I’m a bit torn on this matter. I do enjoy looking around a tube carriage and seeing what other people are perusing, but at the same time claim not to care too much about what people see in my hands. On a bit of further self examination I realised that this wasn’t entirely true, with Satan Burger (cover NSFW…or tube) sitting quite low on my to read pile (despite it being a rather interesting book) due to its cover and my deliberate seeking out of the non-film/tv tie-in versions of most books that I get to after the inevitable conversion takes place. But then again, for me that’s not necessarily about showing off to other people but often more of a choice as to which covers I feel look best – I recently grabbed the Red Riding Quartet and went for the tv tie-in covers because I thought they looked rather good (and were in a 3 for 2…).

My love of ebooks doesn’t preclude my love of book covers – it just reserves their appreciation to me, the reader, rather than the watchers around me. One of the things that has depressed me slightly about many of the ebooks I’ve bought is that they don’t put any effort into the cover, presenting just a bland and generic placeholder that tells me author name and book title.

Given that the print versions of books (as most of the ebooks I’ve grabbed are merely electronic versions of print) all have to have a cover that has at some time in its life gone through a computer (unless there are publishers out there who are producing ebooks but have a purely analogue print workflow) it strikes me as strange not to at least use that, rather than going through the minimally less effort of producing a new rubbish stock image. With part of the problem of the lack of acceptance of ebooks being their lack of perceived value for money (something that I am increasingly beset by, as publishers continue to charge hardback prices for ebooks even after paperback versions have hit eternal 3 for 2 pile status) the small effort of adding a sheen of quality to an ebook by adding a cover image (something that I do for all of my Gutenberg acquired books) seems like a simple way of trying to change that impression.

There is a potential for having ebook sleeves that you can insert cover art into, or an outward facing LCD screen that could display a book’s cover, however these have issues (mainly around effort and cost respectively) and at first glance don’t seem to be all that worthwhile. But I’ve known people who take Waitrose bags to Tesco and who wear knock off designer label clothing to give an impression that is different to reality. Being able to have a disconnect between what you are reading and what others perceive can be an important thing to some people. The importance of showing off to other people is something that has always been important with luxury items (a niche that books do still fall into in my opinion, unless you are a fan of book stew or hardback kebabs) and something that has already startes to extend into the world of the consumer ebook, with leather covers and custom ’skins’. I would claim not to be interested in such affectation, but am considering getting authors to sign my Sony Reader, so read into that what you will…

My most recent brush with a change in emphasis on who the appearance of something is for is the wonder of the Apple laptop. I stickered up my first MacBook, keeping the stickers in the same orientation as the glowing Apple symbol that adorns the lids of all portable Macs in recent times, and it was commented that I’d set it up in a ‘for you’ orientation – when open the Apple is the right way up for other people, but when closed it is upside down for the owner of the laptop. This change in Apple’s design happened a few years back and to me, at least, does seem to follow the way that Apple products have moved from niche to mainstream appeal, with their admirable attention to form becoming an advertisement for themselves in a similar fashion to Prada bags, Hackett tops and other fashion accessories. In contrast, the trusty corporate ThinkPad (now feeling like a knock-off of their former selves due to the lowering of quality since Lenovo took over the brand) has its logo minimally place in the lower right corner of the lid, the right way up for the user when they open the laptop – people don’t generally show off that they’re tapping away on their work machine…

Returning to books, though, one of the things I’ve seen recently from reading authors’ blogs is that they don’t always like the covers, with Charlie Stross and Neal Asher both occasionally commenting on the art adorning the editions of their books around the world. The cover of a book isn’t only a purely aesthetic thing – it’s all about the marketing. The multiply covered Harry Potter books showed that admirably, with the two very different market segments (kids and adults who wouldn’t be seen dead reading a kids book) catered for and also hitting up the obsessive completists for two copies of each book. However, sometimes I see a book where the cover seems to so widely miss the mark that I wonder what was going through the heads of the marketing people who approved it. Take my current read, McMafia by Misha Glenny. Originally subtitled “A Journey Through Global Organised Crime”, it has recently been rereleased and hit the 3 for 2 shelves just in time to make its way into my eager little hand. However, with the reprint they’ve change things slightly:

Now, that strikes me as a bit of a shift, rebranding a quite serious investigation into the development of organised crime throughout the world into a pithily subtitled popcorn book. So far, and I’m still working my way through eastern europe and Russia, the only people we’ve encountered who might resemble the young lady bending over stage center on this cover are the horrifically abused trafficked women sold by gangsters in northern Yugosalvia. I think I’d rather have an coverless ebook.

