02:08 PM by mtravellerh in E-Book General | News

Thanks to the recent launch of the Sony Reader in Germany, e-book shoppers can now observe a surge in commercial German e-book titles. Two key players in the local market are Thalia and Libri that both offer e-books in the open-standard Epub format. And while getting ePub files onto your Reader may not be easy at first, on the whole, it seems to work quite well.

So everything is milk and honey? Not quite.

Ignored hardware limitations

We're a bit heavy-hearted to report of plenty of unhappy German-speaking users complaining about the sub-optimal quality of ePub titles they've purchased. One cannot help but believe that those book editors in charge were lacking important technical information regarding the current limitations of the Sony Reader. For instance, some simply ignored the size limitation of 300Kb per XML/HTML chunk. Without splitting large files into these smaller chunks, the converted e-book won't work properly on the Sony Reader. We've heard of at least one e-book that has been sold like this.

Flawed cover designs

E-book covers cause plenty of problems, too. Some titles are sold entirely coverless, while others may have a cover, but one that cannot be displayed (hint: the Sony Reader doesn't know Scalable Vector Graphics). (EDIT: It does, actually. This makes the failure to display the cover even more baffling.) This is by no means an exception: Almost half of the reviewed e-books didn't have a cover. Notice that on the vendor's website, titles are prominently displayed with a cover, without any indication that a purchased ePub book would be missing this feature.

Missing Table of Contents

Quite a few ePub editors seem to ignore the importance of a well-done Table of Contents (TOC). Properly working, hierarchical structured TOCs are a rare thing indeed. Some of the (full-priced) e-book titles we checked didn't have a TOC at all.

Overlapping text

Adobe's DE viewer (which is used by Sony to render ePubs) has a fixed setting to display page numbers on the right margin. Most ePub editors seem to ignore this fact by forgetting to create sufficient margins for the page number. As a result, page numbers overlap with actual text content - not a pretty picture.

Basic OCR errors

Many of the titles our members checked had too many basic OCR errors, obviously due to a bad scanning process (proofreading, anyone?). Other ePub titles seem to be based on ostensibly bad PDF conversions (spaces within words, for example).

Meaningless CSS rules

A closer look at the underlying (CSS) styling of ePub files reveals the disappointing fact that some editor "experts" in charge did obviously not know what style rules were supported by the Sony Reader. Outdated "Font" tags were used and old-fashioned inline tag definitions instead of outline style sheets with classes.

Vendors blame publishers

Neither Thalia nor Libri were able to provide satisfying answers to the complaints by our disgruntled members. On the one hand, they admitted that quality may be suffering due to the lacking experience of the editors with ePub. On the other hand, they bluntly stated that they could not grant a right to return defective e-books. Oh, did we mention that in Germany, publishers have even gone to court to enforce the same price for e-books as for printed books?

A glimmer of light

Things aren't exactly rosy for the German e-book market, to say the least. But there is reason to hope. At least in the past few days, we could observe some e-book titles being sold at a marginally lower price than the paper equivalent. Nevertheless, if publishers are sincerely interested in the future and evolution of a functioning e-book market, they must get their act together now and focus on improving the quality of their offerings. It goes without saying that they must quickly fix the existing faulty books and offer them free of charge to affected customers.

01:00 AM by NatCh in E-Book General | News

Dateline: San Diego, CA 9:00 PM PDT, March 31, 2009

In an astonishing move today, Sony, Google and Barnes & Noble announced that they are entering into a joint venture to make millions of first run titles available on the Sony PRS line of electronic reading devices.

This agreement is an extension of the recently announced partnership between Sony and Google to bring Google Books' public domain collection to the Sony Reader. Where it gets really exciting is that the addition of bookseller giant Barnes & Noble to the partnership brings along all of Barnes & Nobles' existing distribution agreements with publishers for still in-copyright works.

"It's been a sort of open secret that for years we've been scanning pretty much everything we can get our hands on," said Jonathan Ipswitch, director of Content Management for Google, "we just couldn't legally share it in any form. Partnering with Barnes & Noble has given us the legal avenue to do so, and Sony's Reader is the perfect device to distribute on because it supports the open ePub format -- open is very important to us."

It's not all sunshine and roses, however: as the price of its participation, Barnes & Noble insisted that the content distributed by this new partnership would carry DRM.

"We were somewhat skeptical of this whole idea initially, I mean we only just bought Fictionwise, after all," said Jordan Andwine, recently appointed Vice President for Electronic Content Marketing at Barnes & Noble, "but with Google offering such a huge leg up on salable content and Sony providing such an excellent vehicle in their PRS devices, we really couldn't pass it up. Once it was agreed that copyrighted works would be sold with copy prevention measures in place, it was pretty much a slam dunk for us."

Another surprise in this announcement is that the partnership will not be using any existing DRM schema.

"Epub is pretty much a blank slate as far copy prevention measures go," said Nicholas Fritz, Sony's Director of Digital Security for Content, "yes, the format allows for DRM as part of the standard, but there's no specific DRM scheme specified. We decided to take the opportunity to develop a new approach to DRM that would address most of the usual objections to it. Specifically, we want users to not have to worry about whether they'll be able to read their books again later down the road. Obviously I can't go into any details at this point -- there are still patents to be filed -- but we're all really excited about the strategy we've developed here."

