TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Garson O.’ Category

By Paul Biba

TorrentFreak reports:

The Pirate Bay has reached yet another milestone. Today, they track more than 20 million unique peers for the first time since the site was launched. It is estimated that the Pirate Bay tracks more than half of all BitTorrent users at any given point in time. By November 2007, The Pirate Bay was tracking around 6 million peers, up from ‘just’ 3 million the year before. The growth has been amazing, and it doesn’t seem that it is going to slow down anytime soon. One of the reasons it was possible for the site to handle this record number of peers are the constant improvements on the software and hardware side. New servers are added regularly, budget permitting, and UDP trackers were added to all the torrents on the site, which are less resource consuming than TCP trackers.

This is what’s called reality. It is generally not a good practice to ignore reality, deny reality, or otherwise pretend that what’s real doesn’t exist. Publishers (and the music industry) like to do this, however. It may be one of the major forms of mass delusion ripe today.

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By Paul Biba

According to the Harvard Crimson, Harvard University does not want to participate in the copyright settlement agreed to by Google and publishers. The Crimson reports that

in a letter released to library staff, University Library Director Robert C. Darnton ’60 said that uncertainties in the settlement made it impossible for HUL to participate.

“As we understand it, the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher education community and by patrons of public libraries,” Darnton wrote.

“The settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable,” Darnton added, “especially since the subscription services will have no real competitors [and] the scope of access to the digitized books is in various ways both limited and uncertain.”

He also said that the quality of the books may be a cause for concern, as “in many cases will be missing photographs, illustrations and other pictorial works, which will reduce their utility for research and education.”

Thanks to Garson O’Toole for the heads up.

By Garson O'Toole

The official Google blog contains an announcement of a new strategy for building a more comprehensive index of the text on the web.

A substantive fraction of Web documents are embodied in PDF (Portable Document Format) files that consist of images in series. These files do not contain text directly. Instead, they contain pictures of text, and any search engine that wants to include these documents in its search results must first perform additional processing to extract the text.

Many of the PDF files that use images for each page were not “born digital.” Often a paper book, manual, or report was converted into an electronic document by scanning each individual page and combining the results to yield a PDF file.

Product Manager Evin Levey discusses the technique Google is now using to improve its search capability:

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By Garson O'Toole

Color e-paper will debut in a display from Qualcomm reports Technology Review in their November issue. The publication uses a curious definition for “e-paper”. They say it means the display “has no backlighting and thus can be read in direct sunlight.” The display consists of “two layers of a reflective material”. “Some wavelengths of light bounce off the first layer; some pass through and bounce off the second. Interference between the two beams creates the color, and electrostatic forces control the distance between the layers.” So this technology appears to differ from the methods pioneered by E Ink based on this short description. (Update November 2: Qualcomm has a web page titled
“How it Works” about the display technology it calls mirasol.)

The display is small and it is part of an MP3 player and not an e-book. Being waterproof would certainly be a nice property for an e-book reader. Author Margaret Atwood has said that you cannot read an e-book in the bath. Sara Nelson, editor of Publishers Weekly has also been dubious about bathtub e-reading. Now that there is waterproof color e-paper display in an MP3 player perhaps an e-book might be next.

Epson is sending out samples this month of a new transflective LCD display for indoor and outdoor use according to Engadget and TechOn. “The new transflective LCDs use a transmissive mode with light provided by a backlight in darker environments, while outdoors and in other well-lit locations their reflective mode harnesses the surrounding light, reducing backlight power consumption” says the Epson press release.

The OLPC is color and it can also be read in direct sunlight; however, the display changes its appearance to black and white when it is reflecting light.

By Garson O'Toole

Bill McCoy, the General Manager of ePublishing at Adobe, wrote an influential blog posting that catapulted the term “social DRM” into wide use. He said

“For eBooks, I really like the ’social DRM’ approach of The Pragmatic Programmers, who ’stamp’ PDF eBooks with a ‘For the Exclusive Use of …’ and the name of the purchaser.”

Traditional Digital Rights Management (DRM) requires implementing technological obstacles that prevent the purchaser of a digital object from copying, displaying, and accessing the object except in limited ways. These obstacles can cause endless aggravation to the consumer. For example a Kindle format e-book cannot be read on an iPhone or iPod touch even though the hardware sales of the latter Apple devices dwarf the sales of the Amazon device.

I do not know if McCoy invented the term “social DRM”, but his blog post certainly helped to popularize the term. The article facilitated an important dialogue about e-book security, and this post is not meant to be discourteous. However at this stage of the conversation I suggest that the term “social DRM” should be replaced by “digital watermark” or simply “watermark”.

