Wanted from OverDrive and rivals: Smarter software for library e-books

The new version of the OverDrive library app, for e-books and audiobooks, has just appeared for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and the iPad III.

Compared to past incarnations, 2.4.2 should delight many a patron.

Users of Apple’s IOS operating system will enjoy ‘more control over text justification, line spacing, page margins, and font selection.’

And the just-released Android variant from OverDrive even offers double- and triple-column options in landscape mode, and serif, nonserif and typewriter-like monospaced styles in both regular and bold.

Might such marvels from OverDrive on the way for my iPad soon?

I’ve long begged OverDrive for all-text bolding, and I thank the company for responding (as well as for trying harder recently with APIs, so checking out e-books on nonKindles will be less Rube Goldbergish in the future).

But the real point here is that we still need smarter library-related software for e-reading, with more features and fewer trade-offs. And I’m not merely talking about OverDrive, just one example. A few specifics:

In-book search functions

For now, in both the iPad and Android versions of OverDrive, I still don’t see an in-book search function, not even within the chapter-oriented navigation menu. Is it there? If not, when will OverDrive add it?

My sharp-eyed wife, a heavy user of OverDrive software, can’t find this function, either. So even if it is there, which I doubt, OverDrive still isn’t doing what it should.

By contrast, Amazon’s Kindle software for hand-held devices not only lets me search within a book, but do so rather efficiently—by showing a number of results at once, at least on my iPad. So does the iPad version of Blio, which works with for Baker & Taylor library systems.

All-text bolding–either directly or via font options

But then neither Blio nor the Kindle software has the wonderful bolding options that OverDrive has added to its Android version via the font variants and ideally will include on the iPad and other IOS devices, too.

Text to speech

At least the Kindle E Ink machines let you hear the books via text to speech when publishers allow this; same for Blio’s iPad version, as a paid option.

Why hasn’t OverDrive software caught up with TTS for platforms like the iPad and Android machines?

Shouldn’t libraries be especially respectful of the needs of the visually impaired?

Notes—not just book-marks

Kindle and Blio let you take notes. OverDrive’s own software doesn’t, at least not for Andorid and the iPad—even though schoolwork is among the major reasons why people use public libraries. No small number of recreational readers also want note-embedding capaiblities.

* * *

Perhaps the biggest fault of the most popular e-readering apps, for both retail use and libraries, is that they’re dumbed down compared to freeware and shareware alternatives that won’t work for DRM- or format-related reasons. Some of the best DRM-free programs such as Moon + Pro for Android will even let you zap lines between paragraphs while adding indentations. Not everyone wants to mess with Calibre-based customizations.

Vendors would argue, ‘But we’ve got to dumb down our products for the typical library patron.’ No, you don’t. Just include one menu choice, ‘Advanced features,’ and let that open up a whole range of customization options for serious e-book lovers. OverDrive could even offer a ‘revert to original settings’ for people who feared they would do irreparable damage.

What do you think, readers? As you see it, what are the most important features missing from library software for e-reading on mobile devices like my iPad? Care to share your priorities, not just for apps from OverDrive and rivals but also for third-party products that work with their servers (such as Bluefire Reader, Aldiko and Mantano in OverDrive’s case and various version of the Nook reader for hardware and software—plus 3M-related products and those for Baker & Taylor and the rest).

Detail: The OverDrive-supplied screenshot, picked up from the App Store, might be from an iPhone or Touch rather than an iPad. The software runs on all three kinds of devices.Similar Posts:

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Pocket Star relaunched by Simon & Schuster as dedicated ebook imprint

From the press release:

- Louise Burke, Executive Vice President and Publisher, announced today that
Pocket Books, America’s first paperback publisher, has re-launched its Pocket Star line as an eBook-only
imprint. As it did in print, Pocket Star will continue to feature bestselling and debut authors in popular
genres including women’s fiction, romance, thrillers, urban fantasy, and mystery.

Louise Burke said, “Similar to how mass market has served as a platform to develop future hardcover
authors, it is our mission to use Pocket Star’s new digital-only format to establish new voices in the
marketplace. An eBook imprint is flexible, cost-effective, cutting-edge and makes sense in today’s
marketplace. Under the Pocket Star banner we will publish original works including full-length novels
and novellas from some of our most popular authors.”

Pocket Star will follow the model of the successful eBook publication of WARLORD WANTS FOREVER, a
novella by #1 New York Times bestselling author Kresley Cole that has now sold almost 60,000 copies.
The imprint is launching with titles from its Spring and Summer lists, featuring authors V.C. Andrews,
Nathan Dodge, Cindy Gerard, Laura Griffin, Sabrina Jeffries, Carrie Lofty, and Michael R. Underwood,
among others. All Pocket Star eBooks will have the full support of Pocket Books’ creative and innovative
publishing resources. Reflecting a fluid marketplace, titles initially published under Pocket Star may
transition from eBook to print format.

Lauren McKenna, Executive Editor, has been named Editorial Director of Pocket Star and will oversee all
content. “Lauren has been instrumental in helping shape our vision for Pocket Star.” added Ms. Burke,
“She will be vital to the further development of this new imprint.”

To access the Pocket Star eBook Sampler, please click here or paste this URL into your browser:
http://www.simonandschuster.com/admin_assets/7080_PocketStar_eSAMPLER_1_.pdf

Pocket Books will remain home to mass market authors published in both print and electronic formats.

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Gale digitizes popular 20th century weekly – Liberty Magazine

There are very few magazines that are able to stand the test of time while so accurately capturing the moods and attitudes of an entire country. Liberty Magazine, a weekly that rivaled the Saturday Evening Post in its heyday, has found new life within the family of Gale Digital Collections. Gale today launched the Liberty Magazine Historical Archive, 1924-1950, a complete digitization of the entire run of Liberty Magazine, nearly 1,400 issues, with more than 17,000 fiction and non-fiction articles and thousands of advertisements all in a searchable, full-color format.

If the Stanley Cup playoffs have got you interested in ice hockey, you can read about its beginnings with “Hell on Skates – A look at Hockey, that mad, glad, man-smashing epidemic from Canada – Is it a Game or an Affliction?” (Feb. 17, 1934).

Or if the upcoming summer Olympics have you feeling less that athletically gifted, skim through a piece by Dr. Seuss, titled “Goofy Olympics” (June 4, 1932), and try your hands at Thumb Twiddling, the “newest Olympic game.” According to Dr. Seuss, “the majority of the enrolled competitors are Wall Street brokers, who have been kept in excellent practice ever since the crash of ’29.”

This unique archive houses treasures that will be useful for students and scholars of many disciplines as well as the general reader.

The historical archive of Liberty Magazine, long considered one of the greatest magazines in America, is now available in a digital format from Gale, a leading publisher of research and reference resources for libraries, schools and businesses and part of Cengage Learning. The Liberty Magazine Historical Archive, 1924-1950 is a complete digitization of the entire run of Liberty Magazine, nearly 1,400 issues, and contains over 17,000 fiction and non-fiction articles and thousands of advertisements all in a searchable, full-color format.

“This archive offers a rich perspective of the everyday lives of working and middle-class America, from the Roaring Twenties through the Great Depression and World War II,” said Jim Draper, vice president and publisher, Gale. “It will serve as an important resource for research on the 20th century, as primary sources for this time period are in high demand.”

