Harvard Libraries

Blah blah blah Harvard is working on shifting to digital.

Interesting: Harvard has seventy-three libraries including the Widener collection which is so huge it requires a forklift to navigate its fifty-foot shelves. I really want to see that. I wonder how well it's organized.

Downloading Stuff You Already Own

So if you download a free digital copy of a book you've bought, did you do anything wrong?

Penny Arcade - Flight of the Ebook Readers

A Penny Arcade comic!

One deficit an electronic reader has over printed media, and this is only a factor if you've been in the air as much as we have lately, is that there are portions of the flight where you can't read. Your "book," as it were, now belongs in the same criminal class of devices which includes laptops and missile transponders. The other deficit, I suppose, is that when the device runs out of power your "book" ceases to exist. It retains the gaudy and absurd physicality so common with objects, but all the purpose has leaked out. The unbook you have left becomes a lady of impenetrable chastity.

Judging E-Books by the Cover

The downside to e-book readers not showing book covers - stuff like this doesn't happen as often:

Bindu Wiles was on a Q train in Brooklyn this month when she spotted a woman reading a book whose cover had an arresting black silhouette of a girl’s head set against a bright orange background.

Ms. Wiles noticed that the woman looked about her age, 45, and was carrying a yoga mat, so she figured that they were like-minded and leaned in to catch the title: “Little Bee,” a novel by Chris Cleave. Ms. Wiles, a graduate student in nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, tapped a note into her iPhone and bought the book later that week.

Eye Tracking Technology

Also from Wired:

The best thing about reading a book on a tablet (so far) is how closely it approximates reading a “real” book — which is why the Kindle’s screen is matte like paper rather than luminescent like a laptop. Some (not all) fear for the demise of real reading and writing, but it’s more likely we’re really at the leading edge of an innovation curve that could breathe new life into the written word.

For example: What if those written words were watching you reading them and making adjustments accordingly? Eye-tracking technology and processor-packed tablets promise to react, based on how you’re looking at text — where you pause, how you stare, where you stop reading altogether — in a friction-reducing implementation of the Observer Effect. The act of reading will change what you are reading.

This one's pretty curious. I doubt I'm going to like it too much; my dedicated reading time is before I go to sleep. As I grow more and more sleepy, my ability to focus changes. I sometimes close one eye or the other to focus better on the words. If definitions kept popping up I think I'd go crazy. On the other hand, if the technology was sensitive enough... definitions might help, particularly late at night when I don't feel like hauling myself out of bed to look something up in my gigantic dictionary.

E-book Sellers and the iPad

From LISNews: E-Book Sellers Face a Battle to Win iPad Customers. Wait, people bought iPads?

Zinnnnng.

Popular Science

Popular Science articles are now online and free. You can browse by issue.

There better be stuff about ROBOTS in there or I'm gonna be disappointed.

With Enough Libraries, All Content is Free

From Jessamyn West:

“With enough libraries, all content is free.” That is to say… if the world was one big library and we all had interlibrary loan at that library, we could lend anything to anyone. The funding structures of libraries currently mean that in many cases we’re duplicating [and paying for] content that we could be sharing. This is at the heart of a lot of the copyright battles of today and, to my mind, what’s really behind the EBSCO/Gale/vendors. Time Magazine is losing money and not having a good plan for keeping their income level up, decides to offer exclusive contracts to vendors and allows them to bid. EBSCO wins, Gale loses. Any library not using EBSCO loses. Patrons lose and don’t even know they’ve lost.

The Amazon/Macmillan Thing

I wanted a good place to read up on the kerfuffle about Amazon unlisting books from Macmillan and I think I found one: All The Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed the Weekend from John Scalzi's blog.

Five Lessons Learned From an E-Book Experiment

Shane Richmond decided to read only e-books from October 2009 to January 2010.

Five lessons he learned:

1. The weight is a nice advantage
2. Page turning is less irritating than you’d think
3. Being able to search a book is very useful
4. Text formatting can be annoyingly sloppy
5. Availability of titles is the biggest problem

Read the article for explanations of these five points. I was sort of surprised by number two, but it made sense; you get used to pressing the button to turn a page before you finish reading the last words on the page.

Confessions of a Book Pirate

An article from The Millions about everything you wanted to know about book piracy. Maybe not everything, but still quite a bit. The Millions, an online literary magazine, interviewed a book pirate who goes by the name 'The Real Caterpillar'.

