instead of loading the files up with DRM. They found there was no piracy of watermarked titles; but there was theft of non-watermarked titles that had been ripped from CDs and posted on peer-to-peer sharing sites. They intend to put more titles into the program.”

(Spotted via Peter Brantley.)

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By Ficbot

Moderator’s note: The IDPF is holding the Digital Book 2008 conference today. May companies there heed Ficbot’s advice! - D.R.

I enjoyed the recent TeleBlog debate on resizing text on the fly. Is this a feature people really use on a regular basis? And do we need an e-book standard like ePub, which allows easy resizing and could work for everything from a cell phone to a book-optimized tablet?

One’s not enough

In a word, yes, because many e-book fans read on more than one device. They can pack their p-books in their bags and take them anywhere, so why shouldn’t they be able to carry around their e-books just as easily, no matter which device they are toting (an aside: that’s not my bag in the photo)?

They also need to be able to resize fonts easy to allow for different reading conditions, such as when their eyes are tired; and that’s not the only issue. On some devices, such as a cell phone or PDA, the fonts in formats like PDF may display differently compared to a tablet or desktop with a much-larger screen.

Potential boon to publishers and e-retailers, Amazon included

And why might readers be carrying different devices? Because some of their devices may be tools they use for other purposes. Letting them carry books between them would be a boon to publishers because it lets people do more reading and be more inclined to buy books. If the only device I have with me on a given day is my Eee PC and I can’t read a certain format on it, even though the book is important to me, then eBabel has once again reduced my productivity.

I hope Amazon is reading this. Remember, you can’t display an e-book from the Kindle Store on anything but a Kindle, not even your desktop machine. This eBabel is no small reason, among others, why I don’t own a Kindle even though, yes, it would let me change fonts within a certain range. Even Amazon’s Mobipocket is no solution since it can’t run on many computers, including my Linux Asus. We need a true nonproprietary standard.

A not-so-secret diary which Jeff Bezos should read

For Amazon and for those who wonder just what an avid e-reader means by “multiple devices” and why the reader might need them, here’s a glimpse inside the last week or so of my techie e-reading life:

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By David Rothman

With a 10-inch/1024×600 display and a U.S. price as low as $399 for the Linux version, the MSI Wind laptop could please e-book fans who otherwise might crave an Asus or another competitor. Laptop Mag’s interview with MSI exec Andy Tung is here; the full specs, here. U.S. availability is apparently June 3—I’m not sure about elsewhere. Not bad for a Kindle price and a host of uses, eh? Of course, the K-machine is smaller and easier to master.

Yes, there’ll also be a Windows version for $549, with an 80G hard drive, like the Linux one. And a sub-$500 Windows option will be along later. Oh, and get this: Battery life for the Win XP flavor with a six-cell battery might be as long as 5.5 hours thanks to the use of Intel’s Atom chip, which runs at 1.6GHz.

Related: Techmeme roundup and Google News one and MSI Web U.S. site. Also a slew of write-ups on the $549 Asus Eee PC 900, which LM’s Joanna Stern reviewed earlier this week.

Coming later today: “A Week in the life of a gadget-loving e-reader”—the TeleBlog’s Ficbot, a busy K-12 teacher and Asus owner up in Toronto.

Technorati Tags: MSI Wind

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By David Rothman

Matt Sumell, a short story writer, is the first “Featured Contemporary Author” on the home page of the BookGlutton site. BG is a Web community through which you can annotate others’ works—publicly or privately—or publish your own. You can even do ePub conversions from HTML.

“We’ll be highlighting contemporary authors that have uploaded original work or excerpts of published material in a section on the homepage,” says Travis Alber, BookGlutton co-founder. “Although we continue to bring in public domain and Creative Commons work, we have now begun to expand our catalog to new copyrighted material; we’re excited to provide a space for new and contemporary authors to showcase their writing. We’ll be rotating the featured authors frequently.
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By Joe Wikert, a VP in the Professional/Trade division of John Wiley & Sons

I love it when a company takes action on a community-generated product idea.  Three short months ago I wrote this blog post about an opportunity for someone to build a new content delivery model around the Wikipedia.  That “someone” turned out to be DailyLit, an organization that already had the infrastructure in place to deliver the content model I described.

Earlier today, DailyLit President & CEO Susan Danzinger announced the new Wikipedia Tours service.  They’re launching with 10 different subjects including Wonders of the World, Famous Inventors and one I already signed up for, Presidents of the United States.  All of the products are currently free, but as I mentioned in that earlier post, I think they could eventually monetize some (if not all) of them.

Kudos to Susan and her team for quickly adding this service to the DailyLit product line!

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