January 3, 2008

The Kindle Digital Text Platform

I was rooting around on Amazon the other day, seeing what other kind of (non-book) content was available for the Kindle when I discovered the Digital Text Platform Amazon has made available for publishing content in Kindle format. "DTP" is listed as Beta, but I found it functional and easy to use. Basically you create all the metadata for the title, including pricing information, and then upload the content for conversion to the Kindle format. To test it, I created an eBook out of a series of articles I have written on content management and XML. They seem to want HTML ("The preferred format for uploading content is as a single HTML file"), but I got impatient when I then read you needed to assemble linked images in a zip file using special instructions. So I went with a single Word .doc file ("standard .doc files will often convert without a hitch"). For the most part, it did convert without a hitch, though it did a woefully bad job with a small number of very simple tables. To work around that, I simplified a couple of the tables and deleted the others. In fairness to Amazon, I worked quickly, and could have experimented with HTML tables.

If you're a Kindle owner and happen to buy the title, I would love to hear from you about the experience. Since I don't own a Kindle yet, I had to rely on the preview capability in DTP, which basically gives you an HTML view of the content.

From the introduction to the eBook:

The following articles, white papers, and blog entries were written between 2000 and 2006. They appeared in one of several publications: The Gilbane Report, eContent Magazine, E-DOC Magazine, or Transform Magazine. Some appeared in my blog, www.billtrippe.com, or its predecessor blog, Ideas in Technology and Publishing. I undertook this compilation as an experiment in working with the beta version of Amazon.com's Digital Text Platform for creating content for the Kindle eBook reader.

I only edited the material lightly, so the articles are showing their age in places. Some links are likely out of date, some product references may be to versions of products that have since been superseded, and at least one product, XMetaL, has changed corporate ownership at least once since first written about in one or more of these articles. However, I chose these articles from many, many others I could have chosen because the material is evergreen and still useful, I think. I stand by what has been written here, especially for the price!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:56 AM

December 4, 2007

Meanwhile, Over at Gilbane...

Tomorrow, I will be part of a webinar, What Every Publisher Needs to Know About Content Management. It's being put on by Book Business Magazine and sponsored by Follett Digital Resources. Matt Steinmetz, Special Projects Editor for Book Business will be moderating, and I will be joined on the virtual dais by Jabin White, Vice President for Product Management at Silverchair.

I'm going to be presenting a market overview, offer some definitions, and discuss some recent and emerging trends. I'm going to leave most of the heavy lifting to Jabin, though. He is truly one of the smart guys in the business and an excellent presenter, and I am looking forward to hearing what he has to say.

You can go right to the registration page here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:40 PM

November 30, 2007

Kindle Still "Sold Out"

I keep seeing references to Kindle being sold out, but I have yet to find a number of how many sold. The main Kindle page at Amazon now says you won't get one by Christmas. This seems like a problem to me--missing Christmas sales and also not even promising a specific ship date.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:04 PM

November 28, 2007

Wall Street Hearts AMZN

It's been an up and down week or so in the market, but not so for Amazon. Wishful eBook fans might imagine it is all due to Kindle, but impressive online Christmas shopping numbers are the more likely booster.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:53 AM

So You Want to be an Author?

Chris Webb, executive editor at Wiley Publishing, has written and has now assembled some terrific advice on developing a book proposal. Chris has been writing these over time, and has now pulled them together. As he notes, Chris does work in technology publishing, so some of these will be specific to computer book publishing, but much of what he has written is useful for any type of non-fiction book.

Oh, did I mention Chris was the editor for an excellent book on Digital Rights Management?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:37 AM

November 19, 2007

Amazon Kindle

Amazon debuted Kindle, its eBook reader, today. I haven't seen it yet, of course, but I'm impressed by the number of titles they have available at launch. And the pricepoints--NYT's bestsellers at a standard price of $9.99.

Lots of interesting details about the feature set as well as the complementary content, like Wikipedia, newspapers, blogs. Another detail, reported by CNET, caught my eye:

Kindle, which was manufactured by an undisclosed Chinese original equipment manufacturer, connects to its specialized Amazon store via an EV-DO (Evolution Data Optimized) cellular network through "Amazon Whispernet," built atop Sprint's EV-DO network. No data plan or monthly bill is required. "We pay for all of that behind the scenes so that you can just read," Bezos said, adding that he estimated that it would take "less than a minute" to download a book.

If it is really that easy to use and keep up to date, they are on to something.

WSJ.com has a blog roundup (subscription), and proving that Kindle seems to be real news, it even made All Things Considered. And, last but not least, PW weighs in.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:52 PM

November 13, 2007

Digital Text Community

Jon Noring of Digital Pulp Publishing has announced the start of "The Digital Text Community" (DTC), a public mailing list (on YahooGroups) devoted to serious discussion of digitizing "ink-on-paper" publications.

The full group charter is found at the group's home page.

DTC will be lightly moderated primarily to ensure civil discourse, and a separate archive of the discussion will be started and maintained (Jon notes that YahooGroup's default archive is poor, to say the least.)

Jon explained his rationale for starting the group:

The primary reason why I am starting DTC is that there is, surprisingly, no independent and dedicated forum to discuss the various, interrelated technical and non-technical issues of digitizing "ink-on-paper" publications, such as books, periodicals, etc.

Current discussion on digitizing paper publications is disjointly spread around in various nooks and crannies. For example, there are forums for particular digitization projects such as Project Gutenberg (e.g. "gutvol-d") and Distributed Proofreaders (which maintains a set of online-only forums.)

And then there are more generalized forums which touch upon various topics of relevance to text digitization, but which is not their main focus. Examples are Book People (which John Mark Ockerbloom is sadly closing the end of the month) and The eBook Community (another YahooGroup which I administer.)

The summary purpose of DTC is given in the last paragraph of the DTC group charter:

"This group is not affiliated with any particular project or organization, but rather is independent. It is hoped this group will be a bridge between the various text digitization projects, enabling information exchange for everyone’s benefit."

This sounds like a great new resource, and I have already subscribed. You can too, here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:27 PM

November 2, 2007

Sentiment is for Girls

Not my sentiment, of course. Mark Twain's, as recently shown at a great new (and free!) repository launched by the University of California Press.

Damnation, (if you will allow the expression,) get up & take a turn around the block & let the sentiment blow off you. Sentiment is for girls—I mean the maudlin article, of course. Real sentiment is a very rare & godlike thing. You do not know anybody that has it; neither do I.
The homepage for the repository is here.

