Is writing a book a form of punishment? A lot of authors think it is, even when they’re being compensated for it. But they’ll count their blessings when they read about Dr. Andew G. Bodnar, a former senior VP at Bristol-Myers Squibb. He’s writing a book to stay out of jail.

According to Natasha Singer of the New York Times, Bodnar had given false statements to the federal government in a patent dispute and pleaded guilty. Judge Ricardo M. Urbina of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia sentenced Dr. Bodnar to two years of probation on the condition he write a book about his crime. The purpose is to help those tempted to transgress to benefit from his lessons. This is perhaps the most extreme instance on record of a judge throwing the book at a convicted man.

We’ll track this case to see if Bodnar’s attorneys challenge the sentence on the grounds that it is cruel and unusual. Meanwhile, you can read the details here.

RC

Google has issued a statement on its the public policy page of its website concerning the so-called orphaned books issue in the forthcoming settlement hearings this coming fall.

“As ‘parent’ rightsholders claim their books through the Book Rights Registry, we think it will become clear that most out-of-print books are not actually ‘orphans.’ Books that were once difficult for anyone to license will become books that are very easy for everyone to license, either through the Book Rights Registry or directly from their owners. Furthermore, many books that some think are in-copyright orphans (including a large percentage from 1963 or before) are actually out-of-copyright, and Google is working to make more information available that can clarify their copyright status.

“The settlement will also make it far easier for anyone — including Google’s competitors — to license the use of most out-of-print books. As authors and rightsholders claim their books under the settlement, information about what books have been claimed and who claimed them will be made publicly available, allowing others to take advantage of this information. What’s more, the settlement creates an independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry run by authors and publishers that will be able to license other services on behalf of rightsholders who want it to do so.”

Every author with a backlist should bone up on all sides of the question as the debate intensifies over the summer. Google’s statement is a good place to start.

For the complete text of their statement click here.

RC

Scientists and government officials are commonly invited to brief science fiction writers on recent discoveries and policies. But it’s quite a different matter for the writers to brief the scientists and lawmakers. Yet, in the last couple of years, that’s just what’s happened: the US government has been inviting science fiction writers to Washington DC to do some brainstorming. What’s more significant, the government actually listens to what they have to say. Small wonder: many of the officials read science fiction, and some of them write it.

It all started when writer Arlan Andrews founded an organization called Sigma. It sounds black ops but is actually composed of sci-fi and other writers with science credentials and even advanced degrees. They’ve shared their visions with the US Army, Air Force, NATO “and other agencies they care not to name,” writes Washington Post staff writer David Montgomery. Except for travel expenses, the authors provide their services pro bono. As for those travel expenses, journeys through time and space are excluded. Sigma’s authors visit the future, Andrews explains, and “we owe it to mankind to come back and report what we’ve found,”

The most recent convocation took place in May when a delegation of writers writers led by award-winning SF novelist Greg Bear was invited to the Homeland Security Science & Technology Stakeholders Conference to do a little blue-skying. Bear served as master of ceremonies and, as author of Quantico, an adventure projecting a future FBI, he was right at home. (The e-book edition of Quantico is one of seventeen Bear novels published by E-Reads.)

“Rolf Dietrich, Homeland Security’s deputy director of research, says the writers help managers think more broadly about projects, especially about potential reactions and unintended consequences,” writes Montgomery, quoting Dietrich:”They have a different way of looking at things.’”

Well yes, science fiction writers certainly do, and it’s great to know that a federal agency actually appreciates them for it.

You can check out their brainstorms here.

RC

Forrester Research, the technology and market research company, has issued a report that “the eBook and eReader market has now hit a point where it is ready to break out of its niche and become a mainstream phenomenon.” In EReader and EBook Market Ready for Growth. ReadWriteWeb’s Frederic Lardinois describes a report by Forrester’s Sarah Rotman Epps that at first there was skepticism that e-books would attract more than “a small number of book-loving early adopters,” but Forrester acknowledges it “underestimated the fact that consumers would fall in love with the Kindle’s one-step shopping system and the immediate gratification of buying books in the Kindle store.”

Another reason for the upsurge is that “Today’s consumers have embraced mobile, on-the-go media consumption thanks to the prevalence of MP3 players and handheld video games.”

“Forrester also predicts that the eReader market will soon expand beyond books,” writes Lardinois, “especially once eInk technology becomes more mature and maybe even allows for color reproductions. Forrester’s Sarah Rotman Epps expects that newspapers, magazines, comics, and business and personal documents will also soon become more important, especially as other vendors besides Amazon start to produce more compelling devices and user experiences.”

