ebooks

I ran across an interesting pair of articles concerning academic journal indexes—a complaint about the journals’ expense and inaccessibility by Laura McKenna in The Atlantic, and a rebuttal pointing out a number of errors and misconceptions in McKenna’s article by Nancy Sims of the University of Minnesota Libraries on her blog.

At the heart of McKenna’s complaint is the often outlandish pricing for individual articles found on some of these journals, such as JSTOR. She brings up the example of a charge of $38 for a 12-page article. McKenna posts an explanation for this state of affairs that involves publishers selling rights to academic articles to index services, which then sell the articles themselves back to universities. Sims points out this is an oversimplification, and that McKenna is imputing for-profit status to some entities that are actually non-profits.

McKenna concludes:

How could we make this academic research more accessible to the public? The challenge is finding a way to get research on the web by bypassing the publisher/JSTOR nexus. If academic journals skipped that needless step of providing a print version of their journals, they could stop this cycle. They could simply upload the papers to a website and take the publishers out of the process.

Sims responds:

I think I’ve pretty much fully addressed the misconception of a "publisher/JSTOR nexus", but wanted to point out that continuing to provide print access is not the thing that’s hanging up this dysfunctional cycle. Online-only access carries plenty of costs of its own. The non-profit open access publisher PLoS charges a publication fee of couple thousand dollars an article to underwrite only some of their costs. Many institutions or grants underwrite open access publishing fees or even whole open access publications, though. In the long-run, the costs are much lower to institutions than when subsidizing commercial profits.

Sims points out that, while JSTOR does have some problems, it is actually one of the better elements of the current academic publishing landscape. There is room for improvement overall, and there are many people already trying to reform the system. But the academic publishing system is not as simple as it looks, and complicated systems take time and effort to change.

I wonder just how much of this stems from people accustomed to the ease of finding things on the Internet being exposed to the less user-friendly nature of academic indexes? I was using indexes well before the World Wide Web, thanks to the systems at my local college library, and they took some getting used to. Many of them didn’t store text at all, but just told what issue of a magazine the article you wanted was in, and then you had to go to microfilm to find the actual citation.

Now the Internet has become a lot easier to find stuff you want (thanks in no small part to Google), but indexes have stayed about the same. Perhaps when people are used to getting stuff fast and free, costly and tricky-to-navigate systems seem that much more offensive. (This might also be why most paywall implementations run into trouble.)

Regardless, I’m sure that sooner or later the net’s simplifying influences will reach into academic publishing as well. It’s just a matter of time.

(Found via BoingBoing.)

Salon Magazine has republished an Imprint review of a book about two men who revolutionized the paperback publishing age back in the 1960s. The Electric Information Age Book is about publisher Jerome Agel and designer Quentin Fiore’s bold experiment in making paperback books that were more than just flimsy versions of hardcovers.

Agel aimed to produce paperback books that best represented and conveyed the media realities of the era. The radical use of text, typography and illustrations challenged the traditional expectations of how the pages of a book could be presented to readers. The opportunity that Agel recognized was in how media culture, as mediated through the popularity of film and television, could be explored, employed and exploited to make an event of a newly published book, turning it into a media spectacle.

After communication theorist Marshall McLuhan said kind things about their first book, Agel and Fiore approached McLuhan with a proposal for The Medium is the Massage, a book pairing quotes from McLuhan’s prior works with suitable images. Combined with Agel’s promotional abilities, the book was a big hit, and others followed.

The article gets a little deep philosophically for me at times, but one thing that stands out is a rumination on what some of McLuhan’s observations should mean for the e-book of today:

In a 1967 letter, McLuhan wrote, “Every new technology creates a new environment that alters the perceptual life of the entire population.” This is true. But why hasn’t this maxim found purchase in publishing today? The potential for e-books is staggering though that potential remains disappointingly unrealized. The presentation of content and the form of books, whether printed or digital, remain, for the most part, the same as ever. Social networking has reconfigured elements of promoting books to an extent, but no book trailer or Twitter trend has ever generated as much interest in a book as when this past October FSG paid for a Times Square billboard to promote Jeffery Eugenides’ “The Marriage Plot.”

It also makes the case that one important difference between the way Agel and Fiore worked and the way publishers today work is that all their attention was on the reader, whereas today’s publishers have their minds solely on selling books—and if readers “happen to actually read the book, that’s a bonus.”

