In comments on a post relating to the announcement that iBooks on the iPad would be able to sync “free” EPUB books through iTunes, a reader expressed skepticism that users would be able to download them without iTunes.

Hey iPhone/iPod Touch users: What can you download directly and use without using itunes on a separate computer? Can you download a file to the iPhone/iPod Touch via the web then open that file?

If I want to read a Baen epub why do I need to go through iTunes?

In fact, you can currently purchase and install apps, podcasts, music, and movies directly from the iPhone and iPod Touch without having to go near a computer. It stands to reason the same thing should hold true for e-books when they come around for iBooks.

As for what e-book clients allow direct download from the web, that would actually be “just about all of them”. At the moment, iTunes doesn’t support syncing any e-books at all (apart from encapsulated appbooks, which are installed either via iTunes or via the app store interface on the device just like any other app). Or any other third-party files, for that matter. It is thought (or at least hoped) that will change with the “sandbox” shared document folder in the iPad.

Consequently, this means that every extant e-book app on the iPhone at the moment has to have its own separate method of syncing books. The sync methods of the best-known iPhone e-book apps follow the jump.

Stanza and Bookshelf: You can download books directly from the Internet within the reader (both these apps have a number of public-domain e-book catalogs and e-book stores set up by default, plus you can add Baen Webscriptions and others—so if you want to read a Baen EPUB in Stanza, it’s just a matter of going to the on-line library and pulling it down).

Both these apps also have their own “servers”—conduit apps that you can run on your PC that will let you sync books into the device via Rendezvous; you can also run a Stanza server from within Calibre.

eReader: You can download e-books from the Fictionwise.com and eReader.com stores directly by logging in—or you can download a book directly from the web by entering a special URL within Mobile Safari. Instead of

http://hostname.tld/filename.pdb

you enter

ereader://hostname.tld/filename.pdb

and it knows to call eReader for that file.

As for loading your own books in, you either have to upload them into a personal directory on ereader.com or fictionwise.com, or else put them on a webserver of your own and enter the URL.

Kindle Reader: It pretends it’s a Kindle, and syncs with your Amazon Kindle account via the Internet to download whatever books you “own” whenever you want. (There’s no way to load your own documents into this one.)

Kobo (nee Shortcovers): As with the above, you download books directly from the app vendor’s catalog into your phone.

iSilo, AirSharing, GoodReader: These apps have the ability to make your iPhone act like a network hard drive. You start the server, add an entry for it in “My Network Places” (or the equivalent on your Mac or Linux computer), then you can drag and drop files into it and they transfer across the network. Also, iSilo and I think GoodReader can download files from on-line, but I’ve never really used this method much.

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Received this email from Dave.

I saw a note on the Lexcycle forum that Stanza was no longer listed in iTunes US Store. I just checked and it is no longer available in the Canadian store. I also noticed in the forum a rare posting from one of Stanza’s creators stating that there is currently no plans to update the application for iPad. One has to wonder what Amazon is doing… It is definitely worrying.

Wow! I just checked the US App Store and the Kindle App is still there, but Stanza is gone.

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So many articles on the potential for e-textbooks! Chris Meadows posted earlier about the shortcomings of the Kindle DX at Virginia University, for example. Not so great with the PDFs, and better suited for reading fiction. So…what if reading fiction is part of your degree? Can an ebook reader replace a bagful of textbooks then? I did some thinking about my own degree in English Language and Literature (1996-2000) and I think that if ebooks had been even half as big back then, I would have saved a fortune!
WHICH OF MY COURSES WERE E-FRIENDLY?

The first year course was your standard Norton Anthology-based type of thing, with one or two major novel studies, one of which was usually a Canadian novel. In my case, the novel was ‘Lives of Girls and Women’ by Alice Munro, and it must have been a huge hit among my professors because this would be the first of four times it would be a required reading in one of my classes (it would come up again in Post-Colonial Literature, Canadian Literature and Women in Literature). It is not available as an ebook at the three stores I checked, but other works by Munro are so an e-friendly professor could easily make a substitution. Nearly all of the Norton Anthology material would be extremely easy to find on-line for free.

