TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Michael Harris’ Category

By Michael Harris, Assoc. Prof., Information Systems, Indiana U. - Southeast

An article in the New York Times notes that Web site Scribd now allows independent authors to upload and sell their own books.

Scribd’s authors set their own prices and keep 80 percent of the revenue. What’s more, smart authors can choose to keep their books DRM-free. Also, Scribd’s move should help lower the entry cost for first time and niche authors.

But if my tastes are typical, there are still formidable market barriers for these smaller authors.

Spotting the winners

For example, it isnt’t enough to print books—how to spot the good ones? Publishers can help.  Anyone who has read through the slush piles of a major publisher will tell you that the dregs far outnumber the gems. Frankly, I don’t mind paying for someone else to pick out worthwhile books for me.

Closely related to this selection process is that of marketing. I find the online book search process at the Amazon’s of the world to be quite limiting. It works well if I want to find the latest book by a known author. It also works if I want to see similar works that are already hot. How do I find undiscovered works? Today, I turn to publishers I highly regard, such as Baen, and trust their recommendations.

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By Michael Harris, Assoc. Prof., Information Systems, Indiana U. - Southeast

 Moderator’s note: I myself am curious if thinness might mean a bit more bending of the case—and more risk to the E Ink display. – D.R.

How big should an e-book device be? That’s the topic of a discussion at MobileRead, starting on the thread’s page 94.

Thin is in if you go by the current buzz. One of the Kindle 2’s biggest changes is its new sleek form factor. Astak, represented by RobertB on MobileRead, drew thousands of visitors at CES and the company noted: "CES showed thin is what the buying public wants."

It’s clear that thin is sexy, but is it functional?

When you read a novel, you spend hours interacting with the physical medium. That can mean hours spent holding a knife-thin device by grasping a narrow bezel. Several MobileRead commenters have pointed to the Rocket and RCA book readers as devices that are comfortable to hold. Such reader devices have a meatier, curved grip that is easier to grasp.

The dilemma appears to be that the mass-market likes thin, but that some experienced users prefer something easier to hold. One compromise that has been suggested is the creation of a case that provides more surface area for the device. Of course, the tradeoff is that the case would take up more room in your briefcase or luggage.

What do you think? Thin and light for portability? Or, thicker to make it easier to grasp?

By David Rothman

The Kindle 2 will let you find your place in your book even after you transfer the text to a different Kindle—or maybe even an iPhone or Android phonein the future, if speculation is on target.

In a TeleBlog post some months ago, info-sci prof Michael Harris proposed a similar idea. Coincidence? I don’t know.

Whatever the case, it’s good to see Amazon adding the feature.

Part of Michael’s imaginary scenario, as we published it on December 8, 2007:

I purchase a new e-book and begin to read it on my large screen e-reader tablet. As I log off for the night, my tablet updates the web server with my progress through the book.

At lunchtime the next day I decide to read a few pages. I usually don’t carry my 12-inch e-reader tablet to work, but I can use my work desktop machine and I can log in where I left off.

By David Rothman

This screen-related gem was spotted by the sharp-eyed Michael Harris in the blog of Mary Lou Jepsen, formerly OLPC’s CTO and now running her own tech company, Pixel Qi:

"We’ve been a bit quiet in the blog, but have found manufacturers and kicked off development of some new screens that will be ready next year. These screens will go into both laptops and e-book readers and offer massively longer battery life, and much better readability in both room-light and in sunlight, as well as in the case of the laptop screens excellent color, contrast. We have been working hard and traveling constantly all over the world to meet with customers, manufacturers, partners and funders. We are in process of closing our series-A investment round and will announce it shortly."

Strong competition for E Ink? Remember, Mary Lou is talking about color, a handy capability for the textbook market. I wonder about refresh rates. Will the displays also be good for movies and all that.

Faust in reverse for Mary Lou?

Meanwhile I wonder if Mary Lou will link up with Amazon, now that the company is making a big push in textbooks. I’d have mixed feelings on that at best—given Amazon’s love of DRM and eBabel in the e-book area.

Hey, Mary Lou, could you do a Dr. Faust act in reverse (image)? Let Amazon strike a bargain with an angel, you, rather than the Devil.

"No miracle displays for you, Jeff, unless you stop trying to herd the whole bleepin’ world into Amazon-blessed formats."

Of course, we can hope that maybe Amazon on its own will let the Kindle render ePub natively, and will start a DRMfree e-book store.