For years I’ve been interested in the way that people interact online, from chatting via the terminal at college, through blogging LiveJournal, to the constant barrage of Twitter and it’s new ilk. These days these are all rolled up under the rather inclusive banner of “Social Media” a term that I feel has little meaning. Last week saw one of the largest social media gatherings in London so far, Amplified08. Largest, at least, in terms of an event to talk about social media as a concept, rather than meeting through social media (and normally trying to drink a sponsor’s bar tab).

I won’t talk much about the talk that me, Annie Mole and Chris Meade presented, as Nicole over at the London Geek Girl Dinners has already done it much better than I on their blog and the slides are up on SlideShare. However, the big thing I took away from the talk was what Chris said – books aren’t about the paper, they’re about the words and the experience they inspire inside your head. When we get over the hurdle that the constant interconnectedness of the medium and the content of a book the ebook will take off, but until that time it’ll be slow going.

The conference itself was great, although the overriding feeling I left with was one of mild confusion – what was it meant to be? It was billed as the meeting of the “Network of Networks”, getting the groups within social media together under one roof to talk. However, the sessions themselves seemed to be a bit short (as we discovered when we thought we had an hour, only to find that we only had 40 minutes) and the fray of people outside of the main conference room was not an environment entirely conducive to conversation. I had a really good time, talking about books, the parallels between improv theatre and interaction in social networks and the future of online video. However, the most useful conversations I had were sitting in rooms waiting for sessions to start, or carrying on conversations after they ended, as well as a short time in the overflow pub, talking with Rachel Clarke and Steve Lamb. Part of the stated aim for amp08 was to set up amp09 to lead to amp10 as a big social media event, but this really felt like the ground work, basically a scaled up version of Tuttle and the other groups that meet regularly.

It was organised where it needed to be, it was disorganised where it needed to be, but overall it didn’t have much direction, which I think was probably a good thing. The purpose will crystallise over time and I don’t envy the organisers the task of collating these opinions and trying to drag out the ideas that will form the basis of amplified09. However, I’ll help where I can and I suspect that anyone else who likes talking will do the same.

Overall I think my take home from the day can be summed up quite neatly. I bumped into Christian Payne shortly after turning up and he told me that he was interviewing as many people as he could, asking them one question – “What do you think the future of social media is?”. I ran away before he could get his camera out as I can’t answer the question other than with another question – “What do you think social media is? I’ve not got a clue…”

The first thing that always seems to come up when talking about ebooks is their pricing. Generally they’re the same amount as a papery book and that bangs against the normal human issue with paying for pure information at the same rate as a physical object. I’ve always intellectually justified this to myself by claiming that the vast majority of the price of a book goes towards profit and the process leading up to printing and distribution, and that it makes sense for ebooks to cost the same as their dead-tree counterparts. However, repeatedly saying this doesn’t necessarily make it true – hopefully I will be assured or corrected by secret industry contacts (hello secret industry contacts!) before I stand up and make potentially inaccurate statements before a most probably well informed crowd.

The next thing, and one that came up in a drunken conversation (well, drunken on my side) with a visiting school chum at the weekend was the wonder of digital rights and copy protection. One of the main benefits of the physical book is that you can do pretty much what you want with it after purchase. Burn it, sell it, eat it, lend it to a friend, tear out the pages and make origami camels, whatever. You can do a lot with ebooks, but the kicker is the lack of a right to resale and lending, with the added potential difficulty of locked formats having potential obselescence issues down the line, stopping you from reading the book that you have paid for. This looms dangerously close to Cory Doctorow’s standard rhetoric of “The MAN is stopping YOU from doing what YOU want with things YOU have PAID for!!1!”, which has a definite point at the same time as occasionally invoking an annoyance within me similar to that which The Dawkins does. My point of view on this seems to be much more on what I understand (probably incorrectly) as that of the free-market capitalist – if people don’t want the product then they won’t pay for it. If the product, as a combination of content, price and restrictions, is not acccepted by the public then it will fail. If similar products with different pricing, content and restriction models do better then sensible companies will move towards those ideas in order to gain their share of the market. Yes, it’s a slightly simplistic and optimistic view of the wonderful world of capitalism, but voting with your wallet is what most companies understand. There is also the wonder of industries banding together and offering very similar unpopular products as the only choice (DRM’d ebooks in this case), but there are always outliers, especially in publishing as printing becomes cheaper and boutique coompanies, like bookkake, can spring up, and it’s these guys that draw the cash and hopefully show the big monoliths the way to go.

