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By Nico Vreeland, on February 23rd, 2009 According to a story from NPR, a small college in Missouri is testing out etextbooks this semester, in anticipation of using exclusively digital textbooks soon, presumably next fall. Evidently, the groundwork was partially laid by the school’s policy of issuing laptops to all incoming students. In addition:
Northwest Missouri State is in a unique position to go entirely digital: In addition to the laptops, students rent all their textbooks from the college. So when a comprehensive selection became available digitally, [President] Hubbard decided to make the switch.
I’ve got to admire their bravery, especially without even using dedicated ereader devices. I can’t imagine doing all my studying in front of a computer screen, but perhaps this is simply a matter of adjustment.
The article mentions good and bad feedback from students, and in addition to some obvious drawbacks, etextbooks also have some very nice advantages; I’d put searching inside them and embedded video at the top of the list.
Hopefully this news will serve to light a fire under Plastic Logic and other companies. There’s a whole lot of money to be made on students, and once colleges start working out ways to make their bookstore ducats and simultaneously go paperless, the switch might just happen with or without dedicated devices.
[via NPR]
By Nico Vreeland, on February 23rd, 2009  There’s quite an interesting post on Booksquare today about ebook pricing, and why the publishing industry is keeping eprices artificially inflated. The writer, Kassia Krozser, lays into publishers for fearing to get on board with ebooks, refusing to invest in epublishing the same way readers are investing in ereading, and not realizing that they now have to follow the Kindle’s $9.99 pricing model.
She offers both hope:
People will pay for content as long as it meets some basic needs. Digital books offer as much pleasure as print books, but digital books are also viewed as something slightly different.
and harsh reality:
In the digital marketplace, books have to remain competitive with other media. It’s not so much your opinion of the value of your product that matters; it’s all about how the customer values your product…. You can trot out your business model and your profit-and-loss statements, but your customers don’t really care.
The thing is, I understand why big publishing houses aren’t getting behind ebooks. It’s the same reason people buy more Nora Roberts books than Karen Brown (besides the fact that they’ve never heard of Karen Brown).
The problem is that we all have a deep-seated aversion to risk, an aversion which allows consumers to be more easily controlled by major media corporations who themselves are seriously risk averse. This cycle is strangling the development of artistic media in the modern world.
However, the digital revolution of media (lynchpinned by digital piracy) has a chance to free us from that risk aversion, and lead to the resurrection of art, including, maybe most of all, the resurrection of good writing.
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By Nico Vreeland, on February 23rd, 2009 UPDATE: See end of post.
I’ve come to the conclusion that ereaders are not ready for serious books. They’re simply not good enough for students or anyone who wants to interact with what they’re reading: highlighting, taking notes, none of that is truly functional yet.
So, if you’re in the market for an ereader with which to casually read books and newspapers—one that doesn’t have any kind of keyboard—two stand out from the crowd: the Sony PRS-505, and the BeBook from Endless Ideas BV. (The CyBook was close, but it’s $50 more expensive than the BeBook including a cover, it doesn’t support as many formats as the BeBook, and doesn’t display page numbers or have number buttons, which is simply too little functionality, even for a casual ereader.)
I decided to get both a 505 and a BeBook and see for myself which was better. Here’s a side-by-side comparison.
Note: Sony Readers are not currently compatible with Mac or Linux. They still work with Calibre, but you won’t be able to buy or borrow any DRMed books (which means any current books). If you use one of those systems, get a BeBook.
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By Eric Markowsky, on February 22nd, 2009
I’m looking at my bookshelf right now, comparing my largest books to my smallest books. The fattest books, (a few reference volumes, a couple of art books, several anthologies, and a copy of Infinite Jest which I am still too intimidated to begin) stand on the bottom shelf, ranging from around eight inches tall to well over a foot. The skinniest books are hiding on the middle shelf, mostly individual volumes of poetry whose spines blend together into one solid stripe of art deco rainbow. Above that is a hodge-podge of paperbacks and periodicals, some neatly lined up and some stacked teetering on top of each other, the broader volumes providing a foundation for my pocket-sized books.
Now I’m trying to imagine one universal ereader that could reasonably accommodate all of these different sized books with minimal effect on the experience of actually reading them. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on February 20th, 2009 BeBook support might very well be the best in the business.
I recently got a BeBook after my Sony PRS-700 took a powder. After messing with the Mobipocket Reader software for a long, long time, I still couldn’t make the thing read a library book. This terrified me briefly, because I have a severe allergic reaction to paying for books with digital restriction measures, so the ability to borrow and read library books is essential to me.
Eventually, I found this thread on the BeBook support forum. It details the problem (the BeBook has no internal clock, and so the time-stamped DRM on library books thinks they aren’t active), and one user gives a link to a hack that you can load on an SD card that will give the BeBook a clock, or at least the ability to think it has a clock.
Here’s the interesting thing: the poster with the original problem was a bit reluctant to use a third-party hack, and wanted to wait for an official response from BeBook. The official response came, and BeBook support reported that they’d tried the hack out, and it worked, and they gave their (unofficial) OK.
