Elsevier Enables its e-Books to Read Aloud, Increasing Access for People With Visual Disabilities

PRNewswire-FirstCall: "Elsevier, the world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and solutions, announced today that it has enabled the text-to-speech option on all of its ePub book titles."

Amazon Debuts Kindle for Web, While Google Brings Knife to a Gunfight

VentureBeat:

Signaling renewed competition in the e-reading space, Amazon today debuted a web-based extension to their existing Kindle platform with a new product called Kindle for the Web, which is nearly identical to a product Google announced yesterday dubbed Google eBooks, which is also a cloud-based ebookstore and reading webapp that lives within the browser.

Unlike Google’s dearth of reading devices, Amazon’s new service snaps into the same “buy once, read everywhere” experience that the existing line-up has successfully offered: last-page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights synced and automatically archived across all Kindle hardware and applications for third-party platforms such as iOS, Android, Blackberry and the like.

Kindle for the Web affords a few extra features too: since whole books can now be read in an embeddable reader applet, independent third-party publishers and authors can now preview and sell content directly on their own sites, earning them referral fees through Amazon’s Associates Program.

These fees are in fact the only thing that really separate Kindle for the Web from Google eBooks, which has not yet developed a third-party seller model in their product.

It’s actually hard to see why Google would enter the e-reading market without disruptive new distribution and revenue models, facing up against entrenched competition from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, which can clearly afford to experiment. ...

Indie Bookstores Participating with Google eBooks DON'T AS YET KNOW What Percentage of Sales $ They Will Get to Keep

So says Michael Tucker, president of the American Booksellers Association in Tarrytown, NY. CSMonitor: "About 220 ABA member stores are already selling Google eBooks through the ABA’s IndieCommerce website, and many more are expected to join, says Tucker. A list of participating ABA member stores that have opted in to sell Google eBooks online can be found here. It’s not yet clear how Google will share eBook revenues with independent sellers. Most book sales involve a 70-30 split, with publishers getting 70 percent of revenues and sellers 30 percent. Google will take a percentage of that 30 percent share, says Tucker, though it’s not yet known how much. 'It will be very reasonable,' he says."

First Espresso Book Machine in Continental Europe

Note from Ed: Espresso Book Machine = Desperation move by brick and mortar outlets. PW: "On Demand Books, the company behind the Espresso Book Machine, continues to extend its reach. Late last month it installed its first machine in continental Europe at the American Book Center in Amsterdam. The machine is currently being tested and will be up and running and able to print books in multiple languages at the beginning of 2011. ... " I looked at this technology about eight months ago at the Harvard Bookstore, and was dramatically underwhelmed. Plus, just 56 machines installed worldwide after all this time since the launch? Not exactly catching on like wildfire.

Big Hiccups in Google eBooks

The Washington Post notes numerous problems:

Google's Web-based reader application will be able to show a book's original fonts and graphics, but it won't support offline reading at the start.

Other promised features didn't make the cut for the launch. The company held up support for copy-and-paste and printing, for example, after too many publishers balked. Highlighting and annotation features won't happen until later. The same goes for text-to-speech capabilities that would allow Google's reader programs to read a book aloud. ...

It's important to remember that although this is the seemingly unstoppable Google we're talking about, the Mountain View, Calif., company doesn't have that much experience selling directly to consumers. One of its few earlier ventures in that category - an online video store it launched in 2006 - lasted about a year and a half before Google shuttered it.

After trying out Google eBooks in two Web browsers, three mobile devices (an iPad 3G, an iPhone 4 and a Samsung Galaxy Tab) and one e-book reader (Barnes & Noble's NookColor), I can only think this store could use another run through the typewriter.

Browsing and searching through Google's e-book store is no problem, and it seems to stock the same new titles at the same prices as elsewhere. But its pricing and selection didn't beat the Kindle store's in a search for three older, Washington-related books.

Christopher Buckley's "Thank You for Smoking" costs $9.99 from Google but $8.69 on Amazon. My friend Robert Schlesinger's "White House Ghosts" goes for $13.99, the same as Amazon's Kindle price - and $1.30 more than what Amazon charges for a hardcover copy. Zachary Schrag's excellent history of the Washington Metro, "The Great Society Subway," is overpriced for the Kindle at $16.50, but Google asks $17.60 for a version, optimistically labeled "Better for larger screens," that offers only scanned-in images of pages.

