TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Canada’ Category

By Chris Meadows

Since the original news reports on Dr. Peter Watts’s conviction for “assault”, it has come out that the charge actually was not assault, and that charge was never offered to the jury. In a comment on a Port Huron Times-Herald’s article’s comment thread, one of the actual jurors writes:

Assault was never one of the charges. We were given one option… felony obstruction/resisting. I don’t know if the prosecutor dropped the assault prior to the jury convening, but it was never presented to us.

and in a different post (quoted by one of Dr. Watts’s friends in his own blog about the affair):

As a member of the jury that convicted Mr. Watts today, I have a few comments to make. The jury’s task was not to decide who we liked better. The job of the jury was to decide whether Mr. Watts "obstructed/resisted" the custom officials. Assault was not one of the charges. What it boiled down to was Mr. Watts did not follow the instructions of the customs agents. Period. He was not violent, he was not intimidating, he was not stopping them from searching his car. He did, however, refuse to follow the commands by his non compliance. He’s not a bad man by any stretch of the imagination. The customs agents escalated the situation with sarcasm and miscommunication. Unfortunately, we were not asked to convict those agents with a crime, although, in my opinion, they did commit offenses against Mr. Watts. Two wrongs don’t make a right, so we had to follow the instructions as set forth to us by the judge.

I am correcting the previous TeleRead story accordingly.

By Chris Meadows

Canadian science-fiction author Dr. Peter Watts has been found guilty of assault felony obstruction in connection with the incident we mentioned in December, when he was stopped on the US side of the border while crossing back into Canada.

As Watts tells the story, he was attacked and arrested by the border patrol officer; as the officer tells the story, Watts attacked him. Watts faces up to 2 years in prison; sentencing will take place April 26th. (Found via BoingBoing.)

Update: Ted R. points out Peter Watts’s blog entry on the verdict. As Paul Durrant also says in comments below, it turns out he was convicted not for “choking” a guard, but rather for not immediately obeying the guard’s order to get on the ground.

Update 2: It turns out that the paper misreported the charge; according to one of the jurors, “assault” was never presented as a charge, simply “felony obstruction/resisting”

By Paul Biba

From their news site:

Project Gutenberg of Canada Release their 500th eBook

“Forty Years of Song” by Emma Albani, first published in 1911. Emma Albani (1847-1930) was the first Canadian singer to gain a worldwide reputation, which is rather something considering the combination of Canada’s low population and remoteness for the time period. Think of how much “easier” it was for Piaf. “Easier” quotes because Edith Piaf did not have an easy time, but it was certainly easier for the world to find HER.

Our 400th Project Gutenberg eBook in Portuguese has just been released

Novo Dicionario da Lingua Portuguesa, by Candido Figueiredo. Released as PG eBook #31552.

Thanks to Rita Farinha, Alberto Manuel Brandao Simoes and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (This file was produced from image generously made available by National Library of Portugal (Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal).)

By Chris Meadows

In 2008, we covered a story about the Associated Press claiming that bloggers needed to buy licenses to quote more than ten words, then hastily backpedalling into a murky area of refusing to say how much was all right to quote.

It turns out that Canada has been going through something similar. TechDirt posts that last week, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) came out with a new set of rules intending to “bring some clarity and some consistency” and make the rules “as unambiguous as possible.”

However, as TechDirt points out, the actual effect was to do exactly the opposite, because the rules seemed to state that any quoting of stories by bloggers was not permitted.

Now the CBC is hastily attempting to clarify what it meant, claiming that it is, in fact, all right for bloggers to quote the CBC, even though this directly contradicts the rules as laid down on their site. The CBC representatives say they will be reviewing the terms in light of public objections.

It seems to be fairly common now for media organizations to try to put limits on fair use. We’ve seen this with the AP, with Murdoch and Cuban’s claims of news aggregator freeloading, and now with the CBC. Where will it all end?

By a TeleRead Contributor

It is time for me to give an ereader a serious shakedown. In Slow Reading, I asserted that print books are still the superior technology for reading anything of length or substance; that view remains. However, it is clear that the writing and publishing world is changing. I am discovering excellent writers who are publishing their material independently, often as ebooks. I want to read this material, but not on a computer, and without printing it. A specialized reading device might fill the gap.

Amazon’s ereader, the Kindle, came to Canada in late 2009. No doubt there are good reasons not to buy a Kindle. Personally, I find Amazon’s competitive practices too aggressive (such as disabling the buy button for publishers who do not use their print-on-demand service). Also, I was vaguely aware that Kindle uses Digital Rights Management (DRM) to try to restrict access to it content, unlike Sony’s Reader which uses the open epub format. I am better informed now. However, Amazon was the first to offer a wireless reader in Canada. I was curious and felt the need to play. I put the Kindle on my Christmas list. (more…)

By Chris Meadows

CBC News reports on rising opposition to the “anti-counterfeiting” treaty ACTA, which is being negotiated in secret among the United States, Australia, Canada, the European Union, and a number of other governments.

