Stealing Books - Easy!

Here's another brief bit from one of my favorite blogs, TechCrunch. Although the Kindle, Amazon.com's brand-new e-book reader (about which we have blogged extensively) sells books in the proprietary, locked MobiPocket format, the writer points out how easy it is to download book files from any of the myriad BitTorrent sites (where all those illegal file copies--music, movies and, yes, books, too--can be found if you're not worried about being tracked by the RIAA or any of the other organizations dedicated to chasing after data thieves).

Now, there are a number of sites, like Project Gutenberg, where files exist for any number of out-of-copyright/public domain titles. These files can be downloaded for free and used as the reader chooses. They are often posted in multiple formats like .txt (Text only), .pdf (Adobe Reader), .doc (Microsoft Word) and .Lit (Microsoft Reader). The Kindle can read text and Word files and the other two are easily converted into one or the other of these formats and they can then be added to the Kindle via the dedicated email address that comes with every Kindle account.

However, the BitTorrent sites have files for lots of books, including plenty of brand-new copyrighted titles, that can be downloaded just as easily, converted to whatever format seems best and loaded onto the Kindle via that same email address.

It's easy. It's quick. It's convenient. It's free. It's also completely illegal--but we haven't seen that stopping too many music collectors or movie fans now, have we? Are book readers more honest and law-abiding than music and movie fans? There's no real way to know until some deep-pocketed publisher, or a publishers enforcement organization, starts tracking downloads and suing everyone in sight. Perhaps it won't come to that but Amazon has given all those downloaders a way to put their files, legally obtained or otherwise, on a handy portable reading device.

Maybe that Attributor story I did a while back, the one about a company whose service tracks content appearances on the net, begins to make a lot more sense. I wonder what they charge?

- John

In Defense of the Kindle

My colleagues and I at E-Reads haven't been exactly effusive about the merits of Amazon's Kindle (though, compared to some blogs we've read, our comments will seem absolutely benign). However, I do want to say something positive, indeed something very, very positive.

For the past twenty years or so, since I first laid eyes on CD-ROMs, I and a host of cockeyed visionaries like me have been obsessed with the dream of a handheld book reader. Early in the 1990s I wrote for book trade publications about the possibilities and was so certain the day would come that by the mid-1990s I got tired of waiting for someone to invent one and spoke to some technical people about developing one myself. Luckily, the introduction of the Rocket Books in 1998 put an end to my quixotic and potentially bankrupting scheme. More significantly, it also called to arms the community of futurists who'd been doing more than sketching -- they'd been developing the hardware and programming the software and waiting for their moment. And now, in 1998, it was here.

The moment may have been there but the handheld book reader was not: the technology, business model, rights management, and culture were immature. And despite the Sony Reader and the Kindle, they still are.

So what's my defense of the Kindle? Simple. It brings us a gigantic step closer to the dream. Whatever you want to say against it, it combines three superpowerful forces: a flawed but demonstrably usable device, a blitzkrieg of a marketing campaign, and the limitless content of amazon.com. The public's perception of ebooks can never return to the flash-in-the-pan flop that scoffers have branded it.

Maybe the Kindle is the wrong product, but at least it's the wrong product at the right time. However limited the success of Amazon's gadget may be – hell, even if it's a total flop – there's no going back on ebooks now. A wave of technologists will be inspired by the Kindle to do the job right in the next generation of ebook technology. It may still take years but as far as I'm concerned the game is over and the cyberbooks dreamers have won.

Thank you, Kindle.

- Richard Curtis

Piling on

This post may seem to be a bit of a mish-mash but, trust me, there's a central point that should emerge by the time I'm done.

Having joined the fray and unloaded my first thoughts on the subject of Amazon's Kindle earlier this week, I thought I'd move on to newer ideas but "Just when I'm ready to get out, they pull me back in." Clearly, the blog world isn't ready to let go of this ready-made target for their rage, their opinionated attitudes, their endless need to keep on blathering until people are driven into a coma of indifference or simply stunned into immobility.

Publishers Marketplace, that indispensable, online source for publishing-related news, had links to two ebook-related items in today's issue.

One was from a U.K. Bookseller Association blogger and contained a news item that every sensible person has been possibly expecting but, at very least, hoping for since the first stories about EInk went public a couple of years ago. The company is working on developing a system that will allow them to operate in color rather than their initially established, high-contrast greyscale/black & white first generation technology. Despite some technical issues that make eink screens not the best choice for a number of dream applications, the idea of the technology being able to accommodate full color is inspiring and encouraging.

The other was a link to a new review of the Kindle by Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal. Mossberg has been talking about tech for a long time, is widely respected, seen as objective and unbiased and, when he wants to be, which is most of the time, quite blunt and to the point. He had some good things to say about the Kindle but I'd have to say that on balance his review was not very positive. Since some of his opinions mirrored some of mine, I'm not much inclined to disagree with his overall conclusions which sum up for me as "Nice try. Give it another go and I'll look at it again to see if you get it right on the second try...but I'm not betting on it." By now, of course, Amazon has to be getting used to the chorus of critics and presumably they can console themselves by remembering that they very quickly sold out their initial inventory of $400 apiece items and will shortly start filling back orders and banking not inconsiderable additional cash. Just in case that link above ends up falling behind a registration curtain, the end of Mossberg's column has this helpful hint: "Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital website."

