Photo Note:

I’ve had more time to play around with the Astak, and the bloom is off the rose. Yes, the e-ink screen is truly amazing, and far clearer than the touch-sensitive Sony reader’s. However, it has certain other problems.

In Praise of Astak

Before I start talking about the Astak’s shortcomings, I should mention that the company itself has some astoundingly good customer service. For one thing, they monitor the Astak forums on MobileRead and pop up to answer questions.

Whenever I have posted a technical question on the forum, I have almost immediately been emailed by an Astak representative with suggestions and offers of advice. Now, granted, I do not know whether this is their default behavior toward all users, or just because they know I’m reviewing their product. I’d like to think the former is true.

Another nice thing about the device itself is that the firmware is remarkably easy to upgrade. Just put the firmware file on an SD card, slide the card in, and reboot into upgrade mode using a combination of keypresses.

My only complaint in this regard is that the instructions I found for upgrading on their website were not entirely clear. One of the buttons to be pressed is mentioned as the “increase volume key”. I assumed that meant the rocker switch on the right—but after that did not work and I searched some more, I learned that those instructions only applied to the 6” Astak reader devices; for the 5”, you press the page-forward button left of the screen instead. Just a little confusing.

Now let’s talk about some of those shortcomings.

Battery Life

One of the things that makes e-ink so great is that it only uses power when you turn the page. The e-ink page uses micro-capsules that are rotated by current, but require no current to stay set as they are. This is why e-ink readers have such a long battery life.

This should mean that, theoretically, an e-ink reader should use almost no power at all when it is “idling”. I should be able to leave it “open,” like a book, for days on end and pick it up with the same battery level that I left off.

(Granted, there may need to be some minor power consumption—but since it is not driving a display, surely it should use less than a digital watch, which is able to run for months on a single tiny battery.)

Unfortunately, this is not the case with the Astak. If I leave it alone for several days and forget to plug it in, the battery drains completely dry—and requires approximately “overnight” to charge back up to full again. This puts a damper on what ought to be one of an e-ink reader’s biggest advantages.

A Peeling Reader

I also noticed that my sample has started to develop a flaw remarked upon by other Astak users: the peeling paint problem. About half of Astak owners have found that, with a little wear, the paint covering their reader starts to peel off. Here you can see it starting on mine, right around the left page-turn arrows. (You may need to click to enlarge it to see more clearly.)

It is only a cosmetic problem, of course, and Astak’s excellent customer service again comes to the fore: they will, on request, provide replacement units that do not suffer from this flaw. Not everyone even cares about a replacement; one Astak user on the Baen Bar has just peeled all the paint off of his and been quite happy to keep using it that way.

Ex-Calibre

For some reason, I have not been able to make Calibre work with the Astak. I am not sure whether this is the Astak’s problem or some flaw with Calibre (which worked just fine with my Sony).

When I posted to MobileRead about it, it was suggested that I should remove the Chinese language manual from internal memory, as it messes with Calibre’s ability to connect.

I wanted to try to do this, but it seems at the moment I cannot get the reader to connect to my computer’s USB at all. It just shows a “charging” indicator and blinking light, and does not give me a “press Enter to connect” dialogue. But others seem to be able to use Calibre with their devices just fine.

It was not a great handicap, however; I ended up just using an SD card reader to copy my books directly onto my card, which I then put in the Astak. It just takes a few extra steps to make the copy.

If I were going to keep this reader, I might be more concerned about getting Calibre working with it—but since I will be sending it back, I am not going to let it bother me.

Moving on to formats…

Mobipocket vs. ePub

First of all, the majority of the books I read are unencrypted ePub these days, from Baen. I recently downloaded all of my Webscription purchases and put them on a directory of the 2-gig SD card I normally use for my digital camera, and put that in the Astak. The books load right up with no problem.

Reading ePub books on the EZReader is, well, “EZ”. They load quickly, and I am able to access the table of contents, zoom, search, even use the read-aloud feature (once I had updated the firmware to the latest version).

