TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘PDF’ Category

By Joe Wikert

My apologies for not following-up on the promise I made in this earlier post to provide more information in a subsequent post. I got distracted on a few other things but I finally managed to spend some time with the detailed results spreadsheet. Here’s what I found…

Which ebook format do you prefer?

PDF rules the day. It wins out for a variety of reasons including portability, how it renders and even the fact that it’s so mature. Epub was probably second on this list, but it was a distant second at best. And out of the 2K+ responses I only noticed a few references to “Kindle” or “mobi”.

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By Paul Biba

This is an important piece of software, presuming it works well. However, DNAML of Australia is a publishing expert so I think the presumption is that it will. They sent me an email alerting me to Pdf to ePub’s release and here is the link to their site. It costs $99 (I presume Australian dollars) and they don’t, unfortunately, have a trial version available. If anyone uses it please let us know. Here are the specs:

Quick conversion (2 to 5 minutes for an average trade title)

100 % text accuracy

Auto paragraph joining algorithm that works automatically across multiple pages

Correctly splits final HTML into multiple segments, improving performance and lowering memory requirements for ePub readers and eBook devices

Handles images and image positioning based on the PDF positioning

Provides the PDF to ePub user the option to overwrite glyphs (character images) utilised within the PDF, with custom characters using a simple interface which requires no programming knowledge

Converted ePub will be automatically validated to ensure 100% compatibility
with ePub check

Can convert from PDF to HTML allowing for web pages creation from the PDF text

Customise PDF area to extract from thus avoiding common problems with other conversion tools like headers and footers of pages being treated as body text

Provides the PDF to ePub user a pre-set option using PDF to ePub preset rules or to employ custom rules to the ePub conversion process

For Advanced users – PDF to ePub uses a powerful scripting language (.lua) to allow the PDF to ePub user to fully customise how text and images are extracted from the PDF files

Provides the end user the ability to set DPI (resolution) for images and glyph (character images)

Technorati Tags:
e-book, e-books, ebook, ebooks, EPUB, Paul Biba, publishing, PDF, Australia

By Chris Meadows

Over on the Tor.com blog, Bruce Baugh waxes enthusiastic about the “Good Reader” PDF viewer for the iPhone. Normally $4.99 but currently on sale for 99 cents, Good Reader loads PDF files one page at a time, so no matter how large and bloated the PDF file might be (and some role-playing games are really bad in that respect) it will not overload your memory.

I went ahead and downloaded the reader to check it out. I have to admit, it certainly does offer some nice features. It loads via Bonjour WiFi the same as Air Sharing and iSilo, but can also load via USB by using iPhone Explorer for Windows or a custom helper app for Mac to insert the file into the app’s backup on your hard drive and re-syncing, or via download from the web using a built-in browser or a http prefix extension from Safari.

For some reason, large files (such as the 160-megabyte Spycraft 2.0) seem to take a very long amount of time to upload to the device, but once they have loaded they can certainly be viewed. It does takes a while (especially on a relatively slow first-generation iPod Touch) to load each page—and to save on processing, the page is rendered in only as much detail as necessary to view at any given time. For instance, zooming in on part of the screen causes the characters to appear blurred for a few seconds until the app can re-render to that level of detail.

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By Paul Biba

If this works it could be really useful to many of us. I’ve tried the free Amazon converter for the Kindle, but it doesn’t work a lot of the time. Unfortunately I don’t have any PDFs in my queue to convert, but please try this out and post your comments. Here’s what the site says:

Using our PDF-to-Word conversion technology, you can quickly and easily create editable DOC/RTF files, making it a cinch to re-use PDF content in applications like Microsoft Word, Excel, OpenOffice, and WordPerfect.
Best of all, it’s entirely free!

While it’s not possible to replicate the exact formatting and appearance of the original file used in creating a PDF, we believe our free PDF-to-Word converter produces more accurate results than any other tool out there, including the most expensive desktop products.