That last sentence is worth rereading, implying as it does that the Kindle may be regarded as somewhat less than compelling. We know that a new generation of e-reading devices, including some with color screens, is slouching to be born, and Kindle could well lose its lustre despite the huge advantage it currently enjoys. This is reflected in the caution displayed by universities. Given the huge capital outlay and technological commitment involved in adopting and adapting a computer system, schools are sitting on the sideline waiting to see which platform and device wins the school sweepstakes. Even the recently released larger Kindle model may prove inadequate compared to netbooks and tablets that we have predicted will eventually dominate the educational marketplace. Says Lardinois:

The new Kindle DX is geared towards the textbook market, but Forrester warns that universities will be slow to adopt the technology. The schools that Forrester talked to had no plans to encourage students to use the Kindle and the current pilot project only involves a small number of students (50 at Pace, for example). Of course, this is also a classic chicken and egg problem. Textbook publishers will look at the adoption of the Kindle in schools and are unlikely to invest heavily in this technology unless they see a growing market for their content, while students are unlikely to show interest in eReaders unless all of their textbooks are available in this format.

RC

One way to conquer pirates is to co-opt their territory. To chase would-be pirates off Scribd.com, Simon & Schuster has announced it will deploy some 5,000 e-book editions on the website, reports Brad Stone in the New York Times. Though still in startup, Scribd has mushroomed into a hugely popular locus for writers to upload documents, including books.

Unfortunately, despite heroic efforts, Scribd has not been able to bar its doors to those passing off as their own the work of others. But, like a policeman giving a sample garment to a dog to sniff, once the website’s filtering software recognizes a legitimate copyrighted text it will instantly identify and reject imposters. Call it pre-emptive piracy management.

But there’s a far less subtle motivation for publishers to cast their lot with Scribd: its irresistibly low commission on sales. In the first decade of the E-Book Revolution, retailers charged the same 50% discount for the sale of digital content that brick and mortar bookstores charged for print. Foremost among the fifty percenters is Amazon and its Kindle. But of late publishers have begun to question the 50%-off shiboleth. Guru Mike Shatzkin gave sharp voice to this restive group. Pronouncing high discounts “daft,” he declared “There is no comparison between the retailers’ costs and risks associated with physical books and those associated with ebooks. There is no economic justification to providing the same level of discounts.”

“Now,” said Shatzkin, “is the time to change this.” You can read about it in detail here.

Picking up on these populist sentiments, Scribd came out of the chute charging 20% off the list price to its content provider customers, and that includes publishers. Stone quotes Scribd chief executive Trip Adler as declaring that S&S “is the first public endorsement by a major force in publishing that the social Web will play a major role in the future of book sales.”

Other standard bearers of Big Publishing may well join the rush to Scribd. The anti-piracy features are certainly attractive, but the telling factor may well be a desperate need to push Amazon and other etailers back to a commission structure that is, well, not quite so daft.

RC

There’s nothing like a celebrity endorsement to boost a product, and e-books could not ask for a more renowned patron than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Though he stands at the pinnacle of fame as governor of California, it doesn’t take much to make him revert to his identity as The Terminator. In this case the things he wants to terminate are textbooks. After hefting a few, Schwarzenegger, arguably the greatest bodybuilder of all time, joked “I can use these for curls.”

But it isn’t the books’ weight that daunts him; it’s their cost. Waging a fight to the death to extirpate his state’s $24 billion budget deficit, he’s questioned whether printed textbooks are any longer viable, especially when schools buy revised and updated volumes every year or two. So, he’s now looking into taking California’s educational system digital.

Mark Tran, writing for the UK’s Guardian website, picked up on a statement of Schwarzenegger’s that appeared in a California newspaper:

“It’s nonsensical and expensive to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form. Especially now, when our school districts are strapped for cash and our state budget deficit is forcing further cuts to classrooms, we must do everything we can to untie educators’ hands and free up dollars so that schools can do more with fewer resources.”

Tran says the Guv wants to replace high school math and science books with e-book readers, which can hold all the schoolbooks students will ever need. And let’s not forget that updated and revised editions are simply one refresh away.

Read Arnold Schwarzenegger to scrap school textbooks in favour of ebooks.

RC

There was a moment of ribald hilarity at the first government-sponsored e-book conference in 1998, where the e-book industry was officially launched in an atmosphere of evangelical fervor. As one of the few attendees from the traditional publishing sector, I was surrounded by a crowd of techies, engineers, entrepreneurial pioneers, geeks and dreamers who had toiled in the rocky e-book vineyard for years and were at last about to witness the realization of their vision. After a number of presentations had been given, a professorial gentleman took the podium and began a power point presentation. On the auditorium screen was a picture of what looked like tiny white balls.