I do feel slightly dirty when it comes to ebooks. With music I have very much nailed my colours to the metaphorical mast – I will not buy music that has any form of DRM. I support emusic and other companies that do not encumber the media and will continue to encourage others to do so, as well as put most of my music buying money through them (slipping back to archaism with occasional physical CDs, which are all immediately ripped and then hidden away in a pile at home). However, with ebooks I do buy restricted texts and have two reasons why:

1. My standard usage methods are such that I do not care so much about DRM on books. I do a bit, hence the dirt that I won’t wash off, but I generally read books once and then leave them on a shelf. They occasionally get lent to friends, but in general they sit around gathering dust begging me to sell them or at least take them to Oxfam. There’s a hint of a love of books as property, which I need to write about at some time and will probably discuss tomorrow, but mainly there’s laziness. The DRM’d electronic books just stop me from lending my copies to friends, although generally I am able to authorise a number of other “readers” and thus can do my normal lending, although with just a few extra hoops.
2. In order for me to be able to read the vast majority of books that I bought the reader to read, i.e new releases, I have no choice but to buy the DRM’d books. Yes, I am a hypocrite at some level, but I even with the understanding of what DRM is restricting in both a physical and moral sense I am hiding my head in the sand and passing my hard earned cash to the people who are not supporting the distribution methods that I am trying to champion. I temper a bit that with pushing as many of the people and companies who are “on my side” and putting as much of my book money through them as I can, but in the end I know that there is an element of moral bankruptcy (or at least moral “teetering on the edge of my overdraft limit”-cy) to my purchasing habits. But then again people buy petrol from Shell and Nestle’s Milky Bars, and still sleep at night so I have some hope. And Milky Bars.

The thing that I think the DRM issue is currently lacking is the main thing that I think Cory-style shouting is good for – education. The infamous man on the street has no real understanding of DRM and a ranting author and groups like the ORG are gaining more traction with the general populace, letting them know the various issues and what the implications of various restrictions on new distribution media mean to the use of the “normal” person. It’s a slowly growing core of knowledge, but one that is definitely become better known as the media pick up on the ideas and push them out to the masses. Hopefully this will help in the pushing of the distributers to examine new ideas of media distribution, whether it be music, movies or even books.

Technology continues to roll on. I picked up my Sony PRS-500 a couple of months back and already the PRS-700 is out in the US, with a touch screen and annotatable text all clocking in at only a bit more than what I paid for mine. We are still the early adopters and will get stuck with the standard early adopter problems (price, format incompatibilities, planned obsolescence, etc) but it willl move the medium into the mainstream slowly but surely, just as with televisions, digital radios, CDs, mp3 players, VCRs, DVDs and even with the recent high def discs (the format wars of which are still much in recent news). There are new things out there, as the shiny video from Simon Wardley below shows (as well as a bunch of other articles out there that I am now randomly finding, including one from the guy behind bookkake), and we will see these things roll out as they become affordable and marketable. Such is the way of the future. 

With books there is a definite barrier to entry, as we have maybe as much as ten thousand years worth of shared memory with very little change to their basic form, and the human resistance to change is a fearsome thing. Adding to that the switch from the owning of physical objects to that of licensed data, with all the mental blocks, ethical and commercial concerns that it inspires, we have a big barrier to jump. It will take time and balancing between people’s ideas of the use of books and I think that in the end the paper book is not in any real danger as an existing medium, not to the extent that digital cameras have replaced film for example. There will always be a place for a physical object in addition to pure data, at least for the forseeable future. We aren’t going to do away with ten millenia of culture in a mere handful of years, but we can certainly start the process of accepting a new way.