Then, a colleague here at E-Reads mentioned a site I'd heard of but hadn't previously visited--Buzzfeed. The object of this operation is to collect and organize what's going on out there in Blogland and neatly summarize it for our consumption/entertainment. You'll never guess what the title of one of their recent collations was: Kindle Backlash. Clearly, none of E-Reads' comments made the top of the list, but they neatly provided the top five hate-ons for the Kindle. I can't resist pointing you to some of them here.

Chip Kidd, famous book cover designer, contributes a comment that's well under the 200 word limit for the A Brief Message site. Almost 200 words under the limit, in fact, depending how you count.

Robert Scoble, famous blogger at Scobleizer, offers up a highly critical review after using the Kindle for a week.

Mobileread.com thinks that Amazon Kindle might be the worst thing that can happen to e-books. Among the hardest hits is: "Amazon has gone out of their way to make sure that you can only buy books from them, and can't use them anywhere else. When you buy a book, you use it on the Kindle or you're out of luck. We're talking about control of content, with format and DRM lock-in as the tool of power. We're on the verge of a future for content that makes you buy the same thing over and over every time you have a new technology." Now, just in case you haven't noticed, that's what the record business and the movie business have been moderately successful at doing for at least a couple of decades now so don't be too shocked if book publishers are showing the same sort of greedy thinking.

Cracked.com gets off a pretty funny spoof of a new piece of technology designed to supersede the Kindle.

And, finally, Amazon itself manages to collect a large number of negative comments about their own product. Here's a link to all the 1-Star reviews of the Kindle on the Amazon site. Isn't the internet wonderful? Isn't social networking a blast? Just FYI, by the way, when I clicked the link, there were a total of 790 reviews: 191 5-Star; 103 4-Star; 124 3-Star; 121 2-Star and 251 1-Star. Not a scorecard I'd like to see for something of mine, I have to say.

Now, I'm just enough of a contrarian to think that when this many people have something bad to say about anything that I should be looking for a way to put something on the other side of the ledger but, for the moment, I can't think what that might be since most of my reactions to the Kindle were well onto the negative side of the scale. Still, Amazon has taken a big position in a game where I've committed to play and whatever else they've done, they've galvanized the attentions of the world at large, both within the tech field and within the publishing field, and it seems to me like they may also be causing a fair number of people who never think about books at all to give at least a passing thought to the subject of e-books and that can't be all bad, can it? Maybe, as seems too often to be the case, we're a small circle of zealots sitting here raving at each other but I don't really think that's true this time. Let's all ask someone we know who doesn't seem to read much if they know what a Kindle is.

In the meantime, of course, we can dream about how Amazon is going to get it exactly right (for everybody) with Kindle 2.0.

- John

Hands-Free eBooks?

When it comes to technology that disappoints, visor optic systems have pretty much failed to live up to their promised potential for many years now. The vision for the technology has traditionally been that just by putting on a pair of stereo goggles you can immerse yourself in virtual environment. There have been virtual reality helmets, 3D displays, and more recently (and far more affordable) tiny LCD screens mounted in glasses that come alive like a 50" television screen in front of your eyes.

When the first iPod Video came out a few years ago, a number of small companies began capitalizing on the Personal Media Player (or PMP, for short) trend by marketing these "Wearable Video Display" LCD glasses that allowed you to watch the video output from your device. Of course, the limitations of resolution and what content your media device can deliver through video output make everything tricky and somewhat annoying (see an example of what it's like to wear them here).

Picture of the MyVu, reviewed at iLounge.

Another drawback, besides that every one wearing these things looks like Geordi LaForge from Star Trek: The Next Generation, is that it's definitely not the same experience as a home theater like they advertise. The screen appears recessed and is only "large" if you consider yourself to be many feet away in perspective. Yet one of the weirder offshoots from these visors is that it suddenly became possible to not just see your video files inside your glasses, but text, too. And that's one feature that I think Geordi would have enjoyed.

The latest gadget that's shipping this Christmas is the $400 Qingbar GP300 (pictured at the top of this post). It's a completely self-contained set of glasses with a built-in PMP that can read SD cards for your files. And it can display basic .TXT files, just like the ones you can download from Project Gutenberg. (For more examples of wearable video displays, look at the $200 Myvu, and other models from Vuzix, EZVision, and YellowMosquito.) And all this begs the question, do we even need a "book" device to read text? Audio books have long been a part of that answer. And it seems like stereo-displays may be another part, too.

