Open Publishing Distribution System -- an Open-Standards Catalog Format

Andrew Savikas
April 8, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

It's no secret we're big fans of the iPhone/iPod reading app Stanza. While the Kindle App has overtaken Stanza for the top-spot among free book apps in iTunes, Stanza offers a much better reading experience than the Kindle App (for example, by supporting standard formatting like tables and whitespace-preservation). And I'm not the only one who feels that way: "Stanza is hands-down the best e-book reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and its free. Go. Get it now." (Wired.com).

But more than the quality of the software, the major reason I'm so bullish on Stanza is their willingness to experiment. When our own Keith Fahlgren suggested they use the standard Atom format for their catalog system, they responded:

We wound up taking your advice and implemented support for Atom for Stanza's catalog format. Thanks for the suggestion! Using the Atom standard is much better than using our own custom format (although we may need to eventually extend the custom format with our own tags).

And when we proposed using Stanza to create a standalone book app (for iPhone: The Missing Manual), they were eager to dive in head first, and we both learned a lot in the process.

That Atom-based Online Catalog feature turned out to be an interesting prototype for a distributed digital discovery and ecommerce system, and it's awesome to see them willing to embrace the potential for such a system well beyond the boundaries their own product, and to join with Peter Brantley and the Internet Archive in laying the groundwork for what's being called the Open Publication Distribution System:

Users of compatible Reading Systems, in addition to being able to access content they have previously acquired or acquire via other means, are also able to access a catalog (list of online sources of content). Typically, the catalog offers a number of free titles, which may be hosted by the Reading System vendor and/or other sites, as well as the opportunity to purchase or borrow paid content from stores and libraries. Additional stores and libraries may be added by the user to their personal catalog. The mechanism through which compatible Reading Systems access the distributed catalog has three components: eBook content, XML catalog metadata, and an HTTP transport for the catalog. The remainder of this document will discuss each of those components in turn.

One of the reasons we've thrown our support behind the Bookworm online ebook reading system as part of O'Reilly Labs is to help support the development and testing of new standards like this one, and we're excited to contribute to this new initiative. It's also great to see Adobe support this as well, and is a nice follow on to our work with them on EPUB output for the open-source DocBook XSL stylesheets.  

Readers Boycotting Kindle Titles Priced Above $9.99

Andrew Savikas
April 3, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (7) | Listen

Pricing is a red-hot topic among publishers when it comes to ebooks. As I said in a Q&A for Forbes.com last week, cost-driven pricing (especially when the costs in question are calculated based on printed output) is a poor approach for ebook publishers. Readers simply don't care how much it costs a publisher to produce an ebook -- they only care how much it's worth to them. (This is especially true for the iPhone, where books must compete alongside games, music, movies, and other "apps" primarily priced well below $10.)

Now a group of readers is rebelling against books priced above $9.99 in the Kindle store (using Amazon's own tagging system, ironically) and there's a very interesting explanation of the rationale over at Electronic Cottage (all emphasis from the original):

The price also acknowledged the obvious: a Kindle edition is less valuable than a hardcover; although you cannot pass along your Kindle edition to friends, you are at least paying a significant amount less than the hardcover price. Unfortunately, short-sighted publishers feel they are losing dollars instead of realizing that a $9.99 Kindle sale doesn't usurp a hardcover sale. It is a brand new entity. A plus. Pure gravy.

...

I joined the boycott yesterday when I went to buy the new Harlen Coben book, only to be stopped by the high price. Since then, I've added the boycott tags to books over $9.99. I'm not happy about it. I'd rather buy the latest installment of Myron Bolitar's adventures and Chris Knopf's 2008 release, "Head Wounds." In fact, I was one of those who clicked Amazon's "Tell the Publisher" button to indicate that I wanted a Kindle edition of "Head Wounds." But not at $15.40. I'll wait for the paperback. Or get back into the library habit that I abandoned for my Kindle habit. I was irresistibly tempted by the lower prices of Kindle editions, I admit it. I just counted my Kindle orders since I got the reader in December 2008.144 Kindle books. Yikes. 144 books. I had no idea. Publishers, are you paying attention?

