Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conan movie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel seminar.

In this first part of the interview, we largely discussed the early history of e-books and e-publishing, with a diversion into how to restock the public domain. We get more into direct self- and e-publishing matters in the further segments.

Me: I’d like to start by asking: how did you get into self-publishing?

Michael: Well, probably the very first stuff I was self-publishing was my how-to-write newsletter, The Secrets, which I taught classes at GenCon and other conventions for many years and decided to do a newsletter. Decided to make it Internet subscription only, so starting about 7, 8 years ago I was doing this bi-weekly newsletter as PDFs. So that was the very first thing that I did. Right there I realized the possibilities for doing this.

Many years ago I had gotten Apple Newtons and gone through a series of Palm Pilots and every time with the Apple Newtons, with the Palm Pilots, always get the software that would allow me to make electronic books that would work on those devices. Because again I just found it fascinating, and found that huge potential there.

You fast-forward to the Kindle coming out and now all the tablets and all the dedicated readers and suddenly all that potential that I was seeing those many years ago both had devices that made it easier for other people to use and also put in place marketplaces that suddenly made it possible to have an economy based on selling your own work.

Me: It’s funny, you know, those of us who’ve been reading e-books ever since the nineties had gotten to the point of despairing that anybody would ever be interested, and finally Jeff Bezos came along and basically single-handedly created the e-book market.

Michael: Right. You know, I really thought when the Newton came out, because it had on more reader software—I really had high hopes for that. And then when Apple abandoned the Newton and didn’t do anything else to follow that up and didn’t keep that software alive, I felt that that was unfortunate.

And then the software that was being used to make books for the Palm Pilot—unfortunately the company that put it out hit on the plan of charging a royalty for the authors who used their software. [eReader, nee Peanut Press. When Fictionwise bought the company, it discontinued this practice. —CM] And I absolutely balk at that. I mean, this is like the guy who built your house having a percentage every time you sell it. No, no, this job was done along time ago! So I didn’t like that.

So again, now we finally do have both a means to make it convenient for people and an economic structure that makes it very viable for authors to be able to do things, even original things, which is kind of cool.

Me: Yeah, it’s funny that eventually one of the companies that was using eReader’s, or rather Peanut Press’s software back then eventually bought it.

Michael: Right.

Me: And that was Fictionwise, and they completely opened it up, but by then it was kind of too late.

Michael: It was, and down through the years I’ve gotten in touch with Fictionwise and what they wanted for an author to self-publish was they wanted you to have at least ten things—ten novels or whatever—that you were going to be able to bring to that. And even as a published novelist who owns the rights to certain things, I didn’t have and I really didn’t think anybody else was going to have a catalog of books that we’d be able to toss out there just ready to go.

I also think I didn’t like the terms of their contracts—and fortunately we’ve seen the exclusives aspects of contracts going away now, which is good. That’ s always just been stupid. Especially when you’re watching new formats and new platforms come out, why would you sign something away forever when you know in the next week somebody may come up with a brand new thing that will be the new hot thing, and suddenly you’ve signed those rights away. That doesn’t make any sense.

Me: Uh-huh. And certainly one of the big issues in publishing right now is the percentage of royalties.

Michael: Right.

Me: With a lot of publishers balking at giving any kind of high percentage royalties on backlist e-books, and then there’s Amazon and to a lesser extent Barnes & Noble offering 65 to 70% royalties.

Michael: Right.

Me: And so we’ve actually seen estates of major authors like Ian Fleming and Catherine Cookson and so forth taking their backlists directly to Amazon.

Michael: More important than that is you’ve got J.K. Rowling doing electronic books herself. There it’s not even an estate, it is an author who still retains those right who just says, hey, look, I can do more and I can do better than the publishers can.

Me: Uh-huh, and it’s also kind of impressive that she’s going to be doing it without restrictive digital rights management.

Michael: Right.

Me: Basically it’s kind of funny, because all the people—including me—who’ve been complaining about for the longest time expected that when she did eventually come out with them they’d be in the same digital rights management formats that everybody uses and everybody who knows how cracks.

Michael: That’s it, that’s always been my response—whenever another author says to me, “What do you do with DRM?” it’s like, why? You know [it’ll get broken] the second you put it on—I’m not smarter than people who can crack this stuff. I use a form of “moral DRM” which just says, hey look, if you enjoyed this, come on, shoot me a couple of bucks. It’s a fair exchange. My feeling is that if you’re going to use my product for entertainment, and I give you five hours of entertainment, it’s really not too much for me to ask you to give me five bucks.

