TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Ficbot’ Category

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

Buddy Holly’s widow threatened to use copyright law to kill a book by Peggy Sue Gerron—immortalized in the namesake song by the rock star killed in the plane crash of American Pie fame.

Maria Elena Holly felt the book would harm her husband’s reputation. A local newspaper, however, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, sided with Peggy Sue in an editorial in January. “We wrote on June 18 we would respect her more if she dropped the pretense she was trying to protect the name of her late husband and admitted she was trying to cash in for all the money she can get.”

The e-book angle

When I checked just now at least, the book was still alive on Amazon, and from afar, without knowing all the facts, I say, “Good.” There’s even an e-book angle here, given the potential of the medium for newsy books, without the delays that paper publication can bring; and the last thing we want is for copyright law to inhibit authors unfairly.

I hope the quality-to-trash ratio will be good. But that isn’t the issue here; rather, freedom of expression.

A TeleBlog angle, too

Meanwhile the Holly controversy has heated up right here in the TeleBlog. Defending Whatever Happened to Peggy Sue? is Jeffery Haas, who writes: “I’ve met and worked with Peggy Sue Gerron and I have a copy of the book in question. Nothing in the book is libelous and indeed any lawsuit will be dismissed. Most of all, the publication of this book will hardly tarnish Holly’s image. If anything it will shine some more light on what is essentially a story about a man whose complexity was seriously under-portrayed in his sanitized movie biopic.” Nope, I do know of his exact connection with Peggy Sue, but I like the spirit of his comments.

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By Ficbot

My eBookwise is a talented one-trick pony, but I wanted to do more than read. And yet I didn’t want to lug around a fragile, hefty notebook PC or spend big money on a subnotebook. Then I read of the Asus Eee PC, priced for an impulse buy even though it was a long way from a true $100 laptop. About time!

The $350 I paid for my shiny new 4GB Eee, just $50 more than the 2GB Surf model, was well worth it to me.

I had some fairly typical newbie issues while getting the EEE set up. But now that I’m getting more comfortable with its features and how to customize them, I am in love.

Setting up the Eee: Good to go, right out of the box

The EEE was ready to use out of the box. When I turned it on, I saw a window with tabs—work, play, Internet, settings and favorites. Each tab comes pre-set with large buttons. Click, and launch, it was that simple. I already knew most of these applications because the machine is built on an open-source Linux platform, and I had seen some of these programs on other devices: OpenOffice, FBReader, Tux Paint and a few of the games played exactly as on my Mac. I was up and running at once.

The tabs can be customized—to a point. Anything that’s already on there can be added to the favorites tab, but any major tweaking will involve mucking around with the Linux “terminal.” I keep hearing how flexible and customizable the Linux system is, and that may be true for advanced functions. But for the average user who is used to dragging an icon onto a taskbar—and voila, shortcut—putting path names into a “simpleui.rc” file from within the scary terminal mode will be a challenge. Is there really not an easier way? Of course there is. Just not in Linux! With that said, if you are happy with the setup that the Eee gives you, and you don’t want to add anything new, you really can be up and running in about two minutes.

Using the Eee: A snap on the whole, with Acrobat and FBReader included

The keyboard took a little getting used to because of its tiny size; I kept hitting the S when I meant A. I spent about half an hour playing with the included Tux Typing arcade game and it got me much more comfortable with the keyboard layout.

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By Ficbot

Are e-books are killing the print book as we know it? “True/False” or “Either/Or” won’t do here. No binary split, please! As I’ve said before, E and P can coexist.

Print is my choice for gift-giving, the reading of beloved keepsake favorites, foreign-language titles not available in e-versions, and specialty genres like cookbooks where I prefer to see the whole page at once.

What are some cases, though, where I might favor E? Below is my list, and I’d welcome hearing from other TeleBlog readers.

Putting a toddler to bed

I babysit for extra income and often find myself in this situation. The story has been read, the toddler is tucked in and drowsing, but I can’t leave the room until he’s completely sleeping or else the noise of my doing so will wake him up again.

