TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘eBabel’ Category

By David Rothman

Fictionwise has long been a hangout for gung-ho science fiction readers. But guess what? As I write this, not one SF e-book is among the top ten sellers. The champ within the genre is Human by Choice, by TeleBlog contributor Darrell Bain and Travis S.Taylor—-just number 19, though. Have SF readers forsaken Fictionwise?

Not at all. Instead Fictionwise has undergone an alien invasion, so to speak—of romance fans with loose purse strings. 

“Looking at sales from a single typical month, January 2008,” co-owner Steve Pendergrast reported to the Fictionwise e-mail list, “we find there are about one-third more unique romance buyers than unique SF buyers (someone who bought both would end up in both lists). This is not a huge difference in the absolute number of unique buyers. However, the romance buyers also buy more; on average they buy 62 percent more than SF buyers do in terms of revenue. The combined effect is, Fictionwise now sells about twice as much romance as SF. The reverse was true just a few years ago.”

Possible sea change

So what does this mean for the e-book industry? Definitely a seachange if other stores are experiencing similar results. This suggests:

• The e-book business as a whole needs to take on eBabel and DRM problems sooner than many of the old timers would like, if it doesn’t want to miss out on all the potential business from e-romance fans. As a group, they are probably more tech-hip than the typical reader, but almost surely not as much as the SF crowd. The good news for publishers is that readers of romances probably aren’t as likely to use P2P networks for illegal book-sharing as hardcore techies are. Probably. Anyone feel otherwise?
• For ergonomic reasons, it is important to replace PDF with the reflowable .epub format as soon as possible in most cases—to make it easier for read e-books on cell phones, which many of the new crop of readers will favor. Do you really think they all own Kindles? Of the eBabel formats, the reflowable Mobipocket beats PDF by a long shot in usability. So does ePub, and it’s important for the IDPF and publishers to encourage the development of good reading and creation apps—both commercial and open source.
• Also helpful will be more Kindle-style machines that can download titles without hassles, via wireless. Time for more alliances with phone companies? And what about better software to integrate the shopping and reading functions?

Meanwhile, lest Darrell and friends worry, the less spectacular but still noticeable growth in SF is continuing at Fictionwise. “SF sales are not declining by any means,” Steve told the Fictionwise list. “In terms of unit sales, SF sales in (for example) January 2008 were up 12% over January 2007, and in terms of revenue up even more, 16% year over year. Those are very solid growth rates.”

(more…)

Popularity: 2% [?]

By David Rothman

Say good-bye to the Panasonic WordGear (sold for $350, with a 5.6-inch color LCD screen and 1,024 by 600 res).

You read that right: Panasonic is discontinuing the WordGear. Might the WordGear have survived if the IDPF’s ePub standard had been in widespread use and the WordGear could have displayed a zillion and one e-books in that format? Ideally nonDRMed. Panasonic didn’t help when it apparently used a clumsy DRMcentric approach.

Meanwhile hello to the BEBOOK (330 Euros for such features as the 6-inch E Ink display and the ability to read .doc, .txt, .pdf, .jpg, .htm and .rtf files) from Endless Ideas. So when will we see the BEBOOK selling for $159, the price tentatively mentioned for the basic Astak? And how long until the BEBOOK can handle DRMed Mobipocket  or another common format used for bestsellers? Mobi is supposed to be on the way. If so, will Mobipocket permit other DRM-”capable” formats? Or bully Endless Ideas by saving Mobi must have an exclusive? If you want a bunch of hardware makers around, competing to offer the best gizmo at the lowest price, then root for ePub—especially a nonDRMed flavor. Aren’t you tired of Mobipocket and the like dictating to hardware makers?

(Via MobileRead.)

Popularity: 2% [?]

By Tamas Simon

Reminder: These are Tamas Simon’s individual opinions. - D.R.

I read a lot of posts and comments nowadays on the need for a reflowable e-book format. ePub is said to be a “solution” for this. I understand the frustration; I just don’t think reflow is such a big deal, especially not if we look at the long term trends. When do we need reflow anyway? I think there are two cases:

First scenario is when we have some content on a device and we want to change the font size. Honestly, how often does this happen? Once you’ve set the font size for a size that works for you, how often will you change it?