That's a very good question.

"Bite-Size Edits" from BookOven

Andrew Savikas
April 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (12) | Listen

Hugh McGuire's startup BookOven has opened up an alpha version of a project they're calling the Gutenberg Rally, an attempt to harness collective intelligence Mechanical-Turk style to proofread Project Gutenberg texts for typos and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) errors. In "divide and conquer" style, the system presents just one small snippet of text at a time (with some surrounding context), effectively breaking down a mountain of a task into easily managed molehills:

I had a nice chat with Hugh on Wednesday morning, and what he told me about what's to come from BookOven was quite exciting (though apparently still very much in development).

This isn't the first attempt to harness eyeballs for finding and fixing OCR errors (see ReCaptcha), but reviewing the text in context is a much more satisfying experience, and left me wanting to read more of several of the books I was seeing only in snippet form.

Software Development as Collaborative Writing

Andrew Savikas
March 31, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Following a lively backchannel email discussion, I'd planned to blog about what writers, editors, and publishers can learn from software developers (specifically their tools and techniques) but Tim beat me to it over on the Radar blog.

As I said in my email, The more I think about it the more obvious it's becoming to me that the next generation of authoring/production tools will have much more in common with today's software development tools than with today's word processors.

Software developers spend enormous amounts of time creatively writing with text, editing, revising, refining multiple interconnected textual works -- and often doing so in a highly distributed way with many collaborators. Few writers or editors spend as much time as developers with text, and it only makes sense to apply the lessons developers have learned about managing collaborative writing and editing projects at scale.

Programmers faced with annoying problems like "how do I make sure that changes I make to this text don't conflict with someone else's changes" or "how do I tell who among several writers made a particular change to some text" solved those problems long ago (Wikis are a great example of applying some of those tools and techniques to the writing process; API-based offline blogging editors are another).

And while using those tools as-is probably won't make sense for a lot of non-technical writers, those willing to at least try them out will learn a lot about what the next generation of collaborative, distributed, digital publishing tools will look like.

Pragmatic Programmers Now Doing "Ebook Bundles"

Andrew Savikas
March 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

It's great to see other publishers picking up on the "ebook bundle" concept and including multiple formats -- the Pragmatic Programmers are now selling a combo of EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket files for their ebooks. I especially like the way they've phrased it:

You’ve bought a license to the content, not to a particular file format, so you are free to enjoy that content on whatever device, using whatever display technology you choose.

Well said.

Peter Brantley Joins Internet Archive

Andrew Savikas
March 25, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Longtime "Foo" (Friend-of-O'Reilly) and TOC Conference adviser and blogger Peter Brantley has joined the Internet Archive as its Director. From the news release:

In this role, he will direct our efforts and help coordinate with partners in building an open library and distributed publishing system.

Congrats Peter!

Sony-Google Deal Adds 500k Public Domain Books to E-Reader

Mac Slocum
March 19, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

Sony is adding 500,000 public domain EPUB-based titles to its Reader catalog through a partnership with Google. Paul Biba at Teleread examines Sony's rationale:

Sony's apparent intent, meanwhile, beyond adding value to the Reader, will be to use public domain books in ePub to entice people to install its software and in time buy its reader devices.

In the exclusive TeleRead interview, Steve [Haber, President of Sony's Digital Reading Division] emphasized that this program is part of Sony's commitment to an open platform, as opposed to the closed platform of its major competitor (hint, hint, the name starts with an A). The ePub conversion is being done by Google itself, as noted; and Sony and Google are exploring ways to make copyrighted ePub material available.

Catalog expansion and mobile devices are propelling recent ebook/e-reader announcements. Google Book Search opened mobile access to its archive of public domain books in February, and Amazon recently made its Kindle titles available to iPhone and iPod Touch users through a free iPhone app.