Me: I remember back in the early 2000s you wrote sort of a treatise on piracy in which you challenged would-be pirates to scan some rare out-of-print public domain works rather than the works that were readily pirated.

Michael: Right, right. Because I think, look, if you’re going to run a scanner, if you’re going to do that sort of thing and you can look at Project Gutenberg as basically doing that, then gosh, just do something useful. Bring a lot of this stuff back in. There’s some fantastic early science fiction which is out there and I love getting this stuff and reading it all to find—oh, this is the guy that Edgar Rice Burroughs was reading before I got to reading my stuff.

Me: I’m a big fan of Maurice Leblanc myself, the Arsène Lupin novels.

Michael: Oh sure, yeah.

Me: And it really depresses me that so many of them were written after 1923, and they may never get into the public domain, Mickey Mouse being what he is.

Michael: Well, ’23 shouldn’t be a problem. It’s about ’63, ’64. If your book was printed after Walt Disney died, the copyright is never going to get broken. If Walt Disney predeceased the author, it’s never going to come out. Doesn’t mean authors can’t make available, but…

Me: I find myself hoping eventually the public wakes up to what a travesty this extension of copyright is and does something about it, but it’s probably a pipe dream.

Michael: To be quite honest, I think the better place to attack it is not with the public because the public doesn’t pay attention to those things. I think the better place to attack it is with the authors. Think about the fact that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and a number of other billionaires have all gotten together and pledged [that] while they’ll set some money aside for their heirs, they will donate the vast majority of their money to charitable stuff.

You could probably start a movement among authors to say, “I’m going to give orders to my literary estate that after I’m dead I’m going to let my work put my kids or grandkids through college. But twenty-five years after I die it goes into the public domain. And I think working with authors to do that is a lot more reasonable—a smaller audience and target audience that is going to be susceptible and reasonable to that particular thing. The reason you’ll never get a change in legislation is because Senators and Representatives write books.

Interestingly, eReader (which Barnes & Noble bought) long allowed authors to do something similar using an Easter Egg function of the Palm PDA reader client. I wonder if that’s what gave B&N the idea?

At any rate, for Nook owners this could be a rather better way to do book autographs than the complicated Autography system that would involve social networking and downloading and various rigamarole on the part of the author. Nook owners could just activate the autograph function, hand the stylus over, and get the signature. Just like with a paper book.

Which in turn makes buying a Nook start to look more attractive to “serious” e-bibliophiles. The wi-fi model is becoming available for $80 refurbished now and then, after all…

Moran looks at the old Barnes & Noble e-book reader application, based on Fictionwise’s eReader. All in all, he writes, it was a very good application, and did everything he wanted it to. Then B&N essentially abandoned it in favor of their much-less-functional Nook application, which wastes screen space, lacks the in-app Wikipedia access of the old one, and won’t allow side-loading existing eReader-format books.

He has some harsh words for interface decisions in iBooks, too, such as the way the bookshelf format makes books a bit hard to find.

What’s the solution? Frankly, I want one app that lets me read all my books, no matter what the app. I am sick to death of trying to guess which app is going to be the best one to stick with, and even sicker of trying to remember which app I have a particular book in. I mean, I have 15 readers loaded onto my iPhone right now. 15. That’s ridiculous. I’ve tried to keep the number I actually use down to 3 or 4, but it’s hard. And how do you count them? Does Instapaper count? How about the New York Times iPhone app? The Elements app? Various comic book readers? Zinio? The various “Vooks”? It’s a nightmare.

Of course, he understands the source of the problem: the competing DRM formats that the different e-book stores use to promote customer lock-in. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem likely that this problem will be solved any time soon (until and unless it becomes legal to strip DRM and convert your e-books into a single format you can use with just one reader, at least).

It’s such a ridiculous problem, and while it may not be crippling the sales of any particular e-book store, I can’t help feeling that it’s holding the market back, myself. Imagine how it would have affected the print publishing world if you could only put any given publisher’s books in a specific kind of bookshelf.

Hey, publishers, you don’t want Amazon’s Kindle taking over the world? How about concentrating a little less on cross-vendor price parity and a little more on cross-vendor book compatibility? Amazon would lose a lot less of its competitive advantage if you could buy an e-book once and read it anywhere.

And you know what the easiest way to do that would be? Stop using DRM. The DRM that keeps your books from being “stolen” also lets Amazon remain on top of the market, by making sure that readers can’t take Amazon books elsewhere, and can’t bring books from elsewhere to their Kindle.

