TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Roger Sperberg’ Category

By Roger Sperberg

For something like five or six years, I’ve been able to style XML elements with CSS and have the text displayed just the way I want.

That is, in the XMetaL XML editor* and in browsers.

Not in an e-reader, however. All the e-readers specify the vocabulary you’re permitted to use in your e-book**.

There’s a difference between a reader and a browser, between a reader and an editor.

The reader has library functions, bookmarks, annotations. It collects multiple files into a single package; browsers and editors don’t have the same orientation. They just won’t do. (more…)

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Roger Sperberg

Over the last two years, I’ve thought a lot about what I want in an e-reader.

As someone who’s made my living as a freelance writer and written a couple books, I’ve thought about copyright and the rights of a creator. These concerns are pretty low in my current thinking.

As a technologist, I’ve thought about including motion, sound, color and interactivity to take advantage of the content being delivered by a computer. Following the development of Sophie, I’ve come to accept the need for creators to make rich-media texts, no longer thinking of this as an after-creation/publisher activity.

As a reader, I’ve thought about getting ahold of what I want to read and removing the barriers to what Bill Hill calls ludic reading. What kind of device do I want to hold in my hand and what do I want to see on it? In this time, I’ve mostly been using FBReader on the Nokia 770, N800 and N810 internet tablets, and I am consequently dependent upon a flexible and color-capable device, unlike the majority of what the market seems to be offering up right now.

As someone who has worked in book publishing for the last fifteen years, I’ve thought about how to forego copyright as a mechanism for economic protection and still provide incentives for publishers and writers (and jobs for editors). A viable business model — gosh, it sounds more and more like the search for the holy grail.

I’m no true prognosticator, but I think we can see the outline of the next generation of e-readers now.

Bowing to Sophie’s makers, I believe the new e-books will contain far richer media than at present. And by this I don’t mean “including video and audio” but just what Sophie’s makers do: including anything an author might devise when provided with full programming capability.

Like FBReader and Openberg Lector, the next-gen e-reader will accept a whole slew of formats. And as the OpenReader and OEBF formats champion, the most useful formats will deliver a single file that itself contains one or more maps to multiple files inside it. And we’ll be able to escape the “html with a slight makeover” straitjacket we’ve lived with since day one of e-reading.

And as FBReader and Lector insist, the next-gen e-reader will be multi-platform.

All of which lead me to expect that the triumvirate of AJAXed development platforms — Mozilla’s Prism, Adobe’s AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight (I call them “Prairielight”) — will provide us with many new e-readers. (more…)

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Roger Sperberg

Access has announced a public beta of virtual machine software that allows Nokia Internet Tablets to run Palm OS applications. Thoughtfix (aka Daniel Gentleman) at Tabletblog was the first* to report on this and has a video showing the software running as well as some photos.

The Garnet VM runs on the about-to-be-released N810, the N800 and the no-longer-being sold 770.

If, as expected, the software runs in landscape mode on the Internet Tablet, readers of this blog may find more e-books now available to them (and more readable on the NIT’s 225-pixels-per-inch screen). With 770’s going for as little as $100 on eBay, an inexpensive high-quality e-reader on a widely used platform is a reality. For those unsatisfied with the stock on non-DRMed books readable in FBReader, this is good news.

As Internet Tablet Talk headlines it, “Run 30,000 Palm OS apps on your Nokia Internet Tablet.”

Brighthand reports that “Garnet VM is expected to be available by the end of the year free of charge as a download from Access.” (Other reports at intomobile and engadget.)
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* Oops. Dan writes that he got the news from intomobile.

Popularity: 7% [?]

By David Rothman

Ghostbusters had just opened its Manhattan office, in the 1984 movie, when a secretary asked a nerd if he liked to read.

“Print is dead,” same the reply, a line meant to be as risible back then as the scientist’s hobby of collecting molds, spores and fungi.

But is the dialogue such a hoot today?