Liberty Magazine, subtitled “A Weekly for Everybody,” was a general interest magazine founded in 1924 by Joseph Patterson, publisher of the New York Daily News, and Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune and often regarded as the world’s greatest publisher. The magazine’s high-quality and originality of art, stories and features led to an ongoing circulation of 3 million weekly. The magazine’s prominence attracted original contributions from the greatest artists, writers, celebrities and statesmen of the age, including Walt Disney, F. Scott Fitzgerald, H.G. Wells, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mahatma Ghandi, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Babe Ruth and many more.

Gale licensed the magazine’s content from the Liberty Library Corporation, owned by Robert Whiteman, who has collected and organized the content over many years.

“I’m excited to see this great piece of Americana find new life among Gale’s distinguished digital newspaper collections,” said Robert Whiteman. “With articles like Joe DiMaggio’s ‘How much is a Ballplayer Worth?,’ Liberty Magazine content is just as relevant today as it was 60 years ago.”

The Liberty Magazine archive includes content from almost all genres – human interest stories, mysteries, westerns, love stories, humor stories, biographies and autobiographies of the rich and powerful – both famous and infamous, and some of the greatest World I & II stories. Liberty Magazine charted the moods, attitudes, lifestyles, fads, and fortunes of America through its three most significant decades. With approximately 100,000 pages, this easy-to-access collection offers primary source material for American studies, political studies, social and cultural studies, business history, global studies and international relations.

The Liberty Magazine Historical Archive, 1924-1950 will join the family of illustrated weeklies that Gale has made available digitally, including The Picture Post Historical Archive, 1938-1957and The Listener Historical Archive, 1929-1991. It will be cross-searchable on the Gale NewsVault platform.

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Queen Victoria’s personal journals now available for public access, by Sue Polanka

London, 24 May 2012.   HM the Queen launches online resource of all Queen Victoria’s Journals

Her Majesty The Queen today launched a unique online resource that makes available all the personal journals of Queen Victoria.  The Bodleian Libraries working in partnership with The Royal Archives and information company ProQuest, have for the first time ever, made the private records of one of the world’s most influential public figures available for the public to access at www.queenvictoriasjournals.org.

The journals, which span Victoria’s lifetime and consist of 141 volumes numbering over 43,000 pages, have never been published in their entirety and previously were only accessible by appointment at the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. In addition to autograph diaries begun by the youthful Princess Victoria, there are edited versions from her later years, redacted and transcribed by the Queen’s daughter, Princess Beatrice.

Queen Victoria was a prolific writer and recorded her thoughts and experiences almost daily, starting with her first entry as a young girl of 13 and continuing until just weeks before her death in 1901. Her journals provide a fascinating insight into her life as Queen, giving an intimate first-person account of key events in her life and sixty-three years on the throne, from her coronation and her marriage to Prince Albert to the Diamond Jubilee of 1897.  The journals also trace important events in political and social history such as meetings with her Prime Ministers, The Great Exhibition and the Crimean and Boer Wars, shedding previously unrecorded moments of significance for world history.

Throughout her journals pride and passion for country are revealed:  ‘I really cannot say how proud I feel to be the Queen of such a Nation’ (28 June 1838). She writes about her travels across Britain detailing her views on the North-west, Black Country, Wales and Scotland, where on a visit to the Invertrossachs she writes: ‘The romance and wild loveliness … beloved Scotland the proudest, finest country in the world’ (2 Sept 1869).

The journals expose the challenges of duty, when she writes: ‘So much to do, so many boxes, letters, business…’(26 February 1862).  They also reveal the impact of world events when she reflects on the Franco-Prussian War: ‘I ended this dreadful year of bloody conflict in no cheerful mood’ (31 Dec 1870).

Finally, the journals give insight into many personal experiences showing an unexpectedly intimate side to Queen Victoria.  She writes of her early romance with Prince Albert:  ‘He clasped me in his arms, and we kissed each other again and again!’ (10 Feb 1840), and describes giving birth: ‘A boy was born, to great happiness to me.  Dr Snow administered ‘that blessed Chloroform’’ (the birth of Prince Leopold, 22 April 1853). Later in life she describes the loneliness of widowhood: ‘Here I sit lonely and desolate, who so need love and tenderness’ (10 March 1863).

All the journals are now available via this easy-to-use website and can be browsed and read online.  Pages from the journals can be searched by date or place of writing, and transcriptions of each page–searchable by keyword–are currently provided for the period up to 1840, with further releases planned throughout the Diamond Jubilee year. The site includes an interactive timeline and drawings by Queen Victoria, along with selections from her sketchbooks.  Finally, the site includes a number of essays about aspects of Queen Victoria’s life, authored by Sir Roy Strong, Laurence Goldman and Peter Ward-Jones among others.

Members of the public can also access the site to find out about key figures, events or places in history. In the year of our Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, users can even discover what Queen Victoria wrote about her own equivalent celebrations in 1897: ‘It was like a triumphal entry … one mass of beaming faces, and the cheers never ceased’ (21 June 1897).

The resource is available free of charge to all users in the United Kingdom and to the national libraries of Her Majesty’s Realms; users outside the UK can access the website until 30 June 2012. Thereafter, a specialized version for libraries will become available from ProQuest.

‘ProQuest is delighted to enable this content to be accessed and used by the global research community,’ said Rod Gauvin, ProQuest Senior Vice President. ‘It will be an important resource of primary materials for scholars worldwide, particularly those with an interest in British political and social history and those working on gender and autobiographical writing.’

Delivering the journals online has taken eight months to achieve and has involved specialist staff across the three organizations. Digital images of all journal volumes, along with drafts and illustrations, were created on site at the Royal Archives in the Round Tower at Windsor.

Dr. Sarah Thomas, Bodley’s Librarian said: ‘This initiative is a highly engaging and significant partnership across three organizations for the benefit of public and scholarly access to fascinating historical documents, and has been made possible with the support and generosity of Oxford benefactors The Polonsky Foundation and The Zvi and Ofra Meitar Family Fund.’

David Ryan, Assistant Keeper of the Royal Archives said: ‘The virtue of digital access is its ability to reveal the thoughts of Queen Victoria to millions around the world, providing them with a record of the important political and cultural events surrounding a monarch whose name defined an age.’

The Queen Victoria’s Journals website is mobile-compliant and can be viewed from all iPhones, Blackberry and Android phones.  The website is supported by a Facebook page at www.facebook.com/queenvictoriasjournals and Twitter at @QueenVictoriaRI .

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Bowker Research Shows Australia is a Global Leader in E-Book Adoption

From the press release by the Book Industry Study Group:

…The Global eBook Monitor finds that men are slightly more likely to have engaged with the digital book market than women. The 18-24 age group leads in use, just a little ahead of those aged 25-34. However, that may change shortly. ‘Although current e-book use tends to decrease with age, those most likely to come into the market in the next six months are somewhat older than current buyers,’ said Ms. Henry. ‘That’s the pattern we’re seeing in both the U.S. and the U.K.’

