E-book Currents

Howard Falk

Publishers Reconsidering Reader Restrictions

The winds of change appear to be blowing through the ranks of publishers and technology suppliers interested in taking part in the growth of the e-book marketplace. There seems to be a movement to back off on reader restrictions embedded in e-books and to take advantage of the unique position of libraries to promote and advance the use of e-books.

Straws in the wind include the following.

A spokesman for Adobe (www.adobe.com),a company that is deeply involved in e-books and e-book software, sees many e-book publishers "loosening the reins on their content" and "turning off some of their guards".

The president of Texterity, Martin Hensel, has proposed a new arrangement for libraries to lend adult trade front-list e-book titles. Under this plan, patrons would trigger their downloads from MARC records in the library catalog. Libraries would pay $2.95 for each e-book a patron downloads. These e-books would self-destruct after a preset time interval. The downloaded files could be viewed on Palm or Pocket PC hand-held computers. An unlimited number of patrons could receive downloads of the same e-book. The charge per e-book would be reduced to $1.00 per download, when a suitable volume of transactions takes place.

Texterity has been providing software solutions to publishers and other corporate customers for about ten years. Their services allow original text to be converted into e-book, Web and CD formats. IPublish, the Time Warner e-book site that recently went out of business, was a Texterity customer. The Hensel proposal contains the unpalatable feature of prohibiting library ownership of e-book files. Comments are invited at mhensel@texterity.com

A Canadian company called NetActive (a spin-off of Nortel)), is selling software that fingerprints a user's computer, allowing the vendor of e-books or other files to identify that computer. When a user makes a request for a file protected by NetActive, the company's servers process the request and grant or deny access. Using this technology, rather than the usual encrypted reader restrictions, trusted e-book purchasers like libraries would not be prevented from making copies for their own use.

Will New Publishers Dominate E-books?

This is a time when large conventional publishers like Random House and Time Warner are reducing and abandoning their efforts to sell and promote e-books on the Internet. The very size of such publishers gives them a major investment in continuing to do business in ways they have found profitable, and leaves them unprepared to deal with small, specialized reader interest groups. Yet these are audiences that e-books are uniquely capable of serving, since electronic technologies are not limited by the economies of scale that dominate print publishing. The large print publishers have been pushing themselves out of the e-book marketplace with a combination of excessively high prices and insistence on built-in reader restrictions that are highly offensive to potential e-book buyers.

As large publishers vacate the e-book marketplace, they open the way for more flexible players to dominate the production and distribution of e-books. For example, Hardshell Word Factory (www.hardshell.com),a small Internet e-book site that sells titles which carry no reader restrictions, is now operating at a profit. Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com), another site that started small, now sells over 10,000 e-books a month after less than two years of operation. Fictionwise offers e-books in virtually every available format, including unencrypted PDF and Palm device formats. At Booklocker (www.booklocker.com) revenues grew about 75 percent during 2001. E-books at this site sell for about half the price of print books and are delivered in PDF format without reader restrictions.

Freed by e-books and the Internet, authors are beginning to break away and publish independently. For example, Warren Adler has placed all of his 23 backlist novels for sale on the Web. Adler is the author of the books on which the films War of the Roses and Random Hearts were based. Faced with publishers that let most of his books go out of print, Adler laid out about$100,000, bought back the rights to his own books, and launched his own Web site(www.warrenadler.com) where e-book, and print-on-demand versions of the titles are sold. He is now getting an increasing flow of revenue from those works, which are also offered at several Web e-book retail sites he has selected. In addition he has the satisfaction of direct contact with many fans and readers. Other book authors and their agents are planning to retain electronic rights to new works they sell to print publishers. Forrester Research estimates that the book industry will lose $1.3 billion in revenue by 2005 due to such defections.

