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.

But now comes word from BusinessWeek that Sony will also sell e-books elsewhere—in the new Sony Online Store, the current name.

This one will sell music, movies and downloadable apps, too. The feeling among Sony watchers is that the new Sony store will use an iTune-ish approach.No startup date has been announced. 

I’m curious if or how the new Sony store may works with the existing eBook Library software. What’s more, might the current eBookStore vanish? I don’t think so, but who knows?

Is Sony in time going to do the e-book-capable multimedia table that Apple is supposed to offer us? That certainly would jibe well with Sony’s history as a hardware company and the store’s multimedia approach. I’m just extrapolating and guessing. But if you work for a publisher and need to anticipate future possibilities, add this one to the brew.

Also, what e-book format will the new Sony store use? ePub? And what about the DRM situation? Will Adobe-DRMed ePub be the norm? And what if publishers don’t want DRM? Will Sony in fact offer publishers a choice, as I believe it’s indicated?

Apple has backed off from DRM in the real iTunes Store, at least when it comes to music (it is selling “protected” books in the ScrollMotion format). Sony should do the same with e-books.

Perhaps social DRM could be a compromise. I’ll query Sony to see if it has any word on the DRM and format issues and other book-specific details.

Related: Techmeme roundup and Google News roundup.

“Do I really have to answer? I’m not sure,” Friedman told New York University publishing students after someone asked about Open’s position on DRM. “Initially, I was very against the idea of no-DRM. But now I’m not sure."

DRM as the Lysenkoism of big publishing

Ideally she soon will be sure—of the negatives of DRM for consumer trade publishing. Among big New York publishers, the DRM ideology is a little like the old Soviet genetics. If you were a geneticist and wanted to get ahead in the Stalin years, you toed the party line and favored Trofim Lysenko’s brilliance over the shaky, unproven theories of Mendel (sarcasm alert).

Like Lysenkoism, DRM is a laugh—since it’s so easy to scan paper editions of bestsellers and put them on P2P networks; and as for typical books, publisher Tim O’Reilly is right on the mark when he says obscurity is more of an obstacle than piracy. If you want to discourage pirates, the embedding of readers’ names in e-books would be far, far more effective than the usual DRM.

Will the top people in book publishing ever wake up, given the Depression—yes, the D word, not the R word—that book publishers and other communications-related companies have been in? DRM isn’t merely an inconvenience for legitimate buyers of e-books. It just might be a job-killer—as a reducer of books’ value as a medium.

On top of everything else, DRM is a tax on readers and publishers. The technology tends to be proprietary and DRM providers need to charge for their services. In addition, DRM adds to the cost of publishers’ infrastructure and increases the compatibility challenges of the e-book industry. For now at least, reader gizmos from Amazon, Sony and B&N can’t read each other’s “protected” books. Sony and B&N hope to be able to play with each other soon, but then there are scads of other brands out there—not just dedicated e-readers but many other devices such as cellphones.

Smartly, Harlequin’s new digital-only imprint, Carina Press, tells writers that its contracts will not cover use of DRM. And O’Reilly, one of the most tech-hip of publishers, is shunning the technology in line with the wishes of the company’s founder.

For more information on Jane Friedman and Open Read: Read Sarah Weinman’s AOL Daily Finance article, source of the Friedman quotes on DRM.

In the DRM area: See The Pirates of Publishing: A view from the crow’s nest, by William Johnson, a Masters Candidate in the NYU publishing program.

Will this affect your own plans? One more Nook or Kindle sale? Or are you not interested in the Daily Edition Reader in the first place? And what do you think might be the reasons for delays?

The wireless reader is now available for preorders at least.

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?

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.

But what’s meant by “e-books”?

Do we mean just the books themselves or also Nook hardware?

For now, the cards and certificates apparently won’t work—bring forth no small number of complaints from duly disgruntled customers.

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.

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.