 

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:37 PM

October 26, 2007

The Discoverability Wars

Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press has some thoughts about how discoverability and other publishing-oriented technologies have put book publishers in the catbird seat.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:52 PM

October 25, 2007

All the News that's Fit to Click?

eMarketer says that, "It’s wake-up time for the publishing industry. Like it or not, readers and advertisers are turning to the Internet, and print brands must follow." The numbers are compelling.

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You can read some of the summary and purchase the report here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:52 AM

October 24, 2007

"We're thrilled with the early results from customers"

Jeff Bezos says Amazon's customers like DRM-free music. Not a word about eBooks though. David Rothman from TeleRead has some thoughts about the eBook angle.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:26 PM

A Billion Here, A Billion There

And sooner or later, you start talking about some serious revenue.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) released the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report covering the second quarter and the first six months of 2007. Internet advertising revenues (U.S.) for the first six months of 2007 were nearly $10 billion, setting yet another new record and representing a nearly 27 percent increase over the first half of 2006. Internet advertising revenue totaled nearly $5.1 billion for the second quarter of 2007, exceeding the $5 billion mark for the first time in a quarter, a 25.4 percent increase over the same period in 2006.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:06 PM

October 21, 2007

TimesSelectors and TimesRejectors

Over at Civilities, Jon Garfunkel continues his thoughtful analysis of what the changing media mix might mean for the Old Gray Lady.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:54 PM

October 13, 2007

Here and There

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:08 PM

October 12, 2007

Banned Books

A website called the Alternative Reel lists the top ten banned books of the 20th century, and I am proud to say I've read seven of them. Time to read the remaining three!

I like the cover art, and I recognize several of the bindings from my own library.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:02 PM

October 4, 2007

Meanwhile, Over at Gilbane...

The sessions that I have been organizing on enterprise publishing technology have been coming together. For the session on DITA and related standards like S1000D, we have Bob Doyle of the Boston DITA Group and Don Bridges of Data Conversion Labs. We have another speaker from industry who will be talking about S1000D, but he is still awaiting the go-ahead from his corporate communications folks.

For the session on multi-channel publishing, John Parsons, Editorial Director of The Seybold Report will be moderating, and two speakers are on board, again with a third likely to be joining soon. Rich Pasewark, a former colleague of mine from XyEnterprise and more recently with Quark, is working independently now on some very interesting projects. The second speaker is Mark Laroche, who is Director of Production for Digital Media at Random House. He is going to be talking about some very forward-thinking work they have been doing withe the Fodor's travel guides.

Finally, for the metadata session we have two speakers, with a third to be announced shortly. We were very happy to talk our client Richard Ferrie from Pearson into speaking. Rick is Senior Vice President, Publishing Operations and Content Management for all of Pearson, and has some top-level lessons learned on what works and what doesn't in bringing metadata into publishing workflows and systems. Gilbane analyst Bill Rosenblatt will also be speaking, bringing his perspective on metadata efforts at some of the largest publishers and media companies out there.

Keep an eye on the conference session descriptions page and the Gilbane events blog as we add new speakers and elements to the conference.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:05 AM

September 19, 2007

WSJ.com to go Free?

First Times Select, and now WSJ.com? WSJ.com is reporting that WSJ.com might drop its paid model in favor of an ad-supported one. And yes, the article is free, at least as of right now.

Meanwhile, ClickZ is reporting that mobile advertising is about to boom.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:40 PM

August 8, 2007

NY Times to Make TimesSelect Free

Barry Graubart weighs in on the decision at the New York Times to Make TimesSelect free.

Ny_times_logo

The Times has decided to stop charging a fee for its TimesSelect product. TimesSelect, which includes the Times Columnists and OpEd pieces, is free to print subscribers and costs $95 per year for others. There are approximately 220,000 paid TimesSelect subscribers, representing roughly $21 million in annual revenue. It also provides a perceived benefit to print subscribers... While I don't know if the Times will recoup that revenue simply from serving ads on the OpEd pages, this is clearly the right thing to do. Putting a wall up around Times columnists simply resulted in reducing the influence of the Times editorial page. In addition to limiting access for direct browsers, it also dramatically reduced the "pass-along" potential of Times content. Once the walls are down, I'd expect their editorial columns to often be at the top of the "most emailed" lists and also receive numerous links from bloggers, Facebook pages and more.

All good thoughts from Barry, so do read his entire entry. I just want to know if the crossword puzzle will now be available free.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:07 AM | TrackBack

July 17, 2007

The Dramatic Unity of Huckleberry Finn

ResearchBuzz offers up a nice find: The Ohio State University Press Makes Dozens Of Books Free

The Ohio State University Press has announced that it will be making “certain books” available for free download from its site. (You’ll need a PDF reader.) The books are available at here . There are actually over 60 books here, from Daniel Aaron’s Cincinnati: Queen City of the West, 1819–1838 to John Harold Wilson’s Court Satires of the Restoration. Click on the book title for additional information about the book and PDF files of various chapters. The books I looked at were out of paper print but still had very assertive copyright reminders.What I did NOT see was any way to actually search the content, so here’s the Google query you want: keyword inurl:books site:ohiostatepress.org. Add intitle:book title to the search if you want to restrict your results to a specific text.

If you want to go right to the Huck Finn book referenced in the title, click here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:10 PM

June 12, 2007

eBooks for Kids: BookFlix and More

This is interesting.

Two leading children's publishers, Scholastic, Inc., and Disney, will soon discover whether the laptop compares to the lap in the hearts of young readers.
Scholastic is officially launching BookFlix, an educational Web site pairing short films based on popular picture books along with nonfiction e-books that allow early readers to follow the text online.

Update: fixed the link.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:29 PM | Comments (2)

June 7, 2007

Steal this Laptop!

Abbie Hoffman would be proud. Ironically, Abbie's book is flagged as Copyright Protected on Google Books.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:14 AM | Comments (1)

June 1, 2007

Center for Future Civic Media

I get an excellent weekly news and analysis roundup, Outsell/EPS Insights (subscription required). This week they alerted me that the Knight Foundation had handed out its first News Challenge winners.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, top young computer programmers and bloggers, and MTV are among the 25 first-year winners of the Knight News Challenge, announced at the Editor & Publisher/Mediaweek Interactive Media Conference and Trade Show in Miami. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation funded the contest with $25 million over five years to help lead journalism into its digital future. The first-year winners all proposed innovative ideas for using digital news and information to build and bind community in specific geographic areas.

