TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Copia is revising its hardware platforms for a second time

By Paul Biba

We’ve written about Copia in the past. They are setting up a social reading platform on the web which will be combined with an ebookstore and a series of ereaders. I was very impressed with them at Tools of Change and we reported on their revised devices about a month ago.

According to the Wall Street Journal they have revised their hardware platform for a second time. They will be offering, among others, a $99 5-inch color debice this fall

“The iPad disrupted pricing strategy for everyone in the e-reader market, and after the price wars with Barnes and Noble and Amazon, everyone’s trying to differentiate themselves from a price-point perspective,” Tony Antolino, senior vice president of DMC Worldwide, said. “We decided to do a revision of our hardware positioning.”

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DMCA exemptions that might have been

By Chris Meadows

Never one to pass up a chance to poke fun at an easy target, Internet humorist Lore Sjöberg has written a hilarious “Alt Text” column for Wired on “Library of Congress Rulings That Could Have Been”.

Other rulings give users the right to copy videogames for the purpose of researching the quality and type of security measures embedded therein — obviously the main reason people copy videogames — and the right to turn your electronic book into an electronic audio book, assuming there isn’t a legal audio book version already on the market.

I’m very excited about that last one, because at long last I can have A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates read to me to sleep at night.

Don’t miss his list of “rulings that the Library of Congress refused to make, on the grounds that nobody actually proposed them.” Perhaps Sjöberg could propose some of these himself next time around.

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A complete client list from The Wylie Agency

By Gary Price Founder and Senior Editor of Resource Shelf



With Andrew Wylie “threatening” (via FT.com, Registration Required) to expand his exclusive book deal with Amazon.com (OdysseyEditions) we thought some of you might find it both useful and interesting to review the Wylie Agency client list. The only thing we don’t know is how current this list is. It’s long, contains the names of MANY well-known authors, or their estates.

Access the Complete List

From the Financial Times:

Wylie theatens broad digital expansion (Registration Required for Full Text, Free)

Andrew Wylie, the literary agent whose exclusive deal with Amazon.com last week stunned the publishing world, has threatened a broad expansion of his digital publishing business to include up to 2,000 titles if traditional publishers refuse to improve digital royalties.

Mr Wylie has established a digital publishing company called Odyssey Editions and struck a deal with Amazon, giving the online bookseller exclusive access to 20 classics including John Updike’s Rabbit series and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man for a two-year period.

Access the Complete Article

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Indie game developer on when it’s all right to pirate his games

By Chris Meadows

Reaching into the world of video games again for another point that could apply equally to e-books. (At least it’s not about Valve this time.)

Jeff Vogel is the developer behind a number of independent games (perhaps the equivalent of self-published e-books in the video game world) including the Avernum series and Nethergate: Resurrection. And, though he’s nervous about speaking up about it (because he relies on his games to feed his family, after all), he has blogged about three relatively rare cases where he’s more or less all right with people pirating his games.

Though the blog post is about Vogel’s video games, these points could apply equally to music, movies…or, indeed, e-books, if their creators felt the same way. (Though, of course, Vogel does not claim to speak for anyone but himself and his own games in his post.)

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Editor’s Pick of the Week

By Paul Biba

Here we go again:

Andrew Wylie plans to expand Amazon backlist publishing effort by Chris Meadows

Kindle 3 vs Kindle 2 in size plus hands-on report by PC World’s Perenson – photos also by Andrys Basten

iBook buyers beware – no refund or exchange even if your book has been updated!

iPad e-book app review: DiceBook by Chris Meadows

What is the real platform for ereading? Probably smartphones

Disintermediation Happens – Agents and the new reality by Eoin Purcell

Authors Guild on the economics of the Wylie/Amazon agreement – a 300% increase in author income?; may give Amazon too much power

LibriVox – free audiobooks in the public domain

A secret weapon for authors by Joanna

Wired Gadget Lab on the iPad sheet music page turner foot switch

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Barnes & Noble to ramp up Nook promotion

By Paul Biba

According to the NY Times, B&N is going to put a big push into increasing the promotion of its Nook ereader. This will be, in part, by building 1,000-square-foot boutiques in all its stores. The display areas will contain Nooks, demonstration tables, video screens and will be manned by employees who can give customers advice and instructions. The areas will also feature over 100 accessories for the Nook and will be placed outside each store’s cafe. Space will be obtained, in part, from music merchandise.

