TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Amazon now taking orders for XO laptop: Give One, Get One program

By David Rothman

The  idea sounded noble. For $400 total, buy an XO laptop for yourself and another for a child in a developing country. But the execution was a mess. Some customers waited months past the expected time for their little green machines to arrive.

Now, however, One Laptop Per Child has wisely farmed out the retail arrangements to Amazon, which can ship both inside and outside the United States. The main order page is here. As reported in PC World, "The devices will be shipped within 30-days in the U.S. or longer for people ordering from the U.K. or other parts of the world. "

I sold my XO some months ago because OLPC wasn’t paying sufficient attention in my opinion to e-reading software, and more importantly I wanted to raise cash to try other machines. But I still have fond memories of the crisp screen, which actually fared better in bright sunlight. I also liked the ability to use the XO as a tablet.

Yes, I’d welcome updates from XO boosters, including fresh information on the status of FBReader for the laptop.

Related: Relevant items from the independent OLPC News (try here and here if you’re not visiting OLPC News today).

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‘Nintendo lining up DSphone’—with e-book apps as options?

By David Rothman

Could Nintendo be about to battle the iPod Touch and maybe even the iPhone?

Mobile Entertainment reports that Nintendo has trademarked "a number of DS-related titles that could offer a sneak peek at the plans the firm has for its machine." Among them? "DSBook" as well as "DSPhone."

Says ME: "The eclectic list points to all sorts of possible software, or even hardware, releases for the machine over the coming years, with hints towards, sat-nav software, movie downloads, mobile telephony, email, TV and e-books clear to see."

Related: Earlier Nintendo-related stories from the TeleBlog. E-book apps have been running on Nintendo machines already. But maybe new arrangements and new software can broaden the range of titles, among other improvements.

(Found via MobileContent Today.)

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Memo to MIT Press: Get an e-book version of your Turing novel out, so pirates don’t preempt you

By David Rothman

Turing (A Novel about Computation) should be an obvious candidate for an e-book—and not just because of the topic.

After all, the publisher is none other than The MIT Press. No such luck for honest e-bookers, though. I can’t even find a Kindle edition. And here the book has been out for five years.

Meanwhile a pirate site is merrily promoting the novel, by Christos H. Papadimitriou, as a free e-book. The site even slapped its name on a modified cover.

When, oh when, will legit publishers learn? Meanwhile I’ve e-mailed The MIT Press and Prof. Papadimitriou for comment.

The DRM angle: As long as a paper version was available for scanning, even the best "protection" in the world couldn’t have kept the Turing book off the pirate site.

An aside: What’s the University of Phoenix doing with an advertisement on the sleazy pirate site, in between sex ads? Perhaps an agency lined up the ad, and the University doesn’t know what’s going on.

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The perils of building your business model around anti-consumer laws: Music biz lesson for e-book publishers

By David Rothman

A Harvard law professor is arguing that the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act isn’t constitutional. The reason? In effect, he says, the RIAA is enforcing criminal law.

Prof. Charles Nesson, who founded the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, is defending a Boston University student—one of tens of thousands of people whom the RIAA has accused of online song-sharing.

If Nesson succeeds, the RIAA will have one fewer tool to use against piracy.

No, I don’t think people should be able to share books with impunity via P2P, but the act is really over the top—with fines as high as $150K for just one violation. The e-book industry is asking for trouble if it relies on  atrocities like this. Better business models would be far, far more effective and durable.

Related: Harvard Crimson article.

Also on the legal front: Local Wikipedia blocked by German MP, in OhmyNews. As much as I believe in well-stocked national digital libraries, I also believe in robust alternatives. This clip is a good illustration of the reasons why. (Thanks to Wiebe de Jager.)

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The Kindle: Potential cost-saver for college students—but not necessarily for everyone

By David Rothman

"…if college students had the ability to buy all their textbooks on Kindles, they could wipe out the cost of a Kindle with their savings over printed books in 3 semesters, or a year and a half." - Jason Perlow’s ZDNet blog.

The TeleRead take: See the full Perlow item for context. Also remember, this calculation doesn’t cover a more typical reader. "At the two books per month level," Pelow writes, the $359 Kindle is "going to need to cost around $125.00 or $150.00 or so."