Of course, that’s probably never going to happen, in the current climate. And so the Tower of E-Babel continues to climb.

It’s no surprise that speculation has been rife about whether Apple was going to kill other e-book apps on its iOS platform ever since in-app purchases were first made available, and again when Apple launched iBooks. After all, apps like eReader and Kindle and Nook and Kobo allow people to buy and download content completely outside the auspices of its in-app purchase store, without Apple getting its 30% cut of the take. So far all our paranoia has come to naught.

But that may be changing. I’ve already mentioned Apple’s prohibition on providing free e-subscriptions to print subscribers, and the Belgian anti-trust investigation it has provoked., but Monday Note has a look at an issue that’s related but not quite the same.

It seems that, since the implementation of in-app purchases, Apple has historically allowed the purchase of magazine subscriptions by redirection to the magazines’ web sites (just as they’ve allowed Amazon, Fictionwise/eReader, Kobo, and others to sell e-books from their websites that could be downloaded into the iOS e-book app). These purchases, since they were made outside the in-app purchase store, also don’t give Apple its 30% take.

But it does not appear that this situation is going to last.

The bad news hardly came as a surprise to many of us who found strange that Apple allowed content providers to bypass its transaction system for the most promising part of their revenue stream. In the long run, how could Apple limit itself to its 30% cut on a $0.99 purchase, and leave a $100 or $150 yearly subscription unmolested? It was just a matter of time before Apple decided to plug this revenue leak. The grace period was probably the time needed to build a subscription system able to match the App Store’s global scale.

And so for the last three months, Apple has been rejecting magazine apps that use the subscription loophole, and subsequently emailing the developers calling attention to section 11.2 of the App Store Review Guidelines:

11.2     Apps utilizing a system other than the In App Purchase API (IAP) to purchase content, functionality, or services in an app will be rejected

And, the e-mail noted:

For existing apps already on the App Store, we are providing a grace period to bring your app into compliance with this guideline. To ensure your app remains on the App Store, please submit an update that uses the In App Purchase API for purchasing content, by June 30, 2011.

The Monday Note article does not say one word about e-books or e-book apps, but if Apple intends to enforce this provision across the board, it could have the effect of killing off every commercial e-book app except for iBooks. I find it highly doubtful that Amazon, eReader, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, or any other e-book company is going to be willing to sacrifice 30% of its iOS revenue to Apple—or that consumers would be willing to buy the e-books if the stores raised their prices to compensate. If they were even allowed to raise the prices under agency pricing.

But I also find it hard to believe that Apple would be willing to kill off all other e-book apps, given that they help to produce demand for Apple’s pricey device which has a lot higher margins than iBooks e-books, at no cost to Apple itself. After all, e-book reading is widely considered to be one of the iPad’s killer apps. But if they don’t cost Apple anything, they’re also not making it any money, which is something it’s going to be trying to squeeze out of magazine publishers.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how this all works out.

The story idea I had was inspired in part by a number of works I’d read over the years, including half-remembered stories that just popped into my head at odd moments. I actually had to ask rec.arts.sf.written for help identifying a couple of them, since I realized I wanted to read them again. And I thought the fastest way to find them might be as e-books. Funnily enough, these two stories have ended up being a study in e-book contrasts.

One of them was a really short (only 2059 words) story by Stephen Goldin called “The Last Ghost”. It was a Nebula finalist for Best Short Story of 1971—one of the shorter pieces of SF I’d read in my youth, but one of the more (pardon the pun) haunting ones, to live in my memory all this time. It’s available in a story collection by Goldin that can be found as an e-book at the usual places for $9.99…everywhere. (Except at Sony, apparently. Amusingly enough, the E-Reads buy link for Sony links to an expired domain placeholder page.) So much for bargain-hunting!

Even Fictionwise has it. Adding insult to injury, they list a “club price” of $8.49 for it—but my club membership expired last year and can never be renewed. (But I guess they’re going to have to keep on showing the club price until multi-year memberships expire.)

I didn’t want to pay $9.99 for a whole book when I just wanted to read the one story again. While I expect the other stories are all great, I simply didn’t want them right now. But fortunately, a little more research led me to discover that Smashwords has that short story available by itself for 99 cents. That was cheap enough I could buy two copies and send one to the fellow whose shared universe my story idea was set in. (In contrast to Kobo’s and Amazon’s, Smashword’s “gifting” system is rather straightforward, and works not unlike a “coffee money” jar: they simply trust you to put money in for every copy you’re going to email to someone else.) This really helped me out, and is exemplary of what I want e-books to be.

