It would be nice to see Nintendo decide to enable the DS to use its built-in wi-fi to go online and buy ebooks like the Kindle, or even better to be able to access sites like Project Gutenberg and download books for free. The ability to load ePub documents onto the DS would be great too. I mean, by the end of the first quarter of 2007, there were 38 million DSs scattered across the world–that’s a pretty huge market to tap into. By comparison, the Kindle looks pretty small-time.

Reading on a DS seems like it makes a lot of sense, in the same way that reading on a cell phone does. This is a device that you tend to have with you a lot (I have a few friends with DSs, and it’s not often they don’t have them at hand). It’s also a multi-purpose device, which makes you feel better about lugging it along. It’s versatile–you can play Guitar Hero until you’re bored, and then flip through some Dickens for a while. Ubiquitous book content is nothing but a good thing for books–it exposes more people to reading, and each new person makes the book community that much richer.

Still, Nintendo’s offering, as short of the mark as it could be, is a step in the right direction. It could well be that they’re simply testing the waters with this, and are considering a more serious move into ebook territory. We’ll have to wait and see.

More stuff cropped up today that resonates with Accelerando. Linda from Ink and Paper tweeted about an article on Mashable about a pretty fascinating service. Or program. Or some combination thereof. It’s called WordPressDirect, and it’s essentially a blog automation service. You get the program, decide what sort of niche you want to blog about, and enter some keywords. The program then sets up a blog for you (though you get to choose how it looks), making categories for posts dependent on the keywords you’ve given it. So far so good, and no huge deal. The next bit is what put me in mind of Accelerando: the program will then monitor RSS feeds, other blogs, YouTube, and a host of other resources, and automatically post blog entries for you. More after the break. . . .

This is pretty important stuff; you’re basically talking about machines creating content. Linda mused about whether or not what the program does is plagiarism, and that’s a good question. Assuming that it didn’t grab entire articles, but rather just bits and pieces, I could see a fair use argument being put forward. That being said, I’m not sure that programs are sophisticated enough yet to tell which bits are relevant information, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the thing just grabbed entire articles, which would be violation of copyright.

I’m curious about a different angle, though: Assuming that the program managed to cobble together an original article, who would own the copyright to it? I’m sure there are laws on the books about this sort of thing, probably going back to machine-created art like that of Jean Tinguely, but I don’t know what it has decided. If machine-created works are copyrightable, who gets the copyright? The owner of the software, or the creator? Assuming it’s the owner, what are the ramifications of that when you consider that almost all commercial software these days is licensed rather than sold; that is, you don’t own the software you’ve bought. You’re just allowed to use it forever.

Accelerando uses these kinds of thoughts as a jumping-off point, and imagines a world where entire corporations are self-aware computer-guided systems, which clearly has the possibility of ending humans up in a pretty weird place. I don’t want to go too much more into the plot, as I’d hate to spoil it, but it’s certainly pretty fascinating. And the question of how much computer assistance it takes to render something computer-generated rather than person-generated, and how that impacts copyright, is only going to become more important as technology improves. If I tell a software agent to run off and collect some data for me and then to come back when it’s done, did I do the work, or did the agent? It’s an interesting question, and it will probably come up more and more in the next couple of decades.

In Accelerando, Stross paints a not-unfamiliar picture of the near to distant future: Technological change continues not just to advance, but to accelerate, aided by ever-faster computers and more and more ubiquitous communication. It’s a pretty fascinating book so far (I’m just about a third of the way through, but my rate of advance, like his technological change, is accelerating), and I’m reminded more than a bit of George Zebrowski’s Macrolife. Both books span a large stretch of human history, but beyond that they both stress the interconnectedness of people when technology approaches the singularity.

So what does this have to do with my phone and the Google settlement? Well, assuming the Google settlement is approved in June, I’m sure it will not be long until we see the fruits of that settlement show up online. All those books that Google has scanned in will be available for the downloading or the on-line perusing, and there will be a system set up to pay rights holders–and to pay them about twice what Amazon pays for works they sell on the Kindle. To me, this sounds like Google is aiming to enter the ebook market with a bang. So in June or July, I would expect to see a Google alternative to the Kindle store pop up.

So is Google going to roll out an ebook reader? I would say no. Well, not really. But kind of. What we’re going to see, I think, is a new version of the Android cell phone OS that comes out in, oh, June or so. Maybe May. Right now there’s just the one phone that I know of that runs on Android, but there are more companies who are interested. And I would be surprised if we don’t see a new version of the OS, or at least new applications built for the OS, that are tailor-made to display ebooks purchased from Google.