With a view of a virtual page in front of your eyes, with nothing for your hands to hold, the idea of a book as a container is fully exploded. Imagine that to change a page you do a "hard blink" or twitch your index finger. Imagine that the page endlessly unfurls its scroll as your eyes scan: there are no more pages. Whether it's retinal implants or super-contact lenses, science fiction has been way ahead of this game of getting visual information in front of our eyes seamlessly. But we're slowly catching up.

- Michael

Amazon Kindle: Right Questions, Wrong Answer?

What is an ebook? Who sells them? Who buys them? Why do they buy them? How many ebooks does a typical buyer purchase? How do we motivate a reader to buy ebooks? How do we motivate a reader to buy more ebooks? What price makes sense? What do ebook readers use to read ebooks? Is snazzy technology the driver for ebook sales?

Sure, we all want to make money at what we do, don't we? Still, you'd think that a company full of smart people, a company with a reputation for valuing customer service as a highest priority, would have asked the right questions about ebooks and come up with a better answer than the Kindle appears to be.

Last Monday was the day a lot of people had been waiting for, ever since rumors that Amazon was planning to take on the whole challenge of ebook hardware began to buzz. Monday was announcement day, which means the day before that was leak day as early reports started popping up with details, comments, opinions but no new pictures. No great loss, of course, since the Kindle turns out to look like something designed by desperate engineers who needed a box in a hurry and weren't much worried about aesthetics or style. It works, it holds everything inside it where the pieces need to stay but the phrase ugly duckling keeps running through my mind.

See, from some perspectives, the Kindle is a very good thing but from a lot of others it's not at all good. From Amazon's viewpoint, they're getting a nice price for a single-task piece of handheld hardware. $399 a pop. I don't know many rich people but even if I knew thousands of millionaires and billionaires, I very much doubt I'd know many people at all who would want to spend $400 (Allow me my round-off, please. And don't forget taxes, shipping and whatever else might come along to shove the price over the threshold) to be able to carry a lot of books to read. And magazines. And newspapers. Particularly if they figure out, sooner or later, that Amazon is getting them to pay for some things that they could easily get elsewhere at no cost if they were to invest just a little bit of effort and time. Charging for public domain ebooks? The Gutenberg Project has lots of books available and there's no charge (and no rights issues, either). Making you pay for newspaper downloads? It's simple enough to bookmark some newspaper websites and click around a bit. Making you pay to download blogs? Making you pay to email/convert your own files to be readable on the Kindle? Who are they kidding?

Yes, Amazon has done some things right, designing a machine that will pull together books, magazines, newspapers and even blogs onto a single device conceived solely for the purpose of providing a platform for reading. The big problem from my perspective is that comparable (and often superior) platforms already exist but they also do an almost uncountable number of other things. They're called desktop computers, laptop computers, ultra portable computers, handheld computers, smartphones and probably a few other things that I should have added to the list. In a world where you can now buy a laptop for only a couple of hundred dollars more than you would spend on a Kindle, the question I can't get away from is, "Why buy a Kindle?"

Maybe we don't buy those other devices "just" to read books but I read a lot of books and I read a lot of them on screen on one device or another and I'm certainly conscious of that particular use for any device I consider buying. A Palm Treo 700p may not be the ideal model for a portable reading device but there's software you can buy or download for free that makes it a pretty handy tool for what remains, essentially, a pretty basic function, not to mention all the many other functions that the Treo (or any other smartphone or portable computer) fulfills quite handily for no additional cost.

Sony, another company with a long-term rep for finding large customer bases by hitting the sweet spot in terms of market needs has, despite two iterations over a period of time and despite pricing their hardware $100 lower than the Kindle, apparently not found many people who feel compelled to read books on their device with its proprietary, locked-format files. This despite the fact that Borders, which did a trial of selling the reader in 270 stores, expanded the offering to about 500 stores a few months back and has also arranged to launch a dedicated site for selling Sony Reader formatted titles. When the reader launched, books were available only through Sony’s Connect online store.

And, if you look farther back, less than a decade but a long way in Internet time, to the early days of ebook optimism, there is a small string of dedicated-hardware failures: the SoftBook, the RocketBook, and some others I'm not remembering.

Does a pattern begin to emerge?

I can only think of one company that has proven over time that they are capable of being all things to all people in terms of delivering both brilliant software and impressive hardware. Palm actually managed it for a few years but then they lost their way. Apple seems able to do it consistently.

