Just another nerd.
A couple years ago I recommended Newzcrawler as my preferred reader of choice.
Newzcrawler was/is a good program but the developer tried to do way too much with the software and it had a number of nasty gotchas which ended up, well, getting me.
For the past few months I’ve been using Sharp Reader 0.9.7 which works just as well and is free. So far, I’ve been very happy with it.
At his excellent TeleRead.Org blog, David Rothman tackles has an intriguing look at initial attempts to create annotation standards for e-books, web sites and other electronic documents.
One existing initiative trying to move toward open standards for annotation of web documents is the W3C’s Annotea project where “annotations are stored externally in annotation servers and presented to the user by a client capable of understanding annotation metadata and capable of interacting with an annotation server.” The Annozilla project is work to create an extension for Firefox to implement the Annotea method of annotation in that browser.
Rothman has a long list of suggestions for what an annotation system should address, including:
- Provisions for a universal spec that would encompass not just e-books but every conceivable digital object, from Moby Dick to a JPEG of Herman Melville or the sounds of a whale. . . .
. . .
- Provisons for moderation as needed.
One of the things that an annotation system should have is the ability to easily choose from among different annotators and groups of annotators, which would eliminate the need for any moderation system to be built into the annotation system. What I need is the ability to say I want to see annotations from X, Y and Z and only annotations from those individuals/groups.
Via Teleread (the best web site for coverage of e-book and related issues), I came across Kelly Applegate’s DRM horror story which basically recounts how she was screwed by actually bothering to pay for electronic editions of books back when Gemstar was running high,
As the ebooks had the ability to download, I continued
purchasing them. Then I bought a Nuvomedia Rocket EBook Pro. I loved
it. My library climbed to well over 500 purchased books and slowly I
got rid of my paper books except the “keepers”. (I would love to be
able to get those in electronic form because I prefer it but it is
way too expensive at this point.)I have written to several authors about my delimma and many of them
have sent me unencrypted or in some cases replacement encrypted
ebooks to replace the ones I cannot either load on my ebook reader or
to enable me to read them on my computer with the new drive. The ones
that refused my request, I don’t bother with anymore.At this point, I have invested a large amount of money in my
electronic library. I have been through the Gemstar fallout and they
still have MY books that I paid for that I can ONLY read on ONE ebook
reader (I have several). Because of the protections that have been
placed on the ebooks I purchased and not being able to read them on
the reader of my choice, I REFUSE to by any ebook that is protected.
And, I REFUSE to buy any ebook that I cannot get to load on my ebook
reader. I will contact a publisher before I purchase from them and
find out exactly what their books are made of. I, also, insist that I
be able to test drive the formats at their site because I have found
that often I order the HTML version of a book to convert to my reader
and it comes out with gibberish. So, I get another version and
convert it to HTML (Most often it is MS Reader converted to HTML)and
it is perfect for the reader. I have an Excel spreadsheet that I
maintain with the publishers and the formats I must purchase from
them to get the best copy readable on my ebook reader. A few
publishers have told me they will not replace ebooks and will not
accomodate me in any way. It’s their loss. I was going to buy 15
books from one of the sites that would not allow this so they lost a
chunk of change.
As I’ve said before it is pointless to buy an e-book unless you are able to convert it, one way or another, to a non-DRMed format such as HTML. Once you’ve got it in HTML, then you can convert it to pretty much any format you want. But if you don’t have it in HTML, you’re completely at the mercy of the DRM provider.
For example, Sony’s upcoming Reader looks like a decent e-book platform, but you’d be crazy to actually buy DRMed books in its native format given Sony’s history. Instead, wait to make sure it has decent tools to convert HTML files to its proprietary format, and then buy MS Reader books which are easily stripped of DRM and converted to HTML where they then should be easily convertible to a format that the Sony Reader can handle.
Yes, that is a bit more convenient, but a lot less convenient than ending up in the position that Applegate has found herself with hundreds of dollars spent on books that she cannot read except on the dead Gemstar platform.
My house used to be wall-to-wall books, but I dumped several thousand of them before I bought my house because I was running out of space and I’d prefer to have books in digital form. Now my hard drive is overflowing with hundreds of electronic books.
