Welcome to the Digital Book Blog, a blog by RIT School of Print Media students. This blog will be used by students enrolled in the Graphic Media program's Capstone Seminar to collaborate and share ideas as they research the technical, social and business implications of the digital book.
I invite you to join in on our discussion and share your observations as we explore a new chapter in book technology.
Hi All,
Welcome!
This blog is set up as class space for Rochester Institute of Technology School of Print Media Capstone class on digital books.
We'll be discussing the technology, trends and issues that the digital book has introduced to the information industry and to our approaches to communication.
Comments, opinions and questions are welcome.
A thanks to Adam Dewitz for getting this site up and running for us all to enjoy and engage.
A news readers or aggregators or feed reader as they are commonly called allow you to subscribe to a content producers RSS or Atom syndication feed. There are a number of desktop and web-based feed readers available. I have listed some common applications below to assist you in your search for an application that meets your needs. For those just starting out with RSS, I recommend using Google Reader or Bloglines. They are both free and web-based so you can use them from any of the campus computers or on your personal computer without having to worry about keeping your subscriptions synchronized.
NetNewsWire - Available as a paid and lite (free) version.
RSSOwl - Java-based open source desktop application. Runs on Mac, Windows and GNU/Linux.
Bloglines - A free web-based personal news aggregator that can be used in place of a desktop client.
If you use or know of any other aggregators, link it up in the comments.
Modern content syndication platforms are changing the way people obtain information on the web. If you're unfamiliar with news feeds, I suggest taking some time to familiarize yourself with content syndication technology. Wikipedia offers two good article on RSS and the Atom Standard, the two main XML applications used to syndicate content.
Other Related Reading: Syndication File Format Standards and SpecsAtom Enabled Atom Syndication format resources.
I have created a seed list of blogs and news sources that you can import into your preferred feed reader. The list is in the OPML format, a common data format for exchanging lists of news feeds.
Download: Digital-Books-Seedlist.opml (You will need to do a Save As).
Hi All- a post I just saw that would be of interest to us all-
Microsoft Releases Rival to Google's Book-Scanning Project
It may seem like Google's much-debated book-scanning project has secured the participation of every library under the sun. But Microsoft's less-discussed rival project (The Chronicle, October 27, 2005) has managed to recruit some pretty big names of its own -- including the British Library, the University of California, and the University of Toronto. The company has digitized plenty of volumes held by those institutions, and now it will finally give Web surfers a chance to view the fruits of its labor: Today it released a beta version of its book search engine, called Live Search Books. According to CNET News, the tool is modeled after Windows Live Search, Microsoft's search engine for the broader Web. But analysts won't compare Live Book Search to Microsoft's other Web-searching tool; they'll measure it against Google's ballyhooed project. And there's at least one important difference between the two efforts. While Microsoft and Google are both making the full texts of public-domain books available online, Google is also (rather controversially) scanning titles that are still under copyright. Microsoft does not digitize copyrighted books unless their publishers ask the company to do so. Microsoft is certainly hoping its less-aggressive strategy will appease publishers that have objected to Google's no-holds-barred digitization campaign. And Live Book Search plans to woo users by bringing in reinforcements pretty quickly: Books from Cornell University's libraries, the New York Pu blic Library, and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine are expected to appear on Microsoft's service within a month. --Brock Read"
Forbes recently published a special report on books and the future of publishing. Two articles that stood out are Cory Doctorow's Giving It Away and the piece by Jonathan Enfield on copyright issues publishers are dealing with in the Internet age.
Google Book Search is a Google project that aims to make the world's books searchable, similar to the web. It allows one to search the full text of a book. Google Book Search allows one to search out-of-copyright books or books that they have an agreement with publishers for. Along with such an immense project come many issues. Google is in the process of trying to get publishers to join Google Book Search. Google Book Search is continually updated.
Recent updates mention in their Official Blog as of November 21st, 2006 include a variety of things. One of which is the ability to zoom in on text and images. Now you can zoom in or out using the magnifying tool. Another update is the ability to look at the whole book, page under page on a single webpage. This means no more reloads when you turn to another page. You can either have one page below each other like a scroll or have two-page mode with pages side by side then another set of pages side by side underneath. Another update is the ability to use your mouse wheel to scroll or you can drag with the mouse or hit the spacebar to jump to the next page.
Now you can find other related books to the one your reading that may be of interest by clicking the "About this book" link. Once you click, it will display a list of similar books to the one you are reading. This sounds similar to the Amazon "Other Customers Bought..." feature. Lastly, one can find other books of interest by looking at the citations or references. By clicking a citation or reference one can view the other book if it is available on Google Book Search.