I’ve never heard of anything like this. This kind of response shows a clear priority structure: BeBook’s customers come first. I can’t say the same thing about Amazon or Sony.
[here's the specific post that contains instructions on how to read library books on BeBook]
By Eric Markowsky, on February 20th, 2009  Author: Aleksandar Hemon
Riverhead, 2008
Best eBook Deal: Powell’s
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
If you’ve heard anything about The Question of Bruno, Hemon’s stunning debut story collection, then you know that he has the reputation of a linguistic genius (with a MacArthur “genius grant” to show for it). The Lazarus Project builds on that reputation and then some. The prose is so compelling, at times devastatingly funny and charming, at others just devastating, that the book moves like a light read despite its heavy themes, displacement, political upheaval and oppression, the mysteries of other minds. The novel combines Hemon’s linguistic gifts with a well-balanced structure that makes it doubly difficult to put down.
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By Sean Clark, on February 19th, 2009  A French TV Book, whatever that is, circa 1932.
In his post the other day, my esteemed colleague mentioned his preference for watching televisions shows online with sites such as Hulu. He mentioned the “brute force” distributor control that is slowing things down. He said more, and I agree with most of what he said. I won’t repeat it; you can read it on your own. I want to chime in though (be forewarned, I can ramble like the best of them).
I derive a geeky pleasure from reading tech blogs like DVICE, and reading about future technologies being worked out by company labs now. Sometimes, though, the technology we are aching for as consumers is actually a few years old. Our economy and our society’s technological gumption both rely heavily on competition. When companies are locked in battle, fighting for market share by creating the best product, the consumer and technology both benefit. When their hearts aren’t really in it (as I would assert is the case going on with Sony and Amazon with their readers), the consumer and technology suffer.
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By Nico Vreeland, on February 18th, 2009  Author: Lauren Groff
Voice (Hyperion) 2008
Best ebook deal: Library
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
3 |
| Depth..... |
3 |
The Monsters of Templeton opens with an enormous monster literally floating dead in a lake near the town of Templeton. Wilhemina Upton has just come crawling back home after complications with her graduate professor led to a tense situation. Her mother hints toward the identity of her long-unknown father—even mentioning that he lives in their very town—but refuses to just out and tell Wilhemina who he is.
Which is nice, because otherwise there wouldn’t be a novel. Wilhemina (a smarter-than-thou narcissist who studies archeology but likes to drop Whitman quotes uncited into conversation) immediately makes off for the library to study her entire familial history, leading to a series of interspliced letters, journals, and personal accounts. These create for her one kind of understanding of who she is, even as she struggles to find herself in life. Presumably, the monster comes back at some point.
OK, full disclosure: I couldn’t bring myself to finish this book. …
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By Sean Clark, on February 18th, 2009
 Author: Elena Ferrante, Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
Europa Editions, 2008
Best ebook deal: Not available (disagree?)
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
3 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
When I was young I had two recurring dreams–nightmares, really. In the first, my younger brother, who slept in the bunk beneath me, was devoured by wolves on a nightly basis. By the time I mustered the courage to help him, all that remained was a pile of sparkly white bones, stripped clean of flesh. In the second and far less gruesome dream, I’d be at a fair or park or some place of that sort and a boy younger than me would somehow lose his grip on the string tethering a bright red balloon. The balloon would float away and the boy would cry. In the dream I knew he wasn’t crying for a balloon, but for that balloon, and I’d wake up not in sweats as after the wolf dream, but with a weird lonely sadness aching in my stomach. I not only felt bad for the child because of his loss, but angry with him for being so stupid as to lose the balloon. I need help, I know–sorry for getting so personal in this review. The wolf dream I only bring up so I don’t seem like such a sissy because of the balloon. But man, did that balloon dream bother me; I’d seriously cry sometimes. In The Lost Daughter, Elena Ferrante conjures up this same emotion. The book punched me through the gut with an icy fist and left behind in there a similar ball of frustrated and angry sadness bordering on despair. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on February 17th, 2009  TV doesn't rot your brain. Bad TV rots your brain. (image credit bbc.co.uk) Here’s how I watch TV (this all ties in to ebooks eventually). I subscribe to a number of shows on Hulu, and I’ve set up other shows in bittorrent RSS feeds (the ones that aren’t on Hulu). Every day, new episodes of the shows I like come to me somehow, and I watch them in order of how much I like them. If I run out of those and still want to soften my brain, as happens from time to time, I have a number of shows I’ll deign to watch episode by episode on Hulu, in order from bad to worst. And there are, of course, a great many that I’ll never watch, no matter how they’re broadcast.
There are only a rarefied few (House, The Office) that I will actually take the time and energy to hunt down showtimes for, find the right channel, get myself on the couch at the prescribed time, and actually watch the broadcast of, as we watched everything ten years ago.
This is how on-demand digital media changes media consumption: it allows each person to create their own meritocracy of content. They do not have to tune in at a certain time on a certain channel; they do not have to sit through some godawful tripe between Friends and Seinfeld.
The control of consumption is more and more in the hands of consumers these days, and much less in the hands of distributors, and it is this reversal, more than DRM or piracy, that is seismically shifting the media business models of the 20th century.
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