I’m rather loving the ebook thing, even though my current read is a bit hard going, but book availability is still in its early days. Waterstones are the official partners of Sony in the UK and my first trawl around their site (pushed along by the £20 ebook voucher that I bought from them for £10 as a special offer when I bought the reader) found little to encourage me – a bunch of things available from Gutenberg, the entire Mills and Boon catalogue, a load of rubbish and a bunch of electronic versions of softback books at hardback prices (I’m looking at you Prador Moon – £3.49 in paperback now as opposed to £11.99 for the ebook). However, a quick search on the internet in general found me Diesel EBooks and Books on Board, both with a large selection, although both also distributing secure PDFs rather than nice EPub books. They’re also both US sites, but I got both Anathem and The Graveyard Book for a snip compared to the prices of the physical books in the UK.

I’ve found that a lot of the major publishers in the UK have sections of their sites dedicated to ebooks, as well as methods of buying the books straight from them, but my success there was also limited. I found that The Temporal Void was listed as unpublished until a couple of days ago, with a release date in the past, and also that for many books ebook versions were being sold at hardback prices even when paperback versions were available and listed on the same page.

I had a trawl through the Waterstones’s site again a week or so ago only to find that they’d updated their selection and included The Temporal Void with a nice ebook launch discount. I followed that up with Tokyo Year Zero (the hard going book I mentioned earlier) using up my £20 voucher and a few pennies of my reward points (£6 of which I’d got for buying the reader).

Having read about Bookkake on Sizemore’s blog a while back I returned, grabbed their nicely EPub’d versions of Fanny Hill and Venus in Furs, for who doesn’t need a couple of landmark erotic books knocking around in a digital format. Their business model (print on demand, free ebooks with a “if you enjoy the ebooks then please donate or buy the paper copies) fits in well with the digital distribution models that I like the sound of (even if the nature of our society at the moment means that they probably won’t work for larger distribution due to the nature of people to treat digital items as “free”. But that’s a rant for another time, although I’ve started on it before) and they’ve obviously spent some time and effort in generating the books.

As for the larger publishers, I grabbed a few shorts from Tor, who use complete short stories as teasers to draw you in to hopefully buy the novels by their authors, and an obligatory freebie from Baen, who were lead the ebook pack a few years back and still offer a big range of books for free. Despite the temptation it was not a John Ringo book, as even though I enjoyed his Posleen series I am now deeply scared of him (Ringo approves of that article, and commented so, which makes the world just a little more awesome).

So, there are books out there, some of them are reasonably priced and more of them are becoming reasonably priced. Publishers seem to be gradually learning how to get ebooks to work for them, even if most of them are still DRM’ing themselves up the proverbial yin-yang, and they are starting to to see the potential of things to come. However, what does this mean to me as an owner of a Sony Reader – the format wars are all too familiar to us, with the recent HD-DVD/BluRay fun and games as well as a history of Betamax/VHS, computer hardware standards and Sony’s own problems with minidisc and their ATRAC format, especially when they started letting you connect up your MD player to your PC. The Sony Reader uses EPub in one of its signed or unsigned forms – how does that work out?

So far, I’d say fair to middling. Support for US buyers seems to be strong, with Sony’s store pissing all over Waterstones from a height, with a good selection, excellent prices and integration with Sony’s only semi-hateful library software. However, despite my best efforts at lieing to a computer, I could not convince the site that I was a US resident – my lack of US address and credit card put paid to that one. This led me to the other US stores, ones without such an attachment to hardware, and found more books, but generally not in EPub, and definitely not DRM’d using Sony’s scheme. So, at the moment, you are stuck with Waterstones, for better or worse, until such a time as we get more ebook stores in the UK, or more US stores supporting Adobe Digital Editions or Sony LRFs.

