TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘ebook’ Category

By Roger Sperberg

The iPhone/iPod Touch have had the advantage of being the sole handheld devices with an e-reader that could access Amazon’s e-list.

That will soon change. The Windows UMPC will be able to run the Kindle e-reader. Also, Amazon will move the software to new Android and Maemo devices with significantly higher resolution than the iPair’s 480×320. The Motorola Droid 3.7" screen has a resolution of 854×480, and the slightly smaller Nokia N900 has 800×480. Both yield 267 pixels-per-inch compared to the Apple devices’ 163 ppi.

With nearly three times as many pixels per square inch, the typography on the new devices is wonderfully crisp and readable at far smaller point sizes than you would imagine. I write from personal experience of both the N900 display and Coke-bottle-thick eyeglasses.

Whatever the effect on sales that some experts see from waning novelty and growing choices, I predict it will be outweighed by huge new numbers of e-book buyers entering the market and expecting to split their reading among more than one device.

(Adapted with permission from a Reading 2.0 post. Screenshot shows the Kindle app.)

By Chris Meadows

Om Malik has just noticed that the iPhone is good for reading e-books, and calls it “the next hot e-reader”. He reports that, in September, book-related apps overtook games as a percentage of app store-released apps.

From August 2008 to August 2009, games was the category with the biggest number of releases, causing a drop in Nintendo’s revenues as people migrated to the iPhone and iPod Touch as a portable gaming platform. Now Malik thinks that the iPhone will also give the Kindle a run for its money. (Though I think he’s a little late in noticing this, given how it already has been for the last few years.)

Nonetheless, even after observing this swing from games to e-books, Malik thinks that dedicated e-readers will stick around “mostly because it is impossible to read large amounts of text on a smaller screen.” The fact that, as Malik himself reported, e-book apps are now the biggest category of app would seem to suggest not everyone agrees.

By Chris Meadows

I have spent the last two weeks reading e-books on the Astak, and am ready to give my first impressions.

The Screen

First of all, the 800×600-resolution screen. I love the screen. Of course, it is probably the same screen that any non-touch-sensitive e-ink reader has, but compared to the Sony I tested before the difference is like night and day. The touch-sensitive Sony had a huge amount of glare—but on the Astak, the glare is not there.

The words are ink-on-paper clear; if the background is greyer than normal book-quality paper, it is not much darker than the newsprint on which daily papers are printed.

The screen is quite legible for reading, as the photo at left should show. Even (especially) in bright sunlight, it is readable without screen glare. Of course, it does lack the sidelighting of the Sony, but so do “real” books. If reading in the dark was really important to me, I would invest in a clip-on booklight for the snap-on case.

Page-turn time is about comparable to the Sony; it takes a second or two but is not an undue burden (unless you suddenly need to flip back 3 or 4 pages to reread something you missed; then it is a slight hassle but only slight).

(more…)

By Paul Biba

To those who are contemplating giving an ereader for the holidays, the choices must be a bit bewildering. The market has suddenly become flooded with possibilities. I thought I might give you my own personal recommendation based on units I’ve seen or handled.

I would go for the Kindle 2. I’ve used a number of the Sony units, a Kindle 1 and 2, have seen the Nook close up and played with the Astak 5" before I sent it over to Chris Meadows for review. Plus, I handled a number of other units at BookExpo America earlier this year. Here are my reasons for choosing the Kindle:

1. Wireless: once you become accustomed to the free wireless on the Kindle you may very well find it becomes indispensable. It is just so convenient. For example, when I went into the Nook press conference I was sitting on the ferry going across the Hudson and saw someone reading a book I was interested in. I fired up my Kindle and downloaded the book before I reached the other side. Once you can do this you will be amazed at how many books you end up buying. Of course the Nook has wireless too, but for reasons mentioned below I prefer the Kindle implementation.

2. Browser: the Kindle has a built in browser. It’s not very good, but it is important because it enables the Kindle to be a far more open platform than its wireless Nook rival. With the browser you can download from the vast catalog of Gutenberg and also get books from MobileRead, Manybooks, and Feedbooks, among others. At the beach and want to read Dickens? You can on the Kindle. I have even used the Kindle to send email when I’ve been stuck in areas with no AT&T service. The Nook will only connect to the B&N store and this is too limiting for me. I wish Sony had released its wireless unit in time for this little article but no luck so far.

