Unfortunately the attendance list is a little low (8 confirmed including myself), but in my experience these meetups tend to attract a few extras who just pop in. BookNet Canada has a post on it so I’m hoping that one of their reps will be there. I’m curious to see what they have to say about ebook sales.

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What happened? Well, MobileReference was selling copies of Orwell’s 1984. In some countries the work is public domain. Unfortunately pdregistry.ca is presently down so I can’t say with authority whether it’s public domain in Canada, but I believe it is. Judging from their package of 3,000+ classics for $50, MobileReference took from the public domain and improved on it, then sold their improved versions. The problem is the book isn’t public domain in the United States, where their Kindle edition was sold.

Once Amazon was contacted by the American rightsholders they decided to institute a recall. They refunded users and deleted their books. The problem is the recall wasn’t voluntary as every other recall to date.

When a product is recalled it’s usually because there’s a danger to it. When someone steps on a patent or copyright holder’s toes, it’s usually up to the owner to file a lawsuit, and then they can claim the ill-gotten (or in this case mistakenly-gotten, I chalk MobileReference’s mistake up to ignorance or negligence rather than malice) gains. Now, that usually happens because it’s difficult to replace a product with a legitimate one, or to reassign gains. What could Amazon have done here? Maybe reassign the commissions to the rights holders? Maybe reassign the commission and replace the infringing book with a legitimate one?

It seems that Amazon has already promised that they won’t delete the infringing books. Maybe they’ll replace them, if they can figure out how to preserve bookmarks. Maybe they’ll just change who the royalties go to. Maybe they’ll just stop sales and tell the rights holders to pursue remuneration through the courts.

Are automatic recalls unfair? It’s hard to say. It certainly is a lot less harmful all around than lawsuits but publishers and authors shouldn’t forget that consumers are rightsholders too. If there’s an automatic recall it damn well better put the buyer’s needs first.

Thumbnail image by surfstyle and licensed under CC BY 2.0. Thanks surfstyle!

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There are two people who come to mind when I think of this conversation. The first is the person who I responded to, who explained how her students prefer print to online sources. I raised up my hand and explained that print as a medium isn’t what’s attractive to students so much as the editing and review that goes into it before a textbook makes it to print. That’s where I dropped the line that got all eyes in the room pointed to me:

“I haven’t bought a textbook in two years.”

Right now printed books dominate in that regard but we’re seeing textbooks written from the ground up to be Creative Commons licensed though still going through the same peer review and editing processes. We’ve also got books that are written for print under traditional copyrights but also released for free online (as was the case with my CSC 310 textbook, my CSC108 and 148 textbooks, and others). I’m lucky in that computer science seems to have a wealth of free textbooks, much more than any other field.

I’m beginning to see a trend.

Professors are picking texts that are freely available, or building readers out of papers from open journals, or annotating and redistributing texts that allow them to. This isn’t because professors dislike publishers or authors. It might be because it’s the only way they can reduce costs for students and there’s a lot of really good, free content out there. It might be because it’s easier to make course readers out of chapters than muck with licensing groups. It might be because the professor can edit and improve. In my security course we used free online texts that the professor annotated and distributed rather than giving a separate slip of paper with notes. This is the sort of freedom that Flat World Knowledge, Bookriff and SymText offer.

Is print really better?

I don’t know what the reasoning is because I haven’t talked to these professors but I do challenge the notion that print is better. Every higher education student, with rare exception, carries a laptop with them. From the student viewpoint I would much rather download four free textbooks per semester instead of buying eight hundred dollars of paper. It’s far easier on my back, and my wallet. I can do a full text search if the index is poor. There are hyperlinks which make following up a source so much easier and more likely. My fellow students are happy to read on their laptops, but I bought a two hundred dollar epaper reader so I can read on it while coding on my laptop. I realize I’m an outlier right now yet I’m not convinced that I will be in five years when these readers come down in price, add colour and connectivity.

Readers of online textbook are just as likely to read everything as use for reference

The next person I’m reminded of is a University of Toronto member (a librarian I assume) who explained how we have roughly 630,000 full texts available online. As a student I know she’s talking about our Books 24×7 subscription. I don’t recall the total number of readers but I do remember that the number of people who skimmed certain pages versus the number of people who read page by page to be roughly equal. I qualify that as tentative support of the observed trend and would like to see more numbers.