However, a Mobipocket book I read on it did not fare so well. This was 1634: The Baltic War, from one of the Baen CDs hosted on The Fifth Imperium. It was not available in ePub format, so I loaded the Mobi.

I found that, though I was able to read the file, the Astak reader was unable to parse the Mobi table of contents. There was a table of contents I could jump to, but it was all HTML links and I couldn’t figure out how to click on any of those links (if it was even possible at all). I ended up having to use the “jump to page” function in the menu to navigate through the book.

Furthermore, every so often the reader would lose track of my place. I would turn it back on to find myself a few dozen or hundred pages back from where I had been. If I find myself faced with a Mobi-only title in the future (at least while I still have the Astak), I will probably go to the extra trouble to convert it with Calibre first.

eReader and PalmDoc

In email correspondence, Bob Barry, the Director of Global Business Development for Astak, said that the Astak already supports non-DRMed books in Fictionwise’s eReader format, and they are negotiating to add support for eReader DRM as well.

However, I tried testing with three unencrypted eReader books I created myself and that I had verified opened on other devices, and the Astak did not even see them in a directory listing of the SD card. Very disappointing. It appears the Astak may not be the eReader e-reader of my dreams after all.

I was able to open a book in the PalmDoc format, though since it had no table of contents navigation through it would have the same problem as Mobipocket.

Awkward File List Navigation

I should also note that the navigation through the file list is a bit of a pain if you have a large directory. My Baen e-book files take 27 screens to list, alphabetically by title, and there is not any way to jump to specific titles. (Nor can I sort them in any way except title, date, or type, which is not terribly useful in this situation.)

So if I were to want to read Worlds of Honor or Young Miles, I would have to resign myself to paging through 27 pages of files to get to the ones I wanted.

I suppose if I copied my Calibre directory onto the card rather than my unsorted Baen ePub directory I might at least be able to navigate the directory tree by author, but I would still need to know what author wrote the book I wanted.

However, I cannot now remember whether Sony’s file list interface was any better.

PDF

But the PDF format is where the Astak easily falls the shortest. I had expected that, being a more recent device, it should handle PDF files at least as well as the Sony did. (You may wish to read my review of the Sony’s PDF capabilities for comparison purposes.) However, its performance left a number of factors to be desired.

First of all, I loaded the image-only PDF of “Bronte’s Egg”. Full-page, it looked about the same as it did on the Sony, only smaller by an inch. However, when I used the “rotate” option and turned the reader 90 degrees, when I pressed “page forward” the device simply crashed back out to the file list again. I tried multiple times, and it always behaved in this way.

Moving on to Dragon Warriors, we see that in both the portrait and landscape versions, the text looks pretty good. The problem comes when we use the “zoom” function, to break the PDF out of its formatting and zoom the text in a few times. The result: the first column on the page is nowhere to be found. The text below the header starts at the beginning of the second column.

(The Sony was not perfect in this regard either, but at least it put the “Introduction” header at the middle of the page and kept the first column of text before it. But no amount of paging up would reveal that first column of text in the Astak.)

Spycraft, the 160-megabyte overformatted bloat-monster, took more than a little time to load, but once it did it looked fairly decent, if much too small to read. Rotating 90 degrees did improve the readability some—but attempting to zoom in further simply zoomed out instead—and it remained zoomed out through each of the several zoom levels, until I finally reached the one that zoomed it back in to its original half-page view.

Also, zooming, rotating, and page-turning were all extremely sluggish—not that I am surprised, given the 160-megabyte size of this monster.

Spirit of the Century, a much smaller book and less-bloated PDF, came off considerably better. The smaller page size meant it is more readable in general on the Astak, and the non-cruft formatting meant it came off considerably better zoomed in as well.

Tables of Discontent

One other annoyance had to do with the table of contents. The Astak would read the PDF’s table of contents, and this included multi-level TOCs such as the one from Spycraft.

In a multi-level table of contents, if I clicked on “4. Chapter 4: Skills” I would get another table of contents, starting off with “1. Chapter 4: Skills” and then listing subheads for 2, 3, and 4.