I haven’t read either The Electric Information Age or The Medium is the Massage, so I can’t really say what relevance the experimental design of the paperback book might have to today’s books. It seems to me there’s a lot of difference in purpose between an experimental book that pairs quotations with visual imagery and a prose novel meant to convey a story. Of course, there’s plenty of room for both kinds of book in today’s world.

Bloomberg Businessweek has a five-page profile on former publisher turned literary agent Larry Kirshbaum, who Amazon picked to head up its publishing division that is stirring up so much fear and loathing in the publishing industry. (The title of the piece, “Amazon’s Hit Man”, and the cover of the magazine issue featuring a burning book with the all-caps block-letter legend “AMAZON WANTS TO BURN THE BOOK BUSINESS” might be taken as some indication of that.)

For all that the title and magazine cover are a bit (literally) inflammatory, the article is a reasonably balanced look at Kirshbaum’s career and the history of the controversy and animosity that has sprung up between Amazon and the publishing industry.

Kirshbaum’s connections with Amazon go all the way back to 1997, when he introduced Jeff Bezos to publishing-industry magnates at a party thrown by Rupert Murdoch. He had been in publishing since the early 1970s, and became chairman and CEO of Warner Books, where he spent three decades before retiring to become a literary agent. However, publishing was where his heart really was, and when Amazon offered him a position heading up its own internal publishing imprint, he jumped at the chance.

Needless to say, many of Kirshbaum’s former colleagues in the publishing industry have not been terribly enthusiastic to hear that he has joined the company whose pricing practices are in danger of putting their companies out of business. But the literary agents who have worked with him over the years are much happier about it:

As he began to work on Amazon’s behalf last summer, agents, at least, were excited, because getting deep-pocketed Amazon into the game of bidding for books could translate into larger advances. “I want to do business with Larry wherever he is,” says agent Scott Waxman, who sold Amazon the Bob Knight book. “Do I think this is something that would make the Big Six publishers uncomfortable? Yes, with a big capital Y.”

It was interesting to see the description of Amazon’s Kindle launch wherein Bezos sprung a big surprise on the publishers who had up until then been extremely cooperative in preparing e-book editions for Amazon to sell. Bezos’s promise that New York Times bestsellers would go for $9.99 or less did not endear him to those publishers, as this was the first they had heard about it.

Another point that caught my attention was that Kirshbaum was an early proponent of e-books, and convinced Time Warner to invest $10 million in publishing for the Rocketbook. (As an aside, I’d just like to mention how old it makes me feel to hear the Rocketbook referred to as an “early e-reading device.”) Of course, it took the Kindle to make e-reading really popular.

At any rate, Amazon clearly could not have picked a better executive to head up its publishing division. It remains to be seen how well its publishing efforts will go over when it tries to place its books in the bookstores that it is also trying to put out of business, but given where Bezos’s razor-sharp business acuity has led him so far, I’m not about to say he’ll fail just yet.

(Found via Galleycat.)

Social reading site Goodreads is changing the API it uses for pulling book metadata to the site, PaidContent reports. It had been using Amazon’s public Product Advertising API which allowed it to import title, author, page count, and so on. However, Goodreads finds the terms of use for the API have become too restrictive for the site to continue to use it.

In particular, Amazon will not allow sites using the API to link to the book on any other on-line retailer except Amazon, but Goodreader provides links to titles on multiple retailers. Also, Amazon will not allow content from its API to be used in mobile sites or applications. Goodreads will switch to paying to license data from Ingram, and will also use information from the Library of Congress and other sources.

The change is causing concern amid a number of Goodreads users that data about some of their books might be lost in the shuffle, but Goodreads is hastening to reassure users that their data is “100% safe” and it is taking measures to safeguard any books that are in danger of losing their information.

The moral of the story is to be careful about relying too much on “free” services provided by a company out to make a profit. You never know when their needs will come into conflict with your own.

The Consumerist has a cautionary tale today.

An Amazon customer bought a Kindle, but the package went astray in shipment.  Amazon immediately sent another one, however:

My suspicions were confirmed. Someone else had gotten their hands on the first Kindle lost in shipment and because the Kindle came preloaded with my name, email, address and credit card information, this person(s) was able to make purchases on this Kindle. I spoke with the customer service agents who after understanding did their best to help me. They refunded all the purchases that were made. By the time I discovered this, the fraudulent user had made several big purchases of entire TV seasons. They also deactivated the Kindle so the person could no longer use it. …

I love Amazon. They make my life so much easier. What I do not like is them sending out extremely critical information pre-loaded onto Kindles. No one should be able to simply open a box and begin purchasing items on someone else’s credit card. I am lucky the user of the lost Kindle seemed to not really understand this because they didn’t begin purchasing anything until they were 3 days into it.

