Would Gary Price—the founding info-maven of ResourceShelf—buy The Case for Books in an electronic or paper edition?

TeleRead promised an answer, and directly from Gary himself, here it is. – D.R.

The winner? The e-book version, which I’ve been reading on Kindle for iPhone. A few of the reasons why:

1. In all of the last-minute stuff I needed to do before a trip, I didn’t have time to go to the bookstore.
2. I purchased the book the night before my trip. I could have even bought the book in the taxi on the way to the airport or while I waited to board at the gate.
3. Like it or not, Price. It was about one-half the cost of the print edition. By the way, some/all of the essays are likely available for free via New York Review of Books.
4. It seems I’m always losing things so this way I had nothing to lose (except my iPhone, which I would be taking with me anyway) and one fewer item to place in my already-overflowing carry-on bag.

Have I read any of the books on my actual Kindle device (1st gen) since i returned home? No, I continue with my iPhone.

I still have issues with low-light reading. An Amazon rep suggested I could buy a book light and attach it to the Kindle cover. Well, I have a book light and have attached it to the cover. It’s a mediocre experience at best.

(1) “Price of devices,” (2) “price of e-books,” (3) “Smartphones,” (4) “Apple’s rumored tablet computer,” (5) popular authors’ ambiguity over e-books, (6) digital rights complexities, (7) standards issues and (8) librarians’ fears about their jobs.

So, gang, what’s your take? I myself don’t think in terms of either one kind of e-gizmo or another—or even P vs. E. For a long time, there’ll be many choices, even in the latter area. Cellphones aren’t going to kill the Kindle, or vice versa.

Related: eWeek piece arguing against e-readers and other single-use devices.

A prep school in Massachusetts created an uproar by saying e-books would replace paper books in its library.

Now a private high school in Toronto says it is tossing out p-textbooks in favor of Sony e-book readers. The school has deployed at least 110 readers already and is ordering hundreds more.

“Our student survey shows that they are twice as likely to read a book available in an e-book format as in hard copy form," says Sam Blyth, chair at Blyth Academy.

Catnip for students raised on tech

There has been a growing emphasis among schools to engage student interest through technology, and this initiative appears to be, in part, a response to that. A comment from Sam Blyth is of special interest:

"When they were told they would be able to download books free, we asked them ‘Would you be more likely to read outside of school?’ they came back with a yes, and that clinched it."

As a teacher, I have long agreed with the growing chorus of e-book fans who say that the problem is not print versus e-book versus whatever, but that fewer people read for pleasure. Might not e-book readers help popularize recreational reading among the growing number of young people raised on technology?

Textbook access is just one benefit. Schools are using the readers to download other documents such as schedules to keep with them at all times

A back-saver

Meanwhile children are spared the burden of carrying traditionally bulky textbooks to and from school with them. In my work, I have seen students struggle with rolling backpacks full of binders, lunch items, school supplies and books on top of that. A slim little e-book reader would certainly remove a dozen pounds or more from the typical student load.

Granted, e-book readers might not be a perfect solution. Pearson Educational Media is providing content, and I wrote in the summer about my not very positive university-level experience with Pearson. I hope the company is offering more junior users a better vetted and more useful experience. And a future user community seems to not be available yet.

Netbooks a possibility, too—for both reading and writing

School board members in the public school system appear to be waiting for integrated virtual assessment tools and other trimmings. But some already are tech-boosters. One trustee quoted by parentcentral.ca visited a school in Littleton, Colorado, using netbooks with great success. “It was amazing to watch how involved every single kid was in what they were doing.” See a related blog item from the Littleton on the success students have achieved in writing with netbooks—which might also be used in reading.

While we don’t yet have the tools for a perfect system, Blyth is still to be praised for trying to innovate—and for taking advantage of the opportunity to try and hook students into pleasure reading while they are at it, too. There is great potential in the e-market, both for pleasure reading and for environments such as a school. I just wish publishers would realize that there are so many great things which can happen, and that the best way for them to survive and thrive in the digital age is to embrace it, rather than fight to keep the status quo forever.

