TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Tamas Simon’ Category

By Tamas Simon

Reminder: These are Tamas Simon’s individual opinions. - D.R.

I read a lot of posts and comments nowadays on the need for a reflowable e-book format. ePub is said to be a “solution” for this. I understand the frustration; I just don’t think reflow is such a big deal, especially not if we look at the long term trends. When do we need reflow anyway? I think there are two cases:

First scenario is when we have some content on a device and we want to change the font size. Honestly, how often does this happen? Once you’ve set the font size for a size that works for you, how often will you change it?

Second scenario is when switching devices. We have some content that looks acceptable on one device and we want to move it to another device that has smaller screen size. If it has larger screen size, we usually don’t even bother, do we?

Wouldn’t you be happy if…

If someone would let you use a different version of the file for the second device—but still a PDF file or something like that, a “final non-reflowable format”—wouldn’t that make you happy? I think what we really need is not one end-user e-book-format that can reflow a hundred different ways but rather a means to access the content in a format that works at the moment. So the “reflow” can very well happen on a server, in the “cloud” or just by being offered a wide variety of formats.

The Feedbooks approach

Check out Feedbooks for instance. You download the book for one device and then download it again for another device. No problem. “Reflow” is done for you by the site. And it very well addresses the first scenario, too;  you want bigger letters, there you go. I don’t see why this could not work for copyrighted works. We just need someone to provide the service.

At least there would be something value added, something that provides convenience, something that consumers would pay for in an era when content itself becomes so abundant that it’s almost impossible to charge for it. The publishing industry is still fighting this trend but have a look at some bittorrent sites, see what happened to music: you’ll most likely agree that the trend is clear.

The ownership issue

What happens then with “owning a book”? Well, I suppose you could “own” the source format TEX, or XML that is used to produce the different outcomes. Or just share what you have on the P2P network and hope that someone has another format of the content that will help you out one day. Chance are there is.

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Tamas Simon

The Web is the place for valuable but free texts—government, legal, technical and scientific information, for example.

But there’s a problem, literally a big one. The format is often PDF, with letter-sized pages in North America and similar A4 pages in Europe.

Unfortunately, e-book readers like the Sony, the Kindle and the iLiad can’t do full justice to PDFs in that size range. The root cause of the problem is that PDF is a final format, not suited for reflow. So you could well be out of luck if your reader has just a six-inch screen.

Making Mohammed go to the mountain

On the other hand it is very easy for the party who created a PDF document to use a different page size. So my idea here is simple and follows the old motto:

If the mountain will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the mountain.

Let’s lobby for Web sites to produce their articles in PDF format with a page size suitable for today’s e-reading devices.

At a time of global warming, every small little effort counts. If we can save a couple of trees this way, then not only did we provide convenience to people who already purchased these devices, but we are also doing something good for the environment and we will provide further incentives for e-reading.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

By Tamas Simon

I’ve tried Sophie 1.0, and here’s the news: It’s more exciting to me than either E Ink machines or the IDPF’s .epub standard.

Ever since I heard about E Ink, I’ve been a big fan of it. But although I own a Sony Reader and read a lot, I don’t use the Sony. Let me explain why. The main benefit of E Ink is readability. Unfortunately this resulted in slow page-refresh times.

Negatives of today’s E Ink

Current E Ink devices:

• Are monochrome black and white.
• Offer slow page turns and screen refreshes—no video.
• Have slow CPUs - no interactivity.
• Essentially exist just offline offline, for all practical purposes.

Advancements will be coming out of the labs but practically that’s what we have today. 

This makes E Ink devices great for reading long “books” such as novels and lengthy collections of poetry—things that I’d classify classical literature. Unfortunately for E Ink devices, however,  the trend in reading or literacy if you like is quite the opposite.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

By David Rothman

No one’s a bigger defender of the idea of e-book standards than the TeleBlog is.

I’m not entirely happy with the IDPF’s present .epub standards, which don’t assure reliable interbook linking, for example. Even so, at least they’re a start and enjoy the endorsement of some major companies in technology and publishing. But just because .epub’s enemies can be wrong—it’s just a plain lie to say the specs support PDF simply because Adobe Digital Editions does—should we automatically accept what the format’s defenders say?

Going beyond the anti-.epub lies

What if the current .epub isn’t sufficiently useful without proprietary extensions from Adobe? Suppose that it in fact isn’t ready for prime time despite all the vetting it’s gotten from people in technology and publishing and despite the obvious lies of some .epub critics. Ahead is far more thoughtful critique of .epub from Tamas Simon, a proudly geekish TeleBlog contributor shown in the photo above. You needn’t be an XML and tagging expert to understand what he’s driving at. (more…)

Popularity: 6% [?]

By David Rothman

Warning: Here’s a hype alert. The gung-ho users, a grad student and a blogger (A Dress a Day), focus on the positive.

Still, this Google video shows the amount of serendipity that keyword searches and other features of Google Book Search can bring about.