However, in the mean time all is not lost. Thanks to pfig (who being as much of a gadget fiend as myself called from Waterstones the other day to check the compatibility with his Mac and Linux boxes, as he had been playing with a reader in store and just wanted to be sure before he dropped his cash), I found out about Calibre the other day – a cross platform ebook management tool, written in python and originally for the Sony PRS-500, the precursor to the model I have. It’s only an alternative to the other book management systems, as it does only handle non-DRM’d books, but it does have a built in converter to make EPub books from pretty much whatever ebook format you can throw at it, as well as websites (exactly the reason why I started writing my perl back-end for manipulating EPub books). I grabbed a couple of Baen freebies in Microsoft LIT and old-skool Mobipocket formats and in a few minutes had a couple of Sony EBooks ready to go. The LIT worked out much better than the Mobi, the latter having broken spacing and tiny images, delivering a pretty much flawless transfer of the original formatted text. The DRM limitation does stop it being quite as useful as it might, but for now, with so many texts being out there ready for the taking for free, it helps out, and for those not wanting to touch DRM’d files it is an essential.

So, at the moment things are looking okay on the ebook front – we have Waterstones behind the Sony Reader in the UK and there is definitely a growth in the understanding and pushing of the books from the publishers. It’s not that great for us “early-adopting” Sony Reader users, but we have PDFs to fall back on for now, and as long as we reward the publishers who do give us what we want I see the potential for less wrist snapping hardbacks in my future.

If you want to play with phreadz, which is lovely and run by the lovely Kosso who does it all of it himself, then you should be able to get a beta (closed beetroot era, to be exact) login via the politics channel.

I seem to have agreed this evening to look into sorting out video streaming and social media linking for British Computer Society Young Professionals Group talks, starting with a “New Leaf, New Year” evening for the green computing group. Time to work out whether the ideas I had in the meeting are actually possible…

So, I continue my life without papery books. I’ve had my Sony Reader for a few weeks now, and it is still lovely. Since my day one purchase of Anathem and upload of a bunch of classics, I’ve also grabbed Peter Hamilton’s Temporal Void, a pile of Tor short stories, a couple from Bookkake’s collection, Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book and my current read, David Peace’s Tokyo Year Zero. I’ve read a few graphic novels on top of those, but in a “must get used to it” kind of way, I’ve stuck to the e-reader for my regular booky needs. So, how did it do?

The hardware is quite excellent. Apart from a few random crashes and some weirdness where it didn’t charge one night when I plugged it in, it has functioned without hitch and I’ve only needed to charge it once since unboxing it, despite it being handed around to everyone I know and playing a couple of episodes of X Minus 1 as a test of its mp3 player. Ergonomically it’s fine, with my main annoyance being that the navigation pad on the right doesn’t change pages, something that would be useful as my main reading position is Jean-Luc Picard style with the coverless pad in my right hand and cup of Tea Earl Grey Hot in my left, while sitting in my ready room (this may be fantasy. I don’t have a ready room. Or any earl grey, hot or otherwise). This doesn’t work that well, leading to my having to change tea hand, which is more traumatising than the words alone might suggest.  The pages turn quickly when you’re using a non-PDF file and aren’t too slow with PDFs unless they are image heavy, and you get used to the flash of the refresh after a bit. You can change the size of the text with all the books that I’ve tried and with PDF files it reflows text quite well, although it still respects page breaks, meaning that you do sometimes end up with overly short pages when a PDF page is split unevenly across an e-reader page turn. The screen is about as reflective as a glossy magazine, maybe slightly less so, so there are occasional glare issues. However, I’ve not had much trouble reading it in a variety of lighting conditions, from on the tube with the sun at my back to the darkened back room of my local. It also gets comments – it’s quite a pretty thing, especially with its tan pleather cover, and I’ve had a few people wander up and ask what it is, how it rates against real book and just share a general appreciation of the shiny thing. I gathered a small crowd of staff in Carluccio’s a few weeks back, all intrigued by the new fangled device…

There are two pieces of software used with the device – the Sony Library and Adobe Digital Editions. The former is as clunky and ugly as Sony’s software always seem to be (my experiences with the NetMD minidisc player’s software have soured me against anything that Sony may shat out onto my PC) and the latter is a Flash based (maybe Air?) lightweight app that does its job efficiently, even if the interface is using the “I am cross platform by virtue of being totally different to all the avalailable platforms” trick that so many seem to try. I used the Sony software for uploading non-DRM’d books to start with, but having found out that I can just dump them on an SD card and have the reader Just Work with them I’ve not loaded it again. Adobe Digital Editions is used for DRM’d books, as in the UK it seems that Adobe’s locked formats are being used rather than Sony’s.

