TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Ficbot’ Category

By Ficbot

There is a guy at MobileRead with $400 in geo-restricted books sitting on his Fictionwise wish list unable to be bought. I just can’t believe that publishers who really cares about their readers would really sacrifice that guy, his wishlist and his $400.

All this just to save a few hardback sales? And because he lives in the UK instead of elsewhere? Most e-book readers I know don’t buy hardback novels anyway, so it’s not quite the same market.

I would love to get an educated take from publishers. My bottom line on this is, I think the time has come for them to stop explaining why things are the way they are. Instead publishers should tell what their timeline is for fixing this mess, what steps will be involved, and to whom we as readers (and customers!) might address our emails to get things moving along.

We need to show the ones in charge how much we care about this and how much money the publishing industry stands to lose here.

By Ficbot

With Amazon, and now Barnes & Noble, coming out with major new releases, it looks like competition is heating up at last in the emerging e-reader marketplace.

Like most e-book fans, I read the news with interest. Following the not unexpected but still disappointing news that neither the international Kindle nor the B&N Nook would be made available to Canadians soon, I started wondering about people who shop based on features and people who shop based on brand loyalty.

I always thought I was a tough customer who researched every purchase carefully and shopped on the features. But as I read the details about these spiffy new products—available to everyone but YOU, Ficbot, you CANADIAN, you—I looked at my Sony in a new light.

Canada love from Sony

Sony loves Canada. They want me to buy their readers. I got mine in a store, even! Retail! From a clerk who even was properly trained and knew his stuff! Sony has given me the Mac software. They have given me the Google Books access.

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By Ficbot

Editor’s note: Ficbot is a proud Canadian. See her earlier advice for publishers outside the States and insights into buying behavior. – D.R.

Just how can publishers get e-shoppers to click on the Buy button more often—and also make e-books less of a hassle for them?

I’m not CEO of Amazon or Barnes & Noble, and I won’t vouch that all ideas here are feasible. But maybe they can help. I’d love to get responses from publishers. Perhaps they’ll have their own twists to add.

Idea #1: Settle on a format, commit to it and reduce barriers to its usage and adoption.

Reading as a hobby is on the decline, overall. Publishers can’t afford to alienate any potential readers. Especially among the younger set, we are seeing a rise toward multiuse devices. Publishers need to adjust.

There will always be dedicated readers like me who buy devices like the Sony Reader, but the vast majority of future readers will be sneaking in book breaks on cell phones and netbooks (photo) while waiting for the subway.

So your ticket to profit is going to be in volume—you want to get those books onto as many devices as possible. And that’s where a common format, if presented well on different devices, could help.

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By David Rothman

Ficbot’s detailed tips for publishers will be along later today—for example, her advice to clear up confusion on e-book formats and pricing.

But meanwhile here’s a post for shoppers. How are you looking for specific e-book titles and comparing prices? Just what search engines are the most helpful? Other techniques?

One possibility, noted by Frode Aleksandersen, is eBookPrice.info. Have you tried it? How helpful is it for locating titles—and the best prices? In the U.S., the site covers amazon.com, booksonboard.com, cyberread.com, diesel-ebooks.com, ebooks.com, ereadable.com, fictionwise.com, powells.com, sony.com and textbooks.com. In the U.K., it compares waterstones.co.uk and borders.co.uk.

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By Ficbot

Editor’s note: Martin Taylor’s latest thoughts are here and here. – D.R.

The recent posts from Martin Taylor, and my dialogue with him about the non-existent state of New Zealand e-book publishing, had me thinking about my own country.

Not enough Canadian titles are buyable as e-books.

Canada may not be the United States, but it’s hardly the jungle hinterlands, and many of our best authors are popular both here and in the U.S,. and elsewhere. Three of the authors I discuss below are winners of the Man Booker Prize, such as Margaret Atwood (photo); one is a Pulitzer winner; and two have been featured in Oprah’s Book Club. If you think that should make the books popular enough to merit e-book versions, though, you would be sadly mistaken.

I made a list of twenty Canadian authors whose works I have enjoyed and who I felt were reasonably popular enough to have at least some name recognition, certainly in Canada and in most cases, abroad as well. And then I went to Fictionwise to see what was available. My results were mixed.

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By David Rothman

That’s the word to Ficbot in Fictionwise’s e-mail. Quote from Steve Pendergrast, CTO: “There does appear to be a bug which is now fixed, that caused some prior purchases to have download problems. Thank you for bringing that to my attention. There was never any intent to deny past purchases from being downloaded, it was simply a programming error.” Great, but why didn’t Fictionwise communicate earlier?

