10-15-2006, 07:43 AM | #1 | |
fruminous edugeek
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Open Letter to the Science Fiction Book Club (sfbc.com)
Sent to service@sfbc.com:
Quote:
The SF market may be the easiest to break into because we're a bunch of geeks already, always up for something new. But if we can prove that this is a working model with the SFBC, the rest of these clubs could easily follow. (And for the record, I hate DRM as much as anyone, and if my books are only available in DRM format, I'm likely to take steps to make accessable archives for my own purposes, and never mind which country I'm in. But we've got to start somewhere if we're going to get eBooks in volume this century. Maybe after we actually have some eBooks, and publishers view us as a valuable revenue stream, we can talk about forcing publishers to open up the DRM model. Right now we have no leverage. They'e perfectly happy selling dead trees, and other than a few very popular examples like the Harry Potter books, the pirate process isn't going to be fast enough or consistent enough to pose much of a perceived threat to paper sales.) Anyway, that's my bit of activism for the moment. Back to writing (working on a book for teachers on how to use learning games in language classrooms -- it'll be published in open PDF). neko |
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10-15-2006, 11:07 AM | #2 |
Evangelist
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I have been doing something similar to the 'open letter' at a number of magazines I like and would like available as I travel (without the weight) by sending e-mail to the publishers. Some already have .pdf versions available and may need only some minor reformatting for legibility - Popular Science & Scientific American, for example. Others, like Granta & Smithsonian, have most or all articles available as a .pdf and only need 'bound' as a .pdf (with proper sizing) to be legible. Since the Granta is the right size for the phsyical magazine, there may not be any reformatting needed.
Many of the Dell magazines (Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen, Science Fact & Fiction and others) have .pdf files that work now. See the fictionwise.com magazine list - I think there are a few titles I missed. |
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10-15-2006, 04:39 PM | #3 | |
Gizmologist
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Hey, nekokami, nice idea!
There is one detail error I'd like to point out for you, though. You said: Quote:
As I'm typing this, it occurs to me that you may rather have meant that the only DRM type that Sony supports is their own, as opposed to also supporting eReader, MobiPocet, etc. If that's what you meant, I should probably point out that iLiad doesn't presently support any DRM types, and we don't really know what Amazon's Kindle will do, though it does look like it'll support a number of different DRM's. Here's the whole list of what the Reader supports: * TXT * RTF * PDF (Unencrypted) * BBeB (Encrypted and Unencrypted) * JPEG * GIF * BMP * PNG * MP3 (Unencrypted) * AAC (Unencrypted) Just wanted to make sure you should knew that, my apologies if you already did. |
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10-16-2006, 09:30 AM | #4 |
Reborn Paper User
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I'm sure any serious sci-fi provider knows about all e-readers out there but it's a good thing to remind them that there are users of such devices.
Good job nekokami! |
10-16-2006, 10:35 AM | #5 |
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Personally, I'm sorry to hear that the Sony Reader won't read HTML (I thought I'd heard somewhere that it would). Since I haven't heard anything good about the BBeB format either, I may have to add RTFs to my available book formats (no one seems to be buying iSilo formats of my books, anyway) so people can read them on the Sony Reader.
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10-16-2006, 11:34 AM | #6 |
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There were rumors early on about HTML support, but I don't think Sony ever said anything about it.
The LRF's I've played with, both Sony's and Manybooks' have worked well enough, with a couple of exceptions. RTF works great, with the only drawback being that the Reader doesn't support pictures in RTF's. Not much of an issue for novels, of course. |
10-16-2006, 01:14 PM | #7 | |
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Quote:
NatCh, have you been able to use links (e.g. TOC) with RTF. Mine seem to lose their links. That would be a welcome mod for RTF. |
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10-16-2006, 01:16 PM | #8 |
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No, my links go bye-bye in RTF too. I knew there was something else that got stripped ... it also drops multi-column and other 'complex' formatting.
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10-16-2006, 02:45 PM | #9 | ||
fruminous edugeek
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Quote:
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The point is, iRex says they want to have a B2B model. That means they need to find someone else to provide content. An online book club seems ideal for this. You could buy the reader from the book club, hopefully at a discount of some kind and with a bunch of initial books thrown in for free, the same way they do club subscriptions now. Then, on the appropriate day (or next time after that when you power up), your iLiad would remind you that it's time to check your book club picks, and if you click "OK" you'd get a page notifying you of upcoming titles for the month, so you could check off the ones you want and the reader would download them. (It would need to check to make sure you have enough memory, or tell you to swap cards or whatever). Even better, you could ask for some sample pages, the way you can with pBooks when buying from Amazon. If you miss the day, you should still be able to go back and pick up titles from previous months, just as you can usually do now with these club memberships. Sounds like a great business model to me, and a very convenient service that I'd be happy to buy the device for. (I do still need to be able to use it to read and annotate my PDFs for grad school, and handwrite/convert my journal and design notes, etc., of course!) @VillageReader, thanks for the note about SF&F and other SF related magazines available at Fictionwise. I saw those before. Of course, we'll need to get a supported DRM onto the iLiad before this would work, as these volumes are currently locked down (though more than one format is supported, at least). Once we have that, yes, I plan to subscribe to several magazines this way, as it would massively reduce clutter in my house. Perhaps others could also write to some of these companies and post their letters here... would it be worth it to do an online petition? Does anyone ever pay attention to those, or are they just to make the petition participants feel like they're doing something? neko |
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10-16-2006, 02:56 PM | #10 | |
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Quote:
Your model sounds reasonable to me, assuming that there's nothing that would invalidate it that isn't visible to us from the outside. The only possible catch I can see off-hand is probably the cost of the iLiad. I think that'd be a catch for a lot of folks even for the Reader -- I don't know how much they can discount the things in the short run (until e-ink costs start dropping, I mean). |
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10-16-2006, 03:10 PM | #11 | |
fruminous edugeek
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10-16-2006, 03:21 PM | #12 | |
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10-16-2006, 07:01 PM | #13 | |
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10-17-2006, 02:21 PM | #14 | |
fruminous edugeek
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10-17-2006, 03:19 PM | #15 | |
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