TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Chris Meadows’ Category

By Chris Meadows

Om Malik has just noticed that the iPhone is good for reading e-books, and calls it “the next hot e-reader”. He reports that, in September, book-related apps overtook games as a percentage of app store-released apps.

From August 2008 to August 2009, games was the category with the biggest number of releases, causing a drop in Nintendo’s revenues as people migrated to the iPhone and iPod Touch as a portable gaming platform. Now Malik thinks that the iPhone will also give the Kindle a run for its money. (Though I think he’s a little late in noticing this, given how it already has been for the last few years.)

Nonetheless, even after observing this swing from games to e-books, Malik thinks that dedicated e-readers will stick around “mostly because it is impossible to read large amounts of text on a smaller screen.” The fact that, as Malik himself reported, e-book apps are now the biggest category of app would seem to suggest not everyone agrees.

By Chris Meadows

I have spent the last two weeks reading e-books on the Astak, and am ready to give my first impressions.

The Screen

First of all, the 800×600-resolution screen. I love the screen. Of course, it is probably the same screen that any non-touch-sensitive e-ink reader has, but compared to the Sony I tested before the difference is like night and day. The touch-sensitive Sony had a huge amount of glare—but on the Astak, the glare is not there.

The words are ink-on-paper clear; if the background is greyer than normal book-quality paper, it is not much darker than the newsprint on which daily papers are printed.

The screen is quite legible for reading, as the photo at left should show. Even (especially) in bright sunlight, it is readable without screen glare. Of course, it does lack the sidelighting of the Sony, but so do “real” books. If reading in the dark was really important to me, I would invest in a clip-on booklight for the snap-on case.

Page-turn time is about comparable to the Sony; it takes a second or two but is not an undue burden (unless you suddenly need to flip back 3 or 4 pages to reread something you missed; then it is a slight hassle but only slight).

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By Chris Meadows

A couple of weeks ago I got an evaluation copy of an Astak 5” e-book reader. I’ve been reading books on it over the last week, when I haven’t been busy doing other things, and I’m just about ready to start writing my reviews.

But first of all, here is the unboxing video I recorded the other day, in which I take it out of the box and take a first look at it. Enjoy.

By Chris Meadows

Last night, Paul Biba startled me with an offer: he had received a review unit of Astak’s 5” Pocket PRO EZ Reader, but did not have the time to review it. Did I want to?

Did I ever‽ This will make a great opportunity to compare this competing e-book reader to what I remember of the Sony. With that in mind, I am starting a new series of columns: Two weeks with an Astak 5”.

I actually expect to have this reader longer than two weeks—Paul believed it was mine to keep, though I will try not to get too attached to it just in case—but I think two weeks is an ample time to do all the reviewing I need, and the similar naming will keep the categories together in the list.

(Editor’s note: Chris will honestly review the Astak no matter what happens. But for journalistic reasons, we’ll figure out another way to reward his much-appreciated efforts. – D.R.)

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By Chris Meadows

Standard disclaimer for the FTC: I received a free review e-copy of Golden Girl, as I did all of Mr. Melton’s e-books except for Emperor Dad (which I bought). Also, Mr. Melton, his wife Mary Ann, and his dog Sissy stopped by my apartment for a couple of hours the other day, and they gave me a nice print of one of Mrs. Melton’s nature photographs. Of course, even without the FTC I would have said so anyway.

That being said, I’m giving this book a positive review because I like it, not out of any sense of obligation. I do realize I’ve reviewed an awful lot of Mr. Melton’s books here, but on the other hand I feel that as a small-press publisher he needs all the publicity he can get—and for writing such good books, he deserves it, too.

A Foreign Country

L.P. Hartley said “The past is a foreign country,” and most time travel stories seem to take that literally: they treat it as just another place that happens to be separated by years instead of miles. Far too often, time travel is used as a cheap device for exposing characters to “future shock” (or “past shock”) without thought to the consequences that should occur from someone being displaced out of his own time.