This treaty, which often looks a lot more like a copyright treaty than a counterfeit-goods treaty, could have profound implications for many ordinary Internet users (including e-book readers), such as imposing a “three-strikes” provision that would cut off Internet access to accused infringers.

The article states that the next round of ACTA negotiations kicked off today, and a number of activist organizations have jointly announced a “declaration of war” on the treaty. (The article does not link to the full text of this declaration, however, and Google was not able to turn it up.)

Ars Technica reports that “transparency” is on the ACTA committee’s agenda for discussion on Friday, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there actually will be any.

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By Joanna

The weather here in Toronto, Canada, is 18 degrees F and feels like 8 degrees, according to Weather.com’s statistics for 8 a.m. today. That’s just right for snuggling up inside with a good e-book without first having to visit a bookstore or library. In fact, our wintery winters come up in a Canadaeast article headlined Local libraries an overlooked option for free ebooks. The article also laments the lack of Kindle compatibility, which patrons often don’t realize until after the fact.

But here is what caught my eye: hard numbers, at last, about actual numbers of books bought, checked out and wished for.

Granted, this is only one book and one library system, but it still shows that demand is growing. For Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, the Toronto Public Library bought 800 print copies and 15 e-book copies. 1,500 people are on the waiting list for the print copy, and 50 are on the waiting list to check out the e-book. From the article:

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By a TeleRead Contributor

Editor’s Note: The following is reproduced, with permission, from The Mark, a Canadian Web publication. And speaking of Canada, check out a post on the E/P generation gap—by the Toronto-based Ficbot, who interviewed her dad. – Paul Biba

For the last few hundred years, paperbound books have been the dominant form of communicating the written word. Now it may be time for e-books to flourish. In the past year or so, I’ve heard increasingly that books are beginning to be replaced by more "modern" forms of communication; some say this out of worry, others out of excitement. Although I don’t dispute that technology is in fact changing the way people communicate, I wonder if people are really ready for e-books to take centre stage.

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By David Rothman

Canadian journalists are joining TeleRead community members and other e-book-lovers in complaining about Amazon’s sparse offerings up North—at least when it comes to best-sellers.

 Jesse Michaels, finance and tech editor for Canoe.ca, writes: “Sure, Amazon says Canada (and most other countries) has access to a library of 300,000+ eBooks, but there are many big titles we can’t buy because of copyright restrictions.

“Take ‘Pirate Latitudes,’ the posthumous novel from Michael Crichton. The eBook is readily available in the U.S. but Canadian Kindle users are out of luck. Want to read Stephen King’s latest? The same restrictions apply.

“I’ve had the Kindle for about a week now and am growing increasingly frustrated by the inability to buy these and other eBooks. Chances are I was going to purchase them in print anyway, so why can’t I buy the electronic versions in Canada?”

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By Joanna

With Amazon, and now Barnes & Noble, coming out with major new releases, it looks like competition is heating up at last in the emerging e-reader marketplace.

Like most e-book fans, I read the news with interest. Following the not unexpected but still disappointing news that neither the international Kindle nor the B&N Nook would be made available to Canadians soon, I started wondering about people who shop based on features and people who shop based on brand loyalty.

I always thought I was a tough customer who researched every purchase carefully and shopped on the features. But as I read the details about these spiffy new products—available to everyone but YOU, Ficbot, you CANADIAN, you—I looked at my Sony in a new light.

Canada love from Sony

Sony loves Canada. They want me to buy their readers. I got mine in a store, even! Retail! From a clerk who even was properly trained and knew his stuff! Sony has given me the Mac software. They have given me the Google Books access.

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By Paul Biba

How weird is that!! An Amazon search shows that there is no Kindle edition of the award winning book.

Here, however, is an excerpt from the news report:

The winner of this year’s Amazon First Novel Award is Winnipeg author Joan Thomas, who won for Reading by Lightning (Goose Lane Editions). A coming-of-age tale set in rural Manitoba around the time of the Second World War, the novel previously won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book in the Canadian and Caribbean category.

By Paul Biba

From the wonderfully named Quill & Quire:

Deborah Windsor, the executive director of The Writers’ Union of Canada, told Q&Q Omni that the union isn’t telling its members what to do, but is simply advising them to be informed and make a decision they are comfortable with. The union is, however, alerting members to a little-known loophole pertaining to the opt-out deadline. According to Windsor, even those who opt out still have the chance to opt back in before the Oct. 7 fairness hearing in New York.

TWUC is also preparing to send a letter of objection to the U.S. court prior to the objection deadline of Sept. 8.