TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

FTC to hold DRM referendum

By Chris Meadows

Found via Ars Technica: Perhaps the great Spore DRM backlash has had an effect after all. The Federal Trade Commission is going to hold a “town hall meeting” to discuss the issue of Digital Rights Management in general.

Digital rights management (DRM) refers to technologies typically used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, and copyright holders to attempt to control how consumers access and use media and entertainment content. Among other issues, the workshop will address the need to improve disclosures to consumers about DRM limitations. Interested parties may submit written comments or original research on this topic.

The meeting will apparently address the use of DRM not only in gaming, but in all fields—including e-books.

There is a web form on the official site where comments may be submitted. Ars Technica writes that citizens may also submit comments and requests “electronically to drmtownhall@ftc.gov by January 30, 2009” but I am not able to see where they found this information anywhere on the DRM Town Hall page.

This sort of opportunity to have our voices heard directly by a governmental body does not come along very often! If you have any kind of feelings about Digital Rights Management at all, do not miss this chance to speak up!

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E-book review: Emperor Dad

By Chris Meadows

It is unfortunate that young-adult novels are often referred to as “juvenile” books. Juvenile far too often implies the synonym of “childish,” something that grown-ups wouldn’t want to read. Perhaps with the Harry Potter books that stigma decreased a little—though it is still telling that the British publisher had to come out with a line of Harry Potter books with boring covers so that adults would not be embarrassed to be seen with them on the train!

In fact, young-adult novels are often anything but childish. A case in point is Emperor Dad by Henry Melton. Don’t be fooled by the cover art, which unfortunately looks like it could have stepped right out of a Saturday morning cartoon. Inside is an excellent adventure yarn that starts in the most unlikely of settings.

Robert Hill, a scientist father living in small Texas town, has just been laid off from his corporate job—with a wife and 17-year-old son to support. His son, James, is experiencing the usual teenage problems—worrying over being allowed to drive his father’s pickup solo to and from school, football practice versus his grades, and making out with a cheerleader.

But all that changes when Robert makes a breakthrough in teleportation theory. And when James Hill discovers the teleportation software on his father’s workshop computer, and sees the news reports of teleportation thefts by someone calling himself the “Emperor of Earth,” it doesn’t take him long to put two and two together…

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O’Reilly iPhone ‘Missing Manual’ app outperforms most print (computer) books this holiday season

By Paul Biba

That’s the news from the O’Reilly Tools of Change blog. It’s just another indication of how the iPhone has become an industry-changing device. I have phones by HTC, Nokia, MWg, Palm and  Blackberry, but I simply don’t use them any more.

Whenever I switch over to one of them for a change of pace, I switch back the next day.

Clunky GUIs compared to the iPhone’s

Their GUI are just so clunky compared to the iPhone that they are painful to operate. On the book reading front, however, I still have the short battery life problem that will keep me locked to my Kindle as my main book reader. Also, the larger screen is just more pleasant.

As to the substance of the post below, the iPhone has a limit of 148 apps. I already have 62 on my phone, so it is unlikely that I will ever take up app space by adding a book, when I can add books by other means.

Conventional wisdom suggests that when choosing pilot projects, you pick ones with a high likelihood of success. It’s hard to argue that iPhone: The Missing Manual was a reasonable choice for testing the iPhone App waters. But while we knew it would do well, we’ve been quite pleased with just how well:

If the iPhone App by itself had been a book, it would be a top 10 seller in BookScan for Computer Books this holiday season, based on just 17 days of sales.

The print version appears to have been unaffected, retaining a solid position in the top 3 for Computer Books in BookScan

A full 1/3 of those buying the app are outside the US, mostly in countries where the print book is not readily available.

There are certainly some who don’t care for the book-as-app approach, preferring the library model (where one app enables reading multiple titles). It’s also clear there’s substantial customer interest in both options, and we strongly believe that offering a variety of options and letting customers choose is the right approach. This is a time for experimentation, and we’ll be doing quite a bit more of it (format, pricing, content) in the digital — and especially mobile — space in the coming months.

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Libraries are a barrier to reading

By Paul Biba

So says a fascinating blog post by Donald Clark. Here are a few excerpts, and I suggest you read the whole thing. He makes a lot of sense, especially when he talks about publishers confusing the medium with the content. I must also admit that I’ve had some of the same thoughts about libraries myself. Any rebuttal?

Thanks to author Richard Herley for finding this post.