Amazon, even though most of what they've sold up until now is hard goods, is, to my perception at least, a software company at heart. The programming behind their website is excellent, near flawless in fact, and does many different things relating to handling products in a way that satisfies millions of customers very consistently. They're taking a big leap here in trying to wrap their own software in a marketable piece of hardware. Despite a very attention-grabbing launch, and reports that their initial inventory is sold out already (how big was that inventory and how quickly will they be able to re-stock?), there's no guarantee that their marketing might is going to overcome the many hurdles in the way of creating a breakthrough product that will truly make ebooks a ubiquitous commodity that captures the mindshare of the public at large, or even the (much smaller) reading public at large. I wish them great success, since such success would, among other things, presumably sell lots of E-Reads titles and make lots of money for us all, but I don't expect to support their efforts with my money and I have grave doubts that a whole lot of other people will either. There is a substantial but nonetheless relatively small number of gadget freaks out there who have to have the new, new thing right away but once they've skimmed the cream off that market, I don't know how much more deeply the Kindle is going to dig into the masses of what we might call the great unsold. Or should that be "unbuying?"
-- John

Kindle: Not Ready To Burn My Books Just Yet

The launch of the Kindle is the stuff of technology pundits' nightmares. It's not that Amazon has done anything too aggravating with their initial marketing, because they pretty much went by the defacto protocol for glitzy new devices (summoning up every media outlet, declaring a watershed milestone has been achieved for humanity, celebrities delivering tearful thanks for such a perfect device, etc.) and it was more or less a success. Mind you, Steve Jobs is legendary for creating these kinds of reality distortion fields that permeate every aspect of his Apple launches with an overwhelming perfume of delicious mystery and lust. But at the Kindle event Jeff Bezos was less Mesmero! and more like a self-praising high school valedictorian. There wasn't enough magic, or rejoicing fanboys, to mask the concern a lot of us are feeling.

Before Bezos had an opportunity to work his charm and share his vision, I was already wary. My first gut response was that it won't be too long until someone has hacked the Kindle to use the EVDO service for other purposes, stealing the "free" data service from Sprint. It was also another E-Ink based device without a backlight. And the fact that the Kindle has a keyboard seems less interesting once you factor in that E-Ink conserves its battery life by screen refresh limitations that don't coopertae well with keyboard usage: slow page refreshes for every keystroke (typing a 200 word email on the Kindle would probably take more patience and battery power than you'd like).

Jeff Bezos at the launch of Kindle

Then the air went out of the balloon as soon as all the hidden-cost caveats were revealed.

The Kindle is actually an ebook and RSS pay-for-content service that's only available for the Kindle. And if it were a service offered for other devices, like the iPhone, I still don't think it's what consumers want. But like it or not, this is how the road forward is being paved.

The logic, like most digital media sales, continues to be dumbfounding. Other than recently-published books, most of the content you can get for the Kindle is arguably text you can either read for free or get cheaper through other channels. And any content you buy for Kindle can't be read on anything but the Kindle. So, let me ask you to forget about the device for a moment and to consider just the service: Are you the type of person who likes to pay for every document you want to read, regardless of whether it was offered to you free or even that you wrote it yourself?

Because it's unable to support the common document formats of .doc, .rtf, and pdf, you'll need to email any of those files to Amazon's Kindle service to have them converted to a proprietary format at 10¢ a pop. Let me say that again in more simple terms. You have to pay to read your own stuff on the Kindle. The Sony Reader doesn't have that mentality, neither does the Blackberry or the iPhone. Second, if you want to subscribe to certain websites' RSS feeds, or one of Kindle's many pre-formatted newspapers and magazines, you'll have to pay a monthly fee.

The Kindle is a DRM experiment created as the test-tube baby from the DNA of intellectual property laws and the success of the iTunes Music Store. Most of us have been getting used to paying for content that we can't share anymore, but eventually the ramifications of those restrictions are going to be more severe. The DRM world of the future is a place where parents won't have music collections or home libraries they can easily share with their own kids without paying for them again and again. What happens to lending books to friends and the flow of cultural learning when every document and every format requires a service fee?

The Kindle formula seems predicated on the logic that if you're the type of person who wants to read on the Kindle, you're probably the kind of person who can afford the pay for content service. In contrast, the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) XO computer is being designed for people who can afford neither. It's been designed for children so that it can foster learning and sharing information in a humanitarian world that most science fiction readers are familiar with. It's that world where we build new devices to help each other, not to siphon off nickels and dimes. What we've talked about in this office is how cool the XO computer would be as the real "iPod of reading," and it could be. It's the sort of device that could actually get kids back into pleasure reading if there was a socially conscious book service for it.

Unlike Richard, who invoked King Gillette earlier, I don't feel Amazon is going about things the wrong way by pricing the device too high and the books too low. Books should always be made as affordable as possible. In my mind, pricing books too high is one of the reasons there's a pandemic of youth and young adults preferring console gaming and the internet to reading. It's actually less expensive to buy a Harry Potter XBox game than it is to buy the hardcover book. Based on the successful model of selling an expensive console that you buy new games for, it's not out to lunch to assume there are millions of people out there who will invest in a platform if attractive content is there for it. On the surface, the Kindle costs $2,000 less than an iPhone after you factor in the iPhone's nearly mandatory contract for 2 year's worth of monthly AT&T data and phone service, so, relatively speaking, it's a moderately affordable platform. And for the Kindle's $399, you're buying a platform for which Amazon seems very committed to consistently delivering a wide selection of new and backlist content.

