Tag: E-Books

The New York Times has a second look at e-books in An Idea Whose Time Has Come Back. For me, e-books never went away — I will read physical books on occasion, but 90 percent of the books I read these days are e-books that I load on my Pocket PC.

I definitely identify with the NYT’s featured e-book reader,

One such reader is Rebecca Kroll of Scotch Plains, N.J., a live-in caretaker for an autistic teenager, who says she burns through three or four books a day and purchases 50 to 100 a week, an expensive habit that she says costs her up to $400 weekly. “Storage is a big issue with me,” Kroll says. Before she discovered e-books a little over a year ago, 12,000 books crammed her apartment from floor to ceiling, leaving her desperate for more shelf space. Although Kroll says she was initially ill at ease with computers, she now does most of her reading on a laptop and stores thousands of romance and science fiction fantasy novels on two computer disks.

Exactly. I used to have several thousand books crammed in my house — they’re all history now, off to used book stores or trashed. It’s nice to know that if I wanted to, even without using compression, I could fit about 1,500 books on a $70 1gb SD card, and carry another 1,500 around on a second 1 gb SD card. 3,000 books in a tiny space for the price that a single halfway decent bookcase would cost.

The article also notes the ongoing war over DRM,

Already a culture war reminiscent of the one surrounding Napster is shaping up in the world of digital books. My college-age son is in the contingent that reads e-books almost exclusively from free Web sites because of the greater flexibility offered by their unencrypted books. Such sites usually offer plain-text format, which allows him to print as many pages as he needs, or to copy a long quotation from a book electronically and paste it into his term paper. Free sites, at least the legitimate ones, are limited to books for which the copyright has expired. Yet they are popular, especially among students assigned classic works. The University of Virginia library, which makes 1,800 titles available free from its Web site, has sent more than 8.5 million downloadable books to readers since it started the service in August 2000.

Some believe that all e-books should be free of software protection limits. Cory Doctorow, an advocate for less restrictive digital rights at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, made his first novel available free online. He argues that digital content’s unique forms of adaptability — to e-mail, computerized cut-and-paste and software translation engines — are all areas where paper books lag. In his view, anyone who puts a software lock on an e-book is crazy.

I won’t buy an e-book that has DRM, unless I’ve already got a tool to crack the DRM. Adding DRM eliminates much of the usefulness of having the book in electronic format.

The leader here, of course, is Baen’s Webscription program, which allows the reader to download pretty much every book Baen publishes, completely DRM free, for either a month subscription fee or a per-book fee.

The other thing about Baen is that it is significantly cheaper — as it should be — to buy its books online rather than in paper form. For example, $15 will get you all 7 of the books Baen published in April 2004; an incredible deal given that sci-fi paperbacks tend to retail for $5-$7 these days.

It’s a shame that more publishers don’t take Baen’s lead.

Source:

An Idea Whose Time Has Come Back. Sarah Glazer, The New York Times, December 5, 2004.

While searching for resources on print-on-demand publishing I ran across an excellent article putting into context potential lost e-book sales due to unauthorized copying. In an article on the web site of the Publisher’s Marketing Association, Danny O. Snow writes,

As “brick and mortar” bookstores know, a small number of consumers have always stolen books. Losses from theft are a standard factor in calculating bookstores’ operating expenses. Books with high prices seem more likely targets of shoplifters — online or offline.

…

My experience as CEO of Unlimited Publishing LLC (www.unlimitedpublishing.com) reveals a related pattern. We publish books primarily in printed form, but recently began releasing e-books in cooperation with BookZone. We typically price the electronic editions below $5, while paperback prices are $11.99 to $22.99. In the planning stages, we learned that a substantial percentage of consumers — 20% or more — who download an e-book later purchase a printed copy. As a result, we now view e-books as good tools to sell tree-books — not much different than free review copies given to journalists and VIPs.

Snow has a lot more insights which could be boiled down to this — if publishers pass the lower costs of publishing e-books on to consumers in the form of low prices, piracy will become much less of an issue. On the other hand, if publishers insist on charging the same retail price for electronic versions of a book as they do for the paper copy, then a pirate market in electronic books will flourish.

Last Fall, there was a lot of confusion over exactly what Gemstar was planning to do with the Rocket e-book hardware that it acquired from NuvoMedia. At that time, Gemstar was still claiming it would keep the Rocket e-book relatively open, but in an article about the Rocket e-book Jeff Kirvin indicated that Gemstar was heading toward a more closed model where all content for the Rocket e-book would have to come from Gemstar servers. I wrote that a closed model would be suicide.

