TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Humayun Kabir’ Category

By Hadrien Gardeur, Co-Founder of Feedbooks

We’ve officially released a new companion software for Feedbooks users with Windows: News Stand.

Thanks to this software you’ll be able to automatically synchronize your subscriptions (RSS feeds, newspapers) to your favorite reading device.

See Help page. Download latest version here.

Moderator’s note: I’ll give it a try, Hadrien. Sounds intriguing. - D.R.

By David Rothman

Amazon, not another news site, forced Humayun Kabir’s old Kindle News to give up the domain name of kindlenews.info.

The giant bookseller e-mailed the New Zealander that a site serving as an Amazon affiliate could not use the sacred Kindle name in its domain. Humayun’s site, shown in an early Blogspot incarnation, will now be called e-BOOKvine.com. 

Humayun tells me he “decided to transfer the domain to Amazon” because “otherwise they’ll cancel my account.” I’d agree with Amazon when the possibility of confusion exists, but no one could have mistaken Kindle News for an official Amazon operation—not with all the outspoken writings on such issues as eBabel and the company’s DRM games.

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By Humayun Kabir

Can you print an e-book from Kindle when it’s connected to your desktop machine with USB? In general, no, you can’t—but you can do so by copying text in “My Clippings.” Here’s how:

• First, you need to highlight the text you want to copy while reading a book on the Kindle. You’ll see a box around the highlighted text. This will copy the text to a file on the Kindle in My Clippings.
• Now connect your Kindle to your computer through the USB, and copy the My Clippings file to your computer.
• Open the file and print it.

Of course, this way you can’t print the whole book. You have to do it page by page. And for sure, this isn’t convenient. So what can you do? You can’t do anything unless there is some hack by someone. Now the question is, Do you really want to print an e-book that you read on Kindle? Should we have the privilege to do so?

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By David Rothman

The Kindle is catnip for many new e-book fans . But face it, Amazon at its worst can be a mean, bossy company—as shown by a greedy insistence on a new Kindle format. Not to mention its being able to snoop inside your K machine to see if you’re a good boy complying with the terms of service.

So could Jeff Bezos’ people be the ones who used trademark law to scare the Kindle News site into changing its domain to e-BOOKVine.com? Or was it a rival news site?

That’s right. When I accessed kindlenews.info just now, I was redirected to e-BOOKVine.com. The redirect page said, “Due to trademark issues with kindle, we can’t run this webside with our domain name anymore.” See screenshot of the notice. Image above is of the site as hosted on Blogspot on Nov. 25—the Google cache shows only the redirect.

I don’t know the details and will be querying the New Zealand-based Humayun Kabir—whose work in edited form appears in the TeleBlog, with his permission—to see what happened and to obtain a copy of any possible correspondence. Was it fear of Amazon or an actual threat? Or was a rival Kindle news site responsible for the change? Probably not.

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By Humayun Kabir

The Kindle E-Book and Amazon blog has charted estimates of the average Kindle arrival times associated with order dates. The numbers come from this thread within the Amazon Kindle forum pages: Where do you live, when did you order, and when did it arrive?

“One takeaway,” the blog says, “is that if you’re buying a Kindle you might as well order an Amazon Kindle now since it takes approximately six weeks to arrive. The other big takeaways are:

1. It’ll take approximately between 35 and 50 days to get your Kindle.

2. The median is around 40-44 days so 6 weeks approximately.

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By Humayun Kabir

Igor Skochinsky is the reverse engineer guy who hacked the file system of the Kindle, and discovered hidden features that Aamazon didn’t want to reveal. He also wrote a program to generate Mobipocket PIDs from Kindle Serial Numbers so that you can read your previously purchased Mobipocket e-books on the Kindle. The program is freely available from his blog. Igor plans to work on the Kindle further, and later, on Sony reader. Here is his short interview with Kindle News:

Humayun Kabir: Why did you decide to hack or reverse engineer the Kindle?

Igor Skochinksy: I like to get inside of hardware and software to see how it works. Also, in this case I wanted to see how user content and user applications can be added to the Kindle.

HK: From your own experience do you think the Kindle is the most closed or protected system?

Igor: It is closed, but not that much (you can load some user content after all), and protection is not very strong (Sony Reader or Apple iPhone are much better protected).

HK: Is there any fundamental difference between Mobipocket and Kindle formats? If so, what kind of?

Igor: The .azw format is exactly the same as Mobipocket.

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By David Rothman

Quick! Who are the six biggest suppliers for Amazon’s Kindle e-book store, which has 90,000+ titles (books and otherwise)? According to Kindle News, the companies are:

• Tayor and Francis: 14,976 titles.
• Springer: 12,640.
• The public domain: 7,380.
• Harper Collins Ebooks: 3,231.
• Fictionwise: 2,130.
• Oxford University Press: 2,021.