So assuming I want to start off at the beginning of Chapter 4, I would click 1 for “1. Chapter 4: Skills”, right? Wrong. Clicking 1 would put me back at the main TOC. To go into the chapter, I would need to click 2 or up for one of the subheads. This is not a very intuitive interface design.

Conclusion

Although ePub files are a joy to read on the Astak, other formats are considerably less so—and the interface makes getting to those files somewhat awkward when I have a lot of them. With that in mind, though I am enjoying using it while I have it, I find I will not regret sending it back when the time comes.

We’ve known for a long time that a lot more people read e-books on multi-purpose than dedicated devices—they’re cheaper, they do more, they’re easier to pocket.

And more people have them. It is estimated 1.7 million people own a dedicated e-reader, and that number may rise to 4 million by the end of the holidays. But Apple has sold over 50 million iPhones and iPod Touches.

“The iPod Touch is always at hand,” Shannon Stacey, who has written several romance e-novels, said. “It’s my calendar, it’s my everything, so my books are always with me.” Ms. Stacey, who also owns an early Sony Reader model, said she had now bought twice as many e-books for her iPod Touch as for her Sony.

But others are still dubious:

“The Kindle is for people who love to read,” [Ian Freed, vice president for the Kindle division at Amazon] said. “People use phones for lots of things. Most often they use them to make phone calls. Second most often, they use them to send text messages or e-mail. Way down on the list, there’s reading.”

Of course, we know that people who read e-books have been in love with their small screens for more than ten years. E-books were one of the first big “killer app” uses for the Palm, and e-book vendors eReader and Fictionwise have been in business ever since.

Some have even gone so far as to predict “the end of single-purpose devices,” but that is probably still premature.

The download link is on the FAQ page.

When I loaded up the appbook’s listing on iTunes, the first two words to catch my eye from the app’s blurb were “Random House”. At which point I said, “Ahh,” and was no longer surprised. Random House has always led the pack on ridiculous e-book pricing.

That said, the same book on Fictionwise is $40 less $12 store-credit rebate, so “only” $28 (or $23.80 if you subscribe to FW’s discount program). And it is $32 on the Kindle (and hence one of those rare e-books that Amazon actually does not have cheaper than everybody else). That is still a ridiculous rate for an e-book, however. Random House really needs to get its act together.

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.

Just a quick note to say that the technical measures to enforce the geographical restrictions are slowly but surely tightening. The iPhone eReader application just refused to download 2 books that I had purchased (by pretending to be in the USA). It said I was in the wrong location. Curiously I had no problem downloading them to my Mac, form where, in a spirit of perversity, I uploaded them to my Personal Content shelf at Fictionwise, and from there to the iPhone.

However, it does seem that the days of being able to get around this sort of measure are numbered. The FAQ on the FW site still says that less than 10% of their books are protected in this way, but this is woefully short of the truth now. In effect the site is now USA only, and there is nothing much we can do in the rest of the world until the publishers sort themselves out. The local alternatives have a very poor and very expensive selection.

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.

One author has nearly all her catalogue up there—Kelley Armstrong, a sci-fi/romance author. A few others had a handful of recent titles, but nothing from their back catalogues, and not the books for which they were best known and/or for which they had won major awards. Quite a few authors had nothing at all available.

I know e-books are still considered a bit of a niche market. It didn’t surprise me that the genre author had all her stuff up there, and the literary authors were less represented. But here is a thought I would dearly like the publishers to consider. Will you sell a lot of e-books by literary authors? Maybe not. But will you sell any if you fail to make them even available? Absolutely not! You have to play the game if you want to score a point or two!

I’ll post my prescription for ‘domestic’ publishers, be they from New Zealand or from Canada or from wherever, in a separate post. But to start things off in this important dialogue, here are my Canadian top twenty, and the results of my search for their work in ebook form.