The Global eBook Monitor (GeM) tracks consumer purchases of e-books, and attitudes about e-books, in ten major world markets and aims to inform the publishing industry during a critical period of change. An annual study, over time it will create a unique view of market shifts in response to new digital formats. GeM currently operates in partnership with Pearson, Tata Consultancy Services, AT Kearney, and Book Industry Study Group (BISG). It employs online surveys hosted by Lightspeed Research or their affiliates in 9 countries, and by MTi in the US. The minimum number of respondents in each country was 1000; samples were designed and weighted to be representative of the adult (18+) population in terms of age, sex and region, but were by definition drawn from the online population only.

(Via BISG.org > Latest News.)

View the original article here

Etextbook study in a medical school

From an article in TechNewsWorld:

…

To get a better feel for the effects of e-textbooks on student productivity, the Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine’s Health Sciences launched an iPad pilot program and study.

With the aid of a US$10,000 Technology Improvement Express Award grant from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Middle Atlantic Region, Hofstra set out to determine the effectiveness of the iPad and apps as a tool for medical education.

The grant paid for 10 iPads and cases, along with textbook, productivity and medical applications. Ten out of the 40 first-year medical students and 10 out of approximately 30 faculty members involved in the Winter/Spring term received the devices.

In-person training and a support website were provided by the library staff. Some of the apps loaded on the iPads included textbooks not currently available via library subscriptions on various platforms; specific information-retrieval apps such as Pubmed on Tap, Micromedex and DynaMed; patient education apps; and a patient log app such as Drchrono, which served the students as a transportable Electronic Health Record.

“Students were eager to use iPad functionality as a collaborative tool in their case-based and self-directed learning, critical pathways in our integrated curriculum,” Debra Rand associate dean and director for health sciences libraries, told TechNewsWorld. “This grant-funded pilot study provided us with usage trends and the opportunity to obtain significant real-time feedback from students and faculty that will guide us in our future planning.”

The results of the 12-week pilot study were overwhelmingly positive from students and faculty alike. Students and faculty listed the iPad’s top strengths as portability, ease of accessing materials, and the note-taking and annotation capabilities. The top weaknesses noted by study participants were a “difficult to use” onscreen keyboard and the inability to use Flash content. Further, participants noted that the vendor feature allowing the purchase of chapters rather than an entire textbook was not useful.

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Check out new site: 100 Free Books For Your Kindle

There’s a new free ebook site in town – 100 Free Ebooks For Your Kindle.

According to the site it is updated several times a day.

Checking out the site I see that they are NOT a list of public domain books.

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The Future Of Publishing In Microcosm | The Increasing Internationalization Of Irish Publishing

Yesterday I was a little unfair to Easons for the pronouncements of the company’s spokesperson and the tone of the article on its ebook strategy which suggested the company was about to embark on a  mission to build a rival platform to B&N and Amazon, something that would surely have been a valiant, if doomed, effort.

When I thought about it for the rest of the day though it got me thinking about just how much ebooks are changing the profile of book publishing and bookselling and how quickly that is happening. For instance I am almost certain of two things about the Irish ebook market:

1) That foreign based platforms and retailers account for the majority of sales (Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Sony etc)

2) That like in the print world UK publishers (and their local imprints) publish the majority of ebooks bought in Ireland both in terms of units and revenue

I’m also close to certain about a third item, but without evidence I cannot prove it, here it goes anyway:

3) That US-based publishers sell more units (and I don’t doubt generate more revenue) from ebooks in Ireland than domestic Irish publishers do and are perhaps second only to the UK publishers (and their Irish imprints)

The first and the last points there are pretty radical statements. The first represents a huge change to the Irish experience of the book industry. Right now in print terms, most books bought by Irish consumers are sold to them by Irish retailers, Easons the principle one but others like Dubray, The Book Centres, Kenny’s, O’Mahony’s, Hughes & Hughes and many many others. That is despite the growth of physical sales through Amazon and the internationally owned (except for Dunnes Stores) supermarket chains. The wholesale and distribution businesses are also heavily Irish owned (with some British presence, increasingly on the Library supply side of things).

But the situation is dramatically different on the ebook side of the house. Easons is the only ebook retailer of note in the Irish context (others should shout out if I’ve unfairly missed them out). On the ebook distribution side, EpubDirect are the only (and admittedly impressive) crew actually making a go of that business and even they don’t make up for the fact that the majority of ebooks sold in Ireland will have been distributed through other channels.

You can argue the toss over why this is the case but several factors loom large:

1) Irish publishers have been slow to digitize their content (though they are getting there now)

2) Irish retailers have been slow to embrace the web (except for a few notable exceptions) and slower to embrace eCommerce (again a  few notable exceptions aside) and, finally, even slower again to embrace ebook retailing

3) The costs of developing ebook platforms, ebook retailing sites and ebook distribution systems are high, the Irish market is small, while it might have been possible to forecast the potential to gain customers outside of the island, it is a difficult result to actually achieve (which makes EpubDirect’s success all the more impressive) which mitigates against anyone investing in them

In terms of sales, while UK publishers and their Irish based imprints have come to dominate the book trade, significant numbers of books published by Irish houses continue to sell in print form and account for anything between 15-25% of the trade. With ebooks however, sales from publishers whose books would not traditionally have been made available in Irish territory is increasingly likely. For instance a US published book that does well but might not get a print deal outside of the US has as much (if not more) opportunity to sell in Ireland as any other ebook, the key is whether it is high in bestseller/popular lists or promoted by the retailer for some reason

The only ebook store that really seems to cater specifically for the Irish ebook market is Apple’s iTunes so when Irish publishers do start to make content available they have to fight against ALL the published content there is, not just all the domestically published content and all the UK published content as they do in the print world. Further the people making decisions about ebook merchandising are rarely based in Ireland as once they were (or indeed still are in the print world) and therefore open to some discussion or indeed charm (not inconsiderable amounts of which the Irish are possessed).  You see the problem.

The Irish publishing industry is fast running into what might be described as some fashion of an ‘Outside Context Problem‘ wherein the new arrivals on the scene are vastly superior in terms of abilities, vastly superior in terms of resources and possessed of superior technology. While some of the participants in the market might grasp the nature of the problem and respond as effectively as they can, the truth is that the disparity in attributes makes success unlikely and the new threat is very much an existential one.

Which sounds very dramatic but think of it this way. The Irish consumer market for trade books is around €150 million a year and 15 million units all in. Suppose only 30% shifts digital over time or €45 million and 4.5 million units. That would leave only €105 million up for grabs for Irish retailers in print form and 10.5 million units. The impact on stores, book publishers and other market participants would be pretty dramatic. There would be closures and job losses and the industry would be considerably weaker. And that’s just the impact on the retail side of the trade. The impact on the publishing side of the trade is unknowable, but there is little doubt that it would be significant and would probably be negative for the domestic publishers (see my earlier paragraph on why). The UK publishers will probably cede sales to US-based publishers, especially if US publishers seek to enforce global ebook rights deals on authors.

We are probably headed in the direction of 30% digital pretty quickly. If we even approach the kind of conversion to digital sales that seems to be happening in the US or even the UK, we can expect that 30% figure to be a reality by 2015. By then the Irish industry will have changed radically and will become almost unstoppably more international not just in terms of the books that sell her, but also in terms of those who sell them. US publishers will probably be the second biggest publishers of ebooks bought by Irish readers (if not the first having overtaken the UK).

