This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com

Responding to a tsunami of ill will over Amazon’s deletion of two Kindle books, the company’s chief Jeff Bezos apologized, saying the handling of the matter was “stupid” and “thoughtless”. Bezos said that the harm done to Amazon’s image was “wholly self-inflicted.”

Though the company justified its original action on the grounds that the books had been uploaded into Kindle from an unauthorized source, and though Amazon refunded the price of the zapped George Orwell books to customers, Bezos acknowledged that the affair was a public relations debacle.

Though E-Reads expressed a somewhat contrarian view of Amazon’s action, we also recognize that it opened far larger issues concerning the ability of corporations, or even governments, to reach into our homes, businesses and private lives and control what we read, watch, or communicate.

Not everyone is prepared to accept an apology and move on. Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Foundation, said “Unfortunately this matter requires more than just changing internal policy. The real issue here is Amazon’s use of DRM and proprietary software. They have unacceptable power over users, and actual respect necessitates more than an apology – it requires abandoning DRM and releasing the Kindle’s software as free software.

For the full text of Bezos’s apology click here.

RC

“The world is too much with us,” wrote poet William Wordworth. Too bad he didn’t have an Android-powered smartphone.

If he did he’d realize how little of the world he’d actually experienced. By strolling through Grasmere, his Lake District hometown, and pointing the device at inns and shops, countless secrets and wonders theretofore hidden from him would have been displayed on his phone’s screen.

Wordsworth didn’t have a smartphone, but you can experience for yourself the marvels of augmented reality that the smartphone delivers. What’s augmented reality? Leslie Berlin, project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford, recently reported in the New York Times that “the real world is overlaid with virtual information.” By using your smartphone’s global positioning application, your phone can see precisely what you’re looking at. “The augmented-reality application then pulls in information about points of interest in that sight line and displays it on top of the camera view.”

Football fans have been familiar with an early version of augmented reality: it’s the yellow stripe that appears to mark the first down line on the field on game telecasts. In fact it’s a virtual line, invisible to spectators attending the game but absolutely real to television viewers. The technology has now been enhanced and adapted to such competitive sports as golf, tennis, baseball and sailing.

And don’t forget the competitive sport called shopping. Books, for instance. We recently reported a Google book-text search tool called the Barcode Scanner that works with an Android-powered cellphone. According to Google Book Search engineer Jeff Breidenbach, when you download the software into your Android and point your phone camera at a book’s barcode, “it will automatically zoom, focus and scan the ISBN – without you even needing to click the shutter…You’ll then have the option to search the full text of the book on Google Book Search right away”

But that’s just the beginning. Berlin goes on to write, “Augmented reality will ‘reinvent’ many industries, including health care and training…Already, researchers at the Technical University of Munich are looking at ways to display X-ray and ultrasound readings directly on a patient’s body. A research project at BMW is exploring how an augmented-reality view under the hood might help auto mechanics with diagnostic and repair work.

“The industry that may have the most to gain from augmented reality is gaming,” Berlin concludes. Actually, not. Traditionally, the earliest adapters of technological advances are warfare and the sex trade. The military has for years been developing “wearable computers” employing what it calls a Battlefield Augmented Reality System. Here’s an excerpt from a pre-Android paper published in 2002:

Many future military operations are expected to occur in urban environments. These complex, 3D battlefields introduce many challenges to the dismounted warfighter. Better situational awareness is required for effective operation in urban environments. However, delivering this information to the dismounted warfighter is extremely difficult. For example, maps draw a user’s attention away from the environment and cannot directly represent the three dimensional nature of the terrain.

To overcome these difficulties, we are developing the Battlefield Augmented Reality System (BARS). The system consists of a wearable computer, a wireless network system, and a tracked see-through head-mounted display (HMD). The computer generates graphics that, from the user’s perspective, appear to be aligned with the actual environment. For example, a building could be augmented to show its name, a plan of its interior, icons to represent
reported sniper locations, and the names of adjacent streets.

As for the other application, pornography – well, use your imagination.

Read about recent smartphone advances in augmented reality in Kicking Reality Up a Notch.

“The real world is way too boring for many people,” one game developer declared. “By making the real world a playground for the virtual world, we can make the real world much more interesting.”

Which takes us back to Wordworth:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea…

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

A visitor to our website recently posted this comment in connection with what we call The Orwell Kindle Caper:

Yeah, I did not see a big problem here. As long as customers got a refund, no big deal. As far as the possibility of Amazon arbitrarily deleting content they actually had a right to provide in the first place – I don’t ever see that happening. They do actually want customers, after all.