An aside, DRM’d ebook formats: The Sony secure LRF format seems to be a DRM’d version of the open EPub format, as are Adobe Digital Editions, although they don’t seem to be compatible. However, to muddy the waters further, Adobe also do secure PDF, which some sites bill as a Digital Edition, despite it not being a capitalised Digital Edition, merely a digital edition. Luckily the Sony Reader supports both, although in the latter’s case you don’t get the automatic formatting joy that a real EPub document gives you, locking you into the formatting of the PDF, which is generally not designed for the small reader screen. I’ve been looking into what makes up an EPub and behind the scenes it’s just a zip file with a bunch of HTML in. One day my attempt at EBook::EPub might appear on CPAN.

The big question though is how does it read? Answer: a bit like a book. No, it’s not the same. Yes, it still feels a bit weird. But overall it works well, much better than the Palms that I used years back to avoid the wrist snapping weight of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque cycle (note to self – buy the System of The World as an ebook so that you can finish the series, finally). The contrast is not as great as paper, but the resolution seems higher (it’s 170dpi). It handles images well (depending on how the ebook is constructed), with eight shades of grey, and reading The Graveyard Book with the illustrations was a nice surprise, expecting a boring text version as I was. Most of all, I got to read Anathem and The Temporal Void without having to cart around a hefty chunk of dead tree and also have that extra cubic foot of space free in my house, ready to fill with comics, pies or whatever else takes my fancy. I don’t care so much about the carting around of hundreds of books with me at all times, but the small size and fact that it currently contains about a shelf worth of books rather than filling up a shelf makes me a happy man.

Not quite Hen’s Tooth-like in scarceness, but still rather hard to find due to Sony selling out a bit faster than they thought, the Reader is a shiny piece of electronic paper goodness that I have been lusting after for a while. After the Eden Lake screening that I went to a while back, Mr Reynolds pulled his out of his magic sack and the assembled geeky end of the table ooh’d and aah’d over it for a while. They’ve finally been released over here and after a couple of weeks of asking nicely in branches of Waterstones I found one today (with only a mild peek at their website – the Ludgate Hill info is now out of date, as I got the last one).

I’ve only been playing with it for a little bit and so far it’s rather nice. The viewing angle on it makes the screen look very paperlike, with quite good contrast. It has an annoying flash as it changes pages, but does that quite quickly. My main annoyance has been the tieing with Waterstones, who have an awful website where the only way of searching for ebooks seems to be relying on the fact that all the ebooks so far have “ebook” in their title to distinguish them from the other versions. The rather crappy selection does not help matters. As Reynolds mentioned on his blog a while back he couldn’t find an ebook of Anathem, Mr Stephenson’s latest, on the site despite it being available in the USA. I had a tinker, found I couldn’t easily make the Sony store believe I was in America and promptly bought the Adobe Digital Editions version of the book from Diesel eBooks, although it did cost me twice as much. It so far seems to format fine on the screen (even when I press the “make bigger and reformat” button) but we shall see how it goes. By the time that The Temporal Void comes out (next Thursday, I hear) I will hopefully be pleased that it all works.

Now, those two books are the specific items that pushed me towards buying the shininess now. They are both, as were Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and all of Hamilton’s other books (almost), big arse hardbacks. I read the first two books in the Baroque Cycle as ebooks, as having bought the hardbacks I found them pretty much impossible to read while standing on the tube. I may now get a seat every day (thankyou Ealing Broadway), but they are still too big to fit in my bag. As such, a nice way of reading ebooks was something I was after – my previous experience of playing with my Palm PDAs definitely made me want something bigger and more booky. Now it seems I should be able to pick up both books (I am especially looking forward to Mr Hamilton’s as I know that Anathem may cause my brain to melt with it’s pretentiousness, which is not a problem), and read them without having to find a new bag or run the risk of have my hands tear off at the wrist if I am forced to stand on a train. Very messy.

I suspect this is not the last time you will hear of my Sony Reader…