Here were some courses I took in later years:

HOW MY DEGREE WAS SET UP

My degree was set up in an interesting way. The history of literature was divided into ten time periods grouped according to era, and you had to take certain numbers of courses from each of the different groupings. For example, one of the groupings was Old English/Beowulf/Shakespeare/The Restoration-18th Century and you had to take two of them. This was how I got stuck with the Restoration course, which at my school anyway, was a real dud of a course. Most people took the Shakespeare, and those who wanted to skip the foreign language aspects of old and middle English took the only other option and suffered through the dullest period of literary history with a professor who was banned from teaching first year students because he was so terrible. Anyway, the whole thing was set up to make sure that you had a reasonable grounding in most of the major eras.

VICTORIAN LITERATURE: Dead easy to find all of this on-line. We read Dombey and Son by Dickens, something by Austen, several plays and a boatload of Victorian poetry. One of the books we read cost $25 and was used for two classes. I did not write a paper on it. It was a complete waste of money.

SHAKESPEARE: The Norton Shakespeare, at $85, was the single most expensive book I bought for my degree. All of it available on-line for free, complete with line references, fully search-able on the Kindle…

POST-COLONIAL LITERATURE: None of this would have been available on-line. This was an upper-year seminar and the professor got to choose the focus. We had an amazing South African professor who chose to focus the entire course on literature from that country. I remember how expensive it was because all the books had to be special-ordered from the UK and whenever you cross the Europe/North America publishing lines, it costs you. I think you can find a little Coetzee on-line these days because he won the Nobel Prize, but that would be all, I would think.

WOMEN IN LITERATURE: Aside from the ever-present Lives of Girls and Women, I have no recollection of what we read in this class. It was second-year so they still were in the ‘overview’ form and we would have read novels from different eras. I am pretty sure Oroonoko by Aphra Behn was one of them, and you could certainly find that on-line.

CANADIAN LITERATURE: It was all novels. I don’t remember which ones, although I do recall this being my third encounter with a certain Alice Munro novel. That said, I could put together a great syllabus for a course like this made entirely of ebooks. project Gutenberg Canada could supply me with the more historical stuff (Susanna Moodie, the early poets Stepgen Leacock) and Kobo could outfit me with some modern novels. There is a bit of Coupland out there (sadly, not Microserfs, but I am prepared to compromise on this). Robert J. Sawyer, if one is willing to teach sci-fi. I can even get Rohinton Mistry as an ebook from the public library. Thank goodness the Canadian book chain Indigo has their own ebook store now (they are partners in Kobo). I have gotten many of my more recent Can-lit acquisitions there.

AMERICAN LITERATURE: I remember reading Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nathanael West and Poe, who are certainly available in ebook. We all hated the Faulkner and, come exam time, admitted to the professor that not a single one of us had gotten through it. Our big modern novel was Thomas Pynchon, who I could not find in ebook, but the professor had told us he considered deLillo instead, and he IS available.

LITERARY THEORY: The obligatory theory course. This would be so easy to do with ebooks. I remember a mid-term take-home exam that began with ’summarize, in narrative form, the history of literary critcism from Plato to the Romantics.’ I remember frequent discussions about Aristotle, and recall using Star Trek examples in my take-home exam to illustrate the whole ‘probability/possibility’ argument. Public domain, all of these guys.

If I were a professor and I was serious about this, my first step would be to compile my own ‘Norton Anthology’ of public domain materials for the first year survey course. Then I would round out my historical stuff with some more appealing options that leverage the wealth of great public domain materials available now. How about an option to do ‘The History of the Detective Novel’ in lieu of the Austen/Dickens course? We could study Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Poe and their contemporaries. Or maybe an early sci-fi course with Verne, Wydham, Piper and others? And can we discuss the Creative Commons movement as part of Literary Theory and read some of the Doctorow and Stross essays?

So much out there, for those who read. And for those who read academically, a veritable treasure trove. Even back in 1996, where much less material was available, I could have made back three quarters of the cost of my Kindle just on the Shakespeare and Victorian stuff. And now? If professors are sensitive to ebook availability and willing to substitute one Munro for the other, as it were, I bet you could go all-E for the kind of program I took.