Other issues exist besides costs—for example, durability and whether the Kindle’s six-inch monochrome screen is suitable for illustration-heavy textbooks and others with many pictures.

Related: Past TeleBlog posts on the Kindle economics issue and Slashdot discussion.

Photo credit: CC-licensed image from Kari Sullivan of her dog Robot "modeling" the K machine. She’s separately shared her own impressions of the Kindle.

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What’s my 2020 blog doing on the Kindle?

By Joe Wikert

A reader of my Publishing 2020 blog recently e-mailed me this link to a new product for the Kindle. This new product is the feed of the 2020 blog, which Amazon is now selling for 99 cents per month.

I was never asked to participate in the program, so I’m assuming it’s the result of a blogging syndication deal I signed a couple of years ago. Thanks to the world of syndication you never know where your content might appear, and you really don’t have much say in the matter. I’m not complaining, and I certainly don’t anticipate many (any?!) subscriptions to materialize via this service; even if they do, I’m getting a slice of a slice of a pretty tiny (99-cent) slice, so it’s not changing my world.

The bigger question I have is "why?" Why is Amazon bothering with adding these blog feeds? The rankings I’m seeing for most of them is pretty low. More importantly, I’ve found that once Kindle owners discover free blog feed services like Kindlefeeder, they feel the paid feeds are a rip-off.

think Amazon would be better off redirecting their efforts to increase the number of available paid blog feeds. For example, they still only have 18 magazines for sale on the Kindle, and loads of technology and business titles are noticeably absent from the list. Every minute spent adding another blog to the service is time that should have been spent building up the magazine base, IMHO.

Moderator: Some of the 2020 posts, through arrangements with Joe, also appear in the TeleBlog. - D.R.

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Q&A with Ian Freed of Amazon Kindle

By Paul Biba

Eric Engleman of TechFlash has published a Q&A with Ian Freed, the guy at Amazon who is responsible for the Kindle. You can read the whole thing here.

The thing that surprised me the most was Ian’s answer to the question: Are there some Kindle features that you’ve found work particularly well and some that don’t? He responded that newspaper delivery and the experimental browser have gone over really well, but here’s the part of the answer I never would have expected:

The other one — we had pretty good instincts on this but didn’t know for sure how consumers would react — is blogs. The blog experience on Kindle is very different in some ways from the blog experience on the PC. If I’m reading a blog on Kindle I don’t actually have to be connected. I can get five blogs delivered and hop on an airplane with wireless turned off and read through the entire blog as if I’m reading through a newspaper or magazine. And that’s something that we weren’t sure how consumers would react, and frankly, while there is a nominal fee of 99 cents or $1.99 per month for an entire blog, we weren’t sure how people would react to the idea of a paying for a blog. If you think about it, it’s a third or a half the price of a cup of coffee for a month of your favorite blog. It’s not that much money.

Related: Kindle might be open to non-Amazon apps someday, says Kindle VP.

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Mocha VNC Lite: Way to read e-books on your iPhone or Touch, including maybe even Mobipocket titles?

By David Rothman

What if your iPod or Touch screen could display the same view as on your PC or Mac?

Including even programs such as Mobipocket that will work on a PC but not the Apple gizmos?

I can’t promise that the free Mocha VNC Lite app for the iPhone and iPod will allow such miracles. But maybe some kind soul can at least try—and share the results with us.

Lite does not just provide the desktop view, it also offers at least right mouse-button support.

Thwarted by clash with Vista

So why haven’t I tested Mocha VNC Lite on my HP machine?

Because, alas, VNC Lite needs a VNC server on the desktop, and the free versions of the required software don’t get along well with Vista. Could this be my punishment for the Faustian deal I made when I bought a Vista-OS desktop?

VNC server info

For the desktop end of the WiFi link, compatible software comes with the Mac’s OS X Software and free versions apparently exist for Windows and Linux.

By the way, a 3G connection will also work. So if my hunch is correct, you just might be able to access your desktop e-library from anywhere with your iPhone.

And speaking of Mobi…

As for Mobipocket running on iPhone or Touch itself, does anyone have an update?