That led me to check out the folks at MIT who were awarded the biggest chunk, $5M to fund a new Center for Future Civic Media. The idea is intriguing to me, as it seems to go beyond the dreary notion of citizen journalists to instead, "helping to provide people with the necessary skills to process, evaluate, and act upon the knowledge in circulation, civic media ensures the diversity of inputs and mutual respect necessary for democratic deliberation."

They need to work on their "about page," though. Whatever "Future Civic Media" might become, I doubt it includes tar.gz files.


Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:32 PM

May 30, 2007

Excel and XML

Since so much metadata, and even editorial content, is often produced in Microsoft Excel, shouldn't publishers consider using SpreadsheetML for long-term uses of Microsoft Excel? A tutorial over at Brian Jones' blog got me thinking about it. If you are interested in a more in-depth look at SpreadsheetML, start here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:25 AM

April 28, 2007

MathML 3.0 Working Draft Published

Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 3.0: Working Draft

2007-04-27: The Math Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 3.0. MathML is an XML application for describing mathematical notation and capturing both its structure and content. The goal of MathML is to enable mathematics to be served, received, and processed on the World Wide Web, just as HTML has enabled this functionality for text.

In related news, the W3C has also published a MathML for CSS profile.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:33 PM

April 24, 2007

Multichannel Workflows in the Offing?

Over at the Really Strategies blog, Ed Stevenson comments on some print-CMS partnerships.

Last week, Lisa Bos posted on the fragmentation between different types of CMS.  Interestingly, this morning I stumbled upon two announcements on partnerships between companies in different CMS spaces:

Found on Gilbane, "Managing Editor Inc. (MEI) announced a joint development with Clickability to integrate the SoftCare K4 Publishing System with Clickability’s cmPublish."  So here we have an editorial and production system (or print CMS) integrating with a WebCMS.

And CMS Wire announces that Alfresco and WoodWing Software formed a partnership between WoodWing’s Smart Connection Enterprise editorial workflow system and the Alfresco 2.0 open source enterprise content management system. 

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:12 PM

April 17, 2007

Pricing Trends for Scholarly Journals

DigitalKoans is alerting readers about a new report, Trends in Scholarly Journal Prices 2000-2006

LISU, which is based in the Department of Information Science at Loughborough University, has released Trends in Scholarly Journal Prices 2000-2006, a report commissioned by Oxford Journals.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

The research updates the previous findings on pricing for biomedical journals, and has also been extended to analyze pricing for social science titles. Findings within the report show little variation to the original data published in 2004: there are continued trends in price variance across publishers, including median price increases ranging from 42% to 104% for biomedical titles, and 47% to 120% for social science titles.

The entire report can be downloaded for free here (PDF, 718K).

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 12, 2007

Teleread Offers Kurt Vonnegut a Fond Goodbye

And includes a pointer to free downloads of some Vonnegut classics

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a sci-fi writer and satirist who wrote about heroics, vanities and greater sins, inspiring comparisons with Mark Twain, died yesterday at 84 with a full head of hair. You can read a Google News roundup and his New York Times obit along with a link-rich Wikipedia item.

Via Wowio, you can download free ad-supported copies of [a number of Vonnegut books].

I played around with Wowio, downloading Slaughter-House Five. Really, it is not much to write about--PDF files with ads stuffed in every so many pages. The ads are awkwardly placed--they look like full-page magazine ads--and in the default settings of the reader they are just disembodied page layouts. In Slaughter-House Five, it looked to me like the ads disrupted Vonnegut's intended pagination. In at least one place, an ad separates an illustration from Vonnegut's description. The effect is jarring, but if I were a starving college student again, I probably would put up with it in exchange for a free book.

Many, many publishing blogs weighed in on Vonnegut today, and for good reason. He was an oversized talent, and many people of my age and a little older read every Vonnegut book, often more than once. He will be missed.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:26 PM | TrackBack

April 11, 2007

Can Blogs Persist in the Way Scholarly Information Does?

Jon Udell interviews Geoffrey Builder, Director of Strategic Initiatives at CrossRef, and a veteran in the scholarly technology world. They discuss CrossRef's critical role in the scholarly information world, how Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) work, and what this kind of technology means for blogs and other content.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:16 PM

April 10, 2007

A Well Deserved Webby Nomination to PaidContent.org

Webby Nominations Announced; We’re On The List

Funny thing about awards: we diss them publicly all the time, but as soon we get nominated, we become an award whore (well, more specifically me). This time it is the Webby, so I think it is justified. The nominations were announced today, and we’re among the five in the Best Blog: Business category along with some other great names like TechDirt and Dealbook (by NYTimes.com).

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:43 PM

April 9, 2007

A Tip of the Cap to...

... Project Gutenberg, for all its work, including a newly posted "eBook," The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866, which brings us, among other things, passages from Nathaniel Hawthorne's notebooks. Here, Hawthorne offers some thoughts about a trip along Maine's Kennebec River.

Saw by the river-side, late in the afternoon, one of the above-described boats going into the stream, with the water rippling at the prow, from the strength of the current and of the boat's motion. By-and-by comes down a raft, perhaps twenty yards long, guided by two men, one at each end,—the raft itself of boards sawed at Waterville, and laden with square bundles of shingles and round bundles of clapboards. "Friend," says one man, "how is the tide now?"—this being important to the onward progress. They make fast to a tree, in order to wait for the tide to rise a little higher. It would be pleasant enough to float down the Kennebec on one of these rafts, letting the[Pg 178] river conduct you onward at its own pace, leisurely displaying to you all the wild or ordered beauties along its banks, and perhaps running you aground in some peculiarly picturesque spot, for your longer enjoyment of it. Another object, perhaps, is a solitary man paddling himself down the river in a small canoe, the light, lonely touch of his paddle in the water making the silence seem deeper. Every few minutes a sturgeon leaps forth, sometimes behind you, so that you merely hear the splash, and, turning hastily around, see nothing but the disturbed water. Sometimes he darts straight on end out of a quiet black spot on which your eyes happen to be fixed, and, when even his tail is clear of the surface, he falls down on his side, and disappears.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:41 AM

April 6, 2007

eBooks No, But ePaper Yes?