Handheld E-book Sales Increase

Some 180,000 e-books were sold by Palm Digital Media (www.palm.com/ebooks) in 2001. With 1,000 new customers each week, sales were up 40 percent from the previous year and revenue nearly doubled. Over 3,500 titles are offered at the Palm site. These e-books can be viewed on Palm or Pocket PC hand-held computers equipped with Palm Reader software. Most of the e-books can be downloaded in less than two minutes and require only a few hundred kilobytes of storage. There are no hardware or software reader restrictions on these titles. Their use is restricted only by normal copyright practices.

The ten bestselling e-book fiction titles at the Palm site for 2001 were:

• 1.

  Dreamcatcher by Stephen King (Simon & Schuster);

• 2.

  Timeline by Michael Crichton (Random House);

• 3.

  Riding the Bullet by Stephen King (Simon & Schuster);

• 4.

  The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub (Random House);

• 5.

  Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub (Random House);

• 6.

  The Hades Factor by Robert Ludlum and Gayle Lynds (St Martin's Press);

• 7.

  Digital Fortress by Dan Brown (St Martin's Press);

• 8.

  Star Wars: Darth Maul: Saboteur by James Luceno (Random House);

• 9.

  K-PAX by Gene Brewer (St Martin's Press);

• 10.

  The Jupiter Theft by Donald Moffett (e-reads).

The ten bestselling e-book non-fiction titles were:

• 1.

  The Procrastinator's Handbook by Rita Emmett (Walker and Company);

• 2.

  Jack: Straight from the Gut by Jack Welch and John Byrne (AOL Time Warner Book Group);

• 3.

  The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey (Franklin Covey);

• 4.

  Surfing the Edge of Chaos by Pascale, Millemann and Gioja (Crown Publishers);

• 5.

  Get Anyone to Do Anything and Never Feel Powerless Again by David J. Lieberman (St Martin's Press);

• 6.

  Useless Sexual Trivia by Shane Mooney (Fireside);

• 7.

  Dave Barry Is not Taking This Sitting Down by Dave Barry (Crown Publishers);

• 8.

  52 Saturday Nights by Joan Elizabeth Lloyd (AOL Time Warner Book Group);

• 9.

  Now and Forever, Let's Make Love by Joan Elizabeth Lloyd (AOL Time Warner Book Group)

• 10.

  The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler (Villard).

Of course, impressive as Palm e-book sales may be, they are very small compared with sales of conventional printed books. According to Ipsos-NPD, Inc.(Port Washington, NY) less than half a million e-books were sold during the first half of 2001. Compare that with the 548 million conventional books sold during the same six-month period. E-books were about 0.1 percent of the total.

Digital Audio Books Online

Seattle library patrons can now search for popular audio book titles and order them online from the King County Library System. Only one patron at a time can access each library copy of a title and about four copies of some 30 titles are currently available from the King County Library System. When available copies are ordered they are delivered to patrons' community libraries on Rio500(MP3) audio player devices with a new AA battery, a cassette adaptor (for use with car audio systems), headphones and instructions. Patrons can use these materials for a loan period of 28 days. The audio books are bestsellers,classics and popular titles such as Jack: Straight from the Gut by Jack Welch, Envy by Sandra Brown, and Dreamcatcher by Stephen King. The library system plans to add eight audio titles a month to their collection. The audio books are supplied by Audible.com (www.audible.com).

Skylarov Released

Dimitry Skylarov, the Russian programmer, who was arrested by the FBI for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), has been released after being forced to stay in the USA for five months. Skylarov's attorney said that the government has basically dropped the charges against his client under an agreement that lets him go home to Moscow. What the government got was a statement by Skylarov outlining the fact that, as part of his academic dissertation work, he wrote portions of a computer program to demonstrate weaknesses in protection methods for Adobe PDF e-book files. His Moscow company Elcomsoft, which briefly distributed the software in the USA, still faces charges of violating the DMCA.