B&N CEO William Lynch said: “American consumers want to try to hold gadgets before they purchase them”. The article quotes an industry consultant as saying that almost 2 million Kindles have been sold as opposed to more than 600,000 Nooks. Of course the Kindle has had a 2 year head start so this isn’t quite a fair comparison.

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News Corp may dedicate a group to tablet devices

By Paul Biba

According to the Financial Times (registration required) News Corp is looking into setting up a dedicated unit within the company to provide content for a subscription application for tablets. The article says that this was brought about by News Corp’s early success in selling subscriptions on the iPad.

Evidently the service is not supposed to be something that would merely replicate a print newspaper on the iPad, and would have its own new staff and would borrow the resources, but not the content, of the New York Post, Dow Jones and external news sources.

A decision is expected by the autumn.

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BookLiberator $200 DIY scanner

By Chris Meadows

Gizmodo has a piece on the BookLiberator, a cube of plexiglass that contains two opposite-facing video cameras to photograph facing pages of a book. You place it on a book, photograph, lift, turn page, place it, etc.

Conceptually, this appears similar to the $300 DIY Book Scanner I covered in December—they both use two cameras to snap two facing pages at a time. The BookLiberator looks a little more tedious, comparing the two: with the DIY scanner, you just tilt up a hinged half-cube to turn the page, but with the BookLiberator you have to lift the entire cube out of the book.

Still, it’s good to see more non-destructive, relatively fast scanning technologies coming out, whatever the differences. Sooner or later, scanning will be something literally anyone can do. (Video embedded below the jump.)

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Wave of lower cost e-readers coming: are they all junk?

By Chris Meadows

TechCrunch has a piece looking at the new low-cost tablet and e-reader devices planned by Copia (as well as a Copia iPad app). We’ve covered Copia before; the readers’ “gimmick” is supposed to be a unique social-networking component to the devices, allowing readers to exchange reviews and recommendations about books. They recently announced new pricing on their devices.

Another TechCrunch writer uses the opportunity to suggest that we are seeing a repeat of the pricing race to the bottom that happened with netbooks: everyone is coming out with cheap devices, and most of them will be junk. John Biggs writes:

I don’t think ereaders can survive the race to the bottom. They serve a far too specific purpose to last very long and, unlike netbooks, there are no virulent pro-junk ereader owners out there. At best they’re indifferent and at worst they’re disappointed by the ebook selections available to them.

Meanwhile, Read Write Web reports that Sony isn’t necessarily going to continue to trade shots with Amazon and Barnes and Noble (and, for that matter, Borders with the Kobo) as they participate in an e-book reader price war.

"Pricing is one consideration in the dedicated reading device marketplace, but Sony won’t sacrifice the quality and design we’re bringing book lovers to lay claim to the cheapest eReader," said Phil Lubell, VP of Digital Reading at Sony Electronics.

It’s easy to see the low prices for tablets and similar devices as heralding the arrival of a load of cheap junk (see the pieces on the Augen “smartbook” and tablet that Kmart is ostensibly carrying). But on the other hand, there was a similar wave of “cheap” e-book readers back when the Kindle and Nook were priced higher, occupying the price range that the Kindle and Nook devices are in now (though most of them have since disappeared from view).

It might just be that by the time the cheap devices currently occupying that niche go away, the “name brand” readers will be ready to take over that price point, too.

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Hooray! Dictionary, Google and Wikipedia lookups in Kindle updates for iPhone, iPod and iPad—plus word search

By David Rothman

As eagerly as I slammed Amazon for dissing ePub, let me praise it for the fine dictionary and other wrinkles in the just-updated Kindle apps for the iPhone, iPod and iPad.

Fittingly, I’m in the middle of reading Losing Mum and Pup, a sprightly memoir by Christopher Buckley, son of the late William F. Buckley, Jr. WFB, my political opposite, was a strong supporter of the TeleRead vision of a well-stocked national digital library system. Maybe partly in deference to the father, the son’s  memoir serves up more than its share of Latin and French phrases. Jeff Bezos’s dictionary, as you can see to the left, is up to the task at hand.

