Tech review maven Walter Mossberg

In observation of Read An E-Book Week, DriveThruRPG and White Wolf are offering a free watermarked-PDF download of the 224-page World of Darkness rulebook (list price $24.99) for as long as the week lasts. Enjoy!

A recent survey shows that 90% of academic publishers have seen a growth in e-book sales over the last two years. E-book sales now make up almost 10% of total e-book sales in those markets—twice the level of e-book sales in general. Academic publishers have apparently been much quicker to adapt to the e-book market than trade presses.

The survey found that academic publishers were also relatively unconcerned about the various challenges presented by the shift towards digital books. Although piracy was one of the biggest concerns, [report co-author Laura] Cox said very few publishers thought of it as a serious problem.

It appears the next smartphone platform to receive a Kindle reader will be Android. jkOnTheRun reports on an Engadget posting of leaked documents from Dell stating that the Dell Streak (aka Mini 5), an Android device, will include a Kindle reader application (as well as several other Amazon services).

Sony is bringing more newspaper and magazine content to its e-book store. Probably in a bid to strengthen its position before the iPad arrives, ReadWriteWeb reports, it is adding 20 new papers and magazines, including the New York Times and Boston Globe. (Sony press release here.)

Google is slowly conquering Europe. Or at least Europe’s great libraries. Even as its Google Books program has proven as controversial east of the Atlantic as west of it, it continues to make deals with European libraries to digitize their collections. The Guardian reports that Google is going to be working together with Italian libraries and the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage to digitize “up to a million out-of-copyright works”. There is no word on whether this includes any still-in-copyright works as well.

Oddly enough, it happened only a couple of weeks after Google executives received suspended sentences over a controversial YouTube video. Hmm.

TeleRead founder David Rothman sets down his opinions on the decline of newspapers in favor of the web on his Solomon Scandals blog. He feels that “the real newspaper-killer” is online papers’ lack of interactivity and community.

Speaking of which, here is an excellent argument in favor of saving newspapers, found via Adam Tinworth’s blog:

Peter Kafka at the “MediaMemo” section of AllThingsD

Samsung’s E-6 e-reader will be coming this spring to Barnes & Noble at a list price of $299 (down from an original $399), report Engadget and Gizmodo. It is unclear whether they are just going to be sold in Barnes & Noble stores, will hook into the B&N on-line store the way the Nook does, or both. It is also unclear why anyone would buy one rather than the more featureful, less costly Nook.

A press release from book-industry collaboration software provider Above the Treeline notes that the company is partnering with BookExpo America to create an online catalog of new titles being exhibited at the next BEA (to be held in New York City May 25-27). The press release does not really make clear whether it is talking about e-books or print books.

We mentioned Above the Treeline partnering with Firebrand Technologies on a digital galley distribution service back in December.

Here’s another “burn the boats” recommendation from Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, who notes that “Newspapers could save a lot of money if the primary access to news was via the Internet.”  However, Varian adds, newspapers historically have not made much ad revenue from their news, but rather from special-interest sections—and on the web, there are already a lot of websites that cater to those special interests.

See also this comprehensive post by Varian on Google’s Public Policy Blog.

Meanwhile, marketing exec Maurice Levy says that newspapers are overly dependent on advertising and must wean themselves off of it to survive. He suggests a mixture of free and subscriber-only content.

Nate the Great at Nate’s Ebook News reports that an additional 31 CliffsNotes appbooks are now available in the app store, bringing the total to 36 altogether. The CliffsNotes for Romeo and Juliet can be downloaded free until March 15th.

Steve Jobs

A decent commercial, though I couldn’t help but notice the clip from Star Trek during part of a montage of screenshots and images was in full-frame and looked rather cramped.

Speaking of the iPad, CNet has an iPad FAQ that sums up what is generally known about the device. A good summary, though not much in the way of new information.

And speaking of FAQs, here’s a story I found on Nate’s Ebook News: Educause, a thinktank dedicated to “the intelligent use of information technology” in education, has come out with the latest in a series of articles called “7 Things You Should Know About…” The subject of this article is e-book readers (PDF download).

It’s a good basic summary of e-books in education, focusing largely on their utility for holding college textbooks, and their advantages and disadvantages compared to paper books.

The Google Books settlement gets another examination in the pages of the Mercury News. The article is a good summation of the key issues of orphan works, privacy, and competition surrounding the settlement, just in case anyone here doesn’t already know what they are by now.

And in a follow-up to Saturday’s story about Ubisoft’s consumer-unfriendly DRM, BoingBoing and Slashdot are reporting that Ubisoft’s DRM authentication servers went down yesterday—and had been down for ten hours as of the time the article on The Escapist was posted. That’s a ten hour outage on a weekend, during which time no one who purchased the game legitimately and did not crack the DRM could play even a single-player game of Assassin’s Creed II.

Of course, people who pirated the game or who broke the DMCA by breaking the DRM didn’t have any such problem. What are we paying these game companies for?

