TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Evan Schnittman’ Category

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?

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By David Rothman

“Goofy,” says librarian and TeleBlog contributor Rochelle Hartman, after learning from Library Journal that libraries can loan a Kindle as long as no content is on it.

As reported in LJ: “Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener told LJ that a loan of a Kindle without content is OK but sharing a device loaded with content ‘with a wide group of people would not be in line with the terms of use.’” The public library in Sparta, NJ, which does loan out Kindles with books, hasn’t heard from Amazon despite an LJ story about its new service. For now, it appears, the loans will continue. Screenshot is from the library site.

In other Kindle matters:

• Amazon bullied Kindle News into becoming e-BookVine—you can’t be an Amazon affiliate and use a Web address with the sacred K word—but Jason Schramm of The Kindle Report so far has refused to do a rename and turn his domain over to Jeff Bezos and friends. “I understand they need to protect their copyrights and trademarks,” he writes in an informative post reproducing the note Amazon sent him, “but there has to be another way. They risk losing a lot of goodwill from Amazon fans.” Amen. While not a lawyer, I’m all for protection of intellectual property, but here Amazon is “protecting” itself from additional revenue that would affiliates can reel in if they’re easy for people to Google up. Wouldn’t the name “Kindle” be helpful? Amazon could still require that the affiliates took care to distinguish themselves from the mother ship.
• VC Josh Kopelman reminds of us of a generic negative of e-reading gizmos, not just the Kindle—the ban on use of electronic devices “during the first 20 minutes of a plane ride. It’s pretty frustrating to see everyone around you reading a book/newspaper, when your Kindle needs to be holstered.” For the positives of the Kindle for jet travel, check out Evan Schnittman’s thoughts.
• Kopelman likes the ability to read the first few chapters of Kindle books for free and weed out the losers, while Kevin Manley, over at Portfolio, wonders how that might change the nature of books. Remember, the starts of many old-fashioned books are written with the entire work in mind, as opposed to going for immediate gratification of readers. Granted, many shoppers in bookstores will check out the first pages, but they they may also flip through the rest of the books.
• “The Kindle does not induce customers to take time out of their day to read a book and fully understand it,” complains Stephanie Tanizar in The Graphic at Pepperdine University. “Instead, it lets customers take the book into their hacked up time to digest it in unappetizing dribs and drabs. The tradition of putting time aside in order to read is dying out.” Here’s the answer, Stephanie. More leisure time. Good luck getting it in today’s economy, though.

Technorati Tags: Spara,NYT,Sparta Public Library

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By David Rothman

Evan Schnittman, over at Oxford University Press, is an old-time print guy, but he’s been warming up to his Kindle, especially at 30,000 feet.

On a recent jet flight, Evan and his seatmate both started Iwan McEwan’s On Chesil Beach and, after five hours, had read it “cover to cover (in her case), lines 1 - 1565 (in my case). We settled back and compared notes on the grace of McEwan’s language and the depth of repression in the main characters, and then we went back to our own worlds.

“With three long and boring hours of flying to go, I re-opened my Kindle and began reading. Soon I finished the Times, the Journal, and 3 articles in Slate. I was also able to finish the last part of Steve Martin’s memoir Born Standing Up, and started Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. All this time my plane-mate, out of reading material, struggled desperately to entertain herself by leafing through the SkyMall catalogue and pondering the price of a life-sized mechanical swimming pool dolphin (I couldn’t make that up if I tried) while waiting for the movies on Continental Airlines antiquated entertainment system to cycle back to the beginning.

“This is where e-books have a distinct and very important advantage over print, portability. E-books’ greatest potential audience is the traveler.

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By David Rothman

Oh, the frustrations of the blog format, sometimes! Right now we’ve got three great contributions that I wish could all be at the top.

 Hey, TeleReaders; this Kindle’s for my sister-in-law, not you—a well-crafted essay by Evan Schnittman, VP of business development and rights at Oxford University Press, New York—argues that the ease and convenience of the Kindle outweigh any DRM-related negatives. I disagree, but I am delighted to present another viewpoint and am eager for more pro-Kindle contributions. Meanwhile feel free to write civil comments no matter what your opinion.

Graduating to e-books: Many publishing students still clueless is an important alarum for both educators and publishers and comes from Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti, a TeleBlog contributing editor who formerly worked as an editor with the well-regarded David R. Godne and founded her own house. Shockingly, when Sadi asked for a show of hands, she learned that no student in her class owned a PDA, downloaded e-books or understood the practicality of the technology even today.

E-books and the young doctor on the go, by Dr. Karina Descartin, tells what it was like to be a young doctor reading digitized medial information in the Philippines. Karina now lives in the States and is still using E—to prepare for the exams she must pass to practice in the U.S. “Medical e-books predate the specific definition of Medicine 2.0, but now they’re among its most promising tools and in the future will be still more important,” Karina tells us.

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By Evan Schnittman

Think DRM is a necessary evil? Love the iPod model for e-books—built around Amazon’s Kindle? Today’s your day. I’m very pleased to publish some pro-Kindle commentary from Evan Schnittman, vice president of business development and rights at Oxford University Press (photo). Discussion’s more fun with different viewpoints included, and given all my skepticism about DRM and an Amazon - dominated iPoddish model for the book industry, I encourage other defenders to submit their own essays to the TeleBlog. Meanwhile thanks to Evan for taking time to present his side! - David Rothman.

