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BookServer vs. Amazon in e-book distribution battle
October 20, 2009 | 9:22 am
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By David Rothman
“With BookServer, the Internet Archive is hoping that for the first time, consumers everywhere will be able to buy or borrow any text they want while leaving control over pricing and terms of such distribution in the hands of the content owners.” – CNET.
The TeleRead take: BookServer, from Archive founder Brewster Kahle (photo) and colleagues, is a worthy project. I don’t want any company, Amazon or Google, to dominate book distribution.
Even so, the Archive will have to work hard to equal Amazon’s interface and its rich collection of customer-written reviews. Here’s an example of the issues at hand. Will BookServer capabilities be built into hardware e-readers, so to speak, the way the Amazon catalogue is part of the Kindle? Update, 12:32 p.m.: The existence of an RSS-style spec (draft here) is a good start, but that’s still not a full solution.
Might an Archive collaboration be possible with OpenInkpot—which provides software for users to install on dedicated e-reading devices? Imagine manufacturers including OpenInkpot from the start. Jeez, Brewster, you need to think more about the user experience—whether the device is an E Ink tablet, a commercial netbook, an OLPC laptop or regular desktop. This could mean anything from OpenInkpot to browser-plug-ins to dedicated apps.
There’s also the pesky DRM question. Will the master searcher provide detailed rights information, and what if publishers insist on DRM, which is anathema to Brewster? How to handle server-dependent DRM, or will such file be hosted on publisher sites?
On top of everything else, at least for now, there’s the downloading speed issue. When I tried to download an ePub file of a Dickens collection I found via the BookServe search box, it was taking forever. This was on an Archive server. What about files hosted on publisher servers, over which Brewster has no control?
I’d urge publishers to try BookServer, just as O’Reilly and Feedbooks are; but it would appear that this project is still very much in beta stage.
Technorati Tags: Brewster Kahle
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Comments:
Good points. There is also the issue Amazon faced with the public domain works: searching for Lord ‘Dunsany’ brought up various editions of the same work, without any guidance as to differences between them.
Reader reviews would be a great help, as you note. Maybe some sort of Wikimedia approach, so that notes could be added by readers to each edition.
But it’s a great start. I love IA.
> But it’s a great start. I love IA
Me, too, Pond. I hope that Brewster and crew will listen. I’d love to think that people would automatically prefer Open Distribution to avoid Amazon-style monopolies, but the system is going to have to earn readers’ use—by way of great features and convenience and even content, such as reader reviews. Reminder: I know the present setup is just a beta. But in Brewster’s shoes, I’d have waited longer for a more polished version.
Thanks,
David
Their public domain books are based on the same archive.org source as the ones offered by Google, with awful OCR’d “typos”.