Editor’s note For a different perspective, read about disabled student Robert Kingett’s reservations about the Kindle and also E-textbooks not ready for college students yet? Likewise of interest would be the New York Times series on the future of reading, including the issue of whether the Internet has helped or hurt—in addition to various viewpoints on e-books and the brain. For research findings and other observations on e-books in K-12, check out our past items on the work of Dr. Richard Bellever at Ball State University. In addition, see—from the Huffington Post—the latest version of my proposal for a well-stocked national digital library system for K-12 users and others. – D.R.

Update, 12:55 p.m.: New links: E-books go to college, but books still rule the campus, not Kindle in AOL Daily Finance and Sony Reader follows Kindle to the Great White North in Engadget. Also see Google news roundup.

Update, 9:08 a.m.: The NYT is featuring the above headline on the Extra Home Page. Good for the Times! Ahead I’ll reproduce a screen shot of the head from Extra. Now if only the paper will retain the blog headline option! – D.R.

The New York Times is mysteriously killing the wonderful “Extra” option, which, if you turn it on, will turbo-charge the home page with blog headlines blended in with news stories. December 1 is when the option will vanish. Without offering an explanation, a home-page notice directs readers to the  Blogrunner aggregation service, which, for now, has a lower Alexa “reach” score than TeleRead.

I’m baffled why Extra option is disappearing and will ask the Times for an answer. “Extra” is one reason why I spend far more time with the Times than the Washington Post even though I live in the D.C. area.  Is  “Extra” not bringing in enough readers to justify the bother of having it? Is the Times worried that outside blogs are enjoying too much exposure? Or does it want to protect Blogrunner? In the Times place, I’d worry more about the total number of eyeballs and less about Blogrunner individually.

And speaking of the Times: Story shows how the Times still doesn’t get e-books

The smartphone-vs.-dedicated-reader debate, long familiar to TeleRead community members, is the topic of a feature called Library in a pocket.

The most interesting stat is from the Codex Group—predicting that there might be four million owners of Kindles and other dedicated devices after the holidays, far more than the current estimate of 1.7 million. There are 84 million smart phones and similar, at least 50 million of which, being iPhones and iPod Touches, can run e-book software like Stanza and a Kindle app.

Sure enough, as required by law, the Gray Lady ends the feature with a story of a father who keeps paper books around for his kid. Hmm. Does this mean that parents should do likewise with paper newspapers? Just as oddly, the Times does the future-of-books act with too much of either-or-approach. An e-book-hip reader responds with, “Does the future of transportation lie in airplanes, or cars?” As someone who goes back and forth between an iPod, a laptop and E Ink devices and a desktop, I’m hardly alone; and stories like this annoy the hell out of me.

Update, 9:08 a.m.: What this post’s headline looks like on the home page of the NYT’s Extra Home Page

To the New York Times’ credit, it is now featuring the above headline on the Extra Home Page. This is how it looks—a kind of virtual hall of mirrors.

Reminder/Disclosure

We’re a news-and-views outfit, and it’s always possible we may have dealings with the Times—or other media. That said, as you can see from the above, we’ll not let business issues get in the way of our coverage.

But if you use a Linux desktop and are sufficiently adventuresome, yes, you can use the Wine Windows simulator to run Kindle for PC.

Details at Lifehacker. Anyone care to tell how the tip there works out?

Related: An unpopular view of Google Books, by Downes.

Disclosure/reminder: I own a speck of Google stock as a long-term retirement investment, though you’d never know it from some of the posts I’ve done on the proposed Google Books settlement.

And the equivalent for e-books? Maybe diagnostic software for your hard drive or solid-state storage?

Also of interest to bibliophiles—or at least typography buffs: Mistakes in typography grate the purists, in the New York Times. Would you believe, the Titanic movie showed Helvetica numbers on pressure gauges even though Helvetica didn’t exist until 1957, more than four decades after the disaster.

Speaking of print: With New Presses, Daily News Is Betting on World of Print, in the Times.

Random House’s Kindle sales in September, 2009, were $22.6 million, up from $2.9 million a year ago.

The Lost Symbol was a huge part of this with 100,000 ebook sales in its first week.

In the first half of 2009, Kindle ebook revenue grew 400% from a year ago.

(Via Amazon Kindle Review.)

