We receive about 30,000 spam comments a month, so a spam filter is necessary. If you are not a first-time commenter and your comment doesn’t appear, please email me and I’ll check to see if it has been caught by our spam filter.

1. Because you are a first time commenter. In this case the comment is held until I approve it. This is to prevent spam. After you are approved the then all your future comments will go up automatically.

2. The spam filter caught it. Spam is detected in a number of ways by the filter: an usual number of links in a post, many small paragraphs, words in capital letters, unusual spacing of paragraphs, strange characters, etc. Since the first of the year the filter has caught almost 214,000 spam posts – so you can see it is an unfortunate necessity. I check spam a couple of times a day to see if any legitimate posts are caught. If you are in the filter than it may take half a day before I can get around to plucking you out.

Please don’t double post if your comment hasn’t appeared and I find double, or triple posting awaiting approval or in the spam filter, I usually will delete them all as I don’t have time to compare them to see if they are different. It is far better to send me an email letting me know that your comment is stuck somewhere and I’ll get to it in the next 5 or 6 hours.

The best URL for Teleread RSS is currently:

http://www.teleread.com/feed/

(In fact, this URL redirects you to a feedburner RSS feed, but this is more detail than you need to know).

Speaking of RSS feeds, here’s the mp3 for a great SXSW panel discussion I attended in March called Beyond Aggregation — Finding the Web’s Best Content (download mp3)  Description: RSS aggregation has reduced the massive ocean of Web content into something more manageable, but we are still left overloaded with information and manual searching. This panel will explore new avenues for finding the Web’s best content, and how this more intelligent Web will affect major media companies, online publishers and consumers. It included people from Techmeme, readwriteweb.  I found this panel one of the most informative at last month’s conference.

(I’ll try to give a longer wrapup about the other panels  for SXSW soon).

Our hearty THANKS!!! to Alexander Turcic of Mobile Read for pointing us in the right direction. Nobody seemed to know what the problem could be, so I emailed Alex in case he knew something, and he replied with the suggestion that cured the problem. Shows that the ebook community stands by each other in times of need.

If you are still experiencing problems, or if your connectivity has markedly improved, please let us know so that we can stay on top of the situation.

If you experience a problem leave a comment here.  It does not help if you just say you can’t access the site.  There are too many variables for this to be useful.  Please tell us exactly what the error message you received said.  With this info we can do some diagnostics.

You can help yourself too.  If you have persistent errors getting to the site contact your ISP.  When we changed hosts our new domain was propagated out to all ISPs so they could find us.  Some ISPs may not have received the information, or didn’t properly update their tables.  We can’t do anything about this, but you can call your ISP and ask them to check that they have our  site properly registered.

We use Akismet to block spam and it seems to be pretty good. Sometimes, however, it will identify your comment as spam and block it. Every few hours I try to go through the blocked spams to see if anything has been marked as a false positive. Today, for example, I found that both of Cheryl Kaye’s comments, along with several others, were marked as spam and I restored them.

I don’t always have the time to do this, and if I miss more than a couple of hours the spams build up to the point where I can’t possibly review them all. If your comment is lost please email David or me and we’ll try and find it and restore it. However, to keep the site manageable I have to delete all the spams every few days, so please accept our apologies if your comment gets caught in our clean up.

If you have a chronic problem with being blocked Akismet has a contact form that you can use to tell them of the problem. I have no idea if it does any good, but it may be worth a try.

The cool thing about Calibre is that its ebooks include images (at least on the epub version, which is my default). I included a screenshot below of the desktop viewer, which resembles how it appears on my Sony Reader.

Feedbooks also lets you create  add TeleRead to your subscription (but no images are included) with multiple output options.

In addition, TeleRead now has a Long Articles RSS feed: http://www.teleread.com/category/long/feed/ . TeleRead publishes lots of news and commentary, and it’s easy to miss the longer pieces if you’re not careful.  Therefore, I am tagging our longer pieces as “long” so that they appear on this feed (excluding press releases and linkdumps). (Here’s the feedbook page for the TeleRead Long Articles feed). There’s no voodoo magic  involved. You can filter any TeleRead content by category and simply add a /feed at the end of the URL. For example, the feed for my articles is http://www.teleread.com/category/robert-nagle/feed/

Here’s a screenshot of the Calibre viewer of TeleRead with image.

Two kudos.

First, to Brett Fielo, a principal of Webhead Design. Brett agreed to take over hosting the site, and all that it entails, and for his kindness was given a huge amount of hassles and a number of late nights. On top of this, he is not only donating his time as our new sysadmin but is also donating his hosting service, so he’s not making a penny on anything. He’s saving us many pennies as we had to pay for our previous hosting service (but not for Robert Nagel’s efforts as sysadmin, however).

Second, to Robert Nagle, for doing all the free sysadmin work over the years and for taking the time over the last few days to give Brett the benefit of his experience and expertise with the site. Luckily, Robert will continue with us as a contributor, as you can see from his post yesterday.

