TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘public domain’ Category

By David Rothman

None other than Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart has broached the topic of testing Google ads on at least some Gutenberg-related sites, and volunteers so far seem generally open to the idea.

What do you think? Google ads, as I see it, would be a positive if they helped keep Gutenberg sustainable, were done with taste, and came with full disclosure of the way the money was spent. The group should recognize Michael’s many years of dedicated service to Gutenberg and err on the side of generosity toward him, especially since he is at a time in life when his medical needs may soon grow. The important thing is to be open, not just about expenditures but also how they compare with those of similar organizations

PG trademark: Registered in Michael’s name by top lawyer with King estate and Disney among “representative” litigation clients—but read on for context

Yet another improvement, as I see it, would be group ownership of the Project Gutenberg trademark, an integral part of the organization’s activities in the legal sense. That would simplify fundraising.

Notice the partial screenshot to the left from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s records on the Web? In his personal name, Michael apparently registered the Gutenberg trademark with legal help from the office of William H. Brewster, a well-connected, well-regarded University of Virginia law grad in Atlanta whose specialties include intellectual property, and whose powerful firm, Kilpatrick Stockton, long ago secured the first federal registration for another brand name, none other than COCA-COLA. Among the firm’s “high profile clients,” going by a Wikipedia list, is Google, though I don’t see any connection with the ad proposal, just an indication of the caliber of Michael’s trademark-related connections.

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By David Rothman

Nate and Ficbot have had a debate going on cheapie e-book hardware. I’ll take Ficbot’s side—she bought her Eee PC for much more than e-booking alone, a good example of how people’s needs will vary.

Still, props to Nate for reconsidering his comments on FB’s personal situation and also for mentioning the “HP 320LX. You can find it on Ebay. You can find it for less than $60 including shipping. I have one. It supports DRMed Mobipocket and Ereader, as well as PDF, HTML, RTF, TXT. Plus, it comes with pocket versions of Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint.”

OK, here’s a question, now that Nate’s laudably broached the issue of super-cheap readers. Used, just what e-book-capable gizmo would you recommend to a budget-strapped soul with less than US$100 to spend? Or even just $50? Cover both price levels if you can, as well as special user needs that you can think of. If nothing else, consider that the user probably want to transfer books from a main PC to the econo-reader.

A few possibilities: The eBookwise, the Gemstar REB 1200 and used PDAs

At least at the under-$100 level, I’d go for a used eBookwise machine if I could find one under that price on eBay. When I looked just now I couldn’t. The eBookwise can at least read DRMed best-sellers that are available in the appropriate format from the EBW store. I’d also consider a used Gemstar REB 1200 if I didn’t have to worry about reading “protected” e-books.

If I needed to deal with DRM-infested books—and let’s hope that Draconian “protection” soon joins eight-track cassettes in Tech Heaven, or Hell—I’d try to look for a used PDA with 320-by-320 resolution or better and the ability to run Mobipocket or eReader/Palm. Maybe I’d have to settle for 160-by-160. But wait! Here’s a Sony Peg-NV70 PDA going for just $80 as a Buy It Now on eBay. Res is 320 x 480, according to specs on Amazon. If you go a bit above $100, you can snag a linux-powered Nokia 770 for $115 and enjoy a super-sharp screen bigger than the usual PDA’s. What’s more, the Nokia can download e-books directly. Too bad there’s no software out there for it to read DRM-shackled books.

Take it from there, gang. What would be your own recs, including in the less-than-$50 level, where I haven’t named any possibilities? Meanwhile we’ll hope that OLPC or someone else can come up with a laptop selling for less than $100 new, which I think is inevitable, but let’s worry about the here and now.

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By David Rothman

Check out Voluminous: App for organizing, fetching and sharing public domain books, in Boing Boing.

Voluminous, written up earlier in Wonderland, is an “Internet librarian for Mac OS X 10.5.”

Get more info on Voluminous and download here. The trial download is free, and the price is around $30 for people in the States.

Voluminous’s tagline: “20,000 books. For the price of one hardback.”

Compatibility: Apparently none for the PC and linux. I assume that’ll happen in time; otherwise imagine the plight of people who switch operating systems, maybe through no choice of their own. Hmm. Any Mac emulators out there for PCs? Actually, yes, although I don’t know about OS X.

