TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘e-book’ Category

By Chris Meadows

My DSL went out in a thunderstorm today, and between exhaustively troubleshooting it on the phone with an Indian-accented technician and catching up on several hundred Google Reader posts sitting in a FedEx Office (if you’re looking for a quiet place with free wifi that’s open 24 hours, I recommend it; the only drawback is there’s no refreshments), I’ve found myself without much writing time this morning. So this may be all you see from me today.

Ben Hutchins, otherwise known as Gryphon from the Undocumented Features shared writing universe that I covered in one of my “Paleo E-Books” columns, has started a blog called “Use Extra Sheets As Necessary” chronicling his experiences returning to college after the better part of two decades away from it.

Yesterday’s post was about Hutchins’s frustration with the present state of educational information technology. He’s not speaking of computer labs here, or even e-textbooks, but rather the systems that professors use to post adjuncts to the textbooks—assignments, hand-outs: the sort of thing that would have been photocopied and passed out in the days when he and I attended our respective colleges for the first time.

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By Chris Meadows

This month’s free e-book from the University of Chicago Press is a replica of the very first, 1906 edition of the Chicago Manual of Style to commemorate the 16th edition of that work.

Of course, as with all University of Chicago Press free e-books, this book comes wrapped in Adobe Digital Editions DRM—even though, since it was originally published in 1906, this book is well within the public domain by now. (Oddly, I can’t seem to find any public domain version of it on-line, at least not in Project Gutenberg, Feedbooks, or Manybooks. There is a somewhat rough scan of a 1911 edition on Wikimedia Commons, however.)

It’s a pity that this press—an academic press, yet, and thus part of an organization supposedly dedicated to advancing the spread of knowledge—should choose to impose technological restrictions upon a document that should legally be free to all.

Update: A representative of the Chicago University Press has noted in a comment that they do actually offer a DRM-free download of this book as well. While it’s good that they have it available, I do still find it annoying that they went with a DRM-locked version for their publicized free giveaway. If they’re already giving it away free without DRM, what purpose is served by publicizing a restricted version of the same exact thing?

By Chris Meadows

Katie Gatto at our sister blog Appletell has made a post explaining how to determine which e-books in your iTunes listing are DRM-protected and which are DRM-free. It is a useful little tutorial for those who are not sure (or, for that matter, bother to purchase iBooks titles in the first place).

However, annoyingly, Gatto repeatedly conflates DRM with copyright. She begins the article with “If you want to know which of your ebooks are DRM free and which have been protected by copyright,” then mentions that this process “will let you know if a book has DRM protections or if you’re free to share it with others,” and says that if a book is listed as protected, “it has a copyright attached.” She then concludes, “Use accordingly to avoid lawsuits.”

Of course, if you use according to her advice, you probably won’t be avoiding lawsuits. It should be needless to say that plenty of non-DRM-protected e-books (such as those sold by Baen, or posted online by Cory Doctorow) are fully copyright-protected—meaning that while you might be able to share them with friends, you are not necessarily legally free to unless the holder of the copyright allows it.

Might a decreased understanding of copyright be one of the casualties of the media industry’s reliance on DRM? I didn’t think the fact that everything is copyrighted under current copyright law (including books, e-books, Internet posts, and even scribblings on the backs of napkins) was that hard to understand, let alone that foregoing DRM does not mean you are foregoing your right to protection under the law.

Or perhaps peer-to-peer is to blame for this “anything not strictly forbidden must be permitted” attitude. It seems to be very much of a piece with the “innocent infringement” defense that one target of a RIAA lawsuit is assaying:

Whitney admitted to using KaZaA as well as downloading and sharing music over the P2P network, but said she didn’t realize what she was doing was wrong. Her technological illiteracy and age [of 16 years] made her incapable of intentionally infringing the record labels’ copyrights, she argued.

Either way, that a technology blogger should make the same mistake is irritating both from a standpoint of lacking accuracy in reporting, and because it gives more ammunition to the proponents of DRM: “If we don’t protect it, they’ll think they’re permitted to pirate it.” That kind of confusion we can do without.

By Chris Meadows

Sometimes we get accused of becoming an Apple blog, we post so much Apple-centric stuff, but there’s a reason for that. Apple might be obnoxious in its app approval behavior, closed in its development platform, and prudish in its gatekeeping, but there’s no denying that they make some damned fine e-book reading devices. My iPod Touch was my sole e-reader for most of the two years I had it, and I still miss it badly.

Matt Buchanan makes a similar point on Gizmodo, where he says that if the rumors are true about the new iPod Touch that will (presumably) be revealed tomorrow and it ends up with the same retina display, Facetime camera, and 5-megapixel rear camera as the iPhone, it has the potential to be a device “serial killer”—replacing just about every gadget one would carry around (iPod, point-and-shoot camera, motion picture camera, notepad, gaming device, etc.) except the phone.