So, the Kindle does have a good chance of success, as long as Amazon is willing to keep tweaking their formula the way that Apple did for the iPod. Remember, the iPod's success wasn't overnight. When it was first released, it was not a huge seller. There was no Windows compatibility. The touch surface was still a physical wheel. There was no iTunes Music Store. But under the cloak of Steve's reality distortion field, Apple kept refreshing the product with new ideas for 2 full years until they got it right and it took off as a phenomenon for the history books.

The Kindle has a lot going for it because of Amazon's weight in the retail marketplace, but it has to be ready to evolve quickly based on user response. They need to open the platform up for free content. It needs to be ready for user generated .Pub files. They need to make the EVDO service more useful. They need a more polished, premium design that looks less like a snowspeeder. They need to get E-Ink's latest color screens. And I think Amazon is probably already planning for that. Even though they took their sweet time getting all their ducks in a row for the launch, I think that they're not going to shrink back from this vision even if the device sells like a stinker this Christmas (it won't: it's already sold out its initial inventory). The Kindle is going to be with us for a while.

- Michael

King Gillette and the Kindle

E-Reads is second to none in rooting for the success of Amazon's Kindle. Not only does it represent the realization of a dream we have cherished for two decades, but, just to be selfish about it, our books are carried on it and we want to make money. That said, we have a real queasy feeling in the pits of our stomachs that the Kindle is on a path to the same resting place as the Rocket eBook.

Above: Amazon's Kindle.

My technical colleagues have their own reasons for thinking so, but I'd like to stress a couple of my own. The first is that the man and woman in the street does not want or need a dedicated reading device. We have come to rely on our ubiquitous cell phone to carry every electronic and digital application we need, from video to music to games to text to telephone communications. With some clever engineering it can serve as a reader, and in particular the iPhone is only a few warranty-killing tweaks away from adding book reading to its repertoire. What does it take to convince appliance manufacturers that most of us don't really want to carry two or three dedicated devices in our pockets or purses, even ones that weigh only ten or eleven ounces. We're happy with one gadget that satisfies all needs.

There's an important exception to the above, and that is college students, who have no choice but to carry a computer to classrooms in addition to their cell phone. College students are ripe for a better dedicated reading device than the laptop, and it's been sitting under our noses for years in the form of the tablet. Tablet computers perform the same functions as laptops but their streamlined design enables users to read the way college students read textbooks, assignments, or books for pleasure -- that is, in an armchair or sofa or in bed. The first manufacturer to realize this and successfully pitch laptops at colleges will make a well deserved fortune, perform a priceless service, and bring the digital revolution closer to what we all visualized when we pledged our hearts and souls to the service of the Internet.

The other thing that bedevils me is the price of the Kindle, as well as that of the Sony Reader. Forgotten is one of the wisest maxims ever coined by an American businessman and usually attributed to King Gillette, the inventor of disposable razor blades: "Give away the razor and sell them the blades," Gillette pronounced. Amazon has it all bassackwards, making the price of the device high and the price of the content low. It's already been pretty well demonstrated that the public is willing to pay relatively high prices for online books, but it is far from proven that the public will pay a high price for a reading device.

If Amazon wants to give away the Kindle (or at least sell it at a loss for that magical price point of $99.95) it might bring us closer to the tipping point. Amazon has tons of money to lose on a loss leader, but aside from the usual early adopters we may very well see the public respond to the Kindle with less than overwhelming enthusiasm on the grounds of list price alone. Anything less than the stupendous response to the iPod is probably going to fail. At least, Amazon, give us a cheaper device so that we don't add price resistance to all our other reservations!

- Richard Curtis

Amazon's Kindle Announcement

Do you think the Kindle will be the "iPod of reading?" Newsweek leaked Amazon's information early when their online article ("The Future of Reading") went live the day before the scheduled announcement (and the day before the magazine hits the stands). What we all discovered is that Jeff Bezos believes he has the winning device and service, and we'll all be able to buy the fruits of his vision for $399. More interesting is that they've arranged for present NY Times bestsellers to retail through their service for $9.99 each, which is an ebook coup.

Launching with over 88,000 titles (including most of E-Reads' titles), the device is much like a hybrid Blackberry and ebook reader. Thanks to a built-in EVDO cell device, that connects to Sprint's internet network, and built-in 802.11 Wi-Fi, the Kindle can browse for books, blogs, and news on the internet anywhere you can get a signal. Its keyboard is good for searching and note-taking with your text or on the web. You can even listen to music or audiobooks. Just keep in mind it's still an ebook device with a typical E-Ink grayscale screen and no backlight, you can't yet shop at Amazon beyond their ebook store, and you have to pay extra to use your Kindle EVDO service for emailing or blog subscriptions. Barring those limitations, it seems to have everything else the $299 Sony Reader has and more.

