TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Social networks’ Category

By Robert Nagle

Rachel Donadio on literary tastes:

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives.” “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.” To Fels (who happens to be married to the literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about … their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.”

…

James Collins, whose new novel, “Beginner’s Greek,” is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading “The Magic Mountain” on a plane, recalled that after college, he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” on her bedside table. “I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat,’ and I never did think about the person the same way (and nothing ever happened),” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I know there were occasions when I just wrote people off completely because of what they were reading long before it ever got near the point of falling in or out of love: Baudrillard (way too pretentious), John Irving (way too middlebrow), Virginia Woolf (way too Virginia Woolf).” Come to think of it, Collins added, “I do know people who almost broke up” over “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen: “‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’ ‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’”

(See also David Rothman’s March 30 post  E-books, Pushkin and the dating bar and my note on Kundera below).

Novels are no longer reliable cultural reference points in the dating sphere, except to indicate  education level, free time availability and participation in book clubs.

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By Jon Noring

Moderator’s note: Great timing, Jon. I’ve just posted The Triumph of social sites: Publishers, listen up! Annotation-style capabilities, of course, will make in-book communities possible. - D.R.

David Rothman recently called on IDPF to develop an open standard, third-party annotation and linking format. I’ve previously written about the need for such a standard in two TeleRead articles [1, 2]. Hopefully the third time will be a charm!

The need for such a standard is pretty obvious. Various companies are already implementing their own proprietary standards for third-party annotation of, and linking between, digital media such as books, music, video, etc. Annotation and linking of content (no matter the type of content) is rapidly becoming a vital and fundamental component of interactivity with content, being of great value to business, academia, education, libraries and archives, social networking, etc.

Thus it is important for interoperability (that is, to prevent another Tower of eBabel) to have a single, well-designed, open standard format for third-party annotation and linking. From my research in this area, I have not yet found a developed standard suitable for this purpose (but if one exists, let me know, please!)

“Real-World” example: Annotating an e-book

Because the above introduction is a tad theoretical, let me give a fun “real-world” example to better illustrate what I’m discussing:

Mary is sitting on the beach reading a steamy romance novel on her e-book reading device (e.g., laptop computer, or dedicated e-book reader.) In a particular scene of the story, she is introduced to a character named “Charles,” about whom she really would like to share her thoughts with others. For example, she might want to share something relatively academic like “Charles reminds me of a character right out of a 19th century English novel,” or maybe something a little more earthy and personal like “Wow, Charles is a real hunk!” (I’m not sure if “Charles” can be both!)

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By Branko Collin

Illustration: the scarecrow of Ralph Hodgon’s poem The Late, Last Rook, published presumably before 1918; artist unknown.

In a recent Mobileread article that appears to generate plenty of heat itself, regular contributor Bob Russell suggests that ““Friction” is why e-books adoption is slow.” Friction occurs when publishers and distributors put in all kinds of small hindrances to the book-buying process that viewed separately may make good sense, but that added up form an unsurmountable block to members of the buying public. Russell borrows the term “friction” from “Michal Hyatt, President and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, [who] has written in his blog about reducing “friction” as one way for bookstores to increase their sales,” and sees it equally applicable to e-book merchants.

Now Chris Meadows reports that distributing e-books can get you in conflict with the law: Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) has filed a so-called DMCA take-down notice against document sharing site Scribd for distributing e-books without the required permission. Thing is, some of the books that the SFWA wants taken down are distributed with the permission of the copyright holders. As a result, the SFWA take-down notice serves not only to protect the interests of authors whose copyrights have been infringed, but also as a threat to those, authors and site owners alike, who wish to distribute e-books for free.

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By David Rothman

The BeautifulPeople.net site, a dating service and social network for lookers approved by enough screeners, drew a well-deserved verdict from Wired as one of the six lamest social nets on the Web.

Curious, I dropped by. Notice the preferred browser? Internet Explorer, of course—even if I doubt that BeautifulPeople.net would grant Microsoft’s Bill Gates a membership despite all his billions.

Ugly cheapskates?

There. Doesn’t that make you feel all the better for having chosen Firefox or another open source alternative to Internet Explorer? No respect for Firefox users, eh? At least one book-related site has already dissed Firefox surfers as cheapskates because so many of us block obnoxious ads. Nothing against IE folks, of course. TeleRead welcomes all browsers, both the human and software varieties, ugly and beautiful.

Looking ahead to the world of e-book-based communities, I suppose it’s only a matter of time until a new kind of “Facebook” materializes with BP criteria for participation.

Some ugliness from Wired itself

A much less appropriate site for Wired’s “lame” designation, even as a joke, was StopCyberbullying despite the writer’s recognition of it as “A safe place for frank discussions on the topic of Internet bullying.” Under the “Who you’ll meet,” Wired said, “Pussies,” and under “What’s annoying,” the magazine said, “Dare to call them pussies, and they’ll gang up on you mercilessly.” So cyberbullying isn’t a problem among schoolchildren and, yes, in adult life, too? It’s one reason why the TeleBlog maintains an anti-troll policy.

I hope that StopCyberbullying draws an apology from Wired—ideally followed by a thoughtful feature story on the cyberbully problem, which, yes, ultimately could show up in interactive e-books, including comics and other genres favored by many young people.

No, there ought not to be a law against beautiful people sites, or Mensa sites for that matter, but I wonder if in a sense the very existence of BeautifulPeople.net is at least a subtle form of cyberbullying.

By Jon Noring

Over four years ago I published an eBookWeb article entitled “OEBPS: The Universal Consumer eBook Format?”

Unfortunately, due to eBookWeb going defunct (a casualty of the “E-book Dark Ages” that resulted after the dotcom collapse), that article has essentially disappeared from the Internet.

So I am reposting the eBookWeb article here, not only for preservation purposes, but because its themes are stil very relevant today as will be briefly explained in this foreword.

DeLorean jokes

When I wrote that article, e-books were considered a lot like the DeLorean automobile — weird and impractical — the butt of many jokes. The DeLorean even played a prominently silly role in the movie trilogy Back To The Future.

But times have changed! Just as Google News is full of articles about an entrepreneur reviving the gull-wing-doored, stainless steel automobile to an enthusiastic public, so too e-books are finally being noticed and bought by an enthusiastic public. E-book sales are growing at a fast rate.

My 2003 article had three, closely related themes:

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By David Rothman

What’s a populist e-book-Web site to do? The other day, we started a small TeleRead group on Facebook (details coming, along with those for MyBlogLog, where we’re also present) in the hope that our community members could get to know each other better.

And if a few TeleBlog regulars became good friends or established business connections, that would be fine.

Where the bad boys dwell

But now On the Media, the ultimate media show from public radio, tells us that Facebook is on the elitist side and the great masses dwell in MySpace, home to rock bands and the like. Pretty obvious, of course, but it’s still a point worth making. Class barriers are popping up in “No One Knows You’re A Dog” Land.

Check out an OTM audio segment suggesting that Facebook is for nice students (and presumably alumni) with respectable .edu backgrounds who’d rather not brave the wilds of MySpace. The FBers apparently feel that MySpace is a bad boy like its owner, Rubert Murdoch. Author of the study cited on On the Media is Danah Boyd, a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Information Science at the University of California at Berkeley and also a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society (and an alum of MIT and Brown—with, yes, a Facebook account). (more…)