Twenty Canadian authors and their e-offerings

• Kelley Armstrong – This popular fantasy writer known for her ‘Women of the Underworld’ series seems fairly well-represented. She has 14 e-titles listed at Fictionwise.
• Margaret Atwood – A Canadian legend, a seven-time finalist for the Governor-General’s Award and a Booker winner. How many e-books? Only four.
• George Elliott Clarke- Another multi-talented award-winner. Another zero-e-book author. Sigh.
• Douglas Coupland – Only one e-book, and it isn’t even one of his popular ones. No ‘Generation X’? No ‘Microserfs’? Really?
• Robertson Davies – Mo e-books for him either
• Cory Doctorow – That rarest of rare things, a Canadian pioneer. Only four ebooks at Fictionwise, all of them saddled with DRM. But he puts everything on the Web for free.
• Will Ferguson – Why I Hate Canadians is perhaps a little too niche, but he did write a Dummies book too. Alas, it is not available, nor is anything else by this guy.
• Timothy Findley – Two of his recent ones are available, but none of his older stuff (including ‘Not Wanted on the Voyage, my personal favorite).
• Wayne Johnston – Two e-books available. Not the two historical novels that made him famous, but oh well. At least we’re starting somewhere…
• Joy Kogawa – Obasan is a Canadian classic, widely read in schools. No e-version though…
• Anne-Marie McDonald- Nothing. Not even the one Oprah picked.
• Stuart McLean – This guy has a large collection of books based on his radio show. None are available as e-books. I did find one item at Fictionwise by “Stuart Mclean.” but I can’t be sure it’s
  the same guy
• Yann Martel – Nothing. Not even Life of Pi, which won the Booker Prize.
• Rohinton Mistry – He’s won the Booker, and like McDonald, been recommended by Oprah. You’d think that would make him popular enough to merit an e-version or two. Apparently not. Nothing at Fictionwise…
• Alice Munro – Four books available. She’s written 16. And she’s also won the Booker, among other things…
• Michael Ondaatje – Four books. Like others here, they seem to be starting with the most recent, so good luck getting ‘The English Patient’ which is not among the offerings…
• Nino Ricci – Nothing in e-book by this Governer General’s Award two-time winner. And just for fun, I looked up his wife, who is also a novelist and from whom I took a creative writing course once. Nothing by her either.
• David Adams Richards – None of his dozen-odd novels have made it to e-book yet. Not even the ones which won prizes.
• Mordecai Richler – Nothing by this Canadian legend, but I did find his daughter Emma’s debut novel—not its sequel, mind you. Just the first one. But we have to start somewhere, right?
• Carol Shields- Nothing. Not even ‘The Stone Diaries’ which won the Pulitzer.

What’s your guess?

I suspect that it’s the same device for which B&N will power the bookstore.

Furthermore, though this is almost surely outside the FCC’s turf, the reader will most likely use ePub, among other formats—with DRM provided by Fictionwise, now a branch of B&N.

Speaking of DRM—and not just in a B&N context: I’d love for the New York Times to explore, in depth, how proprietary DRM lessens the usefulness of ePub as a standard.

Right now it looks as if we’re headed for B&N-DRMed ePub, Adobe-DRMed ePub and maybe even Kindle-DRMed ePub in time. A piece on social DRM, which Adobe exec Bill McCoy has talked up in the past, would also be a nice gift from the Times to its readers, some of whom just happen to be big New York publishers. Likewise a detailed look at geo-bans and DRM[related factors would be nice, with quotes from affected readers such as Ficbot.

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?

Eric Engleman sent me the following email:

I’m a reporter covering Amazon.com/Kindle for TechFlash, a technology news website in Seattle. We just put together a cool graphic mapping all the players in the expanding electronic book market. I wanted to pass it along to you in case it is of interest. We did it as a resource for ourselves to track all that’s going on in the space, and realized it might be useful for others interested in e-books as well … .

If you go to the TechFlash site you will find not only a link to a larger version of the graphic, but also to a PDF version that has embedded links to news stories and other information about each of the companies listed. They alos ask for your feedback about anything they’ve missed.

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Amazon, e-book, e-books, ebook, ebook readers, ebooks, ereaders, Google, Kindle, Paul Biba, publishing, Sony Reader, TeleRead, Sony, Fictionwise, Barnes & Noble, Irex

The news from late this morning: “It looks like in the last hour or so Fictionwise has removed the new verification from the bookshelf. All my books can be downloaded again. I wonder for how long?”