These sound like some pretty nice updates and they will most likely continue with the growth of the Google service.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/new-way-to-browse-books.html
From Article: Giving It Away by Cory Doctorow
An author, Cory Doctorow, presently sells his books hard copy and also put them up online for people to view electronically wrote this article. The unique part of this is that the copy that is put online for electronic viewing is free. Many authors find this absurd; he is losing money because people are downloading his book for free rather then purchasing it at a bookstore. Doctorow sees nothing of the sort, the most worthwhile part of all this is that more people have the opportunity to read the book, many who would never have purchased the book at a bookstore anyways.
The way Doctorow see it is this, many people who download the book don't end up buying it, but those never would have in the first place. At this point he did lose sales but yet he still got people to read his book, something that should be more rewarding then money to an author. Some people that read the e-book would have purchased the book if it wasn't available online, but that's only a tiny amount of lost sales. But then the rest of the readers who view the book online, go and buy the printed book, these are gain sales, ones that were never expected in the first.
This is one author that sees the real point in putting his book online, exposure. So many more readers found this book simply because of the electronic version. The plus side of all this 'commotion' about posting this book online has given Doctorow many more opportunities then just the book. Doctorow was the recipient of the Fulbright Chair at USC, the offer to write this very high paying article in Forbes magazine, and many other things like to give speeches, write and teach.
Over all I think that many people could learn from this author, a little exposure could bring you a very long way.
To view article:
http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/cory-doctorow-copyright-tech-media_cz_cd_books06_1201doctorow.html
The topic of digitizing books is one that has been out in the open for quite some time now. However, when the topic comes up, so do the issues that go along with it. Issues such as copyright infringement, how much of the book can be digitized and decreasing book sales are just a few concerns people have when it comes to digitizing books. Yahoo, however, is in the process of launching a digitized library of archived books and books found in the public domain. Yahoo, unlike Google, may have a better shot at launching this digitized library due to the fact that they only plan on scanning and digitizing public domain books.
Also, places such as The Univeristy of California, The University of Toronto, the European Archive, the National Archives in the UK, O'Reilly Media, and Prelinger Archives, are helping Yahoo launch it's project by providing them with content including, speeches, books, music, audio and video. Yahoo's goal is to not only provide these digitized works to the public for viewing and downloading, they are also going to try and make it as easy as possible to do so. People will be able to search works using any Web search engine, and downloadable for free. They're even going to try and make it possible to download to handhelds and iPods.
In moving toward this launch, the issue of whether or not book sales will decrease has come up, but Daniel Greenstein, associate vice provost and University Librarian of the California Digital Library, says that contrary to the belief that people will stop buying books if they can just download them, the public exposure to books will be significantly broadened if it's easy to search and view books and works on the internet, thus increasing, not decreasing the sale of actual printed material.
Finally, the Open Content Alliance (OCA) is going to help by offering the idea of the integration of French content into the OCA. Also, the OCA is doing it's best to try and figure out ways for publishers to be compensated for the books that they offer that are copyright protected. They are doing this by working directly with the publishers.
All in all, Yahoo seems to have done their homework and from reading this article, it seems very clear to me that Yahoo may have the upper hand advantage over Google when it comes to digitizing books.
To view article:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5887374.html
Google has been requesting other companies, such as Yahoo, Amazon.com and Microsoft, disclose details of their ebook projects because Google wants to provide online access to millions of library books. Google claims that it is necessary to obtain details about similar projects from rivals in order to complete its own project. Last month, Amazon.com rejected Google's prying attempts and called Google's request a brazen attempt to pry into its trade secrets. Yahoo sided with Amazon.com at the end of this month, refusing to disclose its details to Google and adding that Google will need a court order before Yahoo discloses any information. "The subpoena is seeking information that we don't think is relevant to Google," Yahoo associate general counsel Reggie Davis said. "Frankly, we're concerned that Google may be seeking competitive advantage by seeking the ideas, documents and other things we discussed internally when making a decision on how we were going to approach the issue (library books) online." These refusals come at a beginning of Google's copyright infringement suit.
Google has demanded information from rival companies for its Book Search Library Project, which involves scanning library books, including some copyrighted books, a topic that has angered those in the literature field. A case began in the New York federal courts last year when a group of publishers and the Authors Guild sued Google with claims that Google did not get proper approval to make copies of books available to anyone with an Internet connection. While preparing evidence for its case, Google has subpoenaed Amazon.com, Yahoo and Microsoft and several other companies. Yahoo and Microsoft are part of a collective group of businesses and libraries working together in order to create a digital database of books. Amazon.com has scanned a large number of books so consumers can read excerpts from books that they may want to buy.