When I switched to Google's iOS and Android apps, I was puzzled to see that the former offer more features. The Android program offered fewer font choices (four, compared with seven) than the iPad and iPhone apps and - of all the things for Google to leave out - lacked the iOS release's search function.

Finally, I downloaded PDF and ePub-format copies of "Alice in Wonderland," one of the three public-domain titles that every Google Books buyer gets for free, to inspect on a Barnes & Noble NookColor. The PDF was unreadable - I couldn't even flip from page to page, and its illustrations were replaced by empty red squares - but the ePub looked fine, aside from too-large images.

Had I bought a title off Google to move to the B&N device, I would have been subjected to a fussy file-transfer procedure, required by Google's Adobe-supplied DRM, that involves installing a copy of Adobe Digital Editions, opening the book in that free program, then employing that program to sideload the book on the Nook.

No, thanks. If I wanted to be reminded about why users justifiably resent DRM, I'd rather read a book about the record labels' failed adoption of it. And, given the issues I see in Google eBooks, I might be happier getting that book at a library.

Adobe's eBook DRM Adopted By Google

RTTnews: "Adobe Systems Inc. (ADBE: News ), Monday said Google (GOOG: News ) would use Adobe's Content Server 4 software Google eBooks' content protection, joining over 200 other publishers and distributors who use the Adobe's Digital Rights Management, or DRM, solution."

Alibris and Google Set Up eBook Deal

San Francisco Business Times: "Book search site Alibris made a deal with giant Google Inc. to sell electronic books. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has been scanning and digitizing books for years, and offers many for free and for sale on its site. Now users at Alibris, an Emeryville business that started as a rare and out-of-print book search engine, will be able to peruse and purchase ebooks from the Google system."

How Online Reading Habits Have Changed Over 2010

Macmanus, NYTimes: "One of the more subtle trends of 2010 has been the way that our reading habits have changed, due to a convergence of other Web trends: mobile apps, real-time Web (mostly Twitter), and social networking as a way to track news (mostly Facebook). In the previous era of the Web, the so-called Web 2.0, RSS Readers and start pages were all the rage. Over 2010, though, more people used tools like Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper, Flipboard, LazyWeb, Feedly and TweetDeck, to track news. Nowadays I'm more likely to find stories to read via a vertical aggregator (the media-focused Mediagazer is my current favorite) and save them to Instapaper for later reading via my iPhone or iPad. I still use Google Reader, but in all honesty I now use it more to scan than to read. ... "

Amazon Bouncing Public Domain eBooks from the Kindle Store

This is a good thing. There's no good reason for commercial editions of PD eBooks to even exist, when quality free editions are available from Project Gutenberg, etc. The Digital Reader: "Do you recall that big story last week about Amazon charging for public domain ebooks? Did you notice how much publicity it got? Well, apparently Amazon notieced, and according to Morris Rosenthal of Foner Books, Amazon have started bouncing pd ebooks from the Kindle Store."

Amazon to Demo Kindle for the Web on Tuesday

Computerworld: "Amazon plans to demonstrate a new version of Kindle for the Web on Tuesday, one day after Google launched its Google eBooks and eBookstore strategy. An Amazon spokeswoman said via an e-mail to Computerworld late Monday that the new Kindle for the Web will 'enable users to read full books in the browser and [enable] any Website to become a bookstore offering Kindle books.'"

French Publishers Fight Back With a Communal Digital Newsstand

NYTimes: "PARIS — With sales of newspapers and magazines flagging at the ornate kiosks that adorn the boulevards of Paris, French publishers hope that a planned 'digital kiosk' can help revive their fortunes. The publishers, representing eight of the leading dailies and weeklies in France, said last week that they had formed a consortium to manage the project, which aims to create a single online portal to sell the publications’ contents via the Web, mobile phones and tablet computers like the Apple iPad. Consumers could buy articles or subscriptions with a single click of a mouse once they had created an account. 'The idea is to put a value on online content,' said Frédéric Filloux, a former newspaper editor who is heading the project. 'It’s a matter of survival for us.' ..."