And perhaps there’s a Luddite element to it, a lingering eagerness among certain literary agents and publishing tycoons to stymie the new medium.

The paradox of geo-bans

I’m talking geographical restrictions crippling e-books.

Here’s the book business encouraging customer loyalty to stores. And then you find you can’t buy a much-hyped bestseller from your favorite retailer. Furthermore, what if you live in the middle of Africa and don’t even know of a geo-correct e-store to patronize?

Side effect of geo-DRM: Piracy

A recipe for piracy? I think so. With such eagerness to block the Geographically Undesirable from buying legal copies, I’m hardly surprised to learn from Mike Cane of the pirated edition seen here.

If geo-DRM prevails, pirates will come across to many consumers as friends. Granted, there’s the risk of a virus. But how many pirates uses DRM? Want books without gotchas? Then buy illegally. I’m anti-pirate, but how can one not reach that conclusion?

Newest wrinkle, reportedly: Geo-bans affecting already-bought books

Wait. It’s gets worse. From Ficbot, in Toronto, Canada, comes word that “several people at MobileRead are reporting some disturbing news in the area of geographical restrictions.

“Not only is Fictionwise closing the loopholes that allowed people to get around the restrictions (e.g., use of gift cards) but they are now apparently blocking people from downloading books they bought in the past (before restrictions were imposed) but which are now restricted.

“One poster claims that about eight percent of his bookshelf representing about $300 is now blocked.

”If true, this is a serious claim.

“If something is now restricted and they want to prevent someone from buying it for geographical reasons, that’s stupid, but if they have to follow the rules, so be it. But if they are imposing these restrictions retroactively on books people bought several years ago, that is a whole other ballgame. That’s as bad as Amazon’s 1984 fiasco.

“I always thought Fictionwise was a company with integrity and loved how accessible Scott and Steve [Pendergrast} were. Now, I am being shunted to PR people when  I have legitimate questions, these PR people are ignoring me, and a legitimate issue has come up which I cannot investigate.”

In fairness to Fictionwise, these geographical restrictions are at odds with the past character of the company, now owned by Barnes & Noble; and it’s oh so possible that powerful Luddites or semi-Luddites in the publishing industry have left Fictionwise and B&N with no choice but to impose retroactive restrictions.

U.S. customers now suffering as well

Think you’re safe from geo-DRM and other geo-restrictions just because you live in the U.S.? Sorry. You’re wrong. A BeBook owner in Seattle writes:

“Penguin titles I have assumed are universally available in both the U.K. and the U.S. (and around the world). Now I’ve tried to order the Penguin volume of all the essays of Montaigne, which is available in the EPub format from W.H. Smith (from which source I’ve purchased many e-titles formerly) and I’m told that geographical restrictions prevent W.H. Smith from selling me that title. (The Penguin paper volume of the same title has been readily available for sale in the U.S., and significantly discounted, since 1992.) Why would Penguin impose this restriction? Aren’t they interested in selling their product? Ok, you guys and gals in Australia and New Zealand, you have a new ally in me (as if that’s worth anything).”

Literary agents: Leading villains?

Could the ultimate villains be literary agents, who thrive off the complexity of the publishing industry? Might they be at odds with the interests of authors, not just readers? Literary agents serve many functions, and in the case of p-books, I can certainly appreciate the need to divide up the planet. But e-books are a different story.

As some have suggested, why not give up on the idea of geo-rights and focus instead on language rights?

There is still a need for literary agents and large publishers, but if both groups insist on geo-restrictions, they will only worsen the pain of a transition to digital. Most of the very earliest sales of the Brown book may have been electronic. Now, with e-books on the cusp becoming more than a tiny speck of the publishing business, think of the potential financial loss to authors, publishers and, yes, agents, if the industry is so oblivious to the difference between electrons and atoms.

Note: I invite B&N PR people or others involved to give their side—just as Ficbot had hoped they would do. No need to go through me. The TeleRead comment area beckons. I’m especially eager to know if, as I suspect, publishers are the reason for the extra zeal against the Geographically Undesirable. And are literary agents the sources of the original pressure?