But on the other hand, there’s a book by renowned SF editor and novelist Donald A. Wollheim, writing under the pseudonym David Grinnell, called Edge of Time. Written in 1958, about a team of scientists who manage to create their own universe in microcosm, it really captured my imagination, and has held onto it to this day. But it’s not available electronically anywhere.

Even Google Books doesn’t have it (or much else by Wollheim either), suggesting that either the libraries they’ve scanned so far haven’t had much in the way of SF, or (more likely) Wollheim’s estate or publisher requested the titles be pulled. Even though it’s written by one of the most famous SF editors, a man who helped shaped the course of modern SF and fantasy fandom to a remarkable extent (including being arguably responsible for the popularity of Lord of the Rings exploding due to his unauthorized paperback republication of the trilogy), the book isn’t available electronically—or even in a new print edition—at all.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s unavailable. Not as a pirated e-book (I did look, out of curiosity, but apparently it’s too obscure for any pirate scanners to bother with), but in another Internet marketing innovation: the Internet-ordered, snail-mail-shipped used paperback. I could (and in fact, just did) go into Amazon right now and order a “Used – Very Good” paperback copy for one penny plus $3.99 shipping—about the same amount as I paid for an Amazon mp3 download of Daft Punk’s new Tron: Legacy soundtrack last night. It won’t put it on my iPad, but it will at least let me read it again.

And Wollheim’s estate won’t see a penny of that…penny. Whereas if it were a $9.99 e-book on Amazon, which I would have been willing to buy, they’d have gotten $7. Like so many other orphan or backlist titles, the book is a Manx cat in a “long tail” world.

The fullest potential of e-books is to create a “celestial library” equivalent to the oft-touted “celestial jukebox” of the digital music revolution. That’s what Amazon has been trying to do with its Kindle. And when it works, it works: I was able to find a relatively obscure short story I wanted to read, at a price I found reasonable, with just a few minutes of Googling. But just as often it doesn’t, and Edge of Time is a frustrating reminder of just how far the library’s shelves are from being filled.

Barnes & Noble is proceeding to auction itself off, and has said that Burkle’s Yucaipa Companies is welcome to submit its own bid to be considered alongside all the others.

It is unclear what the results of the auction will bode for Barnes & Noble’s Nook (and, for that matter, for the e-book companies Fictionwise and eReader that Barnes & Noble also owns). But given the decline of print publishing lately, those e-reading properties are probably Barnes & Noble’s biggest attraction to any forward-looking company.

It will be interesting to see who submits bids. Even if Barnes & Noble decides to sell itself directly to Riggio (there have been rumors he plans to make his own bid), knowing who else was interested will give us a good idea of what companies might think e-books are the way forward.

(Found via Galleycat.)

The PW article notes that E-Reads founder Richard Curtis found a lot of agents were reluctant to offer rights to backlist titles without any money offered up front—it simply wasn’t a publishing model they were familiar with. Most of Curtis’s advances are fairly small, just in the few-hundred-dollars range, but it is apparently the thought that counts—and E-Reads’s 50-50 profit share means that books have the potential to earn out pretty quickly.

Curtis said that he sees advances as incentives in what is becoming an increasingly competitive marketplace, where authors and agents may withhold e-book rights when they sell print rights in order to get a better deal for the e-book. "The e-book industry has been moving toward an independent marketplace for e-book rights separated from print rights, the way authors and agents reserve audio rights and movie rights," said Curtis.

The E-Reads blog post notes that E-Reads has been around since 2000 and currently offers 1,200 backlist titles. It points out that agents usually throw e-book rights in for no additional advance money in deals with mainstream publishers, but the growth of the e-book industry makes it more feasible for e-publishers to offer royalties for those rights when offered separately.

It also links to a Digital Book World piece on Curtis’s founding of E-Reads, inspired by the Ben Bova novel Cyberbooks. It’s an interesting piece, touching on the potential conflict of interest inherent in a literary agent becoming a publisher (which Curtis was dealing with ten years before Philip Wylie’s recent Amazon bombshell) and the changes that the growth of the e-book has finally begun to bring to the publishing industry.

Curtis says that as publishers have been moving to entirely digital editorial processes, he has changed his approach to submitting manuscripts as an agent.

“The ebook part of my business and the agent part have cross-pollinated each other,” he explains. “Tricks we learned from the IT guys down the hall are helping me to create submission packages that are really quite amazing.  By clicking on a page of our website you can all but see the entire book that I’m offering.  It’s so much easier for you to envision what the author is like, who the author is, what he or she sounds like, looks like, how they act on television, what the content will be, what the interactive elements are going to be.”