I am usually quite careful with my personal information, and it really bothered me that it was so available to someone else. I just wanted to let the Consumerist know about this so prospective buyers of Kindles or other electronic products can be wary of what is being stored in the device before you ever get your hands on it. …

More details in the article.

Apple’s recent publishing event raised many complaints about restrictive publishing rules for books created with iBooks Author application. In my opinion people don’t complain about iBooks Author or iBooks 2. The weak part is somewhere else – it’s the iBookstore.

I’m sure that if Amazon launched something similar to iBooks Author, not that many people would have complained about that. Kindle Store is closed (though not as closed as iBookstore), but it’s the largest and most advanced ereading ecosystem, available to users of the largest possible number of devices.

For now on, the iBookstore is the average store with overpriced books and limited access. It needs improvements (and it deserves a separate event to announce that). Changes should be made quickly, because it’s loosing ground. It never owned a lot of ground, anyway, compared to the number of eligible devices.

Here’s a list of things I need as an average reader to start shopping in the iBookstore. I’m a dedicated Apple fan, but I’ve never bought a book in Apple’s native ebookstore. If things change – I’m open to try one more time.

1. Web storefront

I’m a Mac/iPad/iPhone user but I rarely use iTunes. It’s the application which I associate with cables and waiting. Waiting for the content to be synced between iTunes and the iPad/iPhone or waiting for the update to be installed. I can accept using iTunes when it comes to unique content.

Books are not unique to iBookstore. They can be found anywhere else. I’m an online user, and the only thing I need is the web browser.

Why there is no web storefront for iBookstore is pretty easy to explain. Apple think they will have enough traffic from iOS users anyway. Plus while they keep their store closed, it’s much more difficult to learn how big is the offer and how low – or high – are the prices.

I use Google to find interesting data in the iBookstore, and if you want, you’ll find anything. The iBookstore doesn’t have a web storefront, but it does have data available for search engines, so there is no point in hiding anything any longer.

I wonder how much traffic they would have, if they opened a web storefront and made their books available for purchase from a web browser, as well as make their offer comparable with other ebookstores. It would definitely help the market, because Apple would have to make their content more competitive.

2. Better search

When I published my books in the iBookstore (via Smashwords), I was not able to find them by searching neither iBooks nor iTunes. I  knew that they were there, I checked it with Google.

Search is the key disappointment iBookstore brings. It’s very slow, returned results are odd, their number is limited and it’s actually not possible to limit search to books only. Searching here is about trying new key phrases again and again and going through the list of results until you find what you’re looking for.

It’s OK with apps, because apps are a completely new experience and users rely on recommendations like what sells best. Books are not new and are not only in the iBookstore. People want to find them quickly, especially that they already know what they want to buy.

3. Better recommendation tools

Everyone who browsed for items in iTunes knows that this marketplace is built around the idea of simple recommendation lists, like New & Notable,Top Charts or Recent Bestsellers. It’s OK if someone wants to buy a book other people read, but it’s not OK in case of more advanced personal preferences.

Kindle Store is the ultimate example of how the marketplace should function. You can get personal recommendations on the basis of the browsing history, you can find user lists with similar books, “customers who bought” and “other items to consider” display relevant books.

It takes some time to learn about all the possibilities of Kindle Store, but the moment you start using them is the moment you neglect any other place which doesn’t offer similar possibilities.

4. Better localization options

iBookstore is available to users in 30+ countries and the localization done right could have brought a lot of positive feedback.

The localization is not only about translating the user interface, but about adjusting the content to users in the particular country. There is no such thing in the iBookstore. There is no way to search books by language, the list called  Bestsellers by Language returns many languages, but your mother tongue is not going to be on top of the list.

If Apple’s marketplace is about simplicity, just make the Swedish books dominant in the Swedish iBookstore and Polish books in the Polish one.