With the technology perfected and enough content online someday, many more “happy accidents” could happen than through shelf-based searches of p-libraries. Tagging and focused blogs would also foster this kind of happiness. Hello, Geoffrey Nunberg? Care to reconsider?

Disclosure: I own a tiny, tiny slice of Google in my undersized retirement account, though you’d never know it from the number of times I beat up on ‘em. In fact, here’s a pointer to Peter Brantley’s blog item on the controversy about the quality of Google’s digitization efforts. (Thanks for the vid link, Tamas.)

Popularity: 3% [?]

By Tamas Simon

Amazon is beta-testing a new payment service that will take the e-tailer into Google Checkout and PayPal territory.

Could micropayments for text and videos—perhaps even blog articles and by-the-chapter books—be on the way? I’m surprised people aren’t discussing the possibilities.

If the charge were a cent, Amazon might take just 0.0025 of that as a transaction fee. Better yet, customers could combine small transactions into a single one and save on fees, using prepaid or postpaid methods.

Similar to iTunes: Way to help finance blogs?

The prepaid idea might be similar to buying a $10 card for iTunes. Once you prepaid the amount, it would be added to your account and then can be used up in small increments.

Such an approach might help finance online magazine-style blogs such as TeleRead—providing an alternative to the ad model. A blog article might cost one cent, and you could set both a monthly maximum and a daily limit. Possibilities:

–Pay a cent per article.

–Buy no more than five articles per day.

–Impose a monthly limit of $1.50.

It would be like a subscription, but better—you wouldn’t pay for material you didn’t use. (more…)

Popularity: 3% [?]

By Tamas Simon

What’s the next step after you’ve found the book you like on the Internet?

Of course, you’ll download it and convert it if you must get it onto the reading device you’re using. But could there be a better approach?

Instead of downloading an e-book file, why not bookmark the location where you’ve found the book—something I’ve made easier via a new service at DigitalReading.net? Bookmarking has lot of advantage, as I’ll show you later in this article, and you can benefit from others’ efforts, not just your own (screenshot). But for now the main reason is that you don’t have to worry about archiving and maintaining your e-book collection. The Web site where you found it is doing that already! Just keep your e-book collection where you keep your bookmarks.

For bookmarking you should use del.icio.us. del.icio.us was sold for 15M dollars to Yahoo!, so it must be doing something right.

The freedom of tagging: No hierarchies to worry about

When you bookmark something on del.icio.us you assign it some tags. This is one of the cool things about del.icio.us because it gives you more freedom than the tree-like hierarchy you can find in your browser. Since the link can have as many tags as you want, it’s easier to find it later. Plus, it’s on the Web so you can access your bookmarks later from another computer (for example, when you go home from work); plus, it has great browser integration. Firefox users can completely replace the browser’s built in bookmarking. (more…)

Popularity: 2% [?]

By David Rothman

So what are the options for turning blogs into p-books? Tamas has just pointed to the Blurb site, which I’d mentioned earlier in a different context, along with Lulu. Any other options of interest, and why? Blurb works with Blogger, LiveJournal.com, TypePad, and WordPress.com blogs (independently hosted WordPress, too?).

Related—for WordPress fans: Top 30 Wordpress Plug-ins in Blogosphere, via Digg. Check out No Ping Wait, which so far seems to be working with the TeleBlog’s WP 2.0.9.

Housekeeping: I’m out of time and will wait until later this week to do my list of ways the e-book industry can address Charles Stross’s concerns.

Popularity: 3% [?]

By Tamas Simon

J.K. Rowling writes in longhand and probably wouldn’t authorize Harry Potter e-books online even if Brinks armored trucks could protect them. But suppose consumers do succeed in enlightening her. Here’s free public advice from the TeleBlog’s latest contributor. - David Rothman

In one of the Harry Potter movies, a photograph came alive in a newspaper. Was that a next-generation E Ink screen with good refresh rate so you could embed videos? If J.K. Rowling can live with such techno-magic, maybe she’ll eventually change her mind about e-books.

Just think how she could single-handedly bring e-books into the mainstream, or at least greatly aid the cause, a good one, considering how digital books could promote literacy among the young.

But how to address Rowling’s current fears of piracy—and similar concerns of other best-selling authors?

Thwarting pirates

One solution, not perfect but certainly worth trying, might be to advertise that the newest book in her world-popular series would be readable digitally in a couple of months—I’ll explain how this would help. (more…)

Popularity: 2% [?]

By Tamas Simon

I am a 33-year-old software engineer, expert in enterprise architecture and Web development. Currently I work for Boeing Canada.

I live in Vancouver, B.C., with my wife and my 11-month daughter.

An ardent e-book enthusiast, I run a Web site at DigitalReading.net where I try implementing various ideas of related services such as e-book search, e-book ratings and review, and collaborative book authoring.

I am also a former member of Mensa (behind on dues).

Popularity: 2% [?]