He also does not believe that e-books will cause the “death” of print, though feels that there will be major changes in the way printed books are produced. He expects the current inefficient “returns” model for printed books to be overthrown, perhaps by an e-book retailer such as Amazon buying a major publishing company.

I find it interesting indeed that an e-publisher is beginning to offer even small advances on backlist titles. I think that it further serves to “legitimize” e-publishing, and certainly makes E-Reads more attractive to writers looking for a place to sell their backlists.

One thing that’s worth noting is that E-Reads’s e-book store is currently run through Fictionwise, and is going to be affected by the recently-announced closing of individual publishers’ branded Fictionwise stores at the end of September. It does not mean they will stop selling books through Fictionwise, but rather that they will simply have to link to Fictionwise in a different way.

These are store-fronts hosted by Fictionwise enabling customers to view only the publishers’ own titles rather than the comprehensive list of all books retailed by Fictionwise.

The dedicated publisher pages will be terminated at the end of September, and publishers have been invited to redirect customer visits and purchases to the main Fictionwise website www.fictionwise.com.

Richard says that, other than this, Fictionwise will continue as normal.

Thanks to Marilynn Byerly for the link.

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?)

Email begins:

My purchasing at Fictionwise has dwindled from a flood to a trickle since the imposition of “geographic limitations”, but I still prefer to buy ebooks there if I can. I also signed up last year (before the imposition) for another 5 years of the Buywise club. Under the current publishing conditions, we customers are told that we will still be eligible for Buywise discounts for the life of our already-paid subscription, and that we can use our existing Micropay balance.

The Micropay balance is the issue here. In mid-July I tried to use mine. It’s shown at the top of the Shopping Cart, and the Help says you can use it. However, the Micropay button no longer shows at the bottom of the Shopping Cart.

Previously, if your total was less than your Micropay balance, and you didn’t have any “PayPal/Credit card Only” titles in your Shopping Cart, then you could press the Micropay button to checkout. Your balance would be debited by that amount, and you didn’t need to pay with PayPal or credit card. This was quick and convenient, and definitely caused me to buy significantly more books.

In mid-July I couldn’t find any way to checkout using my Micropay balance. I searched the site and the Help. I kept going back there every couple of days to see if the problem had been fixed. It wasn’t.

So, on the 27th July, I put in a formal request for Customer Support. I have had no response. My titles are still sitting in my Shopping Cart, and I’m not game to buy anything else until this is cleared up. Fictionwise owe me over $60 Micropay: I really don’t mind how they reimburse me (e.g. a voucher for books), but I’m distinctly unhappy that they aren’t fulfilling their agreement to allow us to use up our Micropay balance, and that they don’t respond to my customer service request. I’ve made a handful of requests over the years I’ve been at Fictionwise, and they have never responded. I have no idea why. There is nowhere to go on their site from that point.

So I emailed B&N, explaining my problem. The first reply was an auto-respond which didn’t address my problem at all. So I asked them to read my email. The second reply was that I should contact Fictionwise. I said that I had tried that (repeatedly), without success, and that surely the customer service behaviour of a wholly-owned B&N company was B&N’s business. The next reply was that it wasn’t, and I should “contact Fictionwise”.

I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone who’s had any success in contacting Fictionwise, or has any idea how I can resolve this. B&N don’t appear to care, which does raise some interesting questions.

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?

Wattpad: IOS4, enhanced part navigation, add My Profile tab

eReader: fixed a book deletion problem for the on-device bookshelf. Changed the background on the iPad for the Find and Color Picker dialogs so that the controls can be seen easeir

Kobo: choose from left or fully justified text layout from reading settings. Enjoy an improved animated page turn effect. Performance and stability improvements.

But in the last couple of weeks, surprise surprise, out came a new iPad-compatible eReader. I’m still not entirely sure why. Are Barnes & Noble still committed to supporting Fictionwise’s platform for the iPhone, and an iPad-compatible version would also look good on iPhone 4? Did they get tired of people asking and complaining about it? As close-mouthed as B&N media relations is, we may well never know.

(And that’s not even the first time this has happened—after I was convinced that Amazon would never allow Stanza to come out with an iPad version, there it came in June! The demons must be having to contend with heavy blizzards.)

At any rate, it provides a perfect excuse for me to get around to taking a look at not only this new revision, but also at the new Barnes & Noble app at long last. Once again, there are two different applications of the same name, but pointed at different e-book stores from the same owner. How do they stack up?

