TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Google’ Category

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

E-books aren’t the only way to “TeleRead”. Whenever we receive a text message, or an instant message on line, you could say we “TelePhoneRead”—as different a form of communication from the phone calls of old as e-books are from printed books.

I covered a similar article from TechCrunch a couple of weeks ago, but Om Malik of GigaOm has posted a piece on “Why we never talk anymore”—an article about the decline in phone voice communications and the rise in other forms such as text and possibly soon video.

Malik talks about his personal history growing up in Delhi, with his family’s rotary phone being the talk of the neighborhood, then using the landline in his early days as a journalist.

It all changed when I got a cell phone in the late 1990s. Sure enough, I got rid of my landline, and slowly my behavior changed: I started sending text messages more often. Initially, they were cheaper than voice minutes, and soon it became a habit. Today, I cringe at the idea of a phone call. Blame it on poor quality of the cell phone networks, but voice isn’t much fun. Instead, I’ve replaced what was a standard mode of communication — phones and faxes — with newer, Internet-based communications.

Just as cell communication replaced landline voice, so text communication is now replacing cell voice. And as I pointed out earlier today, with Virgin’s new unlimited contract-free $40/mo mobile Internet plan, we may be witnessing the next big replacement, as mobile and Voice Over IP replaces cell. Or perhaps I should quotate “replaces”, in the same way that e-books will “replace” paper books.

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By Chris Meadows

In a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched the repeated claims by the content industry that some new copyright violation is going to “kill” their business, a study on the economic impact of Google Book Search shows that having a searchable catalog of books has apparently helped publishers a lot more than it has hurt.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt posts a summary of the study, which shows that affected publishers’ profits grew faster on average in the years after the project than the years before. Publishers who did not opt out of the publishing partner agreement also saw large increases in revenues and profits.

This puts me in mind of the VCR, which thirty years ago Jack Valenti famously compared to the Boston Strangler, but subsequently formed the basis for an entirely new business sector in Hollywood that accounts for significantly more revenue than theatrical showings today. Who knows what Google Books will have made of the publishing industry thirty years from now?

By Chris Meadows

Google’s Android OS has become pretty much the go-to operating system for cheap tablets and e-book readers these days. But what of Google’s other OS, ChromeOS, that is rumored to be hitting tablets by Black Friday?

If you’re curious, and have a computer that is hardware-compatible and a spare USB drive, you can actually try it out and see for yourself. ReadWriteWeb notes that a developer going by “Hexxeh” has been compiling both a modified Chromium (the developer version of Chrome) build called “Flow” and an unmodified, straight-developer build called “Vanilla”. These can be downloaded and placed on a bootable USB drive for experimentation.

ReadWriteWeb also links to a blog post by Lee Mathews of the Download Squad with some additional tips and advice for Vanilla experimenters. Among other things, Mathews notes:

Not all hardware is going to work. The Chromium x86-generic images don’t include a ton of drivers, so you may be missing one fairly important piece of the puzzle: wifi support. Most netbooks will work 100% — full-sized laptops are more iffy.

On a related note, Computerworld reports that the newest beta of Chrome 6 includes menus that have been optimized for touch operation, possibly hinting at the new tablets that are supposedly on the way.

Has anyone tried this OS out yet? What do you think? How is it going to work as a netbook or tablet OS, and might it also make a good e-reader?

By Chris Meadows

Our sister blog Gadgetell is also covering the HTC Chrome Tablet story that we mentioned yesterday, pointing out that the tablet is supposedly going to go on sale on Black Friday.

However, eWeek has an opposing view. Writer Clint Boulton feels that, given that Chrome OS was supposed to launch on netbooks first and there is no sign of them, it seems unlikely Chrome OS will show up on a tablet by the end of November.

Of course, we probably won’t know who’s right until a lot closer to Thanksgiving.

By Chris Meadows

On Business Insider’s “Silicon Alley Insider” section, Eric Clemons and Nehal Madhani from the Wharton School make the provocative claim that, in order to protect newspapers, copyright laws need to be “strengthened” to give them a 24-hour head start—no aggregator is allowed to link to a story for 24 hours after its publication.

They seem to have bought into Rupert Murdoch’s stance that aggregators are, through their ruthless violation of copyright, killing newspapers rather than driving traffic to them. However, they do not provide any proof of this assertion, as Mike Masnick of Techdirt points out:

Revenue from those publications has been in decline for many years — well before Google and the internet existed. The biggest problem many of the bigger publications faced was taking on ridiculous debt loads. On top of that, most of them failed to provide value to their community, as competitors stepped in to serve those communities. That’s not about aggregators.

Masnick also notes that any and every paper has the power to block Google News easily and permanently, via the power of robots.txt.

It’s a bit odd, given all the uproar that’s been going on for so long, that you don’t really see many non-Murdoch papers doing that. Even the ones that do have paywalls, such as the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times, happily allow readers linked from Google News to bypass those paywalls altogether. If Google News is such a huge problem, why are any papers allowing it access at all? Why don’t they put their money where their mouths are?

