TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘iPod Touch’ Category

By Chris Meadows

In comments on a post relating to the announcement that iBooks on the iPad would be able to sync “free” EPUB books through iTunes, a reader expressed skepticism that users would be able to download them without iTunes.

Hey iPhone/iPod Touch users: What can you download directly and use without using itunes on a separate computer? Can you download a file to the iPhone/iPod Touch via the web then open that file?

If I want to read a Baen epub why do I need to go through iTunes?

In fact, you can currently purchase and install apps, podcasts, music, and movies directly from the iPhone and iPod Touch without having to go near a computer. It stands to reason the same thing should hold true for e-books when they come around for iBooks.

As for what e-book clients allow direct download from the web, that would actually be “just about all of them”. At the moment, iTunes doesn’t support syncing any e-books at all (apart from encapsulated appbooks, which are installed either via iTunes or via the app store interface on the device just like any other app). Or any other third-party files, for that matter. It is thought (or at least hoped) that will change with the “sandbox” shared document folder in the iPad.

Consequently, this means that every extant e-book app on the iPhone at the moment has to have its own separate method of syncing books. The sync methods of the best-known iPhone e-book apps follow the jump.

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By Chris Meadows

Since the JooJoo has been delayed, some people who pre-ordered have requested refunds of their purchase. Gizmodo reports that one such customer went back and forth with Fusion Garage over several days, and after PayPal was unable to process the refund, finally Fusion Garage asked for the customer’s bank account information to refund it directly. The customer was understandably suspicious. (Fusion Garage’s response is also included.)

Another delayed e-book device, the Spring Design Alex, began taking pre-orders yesterday for $399, according to CrunchGear. The Alex somewhat resembles the Nook in form factor, save that the LCD screen is a full 3.5” touchscreen display rather than the Nook’s small rectangle.

To the Alex’s credit, the Android-based device will allow a lot more interactivity over the web than most other e-book readers, including websurfing, watching videos, and online communication. It even has a micro SD card slot and USB 2.0, and supports Adobe ADEPT DRM.

But on the other hand, you’re only going to be reading from one display at once—so at any given time, either 1/3 or 2/3 of the device’s screen real estate is going to be useless to you. That extra screen real estate makes the Alex a bit unwieldy—like a Kindle DX with less readable screen area. And honestly, it seems a little expensive for what you get—just $100 more will get you an iPad.

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By Chris Meadows

BusinessWeek reports on the current popularity of iPhone e-book apps, which now outstrip the number of game apps on the app store by over 1,600 titles.

The article mentions appbook creator Michel Kripalani of Oceanhouse Media, who switched over from games to e-books back when there were only 700 book-related titles in the app store. Now his company sells three of the top-ten most-purchased appbooks in the Apple Store.

By and large, the piece mainly talks about appbooks, with a mention or two of other programs such as the Free Books app from Spreadhouse that provides access to over 23,000 public domain titles, the impending iBooks, or even the Kindle Reader app. This is not too surprising given that the vast majority of those book-related titles are appbooks; still, it is a little disappointing that eReader and Stanza do not rate a mention.

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By Chris Meadows

Terry White has an article in Adobe how-to magazine Layers looking at how to export documents from InDesign into EPUB format for use with Adobe Reader or other e-book devices. I don’t have nor have I used InDesign so I can’t really say how good the instructions are.

However, the first half of the article talks about the rise of e-books and e-magazines, discussing the Kindle, the Kindle app for iPhone, and the Zinio e-magazine reader. White doesn’t really mention many of the other e-book options apart from these, but at least he does agree that the PDF format really isn’t best for reading e-books on portable devices.

He seems a little more optimistic about the efficacy of Adobe’s DRM than I would be, though.

By Chris Meadows

Here are some interesting bits of news from the last couple days of the iPad sales frenzy.

Investor Village estimates that 120,000 iPads were preordered in the first day, with wifi-only models beating out wifi+3G by a 2:1 ratio.

"Apple has been able to generate over $75 million in revenue in one day on a product that 99.9% of purchasers haven’t touched or for that matter, even seen in person," said Victor Castroll, an analyst with Valcent Financial Group. "And, we’re still three weeks away. That is amazing."

