Tag: ebooks

May 10, 2010

Thinking about a data-driven college

In an effort to start tracking some of the ideas I have while reading I want to start making note of ideas and questions that come up here. This is the first of such posts and we’ll see what form they take in the future.

Tracking my book reading

Interesting article that examines some of the frustrations with current systems for tracking reading habits. Since I just finished writing an article for The Whitman Pioneer about open knowledge systems this got me thinking:

  • What if colleges started working together on building an open standard for tracking reading? I’m thinking of a system that would get me set up as a Freshman with a way to keep track of every article, journal essay, and book that I read while in school. Then, when I graduate I can either move the system to my server, or the college provides an export file to import into various other services. If I could go back four years and be presented with a choice between a school that had this system and one that didn’t I know which I would pick in a heartbeat.
  • Could we conceive of a service that would not only track reading but track conversations about books? What if I could record conversations with others about a book and upload them to a service, forever associating that conversation with that reading experience?
  • What good is it to track book titles and authors if I don’t also have a canonical, searchable copy of that book online?

The Data-Driven Life

Long feature piece from The New York Times about the various ways people are tracking data about their everyday lives. It turns out that seemingly mundane things can offer remarkable insight into how our minds and bodies work. Couple points about this:

  • All (unless I missed one) of the services mentioned are owned by single companies. Some, in the case of Nike+, by massive corporations. I think there’s a huge opportunity for someone to come up with an open source data tracking system that allows users to own their data. Follow up: what happens to all this wonderful, data-driven insight when these companies go out of business?
  • How can we tie this data-tracking to business interactions? What ways could I track data that would reveal the companies that most consistently affect my day in a positive way?
  • Academically, it’d be interesting to track attention during a semester-long course to see which subjects and discussions were most captivating.

August 14, 2009

Textbook Publisher to Rent to College Students

Published in the New York Times yesterday:

In the rapidly evolving college textbook market, one of the nation’s largest textbook publishers, Cengage Learning, announced Thursday that it would start renting books to students this year, at 40 percent to 70 percent of the sale price.

Then, if you read a little further down the article you come across this:

Besides giving students a new option, rentals give both publishers and textbook authors a way to continue earning money from their books after the first sale, something they do not get from the sale of used textbooks.

Bingo, there’s the rationale behind why these book publishers are doing this: they’re hoping for a renewable revenue stream.

No, it doesn’t seem as though the publishers have suddenly found a soul and decided to stop gouging students on books, it’s just that they’re going to gouge them in a slightly different way and under the guise of providing a more economical option to the student.

February 6, 2009

Even more on e-books

News about e-books just keeps coming. This from a New York Times article today about mobile versions of Google Book Search and Amazon Kindle books:

In a move that could bolster the growing popularity of e-books, Google said Thursday that the 1.5 million public domain books it had scanned and made available free on PCs were now accessible on mobile devices like the iPhone and the T-Mobile G1.

Also Thursday, Amazon said that it was working on making the titles for its popular e-book reader, the Kindle, available on a variety of mobile phones. The company, which is expected to unveil a new version of the Kindle next week, did not say when Kindle titles would be available on mobile phones.

Interesting to see if this catches on or not. The next few years could be quite interesting in terms of the digital consumption of books (although I cannot envision putting paperbacks down).

Link via Google and Amazon to Put More Books on Cellphones – NYTimes.com.

February 5, 2009

The once and future ebook

There’s a great piece on e-books on Ars Technica that is written by John Siracusa. The article is quite long (weighs in at 7 pages) but is also quite good. IN it John writes that:

And so, a sad end for the eReader that I knew (née Palm Digital Media, née Peanut Press). But this story is not just about them, or me. Notice that I used the present tense earlier: “people don’t get e-books.” This is as true today as it was ten years ago. Venture capitalists didn’t get it then, nor did the series of owners that killed Peanut Press, nor do many of the players in the e-book market today. And then there are the consumers, their own notions about e-books left to solidify in the absence of any clear vision from the industry.

I particularly agree with the last sentence here. I think that the lack of consumer information and knowledge is really holding ebooks back. The other factor I think is just a simple lack of experience on the part of the consumer with ebooks. People already read news and such on digital displays, but I think many people (myself included) would balk at the thought of reading an entire novel on a digital device. There’s just some connection that I think most people have to physical books and I think a large portion of consumers will not be convinced until they use ebooks. For that to happen companies need to publicize them and present a clear and consistent message.

Link via The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age – Ars Technica.

