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.

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?

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.

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.

But long term, will price differences with Amazon hurt B&N?

Some readers are up in arms over B&N’s e-books not being inexpensive enough for them, and there’s talk of buying Kindles instead.

The definition of DRMfree can be tricky. I’d hope that little Twilight Times Books in Kingsport, Tennessee, the publisher of my novel, could go on the list. At the same time, yes, like certain other anti-DRM houses, Twilight sells through outlets that taint all books with “protection.” Twilight has no choice. Publishing is a brutal business.

Another issue is whether social DRMed books, a compromise approach, would qualify as DRMfree. Social DRM means embedding a buyer’s name into a book to discourage copying. It is not a perfect system, given the privacy risks. But it is rather different from traditional DRM, which erects barriers against copying, even the legitimate private kind for backup purposes and the like.

However Liza treats social DRM, I hope that her list can help, and that a publication like Consumer Reports will pick up her work, refine it and circulate it widely, just as she has openly built on the efforts of others. If you want books you can truly own, then think about buying from the fiction and nonfiction names on Liza’s list, especially if the titles are in ePub format, which I suspect virtually all of them are, at least as an option.

This is not just a consumer issue, by the way. It is also one for writers. I applaud Carina Press, a new imprint from Harlequin, for promising writers not to insist on DRM—a technology that diminishes the literary value of books by linking them to the survival of individual publishers and specific technologies. I want books to be a permanent medium. DRM—beyond the penalties it imposes readers, especially the disabled—is the enemy of that.

My other proposed addition, besides Twilight Times: Baen, which for years has shunned “protection” and probably has never published a DRMed book.

(Via @jafurtado.)