An alternative for PC owners: The free yBook, which lacks all of Voluminous’s feature but at least is integrated with Project Gutenberg’s catalog. We’ve mentioned yBook a number of times here.

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By David Rothman

Here’s a look at the University of Michigan’s rare-book scanning operation—used for books that the library there deems too fragile for the Google scanners.

The Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle (photo) and a Michigan librarian disagree on the issue of how open the scanned books will be to the Net at large. Brewster still fears Google might in effect lock up the public domain—see his earlier comments on this issue. Speaking of openness, AP reports:

“Google, the Internet’s leader in search and advertising, says the process it developed and is using for scanning the majority of the books in Book Search is proprietary. Employees will not discuss it except to say it is much faster than what [the library] is doing and it’s not destructive.

“‘It took us quite a while to develop it so we do keep that confidential,’ said a library manager for Book Search, Ben Bunnell, who declined even to say where Google does the scanning.”

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By David Rothman

Tarrano the Conqueror, the racist pub domain book where the Venusians served as surrogates for immigrants, turned out to be a dud as recreation, too—not just in the PC Department.

Here is a far more promising freebie, with the important caveat that it may be worth as much to you as what you paid for the link. On the other hand, consider buying the p-edition if this one pans out.

“This one” is Mothers & Other Monsters—author Maureen F. McHugh’s Small Beer Press book that Nancy Pearl, a Seattle librarian well-known to NPR listeners, describes as a “fabulous collection of short stories.”  Pearl says: “Your start with ordinary situations, and when the fantastical occurs, you’re so comfortable with the world that she’s created that you don’t question it as being strange or unsettling.” For example, a woman  meets a potential SO at a dog obedience school, a rather prosaic situation, except her problem is how to endear him to her dead brother, who’s picky about her male companions. As for M Day connections, you’re on your own. (Spotted via Mike Cane.)

Two other good possibilities from SB, already mentioned here, are The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories by John Kessel and Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link. Meanwhile, the latest giveaway from TOR is Reiffen’s Choice by S.C. Butler. Sign up here for TOR’s freebie program.

In the area of nonfiction, the Encyclopedia Britannica 2008 Book of the Year: The World in 2007 is among the latest offerings of the ad-supported Wowio service, unfortunately available only to people in the States for the moment. Includes items on MyFace and Facebook, among others. Wowio has also just released a freebie of the novel Child of the Dark Star by Moyra Caldecott, a long-time booster of e-books.

For people outside the States: Mother’s Day is the second Sunday of May in the U.S. Here’s a list of the dates in other countries.

Related: Tor.com causing an odd guilty sensation, posted in the Digital Copyright Canada.

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By David Rothman

…and guess who is joining Sen. Patrick Leahy in pushing it it? None other than Howard Berman (right in photo at the 2008 Tech Policy Summit)—among the most extreme of copyright hawks, who even hails from L.A. So maybe in the end this legislation has a chance.

The bottom line if the bill passes: It’ll be less risky for U.S. sites like the main Project Gutenberg operation and Manybooks.net to discover and post works without locatable copyright holders. Distributed Proofreaders and the Internet Archive should also benefit, as could libraries and corporate digitization efforts by companies such as Microsoft and Google. We could see many more novels and other items digitized from 1923 and later.

The cynic’s perspective: In return for this legislation in the States and similar measures elsewhere, could various countries end up with still-longer copyright terms? As a gut reaction, however, I’m delighted to hear of the bill, as a start despite major concerns, such as, yes, a weaker House than Senate version. Ok, gang, get to work. What do you like and dislike? One risk is that the bill might be tucked into legislation that didn’t seem so helpful.

Arts Technica’s Nate Andersen has the lowdown.

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By Joe Wikert, a VP in the Professional/Trade division of John Wiley & Sons

Francis Hamit is the author of The Shenandoah Spy, a novel he recently converted for sale at the Kindle Store. He sent me an e-mail about his experience and some of the pitfalls he encountered. I figured others would want to hear the details, particularly self-published authors who are considering the same conversion process. Francis graciously agreed to do a short blog interview, and here’s what he had to say:

JW: What kind of files did you use for the interior process and what sort of problems did you run into with those formats?