Related Stories:

• Adam Hodgkin: "Google Books on Sony eBook Reader"
• Martyn Daniels: "Are Google Establishing Their Sales Channels?"
• New Sony E-Reader Has Touchscreen, No Web Connection
• Kindle vs Sony Reader: Battle of Distribution Channels
• Bookworm Online EPUB Reader Now Part of O'Reilly Labs

One-Question Interview at BookNet Canada Tech Forum

Andrew Savikas
March 19, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the 2009 BookNet Canada Technology Forum in Toronto (motto: Even colder than you expected!), and Mark Bertils caught up with me on my way out for a quick video interview:

Two follow ups on what I said, now that I have my del.icio.us feed handy:

• The Peter Drucker reference is from his 5 Deadly Business Sins: "Cost-driven Pricing. The only thing that works is price-driven costing. The only sound way to price is to start out with what the market is willing to pay--and thus what the competition will charge--and design to that price specification."
• It was Mike Shatzkin (referencing Michael Cader) who made the recent point about the relative low cost of experimentation for publishers around pricing digital products: "You can't get rich or go broke whether you price the ebook 50% too high or 50% too low. Try everything. You'll never have a cheaper opportunity to experiment."

Related Stories:

• Pricing Digital Book Content: Where's the Sweet Spot?
• Expectation of Fair Pricing, Not Free
• Joe Wikert: "iPhone App Store Price Sensitivity"

Coming to Grips with the "Unthinkable" in Publishing

Andrew Savikas
March 18, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (11) | Listen

While much of the Twitter chatter this past weekend was about the annual South by Southwest festival and conference, there was quite a bit of "retweeting" of links to a post by Clay Shirky:

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change -- take a book and shrink it -- was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn't apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won't break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren't in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

I'll second Tim O'Reilly's reaction to the piece:

This is a piece that anyone concerned with the future of publishing simply MUST read.

It's a long post, but well worth a close read (and re-read). Though Clay's talking about newspapers, much of what he has to say applies to book publishing in particular, as well as media in general.

More on Shirky's post from Mark Bertils (@mdash) over at indexmb.com:

Journalism is the act. Newspapers are the artifact. The infrastructure around the artifact is imploding, never to be replaced.

Related Stories:

• Clay Shirky: "The Newspaper Industry and the Arrival of the Glaciers"
• The Confusion Between Content and Containers
• It's Time to Accept an Ambiguous Digital Fate
• News.com: "NYT's Sulzberger: 'We can't care' if newspapers die"

Jakob Nielsen: Kindle Content Must be Kindle-Specific

Mac Slocum
March 16, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Jakob Nielsen offers an in-depth look at Kindle formatting best practices:

For Kindle, it's certainly unacceptable to simply repurpose print content. But you can't repurpose website content, either. For good Kindle usability, you have to design for the Kindle. Write Kindle-specific headlines and create Kindle-specific article structures. [Link included in original post.]

(Via Joe Wikert's Twitter stream)

Related Stories:

• How to Read any Type of Document on the Kindle (Almost)
• Optimizing Web Content for the Kindle Browser
• Kindle Formatting: "Formatting Tips"
• Jakob Nielsen: "Kindle 2 Usability Review"

Is Print a Preference or a Habit?

Andrew Savikas
March 16, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (6) | Listen

Over on the O'Reilly Radar blog, Dale Dougherty posted on students increasingly prefering the sound of MP3 over higher quality music:

[Jonathan Berger] has them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality. He described the results with some disappointment and frustration, as a music lover might, that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said that they seemed to prefer "sizzle sounds" that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with.

I remember wondering what audiophiles were up to, buying extremely expensive home audio systems to play old vinyl records. They put turntables in sand-filled enclosures with elaborate cabling schemes. I wondered what they heard in that music that I didn't. Someone explained to me that audiophiles liked the sound artifacts of vinyl records -- the crackles of that format. It was familiar and comfortable to them, and maybe those affects became a fetish. Is it now becoming the same with iPod lovers?