When you need to quickly re-purpose PDF content in Word, it must also be well formatted. Unlike most PDF-to-Word converters, we use the full range of formatting and layout tools available — including paragraphs, columns, tables, and margins — making pages much easier to edit and manipulate. Pictures, photos, vector images, and Excel charts are all examples of graphical elements that might be contained within PDF files.
Our PDF-to-Word converter is designed to convert and accurately re-position all of these upon conversion. Even for complex drawings and shapes with textures, patterns, and fills, we replicate the images, while maintaining editing capabilities

Thanks to Chip Chick for the link.

By Paul Biba

Murray Alexander’s Palm-Mac blog is one of the best gadget blogs on the web. Murray is also very particular and doesn’t praise anything unless he really likes it. So I was amazed when he actually recommended an app to read PDFs on the iPhone. If Murray says it works, then it works. I’ve taken the liberty of reprinting most of his blog post in full, so to make it easier to read I’ll leave out the blockquotes.

GoodReader for iPhone

Since my Palm days I have always liked to carry around a load of pdf files, mostly used for work but also for a bit of home stuff. My app of choice on the Palm platform was Repligo and since moving to the iPhone I have found it hard to get something that I thought was as good as Repligo. Last week however I downloaded GoodReader and have been impressed with it since to the point where I now think it is in fact a better programme. …

As with a lot of apps for the platform and with Apple being a pain in the butt as regards access to internal bits and bobs, getting your files across onto the device is a bit tiresome. The manual says that files can be emailed across and there are instructions on the developer web site so I will give that a bash too. I will also need to follow the instructions in this link to try out the software which claims to allow usb file transfer…if it works I will let you know. Updated…by Jove, it does work! 2nd Update…the email process looks a right royal pain in the butt and now that I can transfer via USB I won’t need to bother with that method luckily.
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By Paul Biba

Some PDF news today. Thanks to Planet PDF. First, a PDF viewer for the iPhone:

this week in PDF has also seen the launch of Readdle’s new iPhone-based PDF viewer. PDF Expert 1.0 allows users to save PDF email attachments, perform full-text document searching, navigate using PDF bookmarks and includes support for password protected documents. In addition to PDF documents, PDF Expert can also be used to view Microsoft Office files, iWork documents, HTML, TXT and image files. The built-in network file server allows users to mount PDF Expert as a shared network drive over a Wi-Fi network to any computer equipped with Mac OS X 10.4 or later, Windows XP or Windows Vista and copy documents to the iPhone using drag-and-drop or copy/paste techniques. PDF Expert is available exclusively on the Apple App Store at USD $4.99. For more on the product, visit the official Readdle website.

Now, we have another PDF exploit. In order to remain safe the article recommends “Using an alternative reader like those from Nitro PDF Software or Foxit might be a short-term solution. Or users can also disable the Flash in Adobe Reader 9 and disable Flash Player as well.”

Patrick Fitzgerald on Symantec’s blog, noted their discovery of an Adobe Acrobat PDF file that “upon opening drops and executes a malicious binary.” Fitzgerald goes on to say in the post, “It was quite clear that this PDF was exploiting some vulnerability in order to drop its payload.”

Fitzgerald also noted that upon further inspection it was a new vulnerability that they had not seen in the wild before. “What was even more surprising was that this vulnerability affects Adobe Flash — not Adobe Reader as we initially suspected.”

He writes, “The authors of the exploit have managed to take a bug and turn it into a reliable exploit using a heap spray technique.” Fitzgerald also noted that in the newly discovered exploitation the PDF exploiting the vulnerability includes multiple Flash streams. And that their testing revealed the vulnerability is exploitable on both Windows XP and Vista, but the dropped executables will not run on Vista if UAC is enabled.

Adobe posted on its site, that it was aware of the “potential vulnerability” and would update users with more information soon.

