• Kindles (and their attached ebooks) apparently sold like hotcakes this Christmas (though we can’t be sure), while the Nook continues its snaggy, stumbling launch. However, hackers finally cracked the Kindle DRM. It’ll be interesting to see how Amazon responds. Despite purchasing Kobo neé Shortcovers, Borders maintains they’re not working on a ereader device of its own. I’m with Nico on their days being numbered, though I would like to see a solid all platform ebook store contend with the bigger boys. Barnes & Noble, on the other hand, has begun selling readers besides the Nook: the JetBook and the Foxit eSlick.
• More Apple rumors this week, this time that they will be producing a dedicated reader called the iSlate that differs from they long-rumored tablet. Seems convincing, but I wouldn’t trust this one just yet. Paradigm Shift announced a couple of color ereaders, though the screens look to be LCD, which I don’t think will win the day. Asus (of netbook fame) has a rumored ereader/tablet on the horizon, and it gets this week’s Stupidest eReader Name Award for calling it the EeeReader. Finally, hot on Asus’s heels,  Lenovo wants in too (hopefully they come up with the dumbest name yet).
• A library in Oregon has announced plans to lend out ereaders. Hopefully this proves successful and this sort of thing takes off. Interead, makeres of COOL-er ereaders, partnered with OverDrive (who make very solid library software) to expand their ebook store. As you may have heard, there was a big MediaBistro ebook summit recently. Of all places, Vanity Fair has a nice breakdown of the proceedings. Now you can read Sesame Street, Curious George, and Veggie Tales stories on your iPhone, and record your reading for your children to replay later. A Wallace & Gromit ebook sold half a million downloads on the Apple App Store, which is impressive indeed.
• Apparently HP’s new facial recognition PCs are colorblind (in the unacceptable, can’t see black people way). Don’t feed sea turtles brussels sprouts unless you want their farts to mess up your aquarium. I know I’ve posted to it before, but I really like this isn’t happiness.
• This weeks video is an oldie-but-goodie:

Author: Nick Cave

2009, Faber & Faber

Best ebook deal: (I went for the iPhone Enhanced Edition, read more below)

Filed under Literary

This review is going to be a little different, as I read this book using the Enhanced Editions iPhone appbook version of the book. The first half will review the book, and the second will be an installment of iPhone Readers.

Nick Cave’s musical background is immediately evident when you begin reading this book. I haven’t read his debut And the Ass Saw the Angel, but I’ve since heard the writing is similar. Cave utilizes strong rhythms and cadences to his syntax. And while he doesn’t turn the crispest phrases, there is a hypnotic and musical feel to his writing, even if it is a bit manic and cacophonous at times.

This caught me a little off guard. In tackling a book by a rock star, I expected something heavy on plot and zaniness and light on literary style. Unfortunately, The Death of Bunny Munro delivers much the opposite. Despite the pleasingly readable and enjoyable writing, the book lacks considerably in character and plot.  Bunny Munro is an oversexed lout, a traveling lotion salesman who follows his penis around like a GPS tuned to broken, lonely, easily bedded women. And the book is pretty much about him being and doing just that.

When his wife, fed up with Bunny’s infidelity and lack of general human qualities, kills herself, Bunny is forced to care for their son, Bunny Jr., alone. Bunny figures the best way to handle his son is to keep up his drunken cocksman ways while Bunny Jr. plays navigator or waits in the car.

While at first the oddball characters and ridiculous situations are amusing and attention grabbing, Cave fails to employ a plot that encourages any sort of change to keep things interesting. Bunny and the other characters quickly become tiresome, even annoying (I got really tired with Bunny’s fantasies about Avril Lavigne’s vagina), and nothing really happens until the final pages, when Cave tosses in a twist that reads more like a desperate derailment designed to force him to end the novel than any sort of culmination of plot or story.

