Where Amazon has been opening separate stores for various different countries and languages (most recently a French store), Kobo makes all content for all languages available from the same store.

One example which shows why Kobo is ahead of iBookstore or Kindle Store – Smashwords. Books from Smashwords are theoretically available at Kindle Store, Kobo and iBookstore. The deal with Amazon doesn’t seem to work yet. There are over 40,000 Smashwords books in iBookstore US, but I can’t find a lot of them in iBookstore PL. So far, if I wanted to buy Polish books published at Smashwords, I could jump either to Smashwords or to Kobo.

He also points out that Kobo’s use of plain-vanilla Adobe DRM on EPUBs means that it is not restricted solely to Kobo’s own e-book store—it can read any e-books that are sold in Adobe-DRM’d EPUB (as well, of course, as the ones sold DRM-free).

namenick makes some interesting points. It could very well be that even as Kobo remains in third or fourth place in the US e-book market, it will still stay in the running by catering to the places the bigger US names aren’t touching.

Designer Elliot Jay Stocks blogs about Adobe’s pricing scheme, which involves a £3636 platform fee plus a minimum of £3367 set toward the .16 per issue Distribution Service Fee Adobe charges.This is in addition to the cost of the software itself, which doesn’t exactly come cheap, and the 30% fee Apple charges for each issue.

Writes Stocks:

These fees may be a drop in the ocean for large publishing houses, but for those of us who publish on a more independent scale, we’re effectively being priced out of the market. It’s certainly possible to make a profit with Adobe’s model, but it requires a huge audience to make that investment a viable one. If you doubted the worth of producing an iPad magazine due to the extra production time involved, then you have even more reason for concern in the wake of this news from Adobe.

However, the biggest problem I have with this model is not necessarily the actual costs; it’s the fact that Adobe are asking for even more of our money. Not content with charging outrageous prices for bloated, processor-intensive, crash-happy software, they want to make the publishing industry exclusive once again and ignore the last 25 years that fostered such innovation.

He points out the recent criticism of iPad apps as being bloated, poorly-built, and generally inferior to web- or HTML5-based apps, and suggests that it might be a good idea to go ahead with them rather than pay Adobe’s danegeld.

Stocks sees three possible outcomes: people bite the bullet and use Adobe’s software, they switch to one of Adobe’s competitors, or (the one he hopes for) people start realizing that individual magazine apps don’t make sense and make better browser-based experiences instead (which will improve things for everyone).

I think the third option is the best one to hope for, too. The great thing about e-publishing is the egalitarianism of it—electrons don’t cost that much money, so folks with few resources can put together as good an experience as the big boys. Or at least, they should be able to in theory if they’re not being priced out of the market.

On ZDNet, James Kendrick has an interesting post in which he puts forward the theory that tablet computers are “impulse purchases”—things that people decide to buy because they look cool rather than out of any specific need for them. As such, he points out, they have to be priced low enough that the price doesn’t get in the way of the impulse to purchase, and suggests that $500 is the ceiling above which consumers lose that impulse. He believes that no matter how feature-packed a tablet like Motorola’s XOOM might be, if it’s more expensive than the iPad people will balk at the price.

He may have something there. But if that’s the case, I’d suggest that e-book readers must be even more of an impulse buy, given that they are considerably less versatile than tablets (and most don’t have color displays). And speaking of which, David Carnoy has a piece on CNet about how the drops in Kindle prices have forced other readers such as Kobo, Velocity Micro, and Sony models to lower their prices temporarily or permanently. At $99, several of these readers have a considerably better potential to be “impulse buys” than any tablet.

And speaking of tablets and e-readers, new owners of the Notion Ink Adam experienced some frustration as the first software update unexpectedly bricked their devices. Fortunately, the Notion Ink team has rapidly issued a downloadable 80MB fix that can be run from any Windows or Linux PC with a USB-to-mini-USB cable.

Of course, Adobe is the one who actually makes those iPad magazine apps, and there’s also the little problem that relatively few people are interested in paying full cover price for them. So it’s not clear whether this is going to have any greater significance for advertisers in the long run. But still, it’s kind of interesting.

The WWF format is a PDF that cannot be printed out. It’s a simple way to avoid unnecessary printing. So here’s your chance to save trees and help the environment. Decide for yourself which documents don’t need printing out – then simply save them as WWF.

