How Unsexy Publishing Arcana Cloud E-Books’ Future

Publishing professionals and the journalists who cover the industry approach electronic books fundamentally differently from technology journalists and enthusiasts. Just as technophiles’ debates over open vs. closed systems or the relative value of different programming languages rarely filter down to the uninitiated, publishers’ attention to agency vs wholesale models and dramatic power plays between agents, retailers, and publishers can initially be confusing to folks not directly involved.

For example, before Amazon announced its new Kindle last week, the major — and I mean, epoch-making — news in these circles was literary agent Andrew Wylie finally making good on his threat to bypass publishers and ink a deal giving the exclusive e-book rights to his agency’s backlist to Amazon through his imprint called Odyssey Editions. This means that books by Borges, Nabokov, Rushdie, Roth, Ellison, Updike, and Erdrich — some of which had been unavailable in any electronic format — are now available but can now only be bought for the Kindle. It’s the most serious skirmish in a longstanding industry-wide debate between publishers and authors’ representatives over the proper royalty rate authors should receive for e-books, and (in some cases) who owns the rights to electronic versions of a book altogether.

These are arguments readers rarely have the interest or need to pay attention to — until someone claiming the rights to a book (say, George Orwell’s 1984) turns out not to have proper ownership of it, forcing Amazon to remotely remove the book from readers’ machines. Or The legal and economic agreements girding the foundation of the publishing industry, including the sale and availability of e-books, turn out to be like the plumbing running through your house — until there’s a crisis, there isn’t much need to pay attention to it.

I asked publishing professional Don Linn, who’s worked as a book distributor and small press print publisher before starting a much-anticipated but short-lived digital only press called Quartet that closed operations last year, to expand on some points he made on his publishing and technology blog about what he called “L’affaire Wylie.” What became clear is that even publishers, agents, and retailers, who’ve rightly been focused on signing writers and selling books, didn’t appreciate how much the arcana of the business would matter in the move to digital platforms.

Publishing metadata, for instance — things like ISBNs, trim size, etc. — has traditionally been one of the dullest aspects of the business, useful for selling to retailers and libraries but not much else. Now, however, publishers are expanding their definition and uses of metadata, to make their titles easier to find in text searches. Readers don’t care about metadata — until they can or can’t find the book they’re looking for. “Making a title discoverable in a world where hundreds of thousands of books are published each year is more critical than when only tens of thousands were being published,” Don says. “Basically, if you do a poor job with your metadata, you’re hosed.” Metadata is good information management, but in a search-driven business, good marketing too.

There’s also the even thornier issue of rights and licensing — for instance, whether e-books count as a primary right (like the right to print and sell a book in a specific geographic area) or a subsidiary right (like a translation, or in some cases merchandizing). Evan Schnittman of Bloomsbury Publishing wrote a terrific post delineating the specific kinds of rights and royalty rates assigned to each, arguing forcefully that e-books like those sold for the Kindle have to be considered a primary rather than a subsidiary right, since the work of editors, designers, marketers, etc., is the same for each; and most importantly, because the shared ecosystem of print and digital sales means that sale of an e-book typically substitutes for the sale of a printed book.

This may be one reason why innovation in e-books often takes the form of transmedia promotion of print books, like the popular and acclaimed “Cathy’s Book” iPhone app. The app, in this case, is part of a broad network of objects, including the printed text(s) and web sites, positioning the book as part of an alternative reality game (ARG). But what about genuinely self-contained multimedia books, the long-promised synthesis of text, images, video, music, and interactivity that futurists have long-awaited? Are those rights identical to those of a plain-vanilla text e-book like those sold for the Kindle? What happens to them? Linn is wary:

The skill sets required to produce a first class enhanced title are simply not resident in publishing houses, nor are those most qualified to bring those skills to the party likely to choose book publishing as the most promising career path. Because of this, if I were an agent or author, I’d be very careful about which rights (therre’s that word again) I licensed to book publishers unless and until the publisher can demonstrate that it can take full advantage of anything beyond print, digital and audio.

He added that the major e-book retailers were unlikely to do much to push for enhanced titles, or create them: “I could see Apple getting involved as a way to expand hardware sales in the education or business market, though they’ve shown no inclination to create content so far.” Amazon and Barnes & Noble have been cool towards enhanced texts — although Amazon does sell some enhanced ebooks in its Kindle store that, oddly, can’t be read on the Kindle — and are likely to follow the market, rather than lead, according to Linn.

