TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘iPhone and Touch iPod’ Category

By a TeleBlog Contributor

Press release, slightly edited, appears below. Also see earlier item.

Readdle announces its plans to release a native iPhone application for storing and reading office documents and eBooks on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Readdle is a Web-based application for transfering, organizing and viewing documents on the iPhone and iPod Touch. The upcoming iPhone application will extend service functionality, ensuring seamless storage of files on the device and viewing them with no live Internet connection. The document viewing functionality will feature page-by-page reading, adding bookmarks to the text, iPhone optimized PDF rendering and other options.

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By David Rothman

Science fiction and classics are easily among the more popular genres dear to TeleBlog readers. Could this mix be more than just the result of SF’s appeal to our smart, tech-loving regulars who, along the way, frugally enjoy their free classics?

Might SF works reflect more of the spirit of old classics than modern literature does, regardless of criticisms of the prose of Asimov-style writers?

Often, in works such as Isaac Asimov’s, we see less emphasis on character than on action, ideas and interesting situations, if you go by the opinions of many a critic. And even though many female SF fans belie the usual genre stereotypes, most readers of SF are men—perhaps for those very reasons.

TeleBlog survey: Seventy-six percent went for sci-fi

No, this isn’t to say that SF fans ignore other genres such as thrillers, or completely diss modern award-winning literature, even if I suspect SF is a big component within the prestige category. But tellingly, in our recent TeleRead blog survey, 76 percent of the participants listed “sci fi/speculative fiction” among the genres they’d browse in a bookstore if they had an hour to kill. Thirty-three percent went for “classics/public domain.” Just 11 percent mentioned romance/erotic—the very favorites of Jane’s DearAuthor audience.

What does this mean for e-publishers? If they want to reach men fitting the SF/tech/classics pattern, they do well to advertise on sites such as Manybooks.net and Feedbooks. While economy-minded, pub domain fans can be won over with the right titles. The money is there to spend. Another Teleblog survey, in June 2007 revealed that 53 percent of the participants said they planned to buy an iPhone. Even more significantly, as Robert Nagle observed, “the huge number of people who bought 20+ books and e-books per year offers some hope for publishing.” In other words, all that frugal reading of free classics doesn’t interfere with purchases of books.

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By Paul Biba

I was in New York City today and took a shot of this iPhone sign with my iPhone. Stores like this are cropping up all over the city. It just testifies to the incredible demand for the iPhone. If you can’t read the sign it says, “Apple iPhones Unlocked In Stock.”

Such sights made me think about e-books and the relative lack of demand for them. Is it DRM, is it eBabel, is it expensive readers—just what is keeping the demand down? Clearly, as the iPhone shows, if consumers want something, they will demand it and get it. I see nothing like this demand for e-books. Is is just us techies who want them? Does the public even know about them? Do they really want them? I don’t have any answers, but I found the iPhone signs pretty depressing in that regard.

Just how do we get this thing rolling? If the iPhone shows anything it seems to me that this whole thing won’t take off until some really savvy marketing wiz takes it on - Sony and Amazon don’t seem to have cut the mustard in this regard. Why not? Or is it that e-books are only a niche product?

Moderator: See Making Social DRM work for e-books—with maximum privacy protection, as well as Library books you can KEEP forever—and other ideas to help public libraries survive the digital era. - D.R.

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By David Rothman

“In the age of the iPhone it is the paperback, not the hardback, that seems most under threat. Between my passion for” books from PS Publishing “and my lovely iPhone, I have barely touched a paperback in months. The part of me that loves books—that wants to own them, or lend them to friends, or give them as gifts—is far more satisfied by a quality hardback than a cheap paperback.” - Don’t abandon hardbacks, by Damien G. Walter, in the Guardian.

The TeleRead take: Is there such a thing as a “hardback visage”? Walter, now working on a novel under a grant from Arts Council England, has it. Is his grim black-and-white photograph part of a rehearsal for a hardback dust jacket? That aside, I’d agree with him and Ficbot that different media would be appropriate for different circumstances. What a pleasing cover from PS for a reissue of Random Walk, a reissue of a Lawrence Block mystery! Click on the image for a more detailed view.

Where I might disagree with Walter: How keepable a p-book is shouldn’t just depend on “hard” or “soft.” What about the quality of the writing, the cover, typography and the rest? 

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By David Rothman

Google wanted an edge on the iPhone (left photo).

So it’s backing the open Android platform of the 34-company Open Handset Alliance.

Why the devil should Google break into phone hardware when it can leverage the manufacturing and marketing savvy of the LG Group, Samsung and others?