There’s interesting evidence of this too from the other side of the fence. The AAP reported that ‘total eBook net sales revenue [for US publisher] for 2011 was $21.5 million, a gain of 332.6% over 2010; this represents 3.4 million eBook units sold in 2011, up 303.3%.’

Frustratingly the APP did not share details for Ireland (those were contained in the full report but not as a single territory, rather as part of a larger group of English language territories) so we don’t know how well those publishers are doing here. Still, we can assume that they did well relative to the size of the market.

What’s more, Ireland and the story of change in the publishing industry really acts as a microcosm for the rest of the English language publishing industry (indeed it acts as a microcosm for any small market which shares a language with a much larger market be it French or German or Spanish or Chinese).

In some ways the whole industry is encountering the ‘Outside Context Problem’ I mentioned earlier as software and technology firms move into a traditionally physical business, but for larger companies, responding can be easier because of their scale and their resources make for a wider context as it were. It’s the small markets where the combination of these larger players and the changes in technology make for such a difficult problem.

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GPO Partners With Barnes and Noble to Sell Federal eBooks

From the GPO:

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) has signed an agreement with Barnes & Noble to sell Federal eBooks. Titles are available in eBook format for Barnes & Noble’s Nook eReader.

GPO works with Federal agencies to produce their publications, books, and reports in print and digital formats, including eBook formats. Approximately 30 eBook titles are available including popular titles like the Public Papers of the President-Barack Obama, Deep Water: The Gulf Oil Disaster And The Future Of Offshore Drilling (the BP Oil Spill Commission Report), the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, and the newly released Basic Guide to Exporting from the Department of Commerce. GPO makes eBooks available in partnership with Google’s eBookstore, OverDrive, Ingram, Zinio, and other online vendors.

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OverDrive Says Developer APIs Will Become Available in July

OverDrive APIs that were supposed to launch in April are now set to become available in July.

From the OverDrive Digital Library Blog:

OverDrive’s product and development teams have been hard at work developing a suite of APIs (application programming interfaces) that will enable approved vendors to deeply integrate OverDrive-hosted catalogs and nearly 1 million digital titles with their apps and platforms. In July, we’ll launch the OverDrive Developer Portal along with the first set of OverDrive APIs.

As part of the development process, we’ve been working with a group of booksellers, publishers, school, library, discovery platform and mobile technology partners to collect and define integration specifications in order to ensure that OverDrive APIs meet industry standards and support the expressed needs of vendors and developers from around the world.

The OverDrive Developer Portal will serve as the online gateway for developers to gain secure access to OverDrive APIs. To date, dozens of OverDrive partners—including ILS vendors, mobile app makers, library partners and others—have expressed interest in the new tools. Via the Developer Portal, interested vendors can apply for access. Once approved, they’ll find software, documentation, test scripts, and technical support information to enable rich integration with OverDrive digital content.

The initial group of OverDrive APIs will include:

Metadata API: Access catalog information such as title, author, description and title samples.Availability API: Provides unique title-availability information from library holdings including number of units or copies, units available for lending, number of copies on hold, etc.Search API: Allows a variety of third-party platforms and applications to search OverDrive digital collections.

OverDrive is completing R&D and pilot testing of OverDrive APIs with select booksellers, library vendors, and discovery platforms. To receive notification when access to the OverDrive API Developer Portal becomes available, please email a request to API-update@overdrive.com.

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California Historical Society Releases Free eBook Capturing Innovation and Inspiration of Golden Gate Bridge

As hundreds of thousands of admirers of the Golden Gate Bridge begin to converge on the San Francisco Bay area to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the world-renowned icon, the California Historical Society is releasing its first multimedia eBook for iPads to capture the rich history and amazing story of the Bridge through a selection of rarely seen artwork, photographs, video, memorabilia, stories, images and much more.

Published by The California Historical Society and produced by Sol Editions and Wild Blue Studios, the eBook was funded through a grant provided by UnitedHealthcare.The free iPad eBook, “A Wild Flight of the Imagination: The Story of the Golden Gate Bridge,” can be downloaded through the California Historical Society’s new, dynamic and image-rich website at www.californiahistoricalsociety.org. The app is also available on Apple’s iTunes® App Store as a free download under the name “GG Bridge”.

“The story of the Golden Gate Bridge is a remarkable one, captivating millions of people around the world with its themes of promise, innovation, perseverance and artistic inspiration,” said Dr. Anthea Hartig, Executive Director of the California Historical Society. “This eBook will help share that story and bring the amazing history of this California icon to life in an interactive way.”

The eBook’s title is drawn from the exhibition of the same name currently on view at the California Historical Society galleries. The phrase is borrowed from a 1921 promotional prospectus for the Golden Gate Bridge in which the authors, chief engineer for the bridge Joseph Strauss and San Francisco city engineer M.M. O’Shaughnessy, used inspirational language to set a tone for the enormously ambitious engineering feat.

The interactive multimedia app extends the reach of the California Historical Society’s exhibition and makes over 350 historic objects, including dozens of photographs, letters, journals, reports and other memorabilia from its own holdings and 19 other collections available to readers of all ages.

Highlights include photographs by Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, paintings by Maynard Dixon, Ray Strong, and Chesley Bonestell, and architectural drawings by Irving F. Morrow and John Eberson, the two architects who worked on the bridge design. Video highlights include the heroic and poignant voices of men who built the bridge and an opening music selection from composer Rob Kapilow’s “Chrysopylae,” A Golden Gate Opus, written with contributions from sound designer Fred Newman.

Readers of all ages can also watch a short film of Chief Engineer Strauss speaking to a reporter on the bridge during construction, examine the family scrapbook of Fred Dummatzen, one of the workers who tragically lost his life when a scaffold collapsed, and even view some of the proposed bridge color schemes that were ultimately rejected.

“This eBook will connect people around the world with this incredible icon that has become a symbol of California’s innovative spirit,” said Dan Rosenthal, CEO, UnitedHealthcare of Northern California. “UnitedHealthcare is grateful for the opportunity to partner with the California Historical Society to help celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge and share its history through this unique multimedia forum.”

Visitors can experience the Golden Gate Bridge exhibition in person at the California Historical Society (CHS) gallery located at 678 Mission Street in San Francisco through October 14, 2012. Regular hours for public tours are Tuesday through Sunday from noon to 5 pm. Operating hours will be extended during the 75th Anniversary celebrations, and the gallery will be open to the public May 25-28 from 10 am to 5 pm. Admission is free with a suggested donation of $5 per person.

On Friday, May 25 at 6 pm, a special event will be held at CHS, Golden Gate Bridge: Icon, Metaphor, Inspiration, an evening discussion featuring John King, urban architecture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. The California Historical Society’s Ten Lions bookstore is also featuring Golden Gate Bridge souvenirs, memorabilia, books, postcards and other items for sale to visitors.

“This exciting new format allows us to bring the richness of our historic collections to a much larger audience, including teachers and students, and will enable many more people around the world to share in the Golden Gate’s 75th Anniversary, even if they cannot be here in person,” Hartig said.

