TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘long’ Category

By April Hamilton

Moderator: April Hamilton self-published two novels as Kindle e-books recently. The views here are her own, and we’ll welcome other perspectives. - D.R.

Read many good books lately? Me neither, and as both a reader and novelist, I wanted to know why. What I’ve learned is by turns shocking and troubling.

Thanks to over two decades of consolidation, the U.S. publishing industry is now lorded over by just six media megaconglomerates, Viacom, Time Warner and News Corp. among them. If these names sound familiar, it’s because they belong to the artistic visionaries who brought us The Moment of Truth TV show, virtually every Adam Sandler movie ever made, People magazine and much more of the same. They’ve made a lucrative science of cranking out the media equivalent of junk food: overpackaged, overhyped, disposable distractions that never turn out to be quite as satisfying as they looked in the ad, and sometimes even leave you feeling a little guilty. To the media megas, the decision of whether or not to acquire any property, be it a manuscript, screenplay, or video of the starlet du jour going commando, hinges on just one question: how much money do we stand to make on this?

Greedy and blockbuster-centric

Media megas have a right to make a buck just like any other business, but the greedy, blockbuster-centric mentality they’ve used to bring the mainstream film and TV industries to heel is now being forcibly applied to book publishing. In a 2006 Wall Street Journal piece entitled The Hot New Advance: $0, Vanguard Press publisher Roger Cooper said, “Publishing is now very much like opening weekend grosses in the movie business, it’s about exploding out of the box and selling as many copies as possible.” The article spoke of the casino-like environment of the new publishing world, in which newly-released books have only a week or two to hit big before being relegated to the back of the store. As National Writers Union VP Phil Mattera said in his eye-opening 1998 article ‘Crisis of the Midlist Author in American Book Publishing,’ “Hardcover publishers lose money on most of their titles and depend greatly on a few bestsellers…the large publishers are increasingly inclined to concentrate their resources on books that have the greatest potential to become bestsellers. Like Hollywood, book publishing has become a business driven by the quest for blockbusters.”

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By Aaron S. Miller, CTO of BookGlutton, a Web-based community of readers

Reminder: The TeleBlog offers many viewpoints, and I’m delighted to see Aaron not pulling any punches even if I disagree with him in places. - D.R.

Recent posts and comments have carefully pointed out that what we call .epub is actually three separate specifications which evolved from the OEBPS, or OEB for short. These three specs are OPS, OPF, and OCF . . . Or is that OCS? What do each of those stand for again?

The Web grew because smart people who were smart enough to understand SGML were also smart enough to know it was too complicated. What we need is a simplified subset of OEB … or OP … Or whatever it’s called — okay, epub.

Let’s face it: there is no grass-roots explosion of .epub adoption. The most hopeful implementation has come from Adobe, and it’s nice that we have a validator now, but we also need legions of independent developers building APIs and authoring tools and Reading Systems and open-sourcing all of them. We need writers, authors and artists who want to use .epub for their work because it’s simple and hackable, as easy as HTML or easier. We need a way for folks to put their own books up on their blog for download as .epub, or for them to post links to their writer friends’ latest novel, or to their favorite passage in a public domain text. The OP-OB-OC-OS-epub spec doesn’t give us this possibility.

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By Prof. Peter Kerry Powers, English Dept. Chair, Messiah College

Moderator: Might the Kindle take away money for gourmet dog food? I have no idea what this four-legged guy—not mentioned in Prof. Powers’ post—is thinking. But maybe that’s one possibility. Meanwhile check out Rob Preece’s earlier thought on the topic, as well as the related discussion. - D.R.

I admit I’ve been a little hesitant to buy a Kindle, not out of lack of interest or complete antipathy to e-books. Indeed, I’m kind of intrigued if not totally convinced. But the biggest thing stopping me has been the cost.

Professors aren’t as well off as people tend to think, but on the whole full-time professors—a diminishing breed—are still solidly middle class. My salary as a full professor with about eight years of post-collegiate education and 16 years of full time teaching experience is in the low 70s. And, to be honest, most professors, especially at small schools or third-rank state schools make a lot less than I do. I’m like most professors, pleased with so little compared to their expertise and experience. Give me a book and four or five weeks clear of having to prepare for classes or other administrative work in the summer, and everything seems like gravy.

Hesitant on Kindle

Still, even though I’m better off than many people, I’ve hesitated on the Kindle. 400 bucks is at least an hour or two of my daughter’s prospective college education. Who knows, with interest I may be able to add an hour or two. And it makes me wonder just a bit about the business plan associated with dedicated e-book readers. I would be, I think, a prime candidate for an e-book reader. But on the other hand, I’m an absolutely atypical American when it comes to books purchasing. Most Americans say they buy five books a year and read four. My guess is the other sits on the shelf in order too look kind of impressive even though it’s never read. Reading as many as 12 books a year is considered being a dedicated reader by a lot of folks, and was the benchmark employed by the NEA in some of their recent pronouncements.