(more…)

By David Rothman

Looking for an “exhaustive” Kindle/Nook comparison? Jim Fallows of The Atlantic served up some thoughts last week. He passes on opinions from a B&N-related source, then shares his own analysis.

Excerpt: “Nook and Kindle aren’t grossly different cost-wise. So for me, the only reason to switch to the Nook (or if I were a virgin ereader, to buy the Nook rather than the Kindle) is if I thought I’d get a wider selection of the sorts of books I’m likely to buy for my Kindle at a better price from B&N than from Amazon.”

Jim wonders if Amazon will imitate B&N’s friend-lend arrangement. What do you think? He also says Amazon focused too much on the Kindle for its own books and not enough on it as a general-purpose e-reader. Amen to that!

Related: All-in-one post on all-in-one devices, another Fallows post. He himself is sold for now—with the current tech—on the use of dedicated readers.

About the Kindle photo: Yes, that’s a DX instead of the Kindle 2 Jim compares with the Nook. The DX is more expensive than the 2 or the Nook.

By David Rothman

What if a Kindle rival could display videos and do Facebook and Twitter while also offering a touch screen, text to speech, an SD memory slot and Internet capabilities? Those are among the features of the Creative Zii MediaBook—and get this: the company has just displayed a working model. Breaking the news, complete with the apparently Photoshopped image to the left, was EpiZENter.net, which also reports use of the Zii-System-on-a-Chip technology

Ten publishers are said to be in talks with Creative, whose new baby can display newspapers and magazines, as well as textbooks and, of course, educational multimedia. Significantly Creative is a partner in the Singapore government’s FutureBooks initiative. A bit of a TeleRead going on over there? Tech in Hiding says: “By teaming up with the Singapore government, it allows the company to fund much of the production. It’s similar to how the US defense industry works—the government gives money to Lockheed Martin (or similar) to build new fighter jets. The government will still end up paying for the jet, but the company can also sell to other partners- Canada, UK, Germany, etc.” See a Techmeme roundup for more details on the MediaBook.

(more…)

By David Rothman

That’s the latest scuttlebutt. If the widely reported rumors are true; at least they’d jibe with Steve Jobs’ sttement that people don’t read. Some say the rumors could also show that Apple believes the book biz is broken, which, of course, it is. Or maybe the rumors are just an Apple disinformation campaign.

No matter what, a tablet for video could still be great for book reading. What’s more, books could still be part of Apple’s long-term vision. It could let Amazon and Google and others duke it out first. Then it could swoop in with its own major efforts.

Image: It’s Piper Jaffray’s conception of the tablet.

By a TeleRead Contributor

By David Rothman

Google CEO Eric Schmidt made those predictions, according to a Read/Write Web piece. Six-minute video here, longer one here. I wonder what the rise of Chinese on the Net could mean for e-books.

As for the Google OS netbook, it’s to include “HTML5 local caching for offline use.” Including with e-books?

If you’d rather read about Android and that OS’s impact on e-books, check out a Kindle Review post and an earlier TeleRead item.

Related: Different perspectives on netbook sales from SlashGear (upbeat) and China Daily (not so upbeat). Latter is the source of the photo.

By David Rothman

The Que e-reader from Plastic Logic—not just Barnes and Noble’s own Nook—will go on sale at B&N for those who want a large shatter-proof E Ink-based screen. See Plastic Logic news release, Wired News, CNet and Google roundup. Best guess is that the price could be at least $400, or far more than the $259 Nook.

As reported by Wired: “The Que proReader will handle eBooks in the PDF, ePub, eReader, and eReader DRM formats; magazines and newspapers in the GIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, and TXT formats; and documents in the Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint formats.” Plastic Logic is continuing to position the Que as a versatile document-reader for business, rather than simply an e-book reader.

B&N already had said it would serve as Plastic Logic’s content partner after the the Que goes on sale next year. The latest wrinkle is that Que owners will be able to use WiFi browse entire e-books while they’re at a B&N store—just as Nook owners can.

Other hardware news: Bridgestone announces flexible touchscreen color e-reader, in Engadget, via MobileRead. Specs: “5.8mm thick, features a 13.1-inch touch-sensitive e-paper display (with 4,096 colors and a refresh rate of about 0.8 seconds), and some sort of unspecified mobile phone connectivity.”