It sounds a lot like the complaints leveled against digital books, which often turn into litanies of the sensate qualities of print: touch, feel, smell, sound. I hear those comments all the time, unsurprisingly from people for whom printed books have been their primary means of reading for most of their lives. But in about 30 years, no one who's not eligible for AARP membership will remember a world without the Web. Print will always have a place, but by then I doubt it will be a primary format for many, many readers.

What do you think?

Related Stories:

• Ebooks and Print Books are Not Mutually Exclusive
• Reinventing the Book and Killing It are Separate Things
• Open Question: When Will Digital Books Overtake Print Books?

O'Reilly Ebooks Now In Stanza Online Catalog

Andrew Savikas
March 9, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (9) | Listen

Just in time for Read an Ebook Week O'Reilly's 400+ ebooks are now available for direct purchase and download on your iPhone or iPod Touch from within Stanza's Online Catalog. Buying ebooks this way gives you the same flexible, DRM-free ebook bundles as buying through oreilly.com (because you are buying from oreilly.com via Stanza). That means 3 ebook formats and free lifetime updates (and did we mention no DRM?).

To celebrate the Stanza news (and Read an Ebook Week) you'll automatically get 40% off any ebooks purchased on Stanza through March 15.

If you have Stanza on your iPhone or iPod (it's free -- click here to get it), here's how to get to the O'Reilly Ebook Store. From your Stanza Library, click the Online Catalog link:

From there, select "O'Reilly Ebooks" to browse by Bestsellers, New Releases, or All titles:

Select the title you want to see a description:

Press "Add to Cart" to buy the ebook, which will take you through to the O'Reilly shopping cart to complete the transaction (you'll need to create an O'Reilly account if you don't already have one). We're working to make the purchase experience a bit more mobile friendly, but wanted to roll this out right away. There is an awkward step when you'll see what appears to be some gibberish in a confirmation dialog -- go ahead and click download:

We're working with the Stanza folks to try and make that a little cleaner.

If your download is interrupted -- or if you ever want to re-download an ebook you've already purchased -- you can always return to your purchased ebooks by visiting the "My Bookshelf" link from the O'Reilly Catalog in Stanza (or by pointing your iPhone to oreilly.com/e or visiting members.oreilly.com from any web browser):

We'll be adding new titles, free samples, and more ways to browse, search, and sort in the coming weeks.

Kindle Comes to the iPhone

Mac Slocum
March 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (6) | Listen

Users of the iPhone and iPod Touch can now tap into Amazon's Kindle store with the free Kindle for iPhone application. From The New York Times:

The move comes a week after Amazon started shipping the updated version of its Kindle reading device. It signals that the company may be more interested in becoming the pre-eminent retailer of e-books than in being the top manufacturer of reading devices.

Amazon is positioning the iPhone app as a gap filler: nibble on book content while waiting at the airport, in line, at a restaurant, etc., but settle in for deep reading with the original Kindle (or, presumably, the printed edition). Toward that end, the Times says Amazon is using a bookmark feature that keeps a reader's spot as they switch devices.

Reaction to the Kindle iPhone App

I'll be adding to this list over the next few days as more coverage appears (I highly recommend following the real-time Kindle trend on Twitter). Please share additional links and your own Kindle/iPhone analysis through the comments area.

Hands on: Kindle for iPhone a great Kindle companion
(Chris Foresman, Ars Technica)

Clicking on the "Get Books" button on the Home screen instructs users to got to Amazon's Kindle Store via a computer for "the best shopping experience." And they aren't kidding; while there is a link that will open the Kindle Store in MobileSafari, browsing and buying books this way is just plain frustrating. The Kindle's own integrated buying is far simpler in comparison. Apple presumably has this restriction in place so that developers don't abuse the App Store system, giving away free apps on Apple's dime and then selling content elsewhere. Perhaps Amazon can build an iPhone-browsable version of the Kindle Store and display it via an embedded browser, or better yet, perhaps Amazon and Apple can come to some sort of agreement to allow in-app purchasing.

