The BookLiberator

While publishers, booksellers, authors and agents are busy hacking out the future of e-books, in through the side door comes a gadget that could make copyright holder’s lives more complicated yet, according to this report from Forbes:

Remember the sense of liberation that came from digitizing your CDs and then chucking a decade or two’s accumulation of archaic plastic? James Vasile and Ian Sullivan want to give you that gratification again–this time from rendering into bits your hundreds of pounds of dead trees.

Their invention, on display over the weekend at the HOPE hackers conference in New York: the BookLiberator, a simple contraption of poplar wood, screws, plexiglass, and two mounted digital cameras. Rest a book or magazine on the device’s adjustable base, and set its boxy frame so that the plexiglass spreads the pages flat. Take a picture with each camera, turn the page, and repeat. Before long you’ve created new fodder for your Kindle, iPad, or Sony Reader.

The scanner is quicker than traditional scanners at 15 pages per minute, and the quality of the image is better than with traditional scanners. According to the Journal, “Vasile and Sullivan plan to sell their invention in construct-it-yourself kits for around $120, plus an extra $200 for the pair of cameras–less than 10% of the price, they point out, of advanced book scanning devices.”

All of which puts fear in the heart of those who believe in copyright protections (not to mention manufacturers of scanners). Though Vasile, a lawyer for the Software Freedom Law Center, told the Journal, “We don’t think the major use case for this is copyright infringement. If you want to download a Stephen King book off of bittorrent, it’s already there.”

The Journal continues:

Instead, Vasile hopes that librarians will use the BookLiberator to archive their collections and that college classes will digitize textbooks to allow for easy annotation and “remixing.” “It’s no less legal than a photocopier or VCR,” he says.

But Vasile admits that his brainchild was first known as “BookRipper,” and was partly funded by QuestionCopyright.org, an organization whose favorite slogans include “Radical Copyright Reform” and “Copying Is Not Theft.” A line from Question Copyright’s FAQ: “Q: Isn’t copying a copyrighted work stealing? A: If I steal your bicycle, now you have no bicycle. If I copy your song, now we both have it.”

And “I” have no means of livelihood. But Vasile protests to the Journal that focusing on the copyright infringement aspects of his new device misses the point, “The legitimate uses for this are way more interesting than just free books,” he says. “We want to change the culture of text.”

From Microsoft's patent application for the "Virtual Page Turn"

Has Microsoft done to Apple and Amazon what Amazon had just done to Barnes & Noble — that is, secretly patent key technology crucial to their competitor’s e-reading device?

Last week, a MobyLives report detailed how Amazon secretly patented technology used by B&N’s Nook E-Reader. Now, a report from the Register says Microsoft had similarly filed an application with the US Patent and Trademark Office for a patent on what it called the “Virtual Page Turn” — “the animation of a page-flip when a user makes the appropriate gesture on an ebook’s touchscreen,” one of the key features of the iPad and the Kindle.

From application number 20100175018:

A page-turning gesture directed to a displayed page is recognized. Responsive to such recognition, a virtual page turn is displayed on the touch display… The virtual page turn curls a lifted portion of the page to progressively reveal a back side of the page while progressively revealing a front side of a subsequent page… A page-flipping gesture quickly flips two or more pages.

Microsoft applied for the patent back in January of 2009, perhaps as part of its development on the Courier foldable tablet, which the company abandoned in April.

Still, no one seems terribly concerned. “Microsoft could stir up some licensing trouble for Apple, Amazon, and others who have page-turning animations in their apps,” says the Register report, but trouble seems “unlikely.”

Another report, from TechCrunch, concurs, saying “the action that is being patented seems fairly obvious, which may prevent the patent from being awarded. After all, it is nothing more than an animation of a page being turned, an “invention” which goes back to the days of Guttenberg.”

In a recent feature on Clay Shirky (focusing on his new book, Cognitive Surplus) Guardian contributor Decca Aitkenhead analyzes Shirky’s famous optimism about Internet culture.

According to Aitkenhead, the new book “argues that the popularity of online social media trumps all our old assumptions about the superiority of professional content, and the primacy of financial motivation. It proves… that people are more creative and generous than we had ever imagined, and would rather use their free time participating in amateur online activities such as Wikipedia–for no financial reward–because they satisfy the primal human urge for creativity and connectedness.”