Related: A note that TeleRead Co-Editor Paul Biba received from a geo-ban victim who is giving up on paper books. What some literary agents want? If so, tough luck. The e-genie is already out of the bottle. Also see reports that Fictionwise is tracking IP addresses to determine location. True? I’d welcome comment from Fictionwise or B&N.

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.

I also have time/effort/resources already expended on the Fictionwise Buywise Club for frequent buyers. This makes Fictionwise often the cheapest source for me because I get a member discount. I also get rebates from them when I buy certain books and I can use these rebates to keep buying more. I have an incentive to shop there because I get money back to spend on other things.

Additionally, Fictionwise has the largest selection of DRM-free multiformat books. I have switched devices several times during my patronage and appreciate that each time I do, I can go back and re-download my past purchases in the format I need for my new device. It is very important to me that my purchases are readable in the future because it is, to me, the great benefit of e-books over print books. I have had to give up print books in the past due to lack of space to store them. With that not being an issue with e-books, I like the idea that I can keep them forever. I would not want to buy an e-book that was so infested with restrictive DRM that its future usability on a device of my choosing would ever be in question.

I also appreciate that Fictionwise offers e-magazine subscriptions as part of its inventory. Again, for me, this has been a space issue in the print world. I like that I can subscribe to a magazine, be able to download it in the format of my choosing, and keep it forever just like a book. I have been reading Asimovs this year and might change to Alfred Hitchcock next year. It’s been a treat for me to get a new issue added to my bookshelf every month.

Finally, I appreciate the one-stop shopping aspect. I like having a record of all my purchases in one spot, and I like being able to log in at any time and have all my past purchases right there for reference and re-download. It’s so much easier than having to back up individual files myself from any of a dozen different solo author websites!

Stop Two: eReader.com

I have not bought from eReader.com (owned by Fictionwise and also closed to self-publishers) yet, but its recent price-matching of Amazon’s $9.99 for new releases and best-sellers, has put eReader on my radar, and it offers different promotions from Fictionwise which might make one book or the other a better buy from eReader at any given moment.

Unfortunately the DRM-locked eReader format is not readable on my Sony. If it’s a real bargain price and an author I love, I may go for it since I can easily read it on my iPod Touch. But I prefer to do the bulk of my leisure reading on the Sony; and if a book cannot be easily and quickly used with that device, I hesitate to buy it. I can say without hesitation that the $1,000 and change I have spent on e-books so far would be at least double if DRM were not an issue and I did not have to worry about such things. Publishers and authors have absolutely lost real, legitimate sales from this!

Stop Three: Smashwords

This is another Web site which has recently entered my radar but from which I have not yet purchased. I love that in nearly every case, you can sample part of the book for free to make sure you’ll like it. Plus, Smashwords is friendly to independent writers and offers many self-published titles that other sites don’t carry.

I have already bought one e-book based on a sample; a prior Fictionwise read of mine had the first chapter of the author’s other book included as a bonus, and I liked it enough to buy the second book. Also, if I do read a book and I enjoy it enough to recommend it to friends, the sample allows them to check out my recommendation without a big commitment of time and money. They can read the free sample and make their own decision.

The only problem I have had with Smashwords so far is that I am unfamiliar with nearly all the authors. I have a lot of backlog in my To Read pile right now, so I have not had a lot of time to go exploring. But an author adept at self-marketing who gets on my radar could absolutely convert me into a Smashwords customer. That Web site is absolutely built on a model I could get behind!

Stop Four: Baen Books

As a reader, I love Baen Books’ business model (the company tends to give away the first book for free in hopes of hooking you into the series) and love that Baen offers a range of formats in a DRM-free approach similar to the Fictionwise multiformat offerings. The only reason I am not a more avid customer: I don’t read a ton of conventional sci-fi. If someone recommends something to me, I will absolutely check it out and see what it’s about. But as with Smashwords, I need someone to get me there first. Unfortunately Baen isn’t for self-published writers.