SAVE AS WWF, SAVE A TREE

A format that depicts exactly how a document will look when printed out, that you can’t print out? How extraordinary! Why, I’ve never heard of such a thing! Oh, no, wait. Yes I have.

As “DRM” goes, WWF doesn’t seem particularly effective. Breaking it could be as easy as installing Ghostscript and creating a 7-line batch file. (Would the DMCA come into play here, I wonder? Does preventing something from printing out even count as “DRM”?)

On the other hand, the idea does at least get people talking and thinking about how much we print out unnecessarily. So maybe that’s one point to them.

Still, it’s amusing to envision the WWF and the paper manufacturer behind use-more-paper site PaperBecause.com fighting it out in a WWE-style arena match.

(Found via Engadget, Lifehacker.)

“It’s frustrating,” said Rona Brinlee, the owner of the BookMark in Neptune Beach, Fla. “In this age of instant books, why does it take so long to reprint it?”

Oddly, the article does not follow this question up by pointing out that it can be had as an “instant book”—the publisher offers it as an Adobe e-book for $28 and Amazon is selling a Kindle edition for $9.79. And given Amazon’s recently-added ability to send e-books as gifts (at least in the USA), those who want to give the Twain bio (or any other book) to their Kindle-owning friends or relatives are all set. Furthermore, it can be read on-line for free (albeit in a slightly awkward interface).

And yet, consumers are still rushing to buy the bulky, unwieldy print edition. Yes, e-books still have a ways to go yet.

iPad magazine apps do attract strong advertiser interest, Vinh notes to his surprise. He suspects that it may be an indicator of a bubble rather than any real market for iPad magazine apps—the audience has shrunken dramatically for these apps since their original introduction.

And the reason for this may be that, in aping the format of printed magazines, they are working at odds with the way that iPad users like to read on their tablets.

As usual, these publishers require users to dive into environments that only negligibly acknowledge the world outside of their brand, if at all — a problem that’s abetted and exacerbated by the full-screen, single-window posture of all iPad software. In a media world that looks increasingly like the busy downtown heart of a city — with innumerable activities, events and alternative sources of distraction around you — these apps demand that you confine yourself to a remote, suburban cul-de-sac.

Vinh places a lot of the blame on Adobe, who create many of these applications through their tablet publishing solution. The app encourages publishers to design for a print medium in the knowledge that they can translate that design to tablet format. This results in monolithic apps that take a long time to download and sync and do not offer any sort of social networking or sharing access.

What publishers should be trying to do, Vinh suggests, is concentrate on smaller, nimble apps that can keep readers attention and let them experience the content how they want to. He suggests Flipboard as a positive example.

I think it’s interesting to contrast how e-magazines and e-books have performed in this area. E-books, after all, try to imitate the printed form on the tablet (right down to featuring facing pages and page-turn animations in iBooks). But they seem to have done all right so far. Of course, most e-books do not have anywhere near the layout and picture content of magazines,

(Found via Techdirt.)

Masnick finds the overall copyright claim that the Mark Twain foundation puts on it to be misleading, because the portions of it that have never before been published, as well as the portions that were published before 1923 and any portions published between 1923 and 1963 on which copyright was not renewed, ought to be in the public domain. (I discussed the same issue back in May.)

That being said, he notes that the entire work is available to read on-line for free so it’s not as if the copyright is being used to deny people access to it. I find the format in which it’s posted not terribly easy to read (it’s in a portrait mode page confined to the middle of the window, which I can’t expand save by expanding the font size on the browser), but it’s still nice to have it available.

The University of California Press lists the first volume as an Adobe E-book for $28, which seems like rather a lot; Amazon lists a Kindle edition for $9.99. (Oddly, though the release date for the volume is supposed to be November 15th, Amazon seems to be shipping the book now.) Certainly a 760-page volume for $9.99 gives you a lot for the money.

The press release is full of claims that it provides better security and efficiency and enables better collaboration. I have little doubt that most ordinary users will probably never touch even a tenth of these new features, and probably won’t notice the difference in general.

Christopher Dawson at ZDNet reports on one feature he finds particularly interesting, however—it simplifies the process by which students can build digital portfolios of their works. Users can not only convert multiple documents in different formats into a single PDF, but can even incorporate files in their native formats.