What does this mean for the average reader, trying to bet on a platform or waiting for an immersive experience reading an enhanced version of Austerlitz or House of Leaves? If exclusive ebook deals bypassing the publisher become the rule, some books you want simply won’t be available for the hardware you have. And ultimately, your device’s capabilities will be secondary to whether or not a rights holder has the technical skills and legal clearances to bring the product to market. It may be a few years before the real future of the book is settled. And then, if history is any guide, only for a moment.

Photo credit: www.cathysbook.com


Strained graphene leads to pseudo-magnetic fields, bends physics even further

Man, if only this had been discovered before Ariadne was tasked with building impossible dreams. A team of scientists caught high-fiving over at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have a new and riveting announcement to share, and it revolves around our old and trusted friend, graphene. This go ’round, the self-proclaimed “extraordinary form of carbon” is being stressed to its max, but not without good reason. Thanks to inquisitive minds and a “stroke of serendipity,” a research team was able to create magnetic fields in excess of 300 tesla by simply straining graphene in a certain way. For physicists, the discovery is a dream come true, particularly when you realize that magnetic fields in excess of 85 tesla were practically impossible to come across in a laboratory setting. The benefits here? It’s honestly too early to tell, but gurus in the field are already suggesting that the “opportunities for basic science with strain engineering [are] huge.” Something tells us Magneto would concur.

Strained graphene leads to pseudo-magnetic fields, bends physics even further originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Aug 2010 18:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung to battle iPod Touch with Android

A convincing image has emerged of a new Android-based Samsung portable media player called the YP-MB2, capable of music, video, web browsing, FM radio, photos, and compatibility with the Android App Market. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-12519_7-20012429-49.html” class=”origPostedBlog”MP3 Insider/a/p

Oregon Scientific Releases New Action Cam

OREGON-SCIENTIFIC-A.jpg

Take it snorkeling. Take it sky diving. Take it anywhere that your wimpy little pocket video camera can’t handle. Oregon Scientific has just launched the ATC9K All-Terrain Video Camera, the next generation of its ATC line of action cameras. This bad boy is waterproof and shock resistant, ready to be strapped to a helmet, handlebars, surfboard, or snowboard. It shoots 1080p video at up to 60 frames per second.

If your action video is good enough, you might just win a prize. From now until September 30, ATC user can upload their videos to Facebook for the chance of taking either a grand prize package valued at $750 or a runner-up prize package valued at $350. The ATC9K lists for $299.99 and is available online.

iMac (mid 2010) Core i3 review

There’s nothing outwardly different about the new iMacs Apple just released last Tuesday, but the hardware underneath that familiar aluminum chassis has gotten faster — particularly on the low end, where a new 3.06GHz Intel Core i3 processor and discrete ATI Radeon HD 4670 graphics chip have taken over for the previous gen’s 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo and integrated NVIDIA GeForce 9400m. That’s a big boost — Apple claims the new version is some 50 percent faster — and so we actually turned down the hot-rod 27-inch 2.93GHz Core i7 iMac in favor of a stock $1,199 21.5-inch Core i3 when it came time to pick up a review unit. We wanted to see just how much bang Apple’s delivering for the entry-level buck, and we weren’t disappointed when the tests came back. Read on for the full review!

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iMac (mid 2010) Core i3 review originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Space-bound R2 robot starts tweeting

Robonaut 2 starts social networking in advance of its upcoming mission aboard the International Space Station.

AT&T blocking Dell Streak beta units?

There’s a fascinating discussion going on over in MoDaCo‘s forums today suggesting that Dell Streak units that were given out recently as part of the company’s US beta test in and around Austin, Texas are no longer functioning on AT&T, the result of an apparent IMEI block; voice calls placed from the devices all get re-routed to AT&T customer service, and 2G / 3G data doesn’t work at all. Our understanding is that beta testers were allowed to keep their units after the conclusion of the test period — some of those ended up on eBay, naturally, so you can imagine that buyers are probably feeling a little steamed by this. One user has had luck with data by using the iPad’s APN and plan settings, but otherwise, there seems to be a bit of frustration going around. We’ve reached out to AT&T to figure out what’s going on; we’ll let you know when we have more.

[Thanks, Reece M.]

Update: We’ve had at least one buyer of a beta unit write in to tell us that his Streak is still functional, so it seems that the IMEIs haven’t been blocked across the board — so far, anyhow. Leave us your experiences in comments, won’t you? Thanks, Josh G.!

AT&T blocking Dell Streak beta units? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Why Xbox Might Be Microsoft’s Future — and Computing’s, Too

It’s easy to dismiss Xbox’s new Kinect controller-free sensor as a “Wii Too” product.

But I wonder whether Microsoft is onto something much bigger, something that will take the innovations introduced for the Xbox into the broader sphere of personal computing.