The presenter explained that we were looking at something he called E Ink. Suspended in a liquid were millions of microcapsules containing particles that were dark on one side and light on the other, and each side had oppositely charged particles. By applying an electronic field, the white surface became black. And by sending a computer message instructing the suspension to turn the white microcapsules into black ones shaped like a “W”, the screen would show the letter W. Or by sending a message instructing the suspension to turn the white microcapsules into black ones shaped like War and Peace, the screen would show a book-length screen containing Tolstoy’s epic.

He touched a key on his keyboard advancing to the next slide. Voila!

“See? Your white balls just turned black,” the gentleman explained. He did not crack a smile.

An undercurrent of titters swept the audience as he droned on humorlessly about your white balls turning black and your black balls turning white. Aside from the inadvertent pun, the concept struck me as preposterous. I turned to a colleague and said, “That dog won’t hunt!”

Last month the E Ink Corporation was bought by a Taiwanese company for $215 million.

My notes on that 1998 conference are lost, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the presenter was Joe Jacobson, creator of electronic ink, who was awarded a patent for it in 2000.

He who titters last titters best.

Richard Curtis

Last month, when we reported e-book sales stats for the first quarter of 2009, I wrote “We’re running out of superlatives.” That was after March’s $10 million in sales matched the total for the first three months of 2008! Now we’re running out of italics and exclamation points, too. The April stats released by the Association of American Publishers and International Digital Publishing Forum reached $12,100,000, which my fingers and toes say amounts to a 327% increase over the $3,700,000 figure posted the previous April.

The above chart is for January through March and does not reflect April, but we hope IDPF’s statistician is prepared, literally, to raise the bar, as the ceiling isn’t even remotely in sight.

And we have a few tricks up our sleeves to proclaim future recordbreaking e-book industry performances. Look for announcements in all-caps, bold, and an infinite number of exclamation points.

The true sales numbers may be even higher than the above chart indicates. Michael Smith, Executive Director of IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum) reminds us that:

• This data represents United States revenues only
• This data represents only trade eBook sales via wholesale channels. Retail numbers may be as much as double the above figures due to industry wholesale discounts.
• This data represents only data submitted from approx. 12 to 15 trade
• publishers
• This data does not include library, educational or professional electronic sales
• The numbers reflect the wholesale revenues of publishers
• The definition used for reporting electronic book sales is “All books delivered electronically over the Internet OR to hand-held reading devices”
• The IDPF and AAP began collecting data together starting in Q1 2006

RC

Breathe easy, Kindle, the Cool-er is not your killer. It might not even give you a bloody nose.

A review by David Pogue in the New York Times found a handful of redeeming features, but overall the device seems to exemplify what can go wrong when technologists don’t think things through, don’t perform adequate field testing and market analysis, and rush products to market before they’re viable. “Neil Jones, inventor and chief executive of Cool-er’s parent company Interead, says the device went from original idea to finished product in only four and a half months,” Pogue reports. “Unfortunately, it shows. The hardware and software design are, to put it kindly, unrefined.”

As we recently wrote, the Cool-er has lots of promise and some genuinely competitive features. It’s thinner than the Kindle and about two thirds the price. Its casing comes in a number of attractive colors as opposed to Sony’s battleship gray or Kindle’s bed-linen beige. But note: the casing is in color, but the screen is black and white, and it’s not backlit.

The Cool-er can store 700 books; with a memory card the number soars to 2800. If you get stranded on a desert island, that’s over fifty years of literary companionship at the rate of one book a week. Cool-er’s battery is advertised as holding its charge for 8000 page turns, or about 25 average length books. And, unlike the Kindle, you can remove the Cool-er’s battery; five bucks will buy you a new one.

Pogue notes some other positives:

• The Cool-er has its own online store, stocked with 275,000 titles
• The Cool-er enables you to read on your Mac as well as a PC
• You can share a Cool-er book you’ve bought with four other people. e it to a library

So far so good, right? Now Pogue turns to the not-so-hot aspects. Among them:

• The Cool-er ‘s plastic frame “feels hollow and insubstantial; the plastic literally creaks when you press the buttons, which doesn’t inspire particular confidence”
• The click-wheel “is actually four compass-point buttons (not a true dial)” and they’re “stiff and balky.”
• There’s a several-second lag for page turns, “not an ideal setup for immersive reading.”
• “The four tiny white buttons on the left edge are unlabeled except for cryptic, molded indentations” and even after decrypting their purpose, navigation seems random and arbitrary (including one to play sudoku!).
• Type-size changes require “16 key presses, each requiring about 20 pounds of force.”
• The Cool-er requires you to buy books on your Mac or PC, then transfer them to the reader via a U.S.B. connection.
• “You can drag your own PDF or text files onto the reader…, but success is hit-or-miss. Some of my PDF files wouldn’t open; one froze the machine; the rest often appear with such tiny type that you’d need a microscope to read them. (You can’t enlarge them.)”
• The Cool-er has no audio feature.
• “There’s no built-in dictionary. Because it has no keyboard, it doesn’t permit you to make annotations or search for bits of text.”
• The Cool-er bookstore “has a lot of holes. No Harry Potter, no John Grisham, not even Freakonomics. Of 15 of the top New York Times best sellers, the Cool-er store has only 9, costing $16 to $23. The Kindle store, by contrast, has all 15 — for $10 each.

