TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

TidBITS compares Kindle and iPad

By Chris Meadows

I’m a little late noticing this, but on January 31st TidBITS posted a detailed head-to-head comparison of the Kindle versus the iPad as e-book reading platforms. There is also some discussion of the Amazon/Macmillan dispute, though the outcome was unknown at that point.

TidBITS‘s Glenn Fleishman concludes:

In the end, Amazon is a bookseller, and its foray into hardware shows that it’s better at moving media than making machines. The Kindle has evolved into a nice piece of hardware that gets great reviews from those who keep it.

But, put bluntly, the Kindle DX just doesn’t compare favorably with the iPad in any way other than battery life and screen visibility in sunlight; the Kindle 2 benefits from being smaller and cheaper. And the Kindle ebook library may offer titles at a lower price, though Amazon may be forced to capitulate on that.

The article includes plenty of comparison photos and charts, and makes very interesting reading. As Fleishman, like me, has no difficulty reading from a lit LCD screen, his conclusions may not be valid for everyone, but I think he makes some very good points.

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Coming soon to the Kindle: Color, wi-fi, more applications?

By Chris Meadows

Last week, Amazon bought a touchscreen start-up whose technology would work with color LCD screens. Today, the New York Times’s “Bits” blog has some interesting new glimpses at possible changes to the next model of Kindle.

Robert Brunner, founder of the design company Ammunition, worked with Barnes & Noble to create the Nook e-reader and says he believes that the Kindle will actually become two Kindles. “I think they are going to have to split their line. They can’t abandon E Ink screens, but they will need to create a color device too,” said Mr. Brunner. “Where it gets interesting is, do they just do a device that’s a color Kindle or is it a full computer?”

By scrutinizing Amazon’s job listings board, “Bits” suggests, it is possible to see what kinds of technical specialties Amazon wants to add to its Kindle team. Those specialties include understandings of LCD technology, wi-fi, and application development.

The article quotes several industry executives’ pontifications on what Amazon should do to compete with the iPad on a more equal basis. The consensus seemed to be that Amazon should move beyond just putting books on the device as-is, and instead offer a richer, more compelling experience.

I would be inclined to suggest that Amazon should first concentrate on improving how they put e-books on the device as-is until they get it right. If you have trouble walking, you shouldn’t be trying to run a marathon.

Nonetheless, this hints at some interesting possibilities. For example, about a wi-fi-only Kindle that would be cheaper because it did not have to subsidize a life-long 3G connection, with LCD (or similar technology) for faster screen refresh and apps to use for more than just e-book reading?

Convergence, here we come.

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Why Are Scholarly Journals Costly even with Electronic Publishing?

By Paul Biba

From the abstract:

Journal literature has long played a prominent role in the scholarly communication chain. In recent decades, however, the scholarly communication system has been facing a crisis due to the ever-escalating costs of journals. This paper examines the reasons for the high costs of scholarly journals. … Two of the features of the journal publishing industry cited a decade ago and still valid today are a “lack of competition” and “perverse incentives.” The “first-copy cost” is reported to be the main reason for high journal prices both in print and electronic publishing

For more information take a look here at Resource Shelf.

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Nook now available in stores and online

By Paul Biba

Received a press release from B&N saying that the Nook is in stock online and will be at the majority of stores by mid-week.

Along with the ereader, B&N will be launching new in-store content which will be updated weekly and be available for a four week period. This month the content will be themed for Valentine’s day.

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Beyond the Book podcast on the ebook wars

By Paul Biba

Beyond the Book always does an excellent job with interviews. I received an email from them about their latest live podcast to be held from 2pm to 3pm EST this Wednesday, February 10. During the podcast, Copyright Clearance Center’s Chris Kenneally will be examining the eBook Wars, which are taking shape with MacMillan challenging Amazon and the rise of eReaders and the iPad. Chris and his panelists will look at all sides of the e-book story and what future battles may bring to the print and digital marketplace. The podcast will air live on BlogTalkRadio: http://bit.ly/drJipN

Joining Chris are:

· Andrew Albanese, features editor at Publishers Weekly;

· Sara Nelson, Books Editor, “O” Magazine;

· Brian O’Leary, Founder & Principal, Magellan Media Partners; and

· Mike Shatzkin, Founder & CEO, The Idea Logical Company, Inc.,

During the podcast, Chris will also be taking phone calls at 646-378-1949.

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Rich Adin starts ebook “Hall of Shame”

By Paul Biba

Rich Adin has started his Hall of Shame, to highlight the poor state of editing of so many ebooks.

