eBook Notes For May 13, 2009

Three major items.

First Item: BeBook announced via Twitter that the next iteration of its eInk BeBook device — the BeBook 2 — will contain worldwide 3G capability. In addition, wireless access to eBook buying is currently functional prior to release. And over 190 stores in The Netherlands, including two large chain stores, will stock and promote the BeBook.

BeBook (first version)

Second Item: Amazon has awakened and it’s not happy news for any writer. Amazon announced its Encore program. This is basically a whole new way to screw publishers (by excluding them), writers (by impoverishing them), and printers (by not using them) — all to the benefit of Amazon itself. Amazon has finally figured out what I’ve been waiting for Apple to do: cut out publishers altogether. But unlike Apple, Amazon will be doing it by screwing writers.

Third item: ePubCatalog is active. I see this as a baby step towards the Universal eBook Catalog I called for earlier. This can be successful only if we all cooperate and help fill it up. Go to it, read the instructions, and get a Twitter account if you don’t already have one.

Of less importance, two items regarding Sony:

1) Sony is still delusional. Here’s the latest revelation. Expect more to follow!

2) Sony thinks we’ll accept advertising in electronic periodicals, such as newspapers and magazines. I’ve got news for Sony. Advertising in electronic media = free! There’s no paper and no union drivers whose salaries I have to cover as with a print publication, so there’s just no way I’ll pay for an e-newspaper or e-magazine. Good luck with that, Sony. You can join Murdoch in the corner, mumbling WTF? to one another, clueless to your respective FAILs.

Sony’s Howard Stringer Is Delusional

It just has to be said.

Howard Stringer, in charge of Sony, is delusional.

[NEA Interview] Sony Chairman, CEO Howard Stringer

Right now is an excellent opportunity for consumer electronics companies to improve their understanding of consumers.

Five years ago content companies were regarded as king in our industry, but that was wrong: the customer is king.

Sure, some people might say, “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” But I reached this conclusion after spending more time on the road, worldwide, than most executives.

Consumers today are a lot different from how they were 20 years ago. They aren’t passive any more. The spread of the Internet has given them the power to dictate how products are used, and an increasing number of people are discovering new ways to have fun, such as by creating their own content.

Emphasis added by me.

The customer is king?

1) Then why does the Sony eBook Store still sell proprietary BBeB eBooks?

2) Then why is it still impossible for writers and small publishers to publish at the Sony eBook Store?

3) Then why aren’t there tools for writers and small publishers to create BBeB eBooks?

4) Then why isn’t there Sony eLibrary software for Mac OS X?

5) Then why does the Sony eLibrary software for Windows still bite?

Those six things still tell me the customer is not king — the customer is still an insignificant little lackey the King can piss on.

In fact, which “customer” does Stringer actually mean? Here’s his vision of “customer” just last May:

Walt taking Howard to task over “craplets” on his Sony computers (this is a big thing for Walt). Wants him to take anti-craplet pledge. Howard won’t bite. “You’re not a typical consumer.” Not true! says Walt. Everyone’s got my back on this! Howard: “I promise you a craplets review.”

Emphasis added by me.

Stringer:

If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple Inc of the US.

This is simply delusional!

Does Howard Stringer understand why the iPod and then iPhone succeeded? Does he think it was simply luck, a fluke? As I said earlier, a company not in consumer electronics, without a history of music-related products, based outside of Japan, stole away a market from global giant Sony. Show me where the “open” was in that equation, Stringer!

And then Amazon came along and kicked Sony’s ass again — with the Kindle! This despite Sony spending a ton of money on ads and investing money on two iterations of the Reader!

Now, if Stringer had said this:

If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Amazon’s Kindle.

Emphasis added by me.

He would have at least been in waving distance of reality.

He could have read this waaaay back in January 2008:

1) Give away the ebook file format. That’s right. Let anyone and everyone have it, royalty-free. There’s a precedent for this, Sony helped set it, and Sony reaped millions and millions of dollars from that move and created a new worldwide standard. They did it in conjunction with Philips when they introduced the Compact Cassette tape format.

and:

2) Open your ebook store. Because you’ve held onto the file format, you’ve allowed Amazon a huge advantage here by allowing writers to immediately publish their works and sell them via the Kindle Store. This is really inexcusable, Sony. Do any of you use the Internet? What is the Internet but the largest self-publishing effort in the total history of humanity? How could you have missed that connection? With the year-long advantage you had, your ebook store could have boasted of thousands of titles the Kindle Store lacked. All of them original. And some of them would have remained exclusive to your store because we writers are loyal beasts. We remember who treats us right (and vice versa!).

But apparently he didn’t have his stupid Chumbly tuned to my blog’s RSS feed.

That’s seventeen months lost, Stringer.

How many more are you going to waste?

When the hell do you wake up, man?

Things Change. Things ALWAYS Change.

Enter the WABAC Machine with me, Sherman, and let us return to the streets of the early 1980s.

Regard the people walking and jogging. See the headphones over their ears? What do they lead to? A Sony Walkman — or knockoff.

SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman SONY Walkman …

Now let’s good back to the year 2009. Regard the people walking and jogging. See the earbuds in their ears? What do they lead to? An Apple iPod — or iPhone. (No, you have never seen a Zune; stop being delusional, Sherman!)

APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod APPLE iPod …

Who would have forseen a company not in consumer electronics, without a history of music-related products, based outside of Japan, stealing away a market from global giant Sony?

Today, it’s:

Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle Kindle …

… blah blah blah.

That too will change.

Pirate Planet

Rampant Piracy Will Be The Kindle DX’s Savior

The Kindle DX changes that. Just find the book you want in PDF form, upload it to your Kindle over USB, and you’ve got a perfectly readable and convenient textbook. Sure, students will have to deal with the usability issues I raised above, like slow highlighting. But these books, frustrating as they might be, will be 100% free. That’s $300 per quarter in extra beer money. Most obstacles and morals fade quickly in the face of that much alcohol.

