Open Media Review

Three Fantasy Authors Launch E-Book Store

The FSF Defective by Design folks posted a link to this on Identi.ca. The site is Closed Circle and features titles from C.J. Cherryh, Jane Fancher, and Lynn Abbey. The titles available from this site aren’t from the full catalog of these authors which would be rather huge. I suspect these are newer titles for which the authors were able to retain rights to distribute electronic editions.

There is a lot of good information on the site aimed at helping fans who purchase the e-books use them. Rather than restricting choice, their store offers a zip file that contains the title in pretty much all of the popular e-book formats. The FAQ has good information on and links to reader software for those new to e-books.

This reminds me not so much of the larger e-book efforts, the platform plays, I’ve written about. This feels very similar to musicians who offer MP3s directly for sale on their site. I love the idea and that these women are willing to do this despite there not being any sort of standard for e-books, even a de facto standard.

The final thought I had in looking over the site is how the e-book files are produced. If there is some software or technology partner encoding these for the authors, that is worth sharing as well. If authors knew exactly where to go to get commodity or free encoding with predictable results, like with MP3 audio, I think that might be key to seeing more author hosted stores like these regardless of the thicket of competing readers and formats.

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Barnes and Noble e-Book Reader Launches Today

RWW has the pertinent details, as do many other sites. It seems to be an improvement over the Kindle, in terms of consumer freedoms, but still largely hobbled. Personally, I won’t touch it as long as AT&T is the carrier but also a worry is that B&N still uses cumbersome DRM. They do support more open and standard formats, though, most notably ePub but these do not appear to be the formats used for their commercial offerings.

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Cory’s DIY Experiment

He finally shares details on his print-on-demand, short fiction anthology.

I will admit to some insider knowledge of Cory’s plans and relief that he is finally publicizing parts of what is a very ambition business plan. There is much here that should be familiar by now due to similar experiments by other creatives, most notably Trent Reznor. I would expect Cory to also share what hard date he is able to collect after the fact to give us as complete a case study as possible. Oh and I must start saving my pennies for one of the hand bound editions.

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Author’s Thoughts on His Free Content Work Being Re-published

Via Gnat’s four short links post for today at O’Reilly. Mark Pilgrim explains very clearly that re-publishing without his explicit permission is a large part of the point in him choosing not only an open but a free as in free software license for his book. Important to note that this competitive version only came after his publisher, APress, already had many years to profit from their version alone.

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Sony Partners with Smashwords

I saw this on Wired, a piece by Eliot van Buskirk. Sony is thankfully the lesser part of the story as it turns out. What Smashwords is doing is building a one stop site for self publishing ebooks through partnerships with not only Sony, but also Barnes & Noble and Stanza, among others.

This is actually a competitive offering to Amazon’s Digital Text Platform for doing very much the same thing, except Smashwords is far less limited:

Smashwords says it pays “much higher royalties” than Amazon, distributes to multiple outlets, and does not apply DRM to the eBooks the way Amazon does.

It is unclear whether the lack of DRM applies to Sony who has earned my ire by adopting ePub for its new crop of readers but only after saddling it with DRM. I suspect Sony may be an exception because of the way the article calls out that Sony in particular is accepting submissions worldwide, compared to Amazon which only does so in the US.

van Buskirk concludes with the biggest remaining challenge to innovators like Smashwords, that is filtering. But such a problem to have now that the flood gates have been opened wider for the independent creator and for advocates and fans of open media.

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Clive Thompson on the Future of Reading

Wired has a short editorial from Clive Thompson. It is another thoughtful consideration on the future of the printed book. What I like most about this is how he points out several existing examples that he believes point the way.

But only if publishers adopt Wark’s perspective and provide new ways for people to encounter the written word. We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading.

The example set by Wark is one of opening a work up for annotation, commentary and discussion. I am a big fan of an idea, the unbook, that considers this to be a valuable emerging model not just for after a book has been published but through its formative process and especially for books that in more traditional models would have gone through several editions.

While Thompson focuses in on the dialogue and discussion, I do like that the question he really is posing is the future of reading. I agree that this is far and away the more useful question when contemplating what is going to thrive as digital technologies disrupt the status quo in publishing.

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Amazon Buys Maker of Stanza eBook Reader

There is not much detail about this story beyond what reads like press releases.  According to the NYT article, Amazon has no intention of changing anything about Stanza.  That includes its ability to download free books and purchase books from participating services.  One of those services, Fictionwise, was recently purchased by competitor Barnes and Noble.

I am excited to see competition in the field of electronic books but I am worried that consolidation is happening so quickly.  Usually consolidation spells an end to innovation.  I am hugely concerned that the fledgling, and open, eBook format, ePub, is going to be a casualty of this first round of shakedown.  While Amazon is allowing books without DRM into its closed Kindle eco-system, unlike its audiobook counterpart Audible, their overall commitment to open formats and supporting the choice of the creator is not encouraging.

