TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘public domain’ Category

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 Paul Biba

From the Open Rights Group ORGCon conference:

[ORGCon] James Boyle: The Incredible Shrinking Public Domain from Open Rights Group on Vimeo.

By Paul Biba

We mentioned the Augen 7″ tablet here. Well now there are some reviews – and the reviews are bad.

Laptop’s review is entitled: Augen GenTouch78 hands-on: Android tablets reach new low. It goes on to say:

Android tablets have hit rock bottom. And we’re not just talking about the low, low price of the Augen GenTouch78. This K-Mart special is just that bad. We got our hands on the 7-inch slate this afternoon, and it didn’t take us long to realize that it’s not worth $149. Perhaps not even $49.

Liliputing gives it a fairly mediocre review as well. Both sites have videos you might want to look at.

By Chris Meadows

A MobileRead forumgoer reports that the latest Project Gutenberg newsletter contains an announcement of a new Project Gutenberg mobile website, m.gutenberg.org. The site is to be optimized not just for iPhones, but for any mobile phone including browsing-enabled dumbphones. Writes Gutenberg:

There are 4.5 billion such devices in the world, versus only 1.15 billion computers, and more and more readers, in spite of what the pundits say, are surfing, reading, and everything else on such mobile devices.

We’ve previously covered a couple of stories—earlier this year, and last year—on the possibility of using non-smart cell phones as e-book devices. Even back in 2006, some TeleRead readers noted it was possible.

In parts of the developing world, such as Africa, cell phones are already used for banking and other services considered to be the provenance of the computer elsewhere. It’s good to see the preeminent public domain e-book site in the world stepping up to help meet their e-book needs.

By Chris Meadows

The public domain is a great thing for literary appreciation. Any title older than 1923—which includes most of the great literary novels, the works of 19th-century poets, and so on—is immediately available to anyone who can download an e-book.

But what happens when a lost work turns up—and then promptly vanishes into a private collection? This is the question posed by Michael Rosen on the Guardian’s Books blog. Rosen reminds us that the four year anniversary recently passed of the discovery of a lost poem by Percy Bysse Shelley, entitled “Poetical Essay”.

The poem, self-published by Shelley in support of a friend imprisoned for libel, was known to scholars but considered lost, until a copy of the pamphlet containing it turned up in a British antiquarian bookshop. The reappearance of the poem caused a bit of a stir in the press, with at least one article by a literature professor about it, but then the owner sold it to a private collector and it disappeared entirely from view.

Rosen writes:

First of all, I would like the poem to be available to read by anyone who is interested. I believe that should have happened the moment it was rediscovered. Secondly, I want to know why Professor Woudhuysen was given the right to look at the poem, but no one else was. Thirdly, I want to know why this situation doesn’t seem to bother anyone in the great republic of letters, least of all that guardian of literary precision and exactitude, the TLS [Times Literary Supplement]. Isn’t it an outrage, that a long dead, great writer’s work can be hidden away in its owner’s drawer?

When I covered Mark Twain’s unpublished autobiography, I wondered who owned the copyright on the work and whether it should technically be in the public domain as soon as it was newly published. British copyright laws work a little differently from American ones, but even so it seems that since the Shelley poem was published, but lost, it should be in the public domain.

And there are so few obstacles to making it available now, should the owner want to. The wonder of the information age is that all it would take would be someone typing it into a computer, and suddenly the lost poem would instantly be available to the entire world.

But since the only extant copy of it has disappeared into the hands of a private collector, it is anyone’s guess whether it will ever actually show up. I imagine that, for the collector, the cachet of owning a Shelley poem only a couple of other living people have ever seen might be the entire point of buying it. It might be hard to convince such a person to share it with the world.

By David Rothman

Imagine—under-$100 tablets for libraries. Suppose they can display public domain books and other free content and run library e-book apps from companies such as OverDrive. That day isn’t here yet. But it’s fast approaching. Who says iPads, Kindles, Nooks and Sony Readers will be the only games out there?

