Monday, July 20, 2009

University Presses Stepping Up e-Book Efforts

(By Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 7/17/2009)

In separate announcements, a coalition of four university presses have received a planning grant to study the feasibility of a collaborative scholarly e-book program, and the University of Chicago Press announced a multi-faceted program to make 700 e-books available immediately.

A coalition of presses from New York University, Rutgers, Temple and the University of Pennsylvania, plan to use a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to hire a technical consultant for a six-month study looking at the feasibility of a collaborative scholarly e-book publishing program. The new program will focus on studying the particular needs of university presses and their library partners. (A spokesperson for Temple Univ. press noted that TUP plans to immediately release 50 new e-books that are not a part of this announcement or coalition study.)

The coalition of presses plans to study how to bring together a wide variety of university presses of different sizes—a minimum of ten presses at launch—in an e-book publishing program that would launch with at least 10,000 e-book titles and add five to 10 new UPs each year over 5 years. According to the details of the grant, the new program would focus on the library market and then on supplying e-books to students as well as looking at variety of payment/delivery models—from purchase/subscription to rental models, bundling and POD.

Steve Maikowski, director of the NYU Press, is co-principal investigator on the grant along with Marlie Wasserman, director of Rutgers University Press. “This is a very ambitious planning grant and we are thankful to the Mellon Foundation for supporting the research,” Maikowski said.

For its part, the University of Chicago Press is well under way with its e-book program, announcing plans to partner with BiblioVault, a Chicago digital book repository, to immediately make 700 academic titles available in e-book form. The e-titles are available through the University of Chicago Press website and can be downloaded to a variety of laptops, desktops and mobile devices and read using Digital Editions, a free software reader available from Adobe.

Patti O’Shea, executive director of information systems at the Univ. of Chicago Press, said the press also plans to release more backlist e-book titles as well as begin simultaneous print and digital releases of its books. O’Shea said the press is offering a variety of purchase/rental options including “perpetual ownership at list price, 180-day ownership at about 50% off or 30-day owernship for $5.” O’Shea said the rental options were aimed at students and noted that using Digital Editions allows the e-books, “to be used on up to six unique devices registered to a single users. Readers can seamlessly transfer their e-books between different computers and e-book devices.”

Dean Bobaum, e-commerce and marketing manager at the press, said the press will continue to distribute e-books through vendors like Amazon and suppliers such as NetLibrary. However, Garrett Kiely, director of the Univ. of Chicago Press, said that seeing “big players like Sony and Google in the e-book game, “has lit a fire under academic presses,” to get into the e-book business.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

My first e-textbook experience: Big disappointment from Pearson

(Teleread, By Ficbot)

I’ve just had my first e-textbook experience, and if this is what the future of e-books in education looks like, color me disappointed.

The course is an on-line summer credit offered by a somewhat local university. I have taken one such course every summer for the last three years to add various teachables to my teaching credentials, and in the past, the course has consisted of the following:

  • A print textbook.
  • An online forum with an organizer listing the schedule of readings, discussion questions for them, etc., and a message board to talk about them
  • A “lecture” for each section of the course which could be read on-line or cut and pasted to a word file
  • A section of Internet links to other websites or readings

This course had an “e-book” option where one could pay on a sliding scale to get a) a print book and “access” the e-version b) only a print book c) only the e-version “access.” I suppose the word ‘access’ should have clued me in that this was not a PDF or some-such, but I was just so excited not to have to deal with the clutter of a paper copy (and to save the $20 more plus shipping that the deluxe “e-book plus paper copy” would cost) that I didn’t investigate the situation more carefully.

I came to regret this. If the e-book system used by this course is any way becoming the “standard,” then e-books have no way of conquering the mainstream educational market.

The”’e-book” was compiled by a site called Pearson Educational Media. One can access the “e-book” by setting up an account with them and logging in. From here, I thought I would get a PDF, perhaps with a password, but what I instead got was a Macromedia Flashpaper document. There was no facility to download the text as a file so it could be read on a mobile device. There was no facility to cut and paste the text into a word processor to make your own file to read on a mobile device. You could not even use the arrow keys to read easily off the screen; you needed a mouse so you could move down the hand or click on the arrows. You could print the book to paper. That was the only real “functionality” you had beyond sitting in front of your computer and clicking with the mouse.

There were some other usability concerns. Our on-line postings to the message board required that we respond in such a way as to prove we had done the readings. But there was no cut and paste! So if you had the e-book open in one window and the message board open in another, and you wanted to quote a line or two, you would have to switch back and forth between the two windows and manually type in every word! It’s ridiculous. I still think cutting and pasting the whole shebang into Word so I could read it on my Sony is fair and should be permitted, but you could persuade me why this might not be allowed. But two lines, to put into my message board post? I can’t do that? Piracy of three-year-old journal articles from educational trade magazines is such an issue? Why even have an e-book if you have to type it in from scratch anyway?

Here was another issue: the search box. It seemed to work fine for standard text—plain, simple, less formatted stuff that seemed to come from textbook chapters. But it could not make sense of anything formatted (such as call-out boxes from scanned magazine articles) or anything that wasn’t just regular, basic text. One particularly vital chapter seemed to be scanned from an older book, and there was a lot of ’static’ on the page. The whole chapter was unreadable by the search function. Every time I wanted to refer to it, I had to manually scroll back and find what I was looking for. And of course, once I found it, I had to juggle two windows back and forth while I manually retyped whatever word or phrase I wanted…

So what did my $35 get me? “Access” to a website (for the duration of the course only) that pretty much lets me look, but not touch. No ability to download to my mobile device. No ability to cut and paste even two words from one browser window into another. Limited ability to search for parts I want read later, the usefulness dependent on whether the parts important to me have the fortune to be recognized by the program as actual words. And if I want to keep any of it after the course is done, only a print button and a pile of papers, just like in the old days. This is progress?

