TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Paul Biba’ Category

By Paul Biba

I reprint this in full from Resource Shelf. What a great (can I say it?) resource!

A Never Ending “Virtual Stream” of Digitized Text
by Gary Price, Senior Editior

When Chris Sherman and I were writing and then giving book talks and presentations about The Invisible Web, we said John Mark Ockerbloom’s Online Books Page was an essential resource for anyone interested in digitized, full text books. Now referred by most as eBooks. More than eight years later I feel the same way about this awesome and well organized collection.

Where do you begin with a site so full of content? For me, that’s easy. Monitoring the latest additions to the catalog/page. I am always blown away by the amount of new listings (when does Ockerbloom sleep?) and the number of organizations digitizing books. If you think it’s only Google digitizing books (of course they are a major player) but not they’re far from the only one doing this type of work. Just look for yourself. The page even has an RSS feed.

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By Paul Biba

According to Engadget, via the NY Times, the Nook is sold out and the next round of readers will ship out around January 4.

If memory serves, didn’t exactly the same thing happen to the Kindle 1?

By Paul Biba

The capital-letter-challenged eDGe is now offering ebooks in their new store. They have cut a deal with Ingram Digital for ebooks and with LibreDigital to provide ebooks and over 175 periodicals. They are also connected with the Google Books for download from that source.

I poked around their store and it seems that all the books I looked at were in PDF format – not very reader friendly – even though the machine will read EPUB. However, the ereading part of the unit is 9.7″ so maybe it can do a decent PDF display. There is no mention that I can find of whether the books have DRM or not. We have previously reported on the unit here.

By Paul Biba

Kirtas is a maker of automatic book imaging systems. They also have a POD service that is open to the general public. I poked around their book site after getting an email from them and here’s what I found.

Take, for example, the book A catalogue of English and foreign bookbindings offered for sale by Bernard Quaritch Ltd.. I can download it for free, get a softcover version for $8 or a hardcover version for $18. I can also preview how the POD cover will look (pictured above). They have books from the Rochester Institute of Technology (654), Kirtas Classics (99,799), University of Pennsylvania (224,199), McGill University (37,921), New York Public Library (317,934) and others.

You might want to poke around. The only problem is that the digitized copies are in PDF format, which means that I certainly will never download one. I don’t like reading on the computer and there isn’t a good portable alternative for PDF reading yet. However, the prices are pretty reasonable I can certainly see ordering a hard cover book or maybe finding an unusual book and having it printed to use as a Christmas gift.

By Paul Biba

Is Amazon about to address a gripe of many serious e-bookers—and give the Kindle folders, so people can organize their e-libraries better?

Apparently. Fron the Kindle Facebook page:

“Kindle Customers, We have heard from many of you that you would like to have a better way to organize your growing Kindle libraries. We are currently working on a solution that will allow you to organize your Kindle libraries. We will be releasing this functionality as an over-the-air software update as soon as it is ready, in the first half of next year. – The Kindle Team.”

(Thanks to John Hagewood for the link)

By Paul Biba

That’s what Karen Christensen says. She’s an academic publisher and author and co-editor of the forthcoming book The Business of Sustainability. According to her:

… the debate around green issues behind producing books had so far largely ignored the “vast” impact of data centres and the computer and mobile communications industry.

“I can’t think of an issue where our beliefs about an issue are more out of line with the realities,” Christensen said, whose book is due out in January.

“Both print and digital publishing have an impact on the environment, and we need to get over the misconception that digital publishing is inherently better than publishing on paper. It might be a lot worse.”

By Paul Biba

“Harlequin Horizons,” the romance publisher’s new self=publishing arm, has stirred up a hornet’s nest.

I put the name in quotes because Harlequin has announced that it changing the name of its new venture effective immediately.

According to a press release, authors expressed concern that the original name would cause confusion between this venture and Harlequin’s traditional publishing business.

