TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘events’ Category

By Paul Biba

The organizers of the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair have just published the results of their survey “How will digitization shape the future of publishing?” The results are so interesting that I thought it would be worth publishing the press release in full. Here it is:

Frankfurt, 13/10/2008 - The organisers of the Frankfurt Book Fair – the global meeting place for the book world – have conducted a major survey to find out how digitisation will influence the future of the publishing industry, and who will be the driving force behind it. Over 1,000 industry professionals from over 30 countries responded to the survey, issued via the Frankfurt Book Fair Newsletter. The most interesting results:

• China’s digital influence in international publishing predicted to increase threefold in next five years
• consumers, Amazon, Google believed to drive the digitisation process
• e-content will overtake traditional books in sales by 2018
• online bookselling named as most important development of the past 60 years

As the much-hyped e-readers hit the stores, and digitisation continues to revolutionize all aspects of the book trade, this year over 70 per cent of respondents revealed that they feel ready for the digital challenge. The survey also reveals that current opinion is divided on the future of the e-books and digital content versus the printed word. 40 per cent of respondents expect e-content to overtake traditional book sales as early as 2018 – whereas a third predict that this will never happen.
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By Paul Biba

Tomorrow is the day that Sony is announcing its secret ebook “something”. TeleRead has been invited to the press event and I’ll be there in New York. The event is from 6 to 9 pm, so look for a posting fairly late when I get back from the City. Sony has kept the secret so far, and I have no idea what will be announced.

By Branko Collin

Project Gutenberg present an advent calendar for 2007: twenty four books (presumably holiday themed) “to read to your children.” The idea of an advent calendar is to open one door per day (often leading to chocolates). That means you do not know what is behind a door until you have opened it, but alas, the project’s webmaster hasn’t gone so far as to recreate the secretive part of the concept: you can “open” any “door” of the calendar whenever you like.

Project Gutenberg have also got a Christmas Bookshelf. “Bookshelves” are gutenberg.org’s way of letting readers organize content, and if you haven’t been to the site for a while because you found it hard to find anything, I can advise you to try again and browse through the many bookshelves.

By David Rothman

Bookeen’s new Cybook will offer Mobipocket—in effect making more than 50,000 titles available, or far more more than the Sony Connect store now offers in its BBeB format. Nothing against Sony. This is just an illustration of what happens when eBabel prevails rather than a common standard, like the one on the way from the IDPF. The basic version of the machine is to sell for $350 and appear in September. Meanwhile here’s the official press release.

Paris, France – July 26, 2007 – Bookeen is proud to announce its new Generation 3 Cybook. Based on the latest groundbreaking Vizplex™ epaper technology from E Ink, this ebook reading device offers an impressive 6” screen showing off a 166 dpi resolution.

Bookeen’s new product looks stunningly thin: it is the size of a paperback, the thickness of a magazine, for a weight of only 6.1 ounces (174 g). It boasts an impressive battery life of 8,000 page flips, allowing for an average reading time of 1 month without recharging. (more…)

By David Rothman

Dear J.K.: I know you’re a pen-and-paper woman when you compose, not just a p-book-only reader. But some of your fans feel otherwise about E.

An illegal copy of your latest, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was just removed from the Photobucket Web site.

Meantime Publishers Lunch has picked up other news. “A Vancouver man says he found 495 pages worth of the new Harry Potter on a bit torrent file-sharing website, saved as jpg of photographed individual book pages.” Word of the bit-torrenting is spreading all over the Net. If you go by a Google News search, those are just two examples of the problem.

While you and your publishers can sue to shut down the pirates, wouldn’t the best anti-piracy precaution be legal copies online? Even if they came encumbered with obnoxious DRM, this would be better than no copies at all.

Potter fans even in Iran

J.K., I wish you could see all the traffic that the TeleBlog is getting from people looking for illegal copies. They won’t find them here, ever. But elsewhere? Definitely. If nothing else, keep in mind that you’ve got fans in many corners of the world who can’t just drop by the neighborhood Barnes & Noble. From Vietnam to Iran to China, the Warez-hunters love Potter. And with improved e-book technology, what’s now a minor problem could get much worse. (more…)

By David Rothman

Details from Macsimumnews.com.

