The Kindle Chronicles

I am gratified to see that “eBooks” is in the lead for the preferred way to spell digital books in a poll still running today at Digital Book World. Jeremy Greenfield posed the question to readers in a post dated May 25th. He admitted to not feeling quite right about Digital Book World’s current hyphenated style choice, e-books.

The poll which Greenfield appended to his post offers three choices: E-books, Ebooks, and eBooks. I voted for the third one, for reasons which I explained in my post last week. So far, eBooks is in the lead, with 17.5 percent of the 160 votes cast, followed by Ebooks, 7.5 percent, and E-books, 6.25 percent.

This poll is an opportunity to strike a blow against useless hyphens and for a style choice that puts the emphasis where it belongs–on B for Book, not E for Electronic. If you agree, please click here and scroll down to fill out the poll. If you don’t agree, please resume your regularly scheduled work and forget about it.

Note: For Kindle subscribers, I made this handy URL that you can enter on the browser of a computer or other device faster than your e Ink Kindle:  bit.ly/eBookPoll .

It’s weird, but since converting to “eBooks” I get a small but noticeable lift every time I type the word. It just seems right to me. How about you?

Eric Loss's Self-Portrait at Sea, a Week After Rounding Cape Horn

Ever since I interviewed Eric Loss on October 31, 2011, just before his departure on a solo circumnavigation of the world, I have been following his beautifully written blog to see how he’s doing. I regularly copy and paste his navigation coordinates into Google Maps to see where in the world his last post came from, and these days the map appears on my screen as nothing but blue, with a tiny red “A” marker in the middle of it. You have to zoom out to see any land, and that’s when you realize he’s smack dab in the middle of the South Pacific.

He set sail from Los Angeles on November 7, 2011, in Odyssey, his aptly named 36-foot yacht. He rounded Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America, crossed the South Atlantic to the Cape of Good Hope, proceeded thence to the southern coast of Australia and now, at last, he is crossing the vast Pacific on his last leg home.

Eric is an extremely competent sailor, as well as a bookish sort. He would have needed a bigger boat if he had stowed enough paper books to keep him company. Luckily he has a Kindle 2. Unluckily, the battery died. Here is an excerpt from his post from May 25:

My Kindle, which has been warning me for the past few months that its battery was slowly dying and that I really should go out and buy another Kindle or two from Amazon, finally decided today that it had had enough of my malingering and kicked the bucket.  When I turned it on this morning, the portrait of Virginia Woolf vanished from all but the top right quarter of the screen, where it merely faded and blurred, leaving me with a reading device that only lets me read the first half of the lines on the top half of the page.

Forrester Research’s James McQuivey likes to talk about KPH, a new metric that stands for Kindles Per Household, because he predicts e Ink Kindles will become convenience devices cheap enough to scatter around the house for various family members. Luckily for Eric, the KPB (Kindles Per Boat) total for Odyssey is two. His mother, Katie Loss, sent her son off with her Kindle 3, which has now been activated for the rest of the journey.

Eric took the time yesterday to post a unique, seafaring user-interface comparison of the Kindle 2 and the Kindle 3, AKA Kindle Keyboard. He misses the row of number keys that was eliminated with the Kindle Keyboard, and I remember thinking the same thing. I did learn how to press the Alt key on the K3, which turns the keys in the top row into number keys, but you have to remember which is which. You can also press the SYM button, and a dialog will appear where you can select numbers and symbols with the 5-way controller.

In the following passage, Eric demonstrates why digital rights management (DRM) is such a pain in the keel:

Since my mom’s Kindle is still registered as hers, it has a whole slew of new books on it, but I can’t transfer any of my Amazon purchases between Kindles. Fortunately Baen is an enlightened publisher and has had success selling non-DRM’d eBooks (and in fact offering up a significant free library), and Project Gutenberg obviously does as well, so I was able to finish the book I was in the middle of by transferring it to the new Kindle, along with a few others I had been planning on reading soon.

I hope Mom’s Kindle will last the rest of Eric’s circumnavigation of the globe. What an amazing adventure. I can’t wait to talk to him on his return, for the definitive World Traveler’s Guide to Kindles!

Fair winds and following seas!

Kindle Chronicles listener Tom Semple has forwarded the following helpful details on how to use the Kindle Touch’s “image viewer:”

If you are familiar with the image viewer that has existed on all Kindles prior to Kindle Touch, then you’ll appreciate how this works, though it is different, as with many things ‘Kindle Touch’. It’s not clear if this was added as part of the 5.1 update or was always there, but at any rate, you can indeed view jpg/png/gif files directly on Kindle Touch:

1. Connect via USB.
2. Using explorer/finder, create a folder named ‘Images’ at the ‘top’ or ‘root’ of the Kindle drive.
3. Add images to the folder in one of 3 ways:
- Drag images directly to Images folder. These will appear as individual items in the Images list with display name the same as the file name.
- Create a subfolder of Images and add images to that folder to be treated as a ‘gallery’. This will appear as an item whose display name is the same as the folder name.
- Package the image files in a .zip file and place this in the Images folder to be treated as a ‘gallery’. The display name will be the name of the .zip file.
(Note: ‘large’ images may not appear in the Images item list or display as part of a collection. I don’t know if the limit is one of resolution or of file size, or a combination of both. Empirically, I was able to display a 2500×2500 pixel image, but not one that was 5000×5000.)
4. ‘Eject’ Kindle from computer.
5, Make sure the ‘Filter By’  option is set to ‘All Items’ (should say ‘My Items (n of n)’ in header bar.)
6. Jump to last page by tapping ’1 of n’ label in header bar and entering ’99′ (or any number greater than or equal to number of pages.)
7. On this page (or the previous page, depending on how items are paginated) there should be an item named ‘Images’ (along with ‘Dictionaries’, ‘Periodicals: Back Issues’, and ‘Archived Items’).
8. Tap on this item to view a list of image collection items.
9. Tap on an item to view.
10. Use page turn gestures to cycle through images in a ‘gallery.’
11. When done viewing, use Home button or tap at top of screen to reveal Back button to go back to Images list.

Images are viewed scaled to fit the screen in their original orientation, anchored in the upper left corner of the screen. Unlike the image viewers of previous Kindles, there’s no pan/zoom or ability to rotate, so ideally you’d use an image manipulation program to make everything have a resolution of 600×800 in the desired orientation, for maximum efficiency and ‘prettiness’. Also there is no way to delete images from Kindle Touch short of hooking up the USB cable and using the computer’s file manager. Previous Kindles also save ‘reading position’ within a series of images, but Kindle Touch does not. So it is rather limited and I would say more of a curiosity than something useful (as the previous Kindle image viewer was).

I suspect this is part of an unfinished screen saver feature, where it would actually make sense to display only 600×800 images without any other frills. For example, if they just added a  ‘Set as screensaver?’ option that appears when you tap and hold one of the ‘Images’ items, it would make some people (at least the ones with non-Special Offer Kindles) very happy (unfortunately I tried this and it doesn’t work…). I’m really curious to know if this was there all along, or whether it got added by 5.1. I suspect it has been there all along: the procedure for ‘activating’ it is rather different than that for previous Kindles, which is why I didn’t discover it initially and assumed it was not there at all.

Thanks, Tom!

Judge Denise Cote

I just finished reading U.S. District Judge Denise Cote’s 56-page opinion and order in the eBooks class action lawsuit filed against Apple and five Defendant Publishers. Click here for the PDF.  Some of it is writing only a legal beagle could follow, but surprisingly long sections read like a novel or a well-written Harvard Business School case study. On May 15, Judge Cote denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss the lawsuit. What made as much news as that, though, was the clarity and oomph with which she described the case against Apple, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster.

Noting that the defendants argue the complaint against them “contains no independent allegations of a direct agreement to raise the price of eBooks,” Judge Cote penned this simple, declarative sentence: “The defendants are incorrect.” She goes on to recount the complaint’s charge that Hachette’s CEO in a meeting with an Amazon executive represented that Amazon’s $9.99 pricing for eBook best-sellers and new releases was a “big problem for the industry.” The judge opines that it’s a stretch to accept the defendants’ claim that the Hachette boss was talking about bookstores, not the other Publisher Defendants. “And there is more,” she continues, moving on to descriptions of separate meetings that four of the Publisher Defendants had with Amazon “on the very same day in which they made identical demands on Amazon to switch to the agency model.”

If you only have time to read a portion of Judge Cote’s order, I recommend the 17 pages starting at page 4. Titled “Background,” this section is a nearly thrilling account of how we got here. Judge Cote takes facts for this section from the complaint, and these facts are taken to be true for the purposes of her decision on whether to dismiss the lawsuit. As a narrative, “Background” is instructive reading for anyone who cares about eBooks and what we pay for them. In addition, I found the following nuggets to be enlightening:

• The five defendants plus Random House, which did not agree to Apple’s terms for inclusion in the iBook Store until March 1, 2011, published more than 90 percent of all hardcover New York Times bestsellers in 2009.
• By 2010, Amazon had captured 90 percent of eBooks sales volume in the U.S.
• The Complaint portrays the price-fixing conspiracy in three stages: 1) the “windowing” of eBooks–releasing hardcover books first, delaying the availability of eBook versions, 2) contracting with Apple in order to persuade Amazon to raise eBook prices, and 3) forcing an industry-wide shift to the agency model, under which publishers–not retailers–set the retail price for eBooks.
• By not joining the other five publishers and Apple until later, Random House increased its eBook sales by 250 percent in 2010 as it continued to sell them at $9.99.

Judge Cote will preside over the class action suit brought by Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, a Seattle law firm, as well as the antitrust case brought by the Department of Justice. The defendants are also negotiating with state attorneys general led by the AGs of Texas and Connecticut to reach a settlement that would enable the defendants to escape from the threat of the class action suit.

It is too soon to start counting your restitution payments for all those eBooks you bought in the past two years for more than $9.99. But it’s obvious that the legal challenges facing Apple and the Defendant Publishers will not be inexpensive and will not go away soon.