The eight-inch Android tablet shown to the left sells now for $143.10 at Amazon. $100 in a year or so? With better than the current 800-by-400 resolution? And more than one user review at Amazon, so a purchase is less of a gamble?

You can even plunk down $124 for a rather problematic seven-inch Android tablet passing itself off in a photo as an iPad clone (I wonder about the 720p in the display-related specs, if nothing else). What’s more, there’s also the seven-inch Pandigitial Novel, an Android-based color ebook reader on sale at some places for less than $150 with special offers included. Again, a flawed machine—but a hint of better things to come. Same for the $199 Cruz Reader.

And now a question for library geeks out there: Are any of you experimenting with super-cheap Android machines, given their low costs and the forthcoming software from a major library vendor like OverDrive?  Here’s a chance to stay ahead of your users. If I were a public librarian, I’d think about such angles as:

–The greater demand that the new tablets will create for e-books. Will library budgets be ready? Will people be able to borrow a wide variety of books in E, not just the genre novels and other typical e-book fare? And will your tech support be up to snuff.

–Possible retaliation from certain publishers, fearing that their business models are more threatened than ever. Will some just stop making their books available to libraries or insist on library-hostile terms, if e-books are finally easy to check out with OverDrive’s new software? Should librarians and vendors such as OverDrive try harder to pick up books from smaller, more flexible publishers?

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By Chris Meadows

The Plato Code. No, it’s not the next best-seller by Dan Brown; this is something real. It comes out that a science historian has discovered that Plato, one of the ancient Greek philosophers whose known writings shaped the whole of modern scientific thought, hid secret writings within those known writings by means of a code.

However, banish thoughts of directions to a hidden treasure. The real treasure Plato hid was some of his more radical (for the time) philosophies, that could have caused him to be executed like his teacher Socrates had they become widely known.

The hidden codes show that Plato anticipated the Scientific Revolution 2,000 years before Isaac Newton, discovering its most important idea – the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. The decoded messages also open up a surprising way to unite science and religion. The awe and beauty we feel in nature, Plato says, shows that it is divine; discovering the scientific order of nature is getting closer to God. This could transform today’s culture wars between science and religion.

I can’t help but think the article is exaggerating a little. I have a hard time imagining the “culture wars between science and religion” being “transformed” just because someone just discovered that a philosopher from 25 centuries ago said nature is divine.

Still, if this is indeed true, it’s a fascinating find. Who would have imagined we could still find something entirely new in 2,500-year-old texts? Just goes to show that you can never underestimate the value of a thriving public domain.

And it makes me think about e-books in a new light just a little, too. It’s hard to conceive of an e-book lasting even a hundred years, let alone twenty-five centuries. Plato’s writings were fixed in a solid form, and have survived for thousands of years. E-books have a ways to go before they can last quite that long.

The 32-page paper laying out the methodology used in uncovering the codes can be found here (as a PDF).

(Found via Slashdot.)

By Chris Meadows

Ever consider that we may be becoming too politically correct? I get that feeling on occasion when I see articles like this one.

It seems that a small publisher that reprints classic historical public-domain works, such as the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and so on, has come under fire for attaching a disclaimer that reads, “This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today.” It goes on to suggest that parents discuss with their children how values have changed over the last couple of hundred years.

Amazon customer reviews are almost unanimously condemnatory of the disclaimers.

And though warning labels are usually posted to protect a company from potential lawsuits, constitutional attorney Noel Francisco says this disclaimer has no legal benefits.

"Would it ever be a legal concern that selling the Constitution would expose you to some kind of liability? No. Never,” Francisco told FoxNews.com. "The Constitution is the founding document of the country, an operative legal document."

I suspect this may simply be an innocent case of a boilerplate being applied to works that simply don’t need it, but that doesn’t change how amused I am by the story. Imagine that—the idea that the Constitution doesn’t reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Why, you’d think we’d need a Supreme Court to interpret the document in light of today’s values or something.

(Found via Slashdot.)

