Hasta La Gadget!

If you wanted to know how many pirated e-books are being downloaded, BitTorrent would be a good starting place. TorrentFreak, a blog that covers these speedy, P2P downloads, recently decided to check the numbers. The question: did e-book torrent downloading become more popular after the iPad’s launch?

The answer was a resounding “kinda.” While almost none of Amazon’s top ten appeared on public torrent trackers, six out of 10 books in the business category were available. When TorrentFreak checked the before and after numbers, it found that the number of BitTorrent book downloads grew by an average of 78 percent in the days after the iPad went on sale. Even so, the numbers were still tiny compared to the traffic in movies and music.

What does this mean? First, e-book piracy is still a small problem. Right now it’s a very geeky pastime, which is reflected in the skew of these titles (Getting Things Done, Freakonomics and The Tipping Point were on the TorrentFreak list). This matches up with the usual early adopter profile, the people who would have bought the iPad on its opening weekend.

But where geeks go first, the general public will follow. This happened with music. Now almost nobody I know buys CDs: They pirate, and even my most hardcore book-loving friend is now a Kindle convert. So will the iPad bring this attitude to books?

First, there is the problem of digitizing books. Right now, the best place to download e-books is via irc (Internet Relay Chat), online chatrooms that predate the web. The shared books are tiny text files. Storage and download speed are no problem, but the subject matter is heavily skewed toward popular trash and sci-fi. Original files come from those with enough time and patience to scan, OCR (optical character recognition) and proofread the resulting files, but the majority of what you find are duplicates of these. Contrast this to music, where you pop a CD into your computer and wait a few minutes while it rips the tracks and downloads the metadata.

It is unlikely that there will be a way to scan books so easily at home anytime soon, but what about sharing e-books themselves? If Apple makes its iBooks app available on the Mac or PC, then copying an entire book, even if protected by DRM, will be as simple as automating screenshots of pages and sending them to an OCR program. Only a single copy of a book will need to be pirated thusly and it will then be compromised forever.

Blaming the iPad is stupid, though. If it causes a rise in book piracy, it is only because it is driving demand. The book industry should embrace this and give us what we want: cheap books, published day-and-date with their paper equivalents, along with all back-catalog titles made available. And preferably DRM-free.

There is evidence that this is happening already. The iBooks Store will be rolling out with the iPad as it goes on sale across the world. The iTunes Music Store, by contrast, took years to negotiate itself into non-U.S. markets, and in many countries you still can’t get movies or TV shows. That these deals are in place mere months after the iPad was announced shows that the book industry is at least trying to move into the digital future.

The iPad is fast shaping up to be the go-to e-reading device. Between Apple’s iBooks, Amazon’s Kindle for iPad and the slew of other e-readers in the App Store (although curiously, our favorite Stanza is still absent on the iPad), you can buy and read almost any e-book out there. Blaming the iPad for kicking-off book piracy is foolish. It’s an opportunity, and if book publishers mess it up, they have already seen what happened to the recording industry.

eBook Piracy ‘Surges’ After iPad Launch [TorrentFreak]

Is iPad supercharging e-book piracy? [CNET. Thanks, David!]

Photo: jblyberg/Flickr

See Also:

• iBooks Store Loaded with Project Gutenberg Titles at Launch …
• Apple’s Tablet E-Book App Rips off Indie Dev’s Creation
• Apple iPad Raises the Stakes for E-Readers

E-readers as a whole best be watching their backs (or planning a wave of new functions, one), but it’s safe to say that having color displays would give ’em a leg-up on the retina-killing, battery-draining LCD-based alternatives. Plastic Logic is still working to get its first e-reader (the decidedly not color QUE, for those curious) into the paws of consumers, but already the outfit is planning for the next big thing. Achim Neu, Director SCM, recently spoke at the International Electronics Forum, reportedly stating that his company is aiming to “have a manufacturable color display by the end of 2011 and move it into volume production in 2012.” Details beyond that were scarce, but still, 2012 seems a long ways out — if Qualcomm can get its color Mirasol panel into shipping products, there’s a better than average chance that none of this will matter.

Plastic Logic plans 2012 launch for color e-paper display originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 May 2010 12:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Good news, fellow Brits! Samsung has just announced that it’ll be shipping its two 6-inch, stylus-donning e-readers — the slide-out E60 and the QWERTY-packing E61 — to the UK in July, with the former to be priced at £299.99 ($443) and the latter’s to be confirmed. Sadly, no news on who’ll be delivering the ebooks over these devices’ WiFi, but we’re promised an announcement in a fortnight. For now, gorge yourselves on our latest hands-on photos.

Continue reading Samsung E60 and E61 e-readers heading to British digital bookworms in July

Samsung E60 and E61 e-readers heading to British digital bookworms in July originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 11 May 2010 15:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Looking for a no-frills alternative to the Kindle or Nook? For $150, you’ll probably find it in the Kobo eReader — now available for purchase at Borders, and shipping June 17th. We went hands-on with Kobo in March and rather enjoyed the barebones aesthetic; though an early review cited long load times, we thought the 6-inch E Ink slate got the basics just about right. That’s just us, though — if you get it for Father’s Day as Borders clearly suggests, we’re not sure your picky old man will agree.

Borders’ Kobo eReader available for pre-order, ships June 17th originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 10 May 2010 02:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon may not be rolling out its Kindle 2.5 update until later this month, but the folks at Ars Technica have already managed to get their hands on it, and they’ve kindly shared a few impressions. While the added social networking capabilities may be the most standout feature, Ars found the new “Collections” feature to be the most substantive part of the update, as it finally gives you a way to manage all your books into groups that are more easily browsed than one big list. Those social networking features do seem to welcome additions as well, however, albeit with a few limitations — while you can easily share a passage from a book with your Twitter or Facebook friends, it’s delivered in the form of a link rather than an actual quote. Other new features like password protection also work just as you’d expect, and there’s a number of more minor but pleasant surprises — like being able to pan and zoom in PDF files. Hit up the source link below for a closer look.

Kindle’s social networking-friendly 2.5 update gets an early preview originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 07 May 2010 13:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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