It’s a quick read, and the writing is certainly enjoyable. As long as you think of it as a vacation or commute read, there is certainly reason to dive into this book. However the novel got a lot of hype when it came out, and if you’re expecting a finely crafted book that takes all facets of novel writing into account, prepare yourself for disappointment.

Other books to try: And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (Kerouac & Burroughs), Naked Lunch (Burroughs), Frisco Pigeon Mambo (Payne)

The iPhone appbook Extended Edition version has one particularly cool feature: the coupling of audio and text. This means you can read half a chapter, then hit the audio button and have the audiobook (read by Nick Cave himself) pick up where you left off reading. If you want to go back to reading, the text will be queued up to wherever you left off. This is cool, but it basically means this is a glorified and over-priced audio book ($24.99 at my time of purchase).

As an ereader app, Extended Editions is extremely lacking in features. The included videos of Cave reading are cool, but ultimately unnecessary and the same content as the audio, as the videos show Cave and not any sort of animation or dramatization of the novel (I’ve embedded a sample below). The ebook features–scrolling only, basic bookmarking and text formatting, excerpt sharing–are trumped by the audio, which is undeniably top notch audiobook quality. Cave reads quite well, and the background music and soundscapes, composed by Cave, are pretty great, even if calling it a “groundbreaking 3D audio spatial mix” is a bit of a stretch.

The biggest hangup with this Extended Editions version (aside from the steep price point and the gigabyte of memory space it hogs) is that it is a standalone app, and without background processing on the iPhone, everytime you field an email or text message, you must back out of the app, stopping the audio, and it takes a bit to long to reload up. This gets pretty annoying if you treat the app more or less as an audiobook as I did.

For $25 they should have thrown in an iTunes download of the audio; it would have eased frustrations with multitasking and probably increased the chance of me revisiting the text. As it is, I cleared the app off my phone for space as soon as I was done, and it’s unlikely I’ll rearrange my apps and music to make room for it again anytime soon. You’re better off buying the deadtree or ebook for half the price of this appbook.

The Death of Bunny Munro Chapter 17 from Enhanced Editions on Vimeo.

• Elsewhere in books, Google’s book battle has gone international, while Amazon’s has settled. Aptara and friends are working on a mysterious “solution” to iPhone books. Gormet threw in the napkin, and so did Philly’s libraries. I like what this guy’s got to say about ebook price points, though his bar may be a tad low. Disney books have gone digital, and Simon & Schuster “invented” the vook,  but nobody cares.

• Two of my favorite authors in a blender! Check out Nabokov’s notes on Kafka’s work. Also Kafka-related from Boing Boing, reading his work improves learning? UPDATE: Hilary Mantel has been named the winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize.

• Finally, the fun. Levi Johnston finally uses protection? And while we can all chuckle at this quick Zelda animation, only true dorks can appreciated this apparent infusion of Mother 3 into Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends (bonus points if you know the answer to Tomato’s Bubble Monkey question).

The presentation is top notch. Texts are far more readable in Eucalyptus than in the other reader apps I’ve tried. On top of this everything is well organized, intuitive and easy to navigate. They’ve included plenty of animations and graphical touches that give the package a decidedly professional flair. This does wonders negating the fears of buyer’s remorse I had when I first agreed to spend $10.

The creators of Eucalyptus have taken the time to create little card catalogue pages displaying each book’s publishing info, and the page turning and book shelving animations do a lot for the aesthetic. My favorite touch is a Staff Picks section, which arranges top choices for the user like a display shelf at a book store, and includes book synopses in case you’re choosing from books you’ve never read or heard of before.

I dig the presentation.

The text itself is far more readable due to the excellent formatting. The app uses nice fonts, more akin to hardcover typesets than the typical Courier/Times fonts seen in most other apps. The contrast between font and background is finely tuned as well. Best yet, the actual formatting (tabs, indents, punctuation) looks professional.