"Electronic paper" edging toward reality

"Electronic paper" has long been hyped as the future of newspapers and books, but products like e-books have been slow to take off. That may soon change, say executives involved in the pioneering technology. While Internet companies are scanning libraries of books and making them available online, E Ink Corp., which emerged out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a decade ago, is seeing a surge in orders for its portable, foldable displays that mimic conventional paper to carry such books. Nine different companies launched products last year based on the technology," said Russell Wilcox, E Ink president. "In the last nine months we've gone from manufacturing tens of thousands of parts to millions of parts."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:03 PM | TrackBack

April 4, 2007

Is Print Dying?

Ed Stevenson of Really Strategies has a roundup of recent news.

A small handful of publishers made recent announcements on their decisions to cease publishing in print and move to sole digital content delivery.

The most notable is, of course, InfoWorld's cessation of print this month. 

We are merely embracing a more efficient delivery mechanism --the Web -- at InfoWorld.com. You can still get all the news coverage, reviews, analysis, opinion, and commentary that InfoWorld is known for. You'll just have to access it in a browser (or RSS reader) -- something more than a million of you already do every month.

We also heard Time's announcement that it will discontinue the LIFE newspaper supplement, but still look to build online product offerings under the LIFE brand.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:42 PM

April 3, 2007

Free New York Times Select for Students?

Maybe, Maybe Not.

This problem has been just around the corner since NYT.com first offered academic discounts on premium TimesSelect last year but it didn’t become a real issue until the move to free for students and educators. Prodded by librarians irked at spending large chunks of money to gain access to the whole NYT database through services like Lexis-Nexis, the NYT is changing the offer: only students at colleges that subscribe to the databases will have access to the full archives, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. The change is being made “out of respect and compliance with these agreements that we already have in place,” Vivian Schiller, VP/GM, NYtimes.com, told the Chronicle. One library director said database provider ProQuest was surprised by the paper’s decision to make the archives available to student subscribers for free. Barbara Fister of Gustavus Adolphus College was among those raising the issue online; she told the Chronicle she was torn between wanting all students to have access to the Times online and the fact that she just spent nearly $20,000 to provide archives access through ProQuest.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:38 PM

April 2, 2007

Philly XML User Group

Philadelphia has an active XML user group, with monthly meetings in Center City. The next meeting is next Wednesday, April 11 at 6:00 p.m., at a new location for the group, Wolters Kluwer Health, 520 Walnut Street (the Penn Mutual building).

This month's meeting will feature a presentation, "RSuite CMS: Native XML Content Management," from Michael Puscar of Really Strategies, Inc. RSuite is the CMS developed by Really that uses the MarkLogic Server XML repository. According to the announcement for the event.

Publishers struggle with the same problems as they embark on their XML-based content management solutions. Current CMS solutions don’t offer true native XML management and search. Some call themselves “native XML databases” but they really support XQuery compilation and execution inside an existing RDBMS. This approach does not harness the power of XQuery, limits the use of hierarchical queries, and contributes to major performance issues later when you need to reconstitute XML data scattered across the database into a document for export. So what’s an appropriate definition for “native XML database”? And what does “native” really mean? Let’s discuss this concept and take a look at Really Strategies' RSuite CMS, which offers features like node-level XML management, layered metadata, and true content reuse.

You can register for the event here; it's free!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:44 AM

March 28, 2007

Time Inc. Cancels Life Newspaper Insert; Will Focus On Digital

Another Life for Life

Just last night over drinks in Orlando a media executive, who knows I was associated with Life for many years but has not mag ties himself, asked me why Time Inc. didn’t just focus on Life’s photography and forget efforts like the weekly newspaper insert. The Life brand and legacy could be the draw for a photo-centric website, he argued, wondering why they had never managed to do just that. This morning brings news that Time Inc. is going to do just that—shutter the newspaper insert, which never came close—and wasn’t intended to—the Life weekly of days gone by, and will focus on various digital platforms as well as books.

Online plans already in progress call for a major portal to launch later this year; the plan is to get its entire collection of 10 million photos online. From the release: “The most important collection of imagery covering the events and the people of the 20th century will be made available to the public for personal use at no cost. More than 97 percent of this collection has never been seen by the public and contains the works of such master photographers as Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White and Gordon Parks, among others.”

Is it me, or is the shift from print to digital accelerating before our eyes? This announcement follows closely on the heels of IDG announcing that they are ending the print version of InfoWorld.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:51 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 24, 2007

OUP on Google

OUP Behaves in the Sandbox

OUP's blog today, in a response to the Financial Times article (subscription required) of a couple days ago, talks about what Google's digitization effort is doing for publishing - and how they are responding to it in-house.

What we publishers have come to realize is that Google and friends have opened up the world to our content by showing us that discoverability and access leads to interest and opportunity. Every major media company is now thinking they need to figure out their share of the digital space.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:00 AM

March 19, 2007

The Power of the Pocketbook

Also known as MIT and DRM:

It seems like a small thing - MIT Libraries announced that they would not carry material by the Society of Automotive Engineers - but it has pretty big implications.

SAE's database of technical papers apparently comes girded with a layer of DRM. The library website states:

SAE's DRM technology severely limits use of SAE papers and imposes unnecessary burdens on readers. With this technology, users must download a DRM plugin, Adobe's "FileOpen," in order to read SAE papers. This plugin limits use to on-screen viewing and making a single printed copy, and does not work on Linux or Unix platforms.

Many of MIT's faculty are fellows of the Society, which does not pay its members for the papers it publishes...and yet which restricts access to these papers via that "severe" DRM technology and a subscription fee - in fact, it restricts the mention of these papers in other databases as well...

I should note that FileOpen is not an Adobe product, but a separate company that makes DRM technology.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:06 PM

March 17, 2007

Those eBook Widgets

I haven't hidden my low opinion of Google's book scanning efforts. So I am intrigued that some of the larger trade publishers are stepping up and attempting to do their own digitization--and, notably, establishing their own methods of providing access to the digitized books. The efforts from Random House and HarperCollins have received a lot of attention, mainly because the two companies are such dominant presences in trade publishing. But a lot of the attention has been on their eBook "widgets," the viewing applications they have begun sharing. However, the real story is behind the scenes. Both Random House and HarperCollins are much more interested in having platforms that control the access to the content--allowing models like "look inside the book" and other kinds of partial access. To understand these offerings, you need to look beyond the widgets themselves.