At such times, where noise is perhaps an issue, but proper lighting is definitely a problem, my backlit eBookwise, which can be read legibly and without eyestrain even in total darkness, is a godsend. I can tuck in beside the baby, finish my chapter and hang tight until he’s out completely. My eBookwise an essential in my babysitting bag.

The subway

You’re on the subway, it’s rush hour, and the only thing standing between you and a faceplant into the nearest fellow commuter is a tiny strip of pole which you must sacrifice one of your hands to cling to. Even if you could manage a newspaper with one hand, there simply is not a big enough personal space bubble to allow you to turn the pages. A PDA, cell phone or e-book reader that you can hold in one hand is a wonderful thing.

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By David Rothman

Neil Gaiman’s American Gods wil be available for a month for viewing online, although, alas, it can’t be downloaded (HarperCollins page and Gaiman blog entry, via Mobile Read). It’s s-l-o-w browsing. Perhaps Harper would do better to make a downloadable copy available for a limited time. Even a DRMed copy would be better than the current arrangement.

Meanwhile TOR’s e-book giveaway continues, with Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin being the latest download available in PDF, HTML and Mobipocket. TOR says: “Within a day or so of sending us your address, you should receive an email with a download link for this week’s free book.” In addition, TOR will offer free wallpapers from “some of the best artists in science fiction and fantasy.”

Related: Gretchen Angelo’s Liberte, a free intro to French (via Ficbot’s freebie site). A Yale Ph.D. in French, she teaches the language and literature at California State University, and Ficbot praises the book as “complete and very polished-looking.” The TeleBlog draws its share of readers in France, and I’d welcome their opinions of the Angelo book. In honor of France and its people, perhaps the book can be made available not just as a PDF but also in the French-originated Mobipocket format—much easier to read on handhelds than the Adobe format is.

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By Ficbot

In the old days families watched just the big three or five TV networks—mass-appeal shows like The Love Boat—and that was it. Then the numbers started dropping, and people panicked. But why? Viewers hadn’t wandered far. Millions, for example, were watching cable, including the specialty networks now owned by—you guessed it—the same big networks. NBC Universal is now behind USA Networks, while Disney owns not just ABC but also ESPN.

Today many people are getting their TV fixes online; and, again, the big networks have shown themselves adept at getting a piece of the pie. In short, the viewers are still there. But you may need to advertise in two different spots if you want to hook both the young Web-oriented viewer and his more traditional mom, because they are different markets.

Same crossroad, same need for specialization

I think the book industry may be nearing the same crossroads that television came to. Numbers are down! Oh no! Nobody reads anymore! Or do they? Consider the following scenarios, all based on people I know:

1) An older person is not buying as many books for herself because she is retired now and trying to save her money. Is she lost as a customer? No. She dotes on her grandchild, and every year she buys him books for birthdays and holidays. Target some good kiddie-book marketing at older people, and you may earn back some of their book-buying dollars.

2) A young professional, trying to pay off her student loan, has been getting most of her fiction at the library these days. Is she lost as a customer? No. She’ll buy nearly any book she can find which relates to her developing career—and often, her boss will pay her back for them if she asks. Target some good professional and financial books in the trade journals and personal development mags, and not only will you get her money, you’ll get her employer’s money too.