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Since the JooJoo has been delayed, some people who pre-ordered have requested refunds of their purchase. Gizmodo reports that one such customer went back and forth with Fusion Garage over several days, and after PayPal was unable to process the refund, finally Fusion Garage asked for the customer’s bank account information to refund it directly. The customer was understandably suspicious. (Fusion Garage’s response is also included.)

Another delayed e-book device, the Spring Design Alex, began taking pre-orders yesterday for $399, according to CrunchGear. The Alex somewhat resembles the Nook in form factor, save that the LCD screen is a full 3.5” touchscreen display rather than the Nook’s small rectangle.

To the Alex’s credit, the Android-based device will allow a lot more interactivity over the web than most other e-book readers, including websurfing, watching videos, and online communication. It even has a micro SD card slot and USB 2.0, and supports Adobe ADEPT DRM.

But on the other hand, you’re only going to be reading from one display at once—so at any given time, either 1/3 or 2/3 of the device’s screen real estate is going to be useless to you. That extra screen real estate makes the Alex a bit unwieldy—like a Kindle DX with less readable screen area. And honestly, it seems a little expensive for what you get—just $100 more will get you an iPad.

Samsung has announced it is going to come out with an Atom-based slate PC platform in the second half of the year. Samsung execs stated that the device would be more powerful than the iPad, being a full-fledged PC with a slate form factor rather than just a media and web tablet.

Meanwhile, Samsung is also releasing four e-ink based e-book devices in Australia, ranging in screen size from 5” to 9.7”. Device features will include wifi, access to Google Books, and a QWERTY thumb board on one model. Versions of the devices released in the USA will have access to Barnes & Noble’s e-book store along with the Nook; there is no word on when or which of these devices will come to American shores, however.

Gizmodo also reports on an apparent new iPhone app strategy from publishing conglomerate Hearst—they are releasing a series of $1.99 apps built on a template, which act as content aggregators, drawing together photos and news stories from around the web on a given subject (such as Green Day or Angelina Jolie). Gizmodo compares this to the strategy used by banned appmaker Perfect Acumen, which also “charge[d] people for other people’s content.”

It does seem odd that they are doing this in the wake of Apple’s plan to crack down on templated apps—not to mention a bit ironic given how another megapublisher, Rupert Murdoch of News Corp, is complaining about Google profiteering on other peoples’ content.

Apple has hired Richard DeVaul, a “wearable computing” expert, as its new senior prototype scientist, says Ars Technica. DeVaul’s dissertation involved a form of augmented-reality glasses, which could use GPS and accelerometer data to assist in providing information. Since then, the company he co-founded, AWare Technologies, has created an iPhone fitness tracking application.

DeVaul’s employment provides some tantalizing glimpses at the direction that Apple’s next mobile device developments might take. Might we eventually plug a pair of “iGlasses” into our iPhone and view augmented reality that way, rather than through the device itself? Might we be able to read an e-book on our glasses rather than a handheld screen? This opens up some very interesting possibilities.

For that matter, we might eventually be projecting e-books on our wall. Apple recently filed a patent covering projector systems, possibly with an eye toward integrating picoprojectors into future versions of existing devices—laptops, AirPort hubs, maybe even iPhones. Nice to know Apple plans to continue innovating.

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From the Nieman Lab comes a story of a bookstore in Boulder, Colorado that is trying a new distribution model for local authors. In addition to the usual selection of titles from big publishers, the Boulder Book Store offers a series of distribution packages for local authors selling print-on-demand titles on consignment.

Fees range from $25 to stock up to 5 copies of a book at a time through $255 to arrange an in-store reading and signing, as well as mentions in the store’s website and newsletter and other benefits.

And the books are selling. Not flying off the shelves…but sauntering off, steadily. In the first week in March, [store head buyer Arsen Kashkashian] told me, the store sold 75 consignment books — which, given the store’s 40-percent cut of those sales, and the authors’ fees, accounted for 3 percent of the store’s total revenues for the week. Part of that number, Kashkashian believes, is attributable to the authors’ efforts at self-promotion, which amplify the store’s own marketing strategy. “Some are blogging, some are on Twitter, some just trying to get out there by word of mouth,” he notes. “They’re working their networks, whether it’s online or offline. They’re kind of learning how to do it.”

