The effectiveness of the actual books for children is just one issue. As part of preschool programs, children may learn how to hold and otherwise use a book; e-tech is more complicated for them and their parents alike. One question is the extent to which to associate multipurpose iPad-style devices with reading, as opposed to other activities. A Boston pediatrician, Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffee, reportedly has even said that children under two should not fiddle around with iPads except when the devices are displaying books. I myself can envision parents using the multimedia for themselves to master topics such as childcare and health-related ones. But that is different from just plopping an unattended toddler down in front of the iPad.

Rothman points out in a recent column on TeleRead that one of the points of his series is that parents should do more than “simply [use] e-books as babysitters.” But kids may not be the only ones who need to learn how best to use e-books in learning. Time has an article warning that parents who use e-readers with their kids can actually impede the learning process.

This phenomenon first turned up a few years ago in research at Temple University on e-books for preschool and elementary school children. Instead of talking with their children about the content of the books, parents ended up spouting “do this, don’t do that” directives about how to use the devices. “Parents would put their hands over the kids’ hands,” said Julia Parish-Morris, the leader of the study and now a post-doctoral researcher in pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania. “They were trying to control their children’s behavior” to get them to move through the story chronologically, she explained.

Another study mentioned in the article suggests that parents might “[have] to be trained on how to ask questions and prompt their children to talk about” books viewed through electronic media, as it doesn’t seem to come naturally.

This puts me in mind of some of my own experiences in tech support and lab assisting. One of the lessons I learned was that, if you want someone to learn how to do something, you can’t just reach in and do it for them—you have to talk them through it so they get that kinesthetic experience of doing it for themselves. That can be a really hard lesson to learn for someone without a lot of patience—you want to just get the thing done for them and move on. Perhaps it’s something similar with parents and gadgets—they want kids to use it “the right way” but have trouble realizing that there is no “right way” when it comes to learning.

Gizmodo points out that this shows demand for DVDs is still tenacious—perhaps more so than Netflix expected when it bet so heavily on the streaming future. It costs Netflix as much as 75 cents each time it rents a DVD through the mail, while it may only cost 5 to 10 cents each time it streams a movie. Netflix needs to cut its costs while raising revenues—while it’s cheaper to stream a movie once Netflix has it, licensing films is proving costly.

It’s a bit ironic—in the past I’ve written that Netflix got the jump on Blockbuster by betting heavily on the streaming future from the very beginning. (And indeed, in October 2009 David Rothman linked to a blog post (which is, unfortunately, no longer available) about Netflix’s CEO claiming DVD only had two years left.) But now it looks like Netflix may have overestimated its customers willingness to call rather than fold on that bet. Of course, the fee hikes may help Netflix, by driving away those who only wanted DVDs, increasing the fees paid by the ones who remain, and eliminating DVD costs altogether for those who move over to streaming. And perhaps this will lead to Netflix being able to add more titles to its streaming library.

Regardless, this should also be a lesson to e-book vendors about demands for old versus new media: much as consumers seem to be flocking to e-books now, there will still be a significant demand for printed books well into the future.

Ars Technica reports that Google will release the first e-ink reader optimized for Google Books in about a week. The iRiver Story HD, apparently a revision of iRiver’s 2009 Story e-reader, will include wifi and a qwerty keyboard, and cost $139.99 suggested retail when it hits the street July 17th. I’m not so sure I like the look of the page-turning button being in the middle of the device, with no apparent turning buttons to left and right. Still, we’ll see how it goes.

Business Wire reports that, thanks to the Nook Color and Amazon’s current lack of a color reader, Barnes & Noble actually sold more total e-book readers than Amazon in the first quarter of 2011. Market research company IDC reports that media tablets and e-readers saw the usual post-holiday sales fall-off, but e-reader sales show growth of 105% over last year. It will be interesting to see if the putative two-faced Amazon Android tablet helps Amazon recover sales momentum.

(William F.) Buckley loved my proposal (“inspiring”) and came out in the 1990s with two syndicated columns backing the vision. As a harpsichord-playing Yalie famous for political and cultural conservatism and cherishing archaic words, Buckley was hardly a populist in most respects. But he fervently agreed with me that a national digital library should be universal and offer popular content—both books and multimedia. The library should serve not just the needs of academics, researchers, and lovers of high culture.