Things are changing in higher education textbooks. You can’t rely on print books being bought over another source simply because they’re print. You can’t rely on electronic copies being used to sell paper copies in all demographics. Makers of print textbooks need to recognize that they have a huge advantage right now in terms of reliability but they can’t afford to sit on their laurels while their competition improves. Some demographics won’t consider print an advantage and in a few cases it’s a disadvantage. To serve these people will take some out of the book thinking and I think I helped give an early wake up call to bookcampTO.

What I’m saying is this:

• There are professors out there who want to add their own touch to books.
• Look into freemium business models. Your competition might already be there.
• Releasing free online copies of your book won’t always translate into print sales.

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Hugh McGuire is talking. He starts off with his introduction to LibriVox. It’s a project to make free audiobooks by reading public domain books aloud.

Asked a publisher about how communities affect her business. Answer is wish she knew. They have a website but it’s not enough. Now they have a Facebook group and Twitter, looking for a way to interact more directly with readers. Got suggested to add audio excerpts, etc. Not sure how else to engage people.

Someone else responded “Why does it have to be online? Why not in real life?” Personally I like to think that online is real life too. Maybe the better phrase is “away from keyboard.” Anyhow, engagement can happen by inviting people to events, book signings and the like.

Big point: As a blogger you don’t necessarily want to engage the author on a forum or twitter. You’d want to discuss on your own blog. Think YouTube’s embed feature. Can you do the same to show book covers, give reviews, etc. Social tools that make sharing easy is becoming more important. It’s not enough to just have a “download press kit here” link.

Big part of success is serendipity. A link from a popular blogger for example. It’ll only happen if your content is good enough for someone else to comment on it. Make it easier to share. Attention isn’t worth anything if you’re not engaged and therefore engaging.

The web is used to build authority. Don’t just tell an author to build a website. The author should have genuine interaction and if they are comfortable doing that online, they should. Behave online like you would at a cocktail party. Be yourself. It’s a long tail effect.

How do you have success on Facebook? Can’t just friend everyone. And author pages that just announce new books get unfriended because they’re not giving anything of value. Success happens from sharing and building authority as above.

Don’t build a community on your space. There’s enough spaces. Make it easy for someone else to build community.

O’Reilly might be able to have community editing. It’s a nightmare for fiction. Take a look at the wikinovel which essentially turned the entire community into a focus group. Disagreed: Fanfiction as an example. Look at how Lost treated the community by altering the storyline. Counterpoint: It’d be horrifying if that fanfiction made it into the official text. Countercounterpoint: It did make it into the official storyline in a few cases in Lost.

Newish theme of books through curation. Factfind through Twitter, get tipped off to good websites, filter, publish.

Goodreads doesn’t have a lot of value if the friend list you build doesn’t have similar tastes. Another crowd member votes for authority blogging leading to book recommendations.

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Speaker is Evan Leibovitch. He works at York and was given the mandate to make research more accessable.

From the crowd: What is DRM?
Answer from the crowd: It was used in the music business and it’s collapsing.

Gave the intro to the Kindle. Brings down books to $9.95. DRM required.

Introduces epub. Reflowable unlike PDF.

From the crowd: ePub specification people don’t communicate with W3C. W3C created CSS and HTML which is a moving target. IDPF is in maintenance right now so you can get involved.

Publishers can define themselves by how much control they give up.

More problems came up from the crowds. Adobe Digital Editions doesn’t support very many things. Why would a publisher care about how your font is kerned?

Also from the crowd: The form is part of books. If you don’t care about form, you’re just looking for information, not necessarily books. (I guess I’m not a book fan after all.) Have to think of books are more than trade paperbacks. Think graphic novels, textbooks, children’s picture books. (All of this would take creativity to make in CSS2.)

And from the crowd: It’s hard to give up the formatting control you’re used to with PDF when moving to ePub.

Seems everything is from the crowd. This is my first *camp.

Reminder from the crowd: A two hundred dollar book is that expensive due to paying author, editors, typesetters, etc. Ebooks save ten dollars.