More Information: http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=43041&src=site-marq
Google and Microsoft are at war in terms of building the best online library on the web first. Neither company will reveal how many books they have scanned as of December 7, 2006. There are many court cases pending on issues that pertain to copyrighted books. It is easy for Google and Microsoft to scan books that are out of copyright, but the problem lies with the United States editors. In response to the opposition, many publishers created the xOCA, which stands for the Open Content Alliance, in October 2005. "The OCA is a non-profit organization which joins together an array of universities, foundations, and data processors to create a 'common pot' of digitized books available online for download or printing" (para. 20). Yahoo joined the alliance and financed creating a search engine for them and financed the scanning of 18,000 books. Microsoft has promised to contribute 150,000 scanned books to their collection.
Microsoft recently released a US beta version of their "Live Search Books" at http://books.live.com. A Microsoft spokesman stated that "Live Search Books is advancing the way people search online by digitizing and indexing information from the world's printed materials... There is a lot of trusted and authoritative content that can only be found in books today. We want to make that content accessible to people who are using Live Search" (para. 3). The library currently has only out-of-copyright books in its collection at this time.
"Microsoft has book-scanning partnerships with New York Public Library and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine... the University of California system, and the University of Toronto" (para. 9). Google also has a partnership with New York Public Library and other major universities. Google's collection has out-of-copyright books as well as copyrighted works that were added with or without the publisher's consent. Microsoft states that they have created Live Search Books "with copyright laws in mind." Google says that "freedom of quotation" gives them the ability to draw search results of books and has limited its content to just summaries of copyrighted works that do not have consent. The initial Google Book Search project began in 2004, and was just recently restarted it "with the aim of scanning every literary work into digital format and making them available online" (para. 20) Google and Microsoft are at battle for the potential advertisers looking to reach those who would use the online libraries.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061207/tc_afp/afplifestyleinternet
Due to the fact that I know practically nothing about eBooks, and that I am very interested in the business aspects of how they work, the following articles was very interesting. The article Creating Additional Value from eBook Sales by John Thornhill, discusses how Affiliate Marketing comes into play with ebooks to make them more profitable for the publisher.
Electronic links, also known as Affiliate links, are sent to the consumers of the eBook that was purchased, through a number of direct marketing schemes. The links correspond to sites that cover the same topic as the book that they purchased, and are specially coded so that you, the publisher, get a commission of something bought off the affiliate site. Many manufacturers have affiliate programs available, and these links can also give the original eBook greater value in the long run. If you are "self-authoring" an eBook you can just include the affiliate links in the book, without all the direct marketing issues.
Including these links can be very profitable when used efficiently. However, the over use of affiliate links can cause the eBook to look like pure advertising with no content, so it is suggested to use them moderately and efficiently to keep the probability of a visit to an affiliate link high.
More or less, in conclusion, affiliate links in an eBook can boost the value of the book, and increase profit even after the initial sale is over.
http://articleebusiness.com/ebooks/creating-additional-value-from-ebook-sales.htm
As e-books demands are increasing, publishers in today's mass media market are facing fierce competition. It is not clear whether the growing availability of e-books will have a huge effect like Gutenberg did. However, there are some signs that e-books may have a huge impact on the society. On March 14, 2000, Stephen King released Riding the Bullet exclusively as an e-book and he sold over 40,000 copies on the first day. This shows that e-books are fast-selling.
E-books have many advantages and benefits over the traditional paper book. The e-book technology allows the reader to modify the e-book such as font, color, and size. E-book can provide entertainment for readers. For instance, the readers can hear the voices and sounds while reading e-book if sound card is installed on the computer or reader device. Some reader devices are smaller than a trade paperback which makes it easier to carry around or put it in the pockets. They can store more than fifty books available for them to read on the reader devices.
Unlike traditional paper book, e-books are very easy to acquire. When a customer orders a book online, she/he would have to wait for a few days to receive the hard copy book. However, when a customer orders e-book, she/he would have the book within a few minutes after purchasing it. E-books are cheaper than paper book. Also e-books give great benefit to nature environment.
It seems that e-book is an amazing thing to have in the future. It gives easy life for readers because it has many different special features. We could make any adjustment so that reading would be more enjoyable. I doubt that the publishing industry would go out of business but e-books are most likely to become very successful in the future.
