TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Roger Sperberg’ Category

By Roger Sperberg

The iPhone/iPod Touch have had the advantage of being the sole handheld devices with an e-reader that could access Amazon’s e-list.

That will soon change. The Windows UMPC will be able to run the Kindle e-reader. Also, Amazon will move the software to new Android and Maemo devices with significantly higher resolution than the iPair’s 480×320. The Motorola Droid 3.7" screen has a resolution of 854×480, and the slightly smaller Nokia N900 has 800×480. Both yield 267 pixels-per-inch compared to the Apple devices’ 163 ppi.

With nearly three times as many pixels per square inch, the typography on the new devices is wonderfully crisp and readable at far smaller point sizes than you would imagine. I write from personal experience of both the N900 display and Coke-bottle-thick eyeglasses.

Whatever the effect on sales that some experts see from waning novelty and growing choices, I predict it will be outweighed by huge new numbers of e-book buyers entering the market and expecting to split their reading among more than one device.

(Adapted with permission from a Reading 2.0 post. Screenshot shows the Kindle app.)

By Roger Sperberg

Nokia officially announced its fifth Internet Tablet today, the N900. (For full details, see maemo.org and nokia.com.)

With its flat surface, iPhone-like dimensions, camera, video, and phone capabilities, the N900 aims to fit into the same fits-in-your-pocket-and-does-way-more-than-your-phone category as Apple’s iPhone while still retaining its web-while-you’re-walking-around emphasis.

The N900’s 3.5″ full-color display has a 267 pixel-per-inch resolution (compared to the iPhone’s same-size 163ppi screen) measuring 800 x 480 pixels. This makes for dazzlingly sharp text. The device also includes Flash 9.4 and reads PDF files natively. This, along with the newly added 3.5G wireless capability, would appear to position the N900 as an ideal platform for a synching Kindle e-reader.

Amazon advises publishers to implement color, motion, and interactivity into e-books, despites its Kindle devices’ lacking support of these features. Clearly the bookseller needs more than just Apple’s iPhone and iPod to deliver these electronic essentials lest more entertaining products snatch its current format and pipeline dominance. (more…)

By Roger Sperberg

In the United States, small publishers have a significant levy placed on them if they obtain an ISBN for every format in which they issue an e-book. A publisher like Random House might pay only five or ten cents for each ISBN it assigns. On the other end of the spectrum, a new e-book publisher must either pay $1120 upfront for one hundred ISBNs or $325 for ten at a time as it goes along. As we all know, there are vastly more than ten e-book formats so this is a sticky point.

Bookstores have long declined to sell print books without an ISBN, a reality of entering the book-distribution chain that new commercial ventures have simply had to accept. For physical objects — items that pass across a checkout counter’s barcode scanner — there’s no getting around it.

But inventory management is irrelevant to e-books, which aren’t barcode scanned, and so an ISBN (more…)

By Roger Sperberg

Publishers are expecting libraries to treat ebook lending like physical items: buy one, lend one.

Software publishers started out with the same “X users requires X licensed-copies,” but that evolved into a policy cognizant of the customer’s need to make maximal use of its resources and so X concurrent-users became the norm.

I suppose the technical requirements of a similar ebook-lending policy would be too daunting to effect.

But still, that buy-one/lend-one practice is galling. It just forces libraries to spend money on books that aren’t being lent efficiently, stifling the adoption of ebooks where they’re needed the most.

So I have a suggestion for libraries — ask your patrons to buy ebooks in the library’s name.

If I buy an ebook of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, then it’s glued to me. Love it or hate it, (more…)

By Paul Biba

At least that’s what blog kindle is saying. Here’s an excerpt:

I’ve been counting books in Kindle Store on a daily basis and now the time to share results:

* When I first started counting on the 2nd of March 2009 there were 242,488 books in the Kindle Store.
* As of the 12th of May 2009 there are 281,986. 39,498 books in 71 days.
* So on an average day 556 new books are added to the vast collection already available to Kindle owners.
* If the pace remains constant there will be 411,606 books in the Kindle Store by the end of the year.

Go over and read the rest of the story. Thanks to Roger Sperberg for the link.

By Paul Biba

The BookGlutton people are really on a roll. As Roger Spergerg said in an email to me: The BookGlutton folks are just charging ahead madly! Wonderful!

They have started a new service, currently Twitter based, which will build a catalog of ebooks. Check out their epubcatalog info and here’s an excerpt from their write up:

How do I get started?

It’s very easy if you’re a member of Twitter. We plan to support many services in the long run, but for now, you’ll need a Twitter account. With your Twitter account, follow @epubcatalog. Once you’re a follower, you can tell epubcatalog about books you find on the Web. The only format supported for books is EPUB. Support for catalogs is planned through the OPDS recommendation.

