Bringing Nothing the the Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore

You can find more about this book at PaulCarr.com and the story behind this e-release on TechCrunch.

Paul Carr - Bringing Nothing To The Party -

Halloween Candy: 3 Tales of Horror by Douglas Clegg

 

Nicholson Baker on The Kindle & eBooks

“Here’s what you buy when you buy a Kindle book. You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon.”

“Then, out of a sense of duty, I forced myself to read the book on the physical Kindle 2. It was like going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks.”

Read the full article in The New Yorker.

The return of free TOR ebooks

Free Ebooks from World Fantasy Award Finalists

Last week we announced the return of free ebooks from Tor.com. We’re kicking things off this week with backlist titles from two of the authors who are finalists for this year’s World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. To download these and upcoming freebies, all you have to do is register at Tor.com.

Will Shetterly and Emma Bull are the first married couple to each simultaneously have a novel among the finalists for the World Fantasy Award—Emma’s Territory and Will’s The Gospel of the Knife. In commemoration of this, we’re offering registered Tor.com users free e-book editions of a pair of classics from the Bull and Shetterly backlists—Emma’s War for the Oaks and Will’s Dogland. Check them out here!

Each title in our giveaway program will be available for A Limited Time Only, so don’t delay. The books will be offered in a variety of formats, with no DRM. After this month’s pair of books, we’ll be putting up a new title every month, so make sure you register—and tell your friends about the great books (and blogs, and art, and conversation) that are free at Tor.com every day.

This e-mail was sent to you by Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

email marketing by Macmillan

Great Sony Reader news!

For those of us lowly early-adopters who have a Sony Reader and not the OMFGBBQ Kindle, here's some wonderful news via Engadget:

Sony will be shooting out an update on Thursday to allow the Reader to use purchased books in the protected EPUB format from whoever is peddling them, instead of being tied to the Sony's e-book store, or just DRM-free text and PDF documents.

The content will still be DRM'd but at least we can buy content from someone other than Sony. (Not that I've ever bought more than a dozen eBooks for my reader.)

HP BookPrep Creates Long Tail for Out-of-Print Books

Been sitting on this one for a while so I'm just finally going to dump it here and let you investigate further on your own. Me? I say it sounds and looks interesting.

A new service from HP's IdeaLab is HP BookPrep, a print-on-demand service. With BookPrep, consumers can order any book, whether current or out-of-print, and have it prepared for them as a print-ready PDF eMaster file. What's more, the HP technologies used in the imaging process can restore older, damaged copies of books back to their original form.

via ReadWriteWeb

Another Publishers Ditches DRM on Audio Books

According to the  New York Times Penguin Group is the next published (after Random House) to announce the end of DRM on their audio books. "HarperCollins said the publisher was watching these developments closely but was not yet ready to end D.R.M." I'm not holding my breath on HC because of their recent "protected" releases of free e-books.

Are publishers finally starting to understand

First there was Lawrence Lessig, then Cory Doctorow (or was it the other way around?) who offered the complete texts of their books online, for free. You could read them on the Web site, download them, read them on your computer in Word, put them on your phone, iPod and/or eBook. Finally, you could print your own copy. Many readers ended up buying the publisher-printed copy anyway. Those who didn't make the purchase probably wouldn't have regardless of the availability of the free version. Other authors have started to follow.

And all was good.

But where were the publishers in all of this?

Then came the Baen Free Library. Long-time publisher of science fiction and fantasy, Baen offers more than 100 complete titles in formats from HTML to Rocket eBook (there's a dead format) to RTF. Just read online or download it to go. 4.6 million visits later, they're periodically adding new titles.

Neil Gaiman's publisher, HarperCollins, has started offering complete book for free online. Neil recently asked his readers to pick which of his books would be offered up. Much to his surprise, his largest book, American Gods was chosen and will be made available in the near future. I was excited. I'm not any longer. The problem is that in order to read the book you must do so on their site, in their reader.  The books are not portable in any way, shape, or form. Sure, you can search the contents (nice) and you can embed the book into your site (a la YouTube) but how does that help me read it on my device, when I want, when I don't have a WiFi connection?

Close, but no soup for you!

Next on deck, TOR books. Publisher of Cory Doctorow and many, many other authors I love to read. (L.E. Modesitt, Jr., Brian Lumley, and Brian Herbert, just to name a few.) They're about to launch their new site "Watch the Skies" and if you sign up, they'll e-mail you the link to a free eBook every week. No word on the level of control that they'll give you over said books but with Cory Involved and the word "download" being bandied about, I have all sorts of hope.

So publisher's, who's next?