Related: Not enough bricks to make the Nook click? B&N will sell take-home Nooks at only ‘certain’ stores.

By David Rothman

E-books, alas, are not among the most popular apps in the Android Market. Let’s hope that changes. Get ready for an Android invasion over the next year—-not just phones with that operating system, but also tablets and other devices. Android has attracted its share of gung-ho fans, with Windows Mobile under serious siege.

In the Android world, the top free e-book reader is apparently WordPlayer Art of War, from Andrew Sacher. Here’s what the Market listing says: “WordPlayer is a book reader that allows you to add to your library from amongst thousands of instantly downloadable books or load epub books. WordPlayer’s page navigation, highlighting, bookmarking, and customizable settings make reading a breeze. Comes with Sun Tzu’s classic book of strategy, Art of War, already installed.”

Oh, and get this—from the WordPlayer site: “Use our seamless integration with the Calibre ebook library management application to transfer many types of ebooks to your phone, including CBZ, CBR, CBC, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, MOBI, ODT, PDF, many PRC, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, and TXT formats.” It would be great for everything to be ePub from the start, especially without DRM. But I like WordPlayer’s approach of leveraging on Calibre’s popularity.

Does Art of War live up to the ballyhoo? Anyone here used it? Or can you do so for fellow TeleRead community members and share your impressions?

Other apps of possible interest

Meanwhile here are other Andorid apps of possible interest, beyond two already-familiar ones, FBReader and the Aldiko reader (both of which also can display ePub, among other formats). Not owning an Android device—this could change!—I haven’t tested them.

–JETCET PDF, a demo app. “Download PDFs using the browser or view your PDF attachments in gmail.

(more…)

By Bill McCoy, General Manager, ePublishing Business, Adobe Systems

I remain opposed to DRMed e-books, at least for nonlibrary purposes; but in the interest of fairness, here are thoughts from Adobe’s Bill McCoy, adapted with permission from a Reading 2.0 post. Civil replies, please. I myself liked a blog post Bill did where he personally championed social DRM. Let’s hope that Adobe will officially give the SDRM idea a shot—I see a little hope. – D.R.

Adobe’s interests are far more aligned with the adoption of open formats that we can address with our authoring tools and services. We see e-book DRM as an enabler for a larger market, one that we can address with our tools and services on a level playing field vs. proprietary silos that give a choke-hold to players who have a strong position in the book distribution value chain. We don’t forecast revenue from e-book DRM even in the best case ever itself being a large material business for Adobe—large enough to pay its way and allow us to sustain and enhance the solution, but quite small relative to our other tools and services.

I’ve said before that Adobe’s open to evolving towards a non-proprietary ubiquitous DRM standard, even as we see obstacles to getting there in the near future (especially around IP enablement). What we don’t want to see is one proprietary solution taking over control, or fragmentation of multiple proprietary solutions. Publishers have already voted with their feet, so to speak, by requiring/letting Amazon deploy DRM. If the only reasonable cross-platform alternative for eBooks was to go DRM-free, then some publishers would distribute only through Amazon, leading to everyone else getting "iTunesd". So to me it’s pretty obvious that cross-platform eBook DRM that works with EPUB and PDF is necessary to ensure that the open, cross-platform alternative wins. But if every publisher were to choose to go DRM free, using PDF & EPUB but not DRM, hey I’d have absolutely no problem with that outcome.

By David Rothman

Each B&N store will get a demo Nook, but PaidContent reports that “only certain stores will carry the Nook for on-the-spot sales.”

Gee, I thought B&N would get behind this one. The brick factor is the big advantage that B&N could enjoy over Amazon. People are much less likely to make impulse buys if they can’t take home a unit now.

Hmm. Could the analysts be right after all in downgrading the stock? It’s great for B&N to have a digital strategy. But that isn’t necessarily the same as a well-executed strategy.

By David Rothman

That’s what happened to Jim Fallows, the Atlantic writer, who was shelling out 15-cent payments for PDF conversions.

The brain-dead credit card computers thought Jim was a card thief testing his account with small charges. Result? Visa unplugged his card until he protested (at least I assume he has).

Has this happened to you, with Visa or another company—or to anyone you know? Any measures you can take against it? I can just imagine the card conking out at the very moment you need it the most.