UofT has more than half a million books available online. When talking with people after the session I explained the reason I don’t use the service is because I can’t take it anywhere and I can’t easily pop it onto my ereader.

Someone brought up that people trust print more than the internet. I brought up that people trust edited content, not print, more than most of the content on the internet. I haven’t bought a textbook in two years because I download Creative Commons licensed books. Instead I bought an ebook reader. Two hundred dollars once for four semesters instead of two hundred dollars per semester.

Someone asked if graphs and graphics were okay. I said that it’s okay if I turned the ereader sideways. I think I misinterpreted the question, it would be much harder to read something like an actuarial science textbook that would have many more tables. I’d get annoyed if I had to constant flip the ereader.

Running low on time here. I think that’s it.

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When I buy a piece of media, whether it’s a book or movie or piece of music, I’d like to be able to enjoy it wherever I want on whatever device I want, without having to rebuy it. It’s already accepted that once you buy a CD you can rip it to your iPod. Ripping movies to your iPod is getting there. What about books? What about software?

In the prior two examples it’s easy for the buyer to transcode. It’s automated. It takes hard work to turn a book into an ebook, so I can understand why companies like O’Reilly charge extra for a book that comes with an ebook; but what if the community were to make the ebooks for free? What if developers would port software for free?

I’d like to talk about my old days on irc.bookwarez.org. It hosted a public channel where people traded in versioned text, HTML, LIT, and any number of formats of ebooks that they painstakingly scanned, OCRed and proofread. In many cases they also annotated. The downside to this arrangement is that it could result in lost sales.

What if O’Reilly gave you a free copy of a community contributed ebook with purchase of ebook, or let you buy a bundle with a professionally created copy? Amazon could give you a choice of a book bundle with a community made ebook at no extra charge, or a Kindle copy at a modest surcharge.

Software is a trickier issue. People are again willing to make free versions of games that use official resources for platforms that aren’t officially supported as we see with Freeciv and Frets on Fire but these are reinventions of the wheel rather than tweaked copies. Closed source ports are near impossible to make and the producers these days are unlikely to let their source out.

Projects like Freeciv skirt the same thin line that game console emulators do: the creators of the original don’t like them, but there isn’t much to do if they don’t copy anything. Except when Sony bankrupted the creators of Bleem! under legal costs. Producers of resource-compatable clones seem to be safe as long as they don’t sell their work.

The issue with software has been mostly solved. The community can release clones with little fear. The problem remains with works that have to be copies, not remakes, and are difficult to translate from one format to another. Right now the best example is books. Creative Commons is both libre and gratis. I know that the makers of some of my favourite works will never publish gratis. As a middle ground what I want to see is a scheme that’s libre but not gratis so I can buy something once and enjoy it however I like.

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Canada has become a bit of a backwater when it comes to access to culture. We’re left out of Pandora, Hulu, and the Kindle. Canadian TV streaming is paltry when it comes to selection, a Pandora equivalent is nonexistant, and I didn’t think we had a Kindle alternative until today.

I never really searched but eventially news of Canadian (and one group of American) innovators came to me. Here are the stories of what people are doing with books that’s too cool to stay quiet about.

Shortcovers

Shortcovers is a venture by Indigo to provide the Kindle alternative. I say alternative instead of equivalent because they focus on delivering books to mobile customers rather than also creating a device. Shortcovers lets you buy and read books, or parts of books, on your supported mobile phone or Blackberry.

The evolution described in the WSJ is already apparent in Shortcovers. On Fictionwise you can buy a chunk of an anthology for a pittance. On Shortcovers you can also buy a chapter of a book for the same. Chapters are $0.99 and you can get a discount by buying the whole book at once.

My only problems with the service are that it does not yet support an eink device (especially not my eink device) and the whole-book price points. I still can’t swallow paying fifteen or twenty dollars for an ebook. They do have a few at ten, but none of the ones I wanted.

SymText

The goal of SymText is to provide students with a live document using licensed content as a basis. The professor selects from a large repetoire of material which includes chapters from textbooks, journals, podcasts and presentations.

The students annotate and share. The textbook is a live document. Pair that with an eink reader or a print on demand service and you’ve got a unique and powerful teaching platform.