Finally, a quick “thank you” to Alexander Turcic, of MobileRead, for helping us out by posting about our migration problems and letting you know what was going on. It’s nice to see that we are a community, not just a bunch of internet sites.

Thanks for sticking with us. This computer stuff isn’t as simple as people make it out to be!

(By the way, comments are disabled for this post. If you want to wish David good health, you should make a comment on the initial announcement linked above)

(Also, not sure why the sidebar for this page is doing crazy things. Please excuse that for now).

Keep in mind that people at TeleRead may not know the latest information or we may not be in a position to disclose it publicly. But we will do our best to keep you informed about updates.  [If you have TeleRead business which requires action or a response, you should forward it to Paul Biba at paulkbibaNOSPAMgmail.com - TeleRead staff].

• September 30. Initial Announcement.
• October 2. I talked to David Rothman for about an hour. He sounds good although he is still in the hospital and seemed a little less energetic than usual. My guess is that he will be “back” earlier rather than later (in a week or two), but will probably blog much less frequently for the short term. He talked about buying the Dell Mini and was glowing about the wierd gadgets in his medical room. He will probably be moving to a family member’s house today.

How many books and e-books have you paid for in the last year?

• 20+ books/ebooks 40%
• 11-20 24%
• 5-10 21%
• 0-4 15%

If you have bought an e-book or digital text before, please indicate which type: (Choose one or more)

• fiction (75%)
• business or job-related topic (21%)
• technical/computer manual (19%)
• n/a; I have never bought an ebook (17%)
• something for a hobby (17%)
• something for research or school (17%)

Last year, novels/short stories/graphic novels/poetry/drama comprise what percent of the books you have read last year?

• 100% of my reading (10%)
• 90% of my reading (24%)
• 80% of my reading (15%)
• 70% of my reading (12%)
• 60% of my reading (8%)
• 50% of my reading (7%)
• 40% of my reading (5%)
• 30% of my reading (5%)
• 20% of my reading (4%)
• 10% of my reading (9%)

You have an hour to kill in the fiction section of a bookstore or library. Which kind of books would you spend most of your time browsing through (Choose Only 4!)

• sci fi/speculative fiction (76%)
• Award winners (Booker, Nobel, Natnl Bk Awrd,etc) (40%)
• mystery/thrillers (36-53%; unclear –see note)
• classic/public domain literature (33%)
• humor/satire (26%)
• Comic/Graphic Fiction (23%)
• Lit in translation/Literature not in English (14%)
• Children/Young Adult (11%)
• romance/erotica (11%)
• poetry/drama (9%)

**Mystery/Thrillers was accidentally included as two separate categories on this question. 36% chose the first instance of Mystery/Thrillers; 17% chose the second instance of Mystery/Thrillers. 53% assumes that people chose Mystery/Thriller only once. 36% assumes that people who chose mystery/thrillers chose both instances. Most likely, the general trend is for people to chose one of the two instances, but not both.

You have an hour to kill in the nonfiction section of a bookstore or library. Which kind of books would you spend most of your time browsing through (Choose Only 4!)

• Technical/computers (63%)
• General Science (41%)
• History (48%)
• Biography & Memoirs (28%)
• Criticism & Philosophy (22%)
• Cooking/Food and Wine (22%)
• Politics and Economics (19%)
• Business and Investing (18%)
• Entertainment/Movies/Music (18%)
• Religion/Spirituality (16%)
• Arts & Crafts (16%)
• Home & Garden (12%)
• Medicine and Nutrition (7%)
• Parenting and Relationships (2%)

Comments: Thanks to those who responded. This was interesting and insightful. Here were the biggest surprises to me:

• the huge number of people who bought 20+ books and ebooks per year offers some hope for publishing
• the median response for the percentage of reading which is fiction was  more than 80%.
• 75% of TeleRead respondents said they have bought a fiction ebook before. That is significantly greater than those who bought an ebook for school or work.
• Sci fi predominates here (no surprise), but also interesting the high percentage of Award winners (a general category for “highbrow” readers) and classics/public domain.
• The “hour to kill” question indicates relative preference and might not indicate true taste in books. I suspect that inside a store people are more likely to browse through nonfiction titles than fiction. I have to wonder if  sales figure for an online store like Amazon.com would indicate different preferences than the “time to kill” questions indicate.

One other thing I would have liked to ask is about educational background and geographic location (although our Google Analytics information gives us general information about that). I’m assuming that we have a high percentage of readers who come from an academic background, which may not be typical for Internet readers.

Later, we will have another brief survey on gadgets/technology/consumer habits. Once again, thanks for your feedback.

Both David and I are familiar with the Cybook family of devices and like the company. Regular readers may know that a buyer’s club loosely affiliated with BAEN has been trying to arrange a mass order of e-book devices for interested buyers.  It’s  a bit cheaper than buying directly from Cybook and includes a few extra accessories as well.

