TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Public Domain Day - 2009

By Paul Biba

Thanks to Boing Boing for pointing this out. Public Domain Day was January 1, 2009. On that day many works entered the public domain in many countries around the world. Here is the story from publicdomain:

It is January 1st, which means that this morning at midnight a batch more “life-plus” copyrights expired in those countries — most of them — where copyright expires at the end of the Nth year following the death of the author.
Yes, folks, it’s Public Domain Day! And it’s international! There are little Public Domain Day virtual commemorations going on in places like Poland and Switzerland. Spread the word!

In the life+50 universe, which constitute the largest cohort of countries, including Canada, which collectively have the majority of the world’s population, life-plus copyrights expired at midnight for those authors, or last-surviving of multiple authors, who died in 1958. Some notable life+50 entries into the public domain include life+50 copyrights for authors such as:
Australian politician (and sheep breeder) James Guthrie (“A world history of sheep and wool”)
American film composer Edward H. Plumb (“Bambi” and many other Disney films)
American hymnist George Bennard (“The Old Rugged Cross”)
British painter and illustrator Lucy Kemp-Welch (the original edition of “Black Beauty”)
American screenwriter Jack Henley (“Bonzo Goes to College”)
American writer J. P. McEvoy (“Dixie Dugan”)
American author Betty MacDonald (“Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle”)
British poet Robert Service (“The Cremation of Sam McGee”, etc.)
English poet Alfred Noyes (“The Highwayman”)
English music scholar Percy Scholes (“The Oxford Companion to Music”)
American artist and author Marjorie Flack (“The Story About Ping”)
American writer Johnston McCulley (creator of “Zorro”)
British aircraft manufacturer Alliott Verdon Roe (as in Avro, as in the Arrow)
Serbian geophysicist Milutin Milanković (early proponent of ice ages)
British author and translator Lionel Giles (translator of the most widely-published English edition of Sun-Tzu’s “Art of War”)
Romanian-British rabbi and scholar Shulem Moshkovitz (the Shotzer Rebbe)
American financial analyst John Moody (of Wall Street fame)

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AsianWeek drops print edition

By Paul Biba

AsianWeek has decided to go internet only. With a circulation of over 60,000, this is another example of electronic publishing taking over from the print version.

The economy and the news business have experienced their own changes. There are fewer major newspapers, fewer newspaper readers and fewer newspaper advertisers than ever before. A faltering economy has accelerated the decline. Meanwhile, Asian Pacific Americans have led the way in the digital revolution, migrating away from print media and into receiving their news and information electronically. To reflect these changing times, AsianWeek will cease regular newspaper publication immediately. We will continue to publish online and in special newspaper editions. Electronic versions of AsianWeek articles will be free via email.

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In ‘09: Cellphone e-book boom, tough competition for Kindle, growing DRM resistance, and perhaps a shrinking Mobi share

By David Rothman

I turned away from my iTod Touch screen and peered into a crystal ball for  the January issue of Publishing Trends.

My 2009 predictions shouldn’t surprise TeleBlog regulars. For example:

1. Major growth in the use of cellphones as e-book readers.

2. Tough competition for the Kindle from new rivals such as the Plastic Logic tablet shown in this video—if it lives up to initial ballyhoo. What about screen refresh rates?

3. Greater consumer awareness of DRM as a threat to long-term ownership of e-books. To a multi-device user, the Kindle’s DRM is not seamless.

To the above, I’d add one more: a shrinking of Mobipocket’s market share if Amazon won’t let Mobi release versions for the iPhone and Android. Native ePub rendering capabilities would also help.

A different set of predictions: Those from Michael Cairns, the former Bowker president, who, among other things, believes that 2009 could be still harder on the publishing business than was 2008.

“When times were good,” he writes, “an oversupply of market options—particularly in retail—hid a myriad of structural problems. Right-sizing in media retailing and distribution will result in one major physical book retailer, one wholesaler and one online retailer.” Ouch. I guess p-book writers had better be very nice to Barnes & Noble.

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XML workflow conference: Learn how to cope with both E and P

By David Rothman

Here’s a jog to consider attending the Jan. 13 forum in New York called StartwithXML. Hachette USA CEO David Young and Cengage SVP Ken Brooks will be among the speakers. Registration information is here.

The right mix of tech and workflow matters immensely, as I know all too well  as a Twilight Times Books author. Ever try correcting a book that’ll appear on paper and in a bunch of e-forms? Oh, the fun of dealing with lost paragraph breaks and the like! Here’s to the day when ePub is truly the norm!

Publishers urgently needs to be able to adopt out good workflows for efficient handling of both P and E. I still don’t think they have the right tools,  at least not the small  ones—the reason I’m pushing the ePubWriter idea. But even now, many publishers would be well off using XML files as masters. Publishers might check out the progress of product called Prince, which can turn XML into PDF. See related video.

