Electronic Publications

The New Zeland Herald has a Story on this year\'s Frankfurt Book Fair.


It seems people are more realistic about eBooks this year, In contrast with the \"euphoria\" of last year. Last year some of the marketing Geniuses predicted paper books would become museum pieces within a generation.

\"The electronic book has not fulfilled expectations. It has come back down to earth. The technology still needs working on and we need to consider which titles and which content is suited,\" said Sabine Kaldonek, a spokeswoman.\"

What? You mean the people in marketing were wrong? What a shock, marketing people over hyping something... well at least TV will never do that.

netLibrary, who once claimed to offer \"the only comprehensive approach to eBooks that integrates with the time-honored missions and methods of libraries and librarians\", is up for sale:

Boulder technology firm netLibrary . . . [failed] to raise needed funds in an extremely tough investment environment.

The 230 employees, who were paid through Friday, were told Friday that they are welcome to return on Monday to help the company through its transition, but at in many cases a drastically cut pay rate. Each employee from receptionist to president will be paid $360 a week, roughly the equivalent of unemployment benefits . . .

NetLibrary was founded in 1998. The company had employed about 400 at its peak and had in raised $109.8 million in venture backing from Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill, Liberty Digital and others.

More from the The Daily Camera, with thanks to Gary Price.

Joost G. Kircz envisions a hybrid future for the scientific literature:

Discussion about the value of electronic documents is often hampered by starting from what is usual in the paper world and attempting to impose that on an electronic environment. In order to grasp the impact of the current electronic revolution, and formulate a policy for the future, we examine the aims and content of scientific communication. We then critically discuss the recommendations of an International Working Group [see Learned Publishing 2000:13(4) Oct. 251-8], and show the tension between these very reasonable recommendations and the reality of electronic publishing. We conclude that the scientific article will change considerably but that, in its new more composite form as an ensemble of various textual and non-textual components, it will retain many of the current cultural and scientific requirements with regard to editorial, quality and integrity.

More (as either a RealPage or PDF file) from Learned Publishing.

The Nashville Public Library is experimenting with an idea. They\'re offering free e-books via their web site for research purposes. You can download such items as The Complete Idiot\'s Guide to Geography\" or \"The Mathematical Handbook of Formulas and Tables,\" along with other titles,
and it will be your\'s to use at your leisure... For 24-hours that is, then, *poof* just like that, the book disappears. Better read fast. more... from The Tennessean.

A look at the factors affecting library adoption of e-books:

Like rolling earthquakes, new technology continues to rumble along the length and breadth of the publishing value chain . . . Curiously, however, in some cases, the earth actually moves, while in others, the perception that the earth might one day tremble is all that has happened. The latter, at least as far as trade publishing is concerned, is the situation with e-books on hand-held readers. As Henry Yuen, CEO of Gemstar, feared it might be—and as the general media have now affirmed to be the case—the e-reader marketplace appears \"dead on arrival,\" except for a small band of early adopters.

This is true in library circles as well. \"We are not lending e-books,\" noted Susan Kent, director of the Los Angeles Public Library. \"They are unwieldy and unreadable.\" In a very different environment, Lori Barkema, library director in Albert Lea, Minn., said, \"E-books are just not catching on. Not here, and not in the larger cities. And Minnesotans are big readers. It will be at least five years.\"

More from Publishers Weekly (registration required). This article was prepared for presentation at the Frankfurt Book Fair\'s \"Big Questions\" conference being held on 10/8/01.

Academic Libraries Take An E-Look at E-Books is a project by Spoon River College and Eureka College.


They applied for an Educate and Automate Innovative grant from the Illinois State Library, and bought some eBooks to see what would happen.


The purpose of this web page is to share the experiences of the students, instructors, and librarians during this project.

In the same year that the National Academy Press began offering 2,100 titles free through its web site, the
company also experienced a record growth in sales of printed books. How?
They acted on some simple but revolutionary insights into the way each medium is used:

It would seem axiomatic that giving away pages means that fewer people will buy the books, but that confuses the content with the product. Sugar, butter, flour, eggs, and vanilla are the contents of a pound cake, but quite obviously more than those contents is required to create something pleasing to the palate. It\'s clear to us that the material we publish -- the final printed book -- has a value quite distinct from the content itself, and a utility independent of any particular page. The handy, readable, formatted, bound volume is still the way most people want to read a book-length work . . . To my knowledge, no book by any publisher has ever sold less than expected because it was available free online.