The article discusses a bit of the background and history of ebooks for public consumption, and promotes LibraryCity.org, “a new online ad hoc group that will seek to deal with these matters, especially whether the national digital library should be mainly for the intellectual elite or also serve the rest of society in many directly practical ways.”  It goes on to present criteria for the national digital library:

• A wide variety of books and other items, including the literacy-building kind.
• Accessibility, mixed with realism.
• A democratic organizational model.
• Interactivity and long-term trustworthiness.
• Cost-justification.
• Other business principles.
• Flexibility, especially for the future.

Full text of the article, including details on the above bullet-points, are available on the Chronicle website.

Visit it from a desktop web browser and it looks perfectly ordinary. But go there via the iPad’s Mobile Safari, and the interface becomes essentially the same as an iPad app. You can even tap the “+” in the status bar to add an icon for it to your desktop, and thus pretend that it’s “just another iPad app”—only the presence of Safari’s status bar gives away that it’s still a webpage.

When reading ordinary blog entries, you can swipe the screen from left to right or right to left to move to previous or next entries (though it does take a second or two to load the new entry). About the only thing you can’t do is widen, pinch, or double-tap to zoom in or out.

David writes that the plug-in may be a little rough now, “but look, in effect, I’m giving you a preview not just of the book but also of the future. To think that I wrote the first draft of Scandals on an electric typewriter.”

I’m not entirely sure I think this is as significant as David does, though. He sees it as be a way to bypass Apple’s app-store censorship. And while that’s as true as it would be for any work published as a website rather than an iPad app, I don’t really see anything new about it.

For a long time TeleRead used a plug-in that gave it a simplified appearance on the iPhone’s Mobile Safari (I’m not sure if we still do or not, given that I no longer have my iPod Touch), but it was just a way to make our blog easier to read on that small screen, not a way to imitate an iPhone application. (Though we later went ahead and did a separate iPhone application.) This is essentially the same thing.

It looks nice, and it’s neat to be able to swipe between entries (albeit at a cost of a couple of seconds of loading time) but it’s not doing anything in terms of bypassing the app store that an ordinary web page doesn’t.

(Thanks to Mediabistro’s EBookNewser for also covering the story!)

But librarians do far more than just check out books. They help students with research and information technology, such as the Internet—or even e-books. Students, especially those from low-income families may not have access to the resources they need to do their schoolwork at home.

[Rosemarie Bernier, president of the California School Library Association and librarian at Hamilton High School in Los Angeles,] spoke of a student with a first period English class who came to her in tears because she didn’t have enough time to transfer and reformat the essay she had written on her cell phone. Since she doesn’t have a computer at home, the student’s cell phone is her only hope of completing assignments that need to be typed.

But increasingly, school libraries are being closed, or being staffed with people who only know how to check out books. This is especially worrying given how much more important Internet literacy is becoming as the world becomes ever more computerized.

One of the core principles behind the “Teleread” philosophy expressed by our founder, David Rothman, was the importance of using information technology to further education. But information technology by itself falls short without people who can help kids learn how to use it.

Thanks to the One Laptop Per Child program, kids in poorer parts of the world that had teachers are beginning to get the technology. How ironic it would be if kids in the USA keep the technology but lose the librarians who teach them how to use it.

David’s article is far too long to quote, but here is what Fallows has to say about the:

… guest essay by David Rothman, of the Teleread site and the DC roman-a-clef The Solomon Scandals. David was one of the journalism world’s earliest adopters of computers and related technology. Since 1992, when many people (including me) could barely imagine what a Kindle/Nook/iPad-style “e-reader” might be, he has been analyzing these devices and their social, economic, and political implications on his site. Previously on this site about such implications here and here. By the way, he is running a nice Fake Tony Hayward diary on his site.