Physical watermarks are well known for paper stationery and the idea has been expanded to apply to digital pictures, music, video and now e-books. For additional background there is a useful Wikipedia entry on the term digital watermarking. Here are some reasons for the switch:

• The term “social DRM” is confusing because it does not really refer to an “access control” technology. Instead it refers to a technology for “tracking” and “display”.
• The term “social DRM” verges on the oxymoronic since “social” is nearly the opposite of “DRM” in the context of e-book “security”.
• Agitating against DRM while simultaneously being open to “social DRM” is terminologically confusing.
• The existing term “digital watermark” or “watermark” can typically be substituted for “social DRM” and the meaning can be preserved.
• There is a rich preexisting vocabulary for watermark description and classification such as “perceptible” and “imperceptible”; “fragile”, “semi-fragile”, and “robust”.

I was originally planning to provide a cluster of suggestions to replace or supplement the term “social DRM” such as: customize, tailor, imprint, stamp, inscribe, personalize, endorse, bookplate, dedication page, insert page, fingerprint, hash, and signature. But the easiest approach appears to be adopting the expression watermark.

Here is an example of how to use the term “watermark”: I wish Amazon would use a standard open format without DRM for its Kindle e-books. If Amazon deems some security measure necessary then why not try watermarks. With watermarks and an open convertible format I could still read my Kindle format e-book on my cell phone, computer, or dedicated e-book hardware (with conversion if needed). The catalog of e-books for the Kindle is extensive with Amazon claiming “more than 190,000 books available, including more than 109 of 112 current New York Times Best Sellers.” Please do not lock up this catalog by coercively tethering e-books to the Kindle hardware using DRM.

The landscape image above is a fragment of a picture in the Flickr photostream of Shiny Things. I have superimposed a watermark image of the word watermark. Some rights reserved.

By Garson O'Toole

A Financial Times (FT) journalist believes that Oprah is likely to endorse the Kindle on her show on Friday. The front page of the Amazon store displays a teaser video featuring the talk show star; however, it is modified so that the gadget Oprah holds in her hand is hidden behind a superimposed light burst. The video ends with the injunction, “Watch the Oprah show, then order yours at Amazon.com.” FT says:

Kindle sales appear likely to get a significant boost on Friday, with talk-show megastar Oprah Winfrey apparently about to endorse Amazon’s digital book reader.

Amazon is featuring a trailer of her Friday show on its site with Oprah talking about her new “favourite gadget” which is “life changing for me”. From a side-on view, the product she is talking about looks very like a Kindle.

In an email to subscribers, Amazon says its founder Jeff Bezos will be appearing on Oprah to talk to her about her new favourite gadget.

Earlier Mike Cane pointed out the upcoming Oprah endorsement in a comment on TeleRead.

Related: GigaOM item on the New York Times website on the expected endorsement.

By Garson O'Toole

[Editors note:  any mistakes in this post are the editor's, not the contributor's.  PB] Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of One Laptop per Child (OLPC), originally wished to provide inexpensive laptops to poor children in developing countries. That seminal vision is now being realized in places like the rural community of Gaire in Papua New Guinea where the deployment of laptops is attested to by the canonical images of eager children gazing upon their new devices.

Yet from the beginning some observers wanted low-priced individually-allocated laptops distributed in developed countries too. One commentator said “To have the United States be the only country that’s not in the OLPC agenda would be kind of ridiculous.” Indeed those were the words of Nicholas Negroponte, himself.

So we now have pictures of engrossed young students at the elementary school P.S. 5 in the Bronx in New York City. The blog OLPC in NYC is documenting the project and it says that in the pilot school, P.S. 5, “every child will receive an XO laptop”. Teaching Matters, an educational non-profit, is donating XO laptops to selected NYC classrooms. Laptops have already been placed in the Kappa IV middle school in NYC as reported in OLPC News.

School laptop programs have sometimes endured resistance, criticism and abandonment. For this project specific goals have been outlined:

The purpose of the pilot is two-fold. First, we want to determine if the OLPC device can significantly lower the cost of technology access for schools by lowering the total cost of ownership (hardware and ongoing maintenance.) Second, we will test this environment in conjunction with a curriculum designed to improve teacher practice in the teaching of writing. The curriculum has been designed to take best advantage of one to one computing environments.

The NYC laptop story was covered in the New York Sun. The city of Birmingham, Alabama, also has a pilot program with XO laptops.

By Garson O'Toole

Mary Lou Jepsen is the designer of the remarkable display screen of the OLPC (One laptop per child). I have walked with an OLPC from the interior of a house into a sunny yard, and the experience is remarkable. The LCD (liquid-crystal display) image of the laptop is transformed from a full-color transmissive display while indoors into a black-and-white reflective display while outdoors in sunlight. In a new short interview appearing in Technology Review the innovator Jepsen is asked about the San Francisco startup company she co-founded earlier this year called Pixel Qi (pronounced “Pixel Chee”).