More from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Troy L. Williams, founder and CEO of Questia Media Inc., has authored a piece in the Houston Business Journal on how fabulous online libraries are for, \"students and educators.\" When he says libraries, he naturally means companies like Questia, which are not libraries in my book.


many college students are extremely computer savvy and do all of their research on Internet.


It may be computer savvy to do all your research on the Internet, but it sure isn\'t smart. For the other side of the coin see \"The Computer Delusion\" in The Atlantic

Carrie writes \"Four major publishers have agreed to open an online clearinghouse on the Internet portal
Yahoo to sell their electronic books directly to readers, advancing their efforts to liberate themselves from reliance on online retailers in the nascent business of selling books in digital form.
Full Story from The NYTimes \"

They go on to say Although almost no one is buying electronic books today, there is a mad dash to be the first to market with this kind of thing, on the outside chance it does take off.


Random House, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Putnam, and HarperCollins are the publishers teaming up with Yahoo.

An interesting article on a wildly popular program for decrypting Microsoft e-books, and why publishers\' insistance on overly strict copyright control may doom the e-book as a popular medium:

It\'s easy to load a small library of electronic books into your laptop or handheld organizer and carry it with you on the bus or to the beach. But try to make backup copies of those same e-books or loan one to a friend, and you\'ll run smack into the digital equivalent of an electrified fence. The problem is that once a literary work has been liberated from the printed page, it\'s potentially vulnerable to unlimited digital piracy—a danger that makes most e-book publishers insist on strict software controls to prevent anyone but the purchaser from opening an e-book file . . . Until software makers and publishers can figure out how to protect their e-books without treating all readers like thieves, in other words, the summer of beach-blanket e-books may never materialize.

More from Technology Review.

Slashdot pointed the way to This Techreview Story on An anonymous programmer that has found a way to decrypt Microsoft Reader e-books.The decryption program enables purchasers of \"owner-exclusive\" Microsoft Reader titles—Microsoft\'s most highly protected form of e-book—to convert these titles to unencrypted files viewable on any Web browser. The programmer hasn\'t released it, saying he developed it for his personal use.

Last spring the University of Virginia conducted an experiment in which they provided students with e-textbooks. Apparently it works. So much so that Microsoft is offering its reader through library vendor Follett, and some major publishers, including Harcourt and McGraw-Hill (not Tim and Faith), are jumping on the e-textbook bandwagon. The belief is that generation D will find the
e-textbooks much friendler to use than the traditional, and much more cumbersome tomes of bygone days. more... from On Magazine.

The guardian has a story on ePenguin. Penguin books is preparing to make \"hundreds\" of books available for download. Some titles will even be released online before being available in print.


Information on the Penguin site suggests that the books will be available in either Adobe or Microsoft eBook format. If you send e-mail to [email protected] they will send you a free sample eBook. It doesn\'t say if more will follow on an approval basis.

Besides the fact that there\'s an awful line in here that reads, \"California\'s state university system has written a new chapter in how to lend e-books,\" it seems that Cal State has figured out a way to lend one e-book to more than one individual at a time. This is, of course, thanks to NetLibrary. more... from Wired News.

Chris Taylor writes, \"Come on, hurry up. The clock is ticking. This column will self-destruct in 60 seconds. Haven\'t reached the end of the first paragraph yet? That\'ll be another 25 cents, please. You think I\'m joking? Well, if one company\'s vision of the future of online reading is to be believed, folks who eyeball each line with a snail-like finger had better have deep pockets. On Monday Rosetta Books, a major player in the nascent e-book market, announced a \"$1 for 10 hours of reading\" deal. You pay a buck, download the book, then 10 hours later the text gets all scrambled up. Haven\'t finished? Tough luck; you have to pay again to unlock it. Right now this is just a trial deal attached to one tome — Agatha Christie\'s \"And Then There Were None\" — but you don\'t have to be Poirot to know that it won\'t end there, or that 10 hours\' worth of reading won\'t stay that cheap forever.\" more... from Time Even More from CNet News.