Buchanan says:

Inexplicably, there’s never been a credible iPod touch competitor. The Zune HD doesn’t run apps (the handful it’s got don’t count), so it’s limited in what it can do—it’s simply a very good music player. Android is still a miserable place to be when it comes to media, and on top of that, all of the Android "tablets" have been thoroughly mediocre. There’s nothing out there that’s remotely like the iPod touch. And obviously, there’s a demand for it, since it’s the only iPod whose sales are still growing.

The iPod Touch has basically taken over the ecological niche vacated when PDAs evolved into smartphones, in much the same way as rats or cockroaches might evolve to replace humans after we kill ourselves off. There haven’t been any real competitors, perhaps because most tablets are larger and most devices the same size are smartphones.

Of course, it does get a boost from being an iPod, given that the original iPods rapidly became the 800-lb gorillas of MP3 players, but it’s nonetheless interesting that not even Palm who first made the PDA format successful has tried to make a wifi-only pocket device since the Palm TX. The iPhone might be only one of many smartphones, but the iPod Touch stands alone. (I made a similar point in a post exactly one year ago today, in fact.)

And depending on what gets unveiled in less than six hours, it might just stand more alone than ever.

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By Chris Meadows

This Saturday, I drove about 30 miles west of Springfield to visit the Gay Parita Sinclair, a restored period filling station in Paris Springs, just west of Halltown, Missouri on old Route 66.

Several huge photo blow-ups of the place hang on the wall in the breakroom at TeleTech where I work, in keeping with the building’s “Route 66” decor theme. It was only last week when I googled it that I realized I had actually driven right past it without even noticing it twice while on my way to Carthage. I guess I’d mentally filed it as “just another gas station” without realizing. So as penance, this time I drove out there specifically to see the place.

While I was there I happened to notice, amid the shelves of period and Route 66 memorabilia, a couple of old Brownie cameras.

“I used to have that camera,” I said, pointing to the one on the right.

“You don’t look that old!” the lady who was showing me around (the daughter of the Sinclair’s owner) said.

And it’s true, I wasn’t that old. But the camera was.

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By Chris Meadows

The Bookseller’s FuturEBook blog has an interesting look by Chris Meade at how today’s authors have more power to promote themselves and build relationships with fans than ever before, leading to a new viability for self-publishing.

The Amplified Author of 2010 (term coined for authors engaged in the social web) can sit at her desk and speak directly to her readership through a blog, can expand that circle of readers gradually by using Twitter and other social networks, can find an active readership interested in offering criticism and ideas, can publish work through print on demand and put it on the global bookshelf of the web, can set out her stall of publications and services on a website where she can also offer to run workshops, teach, write reviews, perform; she can take her work to publishers and broadcasters able to give detailed evidence of who her readership is and what they think of her work. Once she makes it into print, she can use her own energies and laptop to promote her masterpiece.

Of course, we have already heard much of this sort of thing, especially in the wake of established authors such as J.A. Konrath or Seth Godin deciding to go it alone and move away from traditional publishing. But the FutureEBook piece explains that thinktank if:book (The Institute for the Future of the Book) is creating “a new kind of hub for writing in the community".

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By Chris Meadows

CNet reports that Apple has released an e-book-related update to its iWork productivity suite. Pages 4.0.4 now includes the ability to export into EPUB files, and Apple has posted a support document to its web site providing tips for creating EPUBs:

Documents exported to ePub format will look different than their Pages counterparts. If you want to get the best document fidelity between the Pages and ePub formats, style your Pages document with paragraph styles and other formatting attributes allowed in an ePub file. A sample document is provided on the Apple Support site that features styles and guidelines to help you create a Pages document that’s optimized for export to the ePub file format, which you can use as a template or a guide. To learn more about using paragraph styles in Pages, see the topics under the heading “Working with Styles” in the Pages built-in help.

As CNet points out, this is useful for more than just authors—it provides an easy way for people to read their own documents on their iPad even if they don’t plan to publish them. As for authors, they will find it helpful to have access to easy EPUB creation right on their Mac.

It’s interesting to note, though, that it doesn’t seem to say anything about whether EPUBs created in iWork will meet Apple’s exacting standards for EPUB posting to the iBookstore.

By Chris Meadows

I didn’t notice this David Pogue article from August 12th until Techdirt and Slashdot pointed it out just the other day. Though most of the article is about other cool features offered by iOS 4 (unified contacts, Facetime tricks), in the last section Pogue talks about the VoiceOver “spoken books” feature on the iPad and wonders why the Authors Guild and publishers hasn’t freaked out about it. I previously looked at the matter back in March; you’d think they would have had time to speak up by now.

