TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Paul Biba’ Category

By Paul Biba

Scribd has teamed up with ProQuestUMI, a publisher of dissertations and theses, to start selling over 14,000 works, form over 14 universities, in its Scribd Store.

ProQuestUMI will charge $49 and sill receive 80% of the sales revenues. This is a big market as they have 2 million doctoral dissertations and master’s theses available from more than 700 active university partners and update their catalog with more than 70,000 new graduate works each year.

You can find out more at here.

By Paul Biba

The Writers’ Union of Canada had decided not to endorse the amended settlement, but the Association of Canadian Publishers and the Canadian Publishers’ Council have not taken a position yet.

The Europeans have been, on the whole, non-committal so far, except the German Boersenverein (booksellers’ association) has expressed concern about being left out – even though they previously said they didn’t want to be in.

The poor New Zealanders must really feel strange as the point of including Canada, Australia and England was that they had a similar heritage and legal system to the US. I wonder whose heritage New Zealand has?

By Paul Biba

Random House’s Kindle sales in September, 2009, were $22.6 million, up from $2.9 million a year ago.

The Lost Symbol was a huge part of this with 100,000 ebook sales in its first week.

In the first half of 2009, Kindle ebook revenue grew 400% from a year ago.

(Via Amazon Kindle Review.)

By Paul Biba

From an EFF release:

We spend a lot of our time at EFF trying to spot new proposals in copyright across the world, and understanding whether they’re good or bad for civil liberties. We’re not the only ones: our understanding depends on the work of hundreds of researchers worldwide who are constantly sifting through new drafts and consolidating older reforms in hundreds of nations.

It’s a global effort, and that’s why we’re happy to announce our involvement in a truly global project: Copyright Watch. Working with academics, libraries and copyright monitors from across the world, Copyright Watch brings together the most recent copies of laws from as many countries as we could find. And with that global team, we’ll be tracking new proposals, consultations, and freshly passed regulations: finding the promising changes, and highlighting the spectacularly bad ideas hopefully before they can take hold. (more…)

By Paul Biba

Received the following email that I thought was well worth passing on:

Dear David and Paul:

I just spent ten years covering e-books in the French-speaking, European and international community.

I wrote my last ebook, “A Short History of eBooks”, in three versions (French, English, Spanish).

The English version — meant to share this work with English-speaking readers, for them to get another perspective — is published online by NEF (Net des Etudes Francaises / Net of French Studies), University of Toronto:

http://www.etudes-francaises.net/dossiers/ebook.htm (more…)

By Paul Biba

…is the title of an interesting article in the Kindle Nation daily. I had never really thought about this, but Stephen Windwalker makes some very good points. You might want to take a look. Here’s a snippet:

… we are finding ways to include the Kindle editions of our blogs in a symbiotic loop wherein each kind of subscriber, reader, or visitor is more likely to visit other associated venues. Not only does my Kindlized blog help make interested readers aware of my Kindle books, but it also drives visitors to my free blog, the free weekly email newsletter that I publish with the help of Constant Contact’s growing suite of complementary services, and even to my telephone or my email inbox if they want to engage me in helping them in their efforts. Most of these other centers of activity, in turn, also build my base of Kinle edition subscribers: proof again that what goes around comes around. And what works for me is working for many other authors, publishers, businesses and organizations as well.

By Paul Biba

Smashwords announced today that it has teamed up with Canadian publisher Shortcovers which will distribute Smashwords books in 189 countries. Here’s an excerpt from the news  release:

Shortcovers by Indigo Books & Music, Inc. (TSX:IDG), a leading global eBook service, and Smashwords, a global publisher and distributor of independently published eBooks, today announced a content distribution partnership that promises to democratize eBook publishing for authors and small independent presses around the world.

Effective November 18, Smashwords will begin supplying eBooks to Shortcovers, drawing upon Smashwords’ rapidly expanding catalog of nearly 5,000 original eBooks from 2,300 self-published authors and small publishers. Smashwords’ authors and publishers come from over 20 countries.