Second scenario is when switching devices. We have some content that looks acceptable on one device and we want to move it to another device that has smaller screen size. If it has larger screen size, we usually don’t even bother, do we?

Wouldn’t you be happy if…

If someone would let you use a different version of the file for the second device—but still a PDF file or something like that, a “final non-reflowable format”—wouldn’t that make you happy? I think what we really need is not one end-user e-book-format that can reflow a hundred different ways but rather a means to access the content in a format that works at the moment. So the “reflow” can very well happen on a server, in the “cloud” or just by being offered a wide variety of formats.

The Feedbooks approach

Check out Feedbooks for instance. You download the book for one device and then download it again for another device. No problem. “Reflow” is done for you by the site. And it very well addresses the first scenario, too;  you want bigger letters, there you go. I don’t see why this could not work for copyrighted works. We just need someone to provide the service.

At least there would be something value added, something that provides convenience, something that consumers would pay for in an era when content itself becomes so abundant that it’s almost impossible to charge for it. The publishing industry is still fighting this trend but have a look at some bittorrent sites, see what happened to music: you’ll most likely agree that the trend is clear.

The ownership issue

What happens then with “owning a book”? Well, I suppose you could “own” the source format TEX, or XML that is used to produce the different outcomes. Or just share what you have on the P2P network and hope that someone has another format of the content that will help you out one day. Chance are there is.

Popularity: 3% [?]

By David Rothman

“Speaking of libraries,” Philip Gulley writes in a mostly lighthearted essay in Indianapolis Monthly on Kindles vs. traditional books, “what will become of them if the Kindle succeeds? Copyright laws, written by lobbyists and passed through a Congress beholden to big money, will prevent libraries from downloading books and sharing them for free with patrons, which will effectively make literature and information inaccessible to the poor. Books will become like healthcare in this country, available to some and not others. Congress might eventually remedy this, but it will take 50 years, and in the meantime three generations of poor children won’t know the pleasure of curling up with a good book, expanding their minds, and broadening their opportunities.”

The TeleRead take: Well, Philip, you’re off on the details, but I like the spirit of the above, which, alas, considering the copyright lobby’s influence in D.C., turns out to be less of a joke than you thought. TeleRead, anyone? And new business and access models for libraries, with fair compensation to creators?

(more…)

Popularity: 3% [?]

By David Rothman

The positives of Ezra Klein’s CJR article and related video: He’s a new Kindle user and hails the machine as “credible. As a product of Amazon, it’s intertwined with the world’s largest online bookstore, legitimized by the one company that can lay some claim to having already changed the way we use, or at least acquire, books. The real question, though, is what took so long?”

In general, the Klein article is upbeat on E and notes the possibilities of  adjustable font sizes, outbound links, interactivity and updated books (albeit, I’d assume, not the 1984ish variety). At the same time his CJR piece correctly recognizes that the Kindle and the like are not perfect replacements for paper books, given the screen-contrast problems of E Ink, among the other flaws.

The negatives—blindness to the eBabel and DRM issues: Um, Ezra, I mostly liked your piece, but as an e-book newbie, you unwittingly left out a few details. Unless we want the whole bleepin’ e-book world to revolve around Jeff Bezos, we deserve nonproprietary e-book standards in areas ranging from the basic format to guidelines for shared annotations and interbook linking.

(more…)

Popularity: 3% [?]

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.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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

Popularity: 3% [?]

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.

Popularity: 3% [?]

By David Rothman

Love the iLiad’s eight-inch screen but don’t want to pay some €650?

The silver “Book Edition,” on sale Friday, might be the answer.

It omits WiFi but comes loaded with 50 free English-language classics—in Mobi format?—and sells for €499. Among the titles are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Pride and Prejudice and Dracula.

U.S. price question

Yes, I have questions. What does the €499 mean for U.S. consumers in practical terms?

The current iLiad goes for US$699. Will the Book Edition’s price be in the lower 500s? I’ve emailed iRex Technologies.

Helping out novices

I also wonder about iRex’s documentation, based on my experiences with the older model. In iRex’s place I’d offer a simple, colorful illustrated guide, going beyond a “QuickStart” card, and distribute it on paper.