As far as I can tell so far, these are really for promoting the print books and not for selling eBooks per se. The Random House site says, “The Random House Digital Page Initiative is an on-going project to index, digitize, distribute and set the terms for using book content online. As part of that initiative, Random House has developed Insight, a service that gives search engines and online retailers access to digitized book content over the Web.”

Both offerings are addressed to balance the need for access and publisher’s concerns about control and insight into how the content is used. For example, Random House’s documentation says, “For the publisher, Insight is a tool to get the publisher's digital content onto the websites of retail partners, search engines, publicity outlets, authors, blogs, and readers … the publisher's digital book content remains in the hands of the publisher. It … implements business rules to guarantee that ownership and management of the digitized content remains with the publisher; and it manages access to the content from third-party websites.”

Also:

In terms of differences:

The HarperCollins/LibreDigital widget is based on the NewsStand technology. According to Todd Eckler, VP of Sales at LibreDigital, the primary difference with the HarperCollins version over the NewsStand version is more functionality for DRM and reporting.

The Random House widget is a Flash client. It looks an awful lot like Adobe’s Digital Editions, but it does not seem to be the same technology.

To my best understanding at this point, they both display PDF files, though LibreDigital does accept other formats (including OEB), and the Random House widget accepts all kinds of image formats as page files (their specifications say at one point “JPG, PDF, indexed text, etc.” and “jpeg, gif, png, pdf” at another point.) So I think it is fair to say that the LibreDigital tool is more of a conventional eBook platform that looks to ingest whole eBook files and the Random House tool is more of a page-turning device that is happy to manage and display page files of several different formats. Having said this, I can’t imagine too many people handing over a bunch of, say, JPG files to Random House with some kind of page manifest, but I may be missing something.

Interestingly, the early reviews on the industry blogs really seemed to favor the Random House widget. Fran Toolan of Issues in Publishing wrote of Random House’s widget, “It also has multiple features not found in Harper's. Some of the features include, displaying multiple sizes, searching for text strings inside the widget (using a Google text search), and offering ways to buy the book.” And C. Max Magee at Millions Blog wrote, “At a glance, the Random House offering is much nicer to look at, faster to load pages, and offers additional functions like search. So, if you want to know who winds the first round of the “Widget Wars,” Random House does.”

I think the real question down the road is who wins the next few rounds of the digital access wars. Google fired the first shot, but the major publishers are firing back--and trying to bring the smaller publishers along as allies.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:20 PM | TrackBack

March 14, 2007

Playing Around...

with the Random House eBook Widget.


Oh, click on it so you can actually read the thing.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:31 AM

March 13, 2007

Slow Blogging

I have been swamped with work, so I have been slow to blog. There are a few items of note, though.

Premium content does indeed seem to have a life. One of the interesting things about these three items is that two of them are top-shelf traditional publishers and the third is a top-shelf TV network. The lesson for me is that people will pay for premium content when the content is very good.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:56 PM

February 24, 2007

How About James Thurber Sponsored by Eukanuba®?

New Yorker Cartoons Available As Animated, Ad-Supported Podcasts

The New Yorker‘s famous cartoons can now be viewed as an animated, ad-supported video podcast on iTunes through RingTales, an online animation syndicator. As part of the deal with the Conde Nast publication (through its cartoon licensing arm, The Cartoon Bank), Santa Monica-based RingTales has the exclusive license to animate and distribute the New Yorker library of over 70,000 cartoons. Podcast subscribers will receive three new animations of The New Yorker “RingTales” each week. In addition to iTunes, which had 14 episodes 20-second episodes available as of Friday morning, the downloads will be available on the magazine’s site, newyorker.com, in March...

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:31 AM

February 18, 2007

But How Does Dear Author Really Feel About It?

Adobe Labs Cooks Up Worst Ebook Reader in Ebook Reader History

Adobe Digital Editions

Dear Adobe,

I have, often, derided the Adobe Acrobat format for ebooks. I have told people on this blog, in emails, on message boards, that this is my least favorite format and that you should only buy this format when there is NO OTHER OPTION. Buying an Adobe ebook, particularly one that requires authentication to read it, is akin to shaving your head when you are one of the most recognizable people in the world and, at one time, one of the most beautiful people in the world.

You’ve come out with a great new software called Adobe Digital Editions, for those people who love ebooks...

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:24 AM

January 28, 2007

File this Under "Not Exactly News"

Dear Author has seen the Vision of the eBook Future via Google and Random House and It Stinks

In 2004, Google announced its plan to scan every book printed. They began working with university libraries such as Harvard, University of Michigan, and Oxford. This caused the publishing industry some great consternation because an author’s work …

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:56 PM

January 18, 2007

eBooks in the K-12 Classroom?

TeleRead offers some thoughts on a WiFied eInk machine and perhaps a K-12 push for the Sony eReader.

Spurred by the threat of the rumored Kindle E Ink machine from Amazon, Sony is considering a WiFi-enhanced successor to the Sony Reader, as well as a push to get E Ink machines into the classroom.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:02 PM

January 6, 2007

Someone is Bullish about eReaders

E-Paper Display Company Plastic Logic Receives $100 Million Funding

In one of the biggest venture capital rounds ever in Europe, UK electronic paper display technology company Plastic Logic has received $100 million in venture funding. The new round was led by Oak Investment Partners and Tudor Investment Corporation.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:06 AM | Comments (1)

December 29, 2006

1984

IT WAS a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:18 AM | TrackBack

December 26, 2006

Two New IDPF Draft Specifications Available

Nick Bogarty of the Interational Digital Publishing Forum reports that two new specifications are available in working draft form and are ready for comment.The IDPF's Open eBook Publication Structure (OEBPS) Working Group has released two working draft specifications, the Open Publication Structure (OPS) 2.0 (internal working draft v0.7) and the Open Packaging Format (OPF) 2.0 (internal working draft v0.7) for public distribution and review as IDPF informational documents.

The IDPF strongly encourages feedback from potential users, developers and others, whether IDPF members or not, for the sake of improving interoperability and quality of IDPF work. The Working Group requests that comments to the specifications be made before Wednesday, January 31st in order to facilitate revision of the specifications. The specifications are available here (OPS 2.0) and here (OPF 2.0).

Feedback on the draft specifications should be made at the IDPF forums under "OPS/OPF 2.0 Public Drafts & Related Documents," and you can find a link to all IDPF specification documents here.