The California Historical Society is also proud to be a partner in 75 Tributes to the Bridge, a community program commemorating the 75thAnniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge, organized by The Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. Learn more at www.goldengatebridge75.org.

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eBooks: IFLA Releases Background Paper on e-Lending

From the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) Announcement:

As part of its work on the 2011-2012 Key Initiatives, the IFLA Governing Board appointed a working group to draft a background paper on digital lending. At its April meeting the IFLA Governing Board endorsed this paper, and we are now pleased to present a version for download.

The paper attempts to:

Provide an overview of the issues relating to eBooks in libraries;Summarise the current positions of publishers in both the scholarly publishing and trade publishing sectors;Summarise the differences in the way that academic/research libraries and public libraries address the issue of digital collections;Address the legal context for eLending and library principles that must be upheld in any suitable models;Provide a detailed legal analysis of e-Lending

The e-Lending environment is changing rapidly at this point in time, and the paper will be reassessed in the coming months in light of any significant developments. Revisions of the paper may take place in light of any assessment.

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The Eagle and the Snake – a plot-interactive ebook

Published by Diversion Books and available on Amazon, B&N, iTunes and Kobo this is a new type of ebook.  From the website:

“Unconventional and innovative, this is the future of e-publishing here and now—a thriller you not only read, but interact with. Pretty cool and completely fascinating. Attention everyone with an e-reader, don’t miss W. Craig Reed’sThe Eagle and the Snake.” —Steve Berry, bestselling author of The Columbus Affair

In The Eagle and the Snake, NCIS agent Jon Shay is the half-Chinese illegitimate son of a politician. He’s also a former Navy SEAL working with operators from Team Six to track down an Iraqi terrorist with a stolen bio-weapon. With the help of an alluring Russian bio-scientist, Jon and his team soon learn that an ancient sect is pulling the strings, and they plan to create a genetic weapon that could alter the course of human history.

The Eagle and the Snake is the first plot-interactive ebook to feature selectable chapters, alternate endings and information links. Included is an enhanced multimedia non-fiction Afterword that explores several topics introduced in the novel, such as Navy SEAL training and tactics, Soviet and Iraqi secret bio-weapons programs and the genetic science behind “hard-wired” personalities.

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Electric Literature launches online literary magazine – Recommended Reading

 From the website.  I love the logo so I’m reprinting it bigger than usual.  Stories are available on the website or in ePub form for free, or in Kindle format for $1.

GREAT AUTHORS INSPIRE US. But what about the stories that inspire them? Recommended Reading, a magazine by Electric Literature, publishes one story a week, each chosen by today’s best authors or editors.

Recommended Reading is released on a four week curation cycle: beginning with a story chosen by Electric Literature, followed by excerpt from an indie press, then an author recommendation, and finally a selection from a magazine’s archive. Each issue includes an editor’s note written by that week’s partner, introducing you to the work and their mission.

In this age of distraction, we’re uncovering writing that’s worth slowing down and spending some time with. And in doing so, we’ll giving great writers, literary magazines, and independent presses the recognition (and readership) they deserve.

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Jailbreaking DMCA exemption likely to be renewed

Wired’s Threat Level blog has some coverage of the latest hearing in the current round of U.S. Copyright Office DMCA exemption hearings. Topics argued today included the iPhone jailbreaking exception, cracking CSS on DVDs, cracking the protections on video game consoles,

Prospects look poor for cracking video game consoles (sadly for PlayStation hacker George Hotz), but good for the jailbreaking exemption. Apple, which argued last time around that jailbreaking would destroy its business model and open cell phone towers to sabotage, was nowhere to be found at this meeting after its business model turned out to remain notably intact over the last three years and cell phone towers went mysteriously unsabotaged. It seems the company has already conceded this fight.

There was also some talk of broadening the jailbreaking exemption to cover tablets and e-readers. However, David Carson, the Copyright Office’s General Counsel, expressed concern that allowing jailbreaking of e-readers could jeopardize copyrighted e-book content. “There are some very important copyright concerns that might be militating against it,” he said.

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Worth Noting: Daisy’s War by Shayne Parkinson

I, my wife, and most people who have read the Promises to Keep quartet of ebooks are big fans of indie author Shayne Parkinson. For those of you unfamiliar with the quartet, I reviewed the books 2 years ago in On Books: The Promises to Keep Quartet and again in On Books: Promises to Keep are Promises Kept, and have been waiting for the next book in the series to arrive. My wife and I are still recommending these books to anyone who asks for an excellent read.

In the past week or so, we were wondering if Shayne Parkinson had finally released the next volume in the series. We hadn’t heard anything and it hadn’t crossed my mind to check Smashwords, when, ‘lo and behold, I received an e-mail from Shayne advising me that Daisy’s War, the latest book in the series has been published and is now available at Smashwords.

I immediately went to Smashwords and downloaded the fifth book in the series. I began reading it within hours. I expected Daisy’s War to be of the same exceedingly high quality as the first four books in the series (all 5 or 5+ stars) and am not disappointed. I couldn’t put the book down and so finished it within a couple of days.

Daisy’s War picks up where the series left off, the early decades of the 20th century. Here is the description from Smashwords:

In 1914, Daisy lives in the quiet New Zealand valley where her family has farmed for generations. Her world seems a warm and safe one. But the Great War is casting its long shadow over New Zealand. Daisy watches in growing fear as more and more of the men leave to fight in Europe, and the War strikes ever closer to the heart of her family.

The brief description doesn’t do justice to the book. The book is a reflection on World War I and its impact on New Zealand, a far-flung outpost of the British Empire, as seen through the eyes of a child who almost understands the whats and whys of war but can’t quite grasp them. Daisy’s dreams take a back seat to the impact of World War I on her extended family and how the need for soldiers ultimately leads to conscription, beginning with single young men but rapidly moving to include married men with children, including Daisy’s father.

The story seems incomplete. We tangentially are given glimpses into the war’s effect on the adults. Because of how the prior books were written, I think Daisy’s War should have run with both major and minor story lines, the major being the tale we are given and the minor a more in-depth look at the effect on the adults. For example, Daisy’s Uncle Alf returns from the battlefields a changed man. We are briefly given a glimpse into why and we know that the children want to avoid him, but we are not given more insight into the change in family dynamics. Perhaps this broader look at intra- and interfamily dynamics is a tale that will be picked up in the next book.

Regardless, this is the outstanding book that I had been waiting for. The only thing missing from the book is an explanation of the character relationships at the beginning, before the Prologue, that a reader can either review to refresh one’s memory or ignore. It has been 2 years since I last read this series and at first it was difficult to figure out who the characters are and their relationships to each other. The first book in the series begins with Amy’s story and the child she had out of wedlock that she had to give up for adoption. In Daisy’s War, we read, for example, of ‘Aunt Sarah’ and ‘Granny,’ and it took me some time to recall that these are the out-of-wedlock daughter and Amy, respectively. Other relationships also took some time but did come back. For example, who was Grandma (as opposed to Granny)?

This is a gripe I have with many authors who write continuing series. It is not so bad when in every book in a series the characters remain the same, just the circumstances change. But in a series like this where there is a constant generational change and an expansion of the families and a long time between books, it should not be assumed that readers will remember what happened in a book that was released more than 2 years ago or recall who married whom and begat whom who themselves went on to marry and beget. In that interim, I have read thousands of manuscript pages for work and hundreds of books for pleasure; some refreshing is necessary.