Is an iPhone/Touch version of Mobipocket for the iPhone still due by the end of the year, as was suggested at the IDPF conference last spring? Mobi has wonderful features. But its delayed appearance on the iPhone reminds us of one more negative of DRMed proprietary formats. The Stanza iPhone app can read Mobi, imperfectly, but not the “protected” variety.

Related: Gizmodo’s  20 essential iPhone Apps, through which I discovered VNC Lite.

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Kindle and PRS-700 compared

By Paul Biba

The Amazon Kindle Review has started a comparison of these two machines. The author hopes the comparison will continue to be filled out in the comments section. While not unbiased, as he admits, it’s still worth reading.

One of the points he makes is one I hadn’t thought of before. Under the advantages of the Sony he says:

ePub support - Lots of people drum this up as a huge advantage. However, opening up the Kindle too much would lead to Amazon not being able to support whispernet i.e. if people start buying their books from other stores.

Is that a valid argument?

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BookGlutton makes huge improvements to its GUI

By Paul Biba

BookGlutton has done a major upgrade to its GUI. You can find all the details here. Among other things:

We recently finished a massive under-the-hood effort to prepare for the next big release of the Unbound Reader. You’ll see some of the improvements right away. For one, we got rid of that pesky pop-up window. None of us has ever been a big fan of pop-up windows, but initially it bought us time to face some of the challenges with having a single-page app open up right in the midst of another navigation framework. Now the reader OPENS IN THE SAME WINDOW as the rest of the site, and conforms to whatever dimensions please you for reading on-screen. So RESIZE AWAY. We’ve scaled it down to fit on my tiniest laptop and up to fill my ginormous 24-inch flatscreen, and it looks great either way. We added A THIRD FONT-SIZE to the font-scaling for those who really want to bump up the dots-per-em.

I had looked at BookGlutton before but, to be honest, had found the interface to be rather annoying so I never used it. I’ve played around with the new GUI and I can say that I will use it now on my eeePC. Good job, and it looks as if better things are coming. One of the books I’ll probably read is Journey to Bagdad - 1915 by Charles S. Brooks.

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‘Mind and Body’: A dead father, a $500K life insurance payout to a teenager, and a government conspiracy

By David Rothman

Mind and Body, a free Creative Commons book by Aaron Dunlap, is the TeleBlog’s latest e-book sighting at Manybooks.net. See if the start doesn’t hook you.

“I was seventeen, almost eighteen, the first time I killed someone.

“It was kind of an accident, in the same way that bubble gum is kind of a food. I hadn’t set out to kill him, honestly, but I wasn’t exactly trying not to kill him either.”

That’s just a hint of the plot, which includes a $500K life insurance payout directly to a teenager without trust safeguards to spoil the fun. His father worked in Quantico, Virginia, “a self-contained ‘city’ that’s home to the nation’s largest Marine Corps base, the Marine Corps University, DEA University, FBI Academy, and a few other assorted pillars of dread.” Plot summary:

Chris Baker considered himself a normal teenager until shortly before his eighteenth birthday when his father died mysteriously, leaving behind an unexpected fortune. Everything changed after that. Now in the crosshairs of the FBI, the Marine Corps, Interpol, and a handful of trained killers, Chris finds himself in a world of guns, assassins, poison, and high-tech espionage. Using techniques and skills he never knew he had, Chris must uncover a government conspiracy that seems to involve everyone and everything he knows.

Formats: Manybooks offers eReader, PDF, Mobpocketi, Kindle and most other common formats for the free edition. Via eReader software and otherwise, it’s readable on an iPhone.

Related: “Buy” link at Amazon (source of above summary), in case you want a p-book edition.

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A lesson for libraries and e-bookers? Colorado library discarding VHS movies

By David Rothman

“The Boulder Public Library is phasing out its collection of VHS tapes, and by the end of this year, patrons no longer will be able to find the fast-becoming antique technology at any of the city’s library branches.” - Boulder Daily Camera.

The e-book angle: VHS was a lot more popular in its heyday than any e-book format. So what will happen if libraries and users stock up on devices built around specific proprietary formats? Even software-based readers can be a hassle to change because of the limitations of operating systems and hardware.

What’s happening at the Boulder library with the VHS cassettes, of course, is hardly unique to it.

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