Now, where don’t I shop, and why not?

• Amazon, for the obvious reasons (no Sony support, and more importantly, no Canada support).
• Scribd (okay for browsing short documents, but every long document I have ever downloaded from Scribd has been an absolutely horrifically messy PDF with no proper line breaks and has looked terrible on my Sony, although I understand that Scribd is working to phase in ePub for many titles).
• Bookstores with restrictive DRM and onerous usage limits (for example, a previous device I had where all books could only be read on the device which bought them, and even if you changed devices to another device from them, that was that)

As for author web sites, I addressed that a little above—I tend to favor store sties. But I will say that an author who puts together a good package may yet convince me. One author who has caught my eye has all 30-odd books available in a bundle from his Web site at a substantial discount over buying them separately. Once my to-read pile is under control, that author may get a sale from me. But for the most part, I do prefer to one-stop-shop when I can.

The Orwellian embarrassment isn’t all. While I’m at it, I also want to apologize for our DRM in general, as well as our eBabel.

Effective immediately, Amazon will encourage publishers not to “protect” their books since DRM makes it impossible to own books for real. Furthermore, we’ll alert customers when stubborn publishers don’t wise up about DRM.

DRM is a consumer fraud, a loathsome white-collar crime in the moral sense at the least—just a fancier equivalent of stealing a pair of boots. You are only renting, not “buying,” despite what our ads may say or imply. On our site, therefore, we’ll follow the example of Fictionwise  as shown in the above image. That is, we’ll spell out the rights that you have or don’t have in your use of books that publishers force us to DRM. Why should we cover up for them? Here’s to informed consumers!

ePub shunning: Mea Culpa!

In this second apology, I’d also like to pledge our respect for the ePub format. We recently promised that Kindles would be more open machines, and now I truly mean it. Customers will get ePub for real, without any proprietary extensions now or in the future.

We may or may not be able to upgrade existing Kindles, but we’ll do our best, and all future devices will be able to read render ePub natively. Kindles will still be able to read our proprietary format, for the benefit of early adopters, but you can bet that ePub will be the future.

Coming next week: The ePub Store

Between the lack of DRM and the use of a long-term e-book standard, our much-valued customers finally will be able to own e-books for real.

In our new ePub Store opening next week, we’ll showcase the titles that allow you genuine ownership. This will be the e-book equivalent of our MP3 Store, which correctly points out that nonDRMed content can more easily be used on multiple devices.

I apologize, apologize, apologize for the harm that DRM and proprietary formats have done to our customers and shareholders alike. The Orwellian incident just shows what happens when retailers and publishers act as control freaks. I’ve learned my lesson. Customers and profits ahead of stupid egos—whether mine or publishers’! From now on, via our ePub Store, we’ll reward our partners who truly respect the right to own books.

Jeff Bezos

Fancier page-turning animation and better iPhone OS3 compatibility are among the other goodies in the just-released version.

What’s more, Hadrien Gardeur at Feedbooks says CSS support is better. The worst feature—this is Hadrien speaking, I don’t have Amazon’s side—is “censorship on all books with subject set to Sexuality in the online catalog.” True?

Trying the search function in Stanza’s multicatalog mode for the word “sexuality,” I found oodles of titles, but maybe I’m missing out on some metadata details.

Annotation tips

Back to annotation. To annotate, just tap the target word associated with your entry. In the same motion, hold your thumb down against the word. You’ll see a white-on-black screen if you’re in the default color scheme.

Next select the word where the annotation will go, if it isn’t marked already. At the bottom of the screen, hit Annotate, then make your entry—if need be erasing the word or words that the annotation feature might have picked up by default. Then hit Save, and you’ll be back in your text. You can modify existing annotations by—within the regular text—doing the same tap-and-thumb motion.

Glitches

One problem with the annotation feature is that the yellow highlighting may not show up well against the basic white background. Look closely at the second shot and you’ll see I annotated “hanged,” toward the bottom of the screen. But the annotation is harder to notice than it should be. Perhaps a different background color would help. Meanwhile I’d also welcome easier, faster annotation—Mobipocket’s approach is much, much slicker.