So the letter from Verizon? It was one of those “new every two” things, where I can get a discount on a new phone since I’ve had my old one for two years, as long as I sign a shiny new contract with them. And will I? Well, reading Accelerando has excitied me about the prospect of virtually ubiquitous internet connection. even if I have to do it through a cell phone instead of cool heads-up display glasses, cranial implants, or having my consciousness uploaded onto the internet. So far. So yes, I’ll probably be getting a new phone in June or so, and it will probably be running Android. I suppose that leaves whether or not I’ll be signing up with Verizon, up to Verizon.

Copyleft symbol

Cory Doctorow, science fiction author, blogger, and part time super hero, has an interesting article up at Locus Online titled “Why I Copyfight.” Doctorow has been involved with Creative Commons for a long time, and has progressive-to-radical views about copyright law and copyright reform; he asks a lot of very pertinent questions, and asks them well.

The thrust of his article in Locus is that copyright laws were created in a time when copying took time, effort, and expensive equipment. As such, he argues, it is out of place in the modern world, where copying is ubiquitous and even necessary. He also brings up the point that copyright law today is at odds with the way that people live their lives; we are all copyright infringers, he argues. More after the break. . . .

That disconnect between the values that most people have and what the law says is the big issue, for me. I remember talking about copyright and digital filesharing in a class; a girl in the class didn’t understand why giving someone a copy of an ebook wasn’t the same as loaning someone a book from your collection until I said, “When you loan someone a book, you don’t have it any more; when you give them a copy of an ebook, you both have it now.”

The point that I made to my classmate is how copyright issues are seen by the law; her confusion was, I think, how those issues are seen by most college-aged or younger people. There is not a differentiation between how things are on the web and how they are in the real world; if I can loan someone a physical book, why not a virtual one? In the same way, people can click “accept” on all the EULAs in the world, but the smart money is on people thinking they are the owners rather than just licensers of their software.

Law and culture are distant relations, at this point, and they are only drifting apart more, and as Doctorow points out, “Content isn’t king: culture is.” So the question is, how can we bring copyright law back in line with how we live, and how can we do so in a way that, in the language of the Constitution, “promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts”? How can we protect creators enough that they will feel motivated to create works, without stifling the freedom of others to create?

O’Reilly is one of the big names in tech books of the “not for dummies” variety, and it should come as no surprise that they are very interested in new technology and publishing. The conference promises to be fascinating; there’s certainly a lot to be discussed, from what publishers sell to how they sell it. Their site doesn’t have a detailed list of presentations that will be given yet, but I’m sure it will be forthcoming as the date of the conference gets closer.

More of my bookshelf. Clever, no?

Well, here it is, hot off the presses both here and over at Ink & Paper: Part 2 of my exploration of ebook world. Again, thanks to Jen, Linda, Bo, and Cam for giving me the green light about posting this here as well as on their site!

Welcome back to the world of ebook design. Last time, we talked about the necessity of mutable design for ebooks; specifically, about the need for things like reflowable text and proportional rather than static margins. Today, we’ll be looking at how to achieve that mutability of design.

Fortunately for us, web pages are already built with this wort of flexibility in mind. In fact, most ebook formats are based in XML, a language that allows you to build your own markup languages. The most widely-known of these markup languages is HTML, the language that web pages are built in.

So what is a “markup language?” Essentially, it is a language that allows you to assign semantic meaning to text. For example, when using HTML, you can use the <h1> </h1> tags around a term to mark that term as a primary header. While this will usually result in that term being set in large print and perhaps bolded, that is not the primary intent of the tags. Those tags are there to let the computer know that that term is a primary header, and what follows that header is related to that term, at least until another <h1> </h1> tag set is encountered. This is particularly important to know if you think that search engines might be interested in checking out your ebook, as proper tagging will allow search engines to provide more meaningful results and better matches to people using those search engines.

HTML and other markup languages, then, are not used to change the layout of a manuscript, though they will do that to a minimal degree. Instead, they are used to define the parts of a manuscript, saying things like “This is a paragraph, but this is a chapter header, and this section here is a block quote.” In order to change the layout, we borrow another tool of the Web: Style sheets. Cascading style sheets, or CSS, are where the lion’s share of the layout information of any modern website is. Essentially, you use a style sheet to tell your browser or other ebook reading device “I want the text to be in 12 point Arial, except that the chapter headers should be 18 point Papyrus and the block quotes should be indented and set in italic.” You can also define text and background images, colors (though colors, of course, will not work on black-and-white screens), and many other aspects of design. However, most ebook formats use only a portion of CSS, so it is not as powerful as it is on the Web.