By Chris Meadows

Gizmodo reports that Ubimark has published a special edition of Around the World in 80 Days that includes QR codes that work with a free iPhone app to serve as links to a website for on-line footnotes and discussion. Just point the iPhone at the code, and the link opens on your phone.

Print books with e-footnotes is an interesting idea with a lot of potential. We all know that printed books aren’t going away—but something like this could serve to provide them with the easy-linking advantage of e-books.

Of course, it’s a little funny that the first book to have these is 137 years old—but then, that also highlights the value of being able to reuse public domain material.

By Chris Meadows

Just over 100 years ago, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, passed away as Halley’s Comet passed in the sky. He left behind him a 500,000-word autobiographical manuscript, under strict instructions that it was not to be published until at least one hundred years after his death.

As to why such a long delay, it’s not entirely clear. Perhaps he wanted to avoid embarrassing friends, or near descendents of friends, with some of the harsh things he had to say. Perhaps the controversial Clemens simply enjoyed the knowledge that, a century after he had passed on, he would cause one final ruckus in a society whose nature he could not even hope to imagine.

Regardless, one thing is clear: the complete manuscript has never been published in full. Excerpts ran in magazines before Clemens’s death, and parts were published in three previous “autobiographies” with the estate’s permission, but over half of the work has not been seen by anyone other than researchers who visited Berkeley’s Bancroft library in person.

"There are so many biographies of Twain, and many of them have used bits and pieces of the autobiography," Dr. [Robert Hirst, who is leading the team at Berkeley editing the complete text] said. "But biographers pick and choose what bits to quote. By publishing Twain’s book in full, we hope that people will be able to come to their own complete conclusions about what sort of a man he was."

The manuscript is going to be published as a trilogy starting in November. It’s unclear whether there will be an e-book edition—I can’t even find an official page on Berkeley listing its publication date, though I may not be looking in the right place.

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By Chris Meadows

One of the more famous diaries as literary work has been the 17th-century diary of Samuel Pepys (whose name, in case you didn’t know, is actually pronounced “peeps”). It is, of course, in the public domain and freely available from a number of repositories. The Literary Platform notes that it is also available as an iPhone app for $1.99 (£1.19 in the UK).

However, this Pepys work is more than just an encapsulated appbook that prevents the text and nothing else. It adds a number of features including a daily diary entry for the current month and day, browsing and saving entries, and so on. It currently includes the first year, 1660, but further years will be added in future updates.

Certainly nothing is preventing people from reading the diary as a Project Gutenberg e-book, but for people who would enjoy the extra features it might be worth a $2 purchase.

By Chris Meadows

Classics ($2.99) was a great-looking iPhone app for its day. An extension of the “appbook” concept in which programmers took public-domain books, built an app framework around them, and sold them in the app store (see my review of the appbook of A Princess of Mars from this post), it bundled a number of the most well-known public domain titles together and prettied them up for iPhone-screen reading.

As an implementation of that idea, it worked all right. In fact, it looked nice enough that Apple featured it in a TV commercial—and subsequently proceeded to steal its basic format (books displayed as covers on a shelf, page-turning animations) for the iBooks app.

Overall, Classics was a good implementation of an idea, but the entire idea is one that I find highly dubious—and it has been rendered largely obsolete by the higher-resolution iPad, to boot.

(Portions of this review come from my 2009 review of the app, updated to reflect changes.)

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By Chris Meadows

Remember how I mentioned the other day that Korean researchers have developed a system for creating 3D e-books?

It appears Google Books has beaten them to the punch. Announced on the “Inside Google Books” blog this morning, Google Books has added anaglyphic (red-blue) 3D capability to its e-books, in the form of a “View in 3D” button at the top of the page.

This holds true not just for the example book linked in the blog post, but for any public-domain e-book on which I happened to search.

Kudos to Google for coming out with such a useful new way to read e-books! You have to admit, this really makes the words pop right off the page.

By Chris Meadows

EnGadget notes that Fusion Garage has missed its latest projected ship date of “by the end of February” for the JooJoo (nee CrunchPad) and now claims it will have a shipping update “by the first week in March.” When asked about possible production delays, Fusion Garage responded, “No comment.”