Related, from Mary Lou: Higher resolution than we thought: The XO laptop screen.

By Michael Harris, Assoc. Prof., Information Systems, Indiana U. - Southeast

What will the next iteration of the Nintendo DS be like? The question is timely, for sales of this popular handheld have begun to slow. Furthermore, the DS-Lite (photo) is almost 18 month old, the typical life span of Nintendo’s handheld systems.

Next generation DS?

At this point, the features of a future design are all speculation, but some of the possibilities would certainly help the DS’ e-book credentials. The addition of a media slot would let users load books on a compact flash card and larger screens would also be nice. The focus of all of this redesign talk is the E3 show in mid-July. The game manufacturers try to make a splash at E3, and a next-generation DS would certainly fit the bill.

Please note that the above speculation is just that, nothing more; would there really be larger screens in a smaller form factor? But the timing is about right. Given Nintendo’s penchant for consumer-level pricing, this could be quite intriguing.

Nintendo likes the e-book market

You may be wondering if Nintendo really sees value in the e-book market. However, as the maker of the brain training series, the company has shown an interest in reaching outside of the typical game-playing niche. Furthermore, Nintendo has been pushing the current generation DS as an e-book reader in Japan. It has begun running e-book ads in subways. As an e-book reader, the DS is already intriguing. Two bright screens, up to 15 hours of battery life (5-15 depending on screen settings) and portability. Also, the one touch screen could be used for annotation. Priced at $129 in the United States, it’s not a bad deal.

Cross your fingers

Since we don’t have any real facts we are free to dream at this stage—who knows, if we “dream” loud enough, perhaps we will get the ear of Nintendo’s product designers. Just imagine a dual screen e-book reader with a media slot, a bit bigger set of screens, touch screen annotation, and appropriate software for under $150. This would be pretty close to my ideal design.

Related: Nintendo capitalizes on game console momentum; profits up 48%, in Seeking Alpha—plus Blogrunner roundup.

By David Rothman

The post below—on Baen’s crowdsourcing of its e-slush pile—made my Sunday. Why?

—First, Michael Harris showed the wisdom of trying new editorial models. I like the traditional model as a major alternative despite its many flaws—would Moby Dick have survived crowdsourcing of manuscript selections?—but it mustn’t be the sole choice. Go here for more on the crowdsourcing phenomenon—farming out complex tasks to a number of people.

—Second, in the interested of sustainability, my goal is for there to be less David in the TeleRead Blog, so imagine my delight when Michael, an associate professor of information systems at an Indiana university, pitched in with his post. It’s enough for a challenge just to keep up with e-book news, and we especially cherish contributions like Michael’s. He took the time to gather facts and present them in a coherent, polished and credible way, just as he did in his explanation of the Zotero personal card catalog.

How to volunteer

Read on, then e-mail us if you know and love e-books and would like the additional exposure for your writing, or can contribute WordPress-related technical help. We’re reaching hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a year, from K-12 students to a PARC researcher and executives at such major houses as O’Reilly, Penguin, Oxford University Press and Simon & Schuster. Michael’s latest informative article—and, of course, he’s just one example of the caliber of our contributors—was worthy of them all.

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By Michael Harris, Assoc. Prof., Information Systems, Indiana U. - Southeast

In David’s article on e-slush, I commented on Baen’s electronic workflow that uses fans as early reviewers. Subsequently, Pam Uphoff of Baen offered a few more details to share with TeleRead visitors.

Just in case you aren’t familiar with the publishing world, I’ll start by defining the problem. Publishers like Baen accept unsolicited submissions from new writers. These unsolicited manuscripts are added to the bottom of the “slush pile” as they join the queue waiting to be read by an editor. With the advent of electronic submission, the Baen e-slush pile has grown to over a thousand queued manuscripts.

Just 40 originals a year: 99 percent rejection rate

Consider that Baen only publishes about 40 original (70+ including reprints) manuscripts per year, and that most of the published books are from established Baen writers. This means that well over 99 percent of the slush books will be discarded. An editor needs to read over a hundred books to find one that fits their needs. Pam explained that editors need to quickly identify rejections, so that they can get through the dross to find the gems. It is easy to get in a negative frame of mind, and this can lead to the premature rejection of a fine manuscript—especially if the manuscript has a rough start.