You’ll also notice that the updates include Google and Wikipedia lookups, and as a bonus, it’s easier than before for me to select text on my iPad for notes or highlighting. Also handy will be the new search function. It can display multiple occurrences of a word.

Jeff, this is all good stuff. Just please—let Kindle hardware and the apps also work their magic on ePub.

And while you’re at it, I still would like the bold-all-text function I’ve been begging major vendors for. Even with good hardware, some of us can enjoy e-books more easily that way.

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Amazon’s me-first ‘tude against ePub: Time for librarians to spank Jeff Bezos if he won’t play well with others

By David Rothman

OK, gang. Parse this exchange between USA Today reporter Edward C. Baig and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, amid the ballyhoo for the third-generation Kindle:

Q: Why doesn’t Amazon support the popular "e-pub" standard used by your competitors and many libraries?

A: We are innovating so rapidly that having our own standard allows us to incorporate new things at a very rapid rate. For example: Whispersync (which uses wireless connections to sync your place in a book across devices) and changing font sizes.

Other standards over time may incorporate some of these things. But we’re moving very quickly to improve the state of the art. It’s very helpful not to have to wait for some third-party standard to catch up.

Chris Meadows nicely shot that one down. So ePub at one point would not even allow font-size changes? Come on, Jeff. From afar I love the better traits of the new Reader and may buy one myself, and I recognize that the Amazon has its share of positives. Respect for e-book standards just isn’t one of them.

In fairness to Jeff, I’m also grouchy toward the International Digital Publishing Forum, the creator and developer of ePub. He is right about the group’s inadequacies. Two years ago and probably earlier, I myself wrote on the sync issue, suggesting that the IDPF come up with an industry standard (since we’re not talking about format matters per se, I’d have been happy simply IDPF simply recognizing others’ efforts in this area).  No such luck. Whatever the reason, the IDPF has been too bleepin’ snailish in the past. I hope that changes, and in fact there are signs it might.

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Andrew Wylie plans to expand Amazon backlist publishing effort

By Chris Meadows

The Financial Times has an interesting article (free registration or Google News search required) covering controversial literary agent Andrew Wylie’s possible further plans. Wylie caused publishers to see red when he took twenty backlist titles whose e-book rights were not covered by contract and published them via Amazon. Wylie says that he is trying to promote the importance of unifying the print and digital revenue streams.

In an interview, Mr Wylie said he preferred to negotiate a deal with publishers that combined the print and digital rights, but had failed to reach a satisfactory compromise after nine months of discussions with all large publishing houses.

“If we do not reach an accord, Odyssey will grow. It will not publish 20 books, it will publish 2,000 and have outside investors and make itself available to other agents,” Mr Wylie told the Financial Times this week.

Other publishers point out that Wylie’s choice of titles is effectively limited since he is restricted to books from before the mid-1990s, when e-books were explicitly written into publishing contracts. So for current and recent books, those revenue streams are effectively united.

On the other hand, all rights from a number of books more recent than that will have reverted to the authors upon going out of print, meaning that those authors will be free to take the e-book versions to whomever they like. And if they’d like to get higher royalty rates for those books that have already earned out their advances, Wylie is offering them a place to go. (Or, of course, they could start their own e-publishing house, as Lynn Abbey, C.J. Cherryh, and Jane Fancher did with Closed Circle.)

Of course, as other agents have noted, since Wylie broke the territory with his controversial e-publishing deal, traditional publishers have suddenly become a lot more willing to make concessions in the matter of royalties for backlist titles.

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Bezos on EPUB, older Kindle resale value

By Chris Meadows

USA Today has another interview with Jeff Bezos (they’re popping up all over given today’s launch of the new Kindles) in which he addresses a couple of points some e-book fans have been asking about for a while.

Most notably:

Q: Why doesn’t Amazon support the popular "e-pub" standard used by your competitors and many libraries?

A: We are innovating so rapidly that having our own standard allows us to incorporate new things at a very rapid rate. For example: Whispersync (which uses wireless connections to sync your place in a book across devices) and changing font sizes.

Other standards over time may incorporate some of these things. But we’re moving very quickly to improve the state of the art. It’s very helpful not to have to wait for some third-party standard to catch up.

That’s right: changing font sizes is a new thing in the world of e-books. And if they had to support that pesky “third-party standard” then they never could have implemented it.