I didn’t come across any wonky spacing, jumbled sentences, or any of the other problems too common in many public domain ebooks. These books appear to have been actually proofed, and that adds a lot to the experience. Oh, and the formatting adjusts with text resizing (which you can do with pinch and push gestures). All this makes the experience feel much closer to reading a book than a computer screen, which I appreciate.

Noticably lacking are text search and highlighting features. They aren’t things I use all that often on mobile readers, but it would be nice to have. The library search functions work well though, as do the contents tables. A great touch is an anonymous feedback feature, which allows you do send a screenshot with comments about technical problems or text copy to the Eucalyptus support. This not only shows a commitment to the customer and to the quality of the product―something lacking in many apps―but also nicely represents Project Gutenberg as a community of readers dedicated to perfecting this electronic library.

Properly formatted public domain text on an iPhone app!

If you want to buy and/or import your newer ebooks to read on your iPhone, go with Stanza or the new Barnes & Noble app. However, if you’re primarily into reading older books on your iPhone–maybe you are someone like me who doesn’t want to pay bookstore prices for a reading experience mostly relegated to the daily commute–Eucalyptus is clearly the most readable and attractive option.

$10 is a tad steep, so Stanza is still a great option for the thrifty reader of classics, but hopefully a price drop is in the future. I should note that 20% of proceeds go to Project Gutenberg, which makes the purchase a little easier to swallow.

To see it in action, check out the video below. It really does look good.

The organization is pretty intuitive, and there is a surprisingly large array of categories. Each book’s entry contains a picture of the cover, basic publisher info, and some helpful links allowing you to email the book’s info to a friend or jump to the book’s page on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. There is also the option to save selections to a “shelf” for future perusal.  The book excerpts are what separates this app from the pack, and it handles it well.

The reading is comfortable, even if the customization options are (understandably) absent. Pretty much you swipe left and right to page forward and back, and that’s it. You can’t change the font size or color or the background color. This isn’t a big deal though at the font is pretty average for iPhone and the text is a very readable grey on white. The formatting isn’t the prettiest in the world, but I didn’t come across any that was problematic either. There’s no bookmarking or text searching, but both would be pretty useless in such short samples anyhow.

Some nice options were included by the developers. You can setup the app to use WiFi only, presumedly to conserve battery and increase performance. You can toggle data cacheing, meaning the app can download data of viewed books for faster and offline performance or keep the data online to conserve memory. I should also mention that Xcerpts’s search funtion is pretty robust–you can even search by ISBN.

I do have a few gripes. Navigation can be a bit tricky at first. I was flummoxed when trying to back out of a category I openeed on accident. None of the buttons seem to back out. I soon gathered that the categories open like a drop down menu, and the other catgories can be reached by scrolling up/down or tapping the cateogry again to collapse it. Not a big deal, but kind of annoying. More of a big deal is that Xcerpts crashes quite often. When I was testing it it crash 40-50% of the times I tried to open up an excerpt, which is far too many. This is something they will hopefully fix in subsequent updates.

The name is stupid, but all in all Xcerpts is a nice little app and will compliment apps like IndieBound and the Amazon shopping app nicely. It’s free, so definitely worth a spin.

So I though about getting into a subscription based audiobook program to keep up with newer books, but then I decided just to start borrowing audiobooks from the library and ripping them to my computer. In the meantime, I began getting audiobooks from a site called LibriVox, where volunteers upload recordings of readings from public domain books. I was immediately (and still am a little) astounded at the high quality of the readings and recordings. They are pleasant and professional. They are also free.

Audiobooks (not the most creative of names) is a free app from the Appstore that provides an iPhone/iPod conduit to the LibraVox catologue. It is a really great program for quickly and easily getting public domain audiobooks and listening to them. The presentation isn’t fancy, but it’s not ugly either, and it is certainly functional. You can browse by author, title, or genre, search for a specific book, or choose “Surprise Me” and get a random offering. You can only choose from LibraVox’s library, which comes from the Project Gutenberg library, and you cannot upload your own audiobooks (which would be totally unecessary seeing as the iPhone has a built in iPod). LibraVox’s selection is satisfyingly deep. Find a book you like and hit download, then you’re good to go.

