Innovative Canadian and American book hackers

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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