In this case, the lack of the information poses another problem: The book doesn’t work well as a standalone book. You need to have read the previous books in the series to understand the importance of what is happening. Although that is good from a series sense, it is bad from the reader sense. A reader who picks up this book first, not having read the previous entries in the series, will not walk away singing the high praises the books deserve. Instead, they will be disappointed because much of the impact of book relies on knowing the relationships.

Regardless, as with the first four books in the series, Daisy’s War is exceptionally well-written. If you have read and enjoyed the first books in the series, then this is a must read for you. The book is reasonably priced at $2.99 and is clearly a 5-star read.

If you haven’t read Shayne Parkinson’s books, begin with Sentence of Marriage, the first in the series, which is free at Smashwords. If you  like historical fiction and/or family sagas, you are likely to find this a captivating series.

(Via An American Editor.)

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Copyright Office considers DVD-cracking DMCA exemptions

I mentioned yesterday that as part of the Copyright Office’s 3-year DMCA exemption hearings, the office would hear arguments on whether to permit cracking the CSS encryption on DVDs. Although it doesn’t directly have anything to do with e-books, I found this coverage by Ars Technica/Wired of the CSS issue interesting enough to bring up in a general DRM-related sense.

As with the last go-round, one of the proposals was to allow filmmakers and other clip-users to decrypt DVDs so as to excerpt clips for use in films and for other fair uses. This use was authorized last time, but since the proposals have to be re-argued every three years it is being requested again. However, a related proposal, made for the first time, aims to allow the general public to be authorized to copy their DVDs.

Needless to say, the movie studios were not pleased:

Clarissa Weirick, the general counsel of Warner Brothers Home Entertainment, testified against all the decryption measures.

"If we didn’t have access controls, there might be the same kind of mass piracy we’ve seen with unprotected music," Weirick said about the copying of DVDs, a proposal put forth by digital rights group Public Knowledge, which did not attend the hearing.

Do they seriously think that forbidding cracking the DRM under the law is going to deter piracy?

There are already tools available now that are completely legal in their places of origin (for example, Handbrake and VLC from France) that allow the unauthorized ripping or viewing of DVDs. And once they’re downloaded, there’s no way for law-enforcement to know who’s breaking DRM behind their own closed doors, unless they get caught as a result of uploading pirated content. That horse is already out of the barn. It’s futile—it’s downright stupid—to try to keep that barn door locked. How can movie piracy possibly get any more “massive” than it already is right now?

And then there’s this gem:

[Studio representatives] said that there is no need to grant the public the right to make copies of their DVDs because the studios are streaming and selling movies online now, and that the public does not own the movies they buy on DVDs. They own the license to play it on a DVD, they argued.

I’m really sick of being told I don’t “own” the media I buy—whether that media is DVDs or e-books. Yes, I know I don’t “own” it in the sense of owning the rights to give people copies or display it in public. We’ve never had those rights, even when media were made available in easily-copyable analog formats. But we still had the fair use rights to make backup copies or make other transformative, non-piratical uses. That was how fair use worked: we were understood to have certain legal rights as regarded the content we bought.

Now, all of a sudden, since media are digital and corporations can be more restrictive (thanks to the laws they bought against breaking DRM), we don’t “own” our media, we’re just buying the rights to use them in the ways the company says we can, which are significantly more restrictive than fair use precedent allows?

Of course they want to make us have to pay for the same piece of film multiple times. Why should they let us rip a movie for free, as we’d be legally able to do without the DMCA, and indeed as we are able to do for unencrypted CDs, when they can sell us a separate digital download of it and make more money? This is a complete joke, and if it weren’t that the laws tend to be interpreted to the benefit of corporations with lots of money rather than consumers, it would never have survived this long.

Since big corporate money’s voices tend to speak louder than consumers’, I’m not holding my breath for those broader legal exemptions to be granted this year—though I expect any that already have been will remain in effect if argued for again. It will probably be a while before the Copyright Office can be convinced to take consumers’ side in this matter. Which is a pity. But given that it’s unlikely anybody will ever find out that a random person is breaking DRM in the privacy of his own home, it may not mean much either way.

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If publishers cannot control e-book retail prices, how should they set their own?

On the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum has a rebuttal to a number of recent posts about e-book production costs and price, including the post by Mathew Ingram that I covered here. Though the article is replete with quotes and counter-arguments, but the central thrust seems to be that publishers ought to be able to charge what they want to—but they really should be wanting to charge less.

At base, copyright holders have the right to ask what they want to get for their work (which is why they were so concerned about Amazon selling ebooks at a loss). If they set the price too high, nobody will buy the book and they will lose money. If they set the price too low, lots of people might buy it, but they will still lose money.

Though I may be oversimplifying his argument, the problem with this is that it really isn’t how the market works. Copyright holders have the right to ask what they want to be paid wholesale for each copy of the book. What happens to the book after it’s bought and paid for by the distributor shouldn’t be any of their concern. Amazon could sell each e-book for a thousand dollars or pay people $10 to read it. (Or at least that was the case until the Justice Department noted as part of its settlement that they need to be making a profit on a given publisher’s works as a whole.)

On a related note, the ever-interesting Mike Shatzkin’s latest column also has to do with e-book pricing. Shatzkin mentions that, in pre-Amazon days, a lot of publishers would sell copies of their books at full retail price via mail-order to people who wanted them and couldn’t find them anywhere else.

He brings this up to note why the idea that publishers should stop printing cover price on books so bookstores could be free to charge more, brought up by American Booksellers Association president Bernie Rath in the ‘90s wouldn’t have worked—if publishers kept selling books at their own retail price, consumers would soon have found out what stores were “ripping them off” by charging more. (This hasn’t stopped others, such as Ed Handyside of UK publisher Myrmidon Books, from proposing a similar idea more recently, however.)

The point is to note how tricky the question of publishers selling direct to retailers is now. Certainly, they can do it. They can do it even better than they ever could before Amazon, thanks to the Internet, especially if what they’re selling are electronic books. The problem is that the question of pricing backs them into a corner. In an agency-less market, if the publishers sell at full retail price, Amazon can undersell them.

But if the publisher discounts, they face another problem. Amazon (and every other retailer) would say, with ample justification, “the retail price my discount and margin should be based on is the price you sell it for.” If “publisher’s retail price” means anything, it must mean that! Just like when publishers didn’t sell direct in the all-print world before online happened, the price the publisher says is the retail price is what intermediaries would expect to see them sell the book for.

The only way a publisher could get away with discounting their own e-book prices in such a situation, Shatzkin posits, is when, like Baen or for that matter Pottermore, they don’t have to sell through any other stores but their own.

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Gigaom looks at why Plastic Logic failed

Good article in yesterday’s Gigaom about the failure of Plastic Logic.  So typical of start-ups, they had a great technology but were never able to execute.  I remember being blown away by a demo of the product when it was first shown to the public.  Putting a display on plastic made it pretty well indestructible. Here are a few snippets:

On the surface, Plastic Logic had it all. When the British company first emerged 12 years ago, it looked as if it could become a technology giant: after all, it was spun out of one of the world’s great universities, staffed by amazing engineers, and owned a killer product — electronic displays that could be printed on plastic as thin as a credit card.