The Google eBookstore is Not a Serious Threat to Kindle (and Why I’m Not Shopping There) - Nate the Great

As usual, the Digital Reader gets it right: "I decided to get a head start on all the pundits that tomorrow are going to post stories with titles like “GE will Kill the Kindle”. I’m not going to discuss the obvious format issue (I don’t think it’s that important). But I did find a problem. I’ve been looking over GE since it launched this morning, and I think it’s missing a critical component. Customer service. ... "

Google Finally Opens Its E-Bookstore

NYTimes: "The Google eBookstore could be a significant benefit to independent bookstores like Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., that have signed on to sell Google e-books on their Web sites through Google — the first significant entry for independents into the e-book business." Could be? No. Won't be. Mark my words.

More Insight re: Borders' Buyout Bid for Barnes & Noble

DailyFinance:

... even though it's Ackman in the news as the leading figure in the buyout, the tactics have Borders chairman and CEO Bennett LeBow written all over them. LeBow muscled his way into Borders' top position by acquiring a considerable amount of stock and warrants that, when they came due, gave him a 35% stake in the company.

Past precedent shows that LeBow's modus operandi with companies is to buy his way into one, use it in an attempt to buy a bigger company, and sink both businesses in the process. In fact, the potential B&N-Borders merger echoes another M&A disaster from the late 1980s: The LeBow-controlled MAI Basic Four attempted to buy larger competitor Prime Computer in a hostile takeover bid. Things didn't end up so well for either company, as they both ended up filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and LeBow was out of the computer business entirely by 1995.

The timing of Ackman's announcement is also noteworthy. On Dec. 9 -- the last day possible before the SEC starts asking uncomfortable questions about the company's financial status -- Borders will report its third quarter earnings. They're expected to be anemic, certainly much more so than Barnes and Noble's quarterly earnings, which were reported last week and weren't exactly fabulous either. Talk of a merger would certainly wake up otherwise sleepy investors who need all the help they can get to be excited about Borders' future, which even a spectacular holiday season won't be able to turn around. (And indeed, the merger talk has awakened investors: Barnes & Noble shares were trading Monday morning at $2.39, up 18%, at $15.60. BGP stock is up 19 cents, or 18%, at $1.27.) ...

Just Nuts: Titanic Rushing to Join Forces with the Andrea Doria - Borders to Buy Barnes & Noble?

The Dividend Daily: "Book retailer Barnes & Noble, Inc. (BKS) on Monday saw its shares soar in premarket trading following the news that Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital hedge fund is willing to finance a $16 per-share cash bid for the company from rival Borders Group (BGP). That $16 bid would represent a 20% premium to BKS’ Friday closing price of $13.28. Ackman also noted he would finance a cash/stock combination offer for BKS from BGP, should both parties prefer to go that route. Barnes & Noble shares soared $2.27, or 17%, in premarket trading Monday."

Sigil eBook Editor = Well Worth a Try

After several weeks of experimenting and kicking the tires, I really must recommend the Sigil eBook editor. Check it out.

• Free and open source software under GPLv3
• Multi-platform: runs on Windows, Linux and Mac
• Full Unicode support: everything you see in Sigil is in UTF-16
• Full EPUB spec support
• WYSIWYG editing
• Multiple Views: Book View, Code View and Split View
• Metadata editor with full support for all possible metadata entries (more than 200) with full descriptions for each
• Table Of Contents editor
• Multi-level TOC support
• Book View fully supports the display of any XHTML document possible under the OPS spec
• SVG support
• Basic XPGT support
• Advanced automatic conversion of all imported documents to Unicode
• Currently imports TXT, HTML and EPUB files; more will be added with time
• Embedded HTML Tidy; all imported documents are thoroughly cleaned; changing views cleans the document so no matter how much you screw up your code, it will fix it (usually)
• An actually usable user interface
• Native C++ application

Cory Doctorow on the Purpose of Copyright

via Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish: "In my world, copyright’s purpose is to encourage the widest participation in culture that we can manage – that is, it should be a system that encourages the most diverse set of creators, creating the most diverse set of works, to reach the most diverse audiences as is practical ..."