• Small size factor: 10.3 ounces, 4.9 inches x 7.5 inches x 0.7 inches
• Full Qwerty keyboard
• 30-hour battery life
  
• 2-hour recharge time
• SD card storage
• USB 2.0 connectivity
• E-Ink screen
• Adjustable font sizes
• Easily stores over 200 books
• You can search books for phrases or names
• 3.5 stereo headphone jack

However, Publishers Lunch's characterization of Amazon's marketing strategy as "brutal" deserves underlining, bold and italics. In plain English, you take your Kindle with you to a bookstore, find the book you want at full retail price, then walk out of the store and order it at a discount from amazon.com. Or maybe, as long as we're being brutal, you don't even wait until you get out of the store. Either way, in Bezos's vision your local bookshop becomes a brick and mortar catalog from which you may select merchandise from an online discounter.

On the other hand it's hard to shed too many tears for the brutes at Barnes & Noble whose ambitions of empire have driven beloved book shops out of business. The chains have had plenty of time to foresee that in the war between tangible merchandise and digital, hard goods simply don't stand a chance.

It will be interesting, fun, and scary as hell to see how this all plays out. Amazon is at the glamorous W hotel in New York today, with Jeff Bezos delivering the Kindle's official introduction with celebrity endorsements (Toni Morrison, James Patterson, Neil Gaiman, etc). Unlike the Sony launch, this seems to be more out of Steve Job's iPod announcement playbook. We'll have more to say on this hot item in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

Houghton Mifflin To Put Books on Cell Phones

Once again, Publishers Weekly has covered a story that proves, to my satisfaction at least, that we're living on the cutting edge of the technological future.

Trade publisher Houghton Mifflin recently announced that they have entered a deal with Mobifusion, a company Publishers Weekly had written about in a story in January of this year covering the launch of their initiative to make book content available via cellphones and other handheld devices.

Houghton Mifflin will be making available a selection of their titles, starting with Fast Food My Way by Jacques Pepin and focusing on reference books like American Heritage Student Science Dictionary and similar reference material. We're not talking straight-up ebooks here, though. Many of the titles will offer what is referred to as "added functionality" without any details specified. I'd be guessing that there will be embedded animations, links to videos and the like.

It's a fascinating time to be following the fate of the ebook business in all its forms. Stay tuned for regular updates and routinely surprising possibilities entering our reality.

--John

The New Sony Reader and the Toshiba Flepia

When Sony finally released its updated Reader, the PRS-505 a few weeks ago (pictured at right), Peter N. Glaskowsky from CNet was one of the first happy reviewers to take a look at the new edition of this famous ebook device. He bought the new model to replace his old 1st generation Sony Reader (the PRS-500), and his write-up of the new version, which I recommend you read, shows he's pleased with the improvements. The new Reader boasts more onboard memory, a new interface button layout, and comes in one of two colors (silver or dark blue). What many people aren't aware of is that it's capable of MP3 playback (yes, both music and audiobooks!) and that you can mount it as a read/write drive by USB to either your Mac or PC, to drag folders of RTFs, PDFs, and other supported ebook formats onto the device. It also has both a Sony Memory Stick slot and a standard SD slot, giving you as much as 10GB of storage space. Sony Connect sells E-Reads titles for the Reader at just $8.99 a pop, or you can purchase our non-DRM Sony ebooks from Fictionwise. This Christmas, the Sony Reader is probably the best device deal, for under $300 at Best Buy.

Meanwhile, Toshiba has readied 2 new color ebook readers that represent an effort to break away from standard grayscale sooner rather than later. The Flepia, in either an A4 or an A5 size, is WiFi enabled and can display 4096 colors on its screen, but there are limitations... it takes about 10 seconds to redraw a screen (aka. flip a page) and bleeding edge technology doesn't come cheap. The problem stems from e-ink panel technology, which is based on creating a static image that does not refresh until you request it to do so, in order to conserve energy, and color technology in this realm is still percolating and expensive. When Toshiba showed a demo version of this technology over a year ago, it didn't blow many people away as much as it delivered a proof-of-concept device. The final versions Toshiba announced as Flepia models won't be available in North America, probably because color e-ink like this is still considered too expensive for our market. However, you can expect future ebook readers for the mass market to eventually incorporate color like the Flepia does.

- Michael

News from Sony, Palm, and iRex

Alongside this week's announcement that the IDPF voted in favor of the Open Publication Standard 2.0, there's been good news coming from a number of ebook technology players.

The new Sony Reader?