First Impressions of Kindle on iPhone
(Walt Mossberg, AllThingsD)

... it is a solid basic app for reading books, and is especially valuable if you already own a hardware Kindle, as I do. In my brief tests, the iPhone app synchronized rapidly and perfectly with my purchased library of Kindle books on Amazon's servers, and allowed me to retrieve a previously purchased e-book, without paying again, just as my hardware Kindle does. It also synchronized to the furthest page I had read in that book on my Kindle. After reading for awhile on the iPhone, I performed that process in reverse, and my Kindle took me to the same spot where I had quit reading on the iPhone.

Kindle for iPhone Review
(Perrin Stewart, 148Apps)

... it's worth having the app on your device for the access to Amazon's virtual library alone. In many cases, the pricing on Kindle versions of books are much cheaper than other ebook stores (compare the Kindle version of "The Graveyard Book" for $9.99 to the Fictionwise version which is $17.99 and the stand-alone iTunes store app which is $17.99, for instance), and they often have books that other stores do not.

Excerpting Best Practices Hinge on Intent

Mac Slocum
March 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

A piece in the New York Times reignites the fair use debate by asking: How much excerpting does fair use cover?

It's a reasonable question, particularly since Google News, the Huffington Post and countless other sites rely on excerpt aggregation to drive traffic and sell ads. But the rules of excerpting are also -- to steal a line from Steve Jobs -- "a bag of hurt."

Fair use is a doctrine, and as much as editors, bloggers and other with an excerpting bent wish for structure (word count, percentage used, image size, etc.), it's not going to happen. Fair use is contextual and case-by-case. That's why Henry Blodget, co-founder of Silicon Alley Insider, has the right perspective:

"To excerpt others the way we want to be excerpted ourselves."

Intent is the key to proper excerpting. If your intent is to single out someone else's work, and drive attention and its associated benefits and detriments to the creator of that work, then excerpts will be short and filled with outbound links. But if your intent is to fool Google, boost your traffic, and use someone else's material to further your own efforts, then excerpts will be long and link-free -- or they'll contain links to your material.

Excerpting is an extension of white-hat vs. black-hat search engine optimization. The white hats understand that search engines are the essential utility on the Web. Gaming them for personal gain erodes value and reduces opportunities for everyone. Black hats care only about short-term efforts, so they do anything they can to turn attention into quick advertising revenue. What black hats don't realize -- or care about -- is the impact their actions have on the structure of the Internet. They're jackhammering the foundation they're standing on.

Sites that push the boundaries of excerpting are engaged in the same self-destructive behavior. They may see short-term traffic and revenue spikes, but the source sites will eventually cry foul and enact their own Draconian countermeasures. Long-term, this doesn't benefit anyone. Sites that rely on excerpted information will lose access, and originating sources will lose attention. To be effective, excerpting needs to be a mutually beneficial relationship that provides value to everyone involved. The only "rule" is intent.

Related Stories:

• Portfolio: "When Fair Use Seems Unfair"
• Webcast Video: Why Publishers Should Care About SEO
• Ruling: Consider Fair Use Before Issuing Takedowns
• Electronic Frontier Foundation: "Google Book Search Settlement: A Reader's Guide"

Hearst Gets Into the E-Reader Game

Mac Slocum
February 27, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Hearst Corp. is developing its own wireless e-reader that may debut this year. From Fortune:

According to industry insiders, Hearst, which publishes magazines ranging from Cosmopolitan to Esquire and newspapers including the financially imperiled San Francisco Chronicle, has developed a wireless e-reader with a large-format screen suited to the reading and advertising requirements of newspapers and magazines. The device and underlying technology, which other publishers will be allowed to adapt, is likely to debut this year.

The larger screen size will put the Hearst reader in the same class as devices from Plastic Logic and iRex.

Fortune says Hearst isn't discussing product specs, but the company has a longtime association with E Ink. Last September, Esquire published the first E Ink magazine cover.

Related Stories:

• What Does Esquire's E Ink Cover Mean for Print Publishing?
• France Telecom E-Reader Includes Subscriptions
• What Would Your Ideal E-Reader Look Like?