A technically detailed assessment from someone in the trenches:

The University of California\'s California Digital Library (CDL) formed an Ebook Task Force in August 2000 to evaluate academic libraries\' experiences with electronic books (e-books), investigate the e-book market, and develop operating guidelines, principles and potential strategies for further exploration of the use of e-books at the University of California (UC). This article, based on the findings and recommendations of the Task Force Report [1], briefly summarizes task force findings, and outlines issues and recommendations for making e-books viable over the long term in the academic environment, based on the long-term goals of building strong research collections and providing high level services and collections to its users.

(More from D-Lib.)

The Chinese government\'s recent move to restrict Internet access has not stopped e-books from attracting an audience there:

A portable e-book device is now available through The Xinhua Book Store in Xinhua, China. The Xinhua E-Book, which has been developed with a Taiwanese tech company, connects to the Internet and supports multimedia Audio visual programs. The Xinhua Post has created a channel for the device. At another Chinese site, Eshunet.com, e-books are free for the taking. (In Chinese, \"shu\" means book.) All titles are in EXE format and over 700,000 units are downloaded each day. Eshunet encourages redistribution, such as posting e-books to other sites or mailing them to friends, and has obtained permission from its authors to give their work out for free.

More from Wired

\"Persecution of an individual shouldn\'t be any company\'s response to a commercial disagreement, especially regarding copyright,\" Connie Foster, the EPC executive director said Sunday.


All members of the EPC -- not just a small portion of them as with print-oriented groups like the AAP -- work with the Adobe and other electronic formats to publish their e-books, and we recognize that the same technology that benefits publishers with lower production and distribution costs also aids copyright violators.


In this case, readers\' interests should be paramount, and the leading e-book formats -- Adobe\'s among them -- slight them by making it impossible to open an e-book when upgrading to a new computer or when suffering a number of all-too-common computer woes, such as virus infection and hard-disk failure.\"

Read the Full Release.

The Electronic Publishers Coalition was founded by a group of publishers committed to furthering the growth of the e-book community. It is the largest trade association of electronic publishers in the world. A primary role of the EPC is to follow through on its commitment to develop a healthy marketplace for digital content as well as to take a leadership role in setting minimum standards in order to encourage quality within our industry.

Pat Schroeder and company weigh in:

In the AAP\'s announcement, released July 19, president and CEO Patricia Schroeder hailed Sklyarov\'s arrest as consistent with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which prohibits the manufacture or distribution of tools designed to circumvent technological protections on copyrighted material. \"It\'s only common sense to expect that, if the public wants desirable books to be available online and through other digital media like the Adobe Reader, the authors and publishers who have the legal rights to commercially exploit such works in the global digital marketplace must have reasonable assurances that the market value of their works can be protected from the extraordinary risks of illegal reproduction and distribution that are made possible by the capabilities of digital media,\" said Schroeder. \"Congress understood this when it enacted the DMCA to help promote the online availability of copyrighted works.\"

This article and an editorial on the case are available at eBookWeb.

\"Free Dmitri Sklyarov!\" was the rallying cry at protests held around the U.S. today. FreeSklyarov.org has information on the protests and the condition of the jailed Russian programmer.

The Adobe/Elcomsoft battle is receiving a huge amount of attention in programming and copyright law circles. The New York Times suggests it is catalyzing resistance to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act:

The arrest last week of a Russian programmer accused of violating an American digital copyright law has stirred an opposition, both against the law itself and Adobe Systems, the software company that initiated the case against the programmer. The Russian, Dmitri Sklyarov, was arrested last Monday at a computer hacker convention in Las Vegas, where he made a presentation about the security flaws in the encryption software, like Adobe\'s, used to prevent the piracy of electronic books. Mr. Sklyarov, who is being held in a Las Vegas jail, was detained under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which makes it a crime to traffic in devices, like software, that circumvent digital encryption. Violations are punishable by as much as five years in prison and a $500,000 fine. (More)