The main drawback to electronic books is finding a decent device to read them on. I’ve read quite a few books on my Pocket PC handheld. While it has a number of things going for it, the biggest drawback there is the small screen. There are a number of dedicated electronic book readers that have various advantages and disadvantages. The one that was really tempting me was the Cybook which is essentially a Windows CE with a 10″ screen. Its main drawback, if the $399 price tag doesn’t scare you off, is that it is relatively heavy at almost 2 pounds. Some reviewers also complain that reading on an LCD screen like that for very long produces eye strain, though I’ve never had problems with that on my much smaller PDA.
Then along comes Sony, which its Sony Reader at CES. This is a revision of the Libre which Sony sold in Asian markets and which some electronic book enthusiasts imported through companies like Dynamism.Com.
Like the Cybook, the Sony Reader has a relatively large screen compared to other electronic book devices. Unlike the Cybook, the Sony Reader is much smaller overall and weighs less than 9 ounces.
Like the Libre, the Sony Reader also uses Sony’s e-ink technology which has a much higher resolution, is considerably easier on the eyes than the LCD screen that the Cybook uses, and has phenomenal battery life (the short version is that the device consumes the majority of its power only when a new page is brought up on the device).
And like the Libre, the Sony Reader has plenty of what has killed the electronic book market to date — digital rights management. Sony will be selling books in an online store for use on the Sony Reader, and these books will be encrypted and DRMed to the Sony Reader. So you buy all your favorite novels on Sony’s store and next year some company comes out with a better reader? Congratulations, you get to go buy all those books all over again if you want to read them on this new device.
Sony’s saving grace is that it claims the Reader will ship with software to convert “Adobe® PDFs, personal documents, blogs, newsfeeds, and JPEGs with the same amazing readability, so you can take your favorite blogs and online newspapers with you.” If it follows through on that promise, I’m buying one of these things the day it comes out if the price point is anywhere near the $300-$400 price range that Sony seems to be targeting.
As I’ve said before the key to e-books is to always buy them in a format that can be cracked and then converted to other formats so you’re not stuck in one device or format. Plus, you want to be able to convert the e-book to text or HTML so you can easily search it on a PC which is half the benefit of having the book in electronic format anyway.
Of all the firms that don’t get electronic books, I’m kind of surprised to see O’Reilly Books in there.
All I want is one thing — an e-book version of Jon Udell’s 1999 book Practical Internet Groupware. This is a book that, to my knowledge, has been out-of-print for several years.
So I go to O’Reilly’s Safari site to see if I can purchase it there and I can, if I’m willing to pay ridiculous prices.
First, I’d have to sign up for a $19.99/month subscript to the Safari site. Then, I could pay to download the chapters in PDF format (because I don’t want to permanently subscribe to Safari) for an additional $22. Even if it was just $22 to download, that’d be a bit silly to pay for a 6 year old book on groupware.
Instead, I ended up ordering a couple copies for $4+shipping from a used bookseller I found on Amazon. Now both O’Reilly and I are losers. I’d really prefer to have an electronic version rather than paper, and I imagine O’Reilly would prefer that it have my money rather than the used bookseller.
Stupid.
OpenReader.Org is an interesting attempt to create a single format for e-books, as opposed to the couple dozen formats that are out there now, with Microsoft’s LIT and Adobe’s PDF formats way out in front of everyone else (Palm READER and Mobipocket’s secure format also have significant marketshare).
The OpenReader format is going to be XML-based, and unfortunately (though of necessity), they will have some way for publishers to wrap the resulting file in DRM,
Q. Will the OpenReader format work with digital rights management — anti-piracy protection?
If publishers insist on DRM, the ideal solution would be to use a standardized DRM solution — preferably owned by no one company. In other words, it would be “nonproprietary.” If you make DRM nonproprietary, however, it is somewhat easier to crack.
Two possible answers exist. One would be to allow publishers to pick their own DRM systems and allow reading software to support multiple systems. A second approach might be to standardize on one DRM system developed by some company who has agreed to make their system available at low cost. Right now, as much as 10 or 15 percent of an e-bookÂ’s price at times may go for DRM-related services. We think this is far too much, especially in a generally low-margin industry like book publishing. OSoft is interested in selling its DRM to publishers at a low price that shouldnÂ’t wreak havoc on their margins, the way present alternatives do on occasion.
It will be interesting to see how far this goes. My own perception is that so few publishers actually seem to care about the electronic book market — due to its relatively small size — that this won’t end up going anywhere. The ebook market is one where good ideas rarely get implemented.
I’d love to be proven wrong on that count, however.