TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘ebook publishing’ Category

By David Rothman

Does it matter if the Sony Daily Edition Reader comes out in January rather than December?

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.

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

OK, it’s official now: this is Kindle launch day in Canada. @AngelaJames is pointing to a news story on Canada.com—apparently based on the press release ahead. Excerpt from story:

“More than 90 top newspapers and magazines are available in the Kindle Store for single purchase or subscription. Available for the first time on Kindle is the National Post. Additionally, all of Canwest’s major daily newspapers will be available on Kindle. They join top papers such as Le Monde (France), the New York Times, the Daily Telegraph (U.K.) and the Washington Post.

The Canadian-targeted Kindle is said to let you choose from 300,000 books although blogs and Web browsing apparently are not available (thanks, eBook Reader).

Big thanks to Steve Windwalker, TeleRead contributor and editor of Kindle Nation Daily, our original tip source in this case! That’s Steve shown on the Kindle screen.

Some Sony hardware news today: Wireless Sony e-reader apparently ready for preorder now—and meanwhile the Sony PRS-500 firmware update is out.

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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 Paul Biba

Some facts about this romance publisher that say something about the ebook industry in general:

Site Launched: Nov. 1, 2006
· # of publishers represented in Nov. 2006: 18
· # of titles available in Nov. 2006: 2000
· OmniLit site launched: July 21, 2009
· Total # of publishers represented in ARe and OmniLit today: 3000+
· # of titles available in ARe and OmniLit today: 250,000+

From 2,000 to 250,000 titles in just 3 years!

According to a Q&A they say that mobile customers are one of their fastest growing markets and they are going to start including eReader along with the other formats they currently support. More details here.

By David Rothman

That’s the word from a company blog.

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.

By David Rothman

Borders is up against such challenges as plummeting revenue, a price war, e-book competition and high debt, says Alyce Lomax, writing for The Motley Fool financial site.

Employee morale may also be sagging.

“I used to come in early and stay late,” a Fool commenter quotes a Border site for employees, “because I loved Borders and wanted it to succeed. Now I’m ashamed to work here.”

As a reader and shopper, and perhaps a writer or publisher, too, what do you think of Borders? Is there any way that e-book tech could help save the company? Or do you think it’s hopeless because Amazon and B&N are so much stronger in the E area?

Related: Will independents outlast the big bookstore chains? by Peter Beren, who writes the SF Publishing Examiner blog.

Image: Flagship store in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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 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

 Announcement from FBReader–slightly edited:

New release 0.11.2 is available for linux computers. Sources and debian packages (for both i386 and amd64 platforms) are available here. This release:

• Fixes a crash on amd64 platform.
• Uses new protocol for a communication with a popular Russian e-book site.
• Includes new features like authorization. Book-buying without a browser will be available in the near future.
• Fixes some small user interface bugs.

Editor’s note: Notice the browserless book-buying? In the future will FBReader be as easily to use for book-shopping as a Kindle is? And will it use a standard shared with other open apps? And maybe even tie in with the Open Content Alliance’s catalog-related efforts?

By David Rothman

Yep, video books exist with the proprietary Vook approach. But how about ePub books with videos embedded?

Liza Daly, creator of Bookworm, had just shared some tips (via Reading 2.0 list).

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.