Shirky argues this always a good thing; Aitkenhead describes herself as a “kneejerk” cynic of these trends,  a “techno-luddite bewildered by the exhibitionism of online social networking” and “troubled by its juvenile vacuity.”

Shirky responds:

I have the amiably simple-minded view of this stuff you would expect from an American, which is that I think freedom is good, full stop. So therefore I think I’m probably constitutionally incapable of seeing a massive spread in those freedoms as being anything other than salutary for society.

And adds, about his luck at predicting the future as an optimist:

[The] thing I’d say about optimism is this. If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you’d wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you’d still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since.

People reading 10.7% slower when reading on a Kindle as opposed to a print book, and 6.2% slower when reading on an iPad, according to a study released Friday by the Nielsen Norman Group.

The study tested 24 readers using a story by Ernest Hemingway (the report doesn’t say which story), “because his work is pleasant and engaging to read, and yet not so complicated that it would be above the heads of users. ”

It also asked participants to rate thier satisfaction with the devies “on a 1–7 scale, with 7 being the best score. iPad, Kindle, and the printed book all scored fairly high at 5.8, 5.7, and 5.6, respectively. The PC, however, scored an abysmal 3.6.”

As for what the subjects had to say about it all:

Most of the users’ free-form comments were predictable. For example, they disliked that the iPad was so heavy and that the Kindle featured less-crisp gray-on-gray letters. People also disliked the lack of true pagination and preferred the way the iPad (actually, the iBook app) indicated the amount of text left in a chapter.

Less predictable comments: Users felt that reading the printed book was more relaxing than using electronic devices. And they felt uncomfortable with the PC because it reminded them of work.

How much some things have changed since the 1996 publication of Nicholas Negroponte’s bestselling book, Being Digital, can be measured by a snippet from a contemporaneous review by Roy Johnson. Near the end of it, Mr. Johnson pokes a little fun at some of Negroponte’s more outlandish predictions:

However, if you can steel yourself against his breathless rush, one or two of the arguments can be made to tremble a little with some applied clear thinking. He [Negroponte] supposes for instance that writers would earn more if their work were distributed digitally (smaller profits, bigger sales). But would you want to download then print off a 500 page book to avoid the publisher’s price-tag? (This is already possible from databases such as Project Gutenberg.) Why have your edition of Moby Dick on 600 loose sheets of A4 when Penguin will supply a bound copy for less than the price of a gin-and-tonic? Nevertheless, this is just one small idea amongst many that he throws off in a series of elegantly catenated chapters.

Applying clear thinking to the future ain’t what it used to be. The idea that readers would forgo paper and ink to read Moby Dick on a Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone, iPad, or a flood of competing devices was apparently not in plain sight at the end of the last century.

The hook in the Times’s weirdly anachronistic report on Friday, “Roll-Up Computers and Their Kin” –- “‘The paper book is dead,’ says the digital visionary Nicholas Negroponte” –- is less clairvoyant than it is an echo of today’s conventional wisdom.

And this prediction –- “Some computer developers envision tablet computers so flexible that you will literally be able to roll them up and slip them in your bag or pocket — just as you would do with a newspaper or magazine today — and then unfurl them on the train” — will strike even benighted technophobes (present) as similarly dated. The Christian Science Monitor reported in 2004 that “Next digital screen could fold like paper” and “They eventually could be made of a pliable, polymer backing that resembles paper.”

E-Ink, a pioneer of “smart paper,” has moved past the envisioning stage to begin creating the stuff, as this Inquirer report details

The Times closes with a quote from Clive Thompson, “science and technology writer and columnist for Wired magazine,” who “foresees e-book publishers offering single chapters of some books for 99 cents each, the price for which iTunes sells single songs today.”

Back to the future, indeed.

You can “start reading Moby Dick …on your Kindle in under a minute” via Amazon –- for precisely nothing ($0.00).

It wasn’t a great day for Barnes & Noble yesterday, although it wasn’t exactly a disaster, either. According to this Reuters wire story,the company “reported a net loss of $32.1 million, or 58 cents per share for it fiscal 2010 fourth quarter ended May 1, compared with a loss of $2.1 million, or 5 cents per share, a year earlier. Excluding one-time items, the bookseller lost 89 cents a share.”