* Crain’s New York Business has a short piece on September 2009 e-book sales at Random House seeing a dramatic 700 perent increase over the same period in 2008—largely due to Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. Just imagine how much sales might go up if they actually sold their e-books at reasonable prices!

* PC World Magazine has a review of the bebook Mini e-book reader. They like it, on the whole, but note it has some interface issues.

* Buzzmachine writes about Rupert Murdoch’s nose-cutting face-spiting decision to start blocking Google. A German research group has analyzed how much damage Google would take from such publisher search-blocking, and come to about the same conclusion as the bulldozer operator from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: almost none at all.

* While this is not related directly to e-books, Wired has a piece looking at a “copyright time bomb” that will soon be giving the music industry more headaches. A 1976 copyright law had provisions that will allow recording artists to reclaim the copyright to their works from the record labels that currently hold them.

The article claims that this applies to all forms of copyrighted material, not just music, but does not go into any details as to how this could apply to non-musical works.

Well, the secret is to use the Manage Your Kindle page. At the very least it can send a day’s worth of postings to the app—I don’t know about blog subscriptions on a permanent basis. You might also try this for newspaper and magazines, although there may be problems.

Within the “Manage” page, scroll down until you see the “Deliver to…” options for individual purchases. Go with “Transfer to computer.” When your browser comes up, you’ll probably be on a “downloads” page. Arrange for the file to be saved or sent to your Kindle for PC app.

I tried this with an old Washington Post edition and got an error message, either because this won’t work with the Post and other newspapers or because something had expired. That’s why I don’t know about magazines and newspapers.

The “Deliver to” tweak worked fine with a day of posts from the TeleRead blog subscription, however (except for some weird formatting).

Of course, you could read blogs directly for free with RSS feeds, but for those who prefer the paid subscription approach, maybe the above tip will help. Anything to modify or add?

Related tip—for people wanting to email book to their Kindles: If you’re having trouble getting your Kindle to pick up books mailed to it—including those to be converted from Word, PDF, TXT, etc.—don’t forget to specify your sending address within Manage Your Kindle. Cost per item is 15 cents.

“I’ve known for ten years what’s been holding agents back from plunging into e-book pool,” he writes in the wake of Amazon spending more than 10K to fly some top New York agents to Seattle for a brain-picking session, “and in fact I can tell it to you in one word: advances. The agents have been waiting for something they can identify with the traditional business model. And advances are as traditional as Thanksgiving turkeys.” Image is of Curtis’s Web site.

Meanwhile publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin tells of trouble that lit agents will suffer in finding a market for their traditional services. More optimistically he writes of expanding opportunities for people advising authors who self-publish. He suggests that agents keep up with new digital and business options for clients, including self-publishing.

Hmm. I see two scenarios. Richard Curtis is writing of the possibility of an important element of traditional publishing continuing with E, while Mike Shatzin is saying in effect: “Hey, get set for lots of restructuring.” I suspect that the future will contain elements of both. My guess—nothing’s conclusive at this point—is that the future isn’t going to be a neat "either or.”

Among other things, will some agents try to sell just p-rights to big publishers, and focus on E, as it grows in importance? And how will publishers respond, especially when some smaller publishers offer more generous terms?

(Curtis item spotted by Dan Bloom.)

Related: Jealous rivals determined to tank Google settlement, from the Curtis blog.

You’re Gary Price, a librarian and e-resources expert well known online for Resource Shelf and other activities such as DocuTicker.

Robert Darnton, a top academic, has just published The Case for Books, mentioned favorably today in the Sunday Guardian.

You quoted the Guardian but want to see the book for yourself.

Should you buy Case as an e-book or p-book? Share and explain your answer, and later this week, you’ll learn what Gary himself actually did.

Don’t just give a generic reply. Think about Gary’s situations. Via the e-editon of Case, you can pick up cites from the book if you’d like. (Yep, I see the Catch-22.) Also—and this might influence your reply, one way or another—two of the essays in the book are already online for free from the New York Review of Books. Update: They apparently are The Library in the New Age and Google and the Future of Books.

Along with others, however, I wonder about the future:

1) The price of $300-400 may seem steep next year for a device intended mainly for Net use. I’d hope the Crunchpad could run e-bookware without being tethered to the Net, but how knows?