At minimum, we should have a PDF we can download and read off-line, and the ability when reading off the OC to copy/paste even in a limited way. Better still would be if they took the raw scans, run them through an OCR program and left us with text we could actually search and bookmark. I would not “buy” another textbook under a scheme such as the current one. I hate reading lengthy documents off a computer screen and need to be able to download it for off-line, off-computer use. And an e-book that a) requires you to print it in order to read it later b) does not let you copy even a snippet from one browser window to another c) only sometimes allows you to search through text as if they were actual words is barely an e-book at all.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

The Summer of E-books

Ditto Book Digital Reading Device Hits the Market

By Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 7/6/2009 7:49:00 AM

With the release of the newest handheld digital reading device, the awkwardly named Ditto Book (Digital Interface Total Text Organizer), this has truly become the summer of the e-book reader.

The Ditto Book is a nonwireless e-book reading device that looks a bit like the Amazon Kindle 2 but has a price ($249) that’s more like that of the Cool-ER, a similar nonwireless e-reading device that debuted at BookExpo America this year. (The Amazon Kindle 2 sells for $359.) Like the Kindle, The Ditto Book has a 6-inch black & white e-ink screen; long battery life and can read both text and PDF as well as play MP3 sound files. On the other hand, like the Cool-ER, the Ditto Book offers an expandable SD card slot that kicks its memory up to 2 GB of storage.

Most importantly, unlike the Kindle, the Ditto Book supports epub format titles, the industry's open e-publishing format standard and the format in which most e-books will be published going forward. In addition the Ditto Book is not a wireless device and users will need a computer and USB connection to move their e-books onto the device after downloading them to a laptop or desktop computer.

Although Amazon’s Kindle dominates part of the e-book marketplace, it seems that more companies are planning to target this sector of the market with black & white reading devices priced to undercut the Kindle. The Ditto Book is just the latest dedicated handheld reading device targeting this sector and it certainly won’t be the last. Companies like Plastic Logic are planning to offer their own black and white devices to a market that includes a range of devices that can used for reading, such as the Sony Reader, mobile phones (with high res screens and full color display for roughly the same price); and lesser known wireless and nonwireless b&w reading devices like the DRS series of devices from iRex Technologies or even the forthcoming full-featured CrunchPad. And you can bet there are even more devices offering similar functionality and similar prices on the way.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Preparing to Sell E-Books, Google Takes on Amazon

Google appears to be throwing down the gauntlet in the e-book market.

In discussions with publishers at the annual BookExpo convention in New York over the weekend, Google signaled its intent to introduce a program by that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers through Google. The move would pit Google against Amazon.com, which is seeking to control the e-book market with the versions it sells for its Kindle reading device.

Google’s move is likely to be welcomed by publishers who have expressed concerns about the possibility that Amazon will dominate the market for e-books with its aggressive pricing strategy. Amazon offers Kindle editions of most new best-sellers for $9.99, a price far lower than the typical $26 at which publishers sell new hardcovers. In early discussions, Google has said it would allow publishers to set a suggested retail price, but that it would set the ultimate consumer price.

“Clearly, any major company coming into the e-book space, providing that we are happy with the pricing structure, the selling price and the security of the technology, will be a welcome addition,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, which publishes blockbuster authors like James Patterson, Stephenie Meyer and Nicholas Sparks.

Google’s e-book retail program would be separate from the company’s settlement with authors and publishers over its book-scanning project, under which Google has scanned more than seven million volumes from several university libraries. A majority of those books are out of print.

The settlement, which is the focus of a Justice Department inquiry about the antitrust implications and is also subject to court review, provides for a way for Google to sell digital access to the scanned volumes.

And Google has already made its 1.5 million public-domain books available for reading on mobile phones as well as the Sony Reader, the Kindle’s largest competitor.

Under the new program, publishers give Google digital files of new and other in-print books. Already on Google, users can search up to about 20 percent of the content of those books and can follow links from Google to online retailers like Amazon.com and the Web site of Barnes & Noble to buy either paper or electronic versions of the books. But Google is now proposing to allow users to buy those digital editions direct from Google.

Google has discussed such plans with publishers before, but it has now committed the company to going live with the project by the end of 2009. In a presentation at BookExpo, Tom Turvey, director of strategic partnerships at Google, added the phrase: “This time we mean it.”

Although Google generates a majority of its revenue from ad sales on its search pages, it has previously charged for content. Three years ago, it opened a Google video store, and sold digital recordings of N.B.A. games as well as episodes of television shows like “CSI” and “The Brady Bunch.” This year, Google said it might eventually charge for premium content on YouTube.

Mr. Turvey said that with books, Google planned to sell readers online access to digital versions of various titles. When offline, Mr. Turvey said, readers would still be able to access their electronic books in cached versions on their browsers.

Publishers briefed on the plans at BookExpo said they were not sure yet how the technology would work, but were optimistic about the new program.

Mr. Turvey said Google’s program would allow consumers to read books on any device with Internet access, including mobile phones, rather than being limited to dedicated reading devices like the Amazon Kindle. “We don’t believe that having a silo or a proprietary system is the way that e-books will go,” he said.

He said that publishers would be allowed to set list prices but that Google would price the e-books for consumers. Amazon also lets publishers set wholesale prices and then establishes its own prices for consumers. In selling e-books at $9.99, Amazon effectively takes a loss on each sale because publishers generally charge booksellers about half the list price of a hardcover ­ typically, around $13 or $14.

Mr. Turvey said that Google would probably allow publishers to charge consumers the same price for digital editions as they do for new hardcover versions. He said Google would reserve the right to adjust prices that it deemed “exorbitant.”