Not as much representation as you’d expect from, say, Random House or Simon & Schuster, eh? Read Kindle News’ full post for more names and stats. I’m delighted to see this breakdown. Thanks to KN’s Humayun Kabir! Gang, what does it mean when Jeff Bezos would love to make the Kindle the norm for reading public domain books—and is DRMing them to the gills? Or when heavily academic and scientific publishers make up such a hefty chunk of the Kindle list?

Meanwhile I wonder if many books from brand-name publishers might be on Amazon but not show up in the study because of connections through distributors. I don’t know. Kindle News puts the number of Kindle books from Wiley at just 105. But Joe Wikert, a Wiley exec who writes the Kindleville blog, says in a comment that the number is much higher.

By Humayun Kabir

Is Amazon going to open the Kindle platform in near future? The answer is probably “NO.” We consumers lack the ability to get the inside information, but we can guess that the decision to make the Kindle a closed platform was done by Amazon itself, not publishers. Book publishers might have encouraged Amazon to use DRMed. But does DRM per se have anything to do with a closed system? NO. Adobe’s Bill McCoy has recently written:

Kindle is far more closed even than iPod, which started out and have remained primarily players for MP3s, easily made from any audio CD. While Kindle supports a couple of non-DRM publication formats (unfortunately not yet PDF or EPUB), there’s almost no supply of non-DRM commercial content, a situation unlikely to change any time soon.

So what’s ahead? Yes, the Kindle is far more closed than iPod, but far less sophisticated in terms of both hardware and software design. iPhone/iPodTouch has already been jailbroken for third-party programs, but did it hurt Apple? No, not at all. Apple couldn’t even win in the “cat and mouse” game with the hackers. Can’t we expect the same thing with the Kindle? It’ll happen in a month or two. The ability to read more content in different formats is more likely to increase the popularity of the Kindle. Amazon should step forward to open the device as a way to handle more diverse formats, as the readers want, rather than dictating the readers what the company insists on.

Here are some suggestions that Amazon can follow immediately:

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By Humayun Kabir

Moderator’s note: Welcome to our latest TeleBlog contributor, Dr. Humayun Kabir of Kindle News! Humayun does not own a Kindle but will be getting one—and for the present article, he has much better qualifications, as a Senior Lecturer in Finance, at Massey University in New Zealand). Yes, I’ll be asking Amazon for its side. In fairness to Amazon, I have heard that the Kindle is making publishers more sensitive to geographically related copyright issues. Still, could that be used to justify the higher prices of Mobipocket e-books and fully explain the gap? I doubt it. Please note one other possible factor; publishers, too, not just retailers like Amazon, can influence the prices of p-books. But I still agree with Humayun’s main premise—that Amazon is forcing customers of its Mobi store to subsidize the Kindle. Also, how about independent retailers relying on the Mobi format and having to drop their e-book prices to compete? - D.R.

Amazon has no problem selling p-books around the world; does it have one in case of e-books? Not exactly. The company is selling e-books worldwide through its Mobipocket.com store. Then again, Amazon is reluctant to sell Kindle editions to people outside the States. If there were any issue with geographic copyright, that should equally apply to Mobipocket e-books. So what’s the story here, and what is the pricing angle?

In search of answers, I compiled some price records of a few New York Times best-sellers from Amazon and Mobipocket Web sites. You can see in the table that the Kindle-edition price is $9.99 for all 20 books. The print edition prices are the ones at which Amazon selling p-books word-wide.

Let’s first compare the Mobipocket and print prices. The Mobi prices are always higher except one, and the differences go as high as $15.75. For an e-book you’re paying more than for print? When comparing with Kindle-edition prices, the difference goes up as high as $25 more than for a p-book. If you want to buy all 20 books in Mobi format, it costs you $367.48, which is $88.60 higher than the cost of the print editions and $167.68 higher than the cost of the Kindle editions. As a Kindle owner you pay 40 percent less than what you pay for print edition. For Mobi you expect to pay low as well, though it might not be as low as what you pay for Kindle editions, but you actually end up paying 24 percent higher over the print edition, and 84 percent higher over the Kindle edition.

After knowing this, how do you feel as a Kindle owner or as any other e-book device owner that can read at least nonDRMed Mobipocket format? If you’re an e-book fan and own a Kindle you save 84 percent because you’re not using Mobi format [moderator's note: the Kindle reads only nonDRMed Mobi - D.R.]. For that, you have to live in the States. If you read heavily and buy any other device, just give up, and start saving toward a $399 Kindle. If you’re not in the USA, go to hell! (more…)