This is exactly the sort of thing that bookstores are going to need to do in order to survive as they face pressure both from online booksellers and from the march of books toward electronic format. Not only is it finding new models of revenue but it is also taking an active role in the community, putting a local face on the book industry and connecting local authors to readers and vice versa.

And it is also giving those self-published authors a better shot at getting more widely known—perhaps helping to counteract that self-publishing stigma Paul mentioned a little while ago.

Will this model proliferate to other local and regional bookstores? It might be worth looking into.

Photo of Boulder Book Store by Jesse Varner used under a Creative Commons license.

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BusinessWeek reports on the current popularity of iPhone e-book apps, which now outstrip the number of game apps on the app store by over 1,600 titles.

The article mentions appbook creator Michel Kripalani of Oceanhouse Media, who switched over from games to e-books back when there were only 700 book-related titles in the app store. Now his company sells three of the top-ten most-purchased appbooks in the Apple Store.

By and large, the piece mainly talks about appbooks, with a mention or two of other programs such as the Free Books app from Spreadhouse that provides access to over 23,000 public domain titles, the impending iBooks, or even the Kindle Reader app. This is not too surprising given that the vast majority of those book-related titles are appbooks; still, it is a little disappointing that eReader and Stanza do not rate a mention.

One interesting point is how easy it has become to create appbooks now.

Using Mobile Roadie’s templates, publishers can create a book app in less than 30 minutes, for a $500 fee up front and $30 a month. Other publishers share part of their app revenues with developers. Some, including Lonely Planet, create apps in-house.

BusinessWeek thinks that e-book-related app sales for Apple devices might be disruptive to e-book readers once the iPad and iBooks have emerged. Standalone e-book reader adoption was expected to double this year, but analysts predict it may only rise by 30% next year.

I have mixed feelings about this. I have never been enthusiastic about appbooks, given that there would be no way for me ever to read them on anything except my iPod Touch. I much prefer an eReader book that I could read on my PC as well—or even a Kindle book, for that matter (since there is now a Kindle Reader for PC too).

And the vast number of appbooks placed into the Books category is frankly overwhelming; it is impossible to find anything of interest by browsing when there are literally thousands of pages through which to look.

On the other hand, there is no denying that the number of e-book apps has brought a lot of attention to the idea of e-book reading, and demonstrated that people do find the iPhone useful for that purpose even without an iPad available. Obviously, someone must buy those things.

And there is no mention of any possibility Apple might start rejecting e-books or e-book apps apart from iBooks. Indeed, the fact that the “Books” category is Apple’s most popular suggests it might be a bad idea for Apple to do anything of the sort.

We will see.

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Is the title of an article at Publetariat. According to the author the source of the stigma doesn’t come from agents, publishers, bookstores, reviewers or readers.

The stigma, the author says, comes from other writers – the competition. Self-publishing is a threat and a traditionally published author is validated by the system he is working in. Writers, says the author of the article, are desperate for validation and they will “ignore their own will in favor of being accepted by their peers. … So let’s sum it up, in a really competitive industry the stigma agains going outside the system is your competition.”

There’s a lot of strongly worded stuff in this long article and it’s well worth reading the whole thing.

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From their press release:

JSAH Online offers access to JSAH from the first volume published in 1941 through the present. The current issues provide leading research articles and reviews about the built environment accompanied by extensive multimedia content including images, videos, and GIS-driven visualizations.

JSAH Online is the first online journal devoted to the arts and humanities that incorporates cutting-edge multimedia features and heralds the launch of the next generation of scholarly communication. Such features in the inaugural issue include recreated music from an ancient Roman funeral, a zoomable image of a 37-foot-long Panorama of Constantinople from 1559, and a 3D model of the Roman Forum and environs overlaid on a Google Earth map.

Unfortunately it will only be open to SAH members in 2010, and after that only to subscribers to the JSTOR platform.