Document Summary

The OPS 2.0 and OPF 2.0 specifications are successors to OEBPS 1.2 which was released as an official IDPF specification in August 2002. The OPS specification describes a standard for representing the content of electronic publications. The OPF specification defines the mechanism by which the various components of an OPS publication are tied together and provides additional structure and semantics to the electronic publication. OPS/OPF will increase the viability and adoption of the previous OEBPS standard as both a cross-reading system interchange and production format as well as a final publication delivery format.

Both OPF and OPS are aligned with the OEBPS Container Format (OCF) specification which defines the standard mechanism by which all components of an electronic publication may be packaged together into a single archive for transmission, delivery and archival purposes. The OCF specification was released as an official IDPF specification on October 27th, 2006.

The OPS/OCF documents were submitted to the IDPF Board of Directors as an Informational Document as defined by the IDPF’s Policies and Procedures, section 4.6.1. While Informational Documents do not have an official specification status in the organization, the Working Group felt it important that IDPF members and the public have the opportunity to review the draft specification in order to obtain feedback on the current state of the proposal as well as to alert IDPF members that a proposal is forthcoming in order to allocate appropriate resources for a proper review. The document is expected to be submitted to the official IDPF output process in Q1 2007 which consists of Board of Director, public, intellectual property and membership review and a final membership vote.

This document was approved for submission by the Working Group on Thursday, December 14th and approved for release by the IDPF Board of Directors as an Informational Document on Friday, December 22nd.

The following documents may prove useful for introduction: the Working Group Charter, Specification Requirements, and IDPF member presentations on OPS, OPF & OCF.

Document Output Procedure

The OPS/OPF 2.0 documents are currently informational documents. All public comments made on the specification will be considered by the Working Group and, if appropriate, edits to the working drafts will be made. The Working Group expects to submit a final draft specification to the IDPF official output process in Q1 2007.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:06 PM | TrackBack

December 19, 2006

Interview: How Taunton Press Built ROI, Customer Loyalty With Video, Slideshow for Sub Site

From the interview:

The Taunton Press' magazines, such as Fine Cooking, Fine Woodworking and Fine Gardening, have had an online presence for a number of years, with articles of past issues archived and for sale. And, they have an online store with more than 500 SKUs.

But in the last few years, company execs realized they had "a large body of great content that our subscribers and customers will consume in a lot of different media," says Interactive Marketing Director Michelle Rutkowski.

One way to offer readers more value while increasing Taunton’s revenues would be to create online paid products -- sites that offered some free content but that required subscriptions to access the rest.

The company created such a site with FineWoodworking.com, which rolled out in November 2005. "We built a big model and projected where we thought we would be, and we're pleased that we're where we think we should be in terms of a business," Rutkowski says.

An interesting case study, and I played a part in the development of FineWoodworking.com, working with Really Strategies and the Taunton folks to develop the requirements, write the RFP, and help choose the vendor, Ektron.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:31 PM

December 17, 2006

Another Sign of Life for eBooks?

S&S news: Digital archive plans—and Claire Israel’s defense of DRM

Simon and Schuster plans to have 12,000+ books from its backlist digitized by the end of ‘07, according to Publishers’ Marketplace. Download sales tripled this year, and DearAuthor credibly believes that “competitive pricing” helped…

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:04 PM | TrackBack

December 11, 2006

More on Microsoft Book Search

Again, as I mentioned in another entry, I have not looked too closely at it yet, but Microsoft Book Search has nice behaviour in the basic interface, and the image in this page was clearly digitized with some care.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:45 PM | TrackBack

Borges Manuscripts Lost, Thought Stolen, Then Found

According to an article in the Boston Globe, two handwritten manuscripts by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges owned by a Harvard Square bookstore were found after being lost and presumed stolen. Store owner John W. Wronoski found the manuscripts Monday afternoon, stuck behind a photograph "just by weird chance," he said. "I am inordinately relieved."

The manuscripts included that of a favorite story of mine, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:36 PM | TrackBack

December 7, 2006

Microsoft Book Search

Microsoft has launched its book search product. My initial reaction is mixed, though I haven't spent much time with it yet. On the one hand, it doesn't seem to work in Firefox (get used to seeing the word "Loading..." if you try to launch it) and it is really slow to start, even in Internet Explorer 6 (I haven't tried it in Explorer 7 yet). On the other hand, the interface for browsing a found book is much more attractive than Google Book Search and the scanning, at a quick glance, seems to be of a signficantly better quality than that on Google Books. Of course, beating Google Books on scanning quality is not exactly difficult.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:50 PM

Download a Good Book Lately?

Late in the last millennium I went to grad school, getting my MA in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College. Recently, a writer from the alumni office, Christopher Hennessey, interviewed me about the eBook business, and he ended up writing an excellent article. You can download a PDF of the entire magazine here (about 2.7 MB). I also took the liberty of creating a PDF with just the article itself, which is about 500K.

A hat tip to Christopher for writing an excellent survey of the value of eBooks to date.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:48 PM | TrackBack

Get Your Multimedia House in Order

“Do opportunities exist to call for more digital offerings, and are you prepared to spend wisely toward them? Looking back five years or so, some publishers put the cart before the horse, burning holes in their pockets for expansive digital publishing before the market was really clear.

“For instance, publishers that think they would benefit most from e-books need to know that a market exists, but it is not as big [as they might think] and there are plenty of third-parties who could easily handle production and hosting. On the other hand, medical and legal publishers with enormous electronic potential absolutely need to make a commitment to a digital presence and they need to adjust staff to handle it."

Sound like good advice? I hope it is. I gave it.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:30 PM | TrackBack

December 2, 2006

The State Of Magazine Websites

PaidContent.org points to some research, The State Of Magazine Websites.

(via Buzzmachine) The Bivings Group, which earlier this year did a comprehensive review of newspaper websites, has done it again with magazine websites: it researched the websites of the top 50 most circulated magazines in the U.S. and evaluated them.

Among the findings:

-- RSS feeds: 48 per cent of magazine websites.
-- Message boards/forums: 46 per cent
-- 38 per cent require registration to view all of the site’s content.
-- 38 per cent of the magazines offer at least one reporter blog.
-- Video is an offering on 34 per cent of websites.
-- Just 14 per cent of websites use podcasts and bookmarking; eight percent allow comments on articles; and six per cent use tags.

I want to know about the 52% of websites who have not implemeneted RSS yet. Hello, McFly!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:03 PM

Just What is a "Publication"?