Apples and Oranges

I had planned to review these two applications at the same time and compare them head to head, but looking again I realized it isn’t really possible to compare them apples-to-apples (or Apple to Apple, as the case may be) anymore. The original Barnes & Noble eReader was an exact clone of the Fictionwise app, created (as far as I know) by the same team of coders by removing a few options and reskinning it to look more like the Barnes & Noble website. In all but a few small particulars, they acted the same.

But the Barnes & Noble iPad app is something completely different. It might read Barnes & Noble e-books, but the user interface is completely new—closer to the way things are done on the Nook device itself, which suggests to me that it probably didn’t have any more to do with the original eReader or anyone who worked on it than the name.

It’s been redesigned from the ground up, and isn’t really an “eReader” app any more than the Kindle Reader is a Mobipocket app. Small wonder that the version for Android has shed the “eReader” moniker entirely, and is simply “Nook for Android”. I wouldn’t be surprised if a future revision of the B&N iPad eReader similarly renamed and rebranded it to “Nook for iPad”. (It would certainly help lessen confusion over compatibility between the two readers.)

On the other hand, the iPad version of Fictionwise’s eReader has hardly changed at all. But that may not be such a good thing.

Regardless, it’s not a simple matter of slapping a few paragraphs onto the end to say “the Barnes & Noble version is just like this except…” So I’m going to devote this review entirely to Fictionwise’s eReader, and cover Barnes & Noble’s later.

Fictionwise eReader for iPad, and the Size Change Conundrum

There was a hack I reported on a few months ago that would allow jailbroken iPads to scale up a number of iPhone apps to work in full iPad resolution without pixel doubling. It wouldn’t be the same as if they had been designed to work in that resolution—interface and design elements might be broken, or at least not look quite right—but it would use full-resolution iPad fonts and graphics.

This is fundamentally what the iPad version of eReader does to the iPhone version: simply changes it to use iPad scaling and font sizes. To be fair, this does work, to a certain extent. E-books look much better (with a few caveats that I’ll get to below) when they can be viewed in a font that is not all fuzzy and blurry from having pixels twice the size they were meant to.

The problem is that there’s more to redesigning an interface originally meant for a small screen to move it to a large screen than just doubling the size of everything.

When the iPad was in the process of being prepped for launch, tech blogs widely reported that Steve Jobs had axed a number of built-in iPhone apps from being converted over, such as the stock ticker, calculator, and clock, because Apple simply couldn’t figure out how to redesign their interfaces to look good blown up to iPad size.

We’re seeing a similar thing here. It doesn’t look like a lot of care or attention was paid to modernizing the eReader client. For all I know, it may not even have been done by the same people. (I certainly wouldn’t like to think that the people who wrote the original version were associated with this. As good as that eReader app is, I would think they’d do a more thorough job.)

Perhaps Barnes & Noble decided to go with their own in-house team rather than whatever coders Fictionwise used. Not being familiar with it, and being too lazy to bother to learn it (after all, it’s not like it’s something important, like the Nook), B&N just slapped the band-aid of resolution-change on it and sent it out into the world.

I do know that the Pendergrasts, back when they were allowed to talk to us, took considerable pride in their iPhone application, and it doesn’t seem likely they’d countenance something so slap-dash as this half-hearted adaptation if they still had any say over it. Chalk it up to another malign influence that Barnes & Noble is exercising over its once-independent subsidiary.

How Does it Look?

I’m not doing the usual “Readability/Ease of Use/Adding Content” sections with this review, because in a very real sense I’ve already done them. Go back and read my review of the iPhone eReader app. In terms of adaptation to the iPad, the screen size is the only thing that’s changed. Everything else is identical.

On the face of it, this doesn’t seem like such a horrible thing. And as I’ve said before, it’s not really bad. Certainly as someone who started out reading e-books in eReader on a 160×160 pixel black-and-white LCD screen, this native iPad version represents a considerable improvement. I’m so glad to be able to read my eReader books in full resolution that a lot would be forgivable. But…well, let’s look at the screenshots.

On the left is the old iPhone version pixel-doubled to the iPad. On the right is the new iPad version, at the same (“Medium”) font size setting. (Click through to see in full iPad resolution.) You’ll notice that the iPad version shows a lot more text, and the text looks a lot less fuzzy, too.

But look at the user interface. It’s exactly the same. In fact, accounting for difference in screen height, I would be willing to say that the height of each status bar measures exactly the same amount of pixels. And, in fact, the icons you tap on are smaller too, because pixel for pixel they’re exactly the same icons. They haven’t been scaled up or changed at all.