Yes, this is exactly the feature that debuted in the Amazon Kindle and was then removed when publishers screamed bloody murder. But somehow, so far, Apple has gotten away with it, maybe because nobody’s even realized this feature is in there.

Why is it all right for the iPad to read books aloud, but not the Kindle? Because it’s more obviously part of an overall accessibility system for the blind, whereas the Kindle’s was meant for the convenience of the sighted (and indeed, the rest of it proved to be so inaccessible to the blind that colleges were prohibited from adopting it for textbooks), perhaps? Or is the Authors Guild more willing to give Apple a pass since it helped them stand up to the “man” on the matter of e-book pricing?

Since Pogue explained how to do it, I went ahead and gave it a try myself. It read a little fast to be understandable on the default setting, though that is adjustable by slider. The odd emphases and pauses also didn’t help understandability, and I didn’t really like the way it changed the device’s default gestures. It’s not going to replace a talented audiobook actor any time soon.

Still, I did like how loud and fairly easy to understand the individual words were, and it’s good to have the capability available even if it’s not one I would ordinarily choose to use.

By Chris Meadows

The Bookseller notes that Penguin is now negotiating with the Wylie Agency over e-book rights for the three Penguin titles Wylie was publishing through Odyssey Editions. This comes shortly after Random House struck a deal with Wylie over its 13 of Odyssey’s 20 books.

If Penguin succeeds in extricating its e-book rights from Wylie’s clutches, that only leaves Odyssey with four titles—and it’s anyone’s guess how long those will stay once their print publishers come calling now that Wylie’s been shown to be willing to deal. Not really so much of a publisher anymore, is it?

By Chris Meadows

Video and computer games share a bit of an odd similarity to books and e-books. Like books, they can be an example of intellectual property encapsulated in an object, which can be bought and sold new or used—but like e-books, they can also be delivered purely digitally, and equipped with restrictive DRM.

And as with both, there’s some controversy surrounding the idea of used sales.

While many print book publishers look at the sale of used books and gnash their teeth, they are largely powerless to do anything about them. The First Sale Doctrine states that it’s perfectly legal for people to resell the media they buy, after all. Some publishers might make noises about forcing used book dealers to pay royalties on titles they resell, but it would take an act of Congress to mandate something like that, and it doesn’t look like it’s in the cards.

On the other hand, just as e-book publishers are able to connive their way around the Fair Use doctrine by putting DRM on their titles and making it illegal to break the DRM, video and computer game developers actually can make buying used titles less attractive—at least, titles that have an on-line play component, interoperability with other games, or some other function that the publishers can block.

All they have to do is include a single-use code with each new version of a game that won’t work for someone who buys it used, and in one fell swoop they remove a lot of the value inherent in the price savings on the used game. (Of course, this also blocks pirated versions of the game, but piracy would have happened anyway—it’s the used resale market that they’re squarely aiming at.)

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By Chris Meadows

Tim Carmody, who I also mentioned earlier today, also has a piece at Wired’s Gadget Lab section on Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader, pointing out that despite the tendency to think of e-books these days as largely a contest between the Kindle and the iPad, the Nook has an estimated 20% of the e-book market—a bigger piece of that market than it has of the printed book market.

Carmody notes that B&N is going for a hybrid strategy that ties together its physical stores and e-book offerings, giving consumers reasons to come into Barnes & Noble stores and spend money on things that have higher margins than books. According to B&N, Nook users have increased their spending by 20%, which is certainly good news for the beleaguered chain’s bottom line.

The question is whether the Nook’s success can come soon enough to save Barnes & Noble, which has taken some pretty big financial hits over the last few years. The company is in the process of fighting off a takeover bid by a major shareholder, while at the same time apparently considering selling itself to someone else. What happens to the Nook if the company changes hands again?

(For that matter, what happens to eReader and Fictionwise?)

By Chris Meadows

Sarah Weinman at Daily Finance has an interesting look at the aftermath of the Random House/Andrew Wylie reconciliation, looking at some oddities around the original publishing deal and the settlement and pondering about what it might mean for the future of e-publishing.

As a result of the make-up, 13 out of Odyssey’s 20 books will no longer be published through Amazon, but will instead revert to Random House. While the exact details are unclear, a Random House spokesman said that the deal would not affect the standard e-book author royalty rates of 25 to 40 percent.

Weinman also considers whether Wylie ever really meant to make a go of it as a publisher, or it was just a publicity stunt to get a better bargaining position. Even granting that Wylie may have been talking about this for a while, she notes:

But even for 20 titles — or just seven, as the case may be now — being an e-publisher is not just about finding a company to do the dirty work of file formatting, then handing over exclusive rights to a retailer as the path of least resistance. To be successful requires a solid infrastructure that multitasks the concerns of authors, publishers, distributors and technology companies. Considering that it’s the offspring of a literary agency that represents 700 authors and employs far fewer personnel to handle those rights, Odyssey Editions smacks of a water-dipped toe, a publicity ploy, rather than a deep commitment to digital publishing.

