TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘media: dinos + mammal acts’ Category

By David Rothman

Could reading newspapers online be harder on the environment than enjoying them the old-fashioned way—on paper?

Perhaps in some respects, if you rely on a desktop computer rather than a little PDA or a dedicated E Ink reader such as a Kindle, Sony or iLiad.

“Reading online on a desktop computer for 10 minutes produces the same load on the environment as reading an e-book for half an hour, and reading online for 30 minutes has the same overall effect as reading a print newspaper.”

So says Would you like that book in paper or plastic?—an article in Environmental Science & Technology—in summing up some recent research.

E-book angle

Now, what are the implications for people (1) reading the newspaper online longer than half an hour on a desktop or (2) reading an entire book? Check out ES&T.

Oh, the variables to consider, and I don’t just mean disposal of old computers or whether you use an LCD or cathode ray tube monitor! Remember, many people like to leave their desktops on constantly to download podcasts or for other reasons, such as avoidance of boot-up delays. If so, that would reduce the extra eco-strain from actual reading—since the equipment would have been humming away regardless. Then again, some might say: “Does your desktop really need to be on all the time?” Power saving tips, welcomed! Your thoughts on power management and the rest, in an e-book context?

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By David Rothman

Yes, the actual book—the paper and cardboard—accounts for just part of what you pay at the store.

But new hikes in paper and fuel costs may make e-books more competitive with P than before. And of course we know which approach is greener.

Related: P-books as global warmers: Another argument for E. Paper books are a speck of paper consumption, but e-book readers can also display newspapers, far more villainous as polluters in P format.

And speaking of the p-to-e transition: Reluctantly, a daily stops its presses, living online, the New York Times’ write-up on the Capital Times in Madison,Wisconsin. Also see Wikipedia item.

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By Peter Osnos, Senior Fellow for Media at The Century Foundation

One of the most persistent explanations for journalism’s present financial troubles is that consumers no longer have to pay for news.

The notion that everything these days is “free” on the Web is an article of faith—which happens to be wrong. Listening to a prominent newspaper editor make the “free” point the other day to a group of mostly nodding (and eminent) figures in the media world, I realized that a cri de coeur (an impassioned outcry of protest) is increasingly necessary. There is a great deal of money being generated by the transmission of news, but very little of it is going to the providers of that news, which is no longer tolerable. News is no more free these days than the “complementary” bag of pretzels you get on a plane, after you’ve paid for the ticket.

Newspapers a bargain compared to hundreds a month for tech

Consider that the consumers are paying for broadband, cell phone service, and satellites, plus the cost of the lap-tops, PDAs, televisions, and iPods. The monthly bill for all the delivery is easily a couple of hundred dollars. Mac laptops start at $1,099. Good Dell laptops start at $999. There are cheap cell phones but the kind that offer news and entertainment are still pricey as is the service that supports them. My household monthly tab for two cell phones (a Blackberry and an iPhone), a premium cable package, broadband, and two desktops computers, is about $675. Obviously, we use these devices for a great many things and, in today’s world, they are probably indispensable.

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By David Rothman

Drat those evil techies—interfering with the get-a-horse-style forecasts of hardworking Luddites!

While academic librarians focus on the current prices of e-readers, let’s remember that PVI will be churning out 120,000 six-inch displays per month in the second half of ‘08, and meanwhile better tech is on the way. We ran a somewhat similar item earlier, but here’s an accidental jog from MobileRead with a link to a few extra details. Remember, displays are the highest-priced part of e-readers. Hello, American Libraries? Are academic librarians—at least those who’ve never even used a Kindle—the ultimate e-book authorities?

Other links of interest:

–”Waterstone’s is believed to have signed a deal to stock Sony’s e-book reader when it is introduced into the UK later this year,” reports the Bookseller. “It is understood that the retailer will be the exclusive vendor of the device in the UK.”