The Unofficial Apple Weblog estimates that about 41,000 of those devices were reserved for in-store pickup at an Apple Store.

It has also come out that, rather than just replace the battery, Apple will replace the entire iPad for $99 once the battery wears out. Engadget worries that this will mean the complete loss of all personal data stored on the iPad.

However, this has always been a possibility. Apple has always warned that any device sent in for service should be backed up beforehand because it is possible they will send a different unit back. This time they are simply being explicit that this will happen.

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By Chris Meadows

Apple has posted a webpage with details about the iBooks iPad app. There are a couple of points of particular interest to TeleReaders.

First of all, iBooks will allow you to “add free ePub titles to iTunes and sync them to the iBooks app on your iPad.” That’s right, the page specifically uses the word “free”. Presumably it means “DRM-free”—since iBooks won’t use or support ADEPT, if someone gave an ADEPT DRM-encumbered e-book away for free, it still would not work.

Still, this is good news for Baen readers, since even Baen’s commercially-sold e-books have no DRM, and all (except the contents of older Baen CDs) are available in DRM-free ePub format.

Second, iBooks will work with the iPad’s VoiceOver text-to-speech screen reader, “so it can read you the contents of any page.” A bit of odd phrasing, that; it implies that it stops at the end of the page and you have to turn the page manually before it will read you more.

Regardless, as Wired’s “Gadget Lab” points out, text-to-speech was a major sticking point with the Kindle 2, with the Authors Guild kicking up such a fuss that Amazon was forced to allow it to be disabled on a per-book basis. There is no word on whether the Authors Guild is going to make the same protests against Apple.

There is also no word yet whether a version of iBooks will be available for the iPhone. The fact that the URL of the iBooks page puts it squarely under the iPad category does not make me hopeful, but we will see.

By Chris Meadows

SmashWords is getting smashed by Read an E-book Week, reports Steve Jordan at Nate’s Ebook News blog. Smashwords is running a special promotion for the week, with 3,000 authors participating, and seems to be running into some bandwidth bottlenecks. This level of demand is certainly a great sign for the viability of the medium.

AllThingsD’s “MediaMemo” section reports that Barnes & Noble has hired Time’s Jonathan Shar to head up its "Digital Newsstand and Emerging Content, Barnes & Noble.com" division. Shar is a 15-year veteran with both print and digital experience. B&N could probably have done a better job coming up with a department name, though.

The New York Times is planning to spin off its Book Review section as a separate e-publication for e-readers, New York Times Marketing Director James Dunn said today at a journalism symposium in Columbia, Missouri. Within the next few weeks, it will be published first for Sony, then for Kindle, and Nook e-readers. Dunn said that the paper would be looking at other sections to see what might best be spun off as further separate publications.

It seems that a Stanford survey has determined iPhones may be “addictive”—essentially by asking people, “Hey, do you think you’re addicted?” I’m not entirely sure I find that methodology convincing. Still, the convenience of always having something to read in my pocket is hard to deny.

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By Chris Meadows

Journalist-blogger Alan D. Mutter writes an editorial in his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur, about Rupert Murdoch’s relaunch of the Wall Street Journal as a New York metro-area local paper in an effort to hurt the New York Times (which I mentioned a few days ago).

Mutter feels Murdoch’s action is irresponsible tilting at windmills, wasting money and goodwill at a time when he should be more concerned about getting News.corp through the transition to being a digital media provider.

In Nate’s Ebook News, Nate the Great mentions that the head of South Korea’s second-largest on-line bookstore thinks that, at least in terms of Korean adoption, e-book readers will be a flash in the pan. Nate points out that the South Korean consumer electronics market is very different from the American market, with a lot more consumer choice available.

Wired’s “Gadget Lab” blog has a great piece on how the touchscreens of smartphones stack up against each other. It turns out that the iPhone’s touchscreen is far and away the best out of several units tested.

There is a very interesting picture of what diagonal lines drawn across the screen by finger look like on each model. The iPhone’s lines are basically straight, but the other phones mostly have squiggles instead of straight lines. Assuming Apple keeps up the same attention to detail, this bodes well for the iPad.

