We've just renewed our weekend subscription to The Age newspaper. We suffered through a couple of weekends without a newspaper (yes, #firstworldproblems, I know), and it got me thinking about subscriptions in general.
I read the newspaper pretty much cover to cover, every weekend (whether this is a productive use of time is an altogether different question!). I do that because it's delivered to my house.
I've also been reading the Words With Jam e-magazine lately, which is quite fun. Problem is, every time I want to download it I need to log onto Smashwords, haul out my credit card, and plug the eReader into the computer. Yes, all you people with Kindles can be smug now. But the point is, it takes effort on my part. You know what I would love? For the magazine to be delivered to my inbox as an email attachment, for me to download whenever I'm ready. I'd happily pay a year's subscription up front.
Well, it looks like I'm not the only one thinking along these lines. I've just discovered www.emilybooks.com. The premise? An ebook a month, delivered to your inbox in your preferred format. I'm signing up right now. I could do with some variation in my reading diet, and thing is, if the book is there, I'll read it. Could lead to some interesting blog posts if nothing else (is it bad for an ereader to throw it across the room?)
I will report back on the great subscription experiment, if I manage to tear myself away from my newspaper. And if anyone out there knows of any other good subscriptions (crime fiction magazines, especially) do let me know!
Showing posts with label eBooks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eBooks. Show all posts
Friday, October 7, 2011
Friday, August 5, 2011
How I learned to read without paper
Today I am interrupting normal transmission to tell you how much I love Readwithoutpaper.com. If you are the kind of person who goes to bed clutching a paper book to your chest, feel free to leave now. This post is for those people who have discovered that with an eReader you can carry a hundred books in your pocket, and have never looked back.
Firstly, you have to understand that in the world of eReaders I am doubly disadvantaged. Firstly, I have a Sony Reader, which reads ePub format. It was a deliberate choice not to get an Amazon Kindle – I’m not a fan of the whole “walled garden” thing – but it does make it a bit trickier buying books. I can buy from Kindle but need to convert to the ePub format, which I can only do if the book doesn’t have digital rights management. Then there are those like Readings' online store which provide books that can only be read in a browser – a fact I only discovered after purchasing a book that I now can’t read on my eReader. I’m disappointed, because I think they have great books and offers, but there’s no way I’m reading a book on my laptop. ePub files are where it’s at for me, but for a supposed industry standard they are harder to find than I thought.
The secondly and worst problem I face is that I’m located in Australia. Australia is more than an afterthought when it comes to eBooks. We are the forgotten pimple on the afterthought’s bum. Think about this for a minute – if I go to amazon.com today, it tells me there are around 968,000 ebooks. Only 717,000 are available to Australians, and for some reason quite a few of those missing seem to be by Australian authors. Australians have become very familiar with the messages cheerily announcing “I’m sorry! This book is not available in your location.” It tends to induce a red mist and an urge to commit grievous bodily harm on the computer (which can only be overcome by thinking about how much that infuriating screen actually costs to fix).
And that’s the problem, really. It’s not that they tell you upfront it’s not available. Oh no, it’s not until you put it into your cart and go to check out that they spring the news on you. In fact, it's happened more than once that I've filled my cart with books, only to be told that none of them are available to purchase. Diesel eBooks is the worst have experienced – they let me purchase a book and then wouldn’t let me download my purchase because I was apparently in the wrong territory. It took an email to the help desk to get a refund, and even then they didn’t refund the credit card charges I paid for making an overseas purchase (okay, it was only about a dollar, but it’s the principle of the thing).
And hence to Read Without Paper. Despite the .com address, it’s an Australian site. It offers ePubs that are easily downloaded to my Sony Reader. Even better, they tell you upfront – when you are actually considering buying the book! – where it is available. It’s a sad comment on the state of eBook sites to say it, but this is revolutionarily wonderful. They have a great range of books that I actually want to read, and they are set out in a way that actually makes sense.
I spent around a hundred dollars on books a couple of months ago. I haven’t spent that much in years. It just goes to show the potential when sites can actually get this thing right – and in my opinion, Read Without Paper definitely have. Cheers guys!
Monday, September 20, 2010
Buying eBooks vs "buying" eBooks
I’ve been thinking about asking Santa for an eReader for Christmas. Apparently, the main manufacturers have recently become aware that there is a place called Australia and *gasp* they read books there! As a result, we have a number of devices to choose from in the price range I’m interested in (AU$300 and below), including the new Sony Touch, the Kindle International version and the Kobo sold by Borders stores.