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By Hadrien Gardeur, Co-Founder of Feedbooks

I remember very precisely my first day with an e-ink device. Instantly I realized what a difference it makes to read on a screen that looks like paper. But for some reason, the whole experience still felt like reading on a screen, instead of reading a book. It took me a few days to fully understand this impression: typesetting. I’m used to hyphenation, kerning, widows/orphans etc.—in a book. On a screen, the typesetting is usually very limited. While the screen looked like paper, the text looked like something that a screen displayed.

I managed to avoid this problem very quickly, using PDF files created for the device, but it’s still something that no reflowable format, no reading system solved yet.

Why should EPUB add support for hyphenation then? Customers expect the same quality of experience with an e-books than a book. Publishers are very picky with typesetting too. So let’s see how EPUB could add support for hyphenation…

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By Branko Collin

There’s a lot of talk about whether e-books will be able to mimic the physical qualities of p-books, but often this talk focuses on the “feel” of books. People like to rifle through pages, smell the paper, make notes in the margins, et cetera.

A p-book does not just act as a container of a book, but also as a preservation device. And it does this against heavy odds. Modern, “acid” paper deteriorates quickly, but it is still possible to preserve books printed on such paper for a long time—hundreds of years in some cases.

In theory, e-books can last much longer than that. By abstracting from a physical carrier, books no longer need to be threatened by the weaknesses of that layer. But there are other threats to e-books that are much more insidious.

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By Hadrien Gardeur, Co-Founder of Feedbooks

Moderator: Our newest contributor is a familiar name, Hadrien Gardeur—co-founder and CTO of the Feedbooks site offering e-books for many devices and in many formats. Feedbooks supports standards for both e-books and the Semantic Web. A hearty welcome to you, Hadrien! - D.R.

EPUB as a standard—it’s actually three standards, OPS, OPF and OCF—is a real step forward for e-books.

I really like how flexible the OPF standard is: with proper fallbacks you can very easily support all sorts of devices, and extend the document. But there’s still room for improvements, and the best way to support EPUB is to discuss how things could be better. For example, how about improved means of linking to other books? Or adding new capabilities to travel guides displayed on a GPS-enabled device?

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By David Rothman

PDF, as I see it, is a toxic to e-books—given all  the scrolling and other hassles it creates for me when I use it on small screens. I can envision PDF for forms and for documents that you may want to print out, as well as for books that are intended more to be admired than read. But as an everyday format for text-intensive reading? No, especially in textbooks, where PDF all too often will slow you down. Via popups, links, you name it, there are smarter ways to handle illustrations than to use PDF’s paper-centric approach.

Not everyone agrees. Without further comment, I’ll present The Other Side, 10 reasons why PDF is the right format for ebooks in education, from the blog for the Keybookshop.com. Have at it, gang—speak up however you feel about this.

“1. Comfort - Teachers and students are already comfortable with PDF. The programs to view the files are ubiquitous. Virtually every computer in an educational setting today can open and view them. This comfort level also means that there is little or no training needed for teachers and students to utilize a PDF file to teach and learn.

“2. Equipment - Schools have the equipment to view PDFs. As mentioned earlier. It would be difficult to find a computer that can’t read a PDF. This means that money for new equipment is not a problem.

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By David Rothman

The nurses and the social worker agreed. “Hearing,” they all more or less said, “is the last thing to go.” At 5:30 p.m. today my mother, always a good listener when my sister and I needed her, died at 94 of congestive heart failure in a rest home in Springfield, Virginia.

I don’t know what the final words she heard were, just that we encouraged her to let go when there was no more fighting to do. Dorothy and I, in fact, tried not speaking to her, despite our wishes to the contrary, so she wouldn’t linger on in pain—congestive heart failure isn’t as gentle a death as the medical gobbledygook might suggest to the ignorant—and within an hour my mother was dead. The intervals between the heaves of her chest grew longer, until at last the moaning stopped and she was still.

Yes, my mother had us late in life and would have been 95 in November. The Titanic had sunk only a year or so before her birth, and on Publishers Weekly’s bestseller list in 1913, Pollyanna was number eight in fiction—safe within even today’s abbreviated public domain.

Lessons from my favorite Luddite

However keen I am on e-books for the elderly, I could not win Mom over, but she enjoyed share of her paper books—from the best-sellers of Herman Wouk, years ago, to, more recently, Nicholas Sparks—along with tunes from Broadway musicals and trips to Nags Head and Fourth of July celebrations at the neighborhood swimming pool and German chocolate icebox, the recipe of which I’ll try to reproduce here in time. Is it really true that chocolate, gooey ladyfingers and whipped cream will prolong life, especially with cherries atop this phenomenon of a dessert? Well, it worked for Mom.