Stories that give serious consideration to the issues of paradox and causality in time travel are few and far between. After all, just thinking about that kind of thing too much can make your head ache. Far easier just to sweep it under the rug like Doctor Who, Quantum Leap, or the later Star Trek series’ time travel episodes (though the first time travel Trek story, “City on the Edge of Forever”, is considered one of the greatest time-travel stories ever).

But Henry Melton’s latest young-adult book, Golden Girl, is one that treats time travel the right way. It starts from an interesting premise, adds a unique time travel mechanic, and puts a teenaged girl at the center of an interesting dilemma—with nothing less than the survival of the entire human race at stake! (Minor spoilers below the jump.)

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By Chris Meadows

We have mentioned solar-powered e-book prototypes in the past, but now one is finally reaching the production stage. LG has announced a solar-powered e-book reader with a 6” OLED display. 4 to 5 hours of solar charging is said to provide ample reading power for the entire day.

It is interesting they have chosen OLED, given that some experts have said OLED is not optimal for e-books given that white pixels require power while black do not, so presenting black text on white paper would use considerably more power than doing the same with e-ink.

None of the articles seems to have any detail as to what e-book formats or storage media this reader would use, or what its price will be. It would seem that keeping it attached to the case is a requirement, but perhaps it can be removed when not needed for charging. Hopefully that lengthy exposure to the sun will not harm the book reader’s screen.

By Chris Meadows

This morning, a friend linked to an Associated Press article, and tweeted, "we feel that the time has come for the cat to wear a bell, and are confident in swift enbellment of the cat." And looking at the article, I have to agree.

The article in question covers the leaders of the Associated Press and News Corp making a lot of noise at the World Media Summit about how the time has come for news services to stand up to news aggregators and search engines and demand payment.

AP chief exec Tom Curley said that more people were using websites such as Wikipedia and Facebook to catch breaking news, rather than traditional news sites, and that services such as AP and News Corp need to act now to regain control of the news content they provide.

That’s right, Tom! Take back the web! Why, how dare those search engines and news aggregators and other such sites have the temerity to publicize your content for you? Let’s not forget, this is the organization that once claimed they would charge bloggers $675 a word for the “fair use” of excerpts longer than ten words, and then retracted the claim but refused to be specific about any new guidelines.

I really like the paragraph further down the page where it talks about the AP planning to set up a plagiarism-detection system to “help boost revenue for the not-for-profit news cooperative”. Did they actually write that with a straight face? If they’re not-for-profit, shouldn’t they be concerned about things other than their revenues?

(Well, all right, to be fair, the quote also mentions the AP’s member newspapers. Still, it looks funny on first read-through.)

You know what Google should do? Google should simply remove the AP and its member papers from its services entirely. No Google News, no Google Blogs if the papers host blogs, no Google search engine indexing at all. Let the AP be entirely defunct as far as Google is concerned.

Then the AP could just find out what would happen to its precious revenue.

Edit: Edited to remove direct link to and quoting in excess of ten words from the AP article. Just in case.

By Chris Meadows

The New York Times has yet another article about the “napsterization” of e-books. Shock, horror. Alarums and excursions.

Randall Stross, the piece’s author, is only the latest of many to surmise that, if more people are reading e-books, e-book “piracy” might actually get big enough to damage the industry. The jury is out on that, but it is something worth thinking about.

Nonetheless, there are a couple of points in the article that need addressing.

When the music industry was “Napsterized” by free file-sharing, it suffered a blow from which it hasn’t recovered. Since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of the industry’s inflation-adjusted sales in the United States, even including sales from Apple’s highly successful iTunes Music Store, has dropped by more than half, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

This is the fallacy of “post hoc ergo propter hoc”. Or, in English, A happened before B, therefore A caused B.