Focused on promising manuscripts

Some might argue that the most efficient process is one that routes everything directly to the recycle bin. Baen decided that, if the review process was to have any meaning, they needed a process that highlighted promising manuscripts, not one that focused on rejection. In service of this goal, they turned to the members of their discussion community (aka barflies).

Barflies who volunteer and are accepted by Baen are given private access to the e-slush pile. Originally, volunteers were assigned a random set of manuscripts to read. However, Ms. Uphoff reports that the process has been modified to allow volunteers to select the manuscripts they review. She explains that this allows volunteers to specialize: “A manuscript doesn’t get a bad review because the first reader doesn’t like ‘that sort of story.’ I get fantasy recommendations from the readers who like fantasy, and Mil Sf reviews from hard core Mil Sf fans.”

Half the slush managed by volunteers

Pam notes that the volunteer network is big enough to manage about half of the slush volume. Recommendations from volunteers have led to the publication of two novels, and the barfiles have queued up a substantial “pile” of books for consideration by a senior editor. When Pam or another senior editor reads a recommended book, they can start the process with a positive expectation.

This e-slush process rests on the ability to quickly share electronic manuscripts. In the paper-based world of yesterday, submissions would still be gathering dust (literally) in the office of an individual editor.

Moderator’s note: As defined by Wikipedia, the term crowdsourcing “is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.” Wikipedia itself just might be the ultimate crowdsourced site. I don’t know if the term would fit the Baen situation exactly since Michael says the publisher “accepts” the volunteers, making them a “defined” group in a sense, but I love the word and he’s certainly entitled to use it. What a readable and informative contribution, Michael! Thanks—you made my Sunday. – David

By Michael Harris, Assoc. Prof., Information Systems, Indiana U. - Southeast

Have you tried the open source Zotero yet? It might be the personal “card catalog” you need to maintain your electronic reading collection. You’ll even be able to use it in the future as a collaborative tool.

This might sound a bit like a sales pitch, but I’m not affiliated with Zotero—just a fan of this noncommercial project. Click on the left image to take a basic tour of Zotero, then visit the tutorial page for more details.

Like many powerful products, Zotero is a bit tough to define. Zotero is sponsored by the academic community, and many folks think of it as a bibliographic database or citation manager. In this regard, Zotero is like an open source marriage of reference managers— like EndNote—and a web browser, Firefox; in fact, it works with a Firefox extension. Requirements are here.

As you browse the Web you can easily save references in Zotero. One-click saves book citations from Amazon, and article citations from Google Scholar. Many academic databases are also automatically recognized by Zotero. When you store a citation you can also save a link to a file or save a local copy of the file in your Zotero database. Articles on the Web can be stored and linked through Zotero or cached locally.

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By David Rothman

Earlier we wondered if e-books would be officially on the Nintendo DS. True, at least on the Lite—along with movie downloads. My big concern is which e-books. Will you be limited just to Nintendo’s list? (Crave piece spotted by Michael Harris.)

Related: Past TeleBlog items on Nintendo DS and books.

By Michael Harris, Assoc. Prof., Information Systems, Indiana U. - Southeast

What is your perfect e-book like? I’ve seen discussions on the ideal e-reader, but I never jumped in with my opinion. Frankly, I was too confused. One person would argue for a large readable display, while another wanted a shirt-pocket sized reader. And I agreed—I wanted a 12-inch screen that fit into my pocket. A backlit or reflective display? Yep, I wanted both. Make it cheap and add in annotation and wireless data. Whatever the tradeoff, I wanted both choices.

Then a few months ago I read about Firefox 3.0. It is designed to support offline web applications. For example, a Google document could be started online and finished when you were offline. The next time you log back into the web, the document would be automatically synced with the Google service. I began to wonder how this would play out in the e-book world and that is when this scenario occurred to me:

I purchase a new e-book and begin to read it on my large screen e-reader tablet. As I log off for the night, my tablet updates the web server with my progress through the book.

At lunchtime the next day I decide to read a few pages. I usually don’t carry my 12-inch e-reader tablet to work, but I can use my work desktop machine and I can log in where I left off.

Late that afternoon my wife calls. She reminds me to run over to the Motor Vehicle office. When I get there I find a line that’s about an hour long. Usually my iPhone screen feels too small for reading, but it’s much better than staring at the ceiling. So, I pull out my smartphone, log in and read a bit more.

On the way home, I use Bluetooth to connect my smartphone to my car speakers. With text-to-speech conversion I can listen to the book during my drive home.

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