To tell you the truth, except for TV and a fondness for the telephone, almost a flesh-and-blood appendage for her, my mother was a bit of a Luddite. I think she prided herself on avoidance of gadgets and tech as much as—until her old age, when she had no choice—she did on her avoidance of doctors. The phone, moreover, was hardly a replacement for all bridge games and garden club meetings and coffees klatches with temple friends.  She believed strongly in community and continuity in the old-fashioned senses and was also a regular at community potluck suppers in her younger days; what’s more, she and her food were always available to comfort the sick or those in mourning. Now her friends can return the favors.

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By Aaron S. Miller, CTO of BookGlutton, a Web-based community of readers

Moderator: Aaron Miller is CTO of BookGlutton.com, a Web-based community for e-book readers. He has 11 years of experience building Web sites for startups and established clients, including WellsFargo.com, Playstation.com, and Macys.com. Welcome to the ranks of TeleBlog contributors, Aaron, and keep the ePub criticism coming! Let’s hope that the IDPF will listen to all sides. Also see Tamas Simon’s essay. - D.R.

Links, bookmarks and annotations all depend on one important thing: the ability to uniquely identify a specific passage or point in a book. And it’s easy with paper. We put daggers and numbers where our notes belong. We highlight, clip, underline. Sometimes we just gesture at a page. But with a digital book, it’s not so easy. A digital book, materially, is something less—so we expect more. Go figure.

Humans need a computer to understand our paper-bound notions of footnotes and margin-notes so that a computer can do what computers are good at. Then we can share those notes, add our own, hide them, rearrange them, count them, abstract them into graphs, delete them. Moreover, we want pica-perfect pointers into texts, maybe even pixel-pointers, so that we have no doubts about where we left off, which syllable we’re analyzing, or where we want to jump next. To a computer, a book is a model, an abstraction of what it really is, and the more computers agree on that abstraction and how to interact with it, the better off we bookish humans will be. Too bad it’s easier said than done.

Key revelations

Smart folks of the digital book world have figured out some key things lately:

1. XML is a book’s best friend. It’s extensible, document-centric, thriving. It’s being used for .mobi, .lit, .epub and more generalized things like DocBook, ODT, and Docx. It can be criticized for bloat, but it’s open, extensible and a kind parent to XHTML. It happens to be more perfect for books than plain text.
2. Books are going Web. They’ve been on-line for awhile, in huge numbers, but until now, no one has taken the time or spent the money to care for them. By “care” I mean care in presentation, due diligence in cataloging, and measurement of the benefits and drawbacks of various technologies.
3. E-books will be cool. Right now, they’re not. At least not iTunes cool. Right now, they’re in the position the MP3 was in 1997. This was when audiophiles scoffed at the format as inferior. Half of them observed that CDs sounded better, and the other half said vinyl sounded best, and then proceeded to make fun of the ones who preferred CDs. Now, it seems, music fans realize that we can all co-exist, and that MP3s are cool in their own right. Book-loving groups aren’t so unified.

Whiffs of potential

Still, we can sense the potential. People are realizing there’s more possibility than the miles of typography-bereft scrolling and the various shopping-cart sites hawking trade at twice the price of paper. Amazon, a web company, is scrambling to figure out how to bridge worlds, extending the tradition of PHB (Proprietary Hardware for Books) while simultaneously trying to leverage their Web properties. Meanwhile publishers can be overheard babbling about widgets and blogs, and when they actually figure out what they’re saying, we’ll see an A-ha moment about DRM.

From a development angle, browser technology is quickly approaching a tipping point where typography and presentation will rival that of print and E Ink. Unlike E Ink, Web technologies are based on software, and this creates freedom and speed. And unlike print, which seems to get cheapened and not cheaper everyday, they’ll allow more at a lower cost. Someday we’ll all use something like E Ink, but not many of us will ever use E Ink as it is now.

More people can be seen firing up their MacBooks in Panera and Starbucks to get their dose of blogs and news. Younger generations, as any newspaper publisher will tell you, no longer read any news on paper.

Take note

This is all positive news. But in all this activity, no one has given much lip-service to a fundamental technology here: annotation. Granted, it’s not for everyone. But it rests upon the ability to point to fragments of documents, even as those fragments change.

The Web can be seen as an example of the perfect space to solve this problem, or a sad example of how annotation has been ignored, depending on one’s camp. Those in the Berners-Lee camp, if there is such a place, would look to the Semantic Web for standards and solutions. But those who look to Ted Nelson will tell you we didn’t implement everything we needed when we invented the Web. Nelson’s original concept included annotations and unbreakable links as part of the fabric of hypermedia. Now, we’re stuck improvising these things on top of a core infrastructure that was never intended for them. And we’re faced with the perplexing question: What happens to metadata when a resource disappears—or worse, when it changes?