Sorry, pal – it’s a big deal. There are some who not only think Amazon’s ability to reach into customers’ Kindles is a big problem, they are genuinely terrified by the prospect of far graver abuses. Because it’s not just about taking back our e-books but taking back our fundamental liberties. At least that’s the way technology columnist Farhad Manjoo sees it, and he’s stated the case with chilling logic in a blog posted on Slate.

Here’s Manjoo’s position in a nutshell:

“The worst thing about this story isn’t Amazon’s conduct; it’s the company’s technical capabilities. Now we know that Amazon can delete anything it wants from your electronic reader. That’s an awesome power, and Amazon’s justification in this instance is beside the point. As our media libraries get converted to 1′s and 0′s, we are at risk of losing what we take for granted today: full ownership of our book and music and movie collections.

Manjoo builds on this disturbing premise. Here are a few excerpts to keep you awake tonight:

• “If Apple or Amazon can decide to delete stuff you’ve bought, then surely a court—or, to channel Orwell, perhaps even a totalitarian regime—could force them to do the same. Like a lot of others, I’ve predicted the Kindle is the future of publishing. Now we know what the future of book banning looks like, too.“
• “Most of the e-books, videos, video games, and mobile apps that we buy these days day aren’t really ours. They come to us with digital strings that stretch back to a single decider—Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, or whomever else.”
• “In Amazon’s view, the books you buy aren’t your property—they’re part of a “service,” and Amazon maintains complete control of that service at all times. Amazon has similar terms covering downloadable movies and TV shows, as does Apple for stuff you buy from iTunes.“
• “In The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It, Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain argues that such “tethered” appliances give the government unprecedented power to reach into our homes and change how our devices function.”
• “The difference between today’s Kindle deletions and yesteryear’s banning is that the earlier prohibitions weren’t perfectly enforceable.“
• “Amazon deleted books that were already available in print, but in our paperless future—when all books exist as files on servers—courts would have the power to make works vanish completely.”

“The power to delete your books, movies, and music remotely,” Manjoo concludes, “is a power no one should have.”

Does he have a prescription for reversing this potential erosion of our liberties? “Here’s one way around this,” he writes. “Don’t buy a Kindle until Amazon updates its terms of service to prohibit remote deletions. Even better, the company ought to remove the technical capability to do so, making such a mass evisceration impossible in the event that a government compels it.”

In light of Manjoo’s well argued contentions, a threatened class action lawsuit against Amazon reported by Publishers Lunch might bring some of these issues to the forefront of our consciousness.

So yes, faithful correspondent, the Orwell Kindle Caper is indeed a big deal. It’s a very, very big deal.

Richard Curtis

Technology blogger David Pogue serves as a formidable lobby of one, chiding Congress for failure to look after the basic needs of a huge segment of the American populace: cellphone users. In a brilliant and must-read article in the New York Times he writes, “If I were on the Senate Commerce Committee, I think I’d start with things like these.” There follows a list of grievances that will make every user want to march on Washington. Here’s a thumbnail:

• “TEXT-MESSAGING FEES Why has the price of a text message gone to 20 cents, from 10, in two years? And…isn’t it a little fishy that all four big United States carriers raised their text-message fees at essentially the same time?… And why are e-mail messages (which require much more data) included with basic Internet service, but text messages require either a per-message fee or a separate package?
• “DOUBLE BILLING In Europe, you’re billed only when you place a cellphone call — not when you answer one….Somehow, though, we’ve let the cellphone industry get into the habit of billing both of us. When I call you, a chat that eats up 10 minutes of my airtime allowance also eats up 10 minutes of yours. A text message that costs me 20 cents also costs you 20 cents.
• “THE SUBSIDY GAME…If your monthly fee includes payment for the phone itself, how come that monthly bill doesn’t suddenly drop in the month when you’ve finished paying off that handset?
• “INTERNATIONAL CALLING Using Skype or iChat or Google Voice, I can place a crystal-clear computer-to-computer overseas call for nothing….Why, then, am I still billed an astonishing $1.50 to $5 a minute to call these countries from my cellphone?
• “15-SECOND INSTRUCTIONS This one makes me crazy. When I call to leave you a voicemail message, the first thing I hear, before I’m allowed to hear the beep, is 15 seconds of instructions. “To page this person, press 5.” Page this person!? Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize this was 1980! “When you have finished recording, you may hang up.” Oh, really!? So glad you mentioned that! I would have stayed on the line forever!
• And then when I call in for messages, I’m held up for 15 more seconds. “To listen to your messages, press 1.” Why else would I be calling!?…Is this really so evil? Is 15 seconds here and there that big a deal? Well, Verizon has 70 million customers. If each customer leaves one message and checks voicemail once a day, Verizon rakes in — are you sitting down? — $850 million a year. That’s right: $850 million, just from making us sit through those 15-second airtime-eating instructions.”