–OCLC introduces high-priced digital archiving service is the headline over Barbara Quint’s clueful article in Information Today. Maybe those costs are what the academic librarians should be ranting about. Quote from Barbara on annual fees: “Charges for the new service fall into 100-gigabyte chunks with each chunk priced at $750—one hundred and one gigabytes and the price jumps to $1,500.” Too bad that OCLC can’t contract this out privately and use the power of permanent links to help libraries build a true Web of enduring content. That would be better than just letting libraries entrust local content to Amazon or Google without librarians calling the shots. But libraries and coherent information strategies are too often like oil and water. Somehow they don’t always mix. The same—for the most part—with libraries and e-book standards. May that change! Libraries need to tell book-related vendors, “Go ePUB or else…”

–Guess who’s now writing a Publishers Weekly blog that democratically appears in the same location as the others. None other than Sara Nelson, the editor-in-chief. But, Sara, isn’t that risky, even if you’re linked in now to the power people at Reed Business Information? We know how ephemeral blogs can be. Care to restore the Web visibility of E-Book Report—my PW blog that mysteriously disappeared to the dismay of unsuspecting folks who were linking to EBR, in the Web sense? All those tens of thousands of words vanished in a flash, not the best move for PW’s credibility online or off. Reversing PW’s decision would a helpful precedent—and insurance for time when new owners take over PW and perhaps make a few personnel changes. Along with my blog archive, PW zapped those of the former publisher and the woman who hired me. Care to get PW back on the right track on these matters, Sara? Or were your bosses the real ones who ordered the massive link kill? Just who controls PW’s link-preservation policies? Whatever the case, PW, so savvy on many other matters, looked like Idiots Central when it so eagerly murdered the links. No need for a linkocide law, but disappointing just the same. I’m rooting for PW to survive, and I’m afraid, Sara, that Web-hostile linking policies won’t cut it. Smartening up about e-book standards would help, too, just as it would for libraries; does PW really want Amazon and the like to run the book business, Standard Oil fashion?

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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 David Rothman

“Ever wondered what we’ll all be reading on the hover bus in The Future? Wonder no more and instead enjoy the marvel that is Bridgestone’s full-size steam-powered electronic newspaper. Feel your mind boggle as it turns its own e-paper pages in a mere 15 seconds. Aw, just watch the thing, ok?” - DigitalWorld Tokyo.

The TeleRead take: Well, it’s a start. Perhaps better things will be on the way soon.

Question: Would you enjoy reading books in the form of full-sized E newspapers, so you could scan over a wider area?

(Big thanks to Mike Cane.)

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By Peter Osnos, Senior Fellow for Media at The Century Foundation

Moderator’s note: I’ve added the chart from Journalism.org, where you can go for a better look at it. - D.R.

In politics, “elitist” is now an epithet, surpassing even “liberal” as a description to be shunned. In the media, however, the “elitist” sector is doing better than most of the mass purveyors of news: the networks, news magazines, and the metropolitan newspapers that flourished so long as all things to all people.

Three leading elite publications come to mind, the Economist, the Financial Times, and the New Yorker. All of them are financially strong, albeit in the case of the Financial Times and New Yorker, after a period of losses. All of them have readers notable for their loyalty (and growing numbers) who are attractive to advertisers for their up-market demographics. And significantly, all of them provide journalism that is very good. Despite tony, Anglophilial reserve that can veer towards fustiness, they have avoided the image of being only for older readers. The New Yorker somehow managed to go from moribund to hip without losing its basic look or persona.

Three other publications serving the same English-language international audience also seem to be doing well, each serving a specific niche. Foreign Affairs, the bi-monthly published by the Council on Foreign Relations, has the highest circulation in its history. The New York Review of Books is choc-a-bloc with ads while newspaper-based book reviews are struggling, and Vanity Fair has held its own now for more than two decades courtesy of Tina Brown and Graydon Carter and offering a mix of first rate narrative writing and well, lesser stuff.