By Robert Kingett

A Kindle review will appear in the near future from TeleRead’s newest contributor, Robert Kingett, a visually impaired 12th-grader in Florida. Below are his thoughts on PDF’s challenges for the disabled. His bio appears at the end of this post. Welcome, Robert! – D.R.

The sad truth is that many e-books are not very useful for the visually impaired.

I have come across numerous instances where I can’t even read a book, let alone navigate it. And here I’m supposed to study it for class!

Blah! All I can do is hunt, peck, and, yes, even beg in some cases for another format of the same book. PDFs can be like potluck. I’ll be lucky if I can even read one line.

Stay tuned, however. I’ll tell you about WebbIE’s free “Accessible PDF Reader”—which may help, at least with nonDRMed e-books. The developers describe WebbIE as “a Web browser for blind and visually impaired people.” A small screenshot appears below, and a larger one is at the end of this past.

What it’s like being me

I’ll be in 12th grade in high school this year, and I love books—just so I can read them with my eye condition, which is something called retinopathy, arising from a premature birth. I can see only in one eye; it has tunnel vision.

If you don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, make a C around your left eye, and cover the other eye completely. And presto, you’re me!

With this issue come smaller ones, also annoying. I can’t read a regular book unless my nose and it are meeting face to face, even with a magnifier. That’s why I live on the computer, or just get audio books.

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By David Rothman

Robert Kingett, a witty, gifted writer in Florida, just happens to be a high school student who can barely see.

Tomorrow in the TeleRead blog, he’ll share with us his own personal PDF hell, as well as a partial solution. I invite our friends at Adobe to reply if they’d like. Yes, I know—some of the problem is with the publishers who format and misformat Robert’s e-books. Meanwhile I can at least take heart in Adobe’s advocacy of the reflowable ePub format, which is much, much friendlier to the world’s Kingetts. Perhaps Robert’s words will inspire publishers, retailers and librarians to speed up the switch from PDF to ePub. Hello, OverDrive. I especially hope you’ll pay attention, as a major provider of e-books for public libraries.

Kingett on the Kindle

In the near future, Robert also will be writing up the Kindle. I hope that our readers over at Amazon will pay attention. You really should be willing to go to court if need to be safeguard your customers’ enjoyment of text to speech. It’s not very good PR to knuckle under to publishers and writers’ assault on fair use and accessibility for disabled people. Ideally Robert’s observations will make it worse PR. Hey, guys, read Robert, then do the right thing. Robert’s review, by the way, will cover much more than just the issue of TTS. He is not the biggest fan of the current E Ink, and he’ll explain why. That’s something to ponder amid cries for “A Kindle in every backpack.”

By Robert Nagle

In the last few months I have been reading about human-accelerated warming and how to understand the impact of our purchasing decisions.

I stumbled upon ClimateCounts, an environmental scorecard site. This site  tracks a company’s commitment to reducing their carbon footprint.

In the computer/electronics category, the highest rated companies were IBM and Canon; the lowest rated company was Apple. Among Internet companies, Google was ranked the highest while Amazon.com and Ebay were ranked the lowest. (Read more about Google’s effort to remain carbon neutral).  The company profile pages give a few sentences to explain the score.  Note: To see the complete report about the company, you need to download the scorecard  PDF (on the right side of the company’s profile). This scorecard goes into greater detail  about how Climate Counts arrived at the number for the score. 

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By Chris Meadows

I have always been skeptical of the idea of PDFs as an “e-book” format.

The PDF format is a queer beastie. It was intended to present a book with strict formatting intact, so that the book could be printed directly without the user needing to format it himself. What the book looks like on the screen is what it looks like when printed.

Hence, PDFs are not really “e-books” so much as they are “dehydrated p-books”. Just add water—or in this case, paper and ink.