Innovators like Stanza, Feedbooks, and Fictionwise have been establishing toeholds on a wide variety of devices while the larger players like Amazon and Sony slug it out with their proprietary devices and formats.  ePub had the potential to emerge as a de facto standard much as MP3 did.  At this was true so long as the heavy weights remained ignorant to the proven market power of being as widely compatible as possible.  Unlike the MP3 format, about which the best feature is just that it lacks DRM, ePub is an open format without, as far as I know, patent encumbrances.  It is morally more closely related to Ogg Vorbis in that respect.

Unlike Ogg Vorbis, which has been well adopted by those interested in freedom from intellectual monopolies, ePub has been gathering potentially effective market forces to help drive its acceptance.  My worry is that Stanza’s acquisition may dissipate enough of that momentum to olbiterate any such potential.  I remain open to being proven wrong.

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Doctorow’s Law

I just watched the video of Cory Doctorow’s talk on eBooks and DRM from the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference.  In it, he expressed the desire to have Doctorow’s Law, if ever a thing is coined, to be that if anyone puts DRM, locks, on your works, as a creative, they are not doing so in your best interests.  Pretty obvious to consumers and advocates of open media.  It is nice to have a shorthand for this idea, though, and I wholeheartedly endorse this coinage.

The rest of his talk does an excellent job of explaining how Audible has turned the tables on publishers.  DRM started as a condition required by publishers before they would enter into electronic distribution in many cases.  Now, though, Audible is enforcing DRM even in cases where authors and publishers wish to release digital audio editions without locks.

As usual, Cory makes his point with eloquence, charm, and plenty of examples.  This talk is well worth a watch.

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DIY Music Manual Has Been Released

In my past interviews with Randy Chertkow and Jason Feehan, they mentioned a rework of their fantastic book, “The Indie Band Survival Guide”. The new edition would allow them to expand on their research and would be targeted primarily at musicians in Europe. That book, “The DIY Music Manual”, is now available. I’d say even if the local specific legal chapters don’t apply, this is probably work checking out for the extra time the guys have had to further hone this fantastic book. If you are in Europe, then you are in luck because I can think of few other people I would trust to have done their homework and get the details you need to know as an independent creator correct.

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Bookworm, O’Reilly Supported Free and Open ePub Bookshelf

As a techie I have used O’Reilly’s non-free bookshelf for technical titles, Safari, on and off over the years. The appeal is understandable, being able to access a virtual book shelf of technical references from anywhere there is internet access. The only reason I do not use it consistently is cost. My technical reading tends to go in waves as I tackle new challenges. During the plateaus I let my subscription to the service lapse because I don’t find myself accessing it enough to warrant the cost.

Regardless of my own cost-based decision, there is a lot else to like as the service has evolved, such as search and PDF copies of chapters and titles. And now O’Reilly Labs is helping to bring a similar offering for our own e-books. The project, Bookworm, was actually developed by Liz Daly who spoke at the recent O’Reilly Tools of Change conference. O’Reilly was apparently so impressed with the tool, they invited Daly to bring it into their R&D space.

Bookworm specifically supports the open ePub format which has been adopted by a number of publishers and is supported by a variety of other tools. One of my favorite free e-book sources, Feedbooks, has an option get download their titles in ePub format. Bookworm offers similar search capabilities to Safari and you can always re-download your ePub files back out of it, a nice option if you want to use it as your main bookshelf but might want to copy books to devices that are not always connected.

Bookworm supports OpenID which is a nice touch as I registered to give the service a try. You are greeted with a free copy of “Pride and Prejudice” to get your shelf started or reminded that O’Reilly now offers ePub as the format for the electronic edition of 30 of its technical titles. There is a tour and an FAQ which helped make getting started pretty simple. The progress through a book is at the level of a chapter, which is better than nothing but arbitrary bookmarks would be a nice future feature. There is a mobile interface that is surprising usable though it does require net access.

For the iPod touch and iPhone, the mobile interface offers a link to open the ePub file in Stanza, a bit of software I have also discussed before. Unfortunately, while Stanza offers a superb disconnected reading experience, it does not sync your place back to Bookworm. Stanza seems to be under pretty active development, so maybe that will change. Hopefully its developers will consider adding direct support for Bookworm. I will say that downloading a book to Stanza via Bookworm is a bit simpler than using the Stanza desktop client, so even without sync between the two tools, this is worth taking a look.

What I really hope is that popularizing the ePub format and supporting such great tools for it, like Bookworm, will put pressure on Amazon and its competitors to give authors and publishers the choice to use ePub if they desire. This sentiment was apparently also pretty strongly expressed at the same ToC conference during one of the morning keynotes by none other than Cory Doctorow.

If someone takes something that belongs to you, and puts a lock on it that you don’t have a key for, that lock isn’t in your best interests.

Doctorow’s Law, I’m going to have to remember that.

Technorati Tags: ebooks, free

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