If you listen to the RIAA, they’ll tell you anything. But all you really have is correlation, not causation. While peer-to-peer is probably a factor, there have been a whole host of economic and market changes in the intervening years which could also be responsible.

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By Chris Meadows

Since Google took on its first 100,000 public beta testers, the Internet has been awash in a wave of Google Wave interest. Some people have even tried to buy or sell Google Wave preview accounts on eBay!

Gina Trapani at Lifehacker has an in-depth first look at Google Wave that examines its various features. Wave comes off as a fancier version of EtherPad (which I covered here), incorporating instant messaging, e-mail, and a number of other features.

Robert Scoble thinks Google Wave is overhyped and will actually lead to “unproductivity.” However, Mark Milian on the Los Angeles Times Blog thinks that Google Wave has the potential to “transform journalism” into a more collaborative process.

You may notice that double bylines aren’t very common. That’s because trying to co-author a news story stinks.

The process usually involves one reporter talking to and researching a few things and another following a different set of sources and finally combining their findings toward the end. This can result in a mess of incompatible and unrelated research that gets either thrown out or somewhat-awkwardly wiggled in.

I find it interesting how much this echoes what I have discovered in writing fiction with EtherPad.

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By Chris Meadows

Found via twitter from Hadrien Gardeur of Feedbooks: the Nintendo DS homebrew e-book reader dslibris has added ePub-reading capability.

Is there anyone out there who has a Nintendo DS and would care to review this e-book app for TeleRead? I do not have one myself, and I was not able to find instructions for how to install the app even if I did.

Related: Nintendo DSi on the horizon: New e-book possibilities?

By Chris Meadows

Engadget’s Michael Gartenberg and Techdirt’s Michael Masnick square off in opposing columns about the merits or lack thereof of Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Gartenberg feels that DRM has been demonized unfairly, and that it enables new business models that could not exist without it.

Take subscription services for example. Sure, I’d love a service that would allow me to download unlimited content in high bitrate MP3 format for a reasonable fee every month. Except economics and greed will never let that happen (although I suspect we’d see a lot users sign up for about 30-60 days).

Gartenberg does not address what happens when that DRM-locked subscription service goes out of business, though he does admit that DRM is easily broken.

Yes, I know most DRM solutions can and will be circumvented. If there’s a lock on the door, someone is always going to try to find the key and usually they will. It’s not about that. Folks that are looking to avoid paying for stuff will usually find a way. I’m talking about folks who are willing and looking to legally acquire content.

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By Chris Meadows

On the Nieman Reports, Michael Skoler sums up the root of the problems that traditional media are now facing. Others have said similar things before, but this essay says them so well that it is very much worth reading.

And what is that root? The way the culture has changed since the advent of the Internet. Most news media are still trying to be one-way, top-down information providers in a fully-interactive world. Skoler writes:

Today, people expect to share information, not be fed it. They expect to be listened to when they have knowledge and raise questions. They want news that connects with their lives and interests. They want control over their information. And they want connection—they give their trust to those they engage with—people who talk with them, listen and maintain a relationship.

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By Chris Meadows

Related: How do you track down specific e-books—and compare prices?

On CNet, Don Reisinger looks at websites that allow book reading on-line. As might be expected, he looks at quite a few sites but barely even scratches the surface.

The sites Reisinger covers are the Alex Catalogue of Electronic Books, AskSam, Bartleby, Google Books, Great Books and Classics, Perseus Digital Library, and of course Project Gutenberg. He does not mention Feedbooks, Manybooks, Scribd, or any of the countless others that are out there. But then, there are so many such sites that no article could list more than a small number.

The sites he does cover are decent enough for reading books on-line. But the fact that the article’s focus is on reading on-line makes it flawed, in my opinion. Almost nobody is going to want to read books on-line, from a computer screen. Downloading them to a hand-held device makes them much easier to read.

For all that, Reisinger does have a decent list of sites, and a good explanation of what makes each one great. If on-line book reading is your thing, there are some good resources here.