Which brings us to the different formats of ebooks that are available today. A quick glance at Wikipedia will show that there are many different formats available; at the time of writing, over two dozen. Many of these formats are a bit too limited for one reason or another. Plain text files, for example, are very flexible, but contain no formatting information other than line breaks, which makes for an unsatisfactory reading experience. By contrast, PDF files offer too much format and not enough flexibility—there is no reflowability of text. Other formats are outdated, or just not in wide use, or are too proprietary.

Two of the biggest formats at the moment are epub and Mobipocket. Epub is a non-proprietary format developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum. It is based on XML, so it offers excellent flexibility, and because it is non-proprietary it doesn’t lock readers into using a single device. It is a relatively new format, but is gaining a lot of support. Of particular interest to publishers, in late July Sony opened up their Reader to epub files, so people with Sony Readers will be able to read ebooks in epub format.

Mobipocket is another XML based format. In contrast to the months-old epub, it has been around since 2000. While it is non-proprietary, the company was purchased in April of 2005 by Amazon, and Amazon uses a DRMed version of the Mobipocket format on the Kindle. The Kindle can also read a standard Mobipocket file, though it cannot read one that has been encrypted with Mobipocket DRM.

Both epub and Mobipocket can be read on personal computers; the Mobipocket Reader is available for free download from Mobipocket.com, and Adobe has recently released Digital Editions, which reads both Adobe’s own reflowable PDF files and epub documents. In addition, both epub and Mobipocket can be secured with Digital Rights Management should you wish to (and I’ll leave it to Cory Doctorow to explain why that’s a bad idea). Again, though, the Kindle cannot read files that have been secured with Mobipocket’s DRM system—Kindle files have their own version of the Mobipocket DRM that is just different enough to make them unreadable.

Creation of Mobipocket files is, for the moment, somewhat easier than creation of epub files. Mobipocket has a free Creator tool that allows you to easily create ebooks from a number of different sources, including HTML and epub files. Epub is a new enough format that there are far fewer tools available for it, but Bookglutton.com has developed a web page that will convert HTML to epub. Your other option is to consult Harrison Ainsworth’s Epub Format Construction Guide to hand-make your epub files, but be warned that it’s not for the faint-of-heart.

Creating your own epub or Mobipocket file is great if you are distributing ebooks yourself, but if you are interested in selling on Amazon.com or Sony’s ebook store, you’ll need to submit your ebook to those companies. Sony’s submission site for publishers is now up and running, and they accept several different file formats. Amazon’s Digital Text Platform also accepts submissions in a number of different file formats. These large online stores certainly expose your ebook to a much larger market, but they take a very large slice of the money you make (Amazon takes 65% of the cover price from each sale).

There are of course many other formats and many other options available; this article is by no means exhaustive. Now that you’ve gotten your feet wet, follow the links and explore the world of ebook publishing—like any high-tech field, it is rapidly changing, and there’s no telling what the next Big Thing will be. Whatever happens to ebooks, though, it’s bound to be a fascinating ride.

Image of a newspaper

Well, this is some interesting news: Google and the Author’s Guild have settled their dispute over author’s rights and the digitizing of massive collections. Or at least, there is a proposed settlement that’s still pending a judge’s review. But it’s sounding pretty definite.

For those not in the loop, the issue here is that Google was working with Stanford University, the University of California and the University of Michigan, to digitize their entire collections. Google would then make these selections available through their Book search program.  The selections are not generally complete, though if the copyright holder consents Google will display the entire work. On some of the books I browsed through, there were notes indicating ommitted pages (“Pages 12-14 are not part of this preview”), and other books would let you browse through the entire work, but only for a certain number of pages; The Two Towers stopped about 300 pages in, with Frodo, Sam, and Gollum just taking leave of Faramir. So most of the books was there, but not all of it. Books in the public domain are viewable in their entirety, and are downloadable as PDF files. More after the break . . . .

When Google first came forward with this system, there was a huge outcry from authors and publishers, despite the limits Google placed on book-browsing (which were a bit more severe for a while; according to an article on Bloomberg today, “Searches in the Google Book program currently generate about three or four lines of text from a work”, which certainly didn’t match up with what I found moments ago). It was feared that putting all these books online for free would have a huge negative impact on sales, as well as being a violation of copyright on a massive scale. So a class-action suit was brought against Google by the Author’s Guild.

The proposed settlement is in the neighborhood of $125 million. Some of that money will be going to authors and publishers whose works have been scanned without permission (so if yours have, get in touch with Google–according to the Washington Post, there’s at least sixty bucks in it for you). That will take about $45 million, while another $34.5 million will go to setting up a program that will compensate rights holders. According to the settlement web page, this program “will, among other things, locate authors, publishers and other Rightsholders and distribute to Rightsholders the revenues from Google’s uses.” These revenues will include 63% of what Google makes from selling the books or placing ads next to the books.