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By David Rothman

Ficbot—check out her cogent reply to critics of Read an E-Book Week—has run across a gem within John Mark Ockerbloom’s Online Books Page site. It’s a link-rich list of works of winners of the Nobel, Pulitzer and Newbery prizes. In many cases the writings are free, especially for people outside the Bono-hobbled United States. Here’s the entry for Sinclair Lewis (photo):

1930: Sinclair Lewis (USA, 1885-1951) : English language books online

• Our Mr. Wrenn (1914)
• Main Street (1920)
• Babbitt (1922)
• Arrowsmith (1925: STILL COPYRIGHTED IN THE US)
• Dodsworth (1929: STILL COPYRIGHTED IN THE US)
• Cass Timberlane (1945: STILL COPYRIGHTED IN THE US)
• Kingsblood Royal (1947: STILL COPYRIGHTED IN THE US)

Notice? This isn’t just a list of books, but also, unwittingly, a policy statement—documenting the damage that copyright term extension has done to the study and enjoyment of literature in the United States. The Sonny Bono Act Copyright Term Extension Act has enriched heirs, not spurred the creation of new masterpieces. Let’s hope that Larry Lessig indeed runs for Congress and can make Bono an issue not just in his race but also the presidential one.

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By Ficbot

Critics of Read an E-Book Week may be missing the point a little. Why assume that “E. vs. P” is an “either or” scenario?

Everyone I know who buys e-books buys p-books, too, and lots of them. There are simply times they might favor one format over the other. For instance. I prefer p-books for cookbooks, health and wellness titles and beloved favorites that I may want to read again. But I would happily take an e-format—if the price is right and the DRM is not unreasonable—for a paperback bestseller I may read once and then get rid of. I also will buy print books when the title is intended as a gift for someone.

I’m not the only one who loves both E and P:

• My sister buys a lot of short stories on Fictionwise. This type of reading is often not available in print bookstores except in anthologies or collections. She likes being able to buy just one story if it catches her interest. Novels or longer works, however, she tends to get in p-form. Additionally, she has a child and gets all her kiddie books in print.
  
• A friend buys magazines such as Analog and Ellery Queen in e-form. These are not the type of magazine that employs fancy layouts or elaborate photo spreads, so they’re very well-suited to an e-format, and it is a cinch to backup his past issues without needing a second bookcase. There is potential here for more literary magazines (where the bulk of their items are just text) to go online!
  
• A lot of the stuff I read in university as a literature major is online now. Too bad it wasn’t then! I would have needed to buy or borrow the modern authors, of course, and I would have needed access to print versions for essay-writing since you need page numbers and line references for that. But if you have to read Oroonoko or Dombey and Son or Dr. Faustus for a course and don’t plan to write on it, you can save a ton by reading it in free e-book form.

That said, there are two arguments the anti-e folks make which, I think, fail to address the bigger picture:

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By Paul Biba

This was emailed to me by Ficbot and I know David extends his thanks:

By Ficbot

If there were only three things I could tell publishers who want to fully embrace a modern,e-friendly business model, it would be these three things: one, the technology needs to get simpler (see: my review of the ebookwise, which I love in spite of its quirks but which my mother would never manage unless someone else loaded all of the content on it for her); two, the selection of available titles needs to dramatically expand (see: the genre listings at any of the main ebook sites, which lean heavily to the romance and sci-fi at the exclusion of literary fiction, foreign language and other genres) and three, that the world wide wed is, surprise, populated by the whole wide world. It’s third third point that I want to address in this article, and I’ll start with a few examples:

1) Amazon Kindle. It’s the latest gizmo, a tad pricey, but widely praised. And…available only to Americans. I understand that there are some technical issues
regarding the accessibility of the built-in network which at the moment inhibits the Kindle’s use outside of the USA. But…well, they should have picked
another network, then. Or worked out the glitches before they sold the product. Because yeah, the whole wide world has a lot of people in it, no? A lot of
potential customers. It just boggles my mind that articles are coming out about how the Kindle has not led to a mass adoption of ebooks—how can it when
large chunks of the reading public can’t even buy the thing?

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By David Rothman

I’m boarding the 10:20 AmTrak from Northern Virginia to New York for my appearance at Tools for Change, the O’Reilly conference, where on Tuesday I’ll be on Steve Levy’s panel on e-book gizmos.

So why is my OLPC XO-1 100 percent loss-proof?