Pogue has plenty more to say, and he says it in The Irksome Cellphone Industry. If you think There oughtta be a law, send Pogue a message of support. His email address is at the end of his article.

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

As Plastic Logic’s device slouches to be born early in 2010, the company has disclosed more and more about about its design, technology and, most recently, its partnership with Barnes & Noble to cooperate with the BN.com e-bookstore. All of which we have chronicled.

What we have not chronicled is the name of the device. Why? Because we don’t know what it is, and Plastic Logic hasn’t told anybody. You can read Brad Stone’s latest reportage about Plastic Logic in the New York Times and you’ll see he covers pretty much everything – everything except the name.

I don’t think the company’s directors realize how frustrating it is for us to refer to the surname but not the given name. Our frustration has reached the tipping point. We don’t want to wait any more. So, we’re inviting readers to make up their own name. Submit it to us and we’ll pick the one we like best and refer to it until Plastic Logic announces the real one.

E-Reads will award a $25.00 B&N gift certificate to the reader who submits the name we like the most. Submit your entries to info(at)ereads.com with the subject “Plastic Logic”. Deadline is midnight EST Sunday August 9 2009 (or until Plastic Logic officially releases the name, whichever comes first). Submissions must be fit to print in E-Reads’ sole judgment, and we shall also be sole judges of the winning entry.

Here’s one to start things off, submitted by a commenter on a prior blog:

“Fantastic Plastic, of course, because everyone attributes fantastic powers to a device no one has seen (except in picture)”

We look forward to your entries.

E-Reads

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Today William Lynch, president of BN.Com, went on Morning Joe, the popular MSNBC television show, to discuss the new BN.com e-book initiative. He also demonstrated on his iPhone how fast anyone can access the site, seek and select a title, order and download it. He did it in front of a camera in about 30 seconds. And what was the book? Lynch cannily chose Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough’s own recently published book Last Best Hope. When Scarborough asked if he should buy a Kindle, Lynch replied that the BN store can be accessed by most other devices and especially the forthcoming Plastic Logic (No-Name) reader. However, the one device they don’t seem to support is Amazon’s Kindle.

You can watch William Lynch’s interview here at MSNBC.

Despite his praise for Plastic Logic, Lynch seemed to make a glaring factual error unless he knows something no one else does: he described the new Plastic Logic display arriving in Q1 2010 as “plastic roll-up,” which according to Plastic Logic is not going to be the case (Plastic Logic announces upcoming reader device – July 22, NY Times). The yet unnamed device will be larger than the Kindle DX, to attract more business users for professional documents, and have integrated 3G and Wi-Fi compatibility thanks to an agreement with AT&T.

Is BN.com going to win customers back from Amazon? They’ll have a fighting chance now that they are looking to streamline the purchasing steps standing between readers and new e-books.

The new BN.com’s “Buy Now (read in seconds)” button in their e-book section is suspiciously like Amazon’s “One-Click Buy It Now” button, which is a notoriously protected feature that Jeff Bezos sought to patent and license. Currently, Kindle customers only need to press one button at Amazon’s website to have the book purchased and immediately accessible to their Kindle or iPhone. Now BN.com customers will have a similar option. But one big difference between the two retailers is that the new BN.com “Buy Now” button is presently only for ebooks, not print books. If the book is going to be delivered by mail, you’d think an extra click or two won’t make a difference, but this is where Amazon innovated their impressive market share by making things easier for the customer. It’s good to see BN.com making a real effort to catch up in more ways than one.

RC and MG

USA Today announced today that its bestseller list will now include Kindle sales in its rankings. “Since October of 1993, USA Today‘s Best-Selling Books List has provided our readers with a complete picture of sales in the publishing industry,” said Susan Weiss, managing editor of the national newspaper’s Life section. “With the addition of sales figures from Kindle, we have created a more robust list which reflects the new platforms consumers and readers are using to purchase books.”

This list will run in Thursday’s edition of USA Today and online at booklist.usatoday.com.

“We are thrilled to be contributing Kindle book sales information to USA Today for their comprehensive bestseller list for books customers,” said Laura Porco, director of Kindle books. “Given the great overlap of taste between Kindle customers and physical book buyers, the USA Today Best-Selling Books List is truly reflective of what customers are buying regardless of format.”

You can read USA Today‘s release in its entirety here.