In this essay, he proposes ways that radically speeded-up adoption of the iPad-style devices could serve economic-stimulus and social-equality needs at the same time. Although he doesn’t put it this way, it’s his counterpart to a post-Sputnik technology-promotion plan. …

David Rothman wanted Washington to see the acquisition as a signal to investigate the e-book industry for possible monopoly practices:

Washington often bungles things, but at least we can vote the bastards out of office. No one elected Jeff Bezos to boss the book business. Significantly, Stanza includes not just e-book-reading capabilities, but also online cataloging ones, which could well be weakened eventually to thwart Jeff’s competition, regardless of any promises to the contrary that Amazon may have made to Lexcycle, Stanza’s developers. Amazon is trying to become the Comcast of the e-book business, the gateway to most everything, and books could become more TVish as a result if, wittingly or not, the company doesn’t give a fair shake to the more adventurous smallfry.

While David’s hoped-for investigation hasn’t happened yet, the danger of Amazon “bossing” the e-book field has at least been lessened since then by first Barnes & Noble and then Apple getting into the game. On the other hand, this has led to some of the acquired smaller fry (most notably Fictionwise and, yes, Lexcycle) showing signs of being stifled.

Paul Biba was concerned about changes to Lexcycle’s management, as well as removal of options from the Stanza reader that Amazon might see as undesirable:

[If] you look at Stanza’s current catalog you will find a lot of entries that don’t have any relevance to Amazon’s business model. As a matter of fact, they are directly opposite to Amazon’s business model. What are they? They are Books on Board, Fictionwise, Random House Free Library, Feedbooks, Smashwords, Project Gutenberg, Munseys, Book Glutton. In other words, all those book sites that do not generate any revenue for Amazon in the current model.

This concern was a touch closer to the mark in some ways. Even though most of these options are still firmly a part of Stanza’s catalog menu, the option to pull down RSS-compiled article bundles from newspapers and magazines (such as the New York Times, which Amazon sells as a Kindle subscription for which it will soon be raising prices) has entirely vanished.

What we didn’t foresee, but probably should have, is the foreclosure on revising the reader for new platforms—even when the platforms are just higher-resolution versions of the original ones.

Turning an iPhone app into an iPad app does not seem to be hard—the one-man program BookShelf did it with no sweat. Yet both Lexcycle and Fictionwise have said they have no plans to upgrade their respective applications—and both businesses were bought by corporations with their own e-book markets to grow.

In some ways this reminds me of those stories about genies, where you have to be very careful to avoid loopholes when you make your wish. When Amazon bought Stanza, it said, “We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition.” And, apart from the magazine menu, that turned out to be true.

And it’s still true. The iPad has come out, with a higher-resolution screen that makes reading books an even better experience—but Amazon isn’t letting Lexcycle change Stanza’s “user experience” to take advantage of it.

And in a closing note, not entirely related to the Stanza acquisition, I have to give myself props for a post from May in which I talk about the clamor for Amazon to add the EPUB format to the Kindle:

But if Amazon did add ePub to the Kindle, what DRM format would it use with it? The Stanza-licensed eReader DRM? The DRM used by Adobe? Amazon’s own incompatible Kindle DRM?

It appears I predicted iBooks…

Government intervention at this stage seems unlikely—as others have pointed out, there is still plenty of room for some other company to enter the fray and outcompete Amazon. For example, if Barnes & Noble were to come out with its own reading tablet using the eReader format which it now owns through owning Fictionwise, B&N might be able to compete with Amazon on the same level.

…and the Nook (although that one was fairly obvious in retrospect).

Lamere points out something that most Kindle users probably do not think about very often: with this system, Amazon knows not only what you are reading, but how you read it. Did you start a book and never finish it? Is there a particular passage you reread most often? Depending on how closely Whispersync tracks your interaction with the books, Amazon might be in a position to know these things and more.

It might be interesting, Lamere points out, if Amazon were to aggregate the data in the form of a number of charts. Which books are most abandoned, which books keep people reading the longest per reading session, and so on. He has a number of interesting ideas, and I must confess that I wouldn’t mind seeing charts like that myself.

“I’d rather not turn to the New York Times Best Seller list to decide what to read,” Lamere writes. “I want to see the Amazon Most Frequently Finished book list instead.”