Now Kirvin has written an excellent follow-up article dissecting the numerous mistakes made by Gemstar which have pretty much taken the Rocket e-book out of contention as a serious product these days. Not only did they go to a business model where all the content had to come from their serves, but Gemstar also a) never even tried to offer anything but the latest bestsellers at hardcover prices and b) systematically did everything possible to kill the independent user communities that Nuvo Media (who originally created and marketed the Rocket e-book) had tried to build.

At this point, I’m skeptical that there will ever be a market for standalone e-book readers after Gemstar’s failure. Kirvin mentions the Franklin eBookMan as an inexpensive alternative to the Rocket e-book. Although the Franklin does seem to understand that it needs to encourage independent content creators, the device has received almost universally negative reviews except from the diehard e-book fans. Personally, I’m more likely to buy something like an IPaq and use that for e-books rather than buy a separate device — the quick growth in features of PDAs is really rendering dedicated e-book readers pointless.

Computer Shopper columnist Jim O’Brien recently did a pretty good job of summing up everything that’s wrong with current e-book schemes (for an article that was generally very optimistic about the future of e-books). Responding to critics of e-books, O’Brien wrote,

E-book publishers have some work to do to prove them wrong. First, they have to stop obsessing over copyright protection and royalties — what publishers and authors want — and start focusing on what consumers want. They need to lift the unnecessary restrictions on e-book readers concerning printing, cutting, pasting, and sharing. Book buyers are older and busier than the teens and college students the music industry targets, so Napster-style piracy isn’t a problem.

Absolutely. On the other hand, I wish computer magazines would give readers what they want to. I actually read this story in the print version and it struck me as odd that computer magazines, especially, which are published both in print and on the web don’t simply print the URL to the web version of a story in the print magazine.

The reason, at least in the case of Computer Shopper, is that it wouldn’t make much difference because the URL for O’Brien’s story looks like this: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/comment/0,5859,2688447,00.html

Yuck. I don’t understand why companies spend so much money on content management systems that are apparently diametrically opposed to human-readable URLs.

Jeff Kirvin has a longish piece about Gemstar’s plans for e-books. Gemstar acquired two other e-book device manufacturers, Nuvomedia and Softbook.

Gemstar recently announced the release of two new models, but Kirvin is less than thrilled at Gemstar’s plans noting,

Gemstar will be releasing two new devices, the REB 1100 (replacing the Rocket eBook at $300) and the REB 1200 (replacing the Softbook at $700). Content for these devices will be exclusively through Gemstar’s own proprietary ebookstore, via the built-in 56k modem in both devices. Gemstar seems intent on cutting the web out of the ebook buying process altogether. Gemstar spokesman Tom Morrow said, “The important thing is that we are tethered to everyone who has a device.”

Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be “tethered” to anything. To my way of thinking, the freedom of buying books on the web and reading them on my PocketPC is one of the great things about ebooks. Gemstar wants to lock me down to a just their bookstore, and if they don’t have the ebook I want, I’m just out of luck? No thanks. Gemstar has also decided to end the support of the RocketLibrarian program and the practice of allowing users to create their own content from HTML or text. The only content of any kind for the REB devices will come from Gemstar’s library. Rupert Murdoch recently doubled his investment in Gemstar, bringing him up to 43 percent ownership. Murdoch talked about publishers being able to “completely bypass the printer, the paper manufacturer and the post office in the delivery of regular magazines and even of newspapers. That’s looking many years out, but it’s not looking too many years down the line for magazines.”

Certainly a stupid direction to take the company in if this is accurate, but is it indeed true? According to a FAQ while Kirvin is right about Gemstar ditching the ability to easily transfer text and HTML to the e-book readers, they will support the open eBook format and allow anyone to offer books in that formatt for the devices:

Will the Gemstar eBook support the open eBook format?

Yes. The current OeB specification is based on our technical implementation. We are also working closely with Microsoft in establishing the Open eBook standards and the OeB process.

It would be better if they also supported plain old text or HTML, but if the information at the Gemstar site is correct, you’re really not tied to a single vendor or source for e-books with these devices.

Update: I e-mailed Kirvin about the discrepancy and he said that he received an e-mail from Gemstar to the effect that they would be honoring pre-existing agreements with Barnes and Noble and Powells, but that all new content would come solely from Gemstar. If this is in fact true, it would be pretty much suicide for the devices in my opinion.