Jacobs writes that he prefers the slow, click-intensive method of annotating common to e-ink readers rather than the “easy” method with tablets, because he is better able to remember what he annotates through e-ink readers’ more difficult process.

E-books are in their infancy now: there’s little textual design to speak of, typography is often terrible, illustrations are limited, errors are shockingly frequent. They’ll get much better. But it would be cool if, when they improve, readers were given means of introducing a bit of cognitive friction when that would make the reading experience a stronger one. Sort of like cranking up the speed and increasing the incline on an elliptical trainer.

Most e-ink readers seem to be locked into one font, unlike tablet- or smartphone-based readers that usually offer plenty of font-changing options. But even on the readers that have the options, I’ll admit I’ve never really considered intentionally making books harder to read so I remember them better. And it should have crossed my mind when I wrote the post about the original study—or when I ran across the post from a neuroscience blogger who suggested that easy-to-read e-readers might interfere with remembering what we read.

Anyway, I still find it amazing to consider that there could actually be a useful purpose for Comic Sans.

Rushdie attended a dinner sponsored by Booktrack to commemorate publishing a Booktrack-enhanced Rushdie short story, “In the South”. He gave a reading at this dinner with Booktrack’s music in the background.

In an interview, Rushdie indicated that he “had to be convinced that this was a good thing” (mainly by his younger son, who said “It’s super cool, dad,”) but discovered he rather liked the effect once he actually heard it.

Rushdie explains that he was offered several chances to weigh in on the music as it was composed, but largely kept out of the creative process, since he found nothing objectionable in the draft material he was sent. “I just liked it. The composer was over in New Zealand, and he would email me clips of the music, and ask me what I thought — so I guess if I thought that something was really wrong, I could have said so. But as it happens, I didn’t think that. He was very generous; he was totally up for me saying whatever I wanted to say.”

“What I didn’t want it to sound like too much was special effects. I didn’t want it to sound like too literal a soundtrack — you know, with bangs and crashes in the right places.”

While I still have my doubts that reading really needs a soundtrack, Booktrack’s willingness to work with Rushdie and make sure he fully approved of its treatment of his work certainly shows its heart is in the right place.

Read an E-Book Week

This year’s big news is, of course, the recognition of the Read an E-Book Program by the Canadian Parliament by passing a motion declaring the entire month of March Read an E-Book Month! Other parts of the site have been updated as well, including information about the ebook market, links leading to reading devices, and 2012 promotional materials (including banners you can use on your site).

So stop by the site, and come back often, as Rita expects more deals to be rolling in before the big week (and month) is here. I’ll also be adding a special deal to REBW, so stay bookmarked for that!

What strikes me most about indie writers, however, is not what they write, but how they publish it. Konrath may be a ‘downmarket’ writer for some, but he is a first-rate publisher for many, as was Hocking: they wrote regularly, priced to the market, and promoted like hell. Heinze and Wilkinson may be looking for publishing deals: they just can’t be bothered waiting for traditional publishers to "discover them".

Traditional publishers need to learn from these successes, if they are to throw off the irritating "legacy" tag some self-published writers hang around their necks.

He suggests publishers should be trying models similar to that floated by Macmillan New Writing (which is unfortunately closed for new submissions right now when it should be scooping up all the fresh “indie” talent it can). They should be building communities and courting the more successful self-published authors (as with Amanda Hocking).

All that makes sense, but the article’s close in which Jones suggests that badly-edited and poorly-presented self-published e-books will put readers off over time, and traditional publishers could improve their appearance, is actually rather amusing. I find myself wondering just where Jones has been over the last few years if he thinks that “professional” e-books are uniformly well-edited or presented. I’ve seen plenty of self-published works that were better than some pro-published for typos.

“Poor books. Snubbed yet again, this time by a university, an institution of learning.”

The article describes the closure of one campus bookstore, causing confusion by students who walked into the building to find it being repurposed as classroom and office space.  Some of the books were moved to the other campus bookstore; the remainder were put into a storage room, and some will be returned to the publishers.

