TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

News & views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics

How ePub beats obsolescence

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

By Jon Noring

Label of Perfect 15126-BWhen I was in college I collected 78 RPM phonograph records, primarily jazz records from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Either I was good at collecting, or just lucky. I found and acquired several large jazz and blues collections (a total of over 100,000 records, about 25 tons, passed through my fingers), and didn’t lose a dime in the process.

I’ve long since given up massively collecting the “old 78’s”, and today have only kept a few favorites. One favorite I kept, a quite rare classic jazz recording from late 1928, is shown to the right. [note 1] My experience collecting older sound recordings has given me some unique perspectives as it relates to media, e-books, copyright, conversion, archiving, formats, etc.

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Posted in Amazon Kindle, Bill McCoy, DRM, E-books and all that, EPub, Jon Noring, OpenReader, book publishing, e-book, e-books, e-books and other digipubs, eBabel, ebook, ebooks, kindle | 4 Comments » | Read more..

New Kindle user’s open-minded essay on e-books: In the May/June Columbia Journalism Review

Friday, May 9th, 2008

By David Rothman

The positives of Ezra Klein’s CJR article and related video: He’s a new Kindle user and hails the machine as “credible. As a product of Amazon, it’s intertwined with the world’s largest online bookstore, legitimized by the one company that can lay some claim to having already changed the way we use, or at least acquire, books. The real question, though, is what took so long?”

In general, the Klein article is upbeat on E and notes the possibilities of  adjustable font sizes,image outbound links, interactivity and updated books (albeit, I’d assume, not the 1984ish variety). At the same time his CJR piece correctly recognizes that the Kindle and the like are not perfect replacements for paper books, given the screen-contrast problems of E Ink, among the other flaws.

The negatives—blindness to the eBabel and DRM issues: Um, Ezra, I mostly liked your piece, but as an e-book newbie, you unwittingly left out a few details. Unless we want the whole bleepin’ e-book world to revolve around Jeff Bezos, we deserve nonproprietary e-book standards in areas ranging from the basic format to guidelines for shared annotations and interbook linking.

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Posted in Amazon Kindle, DRM, E-books and all that, EPub, blogs, book publishing, books, e-book, e-book ergonomics, e-books, e-books and other digipubs, e-ink, eBabel, ebook, ebooks, kindle | 2 Comments » | Read more..