Source: http://www.mindlikewater.com/ebook_catalog/what_are_ebooks.html
The valuable lesson learnt from the destruction of the Library in Alexandria, where hundreds of thousands of books were archived, is to keep more than one copy. The problem associated with the physical books are that, they take time to transport, they fade color and erode in time, needs a lot more space for storage and most of all it is hard to find the buried information. Above all of these problems, we still have an emotional attachment to the physical books.
Having an electronic version of the books (ebook) helps in searching the right book and information we need. The way we read books by holding it is entirely different when it is read on screen. Amazon.com's attempt to make a digital archive for books was brilliant. More than 120,000 books went online on Oct 23rd, 2003. In order to act under copyrights, Amazon allowed only the owners of the books to search within the books' content. Now the customers can search every information in the archive to find out the related books. The company provided a new form of tool which can render books' content instantly, do a quick search and display the books.
Amazon had to talk with a lot of publishers to get their books scanned. It is sad to know that many publishers do not even have access to the digital files, they were lying scattered around the desktop of the editors. Amazon sent the books that need to be scanned to different countries where cheap labor could be obtained. Amazon denies it has built a digital library. Using Amazon one can search, read the information of the screen and scroll a few pages back and forth. But it doesn't allow the user to download the entire book or texts. The sole purpose of the digital archive was to find books. The goal was to sell more books. Thus respecting the physical value of books.
Source: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,60948-0.html?tw=wn_story_page_prev2
Publishing and Digital Change: What's Next? Article from last February about changes in the publishing industry brought on by a digital economy.
Small Steps Toward an N-dimensional Reading/Writing Space. The folks at the Institute for the Future of the Book have created a social reading environment that makes reading a journal paper or book interactive. Be sure to check out the example paper.
Book Search Should Work Like Web Search. Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly on the competing book scanning operations and search results. Should Google Books see books in Live Book Seacrh? More here.
Amazon is releasing a new option in the Amazon search, "Search Inside the Book". This option not only lets you see the book, but you can also get the whole text for the book. This makes it easier for the reader in the fact that when they are viewing the book on their computer or laptop, it is very easy to navigate through the book. Either going forward or backward. Even though this new technology certainly has its positives, it also has negatives. The search option is not always accurate. While conducting a search for "sports broadcaster" by the author, no relative results came up. Also, the table of contents do not contain hyper links to go to a specific chapter, you would have to keep scrolling through till you found that chapter.
Links
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3098831
From Today's Chronicle of Higher Education, an article about e-books and academia. The paper's policy only makes it available to non subscribers for 5 days, so check it out soon.
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=bhfJwtgzpff8hhgwdyrJxnjrsmkzgqfh
In an article from businessweek.com, it states that this digital book technology is becoming more noticeable such as its counterparts which have most recently made a switch to digital like music, photographs, and movies. New technologies are paving the way for digital books such as a company called E Ink, which uses and electronic ink technology to make type look like it is printed. This new technology is going to be used in the new Sony Reader. Apple's iPod's have also paved the way and made these digital books possible. Other company's like in China, called Jinke. Jinke is another digital reader hitting the market in the near future. Google, to this day, has been scanning thousands of books to make available online, making books more accessible. This new technology is around the corner, and will explode like iPod's in the future.
Links
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_09/b3973111.htm
American Booksellers Association Internet bookstore, BookSense.com (http://booksense.com) has recently signed an agreement with Ingram Digital Ventures. The agreement will allow bookstores that participate in the BookSense.com program to sell e-books. They will be able to sell the e-books in three formats. These include: Microsoft, Palm, and Adobe. The agreement should take effect starting sometime in early 2007.
BookSense.com Director Len Vlahos had the following to say about the agreement: "The association has taken a wait-and-see approach to e-books over the past several years, but we feel now is the right time...We're particularly happy to be working with Ingram Digital Ventures." The agreement will also allow them to participate in the Caravan Project.
The Caravan Project (www.caravanbooks.org) will allow customers of books an on-demand choice of the type of book format they want. They can chose from the following: the traditional hardcover or paperback editions, e-books or audio books, which you can download in whole or by chapters. Large-print print-on-demand versions as an option are also currently on the way.
This move to e-books shows that people are becoming more and more aware of the demand for e-books and the digital book. Will the book ever go away? Only time will tell.
http://bookseller-association.blogspot.com/2006/12/booksense-to-go-digital.html
http://www.news.bookweb.org/news/4902.html
I thought David's talk was a good one. I liked how he talked about the evolution of the book. He talked about a lot of things I was unaware of. I liked how he used to movie to illustrate the shrinking of the book.