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By Francis Turner

Moderator: Here’s a close look at the Cybook Gen3 by Francis Turner, an enthusiastic owner who has helped the NAEB buying club survive. See his bio at the end. Welcome to the ranks of TeleBlog contributors, Francis! - D.R.

I’ve had my NAEB-delivered Bookeen Cybook for more than a week now. Enough I think to write a review that is slightly better than “shiny”.

First comment: If you are European, you’ll save a lot if you buy from the NAEB store rather than direct from Bookeen, because with the current weakness of the US$ you save a lot. Choosing the cheaper USPS shipping rate I paid NAEB US$403.80 for my Cybook—which works out at €256.00 at current exchange rates. Adding the €57.15 duty I had to pay the French customs, we have a total of €313.15.

By comparison, if I attempt to buy a base Cybook (and the NAEB package is closer to the deluxe Cybook) for postal shipment in France, then the price is €358.30 which works out at €45 (or about 15%) more. Because the deluxe pack is €450 (plus shipping) and NAEB doesn’t include the spare battery (€44.95), the actual price of the NAEB package if shipped from Bookeen would be over €400. In other words:

• You can buy the deluxe package (including battery) for the price of the standard (€100 saving)
• You are saving between 15% and 33% depending on how you do the sums on what you get

In fact if you buy now, I would even more strongly recommend that you do so via NAEB, because Bookeen are sold out for new orders right now!

Getting started and set up

Now back to the product itself. The first thing you notice when you pull the Cybook out of its box is that it is thin, and, for a piece of electronics, remarkably light. Breadth and length are between a mass market paperback and a trade paperback, but if it were a book, it would be a slim 100 page book as opposed to the more usual 250+ although the weight is closer to that of the standard paperback. For reference, it is just too big to fit in most of my pockets but I do have some coats and jackets that it fits in. I say for reference because I sincerely doubt I personally would want to put it in a pocket anyway, especially because the NAEB package includes a neat leather carrying case (see photo above and click on it to enlarge) which I’m using all the time.

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By Todd Jonz, a co-founder of InfoSeek

Moderator: Infoseek co-founder Todd Jonz, our newest TeleBlog contributor, continues our copyright debate. See his bio at the end. Welcome, Todd! - D.R.

Rob Preece’s thoughts about copyright and DRM are certainly rich in altruism, but I’m not sure I understand the economic analysis behind them.  Here’s how I see the economics of intellectual property and DRM in the entertainment industry.

Content owners view intellectual property in terms of its value, which they wish to maximize and monetize in any way possible.  Consumers view intellectual property in terms of its cost, which they wish to drive as low as they can, to zero if possible.

Content owners justified DRM for years by arguing that rampant piracy was killing their business.  As the movie industry comes off a year of record-setting profits and the recording companies virtually trip over one another in their race to liberate the music they sell online from the shackles of DRM, we can pretty well conclude that the piracy argument was so much smoke and mirrors.

Pirates vs. other customers: Can you really tell ‘em apart?

Yes, piracy exists; it always has, and it always will.  But study after study has shown that the vast majority of consumers, certainly enough to sustain a healthy market, will pay a fair price for digital content if it is made available to them in the unencumbered formats they desire.  It’s also difficult sometimes to differentiate pirates from customers; multiple studies have disclosed that people in the coveted 18-to-34 demographic who share music on P2P networks also spend more each year on CDs than their non-file-sharing brethren.  So much for the “piracy is killing us” assertion.

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By David Rothman

Could Flickr and other sites based on grassroots content have to dump some of Grandma’s photos and other items in time? Even at the risk of kissing off eternal permalinks? That’s the possibility broached in a Silicon Valley Watcher post by Tom Foremski, a former reporter for the Financial Times.

FlickRs and the rest may not be able to grow new markets enough to pay for hosting costs, he says. A debatable thesis? Well, we know that storage prices are headed download, so I’m not sure. So what about bandwidth costs? I’m welcome comments? Your thoughts? Could it be that we’re dining off a feast created by over-expansion during the dot-com boom?

The e-book angles

What about the e-book angle? FlickR-style sites are catnip for people looking for Creative Commons art for books (although remember there could be issues besides copyright, such as modeling fees). What’s more, some e-books in the future would be harmed by the ditching of permalinks they reference. Also, what about future multimedia e-books that supposedly are to be stored for free forever?  Let’s hope Foremski is wrong. Meanwhile here are more details from him:

“Companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits. They will have to dump the data, dump the grandma photos.

“That means dumping the many links that users created to their content. The idea of permalinks, links that will remain rooted forever in the concrete of the Internet, will become a fallacy.

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