Sure, from the perspective of gaming in 2010, it doesn’t offer much that Nintendo’s Wii doesn’t already have — as we pointed out in our review of Kinect in June.

But for one thing, Kinect doesn’t just record your movements. Its system of cameras, microphones, sensors and software algorithms also records (and recognizes) your voice, and can recognize faces and objects. For another, it didn’t come directly from the gaming and entertainment division at Microsoft, trying to copy the Wii. It grew out of Microsoft’s research labs, from a combination of teams already working on alternative input systems for computing devices. Gaming is a high-profile test case for their implementation.

Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, told Computerworld on Thursday that Kinect “portends a revolution in the way people will interact with computers.” Bill Gates suggested something very similar at the D5 conference in 2007: The real transformation of the desktop metaphor for the PC would come through innovations in three-dimensional imaging. PCs and games were both held back by their reliance on the mouse/keyboard and the controller, Gates said:

[The Wiimote is] a 3D positional device. This is video recognition. This is a camera seeing what’s going on. And, you know, in the meetings, like you’re on a video conference, you don’t know who’s speaking, you know, they’re audio only, things like that. The camera will be ubiquitous. Now, of course, we have to design it in a way that people’s expectations about privacy are handled appropriately, but software can do vision and it can do it very, very inexpensively. And that means this stuff becomes pervasive. You don’t just talk about it being in a laptop device. You talk about it being part of the meeting room or the living room.

For a useful analogy and some historical perspective, let’s go back to October 2001. On October 25, Microsoft released Windows XP, still the most popular desktop operating system in the world. Two days earlier, Apple introduced the iPod, the most successful digital music and media player ever. Over the next nine years, what happened?

One of Apple’s shrewdest moves in the past decade was to embrace the iPod as the technological and commercial driver of its core businesses. The iPod was universally hailed as the top device in its class, technologically sophisticated and culturally cool. iTunes gave Apple footholds in retail (first for music, then other media) and on the PC platform. It was the first post-PC device that along with digital cameras and video, let Apple remake the personal computer from a workstation into a digital media hub by way of iLife. Then, in rapid succession, the iPod begat the iPhone, Apple TV, and the iPad. Apple brought multitouch interfaces to its laptops, and now its desktops via the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad. It’s a huge, diversified company, but it all springs from the success of the iPod.

Over the same period, Microsoft lost a lot of its reputation as an innovator, especially in the retail market. It settled its antitrust case with the DOJ. Its web browser and new Windows OS were widely reviled. It tried (and largely failed) to get strong positions in search, smartphones, and music players.

But the Xbox is different. Critics and fans love it; it has sold (and continually grown) like gangbusters; it’s been widely perceived as both serious and cool; it’s had landmark games like Halo, BioShock, and Final Fantasy XIII; and with XBox Live it arguably did more than any other product to actually bring proper networked computing into people’s living rooms.

Apple’s iPod, and then the iPhone, have given the company a direction for the future: innovative cloud and boutique retail, selling handheld computing devices driven by multi-touch interfaces. It’s a very different path than if Apple had continued to follow the roadmap offered by the Mac.

If Microsoft follows the Xbox rather than Windows and Office, or rather than chasing after Apple in tablets or Google in search, we’ll see it become a company less defined by enterprise solutions and spreadsheets than by ubiquitous, large-scale, multi-surface household computing.

Photo credit: Allthingsd.com


More signs iPhone under Android attack

Not a good day for iPhone as another two research groups say Android sales are white hot. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20012418-37.html” class=”origPostedBlog”News – Apple/a/p

CTA’s $20 Baby: Ultimate Boxing Gloves for PS Move

Well, it was only a matter of time before CTA started churning out accessories for the PS Move. Not unlike a similar offering for the Wii, the Ultimate Boxing Gloves are meant to add “realism and excitement to boxing and street-fighting games” by providing “fist-clenching ability” and compatibility “with all PS Move boxing game launches, including The Fight: Lights Out.” Also on tap for the company are the Triple Port Charging Station (for simultaneously charging your PS Move Controller, Navigation Controller and Sixaxis controller), Dual Port (charging one PS Move Controller / Navigation Controller set) and Quadruple Port Charging Stations (for two sets of controllers). Sounds great, guys — but we’re still holding out for something incorporating wings or a rowing machine. Charging Stations due out in September, while the gloves should be available October 1 for $20. PR after the break.

Continue reading CTA’s $20 Baby: Ultimate Boxing Gloves for PS Move

CTA’s $20 Baby: Ultimate Boxing Gloves for PS Move originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Aug 2010 16:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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