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E-books and sex—plus info on the Pixelar e-reader, the BeBook2, and the de-DRMing of Pckt Publishing
March 7, 2009 | 4:37 am
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By David Rothman
Links of 
interest today:
–Is salicious content driving e-books?—in Slashdot. There’s the privacy advantage. What’s more, sex has traditionally been a driver of tech, whether it be video tapes, CD-ROM or streaming video. Not that sex should be inflicted on the unwilling. Just this week, a pornographer sneaked into Twitter accounts to ballyoo a 23-year-old female Webcammer, and I’m wildly in favor of prosecution in such cases. But sex in e-books? Keep Big Bro out of it. Erotica-related titles, by the way, are among the hottest sellers at some major e-bookstores.
–The Pixelar e-reader (first photo), a repositioned Jinke machine perhaps, could be of interest to some wanting a more open approach than the Kindle offers. Yes, ePub is among the formats offered. The big negative is the price, $324+ or more than a Sony reader. Plus, there’s no wireless, unlike the Kindle. (Engadget, SlashGear, MobileRead, Google News).
–The latest BeBbook (second photo) was unveiled at with some enticing features such as WiFi and/or 3G support, and touch screen navigation. Also, there’s talk of DRM capabilities for both ePub and PDF e-books—I haven’t confirmed this. But if it’s happening, then I bet this is through Adobe DRM. Naturally my preference is no DRM. But if you haven’t any choice, it’s good to have this wrinkle. Other supported formats are Mobipocket, Microsoft lit, doc, HTML, txt, prc, fb2 and jpg. Question: Is the touch screen really easier to read from than than the Sony PRS-700′s? Opinions welcome from anyone who happened to be at Cebit. (IT World, MobileRead, Slashgear, Google News round-up.)
–Setting an example for many others, Packt Publishing has zapped DRM from its books. Hello, Amazon? Hello, publishers? If savvy technical publishers like Packt and O’Reilly are shunning DRM—or trying to, given Amazon’s insistence on it—what does that say? (MobileRead.) Update, 7:32 p.m.: Angel James correctly reminds us that Packt Pubishing isn’t the first DRM-avoider, which I’d hope people would understand. Samhain Publising, her house, is among the good guys on this matter.
–The debate rages on—about the virtues of the Kindle iPhone e-reader. For people who want a very simplified e-book experience on the iPhone and don’t mind cutting themselves off from non-Amazon sources, the reader might make sense. But Stanza is better by far from anyone halfway serious about e-books. In fact, get both readers from the Apple app store if you want access to a wide variety of e-books. (Techmeme roundup.)
–Firefox updates are on the way. My Firefox got an auto-patch earlier today, and update 3.1, actually expected now to be called v. 3.5, will be released soon.
–Twitt Reader is said to turn Twitter "into a Google Reader-like experience." (IT World.)
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Comments:
Re: Sex in Ebooks. So, I downloaded a free ebook from Amazon the other day. While I was in the car driving home I turned on the text to speech feature so that it could read to me while I drove. I was quite surprised after about two pages when my urban fantasy book plot was interrupted by a sex-party scene.
Then my mind flashed back to the last time I used the text-to-speech. I was working out at the gym, and I forgot my headphones. I turned on text to speech (on very low, of course) while I used the exercise bike. I would have been quite red-faced if my Kindle had announced the sex-party scene to the world.
I gather that romance/erotica books have long been a category of e-book publishing all their own. I seem to remember one of the first well-known e-publishers was the Hard Shell Word Factory, which began as a primarily romance publisher. At one point I think one of the options for getting your e-book from them was to have it mailed on floppy diskette!
Re: BeBook 2
It’s in fact Adobe’s DRM system. I tried to find out how much BeBook had to pay to gain access to the SDK, but the representative didn’t want to tell.