All concerned are being very mysterious about what sort of "new" DRM strategy they might be exploring, but now that they've mentioned it, details will surely follow before too long. If they really have come up with something that addresses the main consumer concerns about DRM, it could really be a game-changer for e-books in general.

The giant, glaringly obvious question on all this is when will this take place? Well this is apparently only a very recently reached agreement, so it will be some time before customers can purchase electronic books as a result of it. Currently, the predicted go-live date for sales will be April 1st of next year.

Whatever comes of this partnership I think it's safe to predict that it will fundamentally rock the e-reading world.

You can check here for additional details when the press release becomes available.

09:02 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Everything in this post will be confirmed by a press release that will be announced at 9pm Eastern 6pm Pacific this evening. I was lucky to get advance notice.

You may have heard the rumors of the K2 being sold at Sam's Club. The most recent one is actually true. The K2 was being offered in a limited number of stores as a test run.

I just got off the phone with my contact at Amazon, Pilar Lofos. I now have solid information that the K2 will be sold at Walmart and Sam's Club. I was told that there will be a shelf display, and that the box design will not change significantly. Instead, a cardboard sleeve has been designed that will be slipped on over the box. This will improve the visual appearance of the K2 when it is on the retail shelf. The K2 product page is already up on Walmart.com. There is no price yet, though. I have also been told that the K2 will be on store shelves by the end of the month.

I wonder how much Walmart will discount the K2? I also wonder if it was a good idea to have a display sample. The screens are easily damaged.

01:44 PM by wallcraft in E-Book General | News

As seen on teleread: Detroit newspaper to show up on Kindles and Plastic Logic Readers: E-books to benefit?. The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News have stopped home delivery except on Thursday and Friday. They are promising availability on the Kindle by the third quarter of 2009, and:

As part of the initiative, the Plastic Logic Reader will be offered for purchase or lease to subscribers of the Detroit dailies as an alternative to paper delivery. The Detroit newspapers will also be among the first publications to test the new eReader later this year.

The Plastic Logic Reader isn't scheduled for general availability until next year, so it isn't clear how many devices will be in the "test". Still, a subscription to these newspapers may be a way for Detroit residents to get early access to a Plastic Logic Reader.

If only EInk technology was a year or two further advanced. This is probably too little (or too expensive) too late for the US newspaper industry.

06:01 PM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

One MobileRead member came across this store a few weeks back, and and noticed that Horror Mall offered ebooks. Naturally several members went over to check it out, and it was soon noticed that the format selection as limited- only Kindle and password protected PDFs were offered.

I invited Shane Staley, the proprietor of Horror Mall, to join MobileRead to discuss their current policy. My goal was to encourage them to add more formats. Instead, Shane has decided to drop DRM entirely. Horror Mall will now offer ebooks in PDF, Epub, and Mobipocket.

About the Store
Horror Mall is a web retailer that specializes in the horror genre. It carries books and ebooks, as well as graphic novels, artwork, music, games, movies, and more.

03:38 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Robert from Astak just sent us an interesting note which alone induces uncontrollable drooling:

After being absolutely snubbed at CES 2009 to even get a category from CES (see my blog story today) CES has finally seen the light of eBooks and eBook Readers.

They are now working with me to get up a new area at CES for eBook Reader manufacturers, eBooks, freelancers, publishers, content providers!! CES 2010 is January 7 thru 10 in Las Vegas. Room prices are about 1/3 what they use to be and great deals are being had if you book early. I mean MOTELS are at $39.

IF you want to see the next generations of eBook Readers (including 8.1 and 9.7 inch) you will see them at CES. Astak has a 1,100 square foot booth at the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. OH... registration normally starts in July and is FREE!! You will likely see the first COLOR eBook Readers there also.

I would say it is a date you cannot miss.

01:06 PM by Timoleon in E-Book General | News

Today over on Engadget there is a blurb about the upcoming release on Amazon of the "Demi Digital Recipe Reader." Judging from the photos, the thing has a decent looking & sized color display as well as a nice form factor in general, and supposedly holds up to 2500 recipes. It has a USB connection, which I guess you use to manage your recipe database at www.keyindgredients.com.

http://www.mydemy.com/index.html

I was wondering...what are the chances that some clever soul (like an igorsk-type person ) could adapt this device to read books instead of recipes? How many books can you cook with 2500 recipes? I can imagine your quintessential housewife using this thing in the kitchen to brew together her latest dinner concoction for the family, and then sitting down at the table while it cooks and switching her Demi from "Chicken Con Carne Alfredo" to the latest Anne Rice vampire novel...

What do you think? Doable? Worth doing?

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

We know, you're busy. You'd like nothing more than to keep up with the witty kids at MobileRead live and in real-time but, it's tough. We understand. Here is our weekly round-up:

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• PocketBook 360° - new 5" ebook reader
• Picador's New Book Club on Twitter
• Project Gutenberg going Mobi?

E-Book Software - Calibre

• calibre 0.5.3 supports emailing books to the Kindle

E-Book Devices - Amazon Kindle

• Pragmatic Programmers announce Epub & Mobi support

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• Expansion of the Lounge - your vote counts (poll)