The one thing that was really surprising was when he was talking about the book for 5-8 minutes and then just tore it into pieces. It was really surprising, but it really illustrated the connection people have with books these days.
These are my thoughts about the presentation,
-John Tillapaugh
I thought the comparison of books to the movie of the Shrinking Man was interesting because books are becoming smaller in the same manner that the man shrunk. As time passes, books have gone from large stone engravings to "invisable" megabytes, which seems incredible.
I thought it was a little disappointing that David felt that no more beautiful libraries would ever be built because I enjoy spending time surrounding by all diferent types of stories written by all different types of people. I read constantly and love going to the library.
I'm a real "book nerd" as my boyfriend calls me! But I don't think he's being insulting :)
Amazon.com is giving customers who have purchased a physical copy of a book the chance to go online and access the book digitally for an extra fee with Amazon Upgrade. Amazon Upgrade will allow customers to view and search every page of the book, add bookmarks, highlights and notes to the digital pages and copy text from the book and print pages. The publisher will set limits on the text that can be copied for each individual book.
Several authors were interviewed and many of them approved the idea of reaching so many readers yet were worried about copyright issues and being paid for their work. It was also said that the authors cannot see the disappearance of the physical book completely as people won't want to curl up with a good e-book.
Amazon Upgrade comes after the release of several e-book gadgets, such as the Sony Reader, which is priced at $350 and can hold around 80 books. Sony Connect eBooks store contains more than 10,000 titles available for download.
This months issue of Forbes is a special report on the book covering many of the critical aspects and issues we are exploring in this class.
Forbes.com Special Report: Books
This December 2006 special report on "books and the future of publishing" features a series of articles looking at trends in publishing, the effect of the Internet on print books, book burning, plagiarism, film adaptations, top-earning authors, and related topics. Also includes a "To me, books are..." feature with answers from authors such as Margaret Atwood, Amy Sedaris, and Lemony Snicket. From the website for Forbes magazine.
David's presentation focused upon the value of printed books and the reason why books never fade. He personified the existence of books through the video clips. I was surprised when he tore up an old book, because I thought it was a rare copy and we have lost all the information.
I prefer digital books rather than printed books. If the information of the book has been saved already, the destruction of a printed book might not be a problem. Consider a Zip drive, they are not popular anymore because something more powerful replaced them. Book is another medium of storing information and it will be replaced by digital archives, as we see, sooner. I would say we are in a transition period, and since it is widely used all over the world, it will take at least 2 to 3 generation of time to switch. But I strongly disagree with the idea that printed books can never be replaced. I really do not get the emotional part of the printed books. I just read to get some information and have no preference towards the way I get information. Rare and old ancient books should be considered as antique books. They are to be preserved.
This article talked about how all of our information, digital and printed, is slowly disappearing. I found this article very interesting because of how every seems to think that digital is better; in ways it is and in ways it is not. The digital world is ever changing and this makes for certain formats to be put out of practice. With the ever-evolving software and operating systems it seems like every few months you need to buy the software upgrade to stay current with the up-and-ups. When you do this you maybe the most current and tech-savvy person but have your files changes? According to this article many who have upgraded their software have had problems, very critical ones at that. "Several years ago, U.S. Navy engineers noticed that diagrams of the USS Nimitz, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, had been subtly transformed by new software."
So if you don't want to go digital because you are scared that in a few years you won't be able to see your files, then just use paper right? Wrong! Many libraries across the nation are find books that disintegrating as we speak, specifically between the mid-1800's and mid-1984's. These books had a very high acid content, that could possible be preserved by process of deacidification but the costs for this treatment are very high.
As for the world today, nothing seems to last forever, and now more then ever we want to be able to preserve our findings, personal items, and important documents. Maybe we should have paid more attention to our history, "...the most permanent medium is, Kahle doesn't miss a beat: "The clay tablets of the Babylonians. Their libraries are readable to us today." We'll I hope we will be able to find something a little bit more portable!
Check out the article at: http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/books-information-preservation-tech-media_cx_ee_books06_1201acid.html
I have to agree with John, that the most shocking part of David presentation was when he just ripped the book to pieces. It really caught my attention and shocked me, especially because of David's position here at the RIT Library.
I do find it to be very true thought that many people do not really create a relationship with books. Personally I love to read, and I am very skeptical about this whole digital book craze. I have a hard enough time as it is reading the articles that I find to write about for the blogs of this class on a computer screen. I couldn't imagine reading a whole book.