Ryerson’s students are mixed about the use of ebooks and web-based services like Amazon.  The author, though low-key in her wording, clearly sides with the printed book crowd and regrets the loss of the bookstore and the books within.  Of the many students with whom she could have discussed the issue, she chose a print-book lover:

Given the choice between a thick, hardcover text and a Kindle, Owens would choose the book. Better for the eyes, better to highlight with. He said it’s common for students to forgo texts and download course material onto their iPads and laptops, but that’s not for him.

And finally, a clumsy potshot at technology:

Pondering students of the future, Owens sees a post-analog world: “They’ll be plugging things into their brains and projecting images onto the inside of their eyes. We’ll be sitting there on our iPads going, ‘What the hell is that?’ ”

It surprises me sometimes to see the students of today, the workers and leaders of the future, already expressing dismay about technology and innovation; it’s a change in the academic air that is disconcerting.  These are traditionally the innovators of the world.  If they’re shying away from innovation before they’ve even left college, where will the future come from?

IndieCommerce director Matt Supko wrote in an email announcement that the move was in response to Amazon’s policy of “locking in e-book exclusives which other retailers are not allowed to sell.” IndieCommerce has adopted a new policy of listing only “titles that are made available to retailers for sale in all available formats”. Individual bookstores can still choose to carry Amazon titles as custom products.

The odd thing is, the titles Amazon is publishing will have e-book versions available for sale in all e-book formats by retail channels who wish to carry them, via Amazon’s distribution deal with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Even publishing-industry observer Mike Shatzkin noted that in the article I covered last night. But IndieCommerce and the ABA seem to be acting as if this is not the case. Wonder why that is?

(Found via The Bookseller.)

Over the next few months, Cringely will be reposting the entire book to a blog, and inviting reader participation to help him update it for the final e-book form.

Like most blogs, this new one will allow reader comments. And it’s those comments I’ll use in part to update the work when it later appears in eBook form.  What happened to these people?  What stories do you remember? Where did it go from here?

Once the entire book has been serialized, my friend and eBook expert Parampreet Singh (he of the Toronto Singhs, of course) and I will pick the best of these reader annotations along with several thousand words of new material I’ve been saving-up and publish what ought to be an enormous number of electrons — Accidental Empires Rebooted.

And the e-book promises to be interesting, as well: Cringely talks about giving readers the ability to flip back and forth between the original 1996 version and the newly-updated one. Cringely can do this because the original contract from 1989 didn’t mention e-book rights, thus leaving them with him. (Hopefully his print publisher won’t try to pull a HarperCollins.)

This promises to be an interesting experiment, and I will certainly read right along—leaving all e-book experimentation aside, it sounds like a very interesting book in its own right.

(Found via Slashdot.org.)

After buying the Kindle, she discovered she liked it so much she has used it it constantly ever since—though mostly for travel and commuting, where a slim device that can replace a ton of books is most useful. She will “always choose a ‘proper’ book” for reading at home.

Parks does not have an “emotional attachment” to her Kindle, but acknowledges that some generations might, and thinks that it is a good thing that something has moved non-readers to start reading.

It’s true this isn’t really “news”, but it’s nice to see that at least some e-reader skeptics can be swayed enough to enjoy the device for its advantages without assuming it’s going to “kill” reading.

Wright compares Kindle Select to Michael Roberts’s MP3.com independent music distribution site, which allowed independent musicians (such as Wright) to upload mp3 tracks to catch the attention of the Internet audience.

That was, without question, the most fun I’ve ever had online. MP3.com started providing tools for musicians, including the ability to upload mp3 tracks and convert them into a CD — so you could sell your CD alongside the tracks you were giving away from free. No one had ever thought of this before. It was nuts. And the best part of it was meeting other musicians.

MP3.com set up forums and the musicians would talk, trade recording tips, talk about what kind of marketing worked and what didn’t, advertise shows, and organize meet-ups in the real world. The best part was it was completely cross-genre — I was a punk/noise musician but I was making friends with country musicians, house musicians, funk musicians, metal, hip-hop, gangsta rap… you name it. And I got exposed to music I never would have considered listening to before hand. I still carry most of those MP3′s around in my collection.

However, after the site went public, MP3.com instituted a “Payback for Playback” program, which split a pool of money among the artists whose tracks were most played—a very similar idea to the Kindle Select lending library. This program served as an apple of discord, Wright writes, effectively ending the camaraderie and leading a number of artists to try to game the system. 