Could it be they like getting traffic?

By Chris Meadows

I’ve been a little busy over the last few days, between installing Windows 7 over the weekend, my new day job, and other things, but I’m going to try to catch up a little here.

As if triggered by my post wondering where all the iPad alternatives were, there are a whole new bumper crop of tablets on the way, either confirmed or rumored—including a new size of iPad.

I first touched on the 7” iPad rumors in my post about why I would probably get a new  iPod Touch instead of an iPhone 4. Ars Technica didn’t find the rumor very credible at the time, but it seems to be getting a lot more play from a number of sources now.

One of those sources, Engadget, reports that the 7” device will have the same 1024×768 resolution as the 9.7” first-gen iPad, giving it more pixels per inch and bringing it closer to “retina” resolution. It will also have the Cortex A9 processor and 512 megabytes of RAM like the iPhone 4.

Meanwhile, our sister blog Gadgetell reports that Samsung is going to build a 7” Android tablet based on its Galaxy S smartphone design. There aren’t many details about this device, but more might be revealed soon.

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By Gary Price Founder and Senior Editor of Resource Shelf

+ UPDATED 1: August 9, 2010 (6:30 pm): We have started to add in reactions from several groups. They are under the “Reaction” near the bottom of the page.

+ UPDATE 2: FCC Commissioner Michael Copps Has Issued a One Paragraph Public Statement about the Google/Verizon Announcement (PDF)

+ UPDATE 3: Editorial From Seattle Times: Keep The Internet Open, Accessible, Creative

+ UPDATE 4: From Google and Verizon, a path to an open Internet (by Eric Schmidt and Ivan Seidenberg)
Both CEO’s have written this op-ed for the Washington Post.

“Some will claim this announcement moves the discussion forward. That’s one of its many problems. It is time to move a decision forward—a decision to reassert FCC authority over broadband telecommunications, to guarantee an open Internet now and forever, and to put the interests of consumers in front of the interests of giant corporations.”

The Announcement: Blogged Live and Reported On

+ A few minutes before the call, Google and Verizon released the seven point proposal officially titled, “A Joint Policy Proposal for an Open Internet.”

You can also read the proposal as its own document (via Scribd) here.

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By Paul Biba

That’s the title of an Ars Technica article today. The article discusses, at length, the problem with Google’s metadata and says:

Google’s counting method relies entirely on its enormous metadata collection—almost one billion records—which it winnows down by throwing out duplicates and non-book items like CDs. The result is a book count that’s arrived at by a kind of process of elimination. It’s not so much that Google starts with a fixed definition of “book” and then combs its records to identify objects with those characteristics; rather, the GBS algorithm seeks to identify everything that is clearly not a book, and to reject all those entries. It also looks for collections of records that all identify the same edition of the same book, but that are, for whatever reason (often a data entry error), listed differently in the different metadata collections that Google subscribes to.

But the problem with Google’s count, as is clear from the GBS count post itself, is that GBS’s metadata collection is a riddled with errors of every sort. Or, as linguist and GBS critic Goeff Nunberg put it last year in a blog post, Google’s metadata is “train wreck: a mish-mash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess.”

By Chris Meadows

Yesterday we mentioned that Google had stated that the $150 Augen tablet and $100 smartbook included a number of unauthorized closed-source applications (Market, Gmail, etc.).

Now Engadget reports that Augen has issued a press release stating the apps were installed on the devices for “testing purposes” during development, and were accidentally left in the production version of the operating system.

Augen says that it and Google have come to an understanding that, though it can’t do anything about the products that have already shipped, it will remove the controversial apps from future production runs of its products and it is working on getting the proper licensing to put them back in.

Not that these devices are any great shakes as hardware when it comes right down to it. For about the same amount of money, you can get a 2 to 3 year old refurbished Asus Eee, which will probably be significantly faster and more capable.

By Chris Meadows

We’ve mentioned ReCAPTCHA a time or two—the security effort by Carnegie Mellon researchers that took two problems and made them solve each other: how to make a “CAPTCHA” (an automated Turing test meant to prove that a human wants to access the website rather than a spambot) that couldn’t be solved by a computer optical character recognizer, and how to digitize words in old documents that a computer’s OCR couldn’t puzzle out.

By feeding these unrecognizable words to web users, paired with words the computer knew already, it both tested whether they were real people and told the system what those words that were immune to OCR were. It was used to digitize the 130-year archives of the New York Times, one word at a time over the course of a series of millions of web interactions, and proved so successful that it ended up being bought by Google.

However, technology does march on. At DEFCON 18, a researcher presented an paper claiming that he had devised an algorithm that would solve ReCAPTCHAs 30% of the time. While that is only about a 1 in 3 success rate, when solving one ReCAPTCHA fails a website generally pops up another, so a bot using this algorithm would only need to keep trying until it eventually got one right.