He also points out that one of the features it brings is something that various other e-book platforms have had for a while—the ability to annotate PDFs, and even share the annotations with others.

If it sounds like I’m gushing, well, I am. Educators spend inordinate amounts of time trying to bring a variety of documents together in a usable form for students. Students, on the other hand, often lack the tools or wherewithal to assemble a meaningful portfolio. And students with special needs often end up without adequate supporting documentation to demonstrate that they have met state standards because portfolio management is so difficult. Acrobat X literally solves all of these problems in a smooth, polished package. Add in features ranging from document automation to SharePoint integration and you have a really powerful tool that just happens to fit the education vertical to a T.

While this certainly does sound like a big step forward, especially for uses in education, I still catch myself wondering whether Acrobat X is secretly the long lost brother of Speed Acrobat…

Recently released by the National Archives, digitized Escape and Evasion Reports are now available for download in PDF format to your eReader of choice.

Detailed firsthand accounts of harrowing escapes and near-captures by Axis occupiers, Allied aircrew no longer remain faceless.  Instead, we learn their names, hometowns and quite possibly a new view of World War II that up until now was not available online.

The fastest way of getting to the reports is via the link from the NARAnations blog. Clicking on the link, http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/action/ExternalIdSearch?id=305270, will bring you to the main entry for all the reports.  Once there you can browse the list or do further searching, depending upon what subject or person(s) you might be interested in.

Additional tabs at the top give you more background and information about the reports, including Scope & Content, Archived copies (where the actual materials are stored), and Hierarchy, or where this particular report fits into the larger collections made available by the National Archives.

Choosing to browse the reports en masse results in a long list of individual names. While it’s fun to look at individual’s reports, this can prove quite time consuming  if you are looking for something specific.  Searching within the results of all the reports, which is an option, might prove more fruitful.

Selecting a name and clicking on it will bring you to the main entry point for the resource.  While there is some basic information about the person and subject, etc., your best results will be in actually downloading the PDF.

It’s important to note that the reports I did download and sample had been scanned in as images and were not searchable within their contents.  To be perfectly honest, however, in all actuality, OCR’ing these reports would be difficult as they are a mixture of handwritten interviews mixed with typewritten official documents.

From the eReader standpoint, you should be able to transfer and view the reports without too many problems as most devices now support PDF formats, albeit not always easily in some cases.

There’s also the issue of reading a PDF on a small device such as the phone or iPod, but zoom controls, etc. can help to make things more legible.

Along these same lines, there might be some issues with some older devices with limited memory and weaker processors. Given these files are in image-driven PDF, you might have to wait an extra minute or two for them to render on screen.

Even with these limitations, this remains a wonderful resource if you are a World War II buff or historian and helps to bring a face or a name to a mass of reports that might not have otherwise been made available.  If you have a moment give it a try.  Below, you will find links to the actual site as well as NARA to get you started.  Have fun!

Links:

NARAnations blog release: http://blogs.archives.gov/online-public-access/?p=2751

Archival Research Catalog link to reports: http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/action/ExternalIdSearch?id=305270

Sources:

Images courtesy National Archives, http://www.archives.gov/, and are VLC snapshots of multimedia available on site.  War poster courtesy National Archives war poster collection.

Kafka explains that the blame can be placed on Adobe’s magazine app, which “essentially functions as an image reader”, turning each magazine page into “several big photos” rather than presenting it as text. The problem with presenting it as text in HTML, New Yorker Deputy Editor Pam McCarthy says, is that the Adobe app can’t paginate HTML—it just presents it in one long scrollable sheet, which she feels is suboptimal for reading a 10,000-word article.

McCarthy expects a version of Adobe’s software that supports HTML pagination to be available before too long, but even so the magazine doesn’t appear likely to shrink too much. And unless Apple and magazine publishers are able to iron out some kind of compromise, don’t look for subscription prices to be available either.

iPad magazine apps are pretty much a non-starter for me. I certainly don’t see any point spending too much money for a too big app that I can’t do as much with as I could a web version, and fixing the size issue will only change one of those problems.

