TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘e-book ergonomics’ Category

By Chris Meadows

There are some articles whose subject matter is far from new, but which are still interesting because they show more people are taking notice. One of these is the piece the New York Times is currently running on the popularity of reading e-books on smartphones.

We’ve known for a long time that a lot more people read e-books on multi-purpose than dedicated devices—they’re cheaper, they do more, they’re easier to pocket.

And more people have them. It is estimated 1.7 million people own a dedicated e-reader, and that number may rise to 4 million by the end of the holidays. But Apple has sold over 50 million iPhones and iPod Touches.

“The iPod Touch is always at hand,” Shannon Stacey, who has written several romance e-novels, said. “It’s my calendar, it’s my everything, so my books are always with me.” Ms. Stacey, who also owns an early Sony Reader model, said she had now bought twice as many e-books for her iPod Touch as for her Sony.

But others are still dubious:

“The Kindle is for people who love to read,” [Ian Freed, vice president for the Kindle division at Amazon] said. “People use phones for lots of things. Most often they use them to make phone calls. Second most often, they use them to send text messages or e-mail. Way down on the list, there’s reading.”

Of course, we know that people who read e-books have been in love with their small screens for more than ten years. E-books were one of the first big “killer app” uses for the Palm, and e-book vendors eReader and Fictionwise have been in business ever since.

Some have even gone so far as to predict “the end of single-purpose devices,” but that is probably still premature.

By David Rothman

Too bad Amazon isn’t doing nonDRMed ePub to make it easier for books to be read across a number of platforms.

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?

By David Rothman

You apparently can already preorder the $399 Sony Reader Daily Edition, the one with a 7.1-inch E Ink screen and 3G wireless from AT&T in the U.S.

Go here, and let us know if there’s a problem preordering the PRS-900.

Nov. 18 had been mentioned earlier as the starting preorder date by TechFlash in Eric Engleman’s Q&A with Steve Haber, president of the Sony digital reading division.

The Daily Edition will actually begin shipping on or around December 18 if information from a TeleRead community member is correct (thanks, eBook Reader!).

December is also the month when Sony is to reveal the newspapers and magazines that will be available for the device. I just hope the presentation of news content is more efficient than the Kindle’s. I can’t get to the stories lickety-split the way I can reading the New York Times mobile edition on my little iPod Touch.

So who’s carrying Sony Readers right now, or about to? “Wal-mart, Best Buy, Target, Staples, Borders,” Haber has told TechFlash. “Last season was about 3,500 outlets. This year it’s 9,000. Best Buy, this is the first time they have it in stores. It was just online last year. This is a significant push for them. Wal-mart will be more stores than last year. And Staples is all new. Toys R Us.”

Meanwhile, if you own the original Sony PRS-500, you can either update your firmware or trade in the 500 for a new ePub-capable model and get a $50-$75 discount (via MobileRead). You’ll have to send in the 500 for an update—your can’t do it at home.

(Updated at 9:30 a.m.)

Related: Sony, B&N better on DRM than Amazon—but still a long way from perfection.

By David Rothman

“So far, Google has scanned 10 million books. Two million are old enough to be free of copyright, and another 2 million are still in print (Google has made separate agreements with the publishers of those books). The other 6 million are in copyright but out of print, many of them orphans. Thanks to the madness of recent copyright extensions, that category is certain to get bigger all the time. Congress has tried and failed for years to pass legislation dealing with orphan works… Congress and its enthrallment to entertainment lobbyists created this mess. Reset the balance of copyright to something fair for authors and consumers, and all the objections to the Google Books settlement evaporate.” – Larry Downes, nonresident fellow at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, in a CNET opinion piece.

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.

By Chris Meadows

CNNMoney has an article gathering rumors about the Apple tablet that is the subject of so many ongoing rumors. A lot of prognosticators seem to think that the tablet could replace many other consumer gadgets:

If the rumors are true, the tablet will be able to do basically everything a gadget could possibly do. It’s an e-reader, a gaming device, and a music player. You can watch TV and movies on it and surf the Internet (or so we’ve heard). And it will have thousands of third-party apps available for it … or maybe it will run Mac OS X. That’s all still unknown.

Of course, nobody yet knows how much it is going to cost, or exactly how big it will be, or exactly what features it will include, or even when (if) it will come out. There sure is a lot of guessing, though!

Although I have found e-ink to be gratifyingly clear and easy to read in good light, I have to admit that a clipboard-sized version of my iPod Touch with appropriate resolution is something I would find very appealing for a variety of uses—especially e-reading uses.