Anyone still having trouble with already-downloaded books? Of course any fix still won’t solve the basic issue—the continued existence of geo-restrictions, period. Hello, publishers and literary agents? When are you going to fix that?

Related: Fictionwise forced to impose geo-restrictions on ALREADY-bought book? Lit agents unwittingly promoting piracy? and Fictionwise backing down a bit on geo-ban—for some customers’ already-bought books?

By Ficbot

Ficbot is on a roll—writing about special uses for e-book tech. Earlier this week she told how she was using her Sony Reader in her work as a teacher. Got your own ideas to write about? Email us. – D.R.

How to organize your recipe? Use index cards? A database online?

 Lifehacker drew 193 comments when it asked those questions.  Cooking is more of a passion than ever, given the high cost of eating out.

Eat at home. Save money, save the planet!

But how do you manage all those great recipe finds? Why is this so difficult for many?

Click on the above screenshot for a detailed view showing what I’ve been up to, with the wonderful Calibre program. More on it—and other solutions—will follow after the basics.

Why recipes are hard to manage and organize

Three main reasons:

• The recipe information is not centrally organized in one place. Many of us get new recipes from a mix of books (some of which might belong to the library or to other people), newspapers, magazines, Web sites and friends. It’s not like buying a copy of a novel (it’s all right there, and you read it and you’re done).

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By Ficbot

TeleRead welcomes stories of other professionals using e-reading devices in special ways. E-mail Co-Editor Paul Biba. – D.R.

My Sony Reader is a teacher’s pet. Mine. I’m the teacher, and it’s a valuable classroom tool.

How? Well, I don’t just use my Reader for “reading” in the traditional sense. It’s also as a way to take long or important files with me for reading on the go.

My instruction manuals, recipes message board threads, magazine articles and anything text-based—I can easily save them all in HTML. Then I can import the files into Calibre and tag them to group into collections, which I can then load into my Sony.

Please note that the Sony isn’t the only reader useful for taking along professional materials and personal documents. You might be able to do the same thing with your Kindle, for example, or Cybook, iLiad or Be Book. If the material isn’t in digital form, perhaps you can scan and OCR it.

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By Ficbot

Reminder: These are Ficbot’s personal opinions. Feel free to speak up in the comments area! – D.R.

I am sick and tired of endless blog commentary regarding Amazon’s “dominance” in the “e-book market.”

Amazon is not dominating the “e-book market” because it is not participating in the “e-book market.” It is participating in the American market, and according to stats posted earlier in this very blog, it only has 45 percent even there.

That sounds like a lot, but the flipside of 45 percent is the 55 percent Amazon is not occupying—and nearly all of that chunk is filled by Sony, which “dominates” the market elsewhere by default, since Amazon won’t play outside the USA.

Why an Apple Tablet could crush the Kindle

My prediction? The rumored Apple Tablet will be an oversizef, Kindle-sized iPod Touch. It will run all existing iPod Touch/iPhone apps, including Stanza and eReader, which will mean that its adopters can read not just the Internet freebies but also encrypted ePub (the rising standard) and the secure eReader favored by e-book giant Fictionwise/Barnes and Noble.

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By Ficbot

What are e-book buyers thinking when they shop?

I can’t speak for all buyers, but if you want to know why I buy or don’t buy from various sites—well, here’s the lowdown. No ESP needed. I hope this is useful to retailers and aspiring self-publishers of e-books, although most of the sites named here don’t accept titles from the latter group.

Self-publishers face a daunting learning curve these days. So many stores, so many formats, what to do? Many novices begin with Amazon—Amazon makes it easy, and enjoys a large market share. But the company’s Kindle side officially focuses just on the United States, leaving out me and many other voracious readers (I’m Canadian). Sorry, Amazon. Here’s where I am buying e-books.

Stop One: Fictionwise

Fictionwise (screenshot), which normally does not deal with the self-published, is my preferred e-book store, for several reasons. Firstly, the Fictionwise site is the most pleasant of the big storefronts to navigate. I have checked out its main competitor, Books on Board, and can never seem to find things there when I just browse; I need to have a certain title in mind.

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By Ficbot

I’m going to be moving in two weeks, and as part of my preparations, I have been decluttering. My new apartment is brighter, bigger and in a much better location than my present home. I’d love to be able to entertain a little more and have a more adult social life, and piles of towering, yellowing paperback impulse buys are not exactly the epitome of the clean, open look.

So if it’s available in e-book, I am chucking it, secure in the knowledge that I can buy it later if it begs to be re-read.

Magazines a tougher decluttering target

Magazines, on the other hand, are a tougher thing to get rid of. Most of the ones I buy are cooking or fitness related, and those are much less fun to read in plain-vanilla text on a screen. My modus operandi for the fitness ones in the past when I have done such purges has been to gently tear out the articles I plan to refer to again, slide them into plastic page protectors, stick them in a binder I keep for this purpose, and be on my way.