I wish that the University of Toronto were one of the pilot schools. I’ll likely be finished before I have the opportunity to use the service.

The SymText blog has just begun and is off to a good start.

Flat World Knowledge

Update May 1st 2009: I mistakenly reported that Flat World Knowledge was Canadian. They are in fact American, and their contact page lists a New York address.

Flat World Knowledge was created to make textbooks that are gratis and free. That is, they’re free of cost, but also allow you to modify them and distribute them under their Creative Commons licensing.

The texts are peer reviewed and edited. Once they’re finished they’re put up on the catalog for the user (that is, a professor) to review, reorganize chapters, add annotations, or even edit sentences. Once finished the professor can give the book to his or her students or perhaps send the updated version in for review.

The downside? Small catalog. I counted thirty books just now. It’s a refreshing approach. I was happy when in second and third year I was taught under high quality, gratis books licensed under Creative Commons or GPL. Having someone I trust annotate rather than pass on a static PDF and a sheet of notes would be valuable.

LibriVox

LibriVox is a group founded by Hugh McGuire. I later found out that he did it with the advice of CIPPIC, a law clinic I believe in and consulted for. Small world. Mc. McGuire and I are both fans of the public domain but he went out and did something with it.

The LibriVox group is dedicated to taking works from the public domain and creating audiobooks out of them with volunteer narrators. Checking the catalog shows that they’ve currently got 2107 books available.

They’re available for free as either MP3 or Ogg files. Volunteering is as simple as checking the forum for requests (newbies start with short stories), reading it into your mic and cleaning it up with your software of choice. I used audacity. Then, post it! Volunteers are allowed to read out their name and a link to their personal website.

The site is a big hit among the blind, commuters, fans of the public domain, or just plain folks who like to lounge back with a classic audiobook.

Things are changing

Newspapers are experimenting with new revenue streams, new business models for ebooks are coming up, schools are increasingly using gratis etexts.

Books will stay around. They’ll always be around. You don’t need to pay a monthly fee for them or stay where signal is good, used novels go for a dollar, and to my surprise some people actually like the tactile sensation of turning pages; but paper is no longer going to be exclusive in mainstream use. Texts will become liquid and malleable. They will be living documents. When there’s next to no reproduction cost people will step in and give their wares for free. Innovators like the above show that. I look forward to it all.

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The library software I’ve downloaded to keep track of my growing ebook collection is called Calibre. I haven’t messed with it very much but it has an iTunes-like coverflow view, a web front end, an iPhone app and considerable conversion features.

As for converting my favourite sources, it’s not strictly necessary in the case of Project Gutenberg books  since they can easily be read as TXT files on the eSlick. If you want chapter bookmarks and pretty formatting then I suggest GutenMark combined with HTMLDOC.

CHM files are easy to convert on Linux, but a bit of a pain to convert on Windows depending on how the CHM decompiles. I’ve written a short guide on how to convert CHM to PDF while preserving hyperlinks.

Journals are straightforward, they’re just unencrypted PDF files usually.

I’ve already written about unwrapping DRM from Adobe Digital Editions books.

This is also a good opportunity to announce the new guides section of the website, linked to on the top menu. There isn’t much there right now but it’ll grow.

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(Update: This post wasn’t intended as a how-to but people are getting some use out of it. To fill in the gaps, here is an article on how to install the required tools like pycrypto.)

I remove DRM whenever possible because I lost a few iTunes tracks. Also, since the FoxIt eSlick won’t work with DRM immediately, I wanted to be able to test how readily I could use purchases on my eink reader. I’m not intending to pirate ebooks here. It turns out that until a new version of ADEPT comes out I don’t have anything to worry about. The process is easy, fast, and appears to be lossless.

I found out about tools to unwrap DRM from e-books when a DCMA takedown notice was used to remove two python scripts. I managed to snag copies of the suppressed python scripts (ineptpdf.pyw, ineptkey.pyw for Windows or ineptkeymac.pyw for OS X, ineptepub.pyw) from the slashdot comments more easily than my copy of Adobe Digital Editions from the Adobe site, since their web installer failed repeatedly and I had to hunt down the EXE.

