TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Wikis’ Category

By David Rothman

Don’t want water in your automobile’s gasoline tank? Then fuel up at a busy gas station.

And the same’s true with Wikipedia. Generally, not always, entries on popular topics are more reliable than those on more arcane ones. Just be careful about entries which could draw a steady stream of partisan edits.

Such thoughts came to me while I was reading a Wikipedia-related column from Paul Gilster, an author, blogger and contributor to the Raleigh News  & Observer, who pointed out the popularity-reliability correlation. Originally he was a Wikipedia skeptic, but he has since come around around—while, appropriately, warning that you still need to be wary. Paul also suggests going to the source sites mentioned in citations.

At the same time, as the author of Centauri Dreams, a blog on deep space, Paul points to the value of Wikipedia for keeping up to date on arcane scientific subject—on which it can be more timely than, say, the Britannica.

Related: Free subscriptions and widgets for bloggers—from Encyclopedia Britannica.

Popularity: 3% [?]

By David Rothman

Is the publishing industry catching on to the usefulness of the e-books as trail-blazers for p-books? I’ll be surprised if HarperCollin’s new “studio” imprint doesn’t try that. But more immediately:

–Bertelsmann is publishing a condensed paper edition of Wikipedia, in German. Check out the New York Times, Ars Technica and a Google roundup. Could this be the start of a truly sustainable business model for Wikipedia?

–A self-published book is shortlisted for the prestigious Pen/Ackerley award in the U.K. The book came out as an e-book, although I’m not certain if E appeared before or after the P. Author is psychotherapist Jane Haynes, and the title is Who is it that can tell me who I am? The journal of a psychotherapist.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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.

(more…)

Popularity: 4% [?]

By David Rothman

“I’m actually increasingly bored by this question of whether Wikipedia is good or bad, and even more so by the easy vilification of it, a reaction often rooted in professional self-interest. After all, the Oxford English Dictionary, arguably the greatest reference work in the English language (and certainly the greatest reference work about the English language) found its origins in a wiki model, whereby scholars put out the word to English speakers far and wide that they would welcome hard evidence of the earliest appearances of English words.” - Oxford University Press Publisher Niko Pfund in the OUP blog, via Media Bistro.

Detail: He’s answering reader questions and meanwhile has outlined the pros and cons of putting e-books online, in terms of p-book sales.

Popularity: 3% [?]

By Branko Collin

The New York Review of Books has a jealousy inducing piece on Wikipedia, it’s that well written. OK, technically it is a review of John Broughton’s “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual,” a book that describes how to write Wikipedia entries that last. But Nicholson Baker, author of Double Fold, talks mostly about Wikipedia itself, and his own experiences with the internet phenomenon.

Baker does not feel the need to attack or pre-emptively defend Wikipedia, and that—together with the appearance of books such as Broughton’s—seems to signal a turning point for the online encyclopaedia. Wikipedia is no longer in need of definition. You can still have very strong opinions about it but they won’t make Wikipedia go away, nor make it any less important. Today, Wikipedia just is.

Via Martin Wisse.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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

Wikitravel is just what you’d expect: a wiki that’s loaded with travel information provided by contributors from around the world.  What’s somewhat new and interesting, though, is the Wikitravel Press, a print-on-demand (POD) alternative for Wikitravel content.  Launched earlier this month, the Press currently only offers a couple of destination titles (Chicago and Singapore), but I’m sure plenty more will be available shortly. Lulu is the POD provider for this service, and this is the second time I’ve stumbled across a Lulu project in the past couple of days.

One of the key benefits Wikitravel Press touts is the fact that all of their guides will be updated every month.  That’s one of the true benefits of POD, right?  You get to refresh the material on an as-needed basis and I could see where travel content would benefit greatly from this flexibility.

It’s interesting to see the various ways wiki content can be further distributed and monetized.  As I mentioned in this earlier post, I think there’s a huge opportunity for someone to add a new distribution model to the wikipedia itself.

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Robert Nagle

While David is busy testing his newly arrived XO laptop, here’s a side-by-side comparison of the Kindle vs. the XO laptop by Austin technical writer Anne Gentle. Gentle recently prepared a 100% web-based XO manual optimized for the XO browser. Austin writer Anne Gentle writes widely about technical issues and made huge contributions to the XO Quick Start guide. Here’s her piece about how she transformed that same manual from a wiki into a web-based manual for XO users. (Hint: she did it with a commercial documentation tool called AuthorIT).

She also links to a Flossmanuals, a site hosting manuals for various open source manuals (like Audacity, Azureus, Mplayer), etc. This site is another wiki-editing initiative that is more geared to producing technical manuals.

(more…)

Popularity: 4% [?]