NAPCO, our owners, have had their IT people working hard on this. Needless to say we thank you for bearing with us and appreciate your continued support.

What we’ve done so far:

• Added more text to post teasers on the home page (we’re still testing some things here).
• Comments will only appear in comment section when they are approved and appear as part of the post.
• Moved the Comment block higher-up on the page.
• Removed the green font style that made “block quote” text very hard to read.
• Add “Next” and “Previous” links below each post page.
• See all the most recent posts using the “Recent Posts” link in the wibiya toolbar.

Still to be done soon:

• Quick access to ALL the most recent comments.
• Option to subscribe to future comments of a specific post.
• We’re also looking into a few issues concerning broken links to posts.

Regarding the Captcha system, comments have been mixed so far. I can say, however, that it has reduced the number of spam comments we have to review each day from over a thousand to the single digits, and this has resulted in a huge time savings (which can be applied to doing more posts). We’ll keep it under review, however.

Hopefully, it will point you to articles that interest you in a way we can’t do now. I’ve asked that we incorporate a “real” search function and to cater to our international readers. The new look will also allow us to be more advertiser-friendly, which is important if the site is to remain viable and grow even more than it has to date.

Some of you will love the site, and I’m sure some of you won’t – that’s just the way people are. But when we are up and running I will be very interested in your constructive criticism and we will make every effort to tailor and refine the site to your interests. There may also be glitches and problems, and please bring these to my attention as well.

The new TeleRead site design is cleaner and we believe much easier to navigate. Some new features include a section of news from “Around the Web,” surveys for some free stuff and special discounts, and a way to interact with us and many others using Twitter.

At the commencement of the new site design we will also be implementing ReCaptcha for comments. This is in the nature of an experiment and if it doesn’t help our spam load, or it becomes too burdensome to our readers, we will be very willing to change it.

Thank you again for your continued support of TeleRead.

Paul Biba
Editor-in-Chief
TeleRead

Since May we have received over 172,000 spam comments. Why is this important? It’s important because all those spam comments are held by our filter for review before being deleted. That means that Chris and I have reviewed over 172,000 spam comments to be sure that they do not contain false positives. We regularly find false positives and have to approve them. This isn’t the end, though, because an “approved” spam then becomes, in WordPress’s wisdom, a pending comment and we have to go into the pending comments area to approve the false spam for posting – a two step process.

Quite honestly, this is taking too much time. So we’re going to try to see how well reCAPTCHA works. At least it will contribute to TeleRead’s mission. Here’s the scoop on it, in case you don’t know:

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Currently, we are helping to digitize old editions of the New York Times and books from Google Books.

So don’t be surprised when it shows up. Let’s try it for a while and see how it goes.

Keep your eyes peeled.

Sometimes our spamtrap has been known to get a little overzealous and swallow legitimate comments (due to some arcane combination of keywords or alignment of stars or something), but we check the spamtrap several times per day. As long as we don’t get deluged again we should be all right to find false positives sooner or later. (Unfortunately, they will usually get posted in the order in which they were received, which means if we’ve received a lot of comments since then they might not show up in the “Newest comments” bar—I’ve asked about it but there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about that.)

If you post a message and it seems to disappear, please don’t try to post it again—if the first posting of it vanished, odds are the second one will as well, and we’ll just end up with multiple copies of that post in the spamtrap. If you’re really concerned, contact us by e-mail or twitter and we’ll look as soon as we can (though it may not be much sooner than we would have been able to otherwise—I work 8 hours a day, for instance).

Thanks for your patience.

I hope you like the new design – it will be modern and streamlined. Hopefully it will point you to articles that interest you in a way we can’t do now. I’ve asked that we have a “real” search function and our international readers will be catered to as well. It will also allow us to be more advertiser friendly, which is important if the site is to remain viable and grow even more than it has to date.

One of the things I am most excited about is that we will finally have a full set of forums. Yes, you will still be able to comment, but we’ll have a real forum structure that will allow for extended dialog and community interaction. This has proven more complicated than we originally thought, so don’t be dismayed if it doesn’t show up at the launch. We’re trying our best to get it done, but it may end up arriving after we go live with the new design.

Some of you will love the site, and I’m sure some of you will hate it – that’s just the way people are. But when we are up and running I will be very interested in your constructive criticism and we will make every effort to tailor and refine the site to your interests. There will also be glitches and problems, and please bring these to my attention as well.

Keep an eye out.

In that light, it is entirely possible that some comments, including lengthier ones, may accidentally be passed over and lost during our trawl to clear the spam out of our trap. If you post a comment that does not show up on the site for several hours—especially if it was a longer one, mentioned sales or had several URLs in it, or comes from the one or two TeleRead commenters who know that our spamtrap just doesn’t like them for some reason)—it may have been accidentally deleted in which case you will need to re-post it.

I would encourage you to copy and save the text of longer comments into a notepad file against the possibility of that happening, at least until we can deal with the deluge. We care a great deal about our comments, and do our best to rescue every mistakenly-trapped from one the spamtrap, but when this much junk hits our filters at once it becomes much more likely we’ll miss some.