By Chris Meadows

Remember when I was at the Harry Potter premiere and I saw people reading Kindles? It happened again.

Today I was getting ready to watch the 70th anniversary High-Definition digital screening of The Wizard of Oz (a movie based on a book that is itself public domain and hence available as an e-book) when I happened to look up and notice a booklight in use in the back row—a booklight that looked very much like it was attached to an e-book reader cover.

So I went on back and talked to the lady, who was named Teresa (or perhaps Theresa—I did not ask how she spelled it), and she showed me her Sony PRS-505 reader. She said she had had it for a couple of years, and was very happy with it. She was a SF and fantasy fan, with titles from Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Piers Anthony, and others—as well as some public domain titles from writers such as Charles Dickens (as can be seen in the photo). She said she got most of her books from the Sony store.

I showed her my iPod Touch and Stanza, and she was reasonably impressed. She said she might get an iPhone or iPod Touch someday when she had more money or prices came down. I also gave her my card, and told her about TeleRead.org.

As with the Kindles, I was quite impressed by how clear and legible the e-ink screen was compared to the screen on the PRS-700 I tried out. Clearly, if I wanted to experience the true glories of e-ink, I picked the wrong reader to try.

By Chris Meadows

We have probably already given perpetual-copyright zealot Mark Helprin more coverage than he deserves, but this TechDirt article from Michael Masnick is too good to pass up.

It seems that Helprin’s book, Digital Barbarism, has been getting nearly universally panned by reviewers. But according to an op-ed by Helprin in the National Review, the reason for that is not that the book might be bad—it is because publishers assigned the very people Helprin slammed in the book to review it.

If nothing else, Helprin does not suffer from an inadequate ego. In the op-ed, he paints himself as some kind of lone holy warrior, defending the sacred trust of copyright against some vast Internet conspiracy theory:

Because corporate defenders of intellectual property think they need only protect established law, they sit inertially in their towers and forfeit the more general debate to their active and numerous opponents. Thus, unwittingly engaged and with neither allies nor organizational support of any kind, I thought the only way to respond to hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of critics mobilized by “public interest” groups richly funded by private interests such as Google, was to write a book.

Right, Mark. Just keep thinking that.

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By Chris Meadows

One of the most commonly misunderstood things about lawyers is that, as with forensic debaters, they may often choose to argue two opposite, competing sides of the same issue. This is hardly unusual for them—it’s their job to advocate for whatever side they choose, or even both sides if they think the particular cases have merit.

Our pop culture tends to latch onto this and portray any lawyer who does not have a Perry Mason- or Matlock-like dedication to proving clients innocent as being some kind of slimy mercenary—but when you get right down to it,  it’s a very important part of our legal system that people be able to hire someone to advocate for them regardless of public or personal opinion.

I bring this up because otherwise, the natural inclination when people hear that the law form that represented Jammie Thomas against the RIAA is now suing Scribd for copyright violation is to consider them two-faced slimy mercenary bastards—and I have little doubt among the Slashdot crowd there will be a lot of that.

Lawyers Joe Sibley and Kiwi Camara are representing the author of a book who found her work being offered on Scribd, but they are seeking class-action status to represent “every author who owns a valid registered copyright in a work infringed by Scribd.”

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By Chris Meadows

A while ago, I bought Henry Melton’s young-adult novel Emperor Dad, and enjoyed it enough that I reviewed it here. Since then, I requested and received free review e-copies of four of his other books, and finally got around to reading the last of them.

In the info box, I have linked to several places the books can be purchased. If you are planning to buy the dead-tree version, I suggest purchasing direct from the author; he will autograph it for you, and will make more out of the deal than from an Amazon sale. Alternately, if you buy one of the DRM-locked e-books and send Melton proof of your purchase, he will e-mail you a DRM-free version.

Rather than review each book individually, I’m going to cover each of them separately, then talk about what they have in common.

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