5. Fix format incompatibility

The reason why so many users were annoyed with restrictions for books created with iBooks Author were about access. The format plays the major role in how the system works. It’s epub, and it’s good, but the books have Apple’s proprietary formats, Fair Play and the new one, specific for iBooks Author – and it’s terrible.

That’s just too much of incompatibility. Apple don’t understand the fight is not only about which device people will buy, but also about which cloud they will use. I stick to Kindle Store, because I have the most advanced tools to access books from my personal Kindle bookshelf.

What should I need to consider iBookstore as my cloud bookshelf? Epub with no proprietary DRM. Or epub with the industry-wide system, like Adobe DRM – if there has to be one. iBookstore is one of the challengers and being open helps. People will be looking for one cloud bookshelf. The more formats the cloud will “accept” the better. If someone will want to buy an iPad, and owns a 1st gen Nook already, accepting Adobe DRM books would help him to move the ebook library to iBookstore.

Obviously, this can work the other way round, but the freedom of choice is something people will appreciate, and they will be more willing to try the new ecosystem.

* * *

iBookstore is in a position of the challenger but Apple behave like having a leading product. The result is a weak proposal for consumers. They can consider it as a back-up option, but it’s far to treat iBookstore as a default place to shop for ebooks.

Apple, be more open to readers, and readers will be more open to you. You’ll fix a lot by improving iBookstore.

[Via Ebook Friendly]

Check out Woot!

This is a great price for a full-sized tablet – if you are willing to tackle webOS.  It’s refurbished.  HP has announced that webOS will be made open source later this year, so this might be a good bet for the more technically inclined among us.

New Features

• Allow calibre to be run simultaneously in two different user accounts on windows.
• Driver for Motorola Photon and Point of View PlayTab
• Add a checkbox to preferences->plugins to show only user installed plugins
• Add a restart calibre button to the warning dialog that pops up after changing some preference that requires a restart

Bug Fixes

• Fix regression in 0.8.36 that caused the remove format from book function to only delete the entry from the database and not delete the actual file from the disk
• Fix regression in 0.8.36 that caused the calibredb command to not properly refresh the format information in the GUI
• E-book viewer: Preserve the current position more accurately when changing font size/other preferences.
• Conversion pipeline: Fix items in the that refer to files with URL unsafe filenames being ignored.
• Fix calibre not running on linux systems that set LANG to an empty string
• On first run of calibre, ensure the columns are sized appropriately
• MOBI Output: Do not collapse whitespace when setting the comments metadata in newly created MOBI files
• HTML Input: Fix handling of files with ä characters in their filenames.
• Fix the sort on startup tweak ignoring more than three levels
• Edit metadata dialog: Fix a bug that broke adding of a file to the book that calibre did not previously know about in the books directory while simultaneously changing the author or title of the book.

(Via calibre Changelog.)

Presented at Digital Book World, Verso Advertising has posted the 46 slides from its 2011 Survey of Book Buying Behavior.  Note that Verso is an advertising agency, not a polling firm and we don’t have any information about the competence of the company to conduct such surveys.  However, it is still probably worth reviewing.

The ereaders/ebooks portion starts at slide 24 and here are some of the points made on their “Implications” slides, beginning at slide number 41:

E-reader owners reaching Early Majority with 15.8% penetration, double that of the 2010 Survey …

However resistance remains high and seems to be intensifying at 52%, higher than in the 2009 Survey at 40% (Undecideds seem to be grafitating to the “highly likely” or “unlikely” camps in considerable numbers.)

Among avid book buyers, e-reader ownership jumps to 22.3% yet the resistance level seems equally high at 49.7%.

Picture of future begins to solidify, with a high installed base fo e-readers/tablets in the 25-30% range within 3 years, but a large base of resistors at around 50% of the book-reading poopulation.  Consistent with our previous surveys.

Much, much more at the site.  Thanks to Michael von Glahn for the link.

CNet has an article about Google’s stripped-down Chromebook laptops, and their placement in schools. In a speech at the Florida Educational Technology Converence yesterday, Rajen Sheth, Google’s leader of Chromebook work for business and education, announced that hundreds of schools across 41 states have outfitted at least one classroom with Chromebooks.

Three schools in Illinois, Iowa, and South Carolina will be outfitting all their students with the devices—over 27,000 in all. The schools appreciate the advantages the device offers of constant updates, cloud storage, and “invisibility” in terms of booting and use—teachers can focus on instruction rather than technical support.