(And as a reminder, first posts from new commenters are directed to a separate moderation queue, which we also check several times a day. If you’ve never made a comment before, don’t be surprised when it doesn’t show up until we can approve it, but it most assuredly hasn’t been lost or buried in spam.)

Thank you for your patience.

Update: Paul has located a WordPress plugin that can block by IP address. It seems to be working so far!

You can find my review of both cases here.

The rules are simple: the third person to email me with the word “case” in the subject line gets their choice and the sixth person gets the remaining case. You can find my email address in the right hand column.

My iPad hands-on: Stellar for nonDRMed indie and public domain e-books, not just locked bestsellers by David Rothman

iPad: The First Six Hours by Joe Wikert

Will Apple’s iBookstore be Publishing’s Waterloo? by Rich Adin

BookofJoe reviews the iPad

746 free science fiction books for the iPhone

P-books to e-books: The ethics of downloading and the legality of scanning

New digital library about the 1918 influenza pandemic funded

Your Kobo questions answered by Joanna

Joanna interviews Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis

Parent vs Reader, Round 2: Dad vs Kobo by Joanna

Amazon Kindle Review gets it right – Amazon indirectly solving the format problem

John Silbersack: literary agent. even for major authors electronic book sales only account for a few percentage points. Meeting with ebook companies who want to explain their ebook models almost every week, but still very little money being generated on these deals. Most companies don’t offer an advance but higher royalties. These companies are also selling a marketing platform. Probably not the time to fight the battle about who owns backlist ebook rights because of low monetary value. But it is a battle that will have to be fought eventually. 700 backlist works in the Isaac Asimov estate. How does the agent make them available? Time to try short term licenses and experimentation to find best way. Often these new products will be sold side-by-side with the original book. What makes this content different and takes it out of verbatim rights? For out of print books that have reverted to the author, spending a lot of time now sending termination notices to publishers. For the last 50 years in publishing has been a pretty common practice to use orphan works without permission and put aside some money in case someone comes forward. Not so different than what Google is doing now. For the working writer the Google settlement doesn’t make much difference because can opt in/out. How Amazon take a larger percentage of revenue from an ebook sale than the author gets.

Sara Pearl: lawyer. Amazon thinks of themselves as publishers. Their view is that they are creating a new product. For front list publishers very clear that they keep verbatim rights, for “new media rights” those tend to be reserved by author. Author contributes about 20% of “enhanced” work and a lack of clarity about who creates the remaining 80% and what rights are involved. Cost/benefit to any one author to go ahead with any one of the new projects is pretty small. Very unclear as to how any of these enhanced works fit in with verbatim rights as opposed to media rights. Will eventually have to be litigated. Most of what people worry about the Google settlement is a really small piece. For the average author may mean a few extra dollars. Opt out will probably kill the settlement.

Le racheteur est la North American Publishing Company, et le montant de la transaction n’a pas été dévoilé. La formule actuelle ne devrait pas changer, promet la firme basée à Philadelphie. Selon David, le moment est propice pour que TeleRead passe entre les mains d’un véritable éditeur, et qu’il accède à une nouvelle dimension éditoriale.

So long, David, see you soon (in Paris, why not ?) !

Link

In the The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog today, Macy Halford’s E-Free post linked to two TeleRead contributions.

One was from David Wilk (Don’t ignore the reader: E-book pricing models and theories of value); the other, from Richard Adin (a proposal to kill off paperbacks).

As it happened, I agreed with Macy Halford. She approved of David’s idea of bundling free e-books with paper books but disliked Rich’s thought of killing off paperbacks. Here’s to reader choice! But look, I’m glad we ran both essays; perhaps time will show Rich to have been right. Meanwhile another TeleRead poster, Dan D’Agostino, tells me that some library science students are abuzz over The strange case of academic libraries and e-books nobody reads—exactly what he hoped would happen.

We’re also interested in posts on directly practical matters. A recent favorite of mine—hardly the only one—was The ABCs of e-book format conversion: Easy Calibre tips for the Kindle, Sony and Nook, by John Schember. Think of your fellow booklovers who received Kindles, Nooks or Sony Readers as gifts last month but have not yet fully befriended their gizmos.

Intrigued? E-mail me, cc Co-Editor Paul Biba, tell us your background, point us to some writing samples and mention what you want to write about. We’re not piggish about rights—you can use the same material in your own blog. Through TeleRead you’ll simply reach a larger audience and benefit from feedback from some of the best editors in the world on e-book matters: our community members.

Never know who’s reading comments, either: Macy Halford also quoted one of Moriah Jovan’s replies to Rich: “I believe in giving the customer what he wants how he wants it, and killing the paperback would accomplish absolutely nothing. Or worse.”

Tip: My e-mailbox runneth over. Don’t be bashful about sending a follow-up message if you contact me and have not heard in a few days.