David kindly linked on November 21 to my Kindle review on the OUP blog and called me out on a major area of disagreement between us; DRM. One of my basic points is that Amazon has made a huge play taken right out of Apple’s iPod playbook and, if Amazon fails, I fear the world of e-books might forever fail. David’s response was that if Kindle fails, it will be the death of DRM and not the e-book. David’s view is that the restrictive DRM has kept the e-book limited and the only solution is a world of DRM-free content. My position has always been that the iPod, with its 75% market share and pretty much invisible yet omnipresent DRM, is the only model of hope for e-books.

I have been playing with my Kindle and watching others as I demonstrate it. The Kindle comes with the New Oxford American Dictionary preloaded, so I was fortunate enough to attend the Amazon press conference and receive my Kindle the first day it was available. Using the Kindle and showing it to others has helped firm up my position on DRM and on what it takes to be a reading device.

The best quote on how the Kindle does as a reading device belongs to Jeff Bezos. I believe he said something like, “The device disappears after a bit and one is left with a reading experience.” This is exactly what is right about the Kindle–it’s clearly designed by readers for readers. The Kindle is supposed to be a device that disappears, not one that inspires techno-envy. Kindle has one job, and one job only–to create a seamless digital reading experience from purchase through immersive reading.

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By David Rothman

Evan Schnittman, a VP at Oxford University Press, is a nice, smart guy clueful about a lot of things. In the wake of a recent blog posting of his, I hope he’ll rethink matters and take care not to say that e-books will be DOA if the Kindle flops. Best not to confuse DRMed e-book reading with e-reading, period.

Perhaps Evan can scoot on over to Publishers Weekly and see what Bethann Patrick’s e-book-hip readers are saying about the Kindle’s e-babel and DRM. Great to see the readable Bethann excited about E, of course. I hope that both she and Evan will check out my latest PW post—on the Kindle—which I’ll reproduce here in a moment.

What Evan’s company doing right: Allowing ad-supported, nonDRMed books to go on Wowio with the owners’ names embed—social DRM, in other words. SDRM is what Amazon should be using if it is worried about piracy. Traditional DRM really is more about protection of certain tech companies’ business models–Amazon’s, for example—than protection of books. Notice? Jeff Bezos offers nonDRMed music at Amazon. So why can’t he do the same for books, relying on social DRM instead if need be? Could it be that Jeff’s more interested in turning a buck off DRM and his Kindle format—very possibly just Mobipocket with a new file extension and fresh PID numbers—than in being consistent? Mobi itself would work just fine with SDRM.

Related: An E-Book Reader That May Just Catch On, by David Pogue in the New York Times.

Technorati Tags: Evan Schnittman , Amazon , Jeff Bezos , Oxford University Press

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By David Rothman

Links of interest this morning:

–Delays in production of the OLPC laptop, from Wayan Vota at OLPC News. He  remains upbeat on the project’s long-term prospects despite competition from companies such as Asustek and skepticism from some policymakers.

–MobileRead’s .epub poll and accompanying discussion. Participants are focusing on the nuts and bolts. The IDPF would do well to serve up practical information and promote open source software for creation and reading of .epub files. In a related vein, publishers should toss serious money in the direction of the IDPF rather than letting Adobe dominate the financing. I agree with Evan Schnittman that publishers can enjoy an upper hand in relations with tech companies. I hope Adobe fares well with Digital Editions, but .epub also needs alternatives such as the open source FBReader—a viable project that might benefit from more resources from book publishers or maybe even a MacArthur- or Soros-style foundation if publishers don’t come through. Yes, I know. There’s the DRM issue. But .epub should be for all publishers, not just those insistent on DRM.

–Danish record label floats flat ISP fee idea for unlimited P2P music, in Ars Technica. Applicable someday to e-books? Also in Ars: Teachers’ lack of fair use education hinders learning, sets bad example.

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By Evan Schnittman

Moderator’s note: Evan Schnittman is Vice President of Business Development and Rights for the Academic and USA Divisions of Oxford University Press. - DR

Having just returned from Frankfurt and participated in the obsessive focus on digital issues there, it occurred to me that the publishing industry today is in a position rarely if ever experienced before; we suddenly have the upper hand.

To wit, there are three wars that are raging today (and one on the horizon) which are changing the nature of publishing and putting us in the drivers’ seat; discoverability, Print on Demand (POD), and repositories.

All of these wars revolve around the notion of longtail, which is the theory that the optimized search capabilities of the internet provide nearly endless access to otherwise obscure products and that the demand for these obscure products exceeds demand for bestsellers. Longtail is in effect the holy grail of this industry because with each new season of frontlist our backlist grows exponentially. Longtail in book publishing is about selling books we no longer actively promote. With that in mind, here is my report from the front lines.

Discoverability Wars

I have written a fair bit on the notion of discoverability—but to be honest, to date it has been less of a battle and more of a spat between Google and Microsoft. Google was first and by some estimates has 10 times the titles currently available on Live Search Books—not to mention an enormous lead in the search market. Microsoft is a distant third in the search category which has hampered the book search efforts to date. However, Microsoft has recently shown a significant push into this market and with their market cap and cash reserves are very able to make huge inroads with publishers very quickly.

This is good news for publishers as competition breeds new opportunities and motivates both parties to play to our needs, not theirs.

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