This article brought something else to my mind. I remembered seeing articles this morning indicating that the next generation of iPhone might have a forward-facing camera. (And eventually the iPad might, as well.) And I remembered seeing articles about how a certain Gameboy DS app simulates 3D by using its forward-facing camera to track eyeball positioning and moving the screen to match.

So perhaps at some point e-book apps might be able to sneak peeks through that iPhone or iPad camera to track your eyeballs and see where you stopped reading to the very word.

On the one hand, this all might seem a little scary. And as David Rothman pointed out in 2007, any information the Kindle has about your reading habits could potentially be subpoenaed.

On the other hand, the information it provides could let Amazon (and possibly the publishers as well) create a more compelling reading experience that better suits the way people actually read. And there are probably safeguards against making the information individually identifiable.

In the end, people who trust Amazon will continue to use its devices while people who don’t will not.

But at the other end of the spectrum is the TechCrunch piece in which Erick Schonfeld talks about a recent conversation with Netscape-founder Marc Andreesen.

Bringing up the legend that Cortez ordered his ships burned upon arrival in the New World to make sure there would be no going back, Andreesen says that this is also his advice to old-media companies such as newspapers and magazines when it comes to trying to adapt to the Internet: shut down the print version altogether and focus all their efforts on the web.

“You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will.

Andreesen observes that with the coming of the iPad, various print papers and magazines are coming out with “tablet versions” or looking into paywalls, while web publications such as TechCrunch itself are not. He notes that the audience size of the iPad, even if it sells millions of units, will still be dwarfed by the two billion people currently on the web.

Media companies simply don’t understand the new media, Andreesen says, whereas technology companies are used to dealing with constant change. He feels that attempting to preserve the old ways of business and charge for content is shortsighted.

He comes back to the simple fact that the open Web is where the users are. Talking about paywalls and paid apps is like saying, “We know where the market is and we are not going to go there.” Print newspapers and magazines will never get there, he argues, until they burn the boats and shut down their print operations. Yes, there are still a lot of people and money in those boats—billions of dollars in revenue in some cases. “At risk is 80% of revenues and headcount,” Andreessen acknowledges, “but shift happens.”

If that’s true, then sooner or later Danny Bloom and those like him will have to get used to doing without their daily snailpaper.

Le racheteur est la North American Publishing Company, et le montant de la transaction n’a pas été dévoilé. La formule actuelle ne devrait pas changer, promet la firme basée à Philadelphie. Selon David, le moment est propice pour que TeleRead passe entre les mains d’un véritable éditeur, et qu’il accède à une nouvelle dimension éditoriale.

So long, David, see you soon (in Paris, why not ?) !

Link

When discussing the ownership transfer, and my position position as Editor, with NAPCO over the past few weeks, one thing became abundantly clear. NAPCO values the way TeleRead has been written and its journalistic integrity and has no intention of changing this. If I thought they would then it wouldn’t be me writing this. I expect the future TeleRead to be just as outspoken and controversial as it has been in the past and all shades of opinion are not only welcome, but solicited. The more the merrier!

TeleRead has been, essentially, a non-profit enterprise and has been financed mainly out of David’s and my own pockets. I mention this because this has severely limited what we could do with the site. No in-person coverage of CES, for example. Even covering Digital Book World meant that I had to pay for my own hotel accommodations. Now, as part of a commercial enterprise, TeleRead has the possibility to grow in new directions. We will have access to a real IT department, for example, and so may be able to initiate some changes and expansions that David and I have talked about, but could never afford to implement.

As to the future, things will look the same here for some time, but changes will come as we all settle in. If you have any suggestions for the future let me know, either by sending me an email or posting here. I’ll also be happy to answer any questions in the comments section below.

I’m leaving as editor-publisher, but Co-Editor Paul Biba (left photo) will remain—as full editor. What’s more, Senior Writer Chris Meadows (right), the second most frequent contributor, will stay. Both Paul and Chris have been e-book-lovers for eons, and publications ranging from the New York Times to the Guardian have quoted Paul over the years. Under Paul, who has supplied most of TeleRead’s posts since September 2008 and managed it day to day, you’ll continue to be able to speak up for or against DRM and share your thoughts on e-book formats or the Macmillan-Amazon controversy.