Kindle sales don’t seem to have been posted yet when we visited the list late Wednesday evening; only hardcover and paperback sales were noted. The top five were
#1 Common Sense by Glenn Beck, #2 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling, #3 New Moon by Stephenie Meyer, #4 Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer, and #5 My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult.

USA Today‘s is by no means the first e-book bestseller list. Fictionwise, now wholly owned by Barnes & Noble, has kept one for years and it provides fascinating information on the performance of titles in e-books such as recent bestseller by title and by author, highest rated e-books (rated by fan vote) and all-time highest rated e-books.

The International Digital Publishing Forum (formally the Open eBook Forum), the trade and standards association for the eBook industry, has kept a tally of e-book bestsellers by member publishers. In October 2005 for instance the top five e-titles were:

#1 The Colorado Kid by Stephen King
#2 My Fair Temptress by Christina Dodd
#3 The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly
#4 It Happened One Autumn by Lisa Kleypas
#5 MindWar by Darrell Bain

The IDPF’s list was culled from PDA’s, smartphones, eBook readers and PCs. In October 2005 Kindle was a still a gleam in Jeff Bezos’s eye.

Richard Curtis

USA TODAY’S BEST-SELLING BOOKS LIST TO INCLUDE AMAZON KINDLE BOOK SALES INFORMATION

Becomes First Major Book List to Include Kindle in Rankings

McLean, Va. (July 22, 2009) – Beginning tomorrow USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books List will include Amazon Kindle book sales in overall sales rankings. USA TODAY is the first major book list to include Kindle book sales and in doing so will provide a much more robust ranking for our bestseller list. This list will run in Thursday’s edition of USA TODAY and online at booklist.usatoday.com.

“Since October of 1993, USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books List has provided our readers with a complete picture of sales in the publishing industry,” said Susan Weiss, managing editor of the Life section. “With the addition of sales figures from Kindle, we have created a more robust list which reflects the new platforms consumers and readers are using to purchase books.”

“We are thrilled to be contributing Kindle book sales information to USA TODAY for their comprehensive bestseller list for books customers,” said Laura Porco, director of Kindle books. “Given the great overlap of taste between Kindle customers and physical book buyers, the USA TODAY Best-Selling Books List is truly reflective of what customers are buying regardless of format.”

Rankings for USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books List are based on retail sales data collected each week that include more than 2.5 million volumes from about 7,000 physical retail outlets in addition to books sold online. USA TODAY’s list ranks titles regardless of genre or format, providing one of the best assessments of which books are most popular among readers and consumers each week. USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list has been published each Thursday in the newspaper’s Life section since October 28, 1993.

USA TODAY was founded in 1982 with a mission to serve as a forum for better understanding and unity to help make the USA truly one nation. Through its flagship newspaper and popular Web site, USA TODAY engages the national conversation and connects readers online through social media applications. USA TODAY, the nation’s top-selling newspaper with a total average daily circulation of more than 2.1 million, and USATODAY.com, an award-winning newspaper Web site which launched in 1995, reach a combined 5.8 million readers daily. The USA TODAY news and information brand also includes: USA TODAY Education, USA TODAY LIVE, USA TODAY Mobile, Open Air magazine and USA TODAY Sports Weekly. USA TODAY is owned by Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI).

Michael Cader’s ‘s Michael Publishers Lunch passes along an AP story that Plastic Logic “will use AT&T’s network to support wireless connectivity for their coming ereader, comparable to Kindle’s relationship with Sprint. Since AT&T’s network is compatible with cellular carriers and devices in other countries,” Lunch goes on to say, “the company could support Plastic Logic’s European launch as well as their American initiative.”

We’ve written extensively about this much anticipated device, now scheduled for release in 2010. Here’s a thumbnail:

Driven by the same E-Ink technology that powers Sony’s eReader and Amazon’s Kindle, Mountain View California’s Plastic Logic will soon release a large-screen reader designed to carry your daily newspaper, according to Eric A. Taub in the New York Times. The screen will be twice the size of the eReader and Kindle and just about the same weight but two thirds thinner.

With news that Barnes & Noble will be working with Plastic Logic and Rupert Murdoch has been flirting with it, the device is being invested with almost messianic powers. There’s only one problem.

WE DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S CALLED!

Maybe it won’t be called anything, just “I’m reading War and Peace on my Plastic Logic.” Or maybe their name for it is the best kept secret since Operation Overlord. No one has a clue, and we haven’t heard a rumor. Therefore we’re inviting readers and bloggers to name the Plastic Logic Whatsis. We’ll post any that are fit to print.

Forget about “Kindle Killer”, though. We have dibs on that one.

Richard Curtis