Shortcovers operates a mobile and web-based eReading service with almost a million downloads across 189 countries. Shortcovers offers eReading applications for the iPhone™, BlackBerry®, Palm® Pre™ and Google Android™ smartphones. The company also supports Adobe EPUB downloads which enables Shortcovers to offer eBooks on popular eReaders like the Sony Reader.

By Paul Biba

The revised settlement is still dividing the industry. The Open Book Alliance is still dead set against it saying that it is a “set-piece designed to serve the private commercial interests of Google and its partners.” The Alliance is made up of Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, as well as librarians, legal scholars, authors and publishers.

In the UK, however, the Publishers Association, which previously had taken a neutral position, is now supporting the agreement as revised. Despite this, some members, including Hachette UK won’t go along and are still against the agreement.

No matter what the court decides I’m sure we are in for a series of appeals which may very will delay this for a couple of years. I would not even be surprised to see this whole thing eventually reach the US Supreme Court on the basis that this is not the proper set of facts for a class action.

You can find a comprehensive press review along with links to the actual documents at this Resource Shelf posting.

By a TeleRead Contributor

Editor’s Note: another user contribution today, great! This time it’s from Justin Loutsch who reports from South Korea. Paul Biba

Hi there,

I’m in South Korea, and figured I’d go check out the Iriver Story at the only bookstore that sells it and then tell you guys a bit more about it. Feel free to pick and choose what you want to post. I also found the Samsung papyrus there, but didn’t spend a whole lot of time with it.

First, the Story:

I was very impressed with the size of the screen (I currently have a sony PRS 300) and the keyboard is great. It has a search function, something I would love to have to help me find my place or find specific words. I tried it out, but it started typing in Korean and I didn’t know how to change the language interface.
There is a dedicated button to take you to your library, which I now think is kind of neat but I’m not sure how needed it is. The only use I can see for it is switching between many books while reading, which I would hate doing.

I had the text set to the largest setting in the pictures I took, it has 3 settings just like the sony reader. Turning the pages takes about the same amount of time as the Sony, and can be done from either the arrow keys or on either side of the bottom of the device. On the left and right side you see black slits. Above and below each slit are symbols that you can click to turn the page with either hand, however I found that it took a considerable amount of pressure to do this and it was easier to do the closer to the slits you press it.
(more…)

By a TeleRead Contributor

Editor’s Note: Herewith a thoughtful piece from Alex Sanchez. Contributions from our readers are always welcomed. Paul Biba

There has always existed an intense debate regarding Adam Smith’s pivotal work “The Wealth of Nations.” Those on the left have insisted that Mr. Smith advocated a form of Capitalism that was predicated on “fair play” between customer oriented companies. The counterargument on the right has been that Mr. Smith was the first person to propose a purely free market. For our purposes let’s go with the former as opposed to the latter interpretation of Smith’s ideas. There is substantial evidence in his earlier work “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” to support this usage. You may be asking yourself at this point, how does this all link to Amazon?

I thought this question over and over and have not been able to shake the following answer. Amazon is utilizing a market strategy that has some serious Sentimental overtones. In every area that Amazon has entered it has sought to control and/or manipulate factors/opponents as opposed to destroying them. In what surely must be considered an act of bravado it even sells it competitors’ e-book readers, giving the consumer a chance to not buy into the Kindle world. But let’s dig a bit deeper, take for instance its stance on used and/or hard to find books, in which it allows smaller companies a chance to sell their wares on an open market with constant consumer feedback.

(more…)

By Paul Biba

Bill McCoy has started his own blog, as opposed to the one he used when he was at Adobe, and he calls it Bill McCoy: Books 2.0. He starts off by saying:

As well, my work at Adobe these last three years has been centered around a relatively prosaic objective: establishing open standards that enable multi-channel/cross-device distribution of eBooks. For all intents and purposes, this work is done: epub is now firmly established as the industry standard for reflow-centric eBooks. That took a considerable effort, on the part of many people, and I’m really proud that we did it. But… that was the easy part: essentially migration of print to digital. epub does take portable documents to the next level – breaking past beyond PDF’s paper-replica model. But that’s only the beginning of the fundamental reinvention of the book that digital content and the Web will enable. In other words: now it’s really going to get interesting. I expect my future work, and this blog, to focus on this transformation.