Started to advocate well-stocked national digital library systems, a cause still dear to me, TeleRead has been online in one form or another since 1992, when I was posting the library plan on CompuServe. Nowadays we draw close to 100,000 unique visitors a month and are among the world’s primary sources of e-book news for readers, writers, editors, agents and publishers. Among other things, TeleRead prodded the main trade group, the International Digital Publishing Forum, into finally going ahead with a consumer-level standard for e-books; and today the Sony Reader, the new Apple iPad and countless other machines can read files formatted in ePub.

To our current mix of news and views, Paul will be able to add hot tech items picked up from the Gadgetell tech blog and NAPCO’s other online and offline publications. Based in Philadelphia and founded by the philanthropist Irvin Borowsky, a commercial printer at the age of 12, NAPCO dates back to 1958, and some 150 people work there. The company runs 16 magazines in addition to such online enterprises as email newsletters and the Gagetell blog. Among the Borowsky family’s past holdings was the magazine that became TV Guide. What’s more, according to Wikipedia, NAPCO pioneered magazine marketing at supermarket checkout counters. Now it can join in the coverage and popularization of e-books.

Our sale to NAPCO happened for several reasons. We needed more resources to survive the remainder of this recession and compete with the growing number of other e-book-related sites. Also, I suffered a heart attack in 2008 and prefer to spend my mornings—when I’m at my freshest—on walking and other cardio-exercise rather than reading RSS feeds. My father made it to 86 despite his own heart attack, and I’d like to do the same. Along the way, I want to devote more time to reading p-books and e-books, not just writing about them. I may even perpetrate a few more books of my own. I’ll miss TeleRead and the gifted people who have contributed to it, but there’s no halfway; I don’t want to be just semi-retired from here. Paul needs to be free to run his own shop. So except for some advisory work behind the scenes and maybe some occasional contributions, I’m out by choice.

Special thanks to the people who kindly helped me over the years. My appreciation in particular to Jon Noring, Chris Meadows, Branko Collin, Robert Nagle, Roger Sperberg, and, of course, Paul himself, a retired international corporate lawyer in New Jersey, who kept TeleRead alive at a time when I feared I soon might not be. Update: I should also have mentioned Michael Cairns, Karen Holt and Laura Dawson, my consultants during the acquisition period. They acted not for money but out of concern for my health—and interest in TeleRead’s survival as a resource for the e-book community. Talk about generosity!

To respect copyright law, we’ll be sending out forms to allow Jon, Chris and others to keep their work online under the new business model. If you’re among our contributors, I hope you’ll sign promptly and help us preserve the historical record.

Meanwhile, from snowy Alexandria, Virginia—happy e-booking!

////////////////////

Jointly approved official news release from Anvil Brokers

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION: Noel Griese, 770-938-0289 or ngriese@anvilpub.com

TeleRead e-book site acquired by North American Publishing Company

PHILADELPHIA, PA and ALEXANDRIA, VA (Feb. 10, 2010) – North American Publishing Company (NAPCO) of Philadelphia, PA announced today that Gadgetell, a division of NAPCO, has acquired TeleRead.org, a Web Site covering global e-book news based in Alexandria, VA.

TeleRead covers daily and long-term developments for readers, writers, editors, publishers and sellers of e-books, as well as for librarians. Created in the 1990s, it is believed to be the oldest English-language Web site devoted to general e-book news and views.

The site’s opinion posts helped spur the creation of the ePub standard used for e-books by Sony Readers and other products, including Apple’s iBooks e-reading software for the iPad.

According to David Rothman, the founder of TeleRead, who is stepping down as editor-publisher, the time was ripe for moving the popular site to a publisher with more resources.

Philadelphia-based North American Publishing (NAPCO) publishes more than 16 leading trade magazines including Book Business, Printing Impressions, Target Marketing and Publishing Executive.