By David Rothman

“Publishers Lunch has discovered metadata streams from Amazon that confirm listings of “Kindle Edition” offerings for a variety of books, newspapers and magazines–the first tangible signs of the company’s building e-reading initiative following the discovery of an FCC filing for the Kindle last September. Nearly all of the mentions we located are not live on the Amazon site itself, but are found in web services feeds that query the Amazon computers for data that’s posted on other sites. (Indeed, we found the first mention of a Kindle Edition through our own Amazoom tool, which brought up a Kindle match for Hill Harper’s Letters to a Young Brother.)” - PL.

The TeleRead take: Great detective work! Now, here’s the really interesting part, beyond PL’s belief that the Kindle e-book reader (ugly prototype shown here) will pop up in the fall. “Nearly all of the hardcovers and recent releases we found have ‘list prices’ of $16.99 or thereabouts–already lower than the hardcover prices–and the site further ‘discounts’ from a variety of list prices to an apparent standardized selling price of $9.99. This will naturally make people wonder if Amazon is trying to establish that price point as a common listing, as the closest they could come to a system akin to iTunes dollar-per-song model.”

Big question #1: What about the differences in lengths and production costs of books—all kinds of variables?

Question #2: I hope there won’t be any gotchas in terms of formats. Will Mobipocket work ok on the Kindle? And how long until the IDPF format works. It’s coming to Amazon, huh?

(Big thanks to Jane.)

By David Rothman

“When the new Gilbert library opens next month, it will be the first public library in the nation whose entire collection will be categorized without the Dewey Decimal Classification System, Maricopa County librarians say.” - Arizona Republic (via LibraryJournal).

Related: MP3 of chatcast featuring David Weinberger, author of Everything Is Miscellaneous. Also see Weinberger video. (more…)

By David Rothman

“Angered by Google’s attempts to copy their works, publishers have decided to strike back against the ad broker by stealing its technology. Late last week, at New York City’s BookExpo America, the CEO of Macmillan Publishers pilfered two laptops from a booth where Google was promoting its Book Search service, part of an effort to convert the world’s books into digital format.” - The Register. Also see item in Macmillan CEO Richard Charkin’s blog.

Update, 7:05 a.m., June 7: A Charkin rebuttal to TeleBlog commenters, plus a follow-up in his blog to the article in the Register. Please note that his beef is over certain aspects of the Google library project (”digitises…copyright books without permission and without payment”) rather than Google Book Search itself. GBS just happened to be a handy target.

By David Rothman

“Intel detailed plans Tuesday to team up with Asustek Computer, the world’s largest maker of computer motherboards, to make a notebook PC that would cost as little as $200 aimed at the education market in developing countries.” - Reuters via InformationWeek.

The TeleRead take: OK, so it’s clear now that the project is an absolute go, with Classmate being used as the brand name. While the Intel-Asustek machine will be more powerful, the $175 OLPC machine will offer a better screen for e-book reading—not to mention its ability to double as a tablet.

Related: Other articles via Google News. Also see OLPC machine vs. Intel Classmate: Which is better?

By Chris Meadows

The next edition of The Biblio File will be this Sunday, June 3rd, at 2 p.m. Eastern Time. We’ll talk for an hour or two about recent developments in the world of books and ebooks. Scheduled topics for discussion include

And callers are free to propose discussion of topics of interest to
them as well.

http://terrania.us/biblio/ to call in.
http://terrania.us/talkshoe/ for advice on how to do it.

Hope I’ll see you there!

By David Rothman

Did anyone notice OSoft CEO Mark Carey’s IDPF-related observation that “OCF support” is in Sony’s “future plans”? True? And if so will that pave the way for full support of the IDPF standards? I continue to be puzzled why Sony’s BBeB format exists here in the States except as a way to lock in customers. Anyone at Sony care to comment? Meanwhile remember all the tens of thousands of Mobipocket titles and the plans of Mobi’s owner, Amazon, to release an e-book reader. Can Sony’s e-book store ever catch up? Better for Sony to stop playing format games.