By Chris Meadows

What piece of technology most makes you feel like you’re “living in the future”? Laptop Magazine asked a number of speculative-fiction writers that question, including Jeffrey A. Carver, John Scalzi, Charlie Stross, and Tobias Buckell.

Interestingly, most of them responded the iPhone (or in Scalzi’s case, the iPod Touch).

Jeffrey Carver said, after the Star Trek-inspired nature of his flip-to-open cellphone:

My second thought was eBook reader. I love reading on my Sony Reader and also on my Dell PDA, which I keep almost for the sole purpose of using as a book reader, especially for reading in the dark. And the new iPad looks about as much like the electronic reading slates on Next Generation as you can get.

I agree with Scalzi: the iPod Touch epitomizes “futuristic tech” for me. If only Douglas Adams were still alive, he would be amazed at how completely his vision has been realized in this little pocket-portable information appliance. Even more so the iPhone (though I don’t have one of those yet).

What gadget says “I’m living in the future” to you?

By Chris Meadows

Yesterday we covered Penguin CEO John Mackinson engaging in a fair amount of hyperbole concerning the future of the e-book in a post-iPad world. “The definition of the book itself, as far as we can see, is up for grabs.”

Now blogger Craig Mod, a six-year publishing-industry veteran, goes into more specifics, at considerable length, about what the iPad might mean for the format of electronic books. This is a long and thoughtful article with plenty of illustrations that is definitely worth a read.

Formless vs. Definite Content

Mod divides books into categories of Formless and Definite Content. Formless Content is your average fiction book, or non-fiction without many illustrations and tables. The text is the all, and it does not matter how it is paginated or reflowed—it still reads the same on any device.

Definite Content is designed and formatted to be read in a particular way, with pictures and charts embedded in text at specific places. Textbooks are a good example. Devices such as the Kindle or iPhone, Mod says, have historically had trouble presenting works Definite Content due to the black-and-white nature of the Kindle, or the small screen size of the iPhone.

But the iPad presents new possibilities for e-book formatting, and not just in the tired old “add video to it” multimedia sense. Mod observes that the page-turning metaphor could be entirely abandoned. Books could scroll continuously horizontally or vertically, or scroll horizontally for new chapters and other divisions then vertically within that chapter or division.

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By Chris Meadows

Rupert Murdoch has confirmed that the Wall Street Journal will be on the iPad. Meanwhile, the Washington Post just launched a paid subscription mobile news app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. The price isn’t bad—$1.99 for 12 months—but this could go up after the first year.

From Nate’s Ebook News comes word that Opera has updated its e-book reader widget. Only reads DRM-free EPUB, but Nate seemed to find it a decent reading experience.

The EFF has updated “Unintended Consequences”, its annual “__ years under the DMCA” whitepaper. The time count now stands at 12, and the paper piles up ever more cases of abuses of process’s chilling effects on free speech, scientific research, competition, and innovation. (Found via BoingBoing.)

MacRumors has found an Apple job posting for a manager for an “Asia Pacific & Canada” iBooks division. A number of other jobs postings are mentioned, too, including account managers.

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By Chris Meadows

Here are some quick notes about the iPad and related matters.

Last month I reported on TechCrunch’s article about the highest number of paid apps in the iPhone app store being e-books. (There were still more games than e-books, but a higher percentage of them were free.)

Now Matthew Ingram at GigaOm reports that for the first time, the total number of book-related apps (most of them app-books) now outnumbers the total number of games in the App Store. There are over 26,000 books, but only about 24,000 games.

Some of this may have to do with last month’s 5,000-app explicit app purge—it is possible a higher number of those explicit apps might have been games, which would have lowered that category more than the e-book category.

9 to 5 Mac reports that a Los Angeles Examiner blogger claims to have confirmed that the iPad will be arriving in Apple stores for employee training on March 10th, March 26 is a likely release date, and the 3G model will not be available until April or May May. TV commercials will start airing on March 15th, emphasizing the iPad’s e-book-reading capabilities.

(Examiner is a local/regional freelance news blog. In the interest of full disclosure, I also write some occasional pieces for the local Springfield, Missouri Examiner.)

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