Just because someone downloads a file, it does not mean they would have bought the product I think this is the key fact that many people in the music industry ignore – a download does not translate to a lost sale. I own hundreds of paper copies of books I have e-copies of, many of which were bought after downloading the e-copy. In other cases I have downloaded books I would never have purchased, simply because they were recommended or sounded interesting.

E-Reader Rundown and Notes for the Future

Here is WIRED's gallery of e-readers.

"E-readers, as we know them now, are at a crossroads. Next week, Apple is expected to announce a new tabletlike device that could also be used to read digital books. It’s expected to have a color screen, not the monochrome E Ink display found on most e-readers. Apple is reportedly talking to publishers to bring e-books and magazines to the device.

Meanwhile, other computer manufacturers are showing tabletlike devices, which are also based on color LED or OLED screens.

A device with a color screen could really change the landscape. Add the ability to watch video, play games or download apps — which most e-readers can’t do — and e-readers could start to look pretty primitive by comparison."

I did not know E-Ink pages lagged when refreshing the display. A flash of a black screen between page turns would probably irritate me.

Offline Book Lending Costs Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion

From Go to Hellman, a blog I think I will be adding to my daily reading list: Offline Book "Lending" Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion. Man, I wish I'd made this post.

Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher's Weekly that "publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy" comes a sudden realization of a much larger threat to the viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were "loaned" last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf the online piracy reported yesterday, and indeed, even the global book publishing business itself.

Psst... He means libraries.

Seriously, why didn't I make this post? It's hilarious.

Bought or Licensed?

More on Amazon and the Kindle, this time from Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing: even Amazon can't keep it's EULA story straight.

EULA stands for 'End User License Agreement'. It's the bunch of text above the 'accept' button that you never read when you use a program for the first time. Or maybe you do read it!

Scribble in Your E-Book

Maybe I spend a lot of time on e-readers, particularly for someone who says she doesn't even particularly like them. They marry two of my favourite things in the world, though: books and technology, and so I cheerfully read up on their progress.

Samsung e-readers (and the author of the article seems to mix up 'e-book' and 'e-reader') are thus far alone in the capability to write on e-texts, scribbling notes in margins and such. Useful? Maybe kind of, when you consider textbooks. I just stuff bits of paper in between pages with notes myself, so a physical format is still better for me, but... hey, you can write on this reader! And maybe draw little pictures!

The Skiff Reader

Hands down, no contest, I think the Skiff Reader is the niftiest looking e-reader out there. It's a little bendy and uses stainless steel foil instead of glass; it's also got the largest reading area at 11.5 inches. The technical aspects look pretty neat as well. Very sci-fi looking, though I wouldn't want to ride the bus with it out. Notice there's no price listed; never a good sign.

Top Ten Pirated Books in 2009

From TeleRead, The Ten Most Pirated Books of 2009.

1. Kamasutra
2. Adobe Photoshop Secrets
3. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Amazing Sex
4. The Lost Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
5. Solar House – A Guide for the Solar Designer
6. Before Pornography – Erotic Writing In Early Modern England
7. Twilight – Complete Series
8. How To Get Anyone To Say YES – The Science Of Influence
9. Nude Photography – The Art And The Craft
10. Fix It – How To Do All Those Little Repair Jobs Around The Home

Ebooks are like a brown paper bag! Please note almost half the books seem to be/are about sex. Two are do-it-yourself books, which makes sense ("I'm not going to buy this book if I can just do it myself with a download!") and then there's Twilight, a series of guilty pleasure for more grown-ups than I want to think about.

National Geographic

Get 120 Years of National Geographic On Your Own External Hard Drive.

First: YAY!
Second: Is this thing searchable?
Third: YAY!

I'm tempted to get this, though $200 USD is kind of steep. On the other hand, every issue of National Geographic since 1888, people. I get geek shivers just thinking about it.

More E-Books Than Print Books Sold On Christmas Day

Amazon claims that for the first time ever they sold more e-books than print books this Christmas Day, but they aren't sharing specific numbers. Interesting.

The absence of hard stats makes me think Amazon only sold more digital content than print with a bit of number fudging. Regardless of whether that's true, we can take the basic fact that Amazon sold a whole lot of e-content this Christmas, more than before, now that the Kindle is more available. Not to me, though! I just ordered a bunch of good old-fashioned print books with some Christmas cash.

E-Reader Comparison

Jenn Northington will be writing articles for Shelf-Awareness about her e-reader experiences. In this article, she compares various e-readers via the hands-on approach.