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By Steve Tippie, editor-publisher of Opinionated, a Kindle-format magazine

Moderator: Welcome to our latest writer, Stephen Tippe, editor-publisher of Opinionated: Voices and Viewpoints on America and the World. It’s Tribune Media Services‘ new Kindle-format magazine—with commentators ranging from Arianna Huffington to Cal Thomas. This essay is adapted from one in the magazine. - D.R.

In the First Annual Survey of Magazines in the New York Observer, writer John Koblin picks up a prediction from Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair.

“In the next five years in Graydon Carter’s world, you’ll walk onto a plane, or a subway, or a soon-to-be invented mode of transport, and you’ll tuck a little electronic book under your arm. Inside that little book, which will be very expensive at first but soon will cost $150, there’ll be a series of mylar ‘pages,’ and there will be small buttons off to the side, and once you hit one of them, whoooosh, words and photos from Vanity Fair will suddenly appear. ‘You’ll subscribe to five magazines and six newspapers,’ Mr. Carter said. ‘That is what I see as the future. …That I know is coming.’”

A newsstand in my backpack

Well, a couple of weeks ago I hopped into a mode of transport called a cab and headed to O’Hare Airport with a little electronic book, currently very expensive but sure to become more affordable, maybe even as low as $150, tucked in my backpack. Stuck in traffic, I pulled it out and purchased a single issue of the British newspaper The Independent to read, saving my Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, and Atlantic subscriptions for the inevitable airport delays. I simply hit a small button off to the side and, whoooosh, articles from The Independent suddenly appeared. Later that evening in my hotel, I picked up the device again and tried to decide whether I wanted to get back into Joseph Ellis’ lively bio of Thomas Jefferson, American Sphinx, or start the copy of a new police procedural by a favorite Italian author that I had purchased a few days before. I hit another button and, whoooosh . . . well you know the process by now.

A publishing and distribution platform, not just another e-gizmo

For Kindle owners, the future is now and we know that it has already arrived!

Although the Kindle is not yet the exact device of this imagined future—it doesn’t show off the glossy color celeb photos that we love “Vanity Fair” for—it is clearly nearly identical to the device he describes (substitute the eInk screen technology for the mylar pages). Kindle owners know that the device is still in an early stage and will improve and get less expensive. But it is a mistake to focus on the the Kindle as just another electronic device; it is a publishing and distribution platform and model that promises to accelerate the revolution in book and periodical publishing started by the Internet.

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By David Rothman

“I read a lot of news by surfing the Internet, as do many of my colleagues and friends, and I’ve always dreamed of a way to browse news based on geography. What’s happening in Paris today? What are the top headlines in Japan? In collaboration with The New York Times, we’ve come up with a solution: The New York Times offers geo-coded news, and Google Earth offers the platform for reading that news in a 3D browser. This is the first time we’ve endeavored to show news updated in real time, and we’re very excited to work with this first-class publication to bring you the latest and greatest news.” - Wei Luo, Tech Lead Manager, Google Earth.

The TeleRead take: So when will other international publications follow through with similar arrangements? And how soon until we see Google Earth-style features built in open source browsers like Firefox? A Techmeme roundup is here. Meanwhile you can click on the graphic for more details.

The e-book angle: How soon until certain e-books use geo-mapping as as one alternative to traditional indexes.

Related: Jon Noring’s proposal for a GPS repository, which, among other things, could ideally pick up news stories from a variety of publications. Also see Carol Jurd’s post on The Geography of E-Book Mentions.

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By David Rothman

The New York Times is out with a classic blog-basher of a story, In Web world of 24/7 stress, writers blog till they drop.

Could we rewrite the headline, please? How about “Newspaper Until You Drop”? Or an account of the miserly piecemeal system that so many newspapers use in paying stringers?

Moreover, how about the refusal of many and perhaps most U.S. dailies to pay for op-ed contributions? Or the fact that some newspapers themselves are expecting bloggers to work for free or for very little?

