TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘TeleRead’ Category

By Paul Biba

Christopher Kenneally, Copyright Clearance Center, moderator; John Silbersack, Trident Media Group; Sara Pearl, Trident Media Group

John Silbersack: literary agent. even for major authors electronic book sales only account for a few percentage points. Meeting with ebook companies who want to explain their ebook models almost every week, but still very little money being generated on these deals. Most companies don’t offer an advance but higher royalties. These companies are also selling a marketing platform. Probably not the time to fight the battle about who owns backlist ebook rights because of low monetary value. But it is a battle that will have to be fought eventually. 700 backlist works in the Isaac Asimov estate. How does the agent make them available? Time to try short term licenses and experimentation to find best way. Often these new products will be sold side-by-side with the original book. What makes this content different and takes it out of verbatim rights? For out of print books that have reverted to the author, spending a lot of time now sending termination notices to publishers. For the last 50 years in publishing has been a pretty common practice to use orphan works without permission and put aside some money in case someone comes forward. Not so different than what Google is doing now. For the working writer the Google settlement doesn’t make much difference because can opt in/out. How Amazon take a larger percentage of revenue from an ebook sale than the author gets.
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By Paul Biba

We are aware that many of you are getting security warnings about the site. We have both the NAPCO IT team and our friends at WPUgrade.com looking at it and hope to have the glitch fixed soon.

By Paul Biba

On le savait depuis un petit moment, et même que durant quelque temps, David Rothman nous avait proposé de devenir acquéreur de TeleRead (c’est très sérieux comme info, j’ai les mails à votre disposition, pour les sceptiques…). Car voilà, TeleRead n’est pas simplement une mine précieuse de renseignements, c’est avant tout un travail quotidien lourd et qu’à un moment, David préfère se consacrer à l’écriture plutôt qu’à la veille sur internet. Et personne n’y trouvera à redire. (more…)

By David Rothman

You never know who’s reading you when you write for TeleRead.

In the The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog today, Macy Halford’s E-Free post linked to two TeleRead contributions.

One was from David Wilk (Don’t ignore the reader: E-book pricing models and theories of value); the other, from Richard Adin (a proposal to kill off paperbacks).

As it happened, I agreed with Macy Halford. She approved of David’s idea of bundling free e-books with paper books but disliked Rich’s thought of killing off paperbacks. Here’s to reader choice! But look, I’m glad we ran both essays; perhaps time will show Rich to have been right. Meanwhile another TeleRead poster, Dan D’Agostino, tells me that some library science students are abuzz over The strange case of academic libraries and e-books nobody reads—exactly what he hoped would happen.

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By David Rothman

A detachable keyboard for a small portable—the idea is hardly new. Elonex has one already with a spalshpoof keyboard you can separate. That’s also a form factor I envisioned for TeleReaders back in 1992, and surely others had gone before me. You could always arrange for hinges or a stand to prop up the screen.

The results might even be nicer for extended typing than a laptop since you could separately vary your distances from the screen and keyboard.

So what do you think of Freescale Semiconductor’s smartbook reference design, ready for CES. If reality, the design might mean a $200 machine with a seven-inch screen. Actually the price might be just for the screen and CPU alone. Not sure. Sounds too high to me and others. But maybe it’s a hint of better things to come.

Certainly, for K-12, I like this approach much better than just a Kindle-style tablet or a netbook. I’d also like the screen a bit larger. And perhaps the unit could use retractable legs and notch the screen into the keyboard, for a true netbook when you wanted one.

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By David Rothman

Been reading e-books for years (or at least have boned up on ‘em in a hurry)? Want to share your expertise with others? Then write for TeleRead.

E-mail us and point us to a Web site or other writing samples.

You don’t have to be Ernest Hemingway—we just want plain, clear English and a knowledge of e-books. TeleRead is a meritocracy. Credentials count less than whether your words can please some tough editors, namely our readers. They nitpick away at everything, my stuff included, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Housekeeping: The ABCs of format conversion—and why you should know them, by John Schember (right photo) will be coming tomorrow. I wanted to run it today, but got sidetracked by the pieces on e-book search engines.

By David Rothman

Earlier item here. Thanks to Phil Bosua at LOL Software!.

By David Rothman

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it. And the same best wishes for other TeleRead community members, about their respective holidays, including Chanukah, my own. Happy New Year, too!

At the industry level, what do you want for 2010? Here are the “gifts” I’d like:

–Lower prices for e-book gizmos. They’re still typically about $200 and up, although I have seen the JetBook Lite on sale for around $130, a price no longer in effect, alas. Just what will hardware will it take for e-books to become a mass phenomenon? Of course, people can spend less than $50 to read them on used PDAs and cellphones or go with low-cost netbooks, or maybe wait past 2010 for One Laptop per Child’s XO-3, which is supposed to cost well under $100 in time.

–Better screens. E Ink still lacks decent contrast between text and background. The two most promising alternatives seem to be Pixel Qi and mirasol, shown in the left on a Kindle-style mockup.

–Wider selection of e-books. Despite initiatives like Google’s, just a fraction of the world’s books have been digitized, and I still can’t find many literary greats in E. Hello, Saul Bellow’s estate?

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By David Rothman

TeleRead, the oldest general e-book news and view site in the English language, has some new spring in its step following a successful move to a new server. Pages should load faster in your Web browser, and outages should be rare. Like the new page load speed?

Big  thanks to the FullThrottle Development, a WordPress specialist among other things, for making the transition so smooth.

By David Rothman

If all goes well, FullThrottle Development will begin TeleRead’s move to a speedier server at around 10 p.m. Washington, D.C., time. Once the maintenance notice is up, please delay comments until FullThrottle is done—so your words survive the move. I’m just guessing that the move will take several hours.

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By David Rothman

Good news, gang. A zippier TeleRead is ahead—one where the pages will load up, lickety-split. In the next few days we’ll move to a server run by FullThrottle Development, the outfit behind WordPress Upgrades.

The more we dealt with FullThrottle, the more we liked Glenn Ansley and colleagues, and it turns out that their company provides a lot of services that we may need in the future.

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By Paul Biba

A while back I published an article on the equipment I used to cover the various press events I go to for TeleRead, Palm Addict and GPSPassion. You can find it here. I thought you might find it interesting to see how I work on the TeleRead site.

I write for the site on a 17" MacBook Pro with a 500GB hard drive. The Pro is also connected to an external mains-powered 1TB hard drive with 2 partitions, one for a Time Machine Backup and another where I keep all my data. In addition to this I use three external USB 500GB drives: two to back up the Pro’s hard drive on alternate days and another to back up the external drive’s data partition every other day. All the USB hard drives are kept in a different room from my Pro. For backup I use SuperDuper, which works like a charm and has saved my rear end several times.

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