Publishing Perspectives provides some clarification from a Nintendo executive on the rationale behind the 100 public domain e-books cartridge we reported on the other day.

“It’s not really about trying to take on the e-book market,” said Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo’s executive vp of sales and marketing for North America said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “It’s just one more way to enjoy your device.”

British site Campaign Live covers a speech by Alan Rusbridger, editor in chief of The Guardian, at which he said that the New York Times and Rupert Murdoch’s paywalls were “completely antithetical” to the open principles of the web. The print version of the Guardian is the 9th or 10th-largest paper in Britain, but thanks to its presence on the web:

"It’s now the second largest paper in the English language in the world and one of the eighth (sic) biggest suppliers of news content from newspapers in the world.

"And if the New York Times does go behind a paywall, it’s likely that the Guardian will end up as the biggest English-language newspaper on the way.”

Our fellow NAPCO-owned blog AppleTell has a very brief look at three free book-related iPhone apps: Audio Books, the New York Times app, and Amazon Mobile. Audio books in particular looks interesting; it connects to a library containing over 1,800 free audio books. I wonder if they come from LibriVox?

Tools of Change has a great four-minute interview clip of Kirk Biglione from Oxford Media Works in which he talks about the impact the iPad will have on publishing. He talks about the DRM versus standards situation, and compares the publishing industry’s situation to Microsoft’s failed “Plays For Sure” DRM initiative. See it on the TOC site, or embedded below the jump.

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By Chris Meadows

We’ve reported on Nintendo DS e-book applications several times over the last few years—both homebrew apps such as dslibris and a commercial cartridge containing 100 public domain e-books released in Europe in 2008.

The other day, Paul received an email suggesting the new Nintendo DSi XL could be an e-book reader for Europe in lieu of the Kindle. Times Online actually reviewed it in this capacity in January:

Secondly, the bigger size makes the DSi XL a serious rival for more expensive eBook readers. I’m not sure about this, but if the console can open .txt files, then there’s no reason you can’t download your own out-of-copyright classics and bung them on an SD card. I’ll check this out later.

It turns out it might well be an e-book reader for America, too: today, CNet reports that aforementioned 100-public-domain book cartridge will be released on this side of the Atlantic in June, at a standard retail price of $20. (Business Week has another such report.) Publishing Perspectives reports that a similar bundle of French public-domain literature is coming out for the DSi in France on March 5th.

The $190 DSi XL’s screens will be 93% larger than the old Nintendo DS’s (increasing in size from 3.5” to 4.2” diagonally according to Wikipedia), and support wider viewing angles. They are expected to retain the same 256×192 pixel resolution, however.

While this is not as good a resolution as the iPhone’s 3.5”, 480×320 screen, it is still better than the 160×160 pixel display on the original Palm PDAs, and plenty of people read e-books on those in the old days. It does provide over twice the screen area as an iPhone.

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By Chris Meadows

I received the following email today from LibriVox.org, a site where people upload their own audiobook recordings of public-domain books. These recordings are themselves put into the public domain, so they can be used for any purpose just as the original texts can. I have used a couple of them myself in my podcast The Biblio File.

Dearest LibriVox listeners, volunteers, & supporters:

For four-and-a-half years, LibriVox volunteers have been making audiobooks for the world to enjoy, and giving them away for free. We’ve made thousands of free audiobooks that have been downloaded by millions of people; our site gets 400,000 visitors every month. To date, all our costs have been borne by a few individuals, with some generous donations and support from partners. However, these costs have become too big.

For the first time (and hopefully for the last time for at least another four-and-a-half years) we’re asking for your support, for a $20,000 fund-raising campaign.

Find out more about why we are raising money, and about how you can donate by following this link:

http://librivox.org/2010/02/24/librivox-needs-your-help/

Thanks for all your wonderful work over the years, and here’s to many many more free public domain audio books.

best,

Hugh.