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Here are a pair of interesting e-publishing-related videos that have come to my attention lately.

First, a look at a possible new technology for buying and synchronizing e-editions of magazines to tablet computers using a touch-sensitive tabletop surface screen. It looks like something out of Minority Report: the consumer places his tablet on top of the surface, which logs him in, then swipes the magazines he wants across the surface and onto his tablet.

Still, as commenters where I first saw the video pointed out, the question remains why anyone would want to go to the trouble of taking his tablet out to a table when he could just as easily buy and download the magazines from the Internet.

The other video is a clever little piece about the future of publishing created by a UK publisher for an internal sales conference—and it proved so popular that it was shared externally as well. You may be slightly dismayed as it unrolls in front of you, but bear with it and watch it all the way through. You’ll start to see what I mean at about the halfway point.

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This is important stuff, because unless the ABC will audit a magazine many advertisers won’t consider placing ads with it. Up until now the ABC has not audited digital magazines. This is from their press release:

The board of the Audit Bureau of Circulations modified its definition of a digital magazine in the U.S. and Canada to accommodate new reading devices such as the Apple iPad. The new standards state that a replica digital edition must include a print edition’s full editorial content and advertising, but it no longer needs to be presented in a layout identical to the print version. Replica digital editions will continue to be included in a magazine’s circulation guarantee, or rate base.

The board encouraged publishers planning new e-reader editions or mobile apps to seek ABC evaluation if they would like clarification on qualification and reporting of their digital editions.

ABC confirmed that Wired magazine was the first publication to seek review of its iPad version, which will qualify as a digital replica edition under the bureau’s new guidelines. GQ has offered an ABC approved replica app for the iPhone and iPod Touch since December 2009.

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For those of you who have been following John Miedema’s posts, the latest one of which is here, you might like to listen to him being interviewed on via negativa.

Some, not all, of the topics covered in the interview are: Is the length of a book an indication of profundity? Are books mind-altering substances? Which kinds of writing work better in print and which work better on the web? How do you reconcile technophilia with bibliophilia?

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The Financial Times reports on the experience of University of Virginia students in the Darden School of Business, who were issued Kindle DXes as part of a pilot program to see whether they could successfully replace paper textbooks. (Note: The Financial Times has a paywall; if you cannot view the article, search “No substitute for a paper read” in Google News.)

It turns out that for most students, the answer is “no”: although most agree they make great personal reading devices, almost 3/4 of the 63 students participating in the project said they would not recommend the device to an incoming student for use in school work.

For reading fiction, they work well, but the lack of color and zooming options for PDFs mean that they can be problematic for reading textbooks. It is also much harder to take notes than with a pencil or computer.

However, the college’s professors say they are still working on converting their course materials to e-book formats, and feel that the iPad might correct some of the deficiencies the students noted in the Kindle DX.

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Shipment of some iPad accessories, such as the keyboard dock station, have been pushed back a month, from April to May. Over the last few days, the changes have appeared in the ship date on the Apple on-line store. It is speculated that they have simply sold out of their first batches and subsequent units will have to wait for the next order.

Speaking of iPad accessories, Charlie Sorrel at Wired’s “Gadget Lab” blog has a list of five “essential” accessories to go with your new iPad. What’s first on the list? A ziploc bag.

When Jeff Bezos reads his Kindle in the bath, he seals it inside a one-gallon Ziploc bag. If you’re going to be using your iPad in the bath, or the slightly less hostile kitchen, you should do the same. You can see the screen, hear the (slightly muffled) music and generally relax. Amazingly, the multitouch will still work through the plastic. I tried it with my iPod touch a moment ago and it was like the plastic wasn’t there.

Who says e-book readers don’t like the tub?

And second on the list is e-book conversion software—specifically Calibre and Stanza Desktop. Since the iPad will support EPUB, says Sorrel, you should be ready to convert existing titles. Of course, what he does not mention is that if your existing titles have DRM, you will either have to break the law or be out of luck.

Other items include a stylus pen (one of the metal-foam-tipped devices available for use with the iPhone now), a case, and the camera connection kit for reading SD cards.