February 2, 2009

Google and Digitizing Books (again)

There’s another article on the New York Times concerning Google’s effort to digitize books and the recent class-action settlement that fell in their favour. From the article:

Like the oil barons in the late 19th century, Google is thirsty for a vital raw material — digital content. As Daniel J. Clancy, the engineering director for Google Book Search, put it, “our core business is about search and discovery, and search and discovery improves with more content.”

He can even sound like a prospector when he says Google began its effort to scan millions of books “because there is a ridiculous amount of information out there,” he said, later adding, “and we didn’t see anyone else doing it.”

The idea that all of these books will be searchable is certainly appealing to me, but personally a digitized book will never replace a physical copy for me. With the medium of technology as it is now I can enjoy reading newspapers and short to medium articles digitally, but reading through something like Foucault or Aristotle on a screen would simply be intolerable for me. With that said I have yet to try some of the newer forms of digital books (e.g. the Kindle and Classics for the iPhone). Maybe it’s just a computer screen that I can’t handle reading a book on, but until something proves to me otherwise I will not be convinced of a digital presentation for books.

Link via Link By Link – In a Google Library, Millions of Books, but No Card Catalog – NYTimes.com.

February 1, 2009

Printing the NY Times vs a Kindle

An article on Silicon Alley Insider claims that the New York Times would be saving money if it were to buy every subscriber an Amazon Kindle. From the article:

According to the Times’s Q308 10-Q, the company spends $63 million per quarter on raw materials and $148 million on wages and benefits. We’ve heard the wages and benefits for just the newsroom are about $200 million per year.

After multiplying the quarterly costs by four and subtracting that $200 million out, a rough estimate for the Times’s delivery costs would be $644 million per year.

The Kindle retails for $359. In a recent open letter, Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis wrote: “We have 830,000 loyal readers who have subscribed to The New York Times for more than two years.” Multiply those numbers together and you get $297 million — a little less than half as much as $644 million.

While this makes sense it also seems to me that the Times would have more readers than 830,000. I’m just wondering if that number even accounts for all of the copies sold at Starbucks and other coffee shops every day. While it may be cheaper for the Times to get all of its subscribers Kindles I can’t believe it would actually be cheaper to get all of the people who read print editions of the Times a Kindle.

Link via Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle.

February 1, 2009

More on the future of books and publishing

There’s an interesting article that is featured on The Atlantic right now by Andrew Sullivan concerning the problems with and future of book publishing. In the short posting he writes that:

My own view is that the publishing industry deserves to die in its current state. It never made economic sense to me; there are no real editors of books any more; the distribution network is archaic; the technology of publishing pathetic; and the rewards to authors largely impenetrable. I still have no idea what my occasional royalty statements mean: they are designed to be incomprehensible, to keep the authors in the dark, to maintain an Oz-like mystery where none is required.

The future is obviously print-on-demand, and writers in the future will make their names first on the web. With e-distribution and e-books, writers will soon be able to put this incompetent and often philistine racket behind us. It couldn’t happen too soon.

I couldn’t agree with him more. Particularly in an economy that is becoming increasingly poor it only makes economic sense for writers to explore means of making an income that does not require the overhead that the current publishing system does. Furthermore, what Sullivan suggests here would allow writers to create and define themselves as a brand online and then move to print when they know that there will be a significant demand for their works.

Link via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan (February 01, 2009) – Self-Branding And Writing .

January 24, 2009

Digitizing Books

The Daily Dish has an interesting article up about the future of books and Google’s effort to digitize them. Andrew Sullivan quotes another writer who wrote of the recent settlement allowing Google to digitize thousands of books that:

No one can predict what will happen. We can only read the terms of the settlement and guess about the future. If Google makes available, at a reasonable price, the combined holdings of all the major US libraries, who would not applaud? Would we not prefer a world in which this immense corpus of digitized books is accessible, even at a high price, to one in which it did not exist?

Perhaps, but the settlement creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company.

Here’s the link to the original article that Sullivan pulls from which is also an interesting read although it is quite long.

January 9, 2009

Ebook downside

Sort of a downside to ebooks: their non-permanent nature. See the link.

Ebook DRM provider goes dark, the books you paid for disappear – Boing Boing

December 24, 2008

Follow up to Ebooks

The New York Times has another story up about the future of ebooks and their growing popularity. It also poses the question of maybe consumers have finally become comfortable with putting down paper and picking up plastic. I don’t know, I still can’t buy it. At least this one mentions more products than just the Kindle.

Link (via NY Times).