From if:book, on today's publications

On November 27 the Pulitzer Prize Board announced that "newspapers may now submit a full array of online material-such as databases, interactive graphics, and streaming video-in nearly all of its journalism categories

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:14 PM | TrackBack

November 30, 2006

DOIs for Books Gain Ground

Digital Koans alerts us to the news that DOIs for books are gaining ground.

According to CrossRef, the official DOI registration agency, over a half-million DOIs have been assigned to books or book chapters, and twenty of its members are using DOIs in this fashion. What’s a DOI? Here’s a short description from …

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:25 PM | TrackBack

November 22, 2006

Mixing MathML and SGML

Do you have any experience, or know of any instances, of mixing MathML within an SGML document instance? I have a client who is beginning the process of converting an extensive collection of SGML documents, and would like to go ahead and convert the equations first, into MathML, and then insert the equations back into the SGML document instances. One of their services providers is concerned about this. They are citing the SGML character entities in the current document instances versus the need--as they see it--to use Unicode in the MathML. However, as I read the MathML specification, you can still use SGML character entity references as long as you are using the MathML DTD and not the MathML XML Schema (see this section of the MathML recommendation).

Am I reading this correctly? Any experience with this?

I realize there are likely some other issues too, but this one came up in the first discussion...

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:41 PM | TrackBack

November 10, 2006

Digitization at HarperCollins

If you are curious what HarperCollins is doing in terms of digitizing its content, this presentation (PDF) from the Frankfurt Book Fair spells it out some. HarperCollins is being aggressive with this. They cited the costs of digitization as an element in their recent disappointing quarterly profit, and clearly are committed to the efforts.

In addition to lower sales, [HarperCollins CEO Jane] Friedman attributed the drop in profits to continued investment in digital and global projects. HC has now digitized 12,000 titles as part of its digital warehouse, and during the quarter it converted 125 books to its new Browse Inside feature, which enables consumers to search HC books from the company's Web site. Friedman estimated HC will be adding 200 to 500 titles a week to the Browse feature. The company's Digital Media Café also launched in the period. "I remain excited by the digital world," Friedman said. HC's China initiatives also ate into profits in the period.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:33 PM

November 6, 2006

Wikipedia Woes

Perhaps another reason Wikipedia should consider an authentication process for authors.

This is likely a solvable problem, though hackers are determined folks. But the more I think about Wikipedia authoring, the more I think it makes sense for authors to be authenticated.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:15 PM

October 27, 2006

Revisiting Amazon aStore

I noticed recently some sales from my Andre Dubus Amazon aStore, so I spent some time today updating it and adding a couple of new features. Check it out, and shop early and often!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:38 AM

October 24, 2006

Adobe Digital Editions

Adobe announced Digital Editions today (press release here). Digital Editions is billed as a rich internet application for digital publishing, enabling users to acquire, read, and manage a variety of digital content. There is an obvious match here for eBooks, but the platform also has significance for digital editions of magazines, for example, and other content that would benefit from digital rights management (DRM) support.

Ryan Stewart already has a close look at ZDNet, and considers it "extremely compelling for both content providers and users on a number of fronts." Alan Safford has some more thoughts at PC World. David Utter of Webpronews.com discusses some of the hosting and distribution issues, and highlights that Digital Editions is the first Adobe product based on Flex 2 (a point Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch also mentioned this morning).

UPDATE: Publishers Weekly has more, focusing on the reader interface.

I saw it today, and it looked good. It is a Beta, but the interface is attractive and the performance is terrific. I didn't dig in too much, but what I saw was a set of books with an attractive point-and-click navigation and very quick retrieval and display of the titles in Acrobat and in XHTML. You can download it here. I did, and it installs very quickly and easily.

FURTHER UPDATE: Don Fluckinger has a great overview at PDFZone.com.

AND YET ONE MORE: Bill Rosenblatt has some thoughts on the DRM implications of the new offering.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:40 PM | Comments (1)

Blogging Has Been Light

I have been heads down with some project work and writing, so blogging has been light. I am at Adobe Max for a couple of days, and just saw a very cool demo of more integrated Web publishing beginning in Photoshop and extending through Fireworks and Dreamweaver. It was a "future," but I will find out more in a press briefing later today with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch.

UPDATE: There is a beta program for Fireworks 9 if you are interested in applying.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:40 PM

October 12, 2006

Simon & Schuster’s eBook Blog

TeleRead highlighted a new eBook-related blog at Simon & Schuster.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:58 PM

October 3, 2006

CrossRef Indicators

I remember when I first heard about Digital Object Identifiers DOIs and thinking, "great idea... needs critical mass." Well, according to the latest CrossRef Indicators, they have long since passed critical mass.

CROSSREF INDICATORS (September 29, 2006)

Total no. participating publishers & societies 1,683
% of non-profit publishers 64%
Total no. participating libraries 1,107
No. journals covered 15,215
No. DOIs registered to date 22,584,497
No. DOIs deposited in previous month 294,257
No. DOIs retrieved (matched references) in previous month 4,503,094
DOI resolutions (end-user clicks) in previous month 11,007,980

The 11 million plus DOI resolutions is staggering really. That is 11 million clicks on specialized, authoritative content in one month.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:57 PM

September 29, 2006

So Much for the Death of Print

I roll my eyes (well, not really, but figuratively) when I hear people crow too much about the death of print publishing. Clearly, a great deal of publishing is transitioning to electronic distribution, and--just as clearly--publishers are finding slower growth in print products, faster growth in electronic, and improving margins in electronic. But this headline, among others, reminds us that print is not dead.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 27, 2006

Sony Reader Roundup

TeleRead has a good roundup of reviews on the Sony eReader.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:24 PM

September 26, 2006

Sony eReader Available

The Sony Portable Reader System PRS-500 is now available. TeleRead has a very thoughtful article about some of the challenges Sony faces. Meanwhile, I keep offering to review the thing, but no word from Sony.

More here from paidContent.org.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:54 PM

September 21, 2006

Welcome Back, Peter Gammons

Peter Gammons returned to action for ESPN last night. Gammons, the Hall of Fame baseball writer, had a brain aneurysm in June, and the baseball season hasn't been the same without him. Gammons was the baseball beat writer for the Boston Globe when I was a kid and up through the time I flirted with the idea of being a sportswriter. I covered sports for my college newspaper and was a stringer for the New Bedford Standard-Times during a time when the Globe had an amazing array of sportswriting talent, including Gammons, Bob Ryan, Leigh Montville, and Ray Fitzgerald. Even among them, Gammons was in a class by himself. He created a feature that is now a staple of many sports pages, a weekend "notebook" of short items that runs a full page in the broadside Globe to this day (now written by the Globe's current beat writer, Gordon Edes). I can draw a line from that kind of short-form collection to today's blog. Gammons' blog (for ESPN Insider subscribers unfortunately) has been dormant since his illness, but he does have a new column up (and it's free!).