Because most PDFs are in the portrait, 8.5” x 11” orientation, they are not the best format for reading on a landscape-oriented computer screen. However, by dint of wide use, PDF has become a sort of de facto “e-book” standard—especially in the role-playing game market, where publishers use it to offload printing costs of marginal titles onto the consumer.

The PRS-700, unlike most computer monitors, has a portrait orientation, so it should theoretically be better-suited to reading PDFs. The question is whether or not it really is.

The answer, it turns out, is a qualified “sort of”. (As always, click on the pictures for a closer view.)

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By David Rothman

Apropos of e-book readers, where are the Web simplicity mavens when we need them?

Would that every e-reader look like the one to the right, with its nice, clean appearance. An easy click on an icon, and you’re there. Granted, I’m not saying “boring” is for every book—still photos and videos will be fine for appropriate titles. But let’s rely on the books themselves, not e-reader software, to provide the excitement.

A disappointing Digital Editions

By contrast, isn’t Adobe Digital Editions—shown in the second screenshot—a mess? One goal at Adobe was to simplify the interface so it wasn’t so much like the  Space Shuttle-style cockpit.  But damn if Adobe didn’t botch it anyway. Even geeks and semigeeks may struggle to adjust the controls to determine font size, positioning, etc., of PDFs. For shame, Adobe! And for shame, me. I should have beaten up hard on Digital Editions when it first came out.

No decent just-the-book-ma’am mode

Unlike Adobe’s usual PDF offerings these days, Digital Editions won’t let you easily switch to even a halfway-adequate just-the-book-ma’am kind of view. You still see distractions even in the “reading” mode. Not that Adobe’s usual offerings are exemplary about full screen, given PDF’s limits, especially on netbook-size displays. But they’re much better with PDF files than Digital Editions is. ePub? It isn’t as tricky as PDF, since the format is natively reflowable and displays line breaks appropriately even on small screens of netbook size or tinier.

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By Paul Biba

I will be at BEA Thursday through Sunday to cover it for you guys. I’ve never been to one before so I am quite curious about the whole affair. It seems like a lot of time to devote to just one topic, but I’ll see.

As part of the event the Follow the Reader Blog has organized a “Blogger Signing” event. I will be at their booth on Sunday, at noon, if anyone wants to drop by and see what I look like. The whole schedule for the event is too long to publish, but go over and take a look. You may have the chance to meet some of your favorite bloggers. Here’s the description of the event:

Firebrand is thrilled to announce that 41 bloggers signed up to be at our booth (#4077) during Book Expo America. It’s clear from how quickly this idea went from concept to reality, that book bloggers need and want to create community-to-community relationships with publishers, retailers, and readers. This is an incredibly exciting time in publishing!

We invite every publisher at BEA to review this schedule and mark their calendars, so they have a chance to meet the bloggers who are helping to sell their books.

By Chris Meadows

Responses to Wizards of the Coast’s recent decision to discontinue on-line PDF sales have started to come in. Not one to resist the chance to fire a shot across the bow of its biggest competitor, gaming company White Wolf has posted this announcement:

In light of recent announcements, some fans have expressed concern over the future of electronic (PDF) format book sales in the RPG industry. White Wolf Publishing today has announced that it currently has no plans to discontinue its existing PDF products.

“Quite the opposite,” says Eddy Webb, the Alternative Publishing Developer for White Wolf. “I believe this is a growing market with potential we haven’t yet had a chance to fully explore, both as publishers and as fans of role-playing games.” Eddy remarked that he has dozens of upcoming PDF-exclusive products on his schedule in addition to continuing to provide PDF versions of upcoming products, and that White Wolf is still actively looking into returning to the print-on-demand arena.

To celebrate White Wolf’s continuing devotion to PDF products and reward their growing, loyal fan base, the company is offering a free download of the Exalted Second Edition rulebook as well as a one-time 10% discount on the purchase of any White Wolf PDF titles through DriveThruRPG.com and RPGNow.com from 1 Am Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. Simply enter the coupon code “wwlovesyou” to receive the discount. Both offers expire by midnight (EST) on Sunday, April 12th.