I enjoyed the 'journey' that David took us on, showing us where books have come from to where they are today. The whole idea of 'written' text is evolving and hopefully everyone will be able to adjust to it.
I really enjoyed the presentation that was given in our last class. Not to sound repetative, but I was very shocked that he tore that book apart like he did. It made sense when he said that if he had broken something expensive our reaction wouldn't have been so personal. I think that even though technological advances are making book available on different devices, we will always have a personal and emotional connections to books because of the history they carry, expecially books that have lasted hundreds of years.
I also really enjoyed the comparison between the Shrinking Man movie and the shrinking of books. It's amazing how easy it is to have materials adapt to our lives and vise versa. I think that no matter how advanced eBooks and other materials get, our connection to physical books, whether they're new or old, will always be there.
The article I chose was from December 2005, and it talks about the beginning of the Sony E-Reader. It's interesting that just one year ago, Sony's E-Reader was just a twinkle in their eye, and today it's demand is high for the E-Book market. In this article, the E-Reader is compared to the iPod in areas of technological advantages and in cost. The E-Reader was forecasted to cost anywhere between $300 and $500 a year ago, and one year later those prices are still what the E-Reader goes for. This article also talks about how Sony was very hush hush about the E-Reader, and how they were not letting much information out about it, and now it's seems like it was their best kept secret.
The article goes on to talk about the struggles Sony would face, such as building a sufficient market for e-books since in 2004 e-books made up 0.1% of the 2.3 billion books that publishers sold world wide that year. "Is Sony up to the Challange?", the article asked, because not only did they come late in the digital music game, they also launched an E-Reader in Japan which crashed and burned.
After it's rough landing in Japan in 2004, Sony learned it's lesson and was given a second chance to fix the undesireable aspects of the E-Reader before launching it here in the United States. Michael Gartenberg commented that like online music a few years ago, e-books are an untapped market, and in my opinion Sony stepped in at the right time because e-books may be on the verge of taking off like a bandit.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2005/tc20051229_155542.htm
Piracy, the illegal copying or counterfeiting of copyrighted material is becoming a serious issue for the book publishers. Today, readers can download online stories for free. Stephen King released a few chapters from The Plant book online and he expected them to pay to read his stories. Unfortunately, some readers are disrespectful and try to find ways to download the chapters for free. This causes many authors to become more concerned. They fear that their businesses wouldn't do well because people are getting the stories for free from freeware share program.
Publishers are trying to improve the high security for their books so people cannot copy publishers' text from e-book. However, the book security is not one hundred percent secure. That is because when Stephen King released Riding the Bullet exclusively as an e-book, a few hours later, people hacked in the program by breaking the encryption and started to post them on the website so readers could download and read the book for free. It was a big loss for Stephen King. The possible way to prevent this situation from happening again is to set up security for digital rights. It becomes popular because the program wouldn't let the readers open the e-book without password and the e-book couldn't be copied as well.
Today, many companies demand encryption technology to protect their businesses. Also, the companies who make handheld reading devices are trying to add special program that will blocks readers to copy the text and post it on the website. This seems pretty effective.
Source: http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/oct2000/nf20001023_030.htm?chan=search
In this article, Microsoft researcher Bill Hill explains how electronic books can radically transform society by making books available anytime, anywhere. At first Hill worked for a Scottish company where he wrote the user manual for a hypertext authoring and reading application for a Mac. Later in 1994, he lead the Microsoft's typography group.
Hill said, "the electronic book can do a lot of things that a printed book can't do, and will never be able to do". He explained the key advantages for reading a book electronically. Storage space, less weight while traveling, access of books to people with disabilities (ability to zoom, audiobooks), less labor intensive which further reduces the cost of books. The biggest advantage is that it reduces the total consumption of paper.
Considering the various advantages Hill started to work towards the typographical issue on the screen. Fuzzy types could affect the readability of the document. His main goal was to expand readers' comfort level on the screen. Matthew carter, a type designer, worked with Bill and developed Veranda and Georgia, two fort types that are best suitable for reading on screen. These typefaces were embedded into every version of the windows operating system. Hill's emphasis on the psychology of reading was appreciated widely. He says, reading is a conscious and a subconscious process. As long as the typefaces were recognized by the subconscious mind, and not using the conscious mind, reading will take place meaningfully. Another issue towards screen reading is the resolution. In 1998, the group created a new technology called ClearType, which had a 300% larger resolution. This made the typefaces more legible and readable on screen. Hill concluded by saying that "It's not going to happen overnight, it's not going to happen tomorrow, but it's going to happen very quickly. We're on the verge of something.