Now, here’s another standards-related idea. Google should offer full-strength support of the IDPF’s .epub standard and encourage other members of the Open Handset Alliance to do the same. It would be silly, sily, sily for Google to follow Amazon’s Kindle example and saddle e-bookdom with a new member of the Tower of eBabel.

Heeding the howls of eBabel victims

Google likes to sell itself as a do-no-evil kind of corporation, in which case it should heed the howls from readers, publishers, retailers and librarians who have been caught up in the eBabel mess—as documented by the MCLC Library Tech Talk blog in the Phoenix area. The OverDrive e-library service, for example, can work with certain PDAs and Smartphones but not with the Kindle reader, and ultimately even the phone users suffer, since eBabel costs money and thus reduces the range of books online.

Despite all the current Kindle ballyhoo, coming not that long after the mass media told us that Sony would provide the solution, cellphones will most likely be the real platform for e-books in time. Rollout E Ink displays or similar technologies will eventually take over—allowing even phones to sport six-inch displays. Google’s hardware friends could enjoy a head start in the phone market if they looked ahead, -not to mention the contributions they could make to literacy, since phones are far, far more ubiquitous than dedicated e-reading devices and thus lend themselves better to the economies of mass production.

Already coming to Android: .epub-capable FBReader

So now’s the time to think strategically—and tactically, too. It turns out that FBReader, a very good open source program, can already read .epub on the Android platform or at least will be able to in the near future—see mock screenshots of a Java version. In fact, I’ll reproduce a shot here. CSS support isn’t available yet in current FBReader versions, but that should come in time. In Google’s pace I’d encourage the developers of FBReader and other open source programs to come up with advanced apps that could display e-books in a nice, reflowable format that didn’t require the owners of small-screen machines to constantly keep scrolling from left to right, PDF fashion, or suffer other inconveniences.

Along the way, Google should encourage publishers to experiment with social DRM, through which people’s names are embedded into books to discourage piracy—as opposed to the current encrypted-related shackles, which tend to be company-specific.

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By David Rothman

E-books may get a boost if more booksellers follow Borders’ recent move to display more books with covers facing out. The number of titles at the chains superstores will decline five or ten percent, according to the Wall Street Journal. Notice the photo from a Neil Gaiman book signing at Borders? Most of the books in the background are facing spine out, not cover out.

Could Borders’ plans actually be good news in the long run for small publishers, which may suffer the most right now? It sends a message to them of the need to go E. Of course, if they go out of business due to the here-and-now crunch, we can’t be so optimistic. And what about the small publishers trying to both E and P? In that sense, the news from Borders could be better. See Liden Quillen’s Twilight Times Books: Bridging the gap between E and P.

Related: Borders to reduce inventory, show more book covers, from Jason Marcuson, a national account manager at John Wiley & Sons, via Mike Cane.

And speaking of Mike: He finds that the iPod Touch browser isn’t as good as the iPhone’s.

Photo credit: CC-licensed image from Icelight on Flickr.

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By David Rothman

“Though we’ve seen some entertaining descriptions and demonstrations of how it could work, no coder has managed to fulfill perhaps the most requested gap on the iPhone, Copy and Paste functionality—until now. Preston Monroe has developed a bookmarklet that delivers the ability to copy and paste within Safari on the iPhone with surprisingly few limitations.  Dubbed iCopy this bookmarklet can copy paragraphs of text and URLs from Safari and paste the information back into Safari or into email messages.” - iPhone Atlas, via Mike Cane. Larger video here.

Also in the fun-with-tech department: The best laptops under $1,000, in PC World, and The New Two-Laptop Minimum, in Mike Elgan’s Computerworld blog.

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By Paul Biba

We have just recovered from three days without power after the huge windstorms that rocked New Jersey over the weekend. This meant no computer and I kept my iPhone use to a minimum as I had no easy way to recharge it. (Also meant no heat, lights, water, bathrooms, etc. - not a pleasant time).

When the power came back I booted up and went to Bloglines and found, of course, a huge number of RSS feeds to go through. I have 130 feeds in Bloglines and that’s a lot to check if I’ve been off the net for a while. I had the same problem when I came back from California after a 5 day vacation.