I have the first edition of Exalted in hardcover and am quite fond of it. For the unfamiliar, it is an Oriental-styled fantasy game inspired by animé and Hong Kong wuxia action movies. I will definitely be taking advantage of this legitimate free download opportunity.

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By Chris Meadows

Found via my friend Alexander “Zamiel” Williams’s LiveJournal: it seems that Paizo’s loss of PDF sale rights is not due to any disagreement with Wizards of the Coast’s new on-line sale policies after all. In a move that could charitably be described as “puzzling,” Wizards of the Coast has decided to stop selling PDFs on-line entirely, citing piracy concerns.

This makes just about as much sense as J.K. Rowling’s famous piracy-driven refusal to authorize any electronic editions of her Harry Potter novels. In both cases, the “pirated” copies circulating on-line come not from authorized versions, but from people scanning in the dead-tree book. The Wizards PDFs are watermarked with the names of their purchasers, and only a terminally dumb person would put such self-incriminating documents on the pirate networks.

In Zamiel’s LiveJournal entry, he points out that a number of independently-published role-playing games have started putting blurbs in their books asking people who obtain copies illicitly to send them some money or buy a legitimate copy if they like it.

I approve of that. It treats criminals like customers. People do as they’re believed to, very often. Treat a customer like a thief and he’ll take off your table with a disgruntled hiss until he can steal you blind. Treat a thief like a customer and they’ll buy as much as they can afford to. For life.

Meanwhile, Wizards of the Coast has also filed suit for copyright infringement against 8 people in the United States, Poland, and the Philippines for allegedly uploading its new Player’s Handbook 2 onto peer-to-peer networks. Hopefully that works out better for Wizards than the music industry’s lawsuits have for them.

Some believe that PDF sales account for as much as 20% of total RPG sales, and Wizards was one of the biggest sellers of that market segment. That’s a lot of money for Wizards to leave on the table. But Wizards is not necessarily entirely abandoning it. According to the ICV2 article:

WotC is apparently not ruling out digital delivery of its products using a different format or model. “We are exploring other options for digital distribution of our content,” the spokesperson said.

Which undoubtedly means DRM. Good luck with that, too, Wizards; you’ll never keep gamers down on the DRM farm after they’ve seen the bright lights of unencrypted PDF. They’ll say, “Forget that” and download an illicit, scanned-from-dead-tree PDF version, and Wizards won’t see a penny.

By Chris Meadows

Just received the following announcement in the mail from Paizo, one of the major e-tailers of role-playing-game-related PDF e-books:

Wizards of the Coast has notified us that we may no longer sell or distribute their PDF products. Accordingly, after April 6 at 11:59 PM Pacific time, Wizards of the Coast PDFs will no longer be available for purchase on paizo.com; after noon on April 7, you will no longer be able to download Wizards of the Coast PDFs that you have already purchased, so please make sure you have downloaded all purchased PDFs by that time.

We thank you for your patronage of paizo.com. Please check out our other downloads at paizo.com/store/downloads.

Paizo had been in an exclusive vendor relationship with Wizards since 2002. However, they were not impressed enough to adopt the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons in light of the unavailability of an Open Game License for that edition. In fact, their Pathfinder project is a 3.5th-edition-compatible revision of the Open-Game-Licensed D&D 3.5th edition, so there would still be a core ruleset around to support the people who had no interest in changing to D&D 4th’s entirely different play style.

Discussion on the Enworld forum of this announcement includes a link to a Wizards press release announcing “a new Internet Sales Policy” to take effect on April 6th. Presumably, Paizo did not agree with the terms of the new policy.

It’s always regrettable when something like this happens, but it also serves as a jolt to the complacency of e-book purchasers who assume that the store will keep their product around forever for them to download at will. (One of the commenters in the Enworld forum pointed out that RPGNow, another RPG PDF e-tailer, went from unlimited downloads of purchased products to “5 downloads and talk to us when you want more.”)