No mystery. I’m not taking my flagship reading device—lest I lose it, as one Kindle owner famously did. I know. This is sacrilege. E-reader gizmos are supposed to be for enjoyment. But how could I enjoy worrying? I love my XO too much to take risks. Anyone else feel the same about certain machines now owned—and why? Besides I normally use PDAs anyway when I’m outside the TeleBlog’s inner sanctum.

TX as an XO replacement for now

In place of my XO will be an old, reliable companion, my Palm TX, which I can easily fit in my pants pocket. The TX will be just the ticket for checking up on email, although I actually don’t know how much book reading I’ll do from it.

You see, I have p-copies of two related books begging for a comparison–Print Is Dead: Long Live the Digital Book by Jeff Gomez and The Book Is Dead: Long Live the Book, by Sherman Young. My sympathies to both writers. Both books came out several months ago, the latter originally in Australia; and I’m thinking it’s the old Time-Newsweek cover story thing—sheer coincidence. In fact, as I was plugging the hyperlink to Sherman’s blog a moment ago, I saw a TeleRead reference. Talk about nice synchronicity: thanks, Sherman. Point made.

Odds and ends:

• The writer’s strike here in the States is apparently almost over, but meanwhile to get a feel for The Issues at a cosmic level, check out  Fitzgerald vs. Hollywood in the New York Times Book Review, which quotes the author of The Great Gatsby and other masterpieces as saying: “Most writers look like writers whether they want to or not. It’s hard to say why.” So what about sci-fi, SF, whatever, authors? Wouldn’t a fair number of them fall into the geek category? Definitely not tweedy as a group. For that matter, in this multicultural America, isn’t the old Fitzgerald adage really bilge? Whether it’s clothes, hair, mien, whatever, it’s silly to generalize. Besides, if I recall correctly, which I might not, didn’t Fitzgerald himself say a writer could be many persons, and couldn’t that apply to the outside as well as the inside?
• Apologies to Ficbot: I ran out of time, and really did want to post your essay today.
• It’s possible I won’t be as posting as often as I usually do, since there are so many panels to take in at Tools of Change. If nothing else, however, I’ll spare you the Real Time Act. It’s a dirty job and someone else will have to do it.
• Big thanks to Paul Biba, a TeleBlog regular who will offer his own perspective on the conference.

About the photo: It’s from Wikipedia’s AmTrak article and isn’t of the train I’ll be on.

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By Ficbot

Now that I have settled in with my eBookwise e-book reader, I have started to think about future books for it. I have a good stash for the time being, but when I am ready to buy new stuff, what will I do?

Entry point number one will be Internet freebies, of course, from places like Munseys and Manybooks. There are so many classics I haven’t read, and so many trashy pulp fiction hits from yesteryear. But eBookwise and its parent company. Fictionwise, both have on-line stores which can be used with the device. Do I, as a reasonably tech-capable and fairly careful and educated consumer, plan to use these?

What “secure” means in Fictionwise Land

I’ll start with Fictionwise. I won’t buy secure e-books from it. In Fictionwise Land, “secure” means “only available in certain formats,” and most of the time, that means eReader. eReader files are not readable on the eBookwise. I can read them on my Dana, if I have it with me, or on my MacBook, but that’s it. I like that you can download them again if you need to down the road, and eReader seems like the best of the DRM schemes, if one must suffer with DRM. But I enjoy reading on the eBookwise and will try not to buy something that can’t go on there.

How about the non-secure Fictionwise titles? I would buy those, absolutely. Non-secure means you can download them in your pick of formats, and one of those is the eBookwise-compatible .rb format. I would but at Fictionwise before I would buy at eBookwise because with Fictionwise multi-format titles, I would have the option to download a backup directly to my computer. eBookwise does not allow this capability; its on-line bookshelf only allows you to transfer onto your device. If you want to back up those files, you need to copy them off your memory card, and even then, that file is in the proprietary .imp format and not readable on other devices the way .rb files are. So, if the book I want is available at both sites, I would buy from Fictionwise.

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