Copyright Office Supports E-book Copying

At a House of Representatives hearing, the US Copyright Office recommended that Congress allow consumers to make back-up copies of software and digital media, such as e-books, provided that these copies are not distributed for profit. However, the Copyright Office also took a stand against granting "first sale" rights that would allow consumers to resell or give away copyrighted materials that they own. Two days of hearings, held in December 2001 by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property,considered possible changes in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Witnesses from the National Music Publishers Association, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the Business Software Alliance argued against unlicensed distribution of intellectual property over the Internet, calling it piracy. Representatives from the Consumer Electronics Association, the Digital Media Association, and Broadcast Music Inc. argued against provisions of the DMCA. A statement submitted by the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries and others cited "significant challenges to libraries"posed by the DMCA, stressed the fact that "innovation will be impeded" by the Act, and called for passage of fair use provisions.

Copyrights Said to Block Preservation

According to Dan Bricklin, inventor of the original computer spreadsheet software VisiCalc, Copyright protection now being built into CDs, DVDs and e-books will break the chain needed to preserve creative works by making them legible for only a limited period of time and preventing their preservation, as media deteriorate and technologies change. Bricklin believes that providers of electronic materials will preserve only those works they believe to be profitable at a given moment.

Alan Cox, who is the main architect of the Linux operating system wonders how libraries will be able to archive electronic works that can only be read on one specific computer. He believes that we are brewing a second dark age in which e-books and other electronic works will not be preserved. Cox points out that we do not punish photocopier manufacturers for illegal photocopying, nor ban photocopiers, yet that is exactly what legislation like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and its European counterpart, the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD), propose to do for electronic media.

So Much for Preservation

A few weeks ago, thousands of authors and their agents were notified by e-mail that MightyWords was going out of business and that their contracts would be terminated in 30 days. The e-mail notice stated that "Your files will be removed from all MightyWords systems after January 12. We will not 'return' any digital files; they will be deleted from all servers." The authors were advised that if, they did not already have a copy of their work, they should download a copy of their files from the MightyWords site before it closed. The MightyWords site offered thousands of e-books and e-documents, long and short. Included were almost 20,000 Business and Economics titles, over 1,200 Technical (Computer)titles and 200 other titles in a wide variety of categories. Unless individual authors store these materials, they will be destroyed by the demise of MightyWords, clear evidence that the role of libraries as preservers of the written word is even more essential, now that so much material is in electronic form.

E-books for the Disabled: No Copyright Restrictions

Distribution of copyright material by non-profit organizations for use by the disabled is permitted under a 1996 amendment to the US copyright law. Bookshare(www.bookshare.org) has been formed to take advantage of this legal opening and provide an Internet site,where talking books in electronic formats and digital Braille titles can be accessed by readers with visual, learning and mobility disabilities.

Tens of thousands of the disabled now use computers to scan printed books and periodicals and convert them to electronic formats they can use, but it takes several hours of work to prepare a single book in this way. Bookshare collects such scanned materials, prepares them for use by the disabled and makes them available on a subscription basis to qualified individuals and to non-profit organizations that serve them. Subscription fees are modest. The financial goal of Bookshare is to operate at or above break-even within two years.

As of October 2001, 10,000 books had been submitted to the Bookshare site. Books are available to users of the site in BRF format for output to Braille readers or printers, and in NISO/ DAISY format for any of the many devices that allow reading of talking books.

Flexible Video Displays

We have heard of thin plastic screens that act like electronic paper and can be used for signs and other static displays. Now a paper-thin display material capable of showing moving images has been demonstrated by Royal Philips Electronics in The Netherlands, according to a recent article in Naturemagazine. The demonstration display is only two inches across, but it contains 4,000 plastic transistors, shows the contrast of black ink on paper, and demonstrates technology that can provide a flexible display capable of refreshing images at the speed of a conventional television screen.

Howard Falk(falkho@msn.com) is an Independent Consultant based in Bloomfield, New Jersey, USA.