And of course, there’s the dumb name. In our original posting about the device, we wrote:

Aren’t consumers going to be confused by a b&w reader that sounds like “Col-or”? Or is it supposed to suggest the device is cool? Do you pronounce the word like the refrigerated water dispenser commonly found in business offices? Or do you come to a full glottal stop, thus: Cool. Er. No matter how you say it, it’s awkward, cacophonous and meaningless.

Well, I take “meaningless” back. Pogue says “The name Cool-er comes from “Cool E-book Reader.” Well, okay, I guess. But wouldn’t it more correctly be “Cool-Ebr”?

“So no,” Pogue concludes, “you shouldn’t buy this 1.0 effort— but you should root for successors. The ideals that inspired the Cool-er are important and worth fighting for…”

You can read his complete analysis in Don’t Quit That Kindle Just Yet.

RC

Google Book Search settlement and access to out of print books
Tuesday, June 2, 2009 at 8:45 AM
Posted by Derek Slater, Policy Analyst

A few weeks ago we blogged about how the Google Book Search settlement agreement will expand access to books for readers in the United States. We recently took another important step forward, when the University of Michigan announced an expanded agreement with Google that will take advantage of the settlement to expand public access to millions of works from the University’s collection.

Today we want to explain one area of the settlement in more detail: how the agreement increases access to out-of-print books, including books that some refer to as “orphans.”

Out of Print Books

The settlement covers books that Google scans from libraries’ collections, the majority of which may be in copyright but are out of print. These books would ordinarily be hard to access, and one of the principal benefits of the settlement agreement is that it allows people to search, preview, and purchase access to them.

The settlement will also make it far easier for anyone — including Google’s competitors — to license the use of most out-of-print books. As authors and rightsholders claim their books under the settlement, information about what books have been claimed and who claimed them will be made publicly available, allowing others to take advantage of this information. What’s more, the settlement creates an independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry run by authors and publishers that will be able to license other services on behalf of rightsholders who want it to do so.

Today, it may be costly for someone to track down the rightsholders of many older works, and there’s not much reason for those rightsholders to make themselves easy to find, because they can’t earn any money from their work by selling it in stores.

The settlement agreement addresses this conundrum in concrete ways. Because out-of-print books will get a renewed commercial life through Book Search and other services licensed by the Registry, rightsholders are more likely to claim their books. In this way, the settlement creates real financial incentives for owners of out-of-print works to come forward.

In addition, one of the Registry’s core missions is to locate the owners of unclaimed books in order to help authors and publishers claim their works and the revenues due them under the settlement. There is an extremely broad notification program already underway.

Orphan Works

While the majority of all book titles are out-of-print, only a minority of them are what some people call “orphans.” This term isn’t defined in U.S. law and people disagree on the definition, but it typically refers to in-copyright works whose owners cannot be identified or found.

As “parent” rightsholders claim their books through the Book Rights Registry, we think it will become clear that most out-of-print books are not actually “orphans.” Books that were once difficult for anyone to license will become books that are very easy for everyone to license, either through the Book Rights Registry or directly from their owners. Furthermore, many books that some think are in-copyright orphans (including a large percentage from 1963 or before) are actually out-of-copyright, and Google is working to make more information available that can clarify their copyright status.

Of course, some rightsholders may still be too difficult to find. Under the settlement Google will be able to open up access to truly orphaned books, but we still think more needs to be done to allow anyone and everyone to use these works. Any company or organization that wants to open up access to this untapped resource should be able to do so. The settlement is not a panacea, since it only covers a subset of orphaned works, provides only certain uses, and is not able to extend these uses to other providers. The need for comprehensive orphan works legislation is not diminished.

That’s why Google has been working for years to pursue legislation to provide meaningful avenues for any entity to use orphaned works. We first explained our views to the Copyright Office on this subject over four years ago, and it will remain one of Google’s priorities to work to pass effective orphan works legislation.

Fortunately, there isn’t an either-or choice between legislation and the settlement. While we work with others towards a comprehensive orphan works solution, the settlement agreement takes one important step towards opening up access to orphaned books in the meantime. If the agreement is approved, anyone across the nation — from a school child in rural America to a blind PhD candidate — will have an easy way to go online and read books that would otherwise be hard to access. We are excited about making that possible.