TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘TeleRead’ Category

By David Rothman

Two of TeleRead’s three RSS feeds should be working again now—let me know if you have problems. This includes the main feed and the comments feeds. The audio feed should come alive once we get our Categories function restored. Sorry for the interruptions, folks—the result of the blog’s move from a directory to the main address at teleread.org.

Reminder: After you click on a feed, if you’re set up right, you can add us to services such as Google or Bloglines.

By David Rothman

Makes sense, doesn’t it? Move the TeleRead blog—the most popular part of the TeleRead site—to the home page at teleread.org.  (Just to clarify a bit:  this page’s address will become teleread.org, it will no longer be necessary to add the /blog to the end of the address.  All calls to www.teleread.org/blog will be re-directed to just plain teleread.org, so you shouldn’t see a difference.  If you have a problem because your browser doesn’t allow re-directs,  just use the plain teleread.org address in the future. Paul)

So that’s what we’ll do in the next few days if everything works out. The old home page, shown here with the usual TeleRead headlines, will vanish. But files related to TeleRead the cause will remain.

RSS feeds for the TeleBlog should still work, but if not, just visit our home page and look for them in new locations. What’s more, links to TeleRead within the current /blog directory will direct to the TeleBlog’s new home. Contact Paul Biba or me if you have problems.

New hosting service: Webhead Design

Big thanks to Robert Nagle, meanwhile, for hosting TeleRead on his leased server. He’ll still write for us, luckily, and have a bit more time for that and other pursuits now that Brett Fielo of Webhead Design is donating his hosting services and related tech help.

Like Robert, Webhead  fits TeleRead’s philosophy well: “Webheaddesign is a web application design and development firm specializing in developing web solutions using open source technologies.” By all means check out Webhead for your own company’s needs! Webhead has expertise in such areas as PHP, XHTML, CSS, ZEN-CART, MySQL, AJAX, JavaScript, Flash, Motion Graphic, Drupal and video. Contact info is here.

Thanks to Paul for making the Webhead connection!

By David Rothman

Net-hater Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, warns that Barack Obama’s broadband plan could lead to digital fascism on the U.S.

“Imagine the FDR-baiting, Hitler-loving Father Charles Coughlin, equipped with his ‘personalized’ YouTube channel, able, at a click of a button, to distribute his racist message to the suffering masses,” Keen writes in The Daily Beast.

Now, here’s the kicker. I don’t think Keen is entirely wrong, despite his hyperbole.

I’m still waiting for policymakers of understand the need for a well-stocked national digital library system—and more encouragement of book reading in our schools. That’s what TeleRead is about.

E-books can’t single-handedly save us from fascism if the current recession turns into a full-fledged Great Depression, but they can help, by encouraging more sustained thought than videos could.

Related: The Long Decline of Reading in Adrian Hon’s blog (via Mike Cane). Also see an earlier TeleBlog item, E-books, and prep for teachers and librarians, please, Barak—not just broadband: TeleRead, anyone?

(Beast article found via David Farber’s Very Interesting People List.)

By David Rothman

“Don’t blame” carnage in the book industry “on the recession or any of the usual suspects, including increased competition for the reader’s time or diminished attention spans,” says David Streitfeld, a New Yok Time staff writer, in an opinion piece. “What’s undermining the book industry is not the absence of casual readers but the changing habits of devoted readers.” Particularly the buying of used books, he believes. Excerpt:

“Andy Ross, the former owner of Cody’s, told me that buying books online ‘was not morally dubious, but it is tragic. It has a lot of unintended consequences for communities.’

“Mr. Ross said he realized that Cody’s was doomed when he noticed that in the last year he hadn’t sold a single copy of that old-reliable for undergraduates, Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason.’ Students presumably were buying it online. Sales of classics and other backlist titles used to be the financial engine of publishers and bookstores as well, allowing them to take chances on new authors. Clearly that model is breaking. Simon & Schuster, which laid off staffers this month, cited backlist sales as a particularly troubled area.”

Unwitting harm to literacy cause

Novelists, Inc., of course, the aptly named outfit behind the proposal to forced used bookstores to pay “Secondary sale” fees to publishers and writers, will love Streitfeld’s thoughts. Much of the rest of world, as TeleRead’s Chris Meadows makes clear, might not. Used books are protected under the first sale doctrine—the right to sell copies of books you acquire. It’s a tricky matter, this business of deciding how perfect copies of digital books would fit in. But Novelists, Inc. wants fees paid even on paper books. So much for helping literacy, eh? Or for enabling readers to limit their their gamble on just-discovered writer, so that can later buy the authors’ works new?