I have been thinking seriously about a Kindle, but there’s one intellectual property aspect that is giving me pause. You may have heard this story earlier in the year. To summarise, Kindle mistakenly made available a book to which it didn’t have the rights. It then withdrew it from the store and deleted it remotely from users’ devices. The funniest part? The book was George Orwell’s 1984.
So how could Amazon do this? Simple – when you buy an eBook for your Kindle, you’re not really buying the book (you didn’t expect Amazon to be restrained by logic and/or the dictionary, did you?). You’re actually licensing it under a fairly restrictive set of terms and conditions. It’s a model similar to the software world rather than the actual paper book world. And here comes the crunch, in my opinion.
Amazon is perfectly entitled to licence books rather than sell them, as do most of the other eBook publishers. They were entitled to remove Orwell’s book from users’ devices, and if I worked for them I would be thanking my lucky stars that they could use the licence terms to clean up the mess before they were sued for copyright infringement. This is the reason why eBook publishers choose the licence model, after all – it allows them to maintain a much greater degree of control over the things users can do with their eBooks. However, Amazon are so far the only company to unilaterally remove books that readers have purchased (sorry, "purchased"). This might be because the 3G connectibility of the Kindle makes this possible; I'm not sure whether the others would be able to do this in a technical sense.
The real issue in my view is that there is a lack of honesty about what readers are really buying. You don’t see a lot of advertising saying “License your eBook here!” Rather, Amazon’s store provides you with a picture of the book, a blurb and a link to buy the book. The Terms of Use state Unless otherwise specified, Digital Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider. I’d query whether the repeated use of “buy” on the site could even trigger this provision to mean that the content is sold. In any case, users are likely to assume unless specifically told otherwise that “purchasing” a book means that they have bought a copy which is then theirs to own. Technically, they could be vulnerable to action under the Trade Practices Act or equivalent US legislation for misrepresentations or false advertising.
If I was advising Amazon I’d be telling them to change the language in their advertising and to review their Terms of Use. On the other hand, it’s quite possible that Amazon’s attorneys are telling them just that, while the marketers refuse to have a bar of it (cynicism about marketers? Me?).
As a purchaser, it’s another reason pushing me towards the Sony and away from the Kindle, though I have some affection for a company that comes up with such great brand names. I mean, Amazon for an online bookstore? Kindle for an eBook reader? They may have licensing issues but they clearly listened to their trade mark attorneys.
I have been thinking seriously about a Kindle, but there’s one intellectual property aspect that is giving me pause. You may have heard this story earlier in the year. To summarise, Kindle mistakenly made available a book to which it didn’t have the rights. It then withdrew it from the store and deleted it remotely from users’ devices. The funniest part? The book was George Orwell’s 1984.
So how could Amazon do this? Simple – when you buy an eBook for your Kindle, you’re not really buying the book (you didn’t expect Amazon to be restrained by logic and/or the dictionary, did you?). You’re actually licensing it under a fairly restrictive set of terms and conditions. It’s a model similar to the software world rather than the actual paper book world. And here comes the crunch, in my opinion.
Amazon is perfectly entitled to licence books rather than sell them, as do most of the other eBook publishers. They were entitled to remove Orwell’s book from users’ devices, and if I worked for them I would be thanking my lucky stars that they could use the licence terms to clean up the mess before they were sued for copyright infringement. This is the reason why eBook publishers choose the licence model, after all – it allows them to maintain a much greater degree of control over the things users can do with their eBooks. However, Amazon are so far the only company to unilaterally remove books that readers have purchased (sorry, "purchased"). This might be because the 3G connectibility of the Kindle makes this possible; I'm not sure whether the others would be able to do this in a technical sense.
The real issue in my view is that there is a lack of honesty about what readers are really buying. You don’t see a lot of advertising saying “License your eBook here!” Rather, Amazon’s store provides you with a picture of the book, a blurb and a link to buy the book. The Terms of Use state Unless otherwise specified, Digital Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider. I’d query whether the repeated use of “buy” on the site could even trigger this provision to mean that the content is sold. In any case, users are likely to assume unless specifically told otherwise that “purchasing” a book means that they have bought a copy which is then theirs to own. Technically, they could be vulnerable to action under the Trade Practices Act or equivalent US legislation for misrepresentations or false advertising.
If I was advising Amazon I’d be telling them to change the language in their advertising and to review their Terms of Use. On the other hand, it’s quite possible that Amazon’s attorneys are telling them just that, while the marketers refuse to have a bar of it (cynicism about marketers? Me?).
As a purchaser, it’s another reason pushing me towards the Sony and away from the Kindle, though I have some affection for a company that comes up with such great brand names. I mean, Amazon for an online bookstore? Kindle for an eBook reader? They may have licensing issues but they clearly listened to their trade mark attorneys.
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