As Weinman concludes, it’s still uncertain what—if anything—this means for the future of digital publishing. After all, this only directly affects the relatively small subset of backlist titles—books that are still in print whose contracts pre-date the addition of e-book terms. Far more influence might be wielded by authors of new works such as J.A. Konrath or Seth Godin who help to blaze a self-publishing trail, or by Google Books’s digitization of entire out-of-print libraries.

(Found via BookSquare.)

By Chris Meadows

Tim Carmody, late of Snarkmarket, has taken a new posting as media and tech writer at The Atlantic, and has kicked things off with an interesting article looking at ten “reading revolutions” that pre-dated e-books—major or minor events that changed the way people read or wrote, going all the way back to the dawn of recorded history (in fact, one of those revolutions is the invention of the alphabet that was used to record history). (Also worth seeing are the annotations to the photos that illustrate the article, posted to Snarkmarket.)

The invention of the printing press receives prominent mention, of course, but also important was the invention of the codex-style book to replace the rolled scroll. This was made possible by the change from papyrus to parchment to paper, another revolution in itself.

The Industrial Revolution was also a reading revolution, as steam-powered presses and the invention of wood pulp paper made true mass media possible. And even the electronic age saw its own revolution as data storage mediums transformed from vinyl cylinders and discs or huge hard disc drives to smaller tapes and eventually optical media and flash drives. And those are only a few of the ten.

It kind of makes you wonder whether back in Gutenberg’s day anybody was decrying the “death” of the illuminated manuscript.

By Chris Meadows

The O’Reilly Tools of Change blog has launched a new weekly column covering at e-book news. This week’s column looks at the Samsung E60’s UK release by WHSmith, the $70 price cut for the Aluratek Libre (from $169 to $99), the new Laser EB101 device in Australia, the Pocketbook announcement we covered earlier, and a couple of brief notes about the Blio and the new Sony Readers.

One reader that isn’t mentioned in the O’Reilly article is the new Sharp device (pictured above). Sharp’s President Mikio Katayama becomes the latest electronics exec to trash-talk the iPad, claiming the device will “rival” Apple’s tablet and may well feature a color LCD display and possibly even glassesless 3D. (Cool, that would mean we could finally read Google Books without needing special goggles!)

By Chris Meadows

A couple of days ago I mentioned Seth Godin’s departure from traditional publishing, and talked about whether “anyone” could do it. Certainly, from recent reports, Joe Konrath has been doing well with self-publishing through Amazon.

Publishing industry consultant Mike Shatzkin has also taken a look at Godin’s announcement, and whether in fact “anyone” can make that same transition, and has some interesting conclusions.

Shatzkin notes that self-publishing does have some significant advantages, for authors who can make it work. Earning a larger percentage of the sale price, for one; the additional flexibility in how to market and reach an audience for another. But he also points out that publishers may actually be reaping what they have sown.

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By Chris Meadows

I’ve been learning a lot in my new job as a tech support representative so far. It’s kind of funny—before I took this job, I thought I “knew” what tech support was, from my limited exposure to humorous tech support stories, and my work supporting a small web hosting company. But exposure to everyday people with common computer problems has given me a whole new perspective—or at least the start of one. The biggest thing I’m sure of is that I’ve still got a lot left to learn.

It’s surprising, though perhaps it shouldn’t be, just how many people have exactly the same problems. A large percentage of calls I take relates to inability to set up wireless routers. These complicated, cantankerous devices, and the convoluted way in which they relate to people’s computers, cause a lot of trouble and misunderstandings, not to mention frustration. Small wonder that some companies can charge as much as $100 simply to have someone come out and set up a home network. There have been some times when even I’ve felt like it might be worth it to pay someone that much.

Another frequent stumper is the way Microsoft now bundles a trial version of Microsoft Office with every installation of Windows 7. Except it isn’t really a “trial” version so much as it is a “Schroedinger’s version”—when presented with a product key, it’s the real deal; if not, it’s a trial. It looks exactly the same either way when you start it up; the only difference is that some computers have a card with a serial number bundled with them.

Since it doesn’t look like a trial when you first run it (it says it wants a product key and there’s a little tiny button in the corner saying “Trial”) and the only place it says it is a trial, before purchase, is in the very fine print on the item’s description (and who reads that), it’s only natural for anyone who buys a new computer and sees the Microsoft Office icon on their desktop to assume their computer just “came with it”.

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