Not quite, says Jeff Gomez, who uses this wonderful scene in the introduction of Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age, excerpted online.

Good prose will live on in e-books and other media if writers, editors, publishers and others adjust, Gomez believes. But he isn’t so confident about the lasting popularity of books as physical objects.

Jeff, whom I know from his ever-readable Print Is Dead blog—same name, different medium—is hardly the first to feel this way.

Significantly, however, Jeff has worked as director of Internet marketing for Holtzbrinck Publishers and on October 29 will start as senior director of online consumer sales and marketing for the Penguin Group USA. Jeff will help refine the company’s Web site as a means to strengthen author-reader connections. And I hope that in other respects, too, Penguin will let him test many of his opinions in Print Is Dead.

(more…)

Popularity: 5% [?]

By David Rothman

So are the rumors true?

Are the $144 Nokia 770s at Buy.com having problems with bad screens and also with the White Screen of Death? That would certainly be at odds with the predominantly favorable reviews from Buy.com shoppers, but I’m still curious.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for a review of the N800—the 770’s successor—today or tomorrow, complete with my thoughts on how it works with FBReader. Find out whether I agree with Roger Sperberg’s conclusions.

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Roger Sperberg

Planet Maemo has pointed us to Buy.com’s offer of new Nokia 770’s for $139.99. Free shipping too.

The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet runs FBReader, which is a world-class open-source e-reader that accepts books in a large variety of formats, even inside a zip archive: OEB, HTML, FB2, Plucker PDB, CHM and non-DRMed Mobipocket, among others. FBReader runs not only on the Nokia 770 and N800 but also the Linux desktop, Windows, PepperPad, Sharp Zaurus and IRex iLiad. The program is still under development (the most recent version is 0.8.4a) and has not yet implemented bookmarks or annotation.

Probably no other device at this cost matches the 770 in features, capability or fabulous screen resolution (I include PDA’s and computers, not just e-book readers when I say this). The display contains five times as many pixels per square inch as the typical LCD monitor, making it the first on which 6-point type can reasonably be read. (And being 800 pixels wide means web-pages can be viewed without scrolling horizontally.)
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Popularity: 5% [?]

By Roger Sperberg

The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet is not the perfect e-reading device. If it were, it would come with the world-class FBReader pre-installed instead of making you download the software yourself.

Instead, Nokia shows how secondary books are to its thinking by including a Web browser and Flash 7 plug-in, as though Web pages, animation and video were of equal value to e-books; including speakers (and headphone jack) and FM radio, as though listening to music or audiobooks were as important as type; and squeezing five times the usual number of pixels into each square inch of the display as if that were adequate justification for making the screen barely wider than the width of text on a paperback book page.

Pocketable

Sure, the small size means you can carry it everywhere with you because it fits easily into a pocket or purse and weighing only 7 ounces means you actually will carry it everywhere.

And yes, you’ve got to admit that having a PDF reader and the capability to read Word documents (and edit them) if need be does enable the N800 to encompass work documents too and not just “book” books.[1] (more…)

Popularity: 12% [?]

By David Rothman

With DRM and Michael Gorman around, some good news won’t hurt, and this morning it’s of the new Everun machines from RAON Digital.

Need to cope with the Tower of eBabel and run a variety of e-book programs in Win XP? Here’s a solution, assuming that the programs display properly. The hardware supposedly will be be available later this month, with prices apparently starting at the Korean equivalent of $700. Specs:

“Weighing only 460g, the Everun adopted [a] 4.8-inch WVGA (800×480) LCD featuring auto-rotation and auto-brightness control function. It offers up to seven hours (12 hours with a large battery) of battery life thanks to its power saving AMD Geode processor and high capacity lithium-ion battery. The new UMPC supports built-in 802.11b/g WLAN, Bluetooth 2.0 connectivity and optional HSDPA/Wibro modem. Qwerty keypad and optical touch mouse are also contained. Users can choose storage (HDD or SSD) and CPU (LX900 or LX800)…” Options range from a 6G storage card to a 60G hard drive, and include CPUs of either 500 or 600Mhz.