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By Paul Biba

The court has given preliminary approval and the following dates are of interest:

December 14: supplemental notices about the amended agreement to be sent
January 28: objections to amended agreement be filed with the court
January 28: opt in date for those members of the class who had previously opted out
February 18: hearing to determine whether the agreement is “fair, reasonable and adequate”

By Paul Biba

From the Smashwords press release:

Los Gatos, Calif. and Wellington, New Zealand – November 19, 2009 — Silicon Valley based Smashwords, Inc. has acquired Wellington New Zealand company BookHabit Limited, consolidating Smashwords’ position as the world’s premier ebook publishing and distribution platform for independent authors and publishers.

BookHabit was founded in 2008 as an ebook publishing platform for independent authors. During that time, BookHabit developed relationships with 340 authors who collectively published over 600 books.

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By Paul Biba

I just got it from Amazon at $7.99 for my Kindle and I understand that it has been released on the Sony platform as well.

Eoin Purcell raises an interesting question in his blog:

But riddle me this?

Why do they not just sell it direct? The multi-publisher bookstore provides just the platform, they have created an incredible audience and the property is a very, very good one. I cannot understand this decision. Sure the rest of Macmillan also avoids ebook sales listing instead other sellers on their site bit surely the selling of a digital download is not THAT difficult? Is it?

By Paul Biba

AudioLark, who hopes to go live in March of next year, is a new romance audio book publisher. The innovative thing about them is that their selections will be priced at $4.99, $7.99 or $12.99, which is way bellow the typical $35 audio book price.

AudioLark is being run by Jennifer Fedderson, a freelance editor who runs of the Best of the Best Ebook Contest at her website, along with Celia Kyle, a published author.

I wish them the best of luck and also note that they are hiring voice talent and audio editors.

By Paul Biba

The successor to Nokia’s line of internet tablets is now available on pre-order through Nokia’s Web site and through Amazon and others.

List price is $649, but Amazon is selling it for $560 after a $50 rebate.

The Linux-based N900 is able or soon should be able to run such e-book software as FBReader, which can read nonDRMed ePub. I checked the Maemo download site last night and found no e-reading software out yet, but it should only be a matter of time.

Specs: The Meomo 5 operating system (Linux), 3.5 inch touchscreen display, QWERTY slide-out keyboard, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss autofocus camers, 32 GB of internal memory and Mozilla-powered browser.

By Paul Biba

The Opus is a 5″ ereader that supports EPUB, among other formats. It has 1G of internal memory along with a microSD slot. List price is $250, but Amazon, through Beach Camera, is selling it for $215.

Thanks to E-Reader-info for the link.

By Paul Biba

Eight leading textbook publishers, three e-book aggregator and ten universities are working together to test a range of business models for e-textbooks.

17 core textbooks have been selected by libraries for the trials. They cover a wide range of subject areas – from business and economics to law and medicine.

The overall objective of the trials is to identify realistic and sustainable e-textbook business models from the point of view of all key stakeholders. In addition to exploring issues of pricing and usage, the ease of implementation and management of each business model will also be monitored through the trials.

More information here at the JISC website. Thanks to Resource Shelf for the link.

By Paul Biba

It’s time again for the update. I’m posting the actual articles after the break because it’s sort of ugly to put them on the front page.

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By Paul Biba

Here are the notes that I’m taking during the lecture. No particular order or format. Healy’s slides will be made available at Publishing Point. Since most of what he said has already been reported I only note those things that captured my interest:

Lawsuit filed in October, 2005. Google believed that digitizing the books and making digital snippets was “fair use”, and that belief was never actually tested because of settlement. Journals, periodicals, letters, manuscripts, music, lyrics excluded. Google’s use of books is limited to the geographic limits of the US. For in-print books the rights holder must opt in and reverse for out of print books.
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By Paul Biba

Got an email from Michael Pastore, author of 50 Benefits of Ebooks, and he says:

I needed some reference information about images and ebooks — and I couldn’t find it on the Net. So I thought that I would gather this
information in one place.

I’m now seeking help to get this ready: can TeleRead announce this project?

I call it the == Preparing Images For Ebooks Project (PIFEP) ==

The tables he needs help with are here. He needs image file formats and info for stuff such as DPI and aspect ratio for a whole slew of equipment. Michael promises to make the final info freely available to all of us. Please leave any info you have as a comment.