19/11/06

E-Ink device summary piece

Another aspect of the spring clean, some of it better orgainsed in this case.

Guardian Overview of the available products

Wired on Sony Reader:

Brian Appleyard in the Times on Jason Epstein’s vision as ‘the greatest revolution in publishing since Gutenberg).

Books, basically, are about to hit their iPod/iTunes moment, when new technology drives down costs, transforms the medium and provides simplified, targeted distribution. Exactly what will happen is confusing the industry. At last week�s Frankfurt Book Fair, the focus seems to have been downloading books onto machines such as the new Sony Reader, which is being launched in America at about �190.

The cheapest eink device is the Jinke Hanlin: reviews

Future of the Book on Microsoft stepping up:

Making these books searchable online is a great thing, but I’m worried by the implications of big coprorations building proprietary databases of public domain works. At the very least, we’ll need some sort of federated book search engine that can leap the walls of these competing services, matching text queries to texts in Google, Microsoft and the Open Content Alliance (which to my understanding is mostly Microsoft anyway).

But more important, we should get to work with OCR scanners and start extracting the texts to build our own databases. Even when they make the files available, as Google is starting to do, they’re giving them to us not as fully functioning digital texts (searchable, remixable), but as strings of snapshots of the scanned pages. That’s because they’re trying to keep control of the cultural DNA scanned from these books — that’s the value added to their search service.

Microsoft and Google are free to scan them, and it’s good that someone has finally kickstarted a serious digitization campaign. It’s our job to hold them accountable, and to make sure that the public domain doesn’t get redefined as the semi-public domain.

ManyBooks now comes ready formatted for iLiad

Groklaw is in general great for rights-related issues; this article on the british library and DRM was enlightened.

Somebody gets it that DRM is altering the copyright law bargain, by not allowing fair dealing/fair use. And it’s the British Library that is speaking out and saying that the same rules of the road should apply in the digital world as they have always done. Copyright law includes fair use/fair dealing, and there will be incalculable damage if copyright law in the digital environment doesn’t retain those limitations on the copyright owner’s rights. The Library has issued an IP Manifesto [PDF]. I wish to say thank you to the British Library for issuing this document.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Copyright, Future of the book, Google print, Publishing.