TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Wired Magazine’ Category

By Paul Biba

Actually this article is called “How to un-cripple your international Kindle” but the title is misleading. It is a very nice summary of how to use any Kindle’s wireless connections to get content that Amazon does not offer. I even learned a thing or two about Calibre. I never really know how the news functions of Calibre worked, but now I’m going to try them out. Here is what Charlie Sorrel says:

Calibre’s best trick, though, is its Fetch News feature. This works just like podcasting, only it’s for text (and pictures). Choose from a built-in list of newspapers and magazines (Wired.com is in there) and it will scrape the site at scheduled intervals and crunch the articles into an e-reader-friendly form. When you plug your Kindle into the computer, Calibre sees it and automagically sends the new issues across. They’re formatted just like the newspapers you might buy from Amazon.

Dig a little further and you can add custom sources. Plug in the URL of a newsfeed, choose persistence and schedules and you’re good to go. Calibre will grab any new items and package them up into an e-newspaper for you. It can even grab your feeds from Google Reader or Instapaper (and it does a better job that Instapaper’s own solution).

By Chris Meadows

In recent months, Apple has made more and more strange and arbitrary decisions about what applications to reject for the iPhone, eventually courting a full-fledged FCC investigation.

The iPhone (and iPod Touch) is not a wimpy PDA so much as a full-fledged computer, running a scaled-down version of OS X UNIX behind that brightly-colored facade of icons. It’s just as much of a Turing machine as the computer on your desktop—just a little less powerful.

Nonetheless, Apple insists on acting as a gatekeeper, treating that computer more like a standard cell phone to which they can restrict access. However, as Wired points out in this article, the jailbreak tool and Cydia package manager offer a way out of Apple’s app imprisonment—and as much as 10% of the 40-million-device iPhone and iPod Touch userbase may have taken advantage of it.

[Note: “Jailbreaking” as discussed here should not be confused with “unlocking” a phone so that it can be used on competitors’ cell networks. The two are entirely different concepts, and require entirely separate tools.]

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By David Rothman

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and a forthcoming book called Free: The Future of a Radical Price, allegedly ripped off passages from Wikipedia.

“We have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources,” reports the Virginia Quarterly Review blog after working from an advance copy. 

Unfair guilt by association ahead?

Fairly or unfairly, If the charges are true, will this set back the "long tail” philosophy as well as the “free” one?

And what about the fact that, as some have noted, Wikipedia was involved? Was Anderson—editor in chief of Wired—less respectful of Wikipedia than of more traditional sources? And will this affair reflect on him as a researcher, as some believe? Yet another issue, noted in the blog, is Wikipedia’s license under Creative Common’s Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 option.

Chris Anderson’s rather mainstream publisher, Hyperion, is a branch of Walt Disney. The parent company packaged and branded old fairy tales and is a major foe of fair use. Anderson initially intended to provide citations, but they were dropped later on. Even so, should the wording in so many places have been so so similar?

The good news, from an E view point, is that the Web made it much easier to spot the similarities. Someday will e-book publishers routine submit their wares to a plagiarism-detection engine similar to those used at many campuses?

Anderson’s response: ‘My screwups’

“Anderson,” says the Review’s Waldo Jaquith, “responded personally to a request for comments about how this unattributed text came to appear in his book, providing the following remarks by e-mail:

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By Chris Meadows

TeleRead, MobileRead, and other e-book advocacy sites and blogs have complained about Kindle’s format lock-in for a long time. Sometimes it seems as if no one has been listening, as other complaints such as the brouhaha over text-to-speech take center field. However, Chris Snyder at Wired’s “Epicenter” blog has taken notice with an excellent article examining the issue from all sides.

The issue isn’t about DRM protections on the books themselves, but on Amazon’s decision to create — and now perpetuate — a non-portable format that a) denies readers the ability to read e-books they buy from the company on another device and b) books they might buy from an e-books competitor on the Kindle.

It’s a high-stakes strategy that has the potential of creating a standard by the scale of adoption — or join the lengthy list failed attempts to impose a format on market willing to put up with it only until a better alternative comes along. And, it almost always does.

Although TeleRead is not itself mentioned, one of the interviewees uses the term “E-Babel”—which was, as far as I know, coined by our very own David Rothman. (I do not remember ever seeing it in use anywhere before he started using it.)

The article also quotes an Amazon spokesman that Amazon is “agnostic” about e-book DRM, but notes that most publishers still want DRM because of what happened to the music industry.

The push to have Amazon adopt ePub compatibility is also mentioned, as is Tim O’Reilly’s belief that if Amazon does not open up, “the Kindle will be gone within two or three years.” And, for the first time as far as I know, an Amazon representative has responded:

“We are open to making that happen if we can make it a truly seamless and easy experience for customers,” Amazon spokesperson Portugal told Wired.com. “But today that format doesn’t allow us to offer a seamless customer experience on all our titles for Kindle.”

Finally, it mentions Amazon’s plan to make Kindle books available for mobile phones, though Amazon is still not saying what phones or when.

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By Chris Meadows

Found via the MobileRead forum: Wired’s Michael Calore has discovered that the OLPC’s “hidden killer app” is that it makes the “ultimate e-book reader.” Apparently this killer app was hidden so well that Calore was unable to find it for over a year after TeleRead brought it up.

The article touts the OLPC as a full-fledged computer in a rugged tablet form factor, with a screen designed to be visible even in direct sunlight. This does make a pretty appealing package, except for the fact that the OLPC can not support any e-book publisher’s DRM format at present. (Though this could change soon, if Fictionwise’s forthcoming Linux eReader application can be run under the OLPC’s “Sugar” operating system.)

The article does get one fairly important fact dead wrong—it claims (as of this writing) that buying the OLPC under its “give one, get one” program costs only $200, making it about half the price of the Kindle and Sony Reader.

However, it actually costs $200 for each of the laptops the buyer gives to the third world and gets for himself, bringing the cost to $400 for the consumer to get a single OLPC. That’s more than the Kindle or Sony cost, and more than a number of competing netbooks that have sprung up in the OLPC’s wake—such as the $249 Dell we just mentioned. (Which is why the OLPC “give one get one” program did so poorly this past year that the OLPC program had to lay off half its staff.)

The OLPC would make a great e-book reader, and I would not mind owning one at all for that purpose. But Wired seems to be a little late to the party with this observation.

By Paul Biba

TeleRead editor Paul Biba abused his editorial discretion today by making an off-topic post. The post pointed out that his daughter, Erin Biba, wrote the cover article for this month’s edition of Wired Magazine.

Mr. Biba was unavailable for comment, but has been seen wandering around the town where he lives stuffing copies of the magazine into unsuspecting shoppers’ pockets while giggling inanely.