(more…)

By Roger Sperberg

Amazon announced this afternoon that it has started fulfilling orders for its Kindle 2 e-book reader, one day earlier than anticipated. In the two weeks since February 9th’s announcement, the device has already become the number-one selling electronic device at Amazon.

At .036 inches, the new e-reader is thinner than a pencil. Among other improvements over the discontinued 14-month-old Kindle 1, the device-side buttons for turning pages now press inward instead of outward, minimizing inadvertent page turns.

While many had speculated that the $359 price would hinder sales, that doesn’t appear to have occurred. Indeed, the biggest contretemps involving the Kindle 2 has centered around its Nuance-provided text-to-speech voices (Tom and Samantha) and whether authors ought to be compensated when machines read the text aloud.

By Roger Sperberg

An e-book of Best of TOC is available at no charge from O’Reilly Press. at this link. The assemblage of tech writing by TOC speakers and others was put together as a showpiece for the second-generation Espresso Book Machine shown at the conference, with p-books printed and bound in seven minutes (on the low-end device; shorter times for more expensive equipment are promised).

The TOC Blog has a description of the content. (Formats: epub, mobi, pdf.)

By Roger Sperberg

The JP Morgan Library houses, among many other treasures, the only surviving original copy of Paradise Lost, as well as three Gutenberg Bibles. On Monday, I reflected upon the enormous pecuniary value of these specific copies (or instances of a manifestation, as the FRBR taxonomy has it) when Amazon announced its forthcoming Kindle2 e-reader in the Library’s auditorium. No matter how strenuously Amazon labors to associate the Morgan’s grandeur with the Kindle, there will be no similar physical artifacts for future generations to venerate with the electronic books that will be read on this latest and stately issue of the e-book state of the art.

Well, that was a fleeting meditation, I admit. I was soon caught up in the very remarkable features of the Kindle2 that I suspect were not much remarked upon in the media flurry that ensued.

The Kindle2 is the first non-cellphone native of the walkaround web — lightweight, portable and capable of accessing the web at all times from anywhere with no extra charges of any sort.

Astonishingly, the Kindle does not rely on some in-the-future-for-most-of-us widespread WiFi like Sprint’s variously named XOHM or WiMax. Instead we’re talking about Sprint’s 3G (e.g., EVDO) wireless network. For that same unlimited data access, on that very same 3G network, my wife and I are obligated to pay some $60 to $70 each month through 2010. (more…)

By Roger Sperberg

I don’t know when I expected this would happen, but after ten years of collapsing e-book ventures, I was surprised when I walked through Times Square Monday afternoon and saw the Dow Jones News Ticker. This shows only the hottest news, of interest to the largest possible number of people, and there I read the hot news of the hour — a new e-book reader had been announced!

As TMQ might say, This is surely the 21st century, when the release of a new e-reader is blazoned across Times Square for the masses to exult in.

By Roger Sperberg

For something like five or six years, I’ve been able to style XML elements with CSS and have the text displayed just the way I want.

That is, in the XMetaL XML editor* and in browsers.

Not in an e-reader, however. All the e-readers specify the vocabulary you’re permitted to use in your e-book**.

There’s a difference between a reader and a browser, between a reader and an editor.

The reader has library functions, bookmarks, annotations. It collects multiple files into a single package; browsers and editors don’t have the same orientation. They just won’t do. (more…)

By Roger Sperberg

Over the last two years, I’ve thought a lot about what I want in an e-reader.

As someone who’s made my living as a freelance writer and written a couple books, I’ve thought about copyright and the rights of a creator. These concerns are pretty low in my current thinking.

As a technologist, I’ve thought about including motion, sound, color and interactivity to take advantage of the content being delivered by a computer. Following the development of Sophie, I’ve come to accept the need for creators to make rich-media texts, no longer thinking of this as an after-creation/publisher activity.

As a reader, I’ve thought about getting ahold of what I want to read and removing the barriers to what Bill Hill calls ludic reading. What kind of device do I want to hold in my hand and what do I want to see on it? In this time, I’ve mostly been using FBReader on the Nokia 770, N800 and N810 internet tablets, and I am consequently dependent upon a flexible and color-capable device, unlike the majority of what the market seems to be offering up right now.

As someone who has worked in book publishing for the last fifteen years, I’ve thought about how to forego copyright as a mechanism for economic protection and still provide incentives for publishers and writers (and jobs for editors). A viable business model — gosh, it sounds more and more like the search for the holy grail.

I’m no true prognosticator, but I think we can see the outline of the next generation of e-readers now.

Bowing to Sophie’s makers, I believe the new e-books will contain far richer media than at present. And by this I don’t mean “including video and audio” but just what Sophie’s makers do: including anything an author might devise when provided with full programming capability.