Wright sees history repeating itself with the Kindle Select program, and points out that Amazon already has problems with people trying to game the self-publishing system with plagiarized and duplicate content. He wonders how long it will be before the same thing happens with Kindle Select.

He also points out that giving Amazon exclusivity over works harms the publishing ecosystem as a whole. Even if Amazon is accounting for the lion’s share of income right now, keeping content off of its competitors handicaps the competitors’ ability to compete with Amazon.

In the end, whether authors go with Select or not is up to them, but it’s good to hear from all points of view on the issue. It remains to be seen whether Select is vulnerable to gaming or not. As Wright acknowledges in a postscript, the limitation to one book checkout per month for $80/yr Kindle Prime subscribers does restrict how badly the system can be abused, but he is not sure that necessarily removes the vulnerability.

A fundamental legal question involved in construing a contract is what the parties intended at the time the contract was made. The intent must be manifest in some form in the written agreement. A secret intent by one party that the word tomato also includes avocado won’t bring avocados into the contract.

The classic formulation is that there must be a “meeting of the minds” of the contracting parties or else there isn’t a contract or the contract is limited to only those subjects for which the minds met.

A big problem HC has with its case is even showing an intent by both parties to include what we recognize as ebooks today into the 1971 contract in the absence of any language that points to an ebook.

Passive Guy points out that later contracts still have the same problem. Some try to future-proof themselves by adding a “whether now known or hereafter discovered” clause, but the problem PG finds is that implies a meeting of the minds about something neither party knew anything about at the time they signed the contract.

And even though the Julie one wasn’t, a lot of these contracts were drafted after e-books or similar information-retrieval systems were known to exist. One such system, Lexis, was very big in the legal world in the mid to late 1970s, finding its way into law schools in the 1980s and eventually every lawyer’s office—the same lawyers who wrote contracts for the publishing industry. Yet none of the publishing contracts from this era bother to mention it or anything like it.

Absent any contractual mention of ebooks or electronic books or a reasonably detailed description of an ebook reading and distribution system resembling one the lawyers knew intimately, the only reasonable conclusion is there was no intent to include ebooks in publishing agreements of that era.

Just sayin’

I look forward to finding out how the Julie case unfolds. It will be interesting to see if the judge’s preliminary ruling bears any resemblance to that from the RosettaBooks case so long ago—and whether HC similarly drops the case if it appears not to be going its way. I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.

You might not see today’s Google Books-pointing doodle as a moneymaking effort. After all, these Dickens e-books are free. And yet, surely, the aim is gravitate your mind and habits over to the Google eBookstore, where money is exchanged for enlightenment.

It seems clear some people will grasp at whatever straws they can find to make whatever Google does fit with their preconception that anything it does must be evil nasty commercialism. Come on! Dickens was known for his books, and Google has a great collection of them available for free. Why not link to them? Maybe someone will click through and read one, instead of just glancing at the Wikipedia entry about the man.

But no, Google must be crassly commercial for daring to give away these e-books that are undoubtedly infected with some sort of memetic virus that will make people want to come back and pay Google money.

Sheesh.

This is why the Guardian piece observing how much of e-book sales genre-fiction makes up is really hilarious from a genre fan’s point of view: snooty Guardian writer Antonia Senior confronts the fact that “downmarket genre fiction” is driving e-book sales.

For example:

The ebook world is driven by so-called genre fiction, categories such as horror or romance. It’s not future classics that push digital sales, but more downmarket fare. No cliche is left unturned, no adjective underplayed. At the time of writing, the bestselling Amazon Kindle book was Asylum Harbor, by Traci Hohenstein. Crime sells. Try a sample, I dare you. In digital, dross rises. But does this have implications for publishers’ decision-making, as we increasingly migrate?

“Dross rises”? Really? Just because literary fiction makes up 20% of market share, science fiction 19%, and Christian fiction 16%? (And presumably other forms of genre fiction, such as mysteries and crime thrillers, romance, and so on much of the rest.) One imagines Senior making little “ew” noises as she contemplates what dreadful taste the masses have in literature.

Of course, she does have a point that e-readers make people feel more free to read brown-paper-bag e-rotica (in addition to less prurient genre fiction), secure in the knowledge that nobody can see their book’s cover. There’s no need for print publishers to come out with boring-looking covers for popular children’s fiction so adults won’t be ashamed to be seen reading it on the train.