Students do like tablets such as the iPad, but they seem to be taking to Chromebooks just as well.

"Students love the tablet. I am not going to hide that from you," said Diane Gilbert, an English teacher at Kelly Mill Middle School in Blythewood, S.C., who’s taught with tablets in her classroom. She added, though, that Chromebooks have a place: "They will bow down and kiss your feet for a tablet or for a [Chromebook]. But I’m a language arts teacher. My goal is to have students publish their work–create and publish. The [Chromebook] is more alike to a laptop or a desktop in the ability to publish."

Which type of device is better for education? The iPad will allow for interactive textbooks, but there’s no reason that such textbooks couldn’t be used on the Chromebook as well—indeed, Kno’s textbooks can be accessed from any web browser. And the Chromebook’s keyboard and Google Docs word processor means that students can write papers and other creative works on it much more easily than they could on the keyboardless iPad. At a suggested retail price of $349.99, the Chromebook is $150 cheaper than the basic iPad, too—a big savings when it comes to schools buying tens of thousands of them.

E-textbook company Kno has popped out a press release saying that it found 95% of college students who used its e-textbook application “found it very useful and plan to use it again”. The company conducted a study with four California community colleges, on 400 students and faculty in 27 classes using an open-source statistics textbook.

"It is exciting to see the book brought to life through digital enhancements by Kno," said Barbara Illowsky, a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, De Anza College [and co-author of the statistics textbook]. "The student feedback reinforces the need for more instructors to incorporate digital learning into the classroom to make learning fun and engaging."

Of course, the study was done by Kno, so it’s not terribly surprising that it produced positive results. But it’s interesting to see that the company will work with open-source material, not just locked-down stuff published by the big textbook companies. And the fact that 54% of students who used Kno textbooks received an A in the class might suggest a bright future for digital course material—at least at colleges.

(Found via EBookNewser.)

EBookNewser and GalleyCat have posted an infographic from e-book sales tracking company Booklr which compares the average e-book price of the Top 100 e-books for the Kindle and Nook platforms. Based on information collected over the week of January 12th through 19th, the chart shows that the average price of an Amazon Kindle e-book is $6.48, whereas the average price of a B&N e-book is $8.94.

The difference seems to be caused by fully 35% of Amazon’s titles being $1.99 or less, whereas none of B&N’s were. I wonder, though, whether this might be caused by Amazon counting free titles in its lists and B&N not? Or perhaps it’s not possible to list a book at $1.99 or less under B&N’s publishing system. B&N also seems to have a higher percentage of books on its best-seller list over $10 (40% as opposed to Amazon’s 27%).

Regardless, this seems to be another area where Amazon is out-competing B&N. Given how price-sensitive today’s consumers are, a place where you can get a bunch of books for $1.99 or less would seem very attractive.

Remember that report about how rife with plagiarized and duplicate books Amazon’s self-published titles are? Its author, Adam Penenberg, has written a follow-up article for Fast Company in which he tracked down one of the plagiarists to find out more about how and why he had published the title.

The plagiarist is a Kuwaiti national who used the pseudonym “Luke Ethan”. Luke explains that he had gotten a lead on an Internet marketing forum to a private black-hat forum (with a $500 entrance fee), where he paid $100 for what he was told was a collection of material with permission to reformat and resell as e-books. One of those works was an incestuous short story, “I Remember Mother”, by David H. Springer, that someone had reformatted into “My Step Mom Loves Me”. (The change from mother to step mom came about because Amazon doesn’t permit works featuring actual incest to be sold on it store.)

Springer complained to Amazon, and got back a notice from Amazon saying that its plagiarizer had made about $560 from it, and if he felt he was entitled to compensation, he should take it up with that person. For his part, Luke says he was entirely unaware the material had been plagiarized. (Though given the dodgy nature of how he acquired it, not to mention that Amazon’s policies also disallow reformatted duplicate material even when it comes with legitimate permission, it’s hard to feel too sorry for him.)