My big question here is if Google is considering moving these files from .pdf format to something more ebook-friendly, like .epub. It would certainly be a huge boost to the ebook marketplace, and would have that accessibility I mentioned recently. That being said, it would be a phenomenal amount of work to convert all those files to XML and then to whatever ebook format they decided on. If ebook popularity keeps growing, though, this could be a great way for Google to get into the market. I can’t help noticing, too, that their terms are almost twice what Amazon offers on their Kindle store. . . .

So that’s the news and my analysis, for the moment. If you want to read more, there are plenty of articles out there, and if you’re a bit more masochistic than I am you can take a look at the 323 page Motion of Preliminary Settlement Approval.

Yeah, they’re charging enough for it that they can afford to knock over a thousand bucks off the price tag for students. And yeah, I went and bought it. Why? Well, mostly because InDesign and Photoshop are industry standards. And yes, I know and love the GIMP, and I’ve heard good things about Scribus, but I’m just learning how to use those tools right now, and if all goes well I’ll get a job after graduation with a publishing place that has computers of its own. Those computers will more than likely be loaded with Adobe products, so it behooves me to be pretty familiar with them, and I’ll learn how to use them more easily if I’m not more familiar with how another program works.

Another selling point for me was the presence of Dreamweaver, which my sister the web designer swears by. So the Design Premium suite came with some other stuff that seemed useful to me.

I haven’t had much of a chance to test drive everything yet, and in any case I’m at best a novice user, so I wouldn’t check back frequently for insightful product reviews or anything (actually, check back frequently for whatever you want), but I’ll probably have something to say about my impressions of CS4 in the coming weeks.

I don’t know about most of the rest of the reading world, but I do most of my reading on paperbacks. I pick up hardcovers of books I particularly like, or more rarely of new books by authors I know I like. If I buy a hardcover by an author I don’t know, it’s because it’s either on the discount rack or because I’ve heard amazing things from a reliable source, or both (as was the case when I picked up Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which did not disappoint in the least). The bulk of my reading, though is done in paperback. Read on for more of my thoughts. . . .

Assuming that I’m not alone in this, I think it’s pretty fair to say that ebooks, as they stand now, are overpriced. Sure, they’re about half the price of a hardcover, but most people (extrapolating from my personal sample size of me) buy paperbacks, especially when they’re picking up something convenient to read on the sommute to work. $9.99 is, last I checked, a couple of dollars more than a standard priced paperback.

So, are people going to be willing to pay more for an ebook on the Kindle? Sure, some are, but not the great majority of people. People who really like their tech toys will get one (Indeed, the only reason I haven’t is because I don’t want to support Amazon, as I think they’re doing unpleasant things to the book publishing industry, and I haven’t bought anything Sony since the whole rootkit fiasco in 2005, so the Reader is out too), and people who see it as a bit of a status symbol will as well. I’m sure more people will, now that Oprah has heaped praise upon it, but the Kindle is not the Ipod for books.

The digital music surge had two things going for it: one, mp3s were effectively free in the heyday of Napster and then Grokster, so there was no shortage of stuff to listen to; two, it is ridiculously easy to turn a CD into mp3 files to store on your mp3 player. The first is not so much the case with books, and the second is definitely not. If Kindles or Sony Readers came with some sort of scanning device out of a science fiction novel that would scan a given book quickly and painlessly into digital format, I’m willing to bet there would be a much broader interest in ebooks. As that’s not likely to be developed, and it’s hard to beat the p2p network’s price of “free,” the rise of ebooks doesn’t look like it’s got much momentum behind it.

So what are the options for making ebooks more popular? Well, lower price is one. I’d say half the price of a paperback would be a good place to start. This would probably mean publishers would lose some money at the beginning, but it would be an investment in future profitability. Accessibility is the other, and it’s the edge that publishers could have over file-sharers. We all know (through word-of-mouth of course, never by direct experience) how frustrating it can be to scour sites for that one particular song or album that we’re looking for. It will be the same with ebooks, unless there is an ebook alternative to iTunes.

Clearly, both Amazon and Sony have recognized this, and have their respective stores in place to try to become that market. The problem, though, is that these stores are proprietary. You read your Kindle books on a Kindle, and your Reader books on a Reader, and that’s that. What we need is a massive clearing house for ebooks that charges prices that people will think are honestly reasonable (note here that it’s the perception of value that’s important, not the actual value; even if you’re selling an ebook at cost, if people think it’s too expensive, they’ll just find it online for free, assuming it’s not to difficult to do so), and that is very easy to use and accessible.

I have plenty of musings on where I think the ebook market will go, but this post is already stretching on longer than I had intended, so that will have to wait for next time. Until then, good reading.