Figment Aims for Young Readers and Writers

NYTimes:

When Jacob Lewis helped create the beta version of the Web site Figment with Dana Goodyear, a staff writer at The New Yorker, Mr. Lewis envisioned it as a sort of literary Facebook for the teenage set.

“I really went into it and thought, ‘We’ll be the social network for young-adult fiction,’ ” said Mr. Lewis, a former managing editor of The New Yorker. “But it became clear early on that people didn’t want a new Facebook.”

The young people on the site weren’t much interested in “friending” one another. What they did want, he said, “was to read and write and discover new content, but around the content itself.”

Figment.com will be unveiled on Monday as an experiment in online literature, a free platform for young people to read and write fiction, both on their computers and on their cellphones. Users are invited to write novels, short stories and poems, collaborate with other writers and give and receive feedback on the work posted on the site ...

Len Riggio: PW's Person of the Year

PW: "By any standard, the past 15 months have been eventful for Barnes & Noble. In September 2009, the company completed its purchase of Barnes & Noble College Booksellers and two months later introduced the Nook, its entry into the e-reader wars. This spring, B&N appointed William Lynch as CEO and announced a $140 million investment to upgrade its digital capabilities. In late summer, the retailer emerged victorious in a proxy battle (while announcing that it was exploring the possible sale of the company), and in the fall surprised the industry with the launch of Nookcolor. The man behind all these events, who is leading the nation's largest bookseller through an unprecedented transformation, is Len Riggio, PW's Person of the Year."

Nook Color Hacked into a Cheap Tablet

Techtree: "... considering the open source origins of the underlying Android platform, the dormant power of Nook Color's hardware didn't lay unutilised for long. Users had already started rooting, that is gaining Super User privileges to override the Nook UI, their Nook Color to eke out full functionality. In a latest development, the e-reader has been hacked to run Android 2.2.1. What that means is your Nook Color now gets a home screen and the ability to launch Android applications right off the bat. It also gets the phone icon in the process, but that's moot considering it lacks the communication hardware to make and receive calls. ..."

Excellent Interview/Joi Ito of Creative Commons

The Observer: "Joi Ito, 44, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist with a particular interest in the world wide web, was an early investor in Twitter, Technorati, Flickr and Last.fm. He grew up in Japan and the US; he once owned a nightclub in Tokyo and worked as a DJ in Chicago. Time magazine hailed him as a member of the 'cyber-elite' in 1997 and two years ago Businessweek named him 'one of the 25 most influential people on the web'. Ito has a special interest in issues of copyright in the digital sphere and is CEO of the organization Creative Commons. ... "

UK: Agency Pricing Questioned by Waterstone's

The Bookseller:

Waterstone's has publicly queried the agency model, saying its adoption in the UK has 'not been great for anyone' and pricing has not always been fair on consumers.

E-books buyer Alex Ingram was speaking at FutureBook 2010, The Bookseller's digital conference. ...

Ingram said: "No one can judge the success or failure of the agency model just yet, but in the short term it has not been great for anyone. . . What matters most is getting a fair price onto the market, and I don't think that every agency price is fair."

Kieron Smith, managing director of The Book Depository, which has declined to accept agency terms, said: "We do a lot of 'couponing' and the agency model makes it very difficult to do any general discounting. We have a strong customer position that we do not want to change." ...

Conde Nast Digital Chief: Murdoch’s iPad Newspaper “Doesn’t Make any Sense”

VentureBeat: "News Corp mogul Rupert Murdoch is making a big bet on the iPad by hiring big-name (read: expensive) reporters for a new 'iPad newspaper' called The Daily. And other media organizations are skeptical. For example, publisher Conde Nast has made a big deal about iPad versions of its magazines like Wired and the New Yorker, but when Conde Nast Digital president Sarah Chubb was asked about The Daily today at the Ignition conference, she said, 'It doesn’t make any sense.' She noted that Conde Nast was able to revive Gourmet Magazine on the iPad, but that’s because Conde Nast only 'put a little bit of money into Gourmet Live, and we’ve gotten our money back.'" In other words, they did not have to finance original content, which Murdoch plans to do as part of The Daily business plan.

A Concise History of eBooks

This timeline from the Telegraph omits the old Voyager Toolkit (early nineties) - a Hypercard stack approach that I, at the time, thought exceptionally cool.