…

Probably Plastic Logic’s biggest — and most obvious — mistake was in its inability to execute fast enough. The technology was there, sure, but the company struggled to turn it into any sort of viable product in time. It opened its first factory fabrication plant in 2003, but still had no product by the time Amazon’s Kindle first emerged at the end of 2007.

…

All that time that the company had spent building a product, and yet it had ignored what turned out to be its biggest threat: a screen that was not necessarily a better e-reader, but that sidestepped the entire proposition by being a vastly more powerful device.

These are all lessons that the company has learned the hardest way. But it’s worth remembering, whoever you are: no matter how great your technology — and make no bones about it, Plastic Logic does have a remarkable breakthrough technology there — it has to be available at the right time and at the right price.

Much more in the article.

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Amazon solicits ads for Kindle Fire welcome screen, to the tune of $600,000

Might an ad-supported Kindle Fire be in the offing? Ad Age reports that Amazon has been soliciting ads to appear on the Fire’s welcome screen, according to an executive at an agency Amazon pitched. The ad packages would start at $600,000 and include both Kindle Fire and Kindle with Special Offers ads, going up to $1 million for additional ad perks.

The current Kindle Fire has no advertcising, but Amazon has been reported to have a new model of the tablet in the offing for July and may be looking to start the program then. An interesting note is that Amazon reportedly “hasn’t decided” whether it will put ads only on a new special-offers version of the Fire, or introduce them to already-existing devices.

As a result, the ad executives Ad Age spoke to had both declined to participate, since Amazon wasn’t even able to tell them how many devices would comprise the audience—and they were also concerned that their ads popping up on devices that didn’t have ads when people bought them could be a turn-off.

Of course, Amazon has proven remarkably savvy so far at getting people to accept ads on their devices, and indeed the ad-supported Kindles have been Amazon’s best-selling products ever. Special Offers coming to future Kindle Fires is practically a no-brainer. As for already-sold ones, I rather suspect that if Amazon did introduce advertising to pre-existing Fires it would be on an opt-in basis, perhaps offering a $30 (or whatever the price difference is) Amazon gift card in exchange for allowing the company to advertise to you—the reverse of the current system for de-advertising existing Kindles with Special Offers. The company hasn’t offered anything like this to people who bought originally-ad-free Kindles that I know of, but the Fire has been such a popular tablet, with so many more uses than the e-ink readers, that I can see how it might be tempting.

I suspect that if Amazon does it this way, and is able to demonstrate a ready audience, ad agencies won’t stay on the fence for long. And if it makes the Kindle Fire even cheaper, bringing tablets into reach of people who couldn’t afford them before, it could be as good a thing as the ads are for the e-ink readers.

(Found via our sister blog, Gadgetell; also via PaidContent.)

View the original article here

Simon & Schuster settles price-fixing class-action lawsuit

CNet reports that Simon & Schuster, who has already settled its antitrust dispute with the Department of Justice, has joined HarperCollins and Hachette in settling the price-fixing class-action lawsuit by 29 states overseen by judge Denise Cote (who issued a ruling a couple of days ago denying the publishers’ and Apple’s motion to dismiss). The terms of the settlement have not yet been announced.

This leaves the remaining defendants the same in both legal actions: hold-outs Macmillan, Penguin, and Apple. It seems doubtful any of them will be inclined to settle.

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IDPF proposes less-restrictive DRM standard

Here’s an interesting post from the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), the people responsible for the EPUB format. Bill Rosenblatt of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies lays out a proposal for a “lightweight DRM” standard for EPUB that would be more permissive than some of the “heavyweight” DRM systems currently in use. The idea is to prevent “oversharing” such as peer-to-peer while allowing users to make most of the sorts of uses they take for granted with physical books.

As Rosenblatt explains, the idea is not to be uncrackable—he specifically admits that “we expect that a lightweight DRM (in reality, any DRM) will be cracked, and we are relying on anticircumvention law for some level of crack protection.” The idea is to be just tough enough to be considered an “effective technical protection measure” that qualifies for protection under such laws, while still allowing readers to make freer use of the digital products they purchase. The IPDF is taking comments on the proposal through June 8th.

The paidContent article where I found it lists some specific bullet points of the idea, such as watermarking and modification limits, but there’s really not too much point in going into those here. It’s sufficient for my purposes to say that the restrictiveness is somewhere between what most e-book stores use now and none at all. Rosenblatt points to iTunes’s FairPlay DRM as an example of the sort of doesn’t-get-in-your-way user experience he’s going for. And we’ve already had other DRMs, such as eReader’s, that share the element Rosenblatt suggests of a password (such as your credit card number) that you wouldn’t want to share widely.

The problem I see with this idea is, who exactly is going to use it? Rosenblatt points to vendor lock-in as one of the problems with current DRM implementations, but from the point of view of the vendors (who are the ones who actually decide what DRM they use) that’s a feature—exactly the opposite of a problem. And up to now, copyright holders have seen restrictiveness of DRM as a feature as well. Who’s going to make them move to something lighter?

For that matter, when considering those publishers who are inclined to move to something lighter, this could actually be counterproductive for those of us who don’t like DRM at all. The Harry Potter series, some of the most popular children’s books of the last twenty years, are being sold DRM-free. Tor has also announced it is going DRM-free, Other publishers may soon follow. I’d a lot rather have that than some halfway point that’s still needlessly restrictive.

And the reliance on anti-circumvention laws for protection is something that’s always puzzled me. I mean, sure, they’ll criminalize making the tools to break it—but that’s never stopped anyone, especially if that anyone lives in a country where DRM-cracking isn’t illegal to begin with. There are plenty of tools for breaking most kinds of DRM already out there.

And that being the case, if I were the sort of person who was inclined to use a DRM-cracker to break e-book DRM, I could crack all the e-books I wanted to in the privacy of my own home without anyone ever knowing, unless I were foolish enough to brag on the Internet about how I broke the DRM. (Which is exactly why, if I ever theoretically did break e-book DRM, I would never admit to it in public!) Who exactly are those laws protecting?

We don’t need a “kinder, gentler DRM”. It would only serve as a crutch to let media companies cling longer to the illusion that DRM is helpful. We can already crack DRM on e-books—or bypass it by scanning paper books in. DRM is no barrier to the tech-savvy, and only hinders the non tech-savvy. It’s only a needless frustration. Admit it and move on.

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Can unglue.it succeed? Quirky initial selections raise questions

I think unglue.it is a great idea, but after seeing their first selections I must admit that I’m a bit skeptical about their success.  The thing that will make unglue.it work is selecting books that readers want to read and that are unavailable in any form.  Let’s take a look at their initial selections:

Riverwatch, by Joseph Nassis: this book is available from Amazon in hardback for $19.95 and in Kindle format for $3.99.  Why on earth would I pledge money to get an unglued copy when I can buy it for only $4?

6-321, by Michael Laser: again, this is available new on Amazon for $13 and used for $0.01.  No ebook version is available, but is is obscure enough that I couldn’t really care.