Finally, the numbers guessing game has been popular over the weekend, with everybody trying to estimate the number of iPads sold based on order numbers on Apple’s site. Some estimates place the number at about 152,000. However, some say those numbers may be considerably off.

"That number is low," says an industry analyst who is independently monitoring the iPad sales. The analyst, who is collecting sales data for clients and asked not to be identified, says the current tally is conservative and actual iPad sales are significantly higher. The analyst declined to offer an estimate however.

Analysts’ estimates of the total number of iPads that will be sold in the first year range from 2 million to 10 million.

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Another long-standing e-book holdout has finally given in. All 23 novels by popular suspense novelist John Grisham are now available in electronic form via Random House, only 14 months after the initial announcement.

On Amazon, new Grisham titles are $9.99, with older titles at $7.99 or less. Kobo (nee Shortcovers) sent an email alerting customers that it has Grisham books for about the same amount (and for two days using the coupon code “grisham” will get $1.50 off of any e-book purchase). They are also at Barnes & Noble, and presumably other places as well.

Who knows? Maybe someday J.K. Rowling will change her mind as well.

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Editor’s Note: Occasional Teleread contributor Danny Bloom has a blog post here about Prime View International and E Ink and what the future might hold for the Taiwanese company. Here is the beginning. PB

TAIPEI, TAIWAN — This blogpost begins with toilet paper and ends with electronic ink. Read on and you’ll find out what I’m talking about, as I key in this article from my electronic cave in Taiwan.

It’s about Prime View International (PVI), the Taiwanese company that is putting E Ink on the world map in a novel way and writing a new chapter in the history of human communication at the same time. The world, and our culture, will never be the same.

Are you reading this article on a paper surface or “screening” it on a computer screen or on e-paper? In today’s world, you have that choice.

The Digital Age is transforming the world instant by instant, and Taiwan, while not at the center the world — and sometimes downright invisible to the rest of the world which seems intent on kowtowing to communist China rather than recognizing Taiwan as an independent, sovereign nation in its own right — is nevertheless poised to play an important role as the bearer of good tidings and cheer, with this thing called E Ink.

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Battles, conquests, conflicts, naval actions!  Military history is a natural for your reading device no matter if its a phone, e-ink device or just an ordinary laptop or computer.  Today we’ll take a look at some military resources that you can read online or download to take with you for later viewing.

Alright Troop, let’s go!

The Naval History & Heritage Command

Since I served in a field artillery unit, the U.S. Navy is fascinating to me, from the ships and their histories to the chow served on board.  If you’re into naval history, ship to ship actions, and even first hand accounts, then plan on visiting The Naval History & Heritage Command site located at http://www.history.navy.mil/.  With your reading device of choice in hand, you’ll soon find plenty to download for later viewing!  Search by topic or search engine to get started and results will include a wide variety of resources ranging from images to web pages and even PDF formatted documents.  Be sure to try the link for the Navy Department Library and the Online Reading Room located at: http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/readingroom.htm.  Here you can find a chronological breakdown via year as well an extensive subject listing.  Don’t forget to check out the PDF formatted full-text issues of the Naval Aviation News.  With downloadable PDF’s of current issues to historical issues dating back to 1943, these are a real treat for anyone wanting to know more about U.S. naval history.

U.S. Army Center of Military History

Located at http://www.history.army.mil/, the Center of Military History is THE place to find out information about the United States Army and America’s conflicts.  While there is a lot to do on the site, the best place to get started looking for sources for your reading device would be the online bookshelves located at http://www.history.army.mil/bookshelves.html.  Organized in a variety of ways ranging from regulations, publications and other research materials, there is a lot of good material to download and view.  Material is presented in a variety of ways, from web pages to PDF and even audio formats.  Scanning for material, I quickly was able to download titles such as The Panama Canal: An Army Enterprise (http://www.history.army.mil/html/books/panama/panamacanal/index.html) and Operation Urgent Fury, The Invasion of Grenada, October 1983 (http://www.history.army.mil/html/books/grenada/index.html).  If your tastes run to images, there are many on the site to download to your device as well!