So I started wondering if e-clipping might be the way to go, at least for articles from magazines which have less need to be pretty.

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By Ficbot

Related: Chris Meadows’ May 29 installment in his series evaluating the Sony PRS-700. – D.R.

I supervise an informal after-school program a few times a week, and had my Sony Reader PRS-505 out while the kids were at play.

My gadgets are a familiar sight to them—I use a netbook and iPod, among other things, in some of my actual teaching lessons—and the older children are fond of playing trivia games with me on the iPod from time to time. The other day, they were busy with their lego building and I thought I could finish off The Hound of the Baskervilles at last on my Sony Reader. I should know better than to try and use my own toys around inquisitive kids!

Their initial reactions to the Reader were quite favorable. I had a pretty cloth cover on mine, and it made the girls in the group especially interested. Kids this age do not have any preconceptions about gender and technology, thank goodness, and they’ll grow up knowing how to do these things. The girls were quite comfortable with the idea of a book reader once they figured it out, and the advantages of such a device (for example, being able to carry around more than one book) were readily apparent to them with no prompting from me. I got lots of wows and oohs over my pretty toy!

From a software standpoint, they were able with help to sort out the file system and use the categories to find the handful of kiddie titles I had on there. And they had no trouble at all figuring out the buttons and using them to choose a book and advance the screens as they explored. I think some of them were more interested in pressing the buttons than in doing actual reading, but of course depending on the age and reading level of the child, your mileage will vary on that one. One precocious little reader was interested in doing some actual work with me, so as the others wandered back to their toys, I got her started on some actual reading.

First pick: Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses

My first pick was Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. I have a beautiful free version from MobileRead, complete with illustrations, and it hit the spot for reading like this. Each poem was short, geared to children and could fit on one screen. So there was a nice sense of accomplishment when we got to the end of the page because we’d actually finished doing something! I can see a child getting a bit lost on a longer work if they don’t have the tactile feedback of physical pages to work with. If we ever get to the point where we have readers specifically designed for children, a more obvious page indicator—either tactile, or more prominent graphically—would definitely be a feature worth considering.

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By Ficbot

I have read several posts recently, both here and elsewhere, from people in the publishing industry explaining where they want the e-book industry to go.

These posts carefully outline why the current model is the way it is, and what steps publishers are, or should be taking to get readers on board with the way they perceive things to be going. They are also completely missing the point.

Here is a new way of looking at things. Instead of deciding what you want to sell and at what price, then endeavoring to convince people why you have made these choices and what a good idea it is, why not ask them what they want, and find a way to offer them that instead?

For example:

You want a higher price point and the reader wants a lower one. Instead of explaining to them why the price point is where it is, why not lower your costs through cutting out some middlemen or doing some other restructuring to improve efficiency?

Instead of wasting money on trying to increase perceived value through “multimedia” content or other needless additions, how about spending on get your back catalogues out at bargain prices to sell more e-books and stimulate new interest in authors already in your stable?

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By Ficbot

So, how are things going with my week-old Sony Reader? Great, thanks. I love it. It was a wonderful buy for me. Now that I have had time to put it through its paces, here are my thoughts on how it stacks up as a book reader.

Ease of Use

My Sony may not have the Kindle’s wireless function, but it’s a snap to just pop in the USB cable and zap stuff over. When I compare it to the laborious upload method for my old eBookwise—convert documents to correct format, transfer or upload them to to your on-line bookshelf via clunky web form which requires two separate log-ins, plug in the cable, navigate to the bookshelf, transfer your files one at a time, log back into your server on-line, delete them, etc., etc., etc.—this is just a breeze. Open Calibre, choose a file, click send and voila.

How the Sony changed my reading choices

I have been enjoying the wealth of free public domain books for the Sony at MobileRead, Feedbooks, Manybooks and elsewhere. But I do like buying more contemporary e-books too. Using the Sony has really changed my e-book purchasing habits because it cannot read "secure" eReader, which is what I have bought for my previous Palm and iPod Touch devices. The bottom line is that it is easier—and I get a much more presentable reading experience—when I stick to the non-DRM "multiformat" choices at Fictionwise. They are just ready to go on any device you might have, right out of the box. Once you own the title, you own it and can download it at will in any of the offered formats you choose.