FH: We tried the PDF we used for the print version. The front page border separated into another page that was otherwise blank; just a big rectangle. The logo disappeared entirely. Amazon does not like other people’s logos in their space. We couldn’t get either the border or the logo into HTML and the interior map had to be made into a GIF before it would appear. It was a dispute about this logo and some concerns about quality that led us to cancel the CreateSpace edition despite the higher potential revenues. [Moderator: But can you actually get your own logo into Kindle books? See note at the end of this post. - D.R.]

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By David Rothman

Here’s a plot for a mystery novel. Who killed the writer? Perhaps an ancient Egyptian mummy whose spirit hated a book that a Victorian author had churned out about him? Not because it was racist but because it was so mind-numbing?

Such thoughts came to me after reading Bad writing from a long time ago, an Arabist.net post on some “dreadfully dull” writing of yesteryear.

I’ll share a gem the Arabist site dug up from The Spell of Egypt, by Robert Smythe Hichens, tactfully mentioned as an “otherwise a relatively capable early fantastic/mystery writer:”

“The terrific temples, the hot, mysterious tombs, odorous of the dead desires of men, crouching in and under the immeasurable sands, will muck you with their brooding silence, with their dim and sombre repose.”

Actually Hichens did come up with the 1905 novel on which Hollywood based The Garden of Allah film. The poster showing Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer was for the Italian version of the movie.

If you want to see racism from the past, a number of old Gutenberg classics will do. No, I would not want them stricken from the online archives: let’s stay true to literature and history and appreciate how far we’ve come. For a possible example, read Tarrano the Conqueror, complete with references to “the Anglo-Saxon Republic” and pesky immigrants from the planet Venus. Where is the killer mummy when we need him?

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By David Rothman

The adrenaline pumper of the week is a paradox among some editorial folks at New York publishers.

Why do certain members of the corporate literati love E Ink readers for displaying manuscripts, but would hate reading actual books off them?

Just what’s going on beyond blind worship of p-books as physical objects? I, too, appreciate The Look and Feel. But I also like being able to carry around an entire e-library in my pocket and enjoy books and authors I otherwise might not even know about.

Isn’t there a place for both P and E? In the end, as colorful and witty as a cover might be, or as satisfying might be the feel of the pages, shouldn’t words count more than paper and cardboard? To be of another mind is to be a paper fetishist, as some proud PFs call themselves. I admit that certain books will display better on paper—do small screens really do justice to Faulknerian sentences? But then the same could be said of embryonic books, aka manuscripts.

E vs. 22 Xeroxed copies

The good news is that increasing numbers of paper fetishists in publishing have reached the point where they can appreciate E Ink-based readers as work tools.

In the Not want decaf! blog—logo shown above—a hardworking editor of children’s books tells how much she hated lugging around paper manuscripts on the subway or doing the Xerox routine to make 22 copies. “You eventually become adapt at removing multiple paper jams and feel like you spend more time with the copier than with your spouse.”

“The overall process is a lot faster, cleaner, and cheaper!” says Julie or whatever her real name is. “In fact, our IT department found that every copy that we make of a 400-page manuscript costs the company roughly $7! The cost seems even more ridiculous when you realize that most of those manuscripts won’t even be read all of the way through (most editors give a book 30-50 pages to hook them).”

The party pooper

But then Julie spoils the fun by confessing that if she “didn’t work in publishing,” she “wouldn’t buy one for personal use. For me, the interesting thing about e-readers is that unlike music or film, books have never needed a device in order for people to enjoy them. I think that is the main reason that nothing has taken off in books like VHS/DVD players did for movies and the iPod has for music, and I don’t think that most book lovers would like the majority of their library to consist of e-books rather than physical copies. I do think that e-readers might be a good idea for people who don’t typically read often or those who travel frequently and run out of reading material because they can’t carry the books along with them (although airport bookstores now have a service where you can ‘rent’ a book at one airport and ‘return’ it at another airport at any time and get most of your money back!). I think part of what book lovers love about books is owning a physical copy to share with friends or display on their shelves, to look at the cover and hold the book in their hands and flip through the well-worn pages if it is a much-loved copy.