Definitely not good. And yet there were some interesting numbers buried beneath the loss. For one thing, actual print book sales were up slightly, and “Overall fourth quarter sales rose 19 percent to $1.3 billion.” What’s more, sales at its website, BN.com, sales increased a wopping “51 percent to $141 million during the quarter from the year ago. It said it expected it website sales to rise 75 percent to $1 billion in fiscal 2011.”

Still more interestingly, “Barnes & Noble Chief Executive William Lynch, who oversaw the development of the Nook and was named CEO in March, said in a statement that the retailer’s share of the e-book market now surpasses its share of the retail book market.”

So why the loss? According to CFO Joseph Lombardi, “spending on its e-book business explains a large part of the loss in the fourth quarter.”

In fact, as a Publishers Weekly report notes, B&N board chairman Len Riggio says the quarterly report has inspired the company to make a more significant investment in its digital efforts, particularly the Nook. “The explosive growth of digital books has created the most compelling opportunity in Barnes & Noble’s history,” he says. “We have found that Barnes & Noble Members, our best customers, have increased their combined physical and digital spend with us by 17% since purchasing a NOOK, and by a phenomenal 70% in total units.”

As for online sales — always weak against arch-rival Amazon.com — BN.com is “having easily the best year in its history,” says PW, and projections are that the site “could hit sales of $1 billion this year.”

Of course, as this Forbes article notes, Amazon also seems on target for a billion dollar ebook business, especially after cutting the price of the Kindle, making still more ebooks available, and making the Kindle reader available yesterday on Android-based devices.

In his New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof notes that an “ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some of our elegant symbols of modernity — smartphones, laptops and digital cameras” and yes, some ebook readers — “are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in Congo.”

As he explains,

I’ve never reported on a war more barbaric than Congo’s, and it haunts me. In Congo, I’ve seen women who have been mutilated, children who have been forced to eat their parents’ flesh, girls who have been subjected to rapes that destroyed their insides. Warlords finance their predations in part through the sale of mineral ore containing tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold. For example, tantalum from Congo is used to make electrical capacitors that go into phones, computers and gaming devices.

Electronics manufacturers have tried to hush all this up. They want you to look at a gadget and think “sleek,” not “blood.”

However, he notes that “now there’s a grass-roots movement pressuring companies to keep these ‘conflict minerals’ out of high-tech supply chains. Using Facebook and YouTube, activists are harassing companies like Apple, Intel and Research in Motion (which makes the BlackBerry) to get them to lean on their suppliers and ensure the use of, say, Australian tantalum rather than tantalum peddled by a Congolese militia.”

Here’s part of the effort, below.

MobyLives has reported before about disappointments in pilot programs by Amazon to implement Kindles as e-text readers, but a new report from Alison Damast at Business Week seems definitive — it’s headlined, “E-Book Readers Bomb on College Campuses.”

As the article notes,

Hopes were high last fall when the Amazon Kindle DX was distributed to a group of students at seven universities around the country in a classroom pilot program for the electronic reader. With students able to download class materials and textbooks easily onto the slender 10.2-ounce device, many thought the era of carrying heavy textbooks would soon be over. Just a few months later, their hopes were dashed, as students reported that the Kindle was a poor replacement for a textbook, hard to use in the classroom, and difficult to navigate.

“It’s an amazing device for recreational reading, but it’s not quite ready for prime time in higher education,” says Daniel Turner, associate dean of the masters and executive education programs at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, one of the schools that participated in the pilot.

Now, reports Damast,

It appears unlikely that the Amazon Kindle DX will be making a comeback in most college and graduate school classrooms this fall. Over the past few months, results from the pilot programs have trickled in, with most schools reporting that students were dissatisfied with the device as a classroom tool, and that many students had abandoned the Kindle just a few weeks into the experiment. At some schools, more than half the students surveyed said they wouldn’t recommend the e-reader to friends for use in the classroom, citing the device’s lack of flexibility, slow navigation within readings, and an inadequate file management system. Another problem that loomed over the pilot was the device’s inaccessibility to the blind and the visually impaired, due to a complicated menu navigation screen that makes it hard to access the read-aloud feature. Until Amazon addresses these problems, the Kindle is unlikely to be embraced by most of the higher education community, says Tracy Gray, managing director of the National Center for Technology Innovation in Washington.

