Open Media Review » Open News

Barnes and Noble e-Book Reader Launches Today

Thomas Gideon — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:44:31 +0000

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.

Cory’s DIY Experiment

Thomas Gideon — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:43:16 +0000

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.

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

Thomas Gideon — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:39:44 +0000

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.

Sony Partners with Smashwords

Thomas Gideon — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:42:24 +0000

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.

Amazon Buys Maker of Stanza eBook Reader

Thomas Gideon — Sat, 02 May 2009 14:33:33 +0000

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.

Doctorow’s Law

Thomas Gideon — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 13:47:35 +0000

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.

DIY Music Manual Has Been Released

Thomas Gideon — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:49:03 +0000

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.

Bookworm, O’Reilly Supported Free and Open ePub Bookshelf

Thomas Gideon — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:33:15 +0000

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

Happy Public Domain Day!

Thomas Gideon — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:36:21 +0000

Mike at the Creative Commons offers a bevy of links celebrating a day dedicated to the most open of open media, works in the public domain. He points out a couple of blog posts considering the importance of the public domain, many projects contributing to or building on it, and James Boyle’s recent book released on the very subject.

It must be an even sweeter celebration for CC given that they succeeded at reaching their very ambition fund raising goal for 2008. They could not have done so without individual donations in addition to the corporate contributions and grants they receive. If you haven’t already contributed think about adding the Creative Commons to your charitable giving in the coming year. Better yet, consider setting up a modest, ongoing monthly donation; that’s what I do.

Regardless, take some time today to enjoy open and public creative works.

Massive Media Donation to Wikipedia from German Federal Archive

Thomas Gideon — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 19:06:31 +0000

Wikipedia just announced a massive contribution to their Commons.

Starting on Thursday Dec 4, 2008, Wikimedia Commons will witness a massive upload of new images. We are anticipating about 100,000 files from a donation from the German Federal Archive. These images are mostly related to the history of Germany (including the German Democratic Republic) and are part of a cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archive.

The Federal Archive is making the photos available under a CC BY-NV-SA 3.0 Germany license and has apparently cleared its rights to do so. The photos are not of the highest resolution, about 800 pixels on the longest side. Regardless, this is an enormous addition to the commons. Flickr’s collaborations with US museums was on the order of a few thousand, maybe it is up to ten thousand or so. The Federal Archive submission is an order of magnitude or two beyond that.

I think this gives greater cause for the Wikimedia Foundation to exercise the GNU FDL window granted them in a recent updated by the Free Software Foundation to move their content to a Creative Commons license. I have to imagine that the CC license on these photos at a minimum bypasses some of the reuse issues for images in wikis presented by the particular conditions of the GNU FDL.