And speaking of eBabel: Check out Microsoft partners with Linspire for increased interoperability in Engadget. So is this a Good Thing, or are the Redmond folks playing off one linux outfit against another and getting some IP concessions along the way? And what’s ahead in the e-book sense? Could we see a Microsoft e-reader for linux?

(Thanks to Roger Sperberg for the tip.)

Popularity: 2% [?]

By David Rothman

Red Hat is releasing free Liberation Fonts that mimic the metrics of Microsoft equivalents. You can make them the default in Thunderbird, FireFox, and Open Office—or even Microsoft Office. Plus, you can set up apps to convert Times New Roman, Arial and Courier New mentions to open fonts. Actual creator is Ascender, commissioned by Red Hat. Further details here. (Thanks to Roger Sperberg.)

Also of interest: Wikipedia on Linux Libertine.

Popularity: 2% [?]

By David Rothman

The TeleBlog’s daily readership often surpasses that of LibraryJournal.com and normally exceeds the audience of The Book Industry Standard if you go by Alexa.com. Would you believe, the TeleBlog even beats Publishers Weekly on rare occasions. Check out the numbers yourself.

We may well be the most popular Web blog dedicated to e-book industry news and views, as opposed to, say, mobile news in general. Whether the topic is DRM or Iraq, we’ll generally cover it from an e-book angle, and this focus has helped put us on the map. At various times we’ve drawn links from major sites ranging from Wired News and Slashdot to the New York Times, NPR and the Chronicle of High Education, where we’re on the blogroll of the Wired Campus blog. Boing Boing and the Yale LawMeme have praised us, and if:book and MobileRead also have been gracious.

Problem is, I’ve ended up writing at least 90 percent of the TeleBlog’s posts, and to continue at this rate without an adequate revenue stream is out of the question. Google ads would not do the trick. And with a zillion free news sources out there, a subscription plan doesn’t make sense.

Bottom line: Less of David and ideally more of you

So here’s the deal. Effective immediately, I’ll post only when the muses drive me to it—maybe once or twice a week. I hope other contributors will fill the vacuum. I’ll provide editorial assistance if need be so people can appear here at their best, writing in the TeleBlog’s informal style. So feel free to pitch in with your own articles on relevant topics for a global audience.

Who knows? Maybe in the end the number of posts will increase. I’d love that. My goal is not to be indispensable. (more…)

Popularity: 8% [?]

By David Rothman

How does the new N800 from Nokia stack up against the 770 for e-reading? Roger Sperberg is impressed overall with the features of the N800, shown here. But for reading himself to sleep, he’ll stick to the old machine:

…the top-of-the-device rocker button with the + and - zoom is far easier to use on the 770 than the new formation, and this is significant for use of the internet tablet as an e-book reader. You see, FBReader utilizes + and - to advance (or retreat) in the e-text you’re reading, and it’s just plain easier. Not to mention that, sans cover, the 770 weighs only 6 ounces, which is easier to hold up when you’re lying in bed, reading before falling asleep.

So I’m keeping the 770 and my wife gets the N800.

What’s more, here in the States, the 770 will set you back $350 at CompUSA while the N800 costs $50 more.

Related: MobileWack’s roundup on tablets and Mike Cane’s anti-Nokia rant.

(Via Internet Tablet Talk.)

Popularity: 5% [?]

By David Rothman

FBRReader, one of the better e-readers for Linux-based machines, including the Nokia 770, is now running on the Pepper Pad, according to Roger Sperberg.

He says there are “some minor glitches due to its using a different flavor of Linux.” Check the related Google group for more information. Thanks, Roger.

Related: Pepper site and some past posts mentioning the Pad. Also, here’s a Pad for $456 from eCost–presumably not the latest model.

Popularity: 3% [?]