Like FBReader and Openberg Lector, the next-gen e-reader will accept a whole slew of formats. And as the OpenReader and OEBF formats champion, the most useful formats will deliver a single file that itself contains one or more maps to multiple files inside it. And we’ll be able to escape the “html with a slight makeover” straitjacket we’ve lived with since day one of e-reading.

And as FBReader and Lector insist, the next-gen e-reader will be multi-platform.

All of which lead me to expect that the triumvirate of AJAXed development platforms — Mozilla’s Prism, Adobe’s AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight (I call them “Prairielight”) — will provide us with many new e-readers. (more…)

By Roger Sperberg

Access has announced a public beta of virtual machine software that allows Nokia Internet Tablets to run Palm OS applications. Thoughtfix (aka Daniel Gentleman) at Tabletblog was the first* to report on this and has a video showing the software running as well as some photos.

The Garnet VM runs on the about-to-be-released N810, the N800 and the no-longer-being sold 770.

If, as expected, the software runs in landscape mode on the Internet Tablet, readers of this blog may find more e-books now available to them (and more readable on the NIT’s 225-pixels-per-inch screen). With 770’s going for as little as $100 on eBay, an inexpensive high-quality e-reader on a widely used platform is a reality. For those unsatisfied with the stock on non-DRMed books readable in FBReader, this is good news.

As Internet Tablet Talk headlines it, “Run 30,000 Palm OS apps on your Nokia Internet Tablet.”

Brighthand reports that “Garnet VM is expected to be available by the end of the year free of charge as a download from Access.” (Other reports at intomobile and engadget.)
__________
* Oops. Dan writes that he got the news from intomobile.

By David Rothman

Ghostbusters had just opened its Manhattan office, in the 1984 movie, when a secretary asked a nerd if he liked to read.

“Print is dead,” same the reply, a line meant to be as risible back then as the scientist’s hobby of collecting molds, spores and fungi.

But is the dialogue such a hoot today?

Not quite, says Jeff Gomez, who uses this wonderful scene in the introduction of Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age, excerpted online.

Good prose will live on in e-books and other media if writers, editors, publishers and others adjust, Gomez believes. But he isn’t so confident about the lasting popularity of books as physical objects.

Jeff, whom I know from his ever-readable Print Is Dead blog—same name, different medium—is hardly the first to feel this way.

Significantly, however, Jeff has worked as director of Internet marketing for Holtzbrinck Publishers and on October 29 will start as senior director of online consumer sales and marketing for the Penguin Group USA. Jeff will help refine the company’s Web site as a means to strengthen author-reader connections. And I hope that in other respects, too, Penguin will let him test many of his opinions in Print Is Dead.

(more…)

By David Rothman

So are the rumors true?

Are the $144 Nokia 770s at Buy.com having problems with bad screens and also with the White Screen of Death? That would certainly be at odds with the predominantly favorable reviews from Buy.com shoppers, but I’m still curious.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for a review of the N800—the 770’s successor—today or tomorrow, complete with my thoughts on how it works with FBReader. Find out whether I agree with Roger Sperberg’s conclusions.

By Roger Sperberg

Planet Maemo has pointed us to Buy.com’s offer of new Nokia 770’s for $139.99. Free shipping too.

The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet runs FBReader, which is a world-class open-source e-reader that accepts books in a large variety of formats, even inside a zip archive: OEB, HTML, FB2, Plucker PDB, CHM and non-DRMed Mobipocket, among others. FBReader runs not only on the Nokia 770 and N800 but also the Linux desktop, Windows, PepperPad, Sharp Zaurus and IRex iLiad. The program is still under development (the most recent version is 0.8.4a) and has not yet implemented bookmarks or annotation.

Probably no other device at this cost matches the 770 in features, capability or fabulous screen resolution (I include PDA’s and computers, not just e-book readers when I say this). The display contains five times as many pixels per square inch as the typical LCD monitor, making it the first on which 6-point type can reasonably be read. (And being 800 pixels wide means web-pages can be viewed without scrolling horizontally.)
(more…)

By Roger Sperberg

The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet is not the perfect e-reading device. If it were, it would come with the world-class FBReader pre-installed instead of making you download the software yourself.

Instead, Nokia shows how secondary books are to its thinking by including a Web browser and Flash 7 plug-in, as though Web pages, animation and video were of equal value to e-books; including speakers (and headphone jack) and FM radio, as though listening to music or audiobooks were as important as type; and squeezing five times the usual number of pixels into each square inch of the display as if that were adequate justification for making the screen barely wider than the width of text on a paperback book page.

Pocketable

Sure, the small size means you can carry it everywhere with you because it fits easily into a pocket or purse and weighing only 7 ounces means you actually will carry it everywhere.

And yes, you’ve got to admit that having a PDF reader and the capability to read Word documents (and edit them) if need be does enable the N800 to encompass work documents too and not just “book” books.[1] (more…)