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By David Rothman

I’ve got Skype, I’ve got Yahoo Messenger, I follow RSS feeds, various online aggregators, you name it. So Twitter wasn’t that high on my list.

Twitter, though, is very high on other people’s, and maybe I can find time if I cut back a little on RSS feed-watching. So now you can follow me via twitter.com/davidrothman—or click on the “Follow David link” near the top of the second column of the TeleBlog home page. I’ll be adding a photo when the Twitter gods permit. The system is currently too busy for that.

My Twitter posts will be a mix of personal odds and ends, TeleRead and news of The Solomon Scandals, my Washington newspaper novel.

My e-mail address—in case you want to act on the note’s request for feedback: dr at teleread.org.

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By Paul Biba

A few reader submitted articles in response to my earlier requests, but we’d love to see more.

Next time you’re tempted to post  a long comment, why not turn it into a short article instead? Or, even better, come up with a new e-book-related topic. We can’t think of everything. Some of our best contributors, such as Chris Meadows, Ficbot and Garson O’Toole, started out as commenters. Whether it’s wisdom on e-book standards or tips for novices, we want to hear from you.

Just e-mail the the text to readingelectronically@gmail.com. I’ll format it, put in a picture and post it under your name.

By David Rothman

Sure though, comp-sci professor Christos H. Papadimitriou, author of Turing (A Novel about Computation), wants the MIT Press to publish an e-book version. That’s the professor in the photo below.

He wrote me: "Obviously I’d love to see this. Let’s see how they react to the idea."

Currently, the only versions of his book online are pirated—scanned from the p-edition and mocking those who think DRM can protect books.

For book people who don’t know, mathematician Alan Turing is regarded by some as the father of modern computer science. Talk about the ironies of there being no e-book, even five years after publication of the Papadimitriou novel!

On top of that, the Press and ASIS&T published Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier, the last chapter of which contains a 1990s incarnation of my TeleRead proposal for well-stocked national digital libraries integrated with local and academic libraries and schools.

By David Rothman

Barack Obama has not just stood out as a senator and presidential-elect per se.

He is also a source of hope as a role model, and a fairly a tech-smart one at that. Far more than his predecessors, he is comfortable with electronics and the use of the Net as a tool for fund-raising and organizing.

The e-book angle

Now here’s an e-book-related issue. Is it possible President-elect Obama could further literacy by reading an e-book from time to time and telling the press about it?

Granted, paper books exist, too, and the world is already talking about his reading them—and even writing them. But e-books have a special role to play in literacy campaigns among African-Americans and other minorities and young people in general:

• They can easily be distributed on many phones and MP3 players, including iPod Touches. Imagine the benefits in rural areas and urban neighborhoods without good libraries nearby. Having better eyes and a more open attitude, young people are more likely to try out smaller screens than older users are. What’s more, big-screen e-book readers will appear in the future and come down in price. Furthermore, improved book distribution isn’t just a minority issue. Some Caucasian Alaskan are hundreds of miles from well-stocked libraries.
• Distribution is cheaper and easier than for p-books, especially in an era when even giant bookstore chains like Borders are are in peril. At least some savings can be passed on to consumers even if editorial costs and some other expenses will be the same. There is a shortage of good books with minority themes, and E would be one way of economically addressing it.
• Freebies are available of many classics, including some by minority writers (not enough of these books—but a start).
• Young people lead busy lives; now what if they could check out p-books at the library and download the e-versions to read when they were in line at the movies or were stuck in study hall? Cellphones are spur-of-the-moment devices that the young can stash away in pockets or purses (at least when schools allow phones and other electronics). Dedicated readers could be used, too, especially within school systems that banned phones and other interactive devices.
• Some of the young would actually rather press a button than turn a page. So reports an acquaintance of mine who works with K-12 students from a Virginia housing project.
• E-books could reduce backstrain from p-textbooks. Not every textbook lends itself to digitization, especially for small screens. But many do.

No, I don’t have an illusion that all minority children will suddenly start reading E and P just because the Obama loves books ranging from Roth novels to Moby Dick. And tech is just part of the equation: parents and teachers count far more. But E could help. And if Mama wants to read a Harlequin romance on a cellphone—well, even that could be useful to her as a role model.

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