Many novices want to focus on the information, as opposed to accustoming themselves to e-reading right off the bat. Especially I’d play up how to buy books, download Mobipocket Desktop (screenshot) and synch the main PC to the iLiad.

Remember—the wireless Kindle lets you download e-books in a blink; no need to synch or use a memory card. That’s what iRex must compete against. Gang, how do you feel? Remember, iRex wants nontechies to be among the Book Edition’s buyers. What works for you, as an e-connoisseur, might not work for many bibliophiles.

Praiseworthy commitment to many formats

On the positive, beyond that awesome screen, it’s great to see iRex offering the 50 preloaded books and aiming for a lower price.

Furthermore, I like iRex’s continuation of its commitment to a choice of formats. Now supported are “PDF, PRC (Mobipocket), HTML and TXT” and “support for additional E-book formats will become available over the coming months.”

Let’s hope that the IDPF’s ePUB standard will be added shortly, and that iRex will encourage its software partners to cut back on use of DRM, so people can own their books for real.

Titles available: iRex talks about 49,000 books in Mobiformat. The Kindle has 115,000 titles, though at least some of of these are newspapers and blogs, and the screen isn’t as large or readable in general as the iLiad’s is.

Links: Press release, specs

(Thanks to Wiebe de Jager at Ebookreaders.nl and MobileRead.)

Popularity: 3% [?]

By David Rothman

Are e-books more or less secure from censors in a country like Iran than paper books are?

On one hand, you don’t have paper bookstores to draw police attention in meatspace—thousands of dangerous titles can fit on a thumbnail-sized memory card; never mind the copyright angle here. And you perhaps can download the evil stuff from abroad.

Then again, on the other hand, what about the threats of IP blocking and closely monitored Net access?

The DearAuthor angle

In the wake of some friendly advice to writers from Mohammad Hossein Safark, Iran’s culture minister, the above questions could be all too relevant to Iranians. He warns authors to pre-censor themselves and avoid “excessive portrayal of a man and woman’s private relationships” and other taboos (including maybe political ones?).

Hello, Jane? We do get a very small number of Iranian visitors here at TeleRead. Anyone coming from Iranian IP addresses to DearAuthor.com—where some of the spicy books you review might give Safark a cataleptic fit? And what about the sites publishing or selling the actual titles, such as Ellora’s Cave?

(more…)

Popularity: 3% [?]

By Tamas Simon

The Web is the place for valuable but free texts—government, legal, technical and scientific information, for example.

But there’s a problem, literally a big one. The format is often PDF, with letter-sized pages in North America and similar A4 pages in Europe.

Unfortunately, e-book readers like the Sony, the Kindle and the iLiad can’t do full justice to PDFs in that size range. The root cause of the problem is that PDF is a final format, not suited for reflow. So you could well be out of luck if your reader has just a six-inch screen.

Making Mohammed go to the mountain

On the other hand it is very easy for the party who created a PDF document to use a different page size. So my idea here is simple and follows the old motto:

If the mountain will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the mountain.

Let’s lobby for Web sites to produce their articles in PDF format with a page size suitable for today’s e-reading devices.

At a time of global warming, every small little effort counts. If we can save a couple of trees this way, then not only did we provide convenience to people who already purchased these devices, but we are also doing something good for the environment and we will provide further incentives for e-reading.

(more…)

Popularity: 4% [?]

By David Rothman

So is it possible to get $30 off your Kindle, bringing the total down to $369? That’s the offer from Wallet Buddy. One catch, and there may be more, is that you need to be approved for an Amazon Visa card. And will the free two-day shipping apply?

Actually this offer is far from new (also see here), even if it isn’t necessarily common knowledge. Expiration date is listed as May 31, 2008, but I suspect the fun will continue past then, based on past extensions. One MobileReader speculated in the past that Chase, not Amazon, was behind this, and in fact the two companies do have a credit card connection.

Reminder: We’ll continue to point out both the pros of the Kindle (such as easy wireless access to e-books where coverage is available, a big help for technophobes) and the cons (format-and-DRM-related tricks—including the inability to read your purchased books off your cellphone or even your desktop).

And a question: If you haven’t bought a Kindle yet, just how low will be price have to go before you do, assuming you can stomach the DRM and the rest?

Popularity: 4% [?]