100 Classic Books on Nintendo

Who would have thought? I’ve just seen the ‘100 Classic Books’ title advertised on prime time TV, just after Big Brother, for the Nintendo DS. Brain Training was a hinge product. It changed the entire games market. Nothing will ever be the same again. But this is even bolder.
Of course, the traditionalists will be waving their reading glasses in horror, as usual. But to turn books into a fetish is simply to deny learning and access by those who need it most. Real books are great, but let’s not confuse the medium with the content. Just as journalists and newspaper owners fail to realise they’re in the ‘news’ not the ‘newspaper’ business, so book fans and publishers fail to realise that this is about reading, not books. Books are simple a piece of technology. A damn good piece of technology, but one that has some strengths and lots of weaknesses. In time its weaknesses will outweigh its current strengths.

… Why lock up knowledge and the ability to learn in libraries and schools, when we can publish and distribute it at marginal cost to everyone. As long as we publish in open standards, the devices will just keep on coming. Leave the device design to the experts, like Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, I believe that Moore’s Law will produce $10 devices by 2020, possibly a lot earlier – we just need to focus on free content.

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Obama about to sell out to the RIAA et al.? Wants Sonny Bono copyright gouge defender to get major Justice post

By David Rothman

No good. Barack Obama wants an RIAA-loved attorney and a second lawyer, a past defender of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, to get top Justice Department posts. Details from CNET, via Very Interesting People.

Please, Barack. Reconsider. Or at least reassure us you’ll come out against copyright gouges and align your Justice Department accordingly, despite the lawyers’ past offenses.

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Is the iPhone’s small screen actually better for e-reading? And how about Stanza-ePub for newspaper reading?

By David Rothman

Yes, in “some ways” the iPhone screen is better, according to the Book Oven blog, which notes the obvious advantage of mobility. But there are other plusses, too. More than a few readers may actually prefer to focus on narrow, newspaper-style columns.

Hugh McGuire does’t just speak up for narrow in his post. In a comment he also makes the sensible suggestion that the full New York Times be available for Stanza or something equivalent.

Exactly, Hugh. When I was pushing the OpenReader format, similar to the ePub one favored by Stanza, I approached the Washington Post with this very suggestion for OR. I had both PDAs and cellphones in mind, and Jim Brady, editor of the Post Web site, was intrigued. But the idea just didn’t fly elsewhere within the Postocracy. Today the Post shows up on the iPhone via a horrid customized interface, totally inferior to the views offered by the mobile versions of the AP and New York Times. Please, Post. Pay attention. Navigating through you on my iPod Touch is a real chore.

The book-newspaper connection

No, I’m not wandering here from the topic of books. I want to see seamless links in both directions between timely nonfiction books and newspapers, and beyond that, book reading and newspaper reading can reinforce each other.

Who knows, maybe e-books could help revive newspaper book sections, which could link to advertisers’ titles for immediate download.

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Vulgar self-congratulation

By Chris Meadows

I’m not generally one to blow my own horn (much), but on the same day that my Wall•E post was linked by TechMeme, I have discovered that my Ficlets post has been blogged by one of my own Internet heroes, Wil Wheaton. Wil wrote, in the context of discussing AOL’s decision to end Ficlets.com:

A fellow Ficleteer, Chris Meadows, wrote a Requiem for Ficlets that touched me in a way that, if Loretta touched me, I’d say, “Oh yeah, that’s nice.”

And then he quoted me at length, and linked to the guide I wrote for archiving one’s own Ficlets.

Thank you so much, Wil. You’ve made my week.

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iPhone reading: pro and con views

By Chris Meadows

Mark Gladding of the E-Books Just Published site has posted a blog entry on using Stanza with the iPhone. (We previously covered Gladding’s piece on “E-book advice for authors” last month.) He writes that he was initially skeptical about the idea, preferring converting e-books into speech-synthesized audiobooks for listening over reading from a small screen.

However skeptical he started out, Gladding was greatly impressed by Stanza’s display quality and overall ease of use. However, he is disappointed that the Stanza desktop application does not include images from converted books in other formats. (It also strips formatting, such as bold and italic emphasis.) He also remarks on the way that PDF formatting is messed up by conversion, though lays the blame more at the feet of the PDF format than Stanza Desktop.

He concludes:

The iPhone and iPod touch combined with Stanza make for a great e-reading experience. I was pleasantly surprised with how easy on the eye reading from the screen was. I had no trouble reading for an hour straight on the train. If you already own an iPhone or iPod touch you really must give Stanza and ebooks a try.

A number of times, I have seen people who think they wouldn’t enjoy reading on a small device discover after trying it that it is less onerous than they had feared. It is nice to see another example.

However, it is easy for e-book advocates’ enthusiasm for the gadgets to blind them to the fact that some people’s distaste for e-books is not simply a matter of screen size or clarity. Other factors may be involved.

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