Now, that pixel size worked well on the iPhone or iPod Touch, where on the smaller screen it was just the right size for tapping with your fat fingers—but on the bigger iPad screen, it’s going to be a bit harder to find in all that open space if you want to tap something quickly. (And if the higher-resolution version is likewise represented pixel for pixel when it goes to the iPhone 4, those icons are going to be almost impossible to find.)

But the lack of changes goes beyond just the interface. Here are four pictures, to prove a point. (I didn’t bother to upload the full size versions of these to Twitpic, so they won’t show up at full iPad resolution when you click on them. But there should be enough detail to get the idea.)

On the upper left is the iPhone eReader (actually the Barnes & Noble iPhone eReader, since the new version of the Fictionwise one replaced the iPhone version I kept on my iPad) at “Gigantic” font size, “Huge” margin size. On the upper right is the iPad version of eReader set to the largest font size.

Bottom left is the Barnes & Noble iPad eReader app and bottom right is the iPad Kindle Reader app set to their largest font sizes. Notice a difference there?

The “Gigantic” font size on the iPad Fictionwise eReader—the very largest font size it can display!—is smaller than the pixel-doubled version of the iPhone version’s “Medium” font shown further up the review, let alone the maximum font sizes for B&N eReader or Kindle Reader. But ou’ll notice it’s exactly the same size, pixel for pixel, as the non-doubled “Gigantic” size on the iPhone! Same with the margin widths.

I wouldn’t call the iPad font size “gigantic” or the margin “huge” by any stretch of the imagination. While they’re certainly quite readable for anyone with reasonably young eyes, someone with weaker eyes looking for a larger font size such as the B&N or Amazon apps offer is going to be out of luck. Lazy, lazy coders.

That’s the only really big annoyance. There are a couple of other complaints I’ve seen about the iPad eReader that, while annoying, aren’t really worth fussing over.

Minor Nitpicks

One is the fact that there is no two-column mode in landscape like in iBooks or the B&N eReader. While this is bothersome, especially when coupled with the narrow margins and small maximum font size, the Kindle Reader for iPad doesn’t do two-column landscape either and nobody seems upset over that.

The other nitpick has to do with the cover art, on books that have it. Yes, cover art on an eReader book is going to look lousy blown up to an iPad screen. To a certain extent, it looks pretty bad even on an iPhone screen. But that’s not the application’s fault specifically.

After all, what do you expect? The eReader (aka Peanut Reader) format hasn’t been updated in twelve years. It was originally meant for reading on 160×160 pixel monochrome LCD screens, on a device that broke files up into 64K chunks. Cover art still has a maximum size of 64K, and as seen at right is still often formatted so it looks good on a square screen (such as most Blackberries still have).

If you’re going to get upset about that, you’re about twelve years too late. It is for that reason that Fictionwise was planning to migrate to EPUB as its new eReader format…but then it got bought by Barnes & Noble, and that was that.

(The fuzzy iPhone-resolution eReader splash page on launch, though…yeah, I’ll give you that one. Lazy coders again.)

Bright Sides

Not to look a gift horse entirely in the mouth, there are still plenty of things to like about this app—many of them the same things I liked about the iPhone version, since this essentially is the iPhone version writ large (literally). The ease of downloading your entire shelf at once from either eReader or Fictionwise, for instance, or downloading books from webservers by using ereader:// URIs in Mobile Safari. You can’t do those things in the Barnes & Noble app, no matter how much more polished and iPad-optimized it might be.

And I do have a fairly large eReader-format library that I’ve built up over those last twelve years. Until this update there was simply no way to read them at full resolution on the iPad without resorting to illegal methods (well, unless we count Stanza, but Stanza doesn’t have the handy library fetch and it doesn’t quite display eReader books as well as eReader).

Lazy they might have been, but at least they came out with an iPad version at all. If they never updated it again, and this was the final version of eReader forever, I’d still be grateful for at least that much.

Ticked with Fictionwise

Of course, downloading one’s entire shelf at once does lead to another irritation with Fictionwise, albeit one that’s not entirely their fault. In the process I discovered a number of books I had already ordered—among others, several of the Rachel Vincent series of which Shift is one book, and some Dirk Pitt novels—won’t download. And since I lost my iPod Touch that previously had my library on it, I find I’m stuck without access to these books.

Furthermore, the latest books in some of the series I’ve been following—the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs, the Kitty Norville series by Carrie Vaughn—are not available on Fictionwise or eReader, presumably (like the missing books I already bought) due to the Agency Pricing situation. I already bought the latest Mercy Thompson book from Amazon when I was reviewing the Kindle Reader apps, and now I may well do the same for the new Kitty.