Downloading files requires WiFi, which might prove a bummer in certain situations, but all in all it’s not that big a deal. With files that can be in the hundreds megabytes range, waiting for the 3G download would be a pain in the tookus. It’s also worth noting that unlike with reader apps, it’s not a good idea to go downloading like crazy when you first get the app. Though a small pocket library of audiobooks would be nice, the large file sizes can chew up the limited space on your device quickly. You can listen to the first chapter while the rest download, which is a nice touchthat lets you dive right in .

A free app that offers a wealth of high quality content is a welcome addition to my home screen indeed. I’ll certainly be listening to most of my audiobooks between Audiobooks, LibriVox, and Overdrive, rather than paying harcover prices for forgettable books.

image credit: notempire.com

In what could be terrible news, Lexcycle, the producer of the best (by far) reader app for the iPhone, Stanza, has announced their sale to Amazon. If Amazon uses this move to try and strangle the market and push their proprietary Kindle format on mobile devices, this could be very bad news indeed and indicate a big step backwards for mobile device ereading. If however, they stick to their claim to leave Stanza unchanged, or better yet, they open Stanza to the Kindle format without locking out other formats, it could be a step forward. We’ll have to wait and see, but don’t hold your breath.

via Apple Insider.

Wattpad’s innovation is the ability to share. You can tag books you like which will in turn recommend it to readers with similar tags and libraries as you.

Some of Wattpad's suggestions are unhelpful at best and obviously done by title words.

There are also other sharing options such as emailing recommendations through the app, but Wattpad can hardly be granted credit for letting readers emails someone about a book. The recommendation system seems to work a lot like those of Netflix and Pandora, clearly controlled by an algorithm of some sort and therefore every interesting recommendation that shows up bring with it four duds. It’s also obvious that the back up plan for this is to send similar titles, as my recommendations based on the pre-populated Curious Case of Benjamin Button suggest. It’s certainly nice to see someone trying innovation out though, and it’s a commendable move to try book-sharing integration into readers.

Books are all free which is nice, and you can upload your own documents (from ebooks to fanfics) to Wattpad’s website. The downside to this sharing system is that texts don’t download to your iPhone, rather your library is merely a collection of bookmarks to the Wattpad database. Therefore how long your books actually remain available cannot be certain (Twilight was at the top of the What’s New list, and I imagine it’ll be gone the second Little, Brown and Company’s lawyers find out). This also means no service, no reading. So Wattpad’s probably pretty useless on an airplane.

Requiring service to access a book is sucky.

The presentation is where Wattpad really sucks. The texts aren’t cleaned up very well, and so often the screen is filled with messy formatting. Font, text size, color and background color are all customizable. Landscape reading is available with a twist of the accelerometer. Rather than turning pages, books are presented is a single scrolling page which can be set to scroll automatically if you’re too lazy to swipe your thumb (page up and down buttons are available so simulate page turns). There is no bookmarking capability, but Wattpad seems to remember your place in multiple books. There is also a rather unhelpful (because it changes with text size) page number listed in the top corner of the screen.

There's so much crap on the screen that won't go away.

And oh, is the screen real estate is poorly utilized. The header bar, menu bar, useless scroll speed bar and more useless vertical position-in-the-book map take up a solid chunk of the small screen. They go away if you tap the center, but come back 2 seconds later for no good reason. I couldn’t find a way to get them to stay away. When navigating the menus, ugly popup ads clutter things, which is especially annoying since utilizing the full capability of this app requires you to visit their website and presumably see plenty of ad exposure in the process.

So while Wattpad brings a few good ideas to the table, its poor execution makes for an unpleasant reading experience. Reading is an inherently peaceful experience, and any reader app that can’t capture a sense of the comfortable is a failure. Clutter and disorganization don’t make for a comfortable read.