I thought David's presentation was very interesting. Just like everyone else in the class, I was shocked at the fact that David actually ripped the book. I never thought that we would become attached to the book and think that books are very valuable to us.
It was fun to learn about the history of books. I got the chance to see how the book formats have changed over the years. Although electronic books are becoming more popular and e-books are widely used around in the world, traditional printed books will always be part of our lives.
The article discussed the forefront of the digital book transition. It was published in June of 2005 so it is not very current on the technologies, but it has fundamental issues that still apply. Project Gutenberg is "the oldest book digitizing project around, and entirely non-profit" and as of June 2005, there were over 16,000 public domain books digitized and available at http://www.gutenberg.org/. From the Project Gutenberg website, there are now over 20,000 digital books that are in the public domain and 2 million books downloaded each month, which is double what was reported in June 2005. The website also displays a Palm Pilot being used as an e-book reader, and they offer free software that can read the digital files.
The author, Michael Rogers, was on a panel at Yale one week before the article was published. The panel discussed how literary reading is on a decline, mainly among young people. This brought Rogers to the conclusion that at that time there were no decent e-book readers; they needed the iPod of e-book readers. Today, there are "iPods" of readers, including the new Sony reader, which is still very expensive, but not at popular as iPods yet. The panel also discussed the notion of searchability of e-books. At one point Google was extracting facts from pages without any idea of context. Now the reader can view the entire page and skip from page to page very easily, and the reader can see the entire book if desired.
Rogers summarizes the evolution of the digital book as follows: "It's an incredibly powerful technology that opens up the world of books in a way that was never before possible. But it also fundamentally redefines the nature of books, fulfilling exactly a fear of the panel at Yale: that electronics will ultimately break the concept of the book down into much smaller units." Something will be lost and something will be gained from this technological advance; and hopefully we gain more than we lose.
I enjoyed the presentation and like he intended, the PowerPoint was more interesting and engaging than a normal bulleted list PowerPoint. The images he showed supported his comments. It was nice to see how to we got to where we are today and all of the advances our ancestors made.
I, along with my classmates, was very shocked when he tore up the book. It was interesting how he said that he shocks himself when he tears the book that is over 100 years old. It was like he was destroying a piece of history; the book told a story, not only in its contents, but of how it was produced and where it has been. I think that we will always have an emotional attachment to the printed book, though it may decrease slightly as generations become more used to the electronic form of everything.
I think that Mr. Pankow is a great speaker. Its hard for us all to imagine someone ripping up a book as he did, and it nearly ripped my heart out, but he made a valid point about how the sacredness of a book is really only in our heads. The content of a book is really what is universal about it, but maybe the paradigm hasn't shifted as much as it needs to for eBooks to catch on. Seeing his presentation only reinforces the idea that print is not dead, and never will be.
One of the things that sticks in my mind from Mr. Pankow's presentation was the different kinds of substrates that were used to make books before there was paper.
There were a number of things that he touched on that I had never known, including the tablet books with wax that could be scraped out. The miniture books that were printed with 2 or 3 point text was also really neat to hear about.
Stop Worrying about Copyright, by Jonathan Enfield, discusses how the "Digital Revolution" will actually allow printed material to flourish, and not die out like many skeptics have said it will. The fact that the publishing and printing industry already uses a great amount of digitization has saved them a lot of money in transition, and will help them adapt in the future.
Enfield talks about how in the "Internet Age" people want the content they want on-demand, and if the publishers don't make things easily accessible people will get it illegally. This puts publishers in a bad place because the same thing that supports and creates sales of books can lead to illegal copyright infringing. Most take one of two views on the subject. One of "prohibitionist" which supports strengthening the Copyright laws, and the other of " collaborationist" which supports letting customers have legal consumption of a product to forge a long-term loyalty, and profit.
In October 2006 Adobe launched a new program called Digital Edition that allows the standardization of eBook formats. Because each eBook reader, PDA, and cellphones use different publishing formats, this new program could allow for better movement of content and ideas. However, some believe that the technology of standardization isn't the only answer because of the legality of using that content for more than educational use.
In the end, technology will help change the way that we read, but it won't completely replace the use of a printed book.
Article link http://www.forbes.com/technology/2006/11/30/copyright-ebooks-internet-tech-media_cz_je_books06_1201copyright.html
I thought that our guest speaker was one of the better presentations that I have seen while here at RIT. I felt that his presentation was strong and effective in the fact that each slide was not boring and useless. His examples with the Shrinking Man movie was relevant with the topic. I hope to possibly speak with the guest speaker at a later date for more interesting information.