I had been buying everything from Fictionwise due to not wanting to keep multiple e-book libraries, but now that they’re eliminating their discount program and rebates, and Amazon is coming out with reader apps for so many different platforms, it looks as though that’s the way I’m going to end up going next.

In the end, eReader is the app you need for reading eReader books on the iPad in its full resolution, and I am very glad I’m able to do that at last. However, there is still considerable room for improvement—and with Barnes & Noble pouring most of its effort into its Nook platform, it is anybody’s guess whether that improvement can actually happen.

Our sister blog Gamertell, which is a video gaming blog, has the details. Over the last two weeks, Valve’s game distribution platform Steam’s anti-cheating system mistakenly banned about 12,000 Steam accounts from playing Modern Warfare 2, for cheating. Steam’s system is simplistic, usually accurate, and there is no appeal—the only way to start playing a game on policed multiplayer servers again after being banned is usually to buy a whole new copy of the game.

After the controversy erupted, Valve founder Gabe Newell stepped forward to explain and apologize for the technical error. Not only were the 12,000 ban victims reinstated, but each of them was gifted with two copies of Valve’s $29.99 Left 4 Dead 2 zombie shooter—one to keep, one to give away—to make up for it.

Not only did Newell apologize and fix the mistake, but he gave out nearly three quarters of a million dollar’s worth of game product to make it right. Now that’s customer service!

Of course, just as with the Doctors Without Borders DriveThruRPG Haiti e-book fundraiser, Newell could afford to do this because (as with e-books) there are no marginal production costs for digital downloads—he didn’t have to pay the pressing and packaging costs for 24,000 copies of a game. But it’s still foregoing the profits from those copies, which would be about $360,000 if profit is considered to equal 1/2 retail price. Probably more in the case of these games due to that lack of marginal cost.

This partly reminds me of the controversy over Amazon’s removal of an illicit Orwell novel from readers’ Kindles, and Jeff Bezos’s subsequent apology. I seem to recall the book was eventually reinstated on users’ Kindles, some time after the apology, but I can’t find exactly when, or whether Bezos gave out any bonus freebies as Valve did. (My suspicion is he did not.) (Update: Further research, prompted by a comment below, reveals that Bezos eventually offered either a $30 gift certificate or the return of 1984 to the devices of affected users…in September, two months after the incident. Kudos to Bezos for doing the right thing, but did he really have to wait two months?)

But what it really brings to mind is the complete lack of any sort of customer service coming out of e-book companies Fictionwise or eReader, or the publishers who are ultimately responsible, regarding the e-books we purchased in good faith but can no longer download at the moment due to the Agency Pricing mess.

It was brought home to me just how many of my books I can no longer read when I did a mass download of my eReader and Fictionwise libraries into the new iPad version of eReader (which I plan to review soon) and got errors on at least a dozen titles. And people who have asked about the books’ lack have essentially been stonewalled. We haven’t gotten explanations, apologies, or reinstatement of the missing content yet, let alone any make-up gifts. There haven’t been any explanations forthcoming from the publishers, either, who are thoe ones who pulled the pricing strings that led to the books falling out of view.

Judging by their relative customer service records, it certainly makes sense that almost half of all video games are now being sold as digital downloads—and the majority of those via Steam—while still only a tiny fraction of books are e-books.

On the other hand, our sister blog Gadgetell reports that Sharp is releasing 5.5” and 10.8” color LCD tablets through Verizon later this year (see also this TeleRead story), with 3G enabled. Is this something entirely different from the “Entourage” devices above, or did someone just get confused?

Another Engadget story (actually a reblogged PC World story) notes that the Windows 7 Hewlett Packard Slate—the one reported as “missing in action” by the where-are-they-now story we posted a few days ago—has reappeared in a hard-to-find page on HP’s website.

Back in November 2009, on the Android release of the Fictionwise eReader app, one of our readers remarked how odd it was that there was a Fictionwise eReader for Android but not a Barnes & Noble version. Our sister blog Gadgetell reports that Barnes & Noble is finally getting around to fixing that—or at least that a Barnes & Noble tweet says that an Android app is coming “real soon”.

Speaking of Barnes & Noble, I’m a few days late mentioning this, but last week B&N announced another weekly free e-book giveaway—but in this case, the books they will be giving away free are public-domain titles, which are already free via Project Gutenberg and other public domain book sites. eBookNewser quotes tweets from a number of notably unimpressed readers.