TechCrunch fills in the other part of the Kindle DX puzzle.

As soon as I knew the screen size, I immediately realized all the free eBooks that writers put out as PDFs will suddenly be worth getting, since the DX allows them to finally be read on a comfortable device.

But such freebies wouldn’t drive sales of a device such as the DX. Ripping people off would.

Amazon chose not to use Adobe DRM for PDFs. Adobe’s DRM is a very complex beast. Amazon’s DRM so far has not been and all current Kindle eBooks can be liberated for actual ownership.

And here’s the one Comment over there that summarizes everything:

Pirates always win. You’d think Microsoft with their huge amount of money would be able to stop piracy too. Hell, they have been in the software business a lot longer than Amazon and they still haven’t figured it out.

The one eBook file format that has not been cracked is Sony’s Broadband eBook (BBeB). If Sony does indeed release a Reader with a screen the same size as the DX, that might attract the skillz needed to finally make BBeB DRM fall.

What no one realizes is that the advent of digital goods requires a reformulation of economics. That will have to happen too.

Steve Haber Of Sony Nails It: Print Is Dead!

Can E-book Readers Like the Sony Reader Dominate the Industry in 10 Years?

When I headed Sony’s U.S. digital-imaging division, people said, ‘I don’t like digital. I like the warmth of film.’ And then we continued to improve the product. Now Americans buy 40 million digital cameras each year.

Emphasis added by me.

Hey, raise your hand, all you people who are using film cameras. Show me those Instamatics, Advantix, and Polaroids.

Thought so.

When we introduced our Reader, the biggest resistance I heard was, ‘I like the smell of books, and I like the smell of paper. I can’t go digital.’ That was the confirmation for me that this change will happen. If the smell of paper is the biggest push back, then we’re good to go.”

Emphasis added by me.

This should be your wake-up call.

Publishing On Smashwords

Mark Coker is relentless.

Despite the fact I hate the name Smashwords, he’s been at me over and over again to give it a fair shake.

Because a project I had been working on had frustrated me for four days straight, I took a break yesterday and decided to finally go through Smashwords.

I went through about 190 pages of listings. I also did real-time tweeting of that, ragging on some of the bad stuff — and there was a lot — as well as pointing out some interesting things that looked worthwhile (very few!).

Before sleep, I decided I should try publishing something on Smashwords, to see what the entire effort would be like.

Mark Coker dared me to put my fiction up. No, not when it’d be next to things such as this.

At first, I was going to simply publish an essay I believed was in the public domain by someone else.

But something that simple isn’t much of a challenge nor would it have been by me.

So, I decided to take three of the most popular posts I’ve written and repackage them as an “eReprint.” These were the three posts I did in October 2008 about the introduction of the Sony Reader.

Dutifully, I RTFMed over at Smashwords. Moriah Jovan had already clued me in to it wanting a certain type of file only. I wanted to play by the rules and see what resulted.

I took those three posts and made an RTF document in Wordpad (the only writing tool I have, besides BlogDesk, believe it or not!).

I also made a quickie cover (using MS Paint).

Even though the photos in total couldn’t have been more than 500K, when the RTF was saved, it managed to balloon to a whopping thirteen megabytes!

I didn’t find that out, however, until my Smashwords upload was rejected.

I did everything I could think of to shrink the pictures, but the result remained at over ten megabytes.

I then relented and downloaded Open Office.

I opened the RTF in that, put the photos back in again — to see if that would recalibrate their sizes — and saved it as a Word 5 DOC file (which is what Open Office kept switching to, despite my asking for Word 6).

Result: over five megabytes. Smashwords wants nothing more than five megabytes.

Finally, I started deleting photos. That meant some text changes too.

The final result was about four and half megabytes and I was good to go.

The process to publish something on Smashwords is very simple. Fill out a form, choose the cover to upload, then the file of the book to upload, and hit Publish.

After that, a bit of whirring, then the Meatgrinder, as they term it, activates and converts the file into the formats that have been chosen before uploading.

Once that’s over, the eBook is ready to be looked at within Smashwords itself via an HTML window or can be downloaded in the formats chosen.

My first hint of trouble was that the HTML preview was rather wonky. The photos, although not great to begin with, became outright atrocious. Just look at this awfulness:

Click = big

Also, it managed to lose the centered text I put in. It was only in three places, too!

I then downloaded the ePub and the PDF versions to look at.

Remember that ePub is the file format all the major publishers have agreed to use. So this is very important for writers who choose to use Smashwords to put their work before the general public (and, in some cases, ask money for it).

Let’s see the results of the ePub.

This is what it looked like in FBReader, starting with the all-important cover:

Click = big

Oh my god.

Would you want to read that? I wouldn’t want to go further, and I created that! The cover is supposed to look like this.

OK, this I chalk up half to my fault and half to Smashwords. The Smashwords guidelines do not suggest any sort of recommended dimensions for a cover. I simply did a quick and dirty one in MS Paint without paying much attention to the size. But even so, this is horrible.

And then in FBReader this is what the photos turned into:

Click = big

More hair-raising horror!

I can’t dismiss FBReader because it’s the ePub rendering engine that drives the ECTACO jetBook. Will people who view ePub with embedded photos wind up seeing something as terrible as that? I don’t know. (And ECTACO has not been willing to provide a review unit. Maybe this is why!)

With the Sony eLibrary software, the cover results were the same:

Click = big

The photos were no better than the HTML preview:

Click = big

The final test was the PDF. It came out beautifully:

Click = big

My centered text was preserved and the photos were identical to the originals.

And thus ended the experiment.