After listening to our guest speakers this morning, it made me realize there are more ebooks available then I thought. It also made me realize how expensive ebooks are!
Physical hardcover fiction books are about $20-$25 and one of the reasons is due to the cost of materials, as well as the cost of the author's time, the editor's time and the artist's time who designed the pages. If these books are placed online, the cost of materials is basically non-existent (aside from the price of storing the information on a server) and this should drive costs down. Yet I don't think that the prices of ebooks reflect the missing materials cost.
Personally, instead of having digital files on my computer (especially as some of the books are online available for a certain length of time) that cost almost the same as a physical book, I would much rather just buy a physical book, especially when you consider the cost of the ebook reader or another handheld device in order to view the ebook...
I feel the presentation brought about alot of issues and problems of why e-books aren't as popular as they were forcasted to be. I believe in one part of the presentation it was estimated in 2000 that e-books sales would account for 10% of the total sales of books. It turned out only 1/1000th of a percent was accounted for the purchase of the e-book! That was an astonshing number to me.
It seems to be the trend that when a new technology comes out people say that the old technology will vanish almost immediately, but that's never really the case. It usually takes a little while for the people to get used to the new technology.
Also, the price and selection plays a big role. The cost of the readers are expensive and I don't think publisher's are willing to embrace the e-book market totally. Maybe that's why the e-books are relatively the same price. It's the content you are paying for.
I don't think the e-book will take off solely for personal use for a very long time (or ever). I see it having great applications for work and education purposes. People are too attached to a book. They like to carry it around with them, read it in public and let other people know what they are reading. It seems like a social connection, it seems to me that people like other people knowing what they are reading so they can talk about it. I think the majority of people don't like reading large amounts of text off a screen and prefer printed material.
What David Pankow had to say regarding books is not news to me. I had attended previous lectures from other classes I had though I think this is a first time I seen him ripping up a book. But what he had to say makes sense. We live in a technology world with the way we used to do or rely on how to store information has changed and will always will. The same goes for books. We are going to go from reading a hardback or paperback book to reading on a computer screen or an hand held reader. Books are going to be around maybe not in a printed form but around still. Things are changing and books need to keep up with the times in order to have a future.
Google search engine online has been becoming more and more develop over the years with new ways of finding information. Now there is another way to look up books even ones that are not in stores anymore thanks to Google's Book Scan but some publishers feel that Google was going over the line which resulted lawsuits from the Author's Guild and Association of American Publishers. The Guild had thought it was going to hurt them but instead thanks to Google their book sales have actually gone up.
"Google Book Search has helped us turn searchers into consumers," said Colleen Scollans, the director of online sales for Oxford University Press. (http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-20061009GoogleBookScansBoostingSales.html)
With other publishers as well seeing an increase in sales thanks to Google's Book Search. But alas Google may have completion with Amazon who has recently started with ways of looking into the pages of the book first before it is purchase by the consumer. But according to Penguin Chief Executive John Makinson "Our experience has been that the revenue generated from Google has been pretty modest, whereas the Amazon program has generated more book sales," stated this past week at a book fair. Which may make Google consider it's strategies on what they can do improve and become better.
Article
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-20061009GoogleBookScansBoostingSales.html
Google's online ebook library has sparked yet another debate. This time, the opposition comes from Open Content Alliance, who believe that the world's intellectual knowledge should not be present and controlled by a commercial entity, meaning Google. On Wednesday, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced it will provide a $1 million grant to the Internet Archive, a leader in the Open Content Alliance, to help pay for digital copies of collections owned by the Boston Public Library, the Getty Research Institute and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Google has angered the Internet Archive because Google is limiting where the books in their online library will appear; the books will only be returned when a search is conducted through Google due to the fact that most of works are scanned copyrighted material that do not have the author's permission. By using only small amounts from its own search results, Google believes it can get around copyright restrictions under the category of "fair use" protections of U.S. law. Google has admitted to scanning more than 3,000 books per day, a rate that translates into more than 1 million annually and is running up a bill of over $100 million for the digitizating process. By stocking its search engine with unique material, people will have more reasons to visit Google and generate more then the $2 billion profit made in the first nine months of this year.
The Open Content Alliance won't scan copyrighted content unless it receives the permission of the copyright owner. Most of the 100,000 books scanned so far are works in the public domain.
Both Microsoft and Yahoo belong to the Open Content Alliance.
This page contains all entries posted to Digital Book Blog in December 2006. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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