By Paul Biba

The revised Settlement has made a number of important changes:

1. Foreign language works are out: the scope is limited to works registered with the US Copyright Office and books published in Canada, Australia and the U.K. There will be representatives from those countries on the Book Rights Registry board.

2. There will be an independent court-approved fiduciary who will represent rights-holders of unclaimed books and act to protect their interests, including licensing their works.

3. The Books Rights Registry is not required to search for rights-holders who have not come forward.

4. Third parties will be able to sell access to all settlement works, including orphans, even though Google will host the titles.

5. Revenue models have been limited to print on demand, file download and subscriptions.

6. Rights-holders may make their works available for free.

7. The Google’s most favored nation treatment has been eliminated allowing the Registry to license works to third parties without extending the same terms to Google.

This summary courtesy of the Publishers Lunch email report.

Related: Techmeme roundup.

By Paul Biba

Many of us are using shortened urls, especially in connection with services such as Twitter. I do a tweet of almost every post here and it is a nice, quick overview of what’s gone on during the day. Of course, each tweet contains a short url and I’ve been using Tinyurl along withTweetdeck.

However, if the url shortening service goes under then you have lost all your links. They become useless. Now, the Internet Archive, along with 301works.org, has come to an agreement with 20 url shortening services to get dumps of their links and thus preserve them if something happens to the service itself. You can find all the details here, including those services that agreed to participate.

I notice that Tinyurl is not among their members, so I just changed my Tweetdeck settings to use Twurl which is. Now my Twitter links will be preserved.

By Paul Biba

Pub Rants, written by a literary agent, has a post today that let’s us into what’s going on in the publishing industry. A couple of items:

Unlike times past publishers will walk away from a deal rather than give up electronic rights.

If you have, indeed, managed to reserve your electronic rights it doesn’t necessarily mean you can use them. The non-competition clause in most publishing contracts is usually broad enough so that it will prevent an author from publishing electronically even if the author reserves the rights. Agent Kristin says, and I agree with her based on my own legal experience, that very few people bother to read or think about the non-compete clause.

Thanks to Marilynn Byerly for the link.

By Paul Biba

The Practical Nomad, Edward Hasbrouck’s blog, has an article about the new Kindle for Windows software and what it might mean for other formats. He’s also offering a free book in a contest you might be interested in:

… Once content is displayed on screen by a Windows app, it’s available to any standard screen-capture utility.

Now that Kindle for PC has been released, it’s only a matter of time — probably measured in weeks or at most a few months — before someone releases a “Kindle-ripping” app that “reads” a Kindle e-book using the Kindle for PC app, captures the pages from the screen as images, and saves them as a PDF (or text or HTML) file that can be read on any device. The absence of a Kindle for Linux app gives a compelling motive for Linux users to develop such an app, as the only way to read their legally purchased copies of Kindle Edition e-books on their Linux devices.

I anticipate, of course, the same disputes about the legality of these Kindle ripping apps as surrounded the first apps developed to play legally-purchased DVD’s on Linux computers.

By Paul Biba

The Vega Tablet expected next year will run Android, according to several websites. The tablet will be available in 7, 11 and 15 inches and will come with WiFi and 3G. It will have a resistive touch screen (bummer!). I doubt any of these things will make decent ebook readers as their battery life probably won’t be very good. A plain LCD screen will suck down a battery pretty fast. More info here.

By Paul Biba

That’s the story in the Times Online. A computer program used to mark A level English exams marked Ernest Hemingway as less than average and said he should write with more care. It rated Churchill as below average and didn’t like William Golding, either.

This was a trial by the Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors, and their Chief Executive said that he did not feel that the program was reliable at this point. The scary thing is that the article says that similar programs are in use in America and some students have learned to “crack the code” and write in a style that the computer likes.