DRM ala Google

The Guardian: "A greater concern may be over how the content is protected: publishers are fearful that widespread adoption of ebooks could lead to spiraling piracy mirroring that seen in the music business. But Google says in the page about security for Editions that 'once a Google Edition is purchased and is added to a consumer's bookshelf, it can only be accessed when the consumer logs into his or her Google account. When Google Editions are purchased on our site, a Google account is needed to access the content, reducing the likelihood that consumers will share their login information with others'. It adds: 'Each consumer's Google Edition has a unique coding that caches the book when it is accessed through a browser (as opposed to a digital download) ... This means that the Google Edition is broken down into fragments and temporarily stored in – and accessed through – the browser window. The Google Editions web experience, therefore, is not that of a file download – it is an experience that is optimized for reading in the browser. This allows Google to detect and protect against abuse of each Google Edition.'"

Smashwords Adopts Agency Model

Smashwords blog: "Our authors and publishers spoke (and some wrote, screamed, begged and politely asked), and we listened. Effective today, all Smashwords retailers are pricing Smashwords books at the price set by the author or publisher. No more discounting. It also means we have significantly increased the royalties we pay our authors and publishers. ..."

CBS Publishing Unit: E-Books Are The Future

CBS Statement: "While the company is doing well on most fronts, its publishing division Simon & Schuster continues to see softening sales. The publishing revenues have declined from close to $900 million in 2007 to close to $800 million in 2009, and are further expected to decline in 2010. In our forecast, we estimate that Simon & Schuster and CNet together account for around 8% of our stock price estimate. The bright side is that the growth in digital publishing is offsetting the decline in traditional publishing and could well drive revenue growth in the near future given the increased adoption of e-books and greater use of tablets as e-reading devices."

Inventec to Ship a Million Nook Colors Before Year's End

TechEye: "It appears that Inventec’s Nook Color touch controlled e-book readers have been something of a success, with over a million expected to have shipped to Barnes & Noble in 2010. It was only released in mid November, having been announced in late October, but apparently the pester power of over a million kids has paid off, or perhaps parents are trying to attempting to purchase an educational Christmas present rather than Call of Duty Black Ops for their wee'uns. Inventec is also expected to land orders for 6-7 million Palm WebOS-based tablet telecommunication devices from HP next year, according to sources close to Digitimes."

The Nook Color has been Rooted

Geek *dot* com: "While everyone waits for the procession of good Android tablets to arrive, Barnes & Noble had one already on the market in the form of the Nook Color, but limited it to only being a color e-reader. That is until someone figured out to root it, unlocking the full potential of this now tablet device. With an ARM Cortex A8 800MHz processor at its heart, the Nook Color certainly has the power to become a great tablet. As Matt Miller has already shown, it’s great for playing video, so why not for playing games? Well, as you’d expect, one of the first things those applying this rooting solution did was to get Angry Birds running."

Google Set to Launch E-Book Venture

Trachtenberg, Wall Street Journal:

Google Inc. is in the final stages of launching its long-awaited e-book retailing venture, Google Editions, a move that could shake up the way digital books are sold.

The long-delayed venture—Google executives had said they hoped to launch this summer—recently has cleared several technical and legal hurdles, people close to the company say. It is set to debut in the U.S. by the end of the year and internationally in the first quarter of next year, said Scott Dougall, a Google product management director.

In recent weeks, independent booksellers, which are expected to play a big role in Google Editions, began receiving contracts from their trade group. Several publishers said they were exchanging files with Google—a sign that it is close to launch, publishers say. "Because of the complexity of this project, we didn't want to come out with something that wasn't thorough," Mr. Dougall said.

Google Editions hopes to upend the existing e-book market by offering an open, "read anywhere" model that is different from many competitors. Users will be able to buy books directly from Google or from multiple online retailers—including independent bookstores—and add them to an online library tied to a Google account. They will be able to access their Google accounts on most devices with a Web browser, including personal computers, smartphones and tablets.

... Key details of Google's e-book project remain unanswered. Foremost is what percentage of revenue Google will share with independent bookstores and other retailers. It also isn't clear how many bookselling partners it has lined up and who they are. More than 200 independent booksellers in the U.S. could sign up, according to the American Booksellers Association. ...