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:21 AM

September 19, 2006

Russian Math Professor Bypasses Establishment Publishing to Share Breakthrough

Meanwhile, TeleRead shares some news about why hundreds-year old societies may not be the sole arbiter of scientific breakthroughs anymore.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:37 PM

September 13, 2006

Britannica v Wikipedia

Dave Winer points to an an interesting back and forth between the leaders of Britannica and Wikipedia, and offers some thoughts. The direct link to the article is here.

Which reminds me of the journal Nature's article on the accuracy of the two works when it comes to science.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:26 PM

September 8, 2006

Note to Google Books

When you scan a page that has an illustration with an overlay, lift the overlay up so the illustration is actually visible. Oh, and make the book square on the scanner bed so the page is not crooked. Oh yeah, and decide whether to scan the whole book in color or in black and white. Of course, you should also be sure there isn't some bizarre problem with the scanner first. And, needless to say, if the scan you end up with is completely nonsensical, you might not want to include it.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:40 PM

September 2, 2006

Google Books Allowing Downloads: Blah, Blah, Blah

There was quite a buzz about Google allowing people to download PDFs of public domain books as of this week. Almost everything I read was incomplete, or wrong, and there was plenty of irrational exuberance. To me, any discussion of downloadable public domain books has to include Project Gutenberg, but few of the articles mentioned it. So much of the coverage is fawning, which means the project is doomed. It really is the dot.bomb era all over again. I suggest the cheerleaders start here and see how shoddy and incompetent the work is.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:18 PM

September 1, 2006

E-dictionary Studies

Does learning change when kids use electronic dictionaries instead of paper ones? TeleRead highlights some recent research.

“We can be very optimistic of the potential of these students proving that there will be no detriment to learning using eBooks. This optimism obviously begs continuing research.” - Prof. Richard Ballaver and Nicole Adams, Ball State University

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:07 PM

August 27, 2006

‘The Complete New Yorker Solves the DVD-swapping Problem

Via TeleRead The New Yorker will soon offer “a collection of all 4,000+ back issues stored on a 3-by-5-inch 80GB portable hard drive."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:42 PM

August 26, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

I don't know, but maybe they were going for an aerial view here? Every page I looked at in this book is badly done. Is this what some of the top libraries in the world want done with books that are nearly 200 years old? And when Willis A. Boughton donated this book to the Harvard libraries in 1933, did he expect the book to be manhandled this way? I go back to an earlier post I wrote, reflecting on how the president of the University of Michigan gushed about the role of Google Books in historic preservation. Did it ever occur to anyone that Google might know how to build a search engine, but they might not have a clue about how to handle and digitize books?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:28 AM | TrackBack

August 20, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

The thing I have noticed, scanning so many pages of Google Books, is that when the scanning of a book starts to go wrong, it goes very, very wrong.

But, hey, they've got hyperlinks!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:06 PM

August 13, 2006

Dear Sony: Please listen to Jane...

If you have a keen interest in eBook markets and technology, you really should follow the TeleRead blog. This weekend it has a number of fine entries, including Dear Sony: Please listen to Jane about your eBabel problem—if you want to woo romance readers. The advice applies to all kinds of readers, including romance readers.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:38 PM

August 12, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

Check this out. And then the frontispiece photo, where they apparently failed to notice--or failed to do anything about--an overlay over the page. Once again, Project Gutenberg does it much, much better.

UPDATE: It also occurs to me that Google Books does nothing for the visually impaired, but other eBook efforts do.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:37 AM

August 11, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

Oy vey. Start here, and keep paging forward. Maybe the person scanning this book was drinking.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:15 PM | Comments (1)

August 10, 2006

Wise advice to Amazon

Adobe's Bill McCoy and TeleRead's Michael Banks weigh in on Amazon's new push to have publishers use the bookseller's Mobipocket format.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:15 PM

August 6, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

One could guess at what this page is supposed to include on it, but, then again, maybe not. All of which makes this sound like a good idea.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:22 PM

Improving eBook Reading

Jon Udell has a practical suggestion for improving the reading experience with eBooks.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:00 PM

July 27, 2006

What is RDF?

Over at XML.com, Joshua Tauberer has updated a very useful article, "What is RDF."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:27 PM

July 26, 2006

IDPF OCF 1.0 Updated

According to an email I received today:

An updated version of the Open eBook Publication Structure Container Format (OCF) 1.0 specification has been posted on the IDPF website. The updates to the specification were made based on IDPF member and public comments received to date during the current IDPF Member and Public Review. The review period will end on Friday, August 4th. The IDPF strongly encourages feedback from potential users, developers and others, whether IDPF members or not, for the sake of improving the interoperability and quality of IDPF work. Feedback on the draft specification can be provided here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:55 PM

July 25, 2006

Sony Breaks Its Silence

Sony has been very quiet about their new eBook reader since an initial spate of publicity. But just today I received an email with a few details (not many really). I am reproducing the email here.

I continue to be underwhelmed by their marketing efforts. I contacted their PR folks after the initial announcements last December, and again a month or two ago. Still no word from them.

=================================================================

PICK A NICE SPOT FOR YOUR LIBRARY.

=================================================================

Thank you for your patience and for requesting updates on the
Sony(R) Reader, coming this fall, in time for the holidays.
It holds about 80 electronic books, is as easy to carry as a slim paperback and thanks to electronic paper, just as easy to read. Just load it up with tons of great electronic books from CONNECT(TM) eBooks, and you'll never read the same way again.

Explore the portable reader here.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

EASY READING

Breakthrough technology provides clarity that's almost paper- like. View from nearly any angle and adjust text size to your
preference.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

PERFECTLY PORTABLE

It's lightweight, thin, and holds about 80 books. More with optional memory cards. So take your own mini-library wherever
you go.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

LONG BATTERY LIFE

The rechargeable battery allows you to turn up to 7,500
continuous pages on a single charge (when not providing audio).

-----------------------------------------------------------------

CONNECT EBOOKS

Designed with variety in mind, CONNECT eBooks will hav