Thursday at 19:36 Marc Prud’hommeaux, founder and chief developer at Lexcycle, the creators of the Stanza e-book reader, announced, via his blog, the exceeding strange news that the Stanza e-reading app is now, against expectations, available on the i-Pad. Read his note in its charming entirety here.

Why strange? Charlie Sorrel in a commentary at Wired repeats the consensus that “Amazon had bought out Stanza only to kill it and reduce competition for its own Kindle for iPad,” adding,  “It turns out we were wrong.” (Wired’s headline, “Stanza for iPad Adds Comic-Book Support,” is a portent that may distress book publishers as much as or more than e-book innovation.)

In short, it seems that Amazon, which owns Stanza, has again produced an app for its arch-competitor Apple’s device which makes of the i-Pad an e-book reader superior to Amazon’s own Kindle. Of course, e-books from Amazon cannot be read on Stanza, as this post explains on Lexcyle’s website (on the i-Pad you will need Amazon’s Kindle app – also free).

Sorrel calls Stanza “our favorite iPhone e-reading app ever” and it has another fan in CNET’s Scott Stein, who in a review calls it “a longtime favorite of iPhone and iPod Touch users.” (iPhone and iPod Touch are both less than three years old. I wonder what the original meaning of  “longtime” was.)

Here is a summary of some of Stanza’s i-Pad app features:

1. It’s free.

2. Supports “an amazing amount of font, spacing and color customization.” (CNET)

3. And PDF and DjVu documents: “DjVu allows for the distribution on the Internet and on DVD of very high resolution images of scanned documents, digital documents, and photographs.”
http://djvu.org/

4. Supports full color Comic Book Archive files CBR and CBZ, “and it’s fast.” (Wired)

5. “You can also share e-books (or any file in Stanza) via e-mail….E-mailing a CBR comic file directly from Stanza is easy.” (CNET)

6. “Stanza 3.0 also reports itself correctly to the iPad OS, telling it that it is ready to open EPUB files. This lets you open books direct from the web or found elsewhere on the iPad, such as in email attachments or inside Dropbox.” (Wired)

7. “Unlike the Kindle and Barnes & Noble apps, Stanza can still browse Feedbooks, Project Gutenberg, and several other book collections directly within the app.” (CNET)

8. “[A]ny e-books you may already have in Stanza can be gotten out and copied to your computer” (Wired)

9. “Stanza incorporates page-turning that makes the experience just like other e-books, but without requiring conversion.” (CNET)

10. Turkish & Bulgarian translations.

The family of Foxconn suicide Ma Xiangqian gather outside the Foxconn factory to mourn and protest

When yet another of its employees committed suicide Tuesday at its Shenzhen plant (aka the “hell factory” — see yesterday’s MobyLives report), the Foxconn Technology company — a producer of Apple iPads — swung into emergency response mode Wednesday. According to a New York Times report by David Barboza, company chair Terry Gou, “one of the richest men in Asia,” has issued an apology and more:

Sensing a public relations fiasco and facing questions from Foxconn suppliers, Mr. Gou traveled here Wednesday from Taiwan on what company executives said was an emergency trip. As part of a hastily assembled, carefully orchestrated news conference and tour led by Mr. Gou, Foxconn executives defended their labor practices, even as they vowed to do everything possible to prevent more young people from taking their own lives.

The company also presented a panel of mental health professionals to discuss the likely causes of suicide in China generally. At least one of the panelists placed the blame on social issues in the country beyond Foxconn’s control.

And perhaps in a sign of desperation, the company said it had even begun putting safety nets up on factory buildings to deter suicide attempts.

The effort, sadly, was apparently not enough: “Hours after the news conference, another Foxconn employee fell to his death from one of the complex’s buildings,” reports the Times.

Meanwhile, Apple and other companies having their products made there — including Dell and Hewlett-Packard — “say they, too, are now investigating conditions at Foxconn,” according to the report. None of those companies, however, seemed to have revealed any details to the Times about those “investigations.”