HarperCollinsPublishers announced the launch of its Print on Demand (POD) service which will allow Australian and New Zealand readers the chance to purchase individual copies of books that were previously out of print.

See the Google Book Monster attack at Book Patrol along with a mind-boggling chart from the Library Copyright Alliance.

It turns out that the Nexus’s OLED is found wanting, featuring a good deal of posterization and artifacting. In a picture of a Martian sunset, there was a great deal of false contouring and image noise, but the iPhone display was “the same as it looks on a studio monitor.”

The implications for pictures are obvious, but what about text? Though the test does not get into this, part of the use of the same kind of dithering that the iPhone uses to make its 18-bit display simulate 24-bit color is also sub-pixel rendering to make fonts appear better on the screen.

The test does not directly compare how text (as in, e-books) looks on the displays, but given that the iPhone simply dithers better, it stands to reason that text will look better there, too.

The first half is devoted to Murdoch’s purchase of the Wall Street Journal and its subsequent transformation into a general-news paper with which to take on the New York Times. While this does not necessarily have a great deal to do with electronic reading, it does provide some excellent background behind both Murdoch’s and the Times’s decision to implement paywalls.

But in the second half, there is some coverage of Murdoch’s much-publicized feud with Google, which we have covered here a number of times. There are some details about Murdoch’s strategy for dealing with Google (including perhaps pulling all News Corp content from Google News and brokering a deal with Microsoft to put it on Bing, and possibly even suing Google), and discussion of Murdoch’s attitudes toward the Internet.

“Digital is out of his comfort zone,” a former senior MySpace executive says. “It’s much more the Wild West. He gets the raw-competition part of it, but he’s never been in a place where the business model isn’t clear. The destruction is just happening so fast.”

Much of the rest of the article deals with Murdoch’s children and their present and potential future roles in Murdoch’s media dynasty.

This is a great article, and should be read by anyone seeking to understand Murdoch’s role in establishing the future of electronic and print media.

As Erik Sherman’s article on BNET notes, there are considerable technical hurdles to doing this (which is what the patent itself is trying to address), but perhaps more challenging are the legal hurdles.

The Tasini case (which TeleRead mentioned here and here), in which freelance writers sued over their articles’ inclusion in a database, established that permission for article publication in print did not cover further uses such as syndication and database rights.

Of course, since that time publishers have simply added those rights to their standard contracts—and many freelance writers may not necessarily have registered the copyright for their older articles giving them little legal standing to sue.

The rights of authors are under attack

In the US the big publishers have gone into a huddle with Google and cooked up the Google Book Settlement, with the co-operation of the Authors Guild, whose statements on the matter suggest deep confusion.

Google and its partners plan to use a settlement in a civil law case to overturn fundamental principles of copyright law. They are asking the court to approve a massive appropriation of rights from authors of printed books published in the US, UK, Canada and Australia.

For more information check here.

Go here for more details if you are interested in the guts of the Settlement process.

Some quotes picked up from various sources:

“To end the suspense. I am not going to rule today,” he said. “There is too much to digest.”

“I have an open mind. I’m going to listen carefully,” the judge said as he opened the hearing. “I’ll ask a few questions.”

“Voluminous materials have been submitted. There is a lot of repetition. Some of the submissions even quote other submissions.”

(Via Resource Shelf)

Update: for a comprehensive report on what went on in the hearing see this article by the Library Journal.

Reback explains why book search was so appealing to Google: it has to do with satisfying searches in the “long tail” of search subjects that are not the “popular” subjects that make up the majority of Google search queries. Apparently studies have shown these “tail” searches can influence consumers’ decision as to which search engine to use for all their searching.

Google believes that books contain the answers for many of those “tail” searches—and if they can lock in access to the book search database and lock competitors out, they can gain a significant competitive advantage. This, Reback says, is exactly what the terms of the proposed settlement will allow them to do.

The latest hearing on Google Books will take place today. Needless to say, plenty of people will be watching.

Of course, an analyst’s predictions and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee. There is no reason to expect they have any more accurate crystal balls than the rest of us. Still, Apple and Google are about the only e-book competition in Amazon’s league that has yet materialized, and the market share they pick up will have to come from somewhere.

Google reiterates arguments Google has already made in favor of the settlement, and responds to Justice Department objections by citing legal precedents in its favor.

The eventual fate of Google’s settlement is still up in the air, though the upcoming hearing should provide some hints as to its possible future. Given that most of the objectors were not swayed by Google’s revision—even the Justice Department, whose objections the revision was most intended to address—Google and the Authors Guild could be in for an uphill battle.

Publishers are reporting that after the Amazon and Apple deals, Google has had to take a more flexible tone and relent on printing and cut and paste.

(More from the New York Times.)

Now, Google has appealed the verdict on copyright infringement and is claiming that their use of short excerpts in their index is fair use under French law. There is no indication in the article about how long it will take to decide the appeal.