E-books will never be our friends

Here's a great article from the Times Online about eBooks. Considering I gave a presentation on the Sony Reader and the Kindle earlier this week (video available on the NLC blog), I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one who still thinks that they have their place, but won't ever replace printed books. Here's a sample:

None of this, however, spells doom to the physical book. A reader who falls in love with a book, even if first read in electronic form, will still want to own it. Books do more than furnish a room: they are our intellectual companions.

Some books are worth sacrificing a tree to make; others are not, and that is the distinction that the electronic book offers. Ruskin once observed that literature is “divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time”. The books of all time will remain on paper, but those of the hour will increasingly be digital: the airport novel, the reference book, the celebrity memoir. A personal library will no longer be the repository of unread paperbacks, but a genuine index to individuality, as it was in the days when books were rare and precious.

CC-licensed Firefly FanFic by serious SciFi Author

Established and popular science fiction author Steven Brust has written My Own Kind of Freedom: A Firefly Novel and released it under CreativeCommons on his Web site. (.doc & .pdf) I've also uploaded the PDF version to my Scribd account. I've not started reading it yet but I've got it loaded on my Sony Reader so I'll be getting to it soon.

Kindle

Yep folks, I'm not the only one who's disappointed. Designer Philippe Starck finds the Kindle "almost modern" and "a little sad". I love how he points out the awkwardness of the huge button-bars on the sides.

Link: sevenload.com

Oh, and the DRM's been hacked. That could only be an improvement.

Kindle Coverage

Thinking of buying a Kindle? Well, check where you live to see if its wireless connection will work. See those white areas? Live in one of those and you're out of luck. (Which pretty much rules out 90% of my state of Nebraska and 99% of Wyoming and Montana. And those are just the worst examples.)

Odds & Ends

There's been a few news items of late that I've been thinking about yet somehow can't bring myself to write long posts about so I'll just throw out my general opinion on the issues here:

The SAFE Act
Many a library blog have been complaining about the implications of this potential new law when it comes to offering public and open WiFi in the library. While I'm not defending this bill in any way, shape, or form, I think certain bloggers are overreacting. Here's the relevant text:

"Anyone providing an “electronic communication service” or “remote computing service” to the public who learns about the transmission or storage of information about certain illegal activities or an illegal image must..." [emphasis added]

The key phrase here is "who learns about". In other words, providers of open WiFi are not required to troll for illegal activity, just report it if they find out about it. Which, in my opinion is something that we should be doing from a moral standpoint anyway. (You see child porn on a computer in the library, you say something.) If you're concerned about having to report, this is just another reason to not look over the shoulders of your patrons.

The Kindle
I've held one and I'm not impressed. I have a Sony Reader (and not even the latest version) and that impresses me. (I may have one or two of my facts wrong in this bit so please correct me if appropriate. The Kindle is $400. The Reader, $300 or less. The Kindle has a keyboard, the Reader doesn't. So what. I'd rather have that space taken up by the screen instead of having another device on which I have to type with my thumbs. I can easily get pretty much any document I want onto my Sony Reader through an iTunes-esque interface. For the Kindle I either need to buy it from Amazon or go through some undocumented hack-like steps to get my files into it. The Kindle is physically larger than the Reader and just feels more cumbersome. The Reader does audio, the Kindle doesn't. (Ok, not a big deal to me but it might be tom some people.) Those big honkin' buttons on the side of the Kindle are too easily accidentally pressed. The Kindle's WiFi? From what I hear every little thing you do is going to cost you. But you might be in the airport and finish off the last book and need to buy a new one you say. Sorry, but if you're on a trip and have read everything on a device that can hold hundreds of books, you've either had way too much free time to read (go out and get some exercise) on your trip or it's the result of poor planning on your part. Go buy a paperback for $7.99 at the gift shop. At least then you'll own something more than a license.

No, the Sony Reader isn't perfect but I don't believe the Kindle is the killer app of eBooks or even much of an improvement. It's tacking on a bunch of features to a good product that no one really needs. And no, I'm not going to get into the whole DRM discussion here as that applies to both platforms. (Well, no more than I did at the end of the previous paragraph.)

The Sony Reader: eInk has arrived

Here's my second presentation from NLA/NEMA 2007. (I'm posting it early as I know what my post-presentation schedule is going to be and if I don't post it now, it might never show up.)

| View | Upload your own

Would you like some video with that ebook?

Would an e-book that included some video bits make you more likely to buy the book? Well, Avon (the book publisher, not the cosmetics firm) has released Lady Amelia's Secret Lover, "a historical romance novel with a decidedly modern bent". Plus, "as you read this e-book, author Victoria Alexander will pop up onscreen [sic] at various points in the novel to talk candidly about the plot's turning points and her vivid characters. This multimedia experience will draw you into the novel with words and insights directly from the famed romance author!" I'm intrigued enough to have spent the $3.99 (actually a reasonable price for an e-book!) had it been more my style (Horror, SciFi, maybe even Fantasy). Sounds interesting though.