There are all sorts of compelling reasons to try an alternative PDF reader, security not being the least. Adobe Reader is also quite stingy with its functionality – you can’t even annotate PDFs.

Nitro PDF Reader is an alternative reader with a modern-looking interface, and it offers generous annotation options. Unlike Foxit Reader, Nitro doesn’t appear to watermark your PDF when you annotate it. You can highlight sections of the document, add text, add sticky-notes, and stamp your signature (not a digital signature – just a scanned one).

Earlier this year, Apple’s refusal to allow the use of third-party development platforms to create iOS applications touched off a minor furor (and an FTC investigation). Among other things, this meant that Wired Magazine would have to create an entirely separate version of its tablet magazine app for the iPad, instead of being able to create one version in a Flash-based Adobe development environment and export it for multiple platforms including the iPad.

Today, Apple has changed its mind—and its iOS Developer Program license.

In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need.

Businessweek reports that Adobe’s stock has jumped 11% in morning trading since the announcement. It will be interesting to see if Wired will drop the separate development process for its iPad edition, and whether the changes will be noticeable from a user interface point of view.

But another part of Apple’s announcement might, in the long term, be even more meaningful:

In addition, for the first time we are publishing the App Store Review Guidelines to help developers understand how we review submitted apps. We hope it will make us more transparent and help our developers create even more successful apps for the App Store.

App developers have long been after Apple to add more openness and transparency to its somewhat arbitrary-seeming application review process, given that the current system makes it hard to know ahead of time what unguessed-at pitfalls might render all of a developer’s hard work pointless. This announcement suggests that Apple is finally getting around to it, though of course time will tell just how open the process will really become. As Gizmodo points out, even if the rules are all out in the open, it doesn’t help much if their enforcement is still arbitrary.

Richmond writes:

Can we pause for a moment to remind ourselves just how absurd this situation is? It’s been a problem for so long that sometimes it’s easy to take it for granted but we are being sold products that work in one set of circumstances but not others. And there’s no good reason for the distinction. It’s not as if this is a piece of software that needs to be re-written for each new platform – it’s just text.

The limitation is artificial and it’s only there to prevent unauthorised copying but it’s a wasted effort because anyone who intends to share these books can remove the DRM in no time. As always with DRM, it’s the law-abiding customer who gets punished.

He goes on to explain how he used txtr to get around the Adobe DRM by uploading the e-books to its servers and then downloading them into the iPad app. He isn’t wholly satisfied with that solution, but supposes that “it’s a choice between that or nothing.” (He apparently didn’t investigate far enough to find one of the cracks that allow Adobe DRM to be removed while keeping the book in EPUB format, which would have allowed loading them directly into iBooks.)

Richmond compares the current situation of having his books spread across multiple e-book apps to “having bookshelves in four different rooms and not being allowed to move books between them”—a situation with which I can sympathize, given that I’m now having to diversify my own e-library since eReader and Fictionwise can no longer carry the titles I want to read.

Ironically, Richmond says, all content industries vow not to repeat the digital mistakes of the music industry—but the music industry has actually been getting its act together, while books, film, and TV continue to make it hard for consumers to enjoy their products.

None of this is exactly new, of course, but it is still nice to see it continues to be said. Maybe if enough people speak up, the content industries will begin to pay attention. It probably won’t happen, but we can dream, can’t we?

The article notes that B&N faces the problem that the Nook simply isn’t as well-known as the Kindle, but points out that this has the potential to change given that B&N has the ability to promote its device through its physical stores, which Amazon does not.

Meanwhile, eBookNewser reports that Amazon is holding a Kindle commercial contest. Kindle owners can create and submit a 30-second commercial by August 29th. The grand prize winner will get a $15,000 Amazon gift card, and four runners-up will get a $2,500 card each.

And Peter Kafka at All Things Digital’s MediaMemo reports that Condé Nast, whose Wired app is the poster child for the Adobe/Apple Flash feud, has come out with another magazine app—this one for Glamour, and created entirely in-house (unlike Wired’s Adobe partnership). The New Yorker is reportedly up for the app treatment next.

The Glamour app costs $3.99 per issue—like the Wired app, the same as the print price. One new feature Kafka points out is the ability for readers to tap on images to go to a website where they can order the item shown. Glamour isn’t getting a referral cut yet, but that could change.