Nevertheless, Warrior Forum continues to be awash in copyright infringement come-ons. "If you go to the warriorforum and ask around, there are hundreds of people offering to sell you books with publishing rights," Luke says. Check out this ad, posted in its special offers group, for "The Kindle Secret: Want to Create Kindle Books in 15 Minutes or less?" The person behind it hawks a guide for $17 that explains how he’s "dominating" one "hidden Kindle niche." He claims to be "outsourcing books" for "$20 a pop (can you get a whole Kindle book created for $20?) and selling them on the Kindle for $2.99 each," promising that his books "require no marketing and still sell like crazy," with each title earning between $40 and $300 a month. "I don’t write a thing," he brags. He just creates the covers, uploads the content then moves on to the next book. "This is completely scalable. Want to go big? Create 100 books for $2,000 and you’ll have major passive income set up for you in just a couple of weeks."

It is unclear whether Amazon is legally obligated to pay “I Remember Mother”’s original author anything, even though it received 40% of the revenues (about $380) from their sale. The Kindle Direct Publishing Agreement includes a provision stating that Amazon will pay victims of piracy “the Royalties due in connection with any sales of the Digital Book through the Program, and will remove the Digital Book from future sale through the Program, as your sole and exclusive remedy.” (Which makes it a bit odd that Amazon told Springer that if he wanted any money from “My Step Mom Loves Me”, he’d need to take it up with Luke Ethan.) But if Amazon were to be sued, it could undoubtedly tie up the litigant in court for years.

Penenberg notes that this is probably a major reason behind Amazon and other tech companies’ vocal opposition to SOPA and PIPA:

If made into law both could have armed copyright holders with weapons to do battle with websites that host infringing material. In theory, without the hassle of attaining a court order, a single complainant might have been able to force credit card companies to suspend Amazon’s financial transactions, Google and Bing to erase it from search results, and DNS providers to cloak the site so users couldn’t easily find it. One slip up and the impact on a site like Amazon could be devastating. 

Without those bills, Amazon is in the clear over plagiarized material as long as it makes a “good-faith effort” to remove it when it’s told about it. And it doesn’t have to pay plagiarized authors like Springer a cent.

It’s not terribly surprising to learn that there is a very active underbelly of the Internet devoted to selling digital snake oil like private label rights and plagiarized material for “instant” Kindle publication. It’s the tragedy of the commons—any time something could be abused for a quick profit, there will be those who will try to profit, directly or indirectly, from abusing it.

It would be nice if there were a way for plagiarized authors to get their own back from Amazon. It is doubtful Springer could ever recover anything from a citizen of Kuwait. But it would probably take a carefully-balanced law without the potential for abuse inherent in SOPA and PIPA, and it remains to be seen if the content industries are capable of or even interested in producing such a thing.

Jeremy Greenfield reports on the Digital Book World site that Matteo Berlucchi, CEO of social e-tailer Anobii, is urging publishers to drop DRM restrictions on their e-books as a way to fight Amazon. In a DBW slideshow presentation, Berlucchi argues that the big e-vendors use device choice to lock in consumers, licensing rather than selling e-books and offering inferior functionality to that of paper books.

Berlucchi calls attention to the actions of the music industry in recent years, eliminating DRM and permitting ownership of music—you can now even import songs bought on one platform into a competitor’s via cloud services. He proposes fighting piracy through education and legal action, and adopting “Digital Rights Morality” instead of Digital Rights Management: leave off DRM in the cloud, watermark downloadable e-books visibly and invisibly, and just use DRM for library e-books or in selected cases.

As with the music industry, Berlucchi states, this would prevent silos and monopolies, offer more value to end users, and increase competition by allowing anyone to sell e-books for any platform.

Although Berlucchi states early in his presentation that these views are his own, not those of Anobii, publishing pundit (and DBW chairman) Mike Shatzkin nonetheless called the argument “significant” because Anobii is part-owned by the UK divisions of major publishers HarperCollins, Penguin, and Random House.

Going DRM-free has certainly worked for Baen, which includes instructions on its e-book site for how to load its books into several major e-reader platforms. And it has worked for the music industry. It would be nice if publishers would see how well it worked for them, too.

(Found via The Bookseller.)

On Hack Education, Audrey Watters has a fairly long look at why Apple’s new textbook announcement may not be as revolutionary as expected. She was not impressed by Apple’s presentation, stating it lacked Steve Jobs’s magic touch, “the kind of thing that made both fans and skeptics say, ‘Yes, (perhaps) this changes everything.’” She points out that Apple is partnering with the three companies that already make up 90% of the textbook industry, and they have already gotten into digital textbooks (to the tune of $3 billion last year by just one of them).