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By Ficbot

There is a new e-book reader in the Ficbot house! Devoted TeleRead readers know how in love I am with my iPod Touch, which is a wonderful choice for on-the-go reading. But I am an avid enough reader that I was finding I needed a little more in certain situations:

—The smaller screen is less comfortable to read while I am in motion, for example, when I try to read on the treadmill at the gym

—The iPod Touch can’t handle PDF files, and my public library has just made a small collection of these available for borrowing

—The battery life is adequate for a day or so on the go, but less adequate for longer excursions, and I worried it would fail me on my upcoming five hour plane ride to go see my sister next month

—My eBookwise is starting to show its age, and it’s difficult and cumbersome to get content onto it. It also weighs a million pounds and is a pain to carry around

I found a local buyer who was interested in buying the eBookwise. He had one already and wanted a second one for his wife, so I felt great about selling it to a good home and finally upgrading to something a little nicer. I selected the Sony Reader (505 model) because it was pretty much the only game in town. Since I’m Canadian, the Kindle is not available to me, and I wanted the chance to see and touch it before I bought something like this. So I went to my local Sony store and checked out the situation.

The buying experience

The store had both the 505 and the newer model available. I had been warned that people did mpt like the screen contrast of the 700 as much, and it was $150 more expensive, so I focused my efforts on the 505. I was worried the little flicker as it turns the page would bother me; I tested the sample files loaded onto the reader and found that once I got into a story, I was fine. I also did not notice any appreciable glare on the screen, which was nice. The glare issue was what had killed the Alphasmart Dana as an e-reader for me!

The sales clerk was, to my surprise, reasonably helpful. He answered my few questions easily and seemed to know his product. When I told him I was disappointed this product was not available in bookstores and I had to come all the way downtown to get it, he offered up this bizarre theory that Sony preferred to the lone supplier so that people would think they were the only place to get the books too. I immediately rattled off four other places I planned to get books (Manybooks, Feedbooks, MobileRead and Fictionwise) and he admitted that although he is not supposed to endorse such alternatives, one can indeed get content from whole bunches of places.

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By Ficbot

Moderator’s note: A Study in Scarlet, shown below, introduced Sherlock Homes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective—beloved by Ficbot and millons of others. Meanwhile thanks to Ficbot for sharing her favorites in a very personal way! Notice the association of books with memories? And her eagerness to own e-books for real? Publishers, please listen! – D.R.

If I had known that my most recent read was to be my hundredth e-book, I might have picked something a little more edifying than a mystery novel about a girl who lives in a van. But this read is reflective of the general trend I’ve noticed since I first got into e-books several years ago: I read what I can find, and some of it is not material I would have read otherwise.

That can be for the bad as well as for the good: I’ve read many more classics than I ever used to because they are plentiful and inexpensive (i.e. free) to get. And I have read some Internet-only authors whose work you can’t find at your local Borders or Indigo.

When all is said and done, there is a fair share of pulpy trash, but also some gems, some real finds which have enriched my imaginative landscape. And in terms of sheer quantity, this is far more reading than I ever used to do when I had to reply on having the physical book with me.

My best finds—starting with the Sherlock Holmes series

So, what are my best finds? What have I learned after one hundred books?

1) There is value in the classics. 49 of those hundred books fell in this category. Thus far, most of them have been nostalgia reads: kiddie lit from my childhood, or revisits of books I read in university. I would like to expand my repertoire and read some new to me authors. Some favorites:

–The Sherlock Holmes series. I have fond memories of reading this as a child on my father’s knee.

–The Lewis Carroll books. I have even more fond memories, of Grandma this time.

–Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (right image). This was the first classic I ever got swept away in after years of hating the classics.

–The short stories of Mark Twain. He is more known for his nov

els; the short stories were a real treat!

2) You’d be amazed at what is free these days. It is not just Shakespeare and the Bible! Pulp fiction from the glory days, Creative Commons licensed titles from contemporary authors, the mystery and sci-fi novels that defined the genre…the list goes on and on. Some of my best finds:

–The works of Cory Doctorow. Little Brother is his most "important" I suppose, but I like his short stories, and the creepy Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.

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By Ficbot

How much should e-books cost if they don’t require facilities like the one in the photo?

An interesting thread over at MobileRead has generated a lot of thoughtful comment from the e-book reading Internet community.

People keep saying that e-books, with their lack of physical medium, need for shipping and need for warehouse storage, should be priced appropriately cheaper than their print counterparts.

And as well, since they have no second-hand market (and if they did, it could only be enabled to the publisher’s satisfaction using cumbersome DRM!) the price should reflect this loss of privilege.

The math of E vs. P at the consumer level

Too bad the publishers are not yet on board with this and persist in charging hard-cover prices! I could go over (again) some of the logic-and-common-sense arguments the publishers, in their whacky e-phobia, aren’t thinking about. But that’s preaching to the converted here. So instead, I am going to do what I always do and offer some solid math.

Publishers, take note. This is how your customers look at things. These are the thoughts which cross their minds.

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