Fall Out!

Well, there’s lots more military resources for you to examine, so let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.  If your service includes Marines, Air Force or Coast Guard, let me know as I’ve found some great online resources for those branches of service as well–we can do a post on that one also!

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Before the printing press and moveable type, we relied on scribes (in the broader sense of being more than just a copyist) to record words and to copy manuscripts. This was a one-person operation, even if there were many scribes tackling the same document.

The advent of the printing press and moveable changed manuscript production. Now several people working together produce numerous copies of the same manuscript, each having a hand in the whole project.

But ebooks are changing our world again. eBooks in the age of the Internet puts us back to the one-person endeavor. One person can be author, editor, publisher, marketer — just what a scribe did 700 years ago. The question is: Is this progress?
The problem with the scribe system is that two scribes didn’t record the same event identically. And scribes were simply recorders, not investigators, so they did no verifying. Scribal work lacked assurances of credibility; if scribes recorded an event and then rerecorded it but did so differently, which version was the accurate record? And what about the third and fourth transcriptions? The printing press increased accuracy by creating a single record that was accurately replicated multiple times.

You can get a better sense of the problem by considering this: One scribe writes “Giving her the book or the candle is giving her a great gift.” A second scribe, at the same lecture writes: “Giving her the book and the candle is giving her a great gift.” Two scribes, two possibilities, two different meanings. Which is the correct transcription of the lecture? On which transcription should future readers act? What happens if more than one transcription is preserved and repeated in the future? What happens when a scribe 50 years later decides that since both can’t be right, the best thing to do is to combine them into a third possibility: “Giving her the book and/or the candle is giving her a great gift.” Perhaps this doesn’t matter much when talking about the gift, but it surely matters when discussing what the law is and what happened in history.

The problem in the Age of eBooks is the rise of the self-published author. This author is akin to a scribe. There is no assurance that the book I buy today will match the book you buy tomorrow and there is no book against which we can compare to determine the correct version. More importantly, once we stray from the world of fiction, there is nothing to assure the ebook buyer that the ebook author has done any fact checking. When a self-published ebook declares that Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 6, 1941, how will the reader of the future know the truth or falsity of this assertion?

Granted the problem is less dire with “obvious” facts such as the Pearl Harbor bombing date, but what about with “less obvious” facts? How many of us know, for example, the years of the First Crusade without looking it up (1095-1099)? Or of the Children’s Crusade (1212)? Or the year Pompeii was destroyed (79 AD)? Or Rudolph Hess’ rank in Hitler’s Germany (Deputy Führer)? Or when Martin Luther King, Jr. was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama and wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail (April 16, 1963)?

The scribe, like the self-publisher today, exercised great control over his or her individual endeavor. At-whim “improvements” could be made to the next rendition of the work and no one would know because there was nothing against which to compare the current work. It was a replay of the oral storytelling tradition, the handing down of stories from generation to generation with each adding its own embellishment, just done in written form.

But how good is this for consumers and scholars in today’s world? Revised editions, noted as such, are, of course, useful and acceptable. But the unnoted revised editions that can be expected with ebooks, especially self-published ebooks, will create havoc in the marketplace. As reader’s catch an author’s errors and the author corrects his or her work (assuming the author does make corrections), what will be the effect of the errors on those who have read uncorrected versions? Suppose your child bases an essay on a college entrance exam on incorrect information gained from reading a self-published ebook about the Crusades?

Yes, it is clear that other scholars and authors can protest the inaccuracies and even correct them in their own work. But that assumes (a) that the number of sales of the incorrect work will rise to such a number as to attract attention, (b) that those who digested the mistaken information were made aware of the errors, and (c) that the correctors themselves are more than simply misinformers themselves.

eBooks are a great leveler of the playing field in the sense that the combination of ebooks, self-publishing, and the Internet lets anyone with the dream of being the next J.K. Rowling or Stephen Ambrose have the opportunity. This trio of opportunity can, however, cause chaos that is uncontrollable. Conversely, the trio can be the savior of education by combatting the flow of misinformation as is happening in Texas (see, e.g., Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change).