Bezos also points out, to people who just bought older Kindles after Amazon lowered the prices to move inventory prior to the new devices’ launch, that older Kindles do retain resale value quite well—and to be fair, that is true. After all, not much has really changed about the overall e-ink reading experience, and in a lot of respects the old Kindles still work as well as the new ones. They also can be passed down to friends or relatives.

Beyond that, much of what Bezos says here (about the drawbacks of touchscreens, multimedia, and color; the competition; and the growth of sales) he has already said elsewhere.

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Copyright, monopoly, and misconceptions

By Chris Meadows

Copyright is one of the legal theories that tends to come up most often in connection with e-books. The ease of copying digital data, coupled with laws against breaking decryption on that data, have generated a controversy that has been going on for at least twelve years now and shows no signs of stopping.

Yet there are quite a few misconceptions about copyright that tend to persist, and it’s time to try to clear some of them up. (Again.)

Copyright is a monopoly.

By which I don’t mean to say that publishing is a monopoly, though some people might still look askance at the Big Six or Agency Five with that point of view in terms of the recent Agency Pricing controversy. No, copyright itself is a monopoly—a government-granted monopoly over the publishing of certain works.

“But we own those works,” copyright holders might protest. “Of course we have a ‘monopoly’ over them!” They might find this to be obvious, in much the same way people poked fun at Amazon’s strangely-worded “capitulation” to Macmillan in the first few days after Amazon yanked Macmillan’s print titles.

But as much as people snorted at Amazon’s complaint that Macmillan had a “monopoly over their own titles,” it does have that monopoly—but only because, thanks to copyright law, the government says that Macmillan is the only one with the rights to publish those particular works, due to its agreement with the original copyright holders (the authors). Likewise, copyright holders only “own” their works because the government says they do, not from any property inherent in the works themselves.

If it weren’t for those laws, anyone could publish anything with impunity. (As US publishers did with foreign authors’ books, in the 19th century when the US didn’t recognize other nations’ copyrights.) There’s no natural law saying that only the person who wrote the words can copy them, the way that physical objects can only be in the possession of one person at a time. Anyone can copy words or pictures—unless the government steps in to say, “No you can’t.”

There is a common misconception today, especially among people who create copyrighted works, that the purpose of copyright is to protect the people who create copyrighted works. But in a terrific essay in Open Spaces Magazine, law professor Lydia Pallas Loren reminds us that the real reason that copyright was written into the US Constitution was to protect not the creators of the work, but the public as a whole.

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Publishing Point meeting – Naveen Selvadurai of Foursquare

By Paul Biba

At the Publishing Point meeting in NYC. For any of our readers in the City and environs, check out the Publishing Point website and see what’s coming up. They always do the most interesting stuff. Check out their site for videos of their past presentations. Some ebook related, some not.

Today they presented Co-founder of Foursquare and an expert in mobile apps, Naveen Selvadurai, who described the Foursquare site and the concepts behind it. The video will be up on their Publishing Point site soon. Have more than 2million users and over 100 million checkins after only 17 months of operation.

While not directly ebook related, the video of the presentation is worth seeing because it underlines how social media are becoming the more and more important in current society. (It also looks like a really cool thing to do; I’m going to sign up.)

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Media keep coming up iPad

By Chris Meadows

The iPad is so popular these days that everything is coming out with special interfaces for it. There was Pulse, which turns a selection of favorite RSS feeds into something similar to a magazine. Then there was Flipboard, which does the same for links posted to social networks.

Now here are a couple more web media joining the party. Cooliris, a company known for its browser and iPhone photo apps, has created an app for the iPad called Discover that imports content from Wikipedia and reformats it into an iPad-magazine-style interface. Cooliris hopes eventually to bring the same reformatting technique to more content from elsewhere on the web.

Meanwhile, a new WordPress plug-in called PadPressed brings iPad features such as swiping to advance articles to WordPress blogs, making them act more like iPad magazine applications. Like Cooliris, programmer Jason Baptiste has greater ambitions for his plug-in: “We did WordPress first because it’s the largest thing there is next we’re doing Tumblr, Posterous, Moveable Type, and then custom CMSs.”

Whether it will kill the Kindle or not, it’s hard to argue that the iPad has not already had an indelible influence on user interfaces—just like other Apple products that came before it.

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