The researcher’s website is a little hard to read (it was formerly black on red, and the researcher in a fit of pique at complaints of unreadability changed it to an equally hard-to-read black on grey) but includes links to the paper, the powerpoint he presented at DEFCON, and a flash video of the decoding in action.

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By Gary Price Founder and Senior Editor of Resource Shelf

Google comes up with total book estimates and then explains how they arrived at the various numbers. If nothing else, it will show the non-cataloger is not as easy as it looks and many types and sources of bibliographic info exist.

As to the accuracy of the numbers. We’ll leave that to the experts, people with the tools to not only access the data but to also manipulate it in a number of ways.

From Inside Google Book Search

One definition of a book we find helpful inside Google when handling book metadata is a “tome,” an idealized bound volume. A tome can have millions of copies (e.g. a particular edition of “Angels and Demons” by Dan Brown) or can exist in just one or two copies (such as an obscure master’s thesis languishing in a university library). This is a convenient definition to work with, but it has drawbacks. For example, we count hardcover and paperback books produced from the same text twice, but treat several pamphlets bound together by a library as a single book.

You’ll then read about ISBN’s, SBN’s, Library of Congress Accession Numbers, and OCLC Accession Numbers.

Then, Google begins their explanation of how they count.

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By Chris Meadows

Google appears to be abandoning development on Google Wave. The collaboration project many derided as a solution in search of a problem apparently never found the userbase Google had hoped for, perhaps because its user interface never managed to approach the user-friendliness of other Google projects such as Gmail or Google Reader. Writes Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow, on the Google Blog:

Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

I did manage to use it for a couple of TeleRead interviews, and for a story outlining project, but it’s just not the sort of thing that lends itself to obvious uses—unlike Etherpad, the collaborative text editor produced by a company that Google absorbed last year, ostensibly to add its developers to the Google Wave development team. I wonder if the Etherpad dev team will return to working on their previous project, now open-sourced with numerous mirrors.

Hmm, that’s kind of ironic when you think about it. In purchasing and killing the company that made it, open-sourcing it as a byproduct, Google may have given Etherpad the very widespread adoption that it hoped for but never managed to achieve in Wave.

(Found via Gizmodo.)

By Chris Meadows

Peter Osnos at The Atlantic has a piece looking at what is known about Google Editions. It mentions that Google says it’s inked deals with 35,000 publishers, and will have millions of titles to offer.

The e-books will be stored on Google’s cloud, and will support the same sort of pick-up-where-you-left-off capability as Amazon’s Kindle platform. It is not clear, at least from this article, whether in-copyright e-books will be able to be downloaded into e-book reader devices without direct Internet connectivity, however. (Surely they will, given how many people currently have such devices…right?)

Osnos also mentions Google’s cooperation with the American Booksellers Association to allow independent bookstores to sell Google e-books through their own websites.

It still isn’t exactly clear when Google Editions will launch. However, it will be fun to see what happens when it does.

By Chris Meadows

Thanks to its free, always-on Internet, the Kindle can be used for more than just e-books (as xkcd so aptly pointed out). The Kindle World Blog has a great example of this, with a post that includes detailed instructions for using a Kindle to produce Google Maps driving directions—very useful when you’re in the car and realize you’re not entirely sure how to get where you’re going.

Needless to say, this sort of thing has the potential to be very distracting. If you do use those instructions, you should be sure to keep your eyes on the road and only check the Kindle when you’re stopped. (If you’re the sort of person who gets lost a lot, you’d probably be better off with an in-car GPS.)

By Chris Meadows

Brad Stone had an article in the New York Times lately about Google’s Google Editions initiative and what it will mean for independent bookstores. Whereas these stores have largely been left out of the e-book trade up to this point, Google is offering Editions to these stores on a wholesale basis, allowing them to host Google Editions e-book stores on their own websites.

Of course, Google will also be selling the e-books from its own site, but given that Google has considerably more experience selling services than products, those interviewed for the article seemed to think Google’s main emphasis would be on the wholesale side.

[Darin Sennett, the director of Web development at Powell’s,] acknowledged that Google would also be a competitor, since it would also sell books from its Web site. But he seemed to believe that Google would favor its smaller partners.

“I don’t see Google directly working to undermine or outsell their retail partners,” he said. “I doubt they are going to be editorially recommending books and making choices about what people should read, which is what bookstores do.”

The article reiterates Google’s promise not to tie books to any specific device or platform. I wonder how that is going to work, given that DRM by its very nature only works on devices that support it, and most publishers seem adamant that their books must be DRM’d.

I also have to wonder just how many independent bookstores are going to be interested in selling e-books. Powell’s is, naturally; they were originally one of the biggest supporters of the failed Rocketbook reader. But are smaller stores? Of course, given that Google will be providing basically a turnkey solution, it would probably not require all that much interest to do it.