One of the things that digital content makes obvious is that the current physical manifestation of a print-bound textbook is a strangely awful construct — one designed to remove students one step (at least one step) from the primary sources that inform the field they’re studying. You don’t read Darwin; you read "Introduction to Biology." You don’t read de Tocqueville; you read "American History I." Sure, textbooks offer easier-to-digest summaries of the content, geared to the particular grade level of the student. They offer diagrams and illustrations and review questions and a glossary. But textbooks are always an assembly from a variety of sources, geared towards a classroom setting where the teacher leads students through the chapters and the exercises and the examinations. Neither the teacher nor the student is expected to be an expert. You just need to know enough to pass the test.

Digitizing that model of instruction changes nothing. Adding video changes nothing. Pinch and zoom and flashcards change nothing.

As for Apple’s $14.99 per student per year model for high school textbooks, Watters points out that a lot of high schools don’t buy new textbooks every year anyway, and if you look at that $14.99 per year as replacing an only slightly more expensive book that lasted several years, it may not be such a good deal after all.

And as for giving students their own permanent e-copy of the material, what student really ever wanted to keep a copy of his high school textbooks, anyway? And even if they had, taking advantage of it is still going to require getting those students their own iPads, an expensive (and currently far from universally-achieved) proposition.

She also has a few words for the iBooks Author e-book-making app, and its much-maligned license that restricts authors from selling their books through any other outlet than Apple. Apart from being restrictive, and providing no way to mark books that she wants to give away for free with a Creative Commons license, she notes that it is ultimately unnecessary—educators are already able to build their own digital textbooks, albeit without as “slick” tools as iBooks Author.

In the end, Watters writes, Apple’s digital textbook announcement is not the kind of revolution previously expected of Apple—it’s more of the same old same old, and “a slap in the face to educators and students.”

It really sounds like Apple set out to solve the wrong problem with this announcement, focusing on high schools when the real problem, and the much faster move toward e (since college students are more able to afford tablets), is college textbooks. It will be interesting to see what kind of deal Apple can offer them. But I can certainly see Watters’s point of view here—for high schools, this is not the sort of world-changer Apple has been known for in the past.

Everybody’s getting in on the e-book act these days. On Digital Book World’s website, Jeremy Greenfield reports that NBC News is launching an e-publishing arm, NBC Publishing. NBC took notice of consumers’ increasing comfort level with electronic books, including those that feature video, and has decided to leverage its existing archives of over one million hours of video content to create such e-books (and some traditional print-only ones as well).

NBC has hired a number of publishing-industry veterans to staff the new publishing arm, as well as adding a couple of its own television production staff. The company will continue to work on book partnerships with existing publishing partners while also developing new content in-house. It will use its other media properties, including broadcast and cable television networks and msnbc.com, to cross-promote the new e-books.

This is not the first example of an entity realizing it can convert existing material into new revenue streams (the New York Times has already been doing this with Kindle Singles, as have some individual authors), and it certainly will not be the last. I wonder who else is going to start e-publishing soon?

From the press release:

Readers will be pleased to find display and search options by series, authors or genres. 10 romance series available such as: Harlequin American Romance, Harlequin Blaze, Harlequin Mira, Harlequin Presents and Harlequin Silhouette Special Releases and the most popular authors such as Nora Roberts and Debbie McComber.

The National has an article on this topic.  Here are a few excerpts:

While experts say no one tracks overall e-book sales specifically within the UAE, the Printing & Publishing Group (PPG) in the Emirates forecasts sales of paper books to rise 5 per cent this year. It also notes more titles in Arabic are starting to come online for digital devices. “There is growth of Arabic e-books,” says Ahmad bin Hassan Al Shaikh, the chairman of the PPG. …

Among some gadget lovers here, lesser-known models may prove popular for their stronger support of Arabic e-books. “Quite a few Kindle competitors, such as jetBook and Onyx Boox60, now support Arabic,” says David Ashford, the former general manager of AppsArabia, which is based in Abu Dhabi and invests in the best app ideas within the Middle East and North Africa (Mena).

eAlim EL1000, which calls itself an “Islamic iPad”, retails for $299 and has a colour screen that can display the complete Islamic Encyclopedia, passages from the Quran, plus older books that cover Islamic history and other topics.

In response to the growing demand for Arabic e-books, more software developers based in the UAE and the wider Mena region have been stepping in with helpful apps, Mr Ashford says.

More in the article.  Thanks to The Literary Saloon for the link.