“We’re delighted to have acquired TeleRead and to benefit from the diversity of viewpoints in its global digital community,” said Ned Borowsky, president of NAPCO. “E-Books is the hot topic! We have been covering it extensively in the pages of Book Business magazine, through our webinars and virtual shows, as well as at our upcoming conference Publishing Business Conference & Expo this March (www.publishingbusiness.com). TeleRead will dramatically add to the conversation and we couldn’t be more pleased.”

Borowsky said TeleRead will continue in its present format. Co-editor Paul Biba in Bernardsville, NJ, will succeed Rothman as editor of the digital newsletter.

Rothman intends to focus on books and movie scripts, including marketing of The Solomons Scandals, his recently published Washington newspaper novel.

Noel Griese of Anvil Brokers of Atlanta handled details of the acquisition. Michael Cairnes, Karen Holt and Laura Dawson served as consultants to Rothman during the acquisition period.

About TeleRead: The TeleRead digital community is one of the most popular Web sites devoted to general developments in the e-book industry, which accounts for about four percent of the overall $32 billion U.S. book publishing market.

About North American Publishing Company: Founded in 1958, North American Publishing Company (NAPCO) is a family-owned business with publications, face-to-face and virtual trade shows, educational and online services covering multiple markets: direct marketing, publishing, retail, e-commerce, graphic arts, promotional products, consumer electronics, packaging, and more. Additional information about NAPCO is available on the Web at www.napco.com

Tags: North American Publishing Company, NAPCO, TeleRead, e-books, ebooks, publishing, book publishing, magazines, Web sites, media, Ned Borowsky, Irvin Borowsky, David Rothman, David H. Rothman, The Solomon Scandals

In 2008, David Rothman discussed FBI director Robert Mueller suggesting “that the bureau should have a broad ‘omnibus’ authority to conduct monitoring and surveillance of private-sector networks.” Since the Kindle uses wireless networks, David was concerned that it meant the FBI might take an interest in e-book reading habits as well as paper ones.

Now Mueller is at it again. At a federal task force meeting today, an attorney for the FBI said that Mueller would like ISPs to keep records of web users’ “origin and destination information.” In other words, the FBI wants to be able to find out what web sites users visit, just as it can get call information from phone companies.

A number of ISP representatives are cited in the story saying that it would currently be very difficult, and perhaps a violation of wiretapping law, to keep track of that information. Whether possible or not, it could certainly have the potential to be a major violation of privacy.

Almost everybody visits web sites that might be viewed as subversive or undesirable by authorities, or that they otherwise do not want other people to know about. (Some are unfortunate enough to do so while on national television.) On the e-book side, this might include politically-sensitive reading matter, or even sexual fetish art and fiction sites.

It is understandable that the government wants power to track down terrorists. We would like for the government to be able to track down terrorists. The idea is good in theory. In practice, it leads to things like full-body scanners at airports and Canadian author Dr. Peter Watts getting beaten up by the border patrol.

All sorts of people have been subject to government abuse on grounds of terror prevention, including Watts, singer Cat Stevens (who was denied entry into the US in 2004 on suspicion of supporting terrorists), and the thousands of people who are on no-fly lists because they’re unfortunate enough to have names similar to terrorists (including the late Senator Ted Kennedy).

For that matter, J. Edgar Hoover maintained files on a list of 12,000 “subversives” who he planned to arrest without habeas corpus. If another Hoover comes along, some government official with an axe to grind, why should we give him extra ammunition?

Because the access the FBI wants would require them to have a suspect already, they should be able to get much of the same information by examining the hard drives on the suspect’s computer, or subpoenaing access logs from the actual web sites in question. Making people’s entire browsing habits available would support “fishing expeditions,” where the suspect comes before the crime.

Even leaving aside possible governmental wrongdoing, there have been stories about abuses of government databases by employees—for example, in 2008 an investigation revealed the passport files of “at least 127 famous persons had been accessed repeatedly.” I do not want my surfing habits visible to anyone else, even just someone in my ISP. It is simply too big a risk.

David discusses his proposal for a national digital library system, which he has been calling for since 1992. 

Take a look at his article, and if you feel it has merit, why not send a copy to your Senator or Representative?  With a new Administration, perhaps we can get the ball rolling.