All this aside, Stanza’s annotation capability is definite progress! Kudos to Amazon’s Lexycle subsidiary for this feature.

Page turning and OS3 changes

As for page turning, I think the sideward swipe is working better on my iPod Touch than I remember it. But I could be wrong. I’ve set things up so I can move to different pages by either swiping them or tapping the left or right of the screen. if nothing else, Stanza now includes a new animation somewhat like Eucalyptus’s.

I don’t know all the aspects of the OS3 compatibility, but I can pass on word from Lexcyle’s Web site that “we don’t yet support copy & paste; we are considering adding support in the future.”

Stanza compared to the new Barnes and Noble eReader

So how does Stanza compare to eReader—including the new Barnes and Noble incarnation?

No comparison, for my purposes. With Stanza, I’m not irritatingly whipped from the main app to a Web browser. Stanza overall leaves eReader and its cousin in in the dust, whether it’s the extent of customizability  or the number of font selections

When, oh when, will eReader add the Aerial Rounded MT Bold font—for those of us who want extra-high contrast between text and background, one way to improve readability and also allow dimmer LCD settings than otherwise? I’ve begged eReader/Fictionwise to do this.

This said, I much prefer eReader’s overall treatment of its customers and content providers over Amazon’s oft-disgraceful performance (especially in the DRM area and e-book standards areas). I’m rooting for eReader to catch up technologically. Meanwhile eReader fans are welcome to tell me why, for them, Stanza isn’t as good as their own choice.

Interestingly, at least for now, until Amazon or B&N ends the fun, Stanza can read even DRMed eReader books, at least those bought from Fictionwise (I don’t know about those from the B&N store). I’d rather not deal with DRM, but eReader’s system is far less obnoxious than Amazon’s. Bottom line is that if publishers stubbornly insist on DRM, I can presently get the best of two worlds here—an amazing app in Stanza and the least irritating of the major DRM systems in eReader’s.

Coming? Shared annotations?

So what’s next in Stanza? How about shared annotations or at least the ability to transfer annotations to your desktop machine easily or at email them, as one user has suggested? Stanza already picks up dictionary definitions via the Net, so perhaps shared annotations would not be that big a deal.

Ideally annotation sharing could happen via a standard approved or drafted by the IDPF. Pre-Amazon purchase, Lexycle’s people showed an interest in these matters. Meanwhile shame, shame, shame on the snailish IDPF for not drafting or embracing a shared annotations standard. Anyone at IDPF paying attention to the ePub Interoperability list, whose members have been interested in such matters? Among them, for now: Marc Prudhommeaux and Neelan Choksi—yep, the same guys who sold Lexcycle to Amazon. I hope Jeff B’s people will not be so rude as to force them to leave or turn into Amazon shills.

The future of Stanza

In the wake of Stanza’s acquisition by Amazon, I’m just wondering how long Lexcyle will be allowed to continue developing the product in the same ways and to the same extent it has. Will Amazon phase out Stanza in favor of the Kindle app for the iPhone? Or maybe develop both? In Jeff B’s place, that is what I would do, giving consumers a choice.

Potentially, we’re talking more than books here. The same multicatalog capability that Stanza uses for accessing different public domain and commercial book sites could potentially be used for product categories and other classes of information within Amazon.

Of course, that still leaves open the touchy question of how long Amazon will continue to allow noncommercial collections such as Project Gutenberg to show up.

The good news is that Amazon’s Orwellian debacle last week drained its reservoir of corporate goodwill to the point where it may be just a little harder to engage in anti-consumer behavior in other areas.

From a Stanza user’s perspective, the above would be great. I dearly love Stanza, am delighted that its developers are richer than before, but do worry about its fate. In the ideal world, which this definitely isn’t, Bezos would turn the Stanza coding over to nonprofits to let them develop it for accessing public domain and Creative Commons content. Simultaneously he could maintain some control of the coding to exploit Stanza commercially while keeping it out of the hands of competing retailers.

Related: Tweets about the new Stanza.