On Monday, the blog The Reader caught a brief glimpse of Sony's upcoming website changes which briefly revealed they're preparing to release an updated Sony Reader, the PRS-505. The new iteration is expected to have double the internal memory, better control buttons, a more rectangular styling like the original Sony LIBRIé device that was launched in Japan, and should be available as both a dark slate blue or silver finish for the same price as the current model. It's unknown if it will use the new VizPlex e-ink system. The Reader presently sells for $300 and can be found at Best Buy stores across the U.S. (via Wowio)

Palm is also getting ready to inject some new life into their company by integrating two major players from Apple. Apple's ex-CFO Fred Anderson will soon be joining the board of directors and Jonathan Rubenstein, a key player in the iPod's success, will become executive chairman. Earlier this year, a company started by U2's Bono and headed by Fred Anderson, Elevation Partners, bought a 25% stake in Palm, effectively bailing out the company from financial trouble. The new corporate leadership were demonstrably some of the finest people from Apple's resurgence under Steve Jobs and its expected that they will focus more on innovation at Palm. Palm is also expected to update their popular Treo line in the very near future, and it will be interesting to see how the new competition with Apple might help improve their product line. (via Gizmodo)

Finally, iRex scored a major coup for the e-ink based Iliad Reader available in Europe. Les Echos is the first European paper to be made entirely available in a daily ebook edition designed for the Iliad and Star eBook device. A one-year subscription is 365 EUR. Also interesting is that among the first articles in the first Les Echos digital edition is news that Amazon may be set to launch the Kindle on October 15th with an announcement at the Frankfurt bookfair. (via MobileRead)

- Michael

The Open Publication Standard for E-Books 2.0

This summer we've seen a quite a few interesting moves made by ebook technology leaders and there have been hints about the best of what's yet to come this fall, such as new devices from Amazon and Palm. The most important development, I dare say, is one that's been totally overlooked by the media, averse as they are to technical acronyms. This week, the voting members of the International Digital Publishing Forum (aka. the IDPF, which includes E-Reads) made the OPS 2.0 (Open Publication Standard) official. The OPS specifications are the next generation standards for ebook production. The good news for publishers is that this should reduce production costs in the long run, which will in turn be good for consumers because publishers will be able to afford to convert more titles. And, if the developers of ebook software, like MobiPocket, Sony, Adobe, Microsoft, etc., all implement the new specifications fully, then the new standardized files (better known as the ".epub" format) should be the document format of choice for our collective ebook future. I say "should," because it's still not a sure bet.

The biggest hurdles the ".epub" format has faced since the spec was first drafted are getting three specific groups to have interest in using it. The first group is the software companies responsible for digital-rights-managed ebook readers. There's no point producing ".epub" files if hardly anyone can use them yet. Publishers, such as E-Reads, want to be able to produce our books in the standard ".epub" format and then send them off to retailers, who will either sell the unencrypted ".epub" files, or encrypt them by using automated processes to convert them into any DRM format the consumer needs, such as Sony's Reader format, but, as things are right now, it's a rare piece of software that can already read or export ".epub" files, so retailers aren't very interested yet and they're still asking for MS Lit, PDF, Mobi, etc. In fact, only the recently released Adobe's Digital Editions software is really set up to use ".epub" files properly and many other reader applications have yet to completely implement support for the new format. This is because the first group, the software, is still waiting for the second group, the consumer base, to care. Sony has committed to adding ".epub" support for books that the consumers bring to the Sony Reader on their own, but are consumers using the ".epub" format? Well, there can't be grass roots demand for the format when the average consumer is so unfamiliar with it, can't buy it, and has barely any software that supports it. So it falls to the third group, publishers, to start the ball rolling by ordering books to be made as ".epub" files for their archives.

The Benefits of the ".epub" Format

If the average person has never heard of the ".epub" format, let alone tried it out, you can see why more developers aren't yet rushing to make it a "value-added" feature for their software. But the format has some terrific virtues. Unlike a PDF, an ".epub" ebook is designed so that any reader can have better control over how they choose to read a text, with no matter what device they're using. They can easily change fonts, styles, or page sizes and the document will reflow appropriately. And, unlike new reflowable document formats like PDFX or MS Word's DocX, ".epub" is really uncomplicated and it makes for a good legacy format for digital text, because an ".epub" file could easily be converted into any file format you'd like because of its standardized XML structure.

There are two steps to making an ".epub" file. The first is to use OPS (Open Publication Structure), which is just a method of formatting text files with XML tags. This was developed so that there's a uniform way to prepare texts for any device and so that it's easy to reverse-engineer and edit. Next, additional materials, like a cover graphic, are then bundled with the text into a compressed folder with the extension ".epub," which is, really, just a .zip archive. This is the container file, known as OCF (Open Container Format).

For now, the ".epub" format will have to compete for reading audience against established favorites such as HTML formatted books, and RTF files, as well as PDFs, DOCs, and dozens of other conventional formats, so it's up to publishers and developers to make this happen.

The Future Starts Now

To break the old cycle, software and ebook technology companies are trying to spur the use of ".epub" files with some big guns. Adobe is one company that's trying to pave the way forward with its latest version of InDesign CS3, which can export ebooks to Digital Editions in the ".epub" format (more about that can be read here). Since it's official release in June, Digital Editions has been a free download; it's an effort by Adobe to create an iTunes Library equivalent for ebooks. So, with Adobe software you already have an end-to-end package for creating and reading standardized ebooks, and a showcase for the advantages of the next generation of ebooks. Now we have to impress upon everyone else sitting on their hands that this is what we want from them, too.