But no matter how the problem is cut, the question of whether a reversion to the scribal days that the trio of ebooks, self-publishing, and the Internet permits is good or bad remains to be seen. If self-publishers adhere to the more traditional publishing model of fact-checking, professional editors, and high (relatively speaking) quality production, the return to the scribal role will be positive. On the other hand, if the model of “push it out the door as fast as one can” prevails, ebookers and the public in general will suffer, albeit perhaps unknowingly.

Until ebook self-publishing settles into a more formal method of quality control, I think it will be effectively limited to fiction and nonscholarly work. The opportunity to expand into a recognized scholarly venue will be the catalyst that will change self-publishing in the wild to self-publishing on a more formal, certifiable basis. I predict that within the next 10 years we will see a certification process for self-published ebooks — perhaps even for all ebooks — designed to assure the ebook buyer of the quality and accuracy of the content and to assure that revisions and new editions are noted. I expect that future ebook self-publishing will more closely align to current pbook standards than is currently the case, all for the betterment of self-publishing.

Editor’s Note: Rich Adin is an editor and owner of Freelance Editorial Services, a provider of editorial and production services to publishers and authors. This is reprinted, with permission, from his An American Editor blog. PB

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The New York Times has a piece about Emory University’s exhibition of a digital archive of Salman Rushdie’s writing environment. The archive posed some interesting questions to archivists of how best to preserve it—should they simply store the data, or should they go for the look-and-feel of how Rushdie himself experienced it?

They chose the latter.

At the Emory exhibition, visitors can log onto a computer and see the screen that Mr. Rushdie saw, search his file folders as he did, and find out what applications he used. (Mac Stickies were a favorite.) They can call up an early draft of Mr. Rushdie’s 1999 novel, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” and edit a sentence or post an editorial comment.

The article talks about the difficulties inherent in preserving digital media (which we have covered before): it is entirely possible to have an undamaged digital copy, but lack the player hardware or software necessary to read it back.

The merest act of using a computer creates a myriad of data—not just a writer’s word processor files, but cookie files, browser histories, temporary files, and other things that show the traces of what he has been doing. These are the things that computer forensic experts use to find evidence of crimes, but they could also provide valuable historical perspective.

“If you’re interested in primary materials, you’re interested in the context as well as the content, the authentic artifact,” [Erika Farr, the director of born-digital initiatives at the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory,] said. “Fifty years from now, people may be researching how the impact of word processing affected literary output,” she added, which would require seeing the original computer images.

It may even be possible in the future to examine literary influences by matching which Web sites a writer visited on a particular day with the manuscript he or she was working on at the time.

This is the sort of thing that can be scary to think about someone doing if you are concerned about your privacy—but apparently there is a point at which the need for historical research can transcend the privacy concerns of a given person, especially if that person is famous.

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Is the name of an ebook by Gary K. Wolf that just went up on Smashwords. In addition to this, Wolf has also put up Killerbowl, which is his first novel.

Why do I mention this? Because Wolf gained fame when his literary vision of humans cohabitating with animated characters became a reality in the $750 million blockbuster Disney/Spielberg film Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The film won four Academy Awards and launched a multiple-picture screen writing deal for Wolf with Walt Disney Pictures. In addition, his ideas inspired Toontown, the newest themed land at Disneyland and Tokyo Disneyland. According to the Smashwords blurb, Who Censored Roger Rabbit was the basis for the film.

I remember when the film came out and we were all absolutely blown away by what we were seeing. I’m now doing things: first, buying both books and second adding the film to my Netfix queue – haven’t seen it in a while.

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E-Reader-Info is reporting that Spring Design is delaying their Alex until mid-April. The site says that the price has increased to $399.

Laptop is reporting that you can pre-order the WiFi version today, but that the 3G version will not be available till the end of July, as the company is still working with carriers. According to Laptop the Alex will be localized with Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Korean and Hebrew languages. They also have a video (which can’t be embedded so take a look here).

UPDATE:  The Alex is now available for pre-order in the Spring Design shop for $399 in black or white.  Delivery will be “by April 14″.  You can find the shop here.

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