While the XML forum will cover other topics such as tagging, the general question of workflow is especially meaningful to me.

Also of interest: StartwithXML-related posts on the O’Reilly site from Laura Dawson, Mike Shatzkin and Andrew Savikas.

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PC Magazine on eReader and Stanza

By Chris Meadows

As part of their “21 Cool iPhone Apps” feature, PC Magazine has posted 2-page reviews of both Stanza and eReader. It gives both apps high marks, though Stanza gets half a star more than eReader.

Both reviews contain some factual errors, but they are the sorts of things you need to go in-depth to discover—not things that can be easily discovered in a brief review period. In the eReader review, the reviewer complains:

As with Stanza, which can also read eReader’s PDB and PRC file format, buying current bestsellers for eReader is less than streamlined. That’s because the only source, whichever reader you use, is Fictionwise—a slow, quirky site with an outdated design. So, for example, you may already have a Fictionwise account for Stanza, but you can’t use it for eReader, though both apps use the same domain, store, and file format.

This is, of course, doubly untrue—in addition to Stanza’s Fictionwise store, books can also be bought from the ordinary Fictionwise site and from eReader.com in both cases, and both sites have simplified mobile pages which the reviewer apparently missed.

It’s hard to blame the reviewer for this one, though; Lexcycle’s whole Stanza Fictionwise store deal is way too complicated, and it’s easy to miss what sites you can use the eReader client with. Even now, the eReader client’s login process is confusing, and there’s nothing on the screen that says you can log into either your eReader or your Fictionwise account just by entering the different userIDs.

Another error is that when the reviewer counts Stanza’s ability to read more formats than eReader as a plus, he apparently does not notice the way that non-ePub file formats converted over from the desktop lose all formatting. Perhaps he was less focused on these issues than on readability at all.

In any event, it is nice to see an e-book client that is not Stanza getting some coverage in addition to the Lexcycle reader’s rosy glow of publicity. It would have been nice if they could have covered Bookshelf, as well, since it is a much better reader for non-ePub books than Stanza, but they could only cover 21 apps after all.

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Moxie Mo Show on Stanza: “Turning iPhone into a Kindle”

By Chris Meadows

Found via Twitter from @Stanza_Reader: a video blog entry singing the praises of Stanza, comparing iPhone + Stanza quite favorably to the Kindle. In the five minute installment, videoblogger Jeff McCord explains how to install Stanza, and puts it through its paces.

It is a decent enough podcast for what it includes, but—as I stated in the comment I left at the podcast—it is slightly inaccurate in that it implies that Stanza is the only good e-book application for the iPhone, when in fact there are several of them.

And I can’t help but find it a little sad that an iPhone with an e-book reader is always being described as “turning your iPhone into a Kindle.” Why would I want to make my iPod Touch into a monochrome, slow-page-turning, ugly chunk of plastic reliant on Amazon, anyway?

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Requiem for Ficlets.com

By Chris Meadows

In March, 2007, I wrote a post about an interesting new “Web 2.0” fiction site: Ficlets.com, in which users wrote stories singly or cooperatively in 1024-byte chunks. It seemed promising, especially given that writer/web celebrities like John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton were participating. It won web awards at SXSW. People liked it.

But eventually those celebrities found other things to do with their time, and in June 2008, the site was more or less abandoned by its maintainers. Kevin Lawver left AOL, Ficlets’s parent company, and nobody replaced him in any of his administrative functions. The last blog post, on June 4th, sat there forlornly collecting dust and “monthly anniversary” comments with no follow-up. The OpenID login system stopped working altogether and was never fixed.

Yet through all that, dozens of writers continued to keep Ficlets alive, posting thousands of Ficlets—almost 49,000 in all. So it came as an unpleasant surprise on December 6th when a big red banner appeared at the top of the Ficlets homepage, accompanied by a pop-up window to make absolutely certain visitors got the point: “Ficlets is going away soon :(“

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“Is Google’s culture grab unstoppable?” - editorial in The Register

By Paul Biba

The site with the best logo in the world, The Register, has a scathing editorial on Google’s settlement of the “Google Books” case. Since he is an attorney for the original Napster, he is someone we should probably take seriously.

The Google Books lawsuit demonstrates that it is nigh impossible for individual creators to stop the rampage of a corporate King Kong that is willing to spend endless sums on lawsuits to commoditize art. The unspoken lesson to every young entrepreneur in Silicon Valley is to stonewall—litigate if you can, particularly if you are richer than your opponent. Do not underestimate Google’s influence on the Valley - who would argue with the “mind of God”?

Only governments can take on Google-sized bad boys when the big dogs come after your culture. Governments are concerned about the market power of big search companies - this settlement should alarm both regulators and consumers.

As the Booksellers Association correctly concludes, “[A]n over zealous embrace of this new Google initiative may well, in the long term, deliver a more limited route-to-market for books rather than the incremental benefits that seem to be the current perception.”

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