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By David Rothman

French-language video on experiment

Anyone in e-books should be rooting for the success of a trial of the iLiad tablet for newspaper reading—with Le Monde and four other major French newspapers involved.

Get people reading E for any purpose and they may well move on to e-books.

Newspaper/pub domain synergies?

In fact, the French experiment includes not just newspapers and city guides but also novels from Feedbooks, Médiatoon and Mango. Feedbooks is a favorite of ours because of its support of the ePub standard (disclosure: Feedbooks co-founder Hadrien Gardeur is a TeleBlog contributor).

The French experiment is a great example for any U.S. newspaper publishers who might try out the iLiad on readers. Just as e-newspapers are good for e-books, the reverse works. Getting public domain books in the bargain can only make the use of the e-reader more attractive in general.

Cellphone angle

While supportive of Orange’s experiments with tablets, I still wonder if the real future won’t be the use of cellphones for e-reading, as rollable E Ink displays improve—check out the Readius. The PaidContent blog, where I saw the above YouTube, seems to be thinking similar thoughts.

That said, I especially like the iLiad because of iRex Technologies’ open approach, such as support of third-party apps—a stark contrast with Amazon’s Kindle.

What’s more, the large screen should be helpful for readers wanting something reasonably close to the traditional newspaper experience. Other papers involved are Le Parisien, Les Echos, L’Equipe and Télérama.

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By David Rothman

Could the Kindle phenomenon not just help the Sony Reader and other rivals, but also promote e-booking on cellphones or at least BlackBerrys?

Maybe, if you extrapolate from a column by Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal.

Kindle-BlackBerry similarity: Wireless

Gomes is a Sony Reader fan and wants to enjoy e-books, on his Blackberry, even when his tablet isn’t with him.

But the same logic would probably apply even more to Kindle owners, given the wireless connection and the fact that the BlackBerry also has one, unlike the Reader. Wireless is handy for downloading books—including the free public domain variety—although I doubt things are as slick with the BlackBerry.

Why Gomes likes the BlackBerry for e-reading

About his experiences with his BlackBerry and the BB version of Mobipocket, Gomes writes:

“Until a few weeks ago, my assumption had been that a useable electronic book would need to resemble a Gutenberg book as much as possible, with, for example, pages of screen text about the same size as pages of print. I had heard reports that Japanese commuters were using cellphones to read books. But I figured that was sort of the thing only Japanese commuters would ever see fit to do.

“The Sony Reader, however, turned out to be a gateway device. Once you’ve experienced its great rush of convenience, choice and portability, you just have to have more. It’s then that you cross the line and start downloading British novels onto a BlackBerry…

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By David Rothman

Imagine the benefits for multimedia and networked e-books—not to mention easier distribution of public domain books—if a new chip breakthrough pans out, following a demonstration.

“Scientists at IBM say they have developed a new type of digital storage which would enable a device such as an MP3 player to store about half a million songs - or 3,500 films—and cost far less to produce,” reports the Times in the U.K about the new racetrack memory.

The end result for e-books could be:

• The eventual emergence of e-books with generous helpings of video—maybe even complete movies. Current bandwidth might be a hindrance in many cases. But here’s a chance for old-fashioned bookstores, meanwhile, to get part of the action.
• Networked books with caching capabilities, able to pick up not only core material but also preserve related contents from a number of locations for offline reading and long-term storge, could become much more feasible.
• Easier distribution and use of public domain books and others in remote locations without network access. Commercial books, too, could use such approaches, with lock-unlock tech in use. I’d hope that the “protection” would fade away entirely once the books were unlocked. Of course, best to have no restrictions.

No, I’m not saying that all books should contain movies—I shudder at this prospect. Also the question will emerge of when a book stops being a book and becomes just a navigation aid for a film collection. I’m just saying what apparently will be possible.

Same for networked books. I want to lose myself inside a novel and enjoy the author’s vision and voice. Others, though, especially younger people, may feel otherwise, and I myself am excited about the possibilities of networked books for nonfiction. The IDPF had better get off its rear and and grow more serious about annotation standards and interbook linking for .epub.

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