Senior does admit that even she has a fetish for male-oriented historical fiction, reserving her bookshelves for “books that proclaim my cleverness.” But she closes by bemoaning the “boundless idiocy of the unobserved reading public.”

Really? In this era of rampant movies, TVs, computer games, and other distractions, I’d just be glad that they’re reading something at all.

Now a new site, StoryBundle.com, has sprung up that promises to do for e-books what the Humble Bundle does for games: select a few quality independent e-books and allow people to set their own price for the DRM-free bundle. It still seems to be in the planning stages—the site is taking the email addresses of interested parties but does not yet have any bundles on offer.

It will be interesting to see how well it does. One of the secrets behind the Humble Bundle’s success is that many of the titles it offered had already made reputations of their own, and gamers saw this as a chance to snag these popular titles cheaply. Will the Story Bundle offer titles with similar reputations? Are there any independent titles with similar reputations?

I also wonder whether the Story Bundle will do the same as the Humble Bundle and pick a charity or two with which to split the take—I suspect that’s another part of the appeal in that it allows people to feel good about donating to help a charity they support at the same time they support the creators of the works they buy.

At any rate, I’ve signed up for the bundle’s email list and will post again when they announce their first bundle. I wonder what it will include?

(Found via GalleyCat.)

"We are grateful for the judge’s decision in our favor," said John Ossenmacher, ReDigi’s CEO, said in a statement. The company added that "ReDigi is breaking down the barriers that have kept consumers from enjoying their intrinsic and lawful ownership rights to their digital purchases."

Of course, this is only a preliminary ruling that ReDigi can keep doing its thing until the outcome of the trial. It doesn’t necessarily mean the company will come out on top. Still, it’s an interesting start to what will probably be an especially interesting legal challenge with profound implications for all forms of digital media, including e-books. I can hardly wait until the trial itself starts.

The popular BioWare video game series Mass Effect has had a series of spinoff novels, depicting events that take place elsewhere in the game universe simultaneously with the games. The first three of those novels were written by one of the games’ writers, Drew Karpyshyn. I’ve read them, and they told some very interesting stories, part of which formed backstory that was brought up in the first game.

But for whatever reason, the most recent novel, Mass Effect: Deception was farmed out to William C. Dietz, a writer who seems to write a lot of video game tie-ins. And all indications are that he did a poor job—fans of the game have compiled a 13-page list of inaccuracies, some of them rather major—in addition to inaccurate depictions of various alien worlds and species, one character entirely loses her autism, and another changes sexual orientation.

Subsequently, Christ Priestly, community coordinator at BioWare, issued an apology to fans for errors in the books. “We are currently working on a number of changes that will appear in future editions of the novel,” he wrote in a post to BioWare’s Mass Effect forums.

Though how they will do that without totally rewriting the book from the beginning is a headscratcher. As Gamertell writer Jenni Lada points out:

I honestly have no idea how Del Ray and BioWare are going to make this right. It’s not that there are just a few factual errors. There are whole scenes that would have to be rewritten to make things right. Gillian’s character might have to be re-examined in every scene to adjust her behavior. Either that, or a more plausible explanation will have to be provided for why she’s suddenly a normal teenager. I do get the feeling that it will be the last Mass Effect book written by Dietz.

As Lada notes, whatever BioWare does, the errors won’t be fixed until the next printing of the book. Of course, for the e-book version, those errors could be corrected as soon as BioWare finishes correcting them, by re-issuing the e-book—they wouldn’t have to wait for the book to sell enough to merit another printing. (Indeed, with the negative publicity and rash of one-star reviews, it’s hard to imagine anyone being willing to buy it now.)  It could even replace the erroneous versions customers already have, as was done with Neal Stephenson’s Reamde. It’s not clear when or whether BioWare will do this, however.

It’s really puzzling how a book with this many errors made it past BioWare to begin with. Even if Dietz couldn’t be bothered to do his research, didn’t anybody in BioWare familiar with the game world background actually vet the thing? Or was it treated more like a movie novelization where the important thing is to get the book cover out there to advertise the impending new game? Regardless, with BioWare already having to push the release date of Mass Effect 3 back repeatedly, the company probably didn’t need this additional black eye.