Love Like Gumbo, by Nancy Rawles: available in new paperback for $4.75 from Amazon and used for $0.01. Must admit I’ve never heard of it.

Budding Reader Book Set 1: Cat, by Melinda Thompson: this is available from Amazon in Kindle format for $9.99 and has been optimized, so the blurb says, for larger screens.  No reason to pledge on this one.

Oral Literature in Africa, by Ruth H. Finnegan: this is perhaps the most interesting of the lot.  Available from Amazon, used, for $20 in paperback and $36 in hardback.  I’d probably buy the paperback before I pledged any money.

Unglue.it’s initial selections are, to me, rather quirky and are all available for Amazon at reasonable prices. Two of them are even in Kindle editions! Admitedly some of these books are from used book dealers, but if I want one of these I can get it with one click of my mouse – and at a reasonable price, even including shipping.  Why should I pledge money for something like this? Maybe I’m missing something about the concept as a whole, but it doesn’t seem to me that unglue.it is bringing much to the table as yet.

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UMass Digitizes Old Portuguese-American Newspapers

From South Coast Today:

The Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives at the Claire T. Carney Library and the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture of the UMass Dartmouth announce the addition of 14 Portuguese-language newspapers published in California between 1885 and 1940 to its Portuguese-American Digital Newspaper Collections.

[Clip]

The unique collection, which includes some of the earliest known Portuguese-language newspapers in the United States, such as O Progresso Californiense, first published in July of 1885, may be accessed through the Internet for free and without a password at http://lib.umassd.edu/archives/paa/PADigitalNewsColl.html. Each issue of the newspapers in the collection may be browsed in its entirety or searched by keyword. The site also offers the possibility of searching across all issues of the same paper or across all newspapers in the collection.

[Clip]

The digitization is the second venture undertaken by the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives under its Portuguese-American Newspaper Digitization Project. The first was the Diário de Notícias, a daily newspaper published in New Bedford between 1919 and 1973.

Read the Complete Article

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calibre 0.8.52 released

New Features

EPUB Input: When setting the cover for a book that identifies its cover image, but not the html wrapper around the cover, try to detect and remove that wrapper automatically.When deleting books of a specific format, show the number of books with each format availableLinux install: No longer create MAN pages as all utilities have more comprehensive command line –help anywayAdd a tweak Preferences->Tweaks to control the default choice of format for the Tweak Book featureConversion: Allow setting negative page margins. A negative page margin means that calibre will not specify any page margin in the output document (for formats that support this)Tweak book: Fix handling of covers when tweaking KF8 booksKF8 Output: Handle input documents with out of sequence ToC entries. Note that currently section jumping in the KF8 output produced by calibre for such files does not work.Edit metadata dialog: Fix the edit values button for custom tag-like columns showing a unneeded warning about changed valuesEPUB Output: Be a little more conservative when removing tags. Only remove them if they have actual forms inside.EPUB Input: Correctly update the Cover entry in the ToC even when the entry has a fragment reference.Update ImagMagick DLLs in all calibre binary builds to fix security vulnerabilities in ImageMagickAdvanced search dialog: Fix equals and regex matching not being applied for custom column searches.RTF Input: Handle old RTF files that have commands without braces.Get Books: Diesel, fix results not showing when only a single match is foundGet Books: Fix DRM status indicators for Kobo and Diesel stores. Fix smashwords not returning results.Fix regression in 0.8.51 that broke viewing of LIT and some EPUB files

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Emily Books: a new indie online ebook store

From Paper Magazine:

In the era of e-books, what will happen to the indie bookstore? Will the algorithms at virtual big-boxes decide what we read? And if so, will important, life-changing books go undiscovered? This was a future that Emily Gould and Ruth Curry could not bear to live with. 

Gould and Curry are the sorts of friends who are perpetually raving about novels, exchanging them, borrowing them back. And now, they are sharing them through what may be the world’s first independent online store devoted to the e-book, Emily Books. “It’s crazy that no one else is doing this,” says Gould. 

Rather than sell every title under the sun, the site adds one per month in a sort of virtual book club-meets-college syllabus. Gould, a former Gawker blogger-turned-essayist (And the Heart Says Whatever) met Curry in 2005 when they were both working at a publishing house. Last summer they decided to develop the store as a sustainable publishing solution: by cutting out the conglomerates (Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Apple), they pay authors and publishers more per sale. 

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Shakespeare, plagarism, textbooks and English majors

I received an alumni newsletter today from my alma mater detailing an overhaul they recently made to the curriculum for English majors. In my day (1996-2000) the program was set up in such a way as to expose students to major works from as many time periods as possible. Following the standard first-year survey course, there were a dozen other categories and you had to choose amongst the offerings so that you got a certain number from various groupings. For instance, one grouping contained courses in Old English, Shakespeare and the Restoration and you had to take two of the three. The only two compulsories were English 110 (the survey course) and a third-year seminar in literary theory. It was assumed that you could write an academic essay. Beyond a handout on plagiarism and proper use of MLA citation, which was included in every course syllabus, no guidelines were offered. If you struggled, the student centre had tutors who could help you.

The new program has some significant changes. The year 1 offering is now a more remedial-sounding writing and critical theory workshop which seems to cover the plagiarism/academic writing stuff, a bit of what we did in 3rd year literary theory,  and an overview of the major literary forms, with examples of each. Then the venerable survey course based upon the Norton Anthology comes in year 2. And in the upper years, students get to explore the more in-depth and specialized seminar courses based around a variety of topics and time periods. With literary theory thus covered back in the glory days of year 1, the mandatory upper-level seminar is now a new course where the class will study one major text, in great detail, for an entire term.I have mixed feelings about these changes. I went to university back in the days before on-line plagiarism checkers and Wikipedia and cell phones that can store the entire Harvard Classics and still have space left over. It’s hard to believe that 1996 is now considered a ‘simpler’ time, but it seems it is, and I suppose they have to cover plagiarism and research skills in more detail than they had to back when I was there. On the other hand, the third-year seminar sounds interesting. I’d love to know what books they have short-listed on their ‘valuable enough to spend a whole semester studying them’ list!One thing I do know, my English degree would be a lot cheaper now—more than half of the texts I studied are readily available on-line for free. I’d need the library reserve copy for page references to submit with my course work, but I could do the core reading easily on my iPad if I wasn’t in writing mode. The single most expensive book of my degree was the Norton Shakespeare, which was $85!

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New digital distribution service from NetRead

From Publishers Weekly:

NetRead, the Seattle-based company best known for its JacketCaster software that helps publishers organize and transmit metadata to retailers, distributors, and libraries, has partnered with industry veteran Neil Levin to form NetRead Distribution, an e-book distribution service.

The new company will use the proprietary technology platform developed for Jacketcaster to distribute digital content to all the major players, including Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony, said Levin, whose background includes a stint as senior v-p for the distributor National Book Network. While NetRead founder Greg Aden will concentrate on the technical side of the business, Levin is working with publishers to get them to join NetRead Distribution. The company has been in beta for several months with “a couple of dozen publishers and a few thousand titles,” Levin said, but is at the point “where we can scale for volume very quickly.” In addition to offering distribution to U.S. e-tailers, Levin said he expects NetRead to add international accounts soon.

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