I corresponded with Nick Bogaty of the IDPF yesterday and he said, "All major and small publishers I have spoken to are very excited about (the 2.0 standard) and are contracting their conversion houses to start work on .epub conversions. Obviously, it helped to have a company like Adobe participate, but this was (equally helped by) the participation and leadership (of) the folks at eBook Technologies, Garth Conboy, John Rivlin and Brady Duga. It really was a joint effort which couldn't have been done without widespread industry support."

It's this collective effort that will, we all hope, provide the momentum publishers, including E-Reads, need to keep adding new titles. The bottom line is that we're all trying to create a useful and ever-growing body of legacy work that the public will want to access for a long time, and the ".epub" format is the best opportunity to get virtually everyone in the ebook world on the same virtual page.

- Michael Gaudet

Real ebooks on the iPhone and iPod

As we mentioned previously, HarperCollins is trying a web enabled ebook preview experience for the iPhone based on their book widgets, but reading a whole book on your iPod had always been relatively awkward experience, that is until the iPods started coming loaded with OS X. Before the release of the iPhone this past June and the iPod Touch this September, the iPod's unique operating system had no support for any of the popular ebook formats. Users had to convert their book files to .txt notes, which had an imposed character limit and no real typography support, or convert their book into JPGs and load them into their iPhoto library (iPod Photo and later models). But thanks to the OS X underpinnings of the new iPod Touch and the iPhone, there is not only native PDF and Doc support (hurrah!) just like with your Mac, but the courageous can try out new (unsupported) applications and read other ebook formats as well. The only downside is that you have to use ebooks with no DRM, but the upside is that all of E-Reads' titles for sale at Fictionwise are sold in "MultiFormat" PDFs without any DRM (just don't go sharing, okay?), and they are good to view on the new iPods right away (with a little ingenuity described below). Hopefully, with the advent of the Wi-Fi iTunes Store, an ebook solution for these Wi-Fi iPods won't be too far off, either.

So, without further ado, here are some tips for getting ebooks onto your iPod, rated by the ease of solution and the relative quality of the reading experience...

For 1st Generation to 4th Generation iPods and the iPod Mini: You can use the app iPod Notes Manager or follow this tutorial at Makezine.com. Ease: 4/5 and Quality: 2/5

For iPod Photo, Video, Nano, and Classic: The previously mentioned will also work, but you can also convert RTFs, Docs, or PDFs to JPGs and then load those pages into your iPhoto library. You have to make sure the page images are named sequentially and that they are sized to look good on the 320 x 240 pixel display. The final ebook can look pretty nice, but you have to work at tweaking the results. Try an application like PDF Convert or Doc to JPG for Windows. For the Mac, print to PDF from your document, and then open it in Preview and try an export to JPG page by page (free on the Mac, but time intensive - ugh). Ease: 1/5 and Quality: 3/5

For iPod Touch and iPhone: You can use the mobile version of Safari to browse to an online PDF, Doc, or ebook text (such as those at Project Gutenburg or Textoniphone.com), or view a PDF or Doc as a mail attachment. Or you can easily hack your iPod's file system with the help of unsupported software like iBrickr or AppTapp to install the "Books" application. Your mileage may vary, but it indeed works. Ease: 3/5 and Quality: 4/5

Finally, did you know you can organize certain PDFs in Apple's iTunes? Even if you can't sync them with your iPod the way we'd like, it's still a good library application if you're willing to compromise. Gina Trapani at Lifehacker has the scoop.

- Michael

Can Apple's iPhone be an ebook Trojan Horse?

What is the most successfully secretive public company you can think of? My vote would go to Apple. Just take a look at the huge frenzy of interest and speculation they managed to create around the development and release of a new mobile phone model. Admittedly, the iPhone from Apple is something quite special in its way but any one of a dozen other companies would give up a lot to be able to attract half as much attention as they did for a new product release. How many other new phone models have already been announced this year and how excited did you get about any or all of them?

Apple doesn’t like us to know what they’re doing until they’ve done it and are ready to put it on the market the day they announce it. Can ebooks on the iPhone be far away? The device is, among many other things, a masterly handler of files and ebooks are nothing but a special form of file. PDF files are natively handled by the iPhone already and that’s established as one of the preferred formats for ebooks. Maybe all that talk about needing the perfect convergence device for an explosion in ebook interest and readership will become moot when one day soon, a million people discover that they’re already carrying that mythical wonder-device in their pocket and use it dozens of times a day for everything from browsing the web, handling email and listening to music to answering the phone.

Which is why HarperCollins is wooing iPhone users. Here’s the Boston Herald story and here’s what Mac News Network (MacNN) has to say. I could give you plenty more links but you can just Google “HarperCollins and iPhone” and see what several dozen media outlets have to say about the one major publisher with a commitment to ebook publishing to those iPhone owners who might think about checking out how interesting an ebook might be.

- John