2) There’s talk of advertising as a form of support. It had better be as non-obtrusive as Arrington claims. Of course, with advertising, the issue arises of why the cost could not be still lower.

3) Will the Crunchpad use Pixel Qi tech, which is expected to be cheap, cheap, cheap and have both LCD-style and E Ink-style modes.

4) How about existing and almost-existing competition from netbooks and tablets alike?

Keep in mind that I’m in my devil’s advocate mode. As an open-source booster, I want this one to fly!

For more check out a Techmeme roundup and Engadet and UMPC Portal, as well as as a Gillmore Gang vidocast.

Without doubt, Sony’s Steve Haber and Adobe’s Bill McCoy have been more sensible on DRM than Amazon, with more flexible approaches. I applaud their efforts. But we’re a long way from nirvana. Gang, what do you think of this snippet from Boing Boing?

I recently talked to Sony’s Steve Haber, President of Digital Reading, about its flagship ebook reader. Named the "Daily Edition," it hits stores next month. Notwithstanding differences between each manufacturer’s respective libraries, it offers all the best features of its main rival, the Kindle. But Sony says it offers one thing that Amazon won’t: actual ownership of your books.

"Our commitment is that you bought it, you own it," Haber said. "Our hope is to see this as ubiquitous. Buy on any device, read on any device. … We’re obligated to have DRM but we don’t pull content back."

Um, as long as there’s DRM, Sony isn’t offering  genuine ownership of your “protected” books, a category that unfortunately includes most bestsellers. And remember, “Buy on any device, read on any device” is just a hope—and can really be achieved only without DRM or with social DRM (which could embed your name into an ePub file without destroying the ability for it to be read any ePub-capable machine). Operating systems and apps come and go. It is inherently impossible for the e-book industry to come up instantly with up-to-date, DRM-capable apps for every gizmo.

What’s more, genuine ownership means you can sell your books. Is Sony planning this?

The good news is that Adobe, Sony and B&N are hoping to provide compatible DRM approaches. That’s progress but still no substitute for lack of traditional DRM. It would also be nice to see Sony aggressively encourage publishers either to drop DRM or use social DRM, not just less restrictive forms of traditional DRM. Last I knew—this may be changing—Sony insisted that books in its store use DRM. I wonder what the more current policies of Sony and B&N will be.

With B&N, I’d call attention to the fact you can lend a book to a friend—with a 14-day period—only once as far as I know. Again, this is far from genuine ownership.

Meanwhile, in fairness to Amazon and its Kindle, let me note that you can use the K machine’s Web browser to download nonDRMed public domain books and even commercial books without “protection.”

Detail: I’m curious about Boing Boing’s mention of the Daily Edition as having a nine-inch display. Last I heard, Sony was saying the screen would be seven inches. Is Beschizza accurate here?

Related: How the New York Times was fooled? Sony’s misleading ePub-related news release, in TeleRead, and Seattle’s Bill McCoy, E-Books and Digital Distribution Expert, Leaving Adobe, in Xconomy.

As part of a restructuring announced yesterday, Adobe has made the decision to expand its investment in digital publishing, creating a new organization focused on delivering products to increase digital revenue opportunities for book, newspaper and magazine publishers. This organization will combine the efforts of Adobe’s eBook business responsible for the Adobe Reader Mobile SDK, Adobe Content Server, Adobe Digital Editions, and PDF and EPUB authoring support in Adobe InDesign with Adobe’s digital newspaper and magazine efforts responsible for, among other products, the collaboration with the New York Times to create the AIR-based Times Reader 2.0.

The decision to increase investment in this area underscores the importance that Adobe has always given to digital publishing as well as the bright future it sees in helping publishers to deliver compelling digital publications that support a variety of business models: subscription, advertising, retail and other emerging models. We are particularly excited about what we have in store for 2010. We plan to further our reach to emerging mobile reading platforms to allow readers to read anywhere, on any device. With Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture, we will help publishers measure and understand how their readership interacts with and uses their content. But, most of all, we will continue to deliver products that make digital books, newspapers and magazines a terrific experience for readers.
We look forward to working with our existing customers and business partners and welcome any new inquiries as we continue our progress in digital publishing.