Jepsen says that displays from Pixel Qi will be on the market next year. When asked to provide details about new products she replied, “We can’t announce our customers or products yet, but you’ll see these displays in low-power laptops.” When asked to look ahead two years she suggested that her company is aiming directly at the e-book market:

I see an improvement in the readability of screens. The number-one reason why people print a page is resolution, and the number-two reason is that they don’t want to stare into a flashlight. Ultimately, in a year or two, we’d like to have a lawyer’s monitor or an editor’s monitor–some readable screen that’s just for reading. When I started meeting kids in the developing world and seeing that their schools were outside, we saw the opportunity to make screens more readable in sunlight. It’s ironic that the poorest kids in the world are getting the best screen technology through OLPC, but soon the rich people in the rest of the world are going to have access to it too.

By Garson O'Toole

Moderator’s note: Garson’s essay is timely, given that Publishers Weekly is zapping online archives of E-Book Report and two other blogs. E-text is like Silly Putty—endlessly malleable. You can even go beyond that and delete it.  - D.R.

While listening to an audiobook of a well-known multi-award winning novel I was surprised to find that the story seemed different from the story that I read many years ago. Major events in the book that critically defined the mental state of the main character had somehow been significantly altered. I wondered how my memory of the plot and settings could be so faulty, and I was surprised when I discovered the truth. The text of the book had been altered substantially by the author, and the narrator was reading the revised novel.

Curious provisos on cover

The Amazon Web site displays the cover of the book which is emblazoned with the words “Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel of the Year”. But the cover has another curious proviso, “The Author’s Preferred Edition of the Seminal SF Classic for All Times”. However these two statements are contradictory. The prestigious awards were not given to the “author’s preferred edition”. The awards were given to the edition that was actually originally published. The science fiction fans who voted for the Hugo award might have loved or hated the author’s preferred edition, but that is impossible to say because they never saw it before the balloting had ended.

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By Garson O'Toole

“When will publishers and consumers accept e-books on a wide scale?” is a question that many readers of this blog have probably entertained. Some powerful companies have already unabashedly embraced e-books. Perhaps you think I am referring to Amazon or Sony? But the relationships Jeff Bezos and Howard Stringer have with e-books are mere dalliances compared to the liaisons of some other e-book swains. I am referring to companies that love e-books so passionately that they have made them mandatory.

If you have purchased a gadget in recent years such as an automobile navigator, or a cell phone then you probably know about these compulsory e-books commonly called “User Manuals”. I recently purchased a Garmin Vehicle GPS that came with a tiny paper booklet giving minimal instructions. The bulk of the documentation was contained on a computer disk in the form of a PDF file, i.e., Garmin supplied me with a manual in e-book form.

Several other recent purchases did not provide paper manuals. An LG Chocolate cell phone and a Lacie external hard drive were packaged with disks that contained e-book manuals in PDF format. When I bought Nero burner software online the documentation was available only as a download. Even the documentation for a Scooby Doo computer game consisted of a short e-book downloadable from a website.

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By David Rothman

“Meanwhile, tweaks to the particles, solution, and electronics have boosted the refresh rate from one frame per second in current displays to 30 frames per second in a ‘video ink’ prototype. E Ink is working with partners to develop flexible transistors for use in color displays; eventually, such displays could even roll up. Commercialization is still a few years off, but ‘you can imagine a USA Today weather chart where clouds are actually moving,’ says Russ Wilcox, CEO of E Ink.” - MIT Technology Review (thanks Garson)/

The TeleRead take: This is in line with previous predictions, but welcome news just the same.

Related: L.G. Philips LCD unrolls 14-inch color e-paper display, from PC World.

By Garson O'Toole

Moderator’s note: How timely. Bryan Berry with the One Laptop Per Child K-12 project in Nepal, whom I met an an OLPC meeting last night, confirmed to me that shared annotations would be most welcome over there. Annotations are not just for high-level academia. - D.R.

Lexicon Urthus by Michael Andre-Driussi is an out-of-print, expensive, and difficult to obtain book. Powell’s Books, the famous book emporium, will sell it to you, but be prepared to pay $250. Amazon’s prices range from $119 to $284 for a collectible editon.

What does this book contain that would entice buyers to pay so much? The text consists primarily of annotations and explications for a classic series of fantasy books. The Book of the New Sun is the multi-volume magnum opus of Gene Wolfe who is the winner of World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. The opus consists of four volumes and a coda that are intricately imagined and dense with allegory and allusion. The work ingeniously combines fantasy and science fiction by following the dictum of Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The erudite vocabulary of the series is hard to decode even by word mavens who revel in archaisms and obscurity. Yet this description incorrectly implies that the books are impenetrable.

In fact, the book series can be read as a long adventure novel, and the difficult words can typically be given useable meanings from context. Lexicon Urthus is a book for readers who want to delve more deeply into Gene Wolfe’s constructed world. It is a dictionary of words and phrases that appear in The Book of the New Sun, i.e., the kind of information that might appear as annotations in an electronic version of the text. The marketplace clearly reflects the high value that many readers place on artfully compiled collections of annotations.

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