Lately I’ve been poking around on a great directory called the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (located here), which compiles articles about ebooks published in scholarly journals. In general, scholarly journals don’t get very much love from non-scholars. The articles can be pretty dry, and the gists sometimes tough to parse without a filter. However there’s always a lot of interesting reading provided from some very smart people in them, and they’re usually the first places to learn of new trends, studies, etc., before they are disseminated through newsprint and the internet. 

I’ve filtered out some of the most intriguing and provided brief abstracts for them below, and I’ve only included articles that can be accessed for free in this post.

Though some articles linked to by the SEPW are gold Open Access (OA), many aren’t. Most of the people who read these sort of things have subscriptions through scholarly sources, but it’s still frustrating there isn’t a better (read: affordable) way for laypersons to access them. Some journals offer unhindered access to schools and laypersons alike through gold OA, but since scholarly journals aren’t exactly lucrative, most have to remain green OA (which scholar decided to use two “g” words to qualify OA I don’t know) to keep afloat. Makes me wish for the good old days of college library access so I could read any I wished. I’m still waiting for a truly great electronic library to spring up at some point and make this point moot.

Speaking of libraries, this first entry describes how the many different functions of libraries can be enhanced through expanded mobile access. Not directly about ebooks, though they obviously play an important role as libraries become higher tech, the author presents some nice points about how libraries can efficient evolve to meet the changing needs of library users.

People use a growing array of services to manage their digital lives. Although some are local to their devices, a growing number are on the network. Think, in different contexts, of Zotero, Delicious or Connotea; Flickr, YouTube or Slideshare; Google Docs, Scribd or Zoho. Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, as well as others, will continue to aim to provide a framework within which people manage their resources, communicate, and build their online identity. Two thoughts come to mind. One I have already mentioned: some of these resources may be important to the institution, which may want to provide backup services to ensure their continuity. The other is increasingly interesting: how do library resources play in these environments? Can I link to individual catalog records, journal articles or e–books? Can I mix library resources with those in my personal collections? Are library resources RSS–ified?

Read the whole article (only a few pages) here: Always on: Libraries in a world of permanent connectivity by Lorcan Dempsey.

Next, an interesting piece calling for the digitizing of all documentation by expanding programs such as Google Book Search to encompass film negatives, manuscripts, physical art, etc. The article provides a nice breakdown of how the current digitizing efforts work, and some suggestions for how it can help preserve information in danger of being lost. I found the techniques for cleaning up images and digitization most interesting. It’s really great to see effort like this being made to prevent a modern disaster occurring á la the Library of Alexandria.

Read it all here: Toward Digitizing All Forms of Documentation by George V. Landon.

Finally, here’s more of an opinion piece that bounces around a bit, but mostly focuses on some interesting comments about online journals. Most of this is done by pulling various quotations together like that which set this up:

The message here is that, for some nations at least, online journals may be the only realistic way to publish peer-reviewed articles. For other nations and fields, print may already be a less-satisfactory alternative.

You can find the many viewpoints complied in the bottom half of the article. In the first half, the author brings up nice interesting points about open access to information online, something I wish more people would find concern with:

Gratuitous statements by OA advocates to undermine topical-repository mandates and suggest that institutional repositories don’t cost anything to establish and operate don’t get us there—but help assure that we never will get there. There doesn’t seem much question that IRs are in trouble; that doesn’t bode well for green OA as the only or even the primary answer. And nonsense like the reintroduced Conyers bill threatens to undermine what progress has been made on what should be the low-hanging fruit for repositories: research funded by the Federal government, which—if it was carried out in Federal labs—would automatically be in the public domain.

The whole page: Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large.

And, if you’re into stats, here’s a nice state-of-the-industry piece about OA ejournals: LIS Open Acess E-Journal: Where Are You? By Izabella Taler.