Cybook has indicated a commitment to supporting open standards and maintained a balance between that and supporting one DRM standard (Bobipocket). In addition Cybook (and even the NAEB people) have a much more open product development process than, say, Amazon.  Although Kindle is an interesting device with lots of features, the opaque development process doesn’t inspire confidence and gives the impression that it is not terribly interested in hearing consumer feedback prior to its media blitz.  Also, although the NAEB buying club project took a while to get off the ground, Derek Benner has certainly been accessible and answers a lot of questions on the Cybook section of MobileRead and can do the same in the TeleBlog. The Cybook compares favorably to other Vizplex-enabled devices.

My Cybook hands-on

I’ve handled this  device and played with it quite a bit. It’s lightweight and elegant. But it is not without its warts, and it certainly is not the only device out there to enhance the reading experience. It is a good alternative for readers who don’t wish to be dependent on a single vendor for commercial ebooks.  Given Bookeen’s track record with its previous ebook reader, I’m cautiously optimistic Cybook will offer  .epub support somewhere down the road.

Online buying clubs are  still a new concept in the United States, but they have always been popular  in Asia to help consumers obtain volume discounts/wholesale prices on new items. Time will tell how successful this particular venture will be. Here are FAQ about the NAEB online store  and contact information.  One problem with ebook devices is that frequently devices are marketed only to one region, leaving people outside of that region unhappy. Sony Reader was not really available to Europe, the Iliad hasn’t really been available in the U.S. and the Chinese Hanlin devices haven’t been available in Europe or US.

Buyers’ clubs are one way to allow people to have access to devices from other regions and still have support contacts in their own region. With NAEB, they still provide warranty/servicing inside the US (which saves money and time for all). Their website reads:

For the Cybook, NAEB handles our customer’s warranties for Bookeen. We follow their policy which is quoted below.
Limited Warranty Coverage
Bookeen standard Product warranty is one (1) year after date of delivery.
If a defect arises and a valid claim is received by NAEB within the Warranty Period, NAEB will repair the product at no charge (except shipment costs see below), using new or refurbished replacement parts or replace the product with a comparable product that is new or which has been manufactured from new or serviceable used parts and with at least functionally equivalent to the original product.

…

Return process
The customer should review the online help resources before seeking warranty service. If the product is still not functioning properly after making use of these resources, please get in touch with our Technical Support centre at support@naebllc.com to characterize the defect and get the procedure to ship back the defective units.
The shipment of the defective units to NAEB’s office is taken in charge by the customer, the shipment back of the repaired units to the customer is taken in charge by NAEB.

That said, TeleRead will always try to make you aware of reading alternatives regardless of who is advertising on our site, or not advertising (the biggest item this morning is about the noncommercial XO laptop). The market changes quickly, and we’ll strive to provide up-to-date and reliable information for consumers wishing to invest in a reader.

But that in itself is not enough. So David and I are experimenting with advertisers. The deal for them will be this. We need to be free to report honestly on the e-book scene, fight for e-book standards, raise questions about DRM and stand up for well-stocked digital libraries. Advertiser hoping to weaken our commitment to such causes are free to go elsewhere. The tone of our posts didn’t change after David began the PW connection, and we don’t intend for it to happen either with advertisers.

The kind of advertiser we especially want

MarketIntellNow, our first advertiser, which is paying us a certain percentage of sales from research reports, should be an especially good fit. The company’s e-book reading survey fell into our lap, and we thought the results were interesting and relevant and timely to TeleRead readers. We couldn’t pass down an opportunity to do an interview with the company while we were at it—it was my idea. I gave them some tough questions which (I hope) challenged them and also allowed the people at MarketIntellNow to expand on their conclusions.

The company is aware of our interest in e-book standards and other causes and appreciates our comprehensive reporting of the e-book scene; also, it strives to be vendor-neutral in evaluating e-book products.

We may also seek advertising from actual hardware and software vendors. If so, however, they will need to understand our determination to remain true to our values. We’re especially interested in drawing advertisers with an open approach toward standards, and we’ll welcome help from our readers.

Priorities beyond the buck

Even now, ads are not at the top of our priorities. I have my storytelling podcast and Nanowrimo novel to write, and David is too busy hyperblogging to focus on the business side, though we both agree it would be a good idea on a small scale. A few months ago I gave a lecture at Barcamp Houston about how to prevent advertising from eroding the overall reading experience. Suffice to say that David and I don’t wish to see the site turn into something that is not useful or easy to read.

Meanwhile, let me mention that TeleRead has plans to expand beyond news and analysis; we’d like to include more creative content and e-book reviews. You may see additions over the next few months (and ultimately our www.teleread.com home page will actually be a URL worth visiting). The news/weblog portion will probably stay the same; we’ll just be adding more things hopefully of interest.

By the way, if you are interested in setting up some sort of advertising arrangement with TeleRead or have some random business opportunity, feel free to drop us a line so we can plat ahead. Try idiotprogrammer at fastmailbox.net .

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