By David Rothman

How to spot old books in need of special attention? One solution might be an electronic sniffer than evaluates books based on their odors. So proposes Matija Strlic at the Center for Sustainable Heritage at University College London

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.

By Paul Biba

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.)

By Chris Meadows

Here are some stories that do not quite make full-fledged TeleRead posts in and of themselves, but are interesting nonetheless:

* 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.

By David Rothman

Got an Amazon blog subscription and want it to show up in Amazon’s Kindle for PC program, not just your Kindle?

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.

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By David Rothman

Literary agent Richard Curtis says agents will make more books available in E when publishers are readier to pay decent advances for digital books.

“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.

By David Rothman

Pop quiz!

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.

By David Rothman

The spiffy-looking Crunchpad will ideally survive and thrive—and debut as a real product to provide us with yet another alternative to the expected Apple tablet. Michael Arrington, originator of the Crunchpad, says the project is healthy.

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.

By David Rothman

Sony, B&N promise to rekindle rights for book owners is the headline on a Boing Boing posting from Rob Beschizza.

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.

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By David Rothman

Around the same time Adobe is losing e-booker Bill McCoy and hundreds of other people, it’s expanding investment in digital publishing and restructuring. I’d welcome comments from Adobe with details of new appointments and all that. A post from the Digital Editions blog follows. – D.R.

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By Chris Meadows

eWeek’s Jim Rapoza has a blog post suggesting single-purpose devices’ days are numbered. We have touched on the same points as the article a number of times, but it bears repeating: single-purpose devices, such as mp3 players or e-book readers, are less convenient than multi-purpose devices such as iPhones or Blackberries.

Even if the single-purpose devices are better at their purpose than the multi-purpose device, Rapoza suggests, the multi-purpose one will still win out because it is simply more convenient. I am inclined to agree: my iPod Touch may not have as big a screen as the e-ink readers I have tested, but I do not have any problem reading on it—and it fits better in my pocket.

By David Rothman

I’ve just test-driven a beta of Kindle for PC software (download here). It’s very promising, but not nearly as usable for me as Mobipocket, which lets me tweak things just so.

You can’t get a double-page view in KFPC, for instance, which would have been nice on my 25-inch monitor. And while you can choose from ten type sizes and very the width of the text, you cannot change the font style. The serif font in the screen shot is fine. But isn’t there more to life?

Furthermore, speaking of limitations, you can’t adjust the color of the font or background.

I’m not even sure if you can add notes with the new app, not just read them (anyone know of a way?), although you can definitely see and insert bookmarks. And I know it’s in beta, because I don’t see a word-find function yet, just such GoTo capabilities as one based on page numbers.

The good news, not evident to me when I first tested the software and wrote an earlier version of this review, is that, yes, you can download nonAmazon books through Kindle for PC from sites like Feedbooks. Firefox, Internet Explorer or other popular browsers will give you that format as an option.

“The books are then stored in the My Kindle Content folder in My Documents in unaltered .mobi or .prc format,” says GJN, who has tried the feature, as have I now.

“One can also move .mobi or .prc books to the My Kindle Content folder and they show up in your library. I like it much more now. If it could read .pdf file (haven’t tried that yet) and vary fonts, I’d be happy with it. By the way, it counts as one of the six Kindles you can have registered to your account.”

Also on the positive side, the installation went smoothly on both my desktop and Acer Aspire One netbook, and all of my three dozen books in Kindle format showed up without fuss (an aside: because of DRM and Amazon’s proprietary format, I have mostly freebies in my Kindle collection).  In fact, “no fuss” is the program’s main virtue. Amazon cares more about about simplicity than customizability.

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By David Rothman

One Laptop Per Chlld has “scrapped plans unveiled in May 2008 for an e-book-like second-generation XO laptop, instead focusing on an upgraded version of the current XO and designs for a ‘3.0’ version of the device that will be ‘more like a sheet of paper.’ So reports Xconomy. Photo shows the dropped design. The “1.75” XO laptop will boast a faster CPU, from ARM.

About the third-gen, OLCP founder Nicholas Negroponte says he is aspiring toward “a single sheet, completely plastic and unbreakable, waterproof, 1/4" thick, full color, reflective and transmissive, no bezel, no holes. 1W. $75, ready in 2012.”

I can see the logic here. Microsoft is apparently coming out with a twin-screen tablet, and while it’s for a different market, OLPC would prefer to lead the pack. Not only that, imagine the boost that the new design could give e-reading not just in developing countries, but also here in the United States.

In related news from the Xconomy article, the International Telecommunications Union is working with OLPC and others toward high-speed Net service for half the people on earth by 2015. Hmm. Does that include Comcast subscribers during peak periods?