So, while I install I ask on Twitter where to buy some ePub or ADEPT ebooks. Someone suggested BooksOnBoard. They have a copy of Anathem in ADEPT format for $18.07 after the 1% Google Checkout discount, about $2 less than the cost of the hardcover. I’m not happy that it’s so expensive for an electronic copy but I decide to pay anyways because I can’t find another ADEPT copy, let alone cheaper.

I download the 16 megabyte book through Adobe Digital Editions in about a minute and then execute ineptkey.pyw. It notifies me that my key has been stored in adeptkey.der. Next, I run ineptpdf.pyw. I’m greeted with a dialogue box asking me for the key file, the input file, and the output destination. It turns out that the ebook I bought got sent to My Documents/My Digital Editions/. I fill out all the required boxes and click decrypt.

There’s no progress bar, just the hourglass for about thirty seconds, and then it goes away. No success or failure message.

Just to make sure that the PDF I downloaded from BooksOnBoard was encrypted I tried to open it with FoxIt Reader. I get the error “This document is encrypted with some unsupported security handler.” Okay, now I try to open up the decrypted version. Success!

Everything looks to be in tact, including the chapter bookmarks and graphics. I opened it up side by side with the Adobe Digital Edition and started from chapter six, where I left off from the library book. The two did not look alike.

It turns out that the decrypted version looks better! Take a look at the screenshots below, particularly the middle one which compares the Adobe Digital Edition to the decrypted PDF.

Apparently the ebook I bought contains PDF features that Adobe Digital Editions does not support. FoxIt Reader does, though! I’m stunned to think that if I didn’t break the DMCA I’d be stuck with a product that wasn’t just less flexible, but that was inferior!

I wasn’t the only success, but there were a few others having issues. Mobileread has a thread on the inept decryptor.

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It was through giving the Ohpan beta a try that I discovered the FoxIt eSlick. I rated up a number of tech stories and through that jkOnTheRun‘s post about the eSlick potentially working with eReader caught my eye. I didn’t know FoxIt was working on hardware.

I’ve always loved ebooks and I’ve always loved eink or epaper. It combines the convenience and functionality of ebooks with the high readability of paper. Previously I had my eye on the Hanlin eReader V3 which has similar specs but a much weaker CPU. The eReader was the cheapest of the devices on MobileRead’s eInk devices matrix.  I was wary of buying directly from the manufacturer because I didn’t expect much in the way of support. Enter FoxIt and their eSlick.

It has a six inch screen with 600×800 resolution. The picture quality is limited since it only supports “4-level gray scale” which I assume to mean four grays, rather than four bit grays (a total of sixteen shades.) Either way I expect images to be dithered terribly but simple graphs to look good. It reminds me of reading the news through AvantGo on my old Palm m105.

After a bit of research it seems to be a branding of the Neotronix EB-600. The specifications match up including the processor. The difference is FoxIt will be leveraging their fantastic reader since they already have a Linux version. It’s much faster and lighter than Acrobat and seems to run well on the limited Linux device judging by the video of the prototype.

Not only that, it comes with a professional version FoxIt Reader. I seem to have missed the introductory price of $229 since it’s now selling for $259. I decided to sleep on it, but before bed I’d ask if their educational discount applied to hardware as well as software.

Imagine my surprise when they responded to my email forty-three minutes later. Imagine my continued surprise when they agreed to give me the discount. Imagine my jaw dropping when they agreed to give me the 20% discount off the $259 preorder rate, rather than the $300 retail rate, bringing my cost down to $209. That’s the price of one textbook and it comes with a 2gb card, plus the aforementioned FoxIt Reader Pro.

Sold!

Update: Turns out it was a mistake. They do not offer academic discounts yet, which is partly why my eslick hasn’t shipped as of April 28th.

My unit is due to be shipped in two to three weeks, so I’ll have it within a month. By the end of March I’ll be well kitted out with my netbook and reader. Maybe it’ll make me eager to study. In the meantime I’m scoping out a sleeve for the eSlick. Bookeen sells one that looks like it’ll fit since their reader is also based on the EB-600, but costs more and has a CPU that’s half as powerful, and doesn’t have FoxIt Reader. Hey, look, I’m gloating about the gadget already.

More details about the eSlick are available from the FoxIt website.

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