“I can’t be the first person to use a credit card for tiny Kindle charges,” Jim blogs. “Maybe a little coordination to be worked out here, guys? Another opportunity for the Nook?”

By David Rothman

ePub and the group behind it can vex me—a lot. I agree with Paul on such matters as the long-delayed ePub logo. Look, IDPF, where’s the logo contest you promised to announce at Frankfurt? Furthermore, I hate the way proprietary DRM de-standardizes ePub or any other format. What a laugh when Sony brags about “open ePub” or whatever, but feels compelled to use Adobe DRM on bestsellers in the ePub format. Can’t Sony try harder to coax publishers to at least experiment with social DRM (embedding customers names and addresses in e-book files)?

Even so, I remain a gung-ho ePub backer. Publishers such as Hachette will tell you of the economies that ePub has achieved as a distribution format. And if consumers care more about books than about brand names, then they’ll go for ePub, which will increase the number of reading choices. The new Sony wireless reader will eventually let you download from a whole bunch of e-stores. And standards will make that possible. Already many more books exist in the ePub format than the Kindle format, especially with public domain titles included. Just recently, as chronicled by Fran Toolan and picked up by if:book, the Internet Archive announced that all of its 1.6 million books were available in ePub format—ready to be read on anything from a Sony Reader to an iPhone. That’s a proud Brewster Kahle, archive founder, in the photo. At the same time, Google, the archive’s big rival in the public domain area, continues to offer ePub, not just PDF.

(more…)

By David Rothman

Since the early 1990s I’ve urged publishers to take e-library model seriously and even work toward well-stocked national digital library systems in the United States and elsewhere.

Now, in real life, some U.K. libraries are finding a friend in E. The Telegraph reports:

“After years of library membership declining and fears that the public no longer wanted to borrow books, some institutions are reporting a spike in interest since they started to offer e-books.

“Only a handful of libraries have started to offer the service, but many in the library world are hopeful that the revolution in digital reading can help transform libraries’ fortunes, and that the majority of libraries will soon offer downloads as a matter of course, alongside the latest Dan Brown paperback.”

If nothing else, remember that fairly or not, many consumers have trouble paying cash for a bunch of electrons. The library model is a great way to help address that.

I know. Publishers worry about becoming too dependent on library funding, but one way to address that would be a small tax on telecommunications goods and services, as well as cost justification of the kind that I describe in the TeleRead plan, the most recent version of which you can read in the Huffington Post.

Among the reasons why e-books are a hit at libraries, as noted by the Telegraph: “Readers do not need to remember to take their books back on time—a perennial problem for many consumers, because the digital book automatically deletes itself from their machine after 14 days.” Result? Cash-strapped families needn’t worry about library fines. Bingo! A whole new market for publishers.

By David Rothman

Jane at Dear Author, the romance novel site, offers an excellent guide to the current crop of e-books—-but warns that shoppers might do well to wait until next year when better technology shows up.

I agree despite the existence of spiffy new gizmos like Barnes and Noble’s Nook, shown here. The reason isn’t just the expected Apple tablet, which should be good for a bunch of tasks, not just book-reading. My guess is that a slew of e-readers will be out with Pixel Qi technology. PixelQi will let one screen work in an E Ink-style mode (low power consumption, high resolution) or a traditional LCD one (color).

So what does that mean? Well, B&N Nook, which includes a small color screen to go with the E Ink one, might not seem so hot with all the Pixel Qi-based competition I anticipate (nothing definite here, just clues from Pixel QI).

I also wonder about the recently unveiled EnTourage eDG e-reader/netbook, another two-screened creature. What’s the use of LCD and E Ink in one reader if Pixel  QI can handle both modes well well?

Of course, factors such as the number of books available should also matter, not just the capabilities of the hardware.

Amazon might be the winner in the numbers game if you exclude the hundreds of thousands of public domain books that the Nook can access. But that could change and maybe already has if you go by the B&N line.

At any rate, keep in mind the e-book-capable Apple tablet on the way; and besides, a Kindle-capable app should be available for it.

Furthermore, I wouldn’t be surprised if a widely circulated Adobe reader app for the Apple will appear and be able to read books in ePub. A German reader for Adobe-DRMed ePub books on the iPhone has already been announced, one more sign that the ePub standard is winning over large publishers.

(more…)