I found that in both instances I only ended up checking a few favorite feeds and then marked all the others as read. Without any prompting from a list I found that I checked the same feeds both times, so I thought I would share them with you as they seem to be my favorites. I hope you find some of them of interest:

Bookofjoe
Ars Technica
Laptop Mag
MobileRead
Mobile Tech Review
Palm-Mac
TeleRead
The Unofficial Apple Weblog
The Gadgeteer
Dans Data
Peter Watts’ Blog
How to Spot a Psychopath

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By David Rothman

ZappTek’s iPresent It, just out with a new version, 2.3, is a way to read e-books if you don’t want to be a bad boy and jailbreak your iPhone or iPod touch.

iPresent, a slideshow utility, turns your book into a picture gallery, in effect—one page per image. Use swipes to change pages. “It works remarkably well,” reports Jason Etheridge, a TeleBlog reader who tried it with his iPod touch. Among other things, you can convert PDFs to the photo format. And yes, iPresent It also works with other iPods, as the photo suggests. More details here, including tech requirements.

Related: SF author Michael Stackpole’s writeup on iPresent, the ZappTek home page and news and ordering info on iPresent It.

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By David Rothman

Sun will put a Java Virtual Machine on the iPhone, according to InfoWorld,  and meanwhile, via MacRumors.com, I notice that among the sample Java apps is the Libris eBook Reader.

Yes, as Mike Cane and others keep observing, questions exist about whether the Software Development Kit will indeed allow e-book apps.

But ideally Apple can work things out with Sun, as well as open source folks at the grassroots level. Libris already runs on various phones from Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung, among others.

The good and the bad

Good news about Libris: “Libris reads books in PalmDoc, unsecure eReader, plain text, and our own Libris formats [whoops: eBabel alert!]. Books in PalmDoc format are available from www.fictionwise.com (and other places), or you can produce your own books from text or HTML using the included MakeLibris tool. Its easy to convert books from sources such as Project Gutenberg.” See tech specs.

Bad news, perhaps: I tried Libris on my desktop and was less than impressed with the quality of the view. But who knows what the real thing would look like on the iPhone.

Price of commercial version: Hillbilly Software sells LIbris for $9.95.

Related: Apple and eBooks: Why the delay and the possibility of using WordPress from the iPhone, from Mike Cane, as a Mike Egan’s Computerworld blog post challenging Amazon to come out with sales stats for the Kindle. MC also has thoughts on that.

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By David Rothman

Zachary Brewster-Geisz, who gave the world the Books.app reader for the iPhone, tells us a little about himself and shares his future plans for his program—in an iPhone World interview. He lives in “suburban Maryland  with my wife, two kids, two cats, and one very hyper dog and is “a professional father, who also is an independent filmmaker, occasional actor, and hobbyist programmer” enchanted with open source. So what’s ahead for his Book.app? In his words:

• Deletion of books directly from the interface
• Arbitrary folders within the EBooks folder, so you can group books by genre, author, etc.
• A preferences pane to allow you to choose a different font, inverted text mode (white on black), and some other stuff
• A global memory for each book file, so it remembers where you were in every chapter of every book; this would allow you to read multiple books at once
• Some sort of one-touch scrolling/paging system
• Bookmarking!
• Chapter forward/chapter back buttons in the reading screen

“In addition,” he says, “I plan to code an application for Mac OS X to automate the HTML conversion, chapter splitting, and file transfer process, which will also be free and released under the GPL.”

Of course, for now, there’s a pesky little question. Will Apple’s new Software Development Kit allow Zach’s program to run officially, without the risk of a jailbreak approach? What about the issue of disk access, for example? Meanwhile, yes, how could I disappoint folks by not bring up .epub. As a nonproprietary format that major publishers are using for distribution, it goes well with open source.

Follow-up: I’m going to shoot an e-mail to Zach for his latest thoughts on the will-it-run question and perhaps other matters.

(Thanks to Mike Cane.)

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By David Rothman

E-book programs and other third-party software may not work out on the iPhone or may be severely crimped, thanks to some fine print from Control Central—Apple.

While third-party developers are abuzz over the $100M that Kleiner Perkins will dole out for iPhone-ware, the programming community is backtracking somewhat from its earlier ecstasy over the software development kit and the related technical infrastructure. As Wired notes, for example, programs like Firefox might be in trouble if they come with plug-in capabilities. And Gonnected worries about disk-access-related restrictions that might get in the way of e-bookware. Speaking generically, Techdirt wisely advises developers to check with Apple ahead of time. If anyone has a problem in the e-book area, tell me know about it, and I’ll make some noise for you!

Who knows? Will only Jobs-blessed formats run on the thing? This is yet one more reason to care about the .epub standard rather than entrusting your range of reading to individual companies. Apple’s a fine company and ideally will grow at least somewhat less proprietary, just as Sony has in the case of e-books.

(Thanks to Mike Cane. Image from Gerry Manacsa’s site.)

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