He asks that you email to him the book title, author, problem, and samples of errors, among other information. Please email these at Rich’s site, not TeleRead. He asks that you send info to hallofshame[at]anamericaneditor.com

As Rich says: By spreading the word about poor editing and formatting, readers will become knowledgable consumers and speak with their wallets, declining to purchase inferior quality books, thereby shaming publishers into fixing them. Should a publisher undertake to fix a book’s problems, that, too, will be noted, assuming the publisher lets us know.

You can read more details about the project here.

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Solving the e-book problem: a call to arms!

By Ficbot

I am blown away by the responses to the articles Chris Meadows and I posted over the past week. I am dismayed that in some reader’s minds, I came off as anti-author—if that were so, I would be downloading off the darknet right now instead of blogging to you—but I am delighted that the issues which have left me, and many other loyal e-book buyers, so frustrated are finally getting notice.

Readers like me want to buy books and support authors. But we want to be treated like more than a nuisance or afterthought too.

We deserve books which look nice and are free from errors. We deserve to pay a fair price—not overly high, but not overly low either (most of the objection to the Macmillan price raise was a distrust that they would actually lower it later, when the book aged—they have not done this in the past and mass-market $6 paperbacks still are retailing in e-book for $10 and up!)

We deserve books which are not so crippled by DRM that we can’t read them on the device of our choosing (and yes, we deserve to be trusted that we won’t abuse this freedom—treat us like book-buying fans and not potential criminals who must be thwarted at every turn!) We deserve to simply have the chance to BUY the books and not have them made unavailable due to the vendor we shop at or the country in which we reside.

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Oxford dictionaries go online

By Paul Biba

Starting in June when you buy an Oxford dictionary, at least in England, you will get a free subscription to Oxford Dictionaries Onlind and Oxvord Language Dictionaries Online. The subscription will be between 3 months and a year depending on the price of the dictionary purchased. After the subscription expires, renewals will be offered at discounted prices.

The subscription includes dictionaries, thesaurus, usage information, grammar, spelling, writing resources and a puzzle zone.

Now if they would only drop the price of the OED on DVD to a more reasonable amount.

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Divided we stand, united we fall

By Rich Adin

In thinking about ebooks and the future of publishers, I, as have most commentators, have reflected the thinking of publishers that the solution is singular in the sense that one solution will fit all parts of a publishing business. The reality is quite to the contrary; because publishing is a pluralistic endeavor, the solutions must be as well.

Publishing has it great divides, like fiction, nonfiction, and academic, but there are even finer divides. For example, nonfiction can be biography, self-help, technical, cooking, current history, 20th century history, and on and on. When commenters talk about pricing and value, there is little discussion about the particular division under discussion. Most discussions, however, seem to be centered on fiction — the straight text novel.

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Author Henry Porter fears for the future of publishing

By Paul Biba

In an article in The Guardian author Henry Porter bemoans the future of publishing. Here are two quotes of interest:

To begin to write a book these days seems more than the average folly. Publishing appears to have been hit by a storm similar to the one that tore through the music industry a few years ago and is now causing unprecedented pain in newspapers We are told that fewer people are reading, that book sales are down, that the supermarkets which sell one in five copies of all books care more about their cucumber sales, that the book is shortly to be replaced by the ebook and electronic readers sold by, among others, Amazon, which seems bent on reducing publishers to an archipelago of editorial sweatshops and the writer to the little guy stitching trainers in an airless room. …

If you feel sorry for publishers spare a thought – and a dime – for writers, on whose shoulders this huge, discounting, rights-trading, jargon-babbling profiteering melée rests. As things are, the writer’s share of a book that sells for £10, after his or her agent’s fee, hovers between 35p and 40p: more than 95% is kept by the agent, publisher and retailer. The fierce discounting in supermarkets means that writers are now even less likely to earn out their advances. At the same time advances are being cut and authors’ contracts are being summarily cancelled.

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JavaScript Epub readers discussed

By Paul Biba

Threepress Consulting discusses several new JavaScript Epub readers. Why JavaScript?

* JavaScript is the most popular programming language in the world and it might be the best way to get more developers interested in creating and tweaking ePub readers.

* JavaScript ePub readers start challenging publishers, developers, and book readers to start thinking about what’s most important in delivering a compelling reading experience in a browser. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these choices while developing Ibis Reader, which will launch later this month, so I’m eager to see more opinions.

* Building a pure-JavaScript ePub reader requires unzipping in JavaScript, which had no open source implementations until just recently. August has written about and open sourced his critical breakthrough for unzipping files in JavaScript.

For more details, including a like to some tutorials, check the site.

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Dan Poynter and Mark Coker to speak at SF Writers Conference

By Paul Biba

Coker and Poynter will be on a panel entitled “The Ebook Revolution” on Saturday, February 13. It will be moderated by literary agent Ted Weinstein.

Coker is founder of Smashwords and Poynter is author of Dan Poynter’s Self-Publishing Manual. You can find more details here.

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