Old story—in more than one way

What’s more, despite the current ado, this is really an old story. I actually agree with the Times about health risks and the financial and sustainability issues, but they’re hardly limited to the blog world or to this century. Independent writers as a group most always get screwed. Trust me. Trust George Gissing. And publishers are hardly the only villains. The public is willing to spend just a fraction of what it should be spending on actual content, journalistic or otherwise. While the tens of billions spent each year on books would seem high, it’s just a fraction of America’s $13.8 trillion gross domestic product, a situation that TeleRead would help remedy in a way that narrowed rather than widened the digital, knowledge and educational divides.

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By David Rothman

A rival of the Kindle e-reader is to come from a Hearst-backed venture called FirstPaper, which PaidContent describes as a “stealth start up” with offices in Palo Alto and New York City.

If speculation pans out, the new e-book reader will use a flexible color screen nearly as big as a tabloid paper, and you’ll be able to change “pages” by touching the screen. True? Such were the possibilities brought up by the Crosscut news site in Seattle in a May 2007 story on Hearst’s plans to test-market a wireless newspaper “sometime in the next two years.”

Supposedly Hearst’s Seattle P-I was to be a testbed. Kenneth Bronfin, president of Hearst Interactive, denied anything was planned for Seattle. But what about the basic technology? And would the Seattle-related report tie in with the news of the First Paper startup? Not sure.

Media giant backing First Paper

What is clear is that giant Hearst corporation (headquarters shown) is backing FirstPaper. It’s an investor in E Ink, the original developer of the display technology that the Kindle, Sony Reader, iLiad and Cybook Gen3 and similar machines use.

Might E Ink or companies using the technology, such as Prime View International PVI, favor the First Paper device over the Kindle—by way of newest technology? I don’t know. If that happens, however, many in the Print on Demand community would consider this to be wonderful payback for someone with monopolistic ambitions such as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

The involvement of a content company like Hearst in a rival e-reading device might also reduce Bezos’s power over details such as pricing and distribution. The startup is calling itself “well funded,” according to PaidContent, and I wonder if  other media corporations might be involved. One way or another, I’d be be surprised if the FirstPaper device didn’t debut as a distribution vehicle for newspapers and magazines, not just books. The more content you can get from one platform, the more chances of success. But you can bet that e-books will show up via the FirstPaper project, for the SVP is none other than Lee Shirani, who headed Sony Reader’s e-book store.

No format info known—but reader will be Linux-based, with Mozilla-related tech

On the technical side, I don’t see any information about formats to be used. If Hearst is sensible, however, it will join other major companies in the IDPF and press for robust .epub standards not just for books but also newspapers and  magazines. Let’s hope that it rejects a proprietary approach similar to the one that Bezos is favoring for the Kindle. As shown by the decline of America Online, such a strategy would most likely be a loser in the long run. Nonproprietary standards would reduce the same fears that Hearst would use its size to strong-arm publishers.

Use of .epub would be consistent with Heart’s plans to rely on some open technologies. PaidContent says that FirstContent “is developing this device based on Linux and will have some variation of Mozilla browser or its underlying technology (XUL) in it. Some hints about the company’s plans are here and here in the job listings.” The second “here” now longer works. But ahead, I’ll reproduce, verbatim, the first link:

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By David Rothman

Crafty, er, resourceful, people can now get the entire Wall Street Journal site for free, even if Rupert Murdoch hasn’t officially torn down his pay wall.

Such is the impression given by Salon columnist Farhad Manjoo, who obligingly tells how to do referer spoofing, among other things. He maintains his strategies are legal, and I suspect he’s right. We’re not talking about DRM bypasses, just a little ingenuity.

The really fascinating angle here is that the Salon site itself still has a premium plan. Not sure how it would affect Farhad. I myself am a paid subscriber of both Salon and the WSJ.

Also from Farhad: His intriguingly titled new book, True Enough: How to Live in a Post-Fact Society. Could vivid images from an event such as 9/11 actually be at odds with the truth, by encouraging conspiracy theorists ? That’s among the issue Farhad raises. I haven’t read the book, but some years ago Farhad did a good job of interviewing me for an excellent Wired writeup he was doing on NPR’s linking policies of the time.

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