Some stores, such as Fictionwise, are able to offer replacements when they lose books from one source—but when the source in question is the books’ original publisher, there is nothing the retailer can do except advise people to download and archive what they’ve bought and paid for.

On the bright side, unlike the Overdrive/Fictionwise case, at least Paizo did not put DRM on its PDFs beyond personalizing them with the purchaser’s name. Thus, customers who archive their Paizo works can be assured of always being able to read them on any device that will read PDFs.

(As an aside, I was not too impressed with the quality of the one Wizards of the Coast PDF I did buy from Paizo, compared against the scanned version of the same book floating around on peer-to-peer.)

Update: It turns out that the reason for Paizo’s PDF sales ceasing is that Wizards of the Coast has decided to stop selling on-line PDFs altogether.

By Chris Meadows

After consulting with his followers on Twitter, Wil Wheaton has just released his latest book, Sunken Treasures, in DRM-free PDF format via print-on-demand publisher Lulu. Although the print version of the book is $13 (or $15 for the international version), the downloadable PDF is only $5.

Wheaton also noted in Twitter that he had received “[m]any questions about other formats for digital versions of my books. Short answer: all I can do at the moment on my own is PDF.”

An hour after posting the sale link, Wheaton tweeted that he was surprised and impressed by the early response to the book: "This is unreal. The PDF sales of Sunken Treasure in the last hour are over 1/5 of the total print sales in the last 28 days." He added, to those who bought the book, "You’re part of something very exciting and encouraging to me right now. Thank you!"

Wheaton is to be commended for releasing his book without DRM and at a reasonably low price point for an electronic format. I hope that he will sometime be able to release it in other formats more suited to portable devices such as the iPhone.

Update: Wheaton’s blog entry on the sale e-book.

By David Rothman

An Adobe press release follows.

While I dislike eBabel—PDF is among the many clashing format, in a war highly confusing to consumers—the above is still great news for public library users.

PDF is among the more popular formats. And Adobe’s new support for software and hardware developers will also encompass ePub , the IDPF’s standard, which will become increasingly common for library users and others.

Reflowable PDF means that line lengths can more easily fit the size of the screen—especially handy for small-screened mobile devices such as the Cybook. The latest Sony Readers, the PRS-505 and PRS-700, already use the technology.

I’ll be curious to see how smooth the reflowability process is for other machines and in various software apps.

Another issue is the extent to which owners of existing machines, as distinguished from users of easily upgradable apps like Stanza, will be able to enjoy the new capabilities. I’ll welcome further comments from Adobe on these issues.

Update, 2:06 Washington time: Still another issue is whether the vendors will follow through, now that the software developers kit is available. My belief is that the overwhelming majority will. Stanz/Lexcycle and Plastic Logic are already committed, and iRex and Bookeen have hoped for the ability to read DRMed PDF.

DRM capabilities offered as well—for PDF and ePub

Significantly the news release mentions DRM, needed to read most public library books if they’re still under copyright. Of course, this is a proprietary "feature," meaning that ePub books will not be readable with "protection" systems other than Adobe’s. Still, the ability to read ePub, the best eBabel fighter so far, is praiseworthy.

One other question is what this means in terms of legalities from Mobipocket, the Amazon-owned software company, which is said to ban competing DRM-capable apps from E Ink machines. Will the Cybook-type devices be able to offer both the new Adobe capabilities and the existing Mobi? Let’s hope so. If not, maybe it’s time for the U.S. and EU to modify  anti-trust laws if need be to apply to such situations.

Shown is a Cybook, in an old photo, without reflowable PDF involved. – D.R.

Related: OverDrive: BBC audio books to be available to libraries via OverDrive (The Bookseller) and Mobile Flash apps to get better distribution, more money (Techmeme roundup).

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