LibraryLink

Barnes and Noble booksellers launched their e-reader not long ago. The company had tagged it as the Nook, I guess for New Book, or something. Nook sounds suspiciously like “nuke” to me, but what do I know and they didn’t ask me. Anyway, B&N was surprised (”hey, these things are moving”), pleased (”Oh good, we won’t get stuck with unsold units!”) and dismayed (”Oh God, we don’t have enough”), all in short order, to find out that their inital order for the gadgets was way too small. People were snapping them up like Billy-Be-Damned. And now, the whole first shipment of Nooks is gone, all sold out. This is really not bad for a first-generation gadget launch, so B&N has a little room to be pleased. But, I guess they didn’t understand how quickly the scene had changed. Amazon’s Kindle really broke the ice on the reader front, introducing some very swift motion after a long period of stasis. So, B&N under-ordered and now they have a bunch of ticked off customers who will either wait for their Nook, or go to the Kindle. I think SONY is having some of the same problems with its Reader device.

Despite the general satisfaction, all the makers and sellers of e-readers are tugging their collars nervously in anticipation of the 800 lb gorilla’s advent. And that is, the much vaunted and feared Apple E tablet. Nobody knows for sure if Apple really is working on something like this. And nobody knows what kind of a thing it will turn out to be, if they are. But, the general expectation is that the company which brought you the Ipod, the Iphone and the changes that came with these products, will not pass up a chance to go for the hat trick and launch a large-format reader cum other stuff device that will be a significant jump in capacity and function. Some support was given to the speculation by the news that Apple had commissioned Conde-Nast publishers, owners of some big glossy print mags, to prepare a digital version of WIRED magazine. So, we shall see what we shall see. But,
“Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat”, so if Apple doesn’t launch soon, they’ll miss the holiday season entirely. On the other hand, so? We’ll keep you posted.

The parties in the suit over Google’s digitization project have offered a new version of the settlement to the judge presiding over the case. It is intended to meet objections raised by the Dept. of Justice and by other groups, claiming that the previous draft of the agreement gave Google way, way too much clout. So, the judge ordered everyone to get back to work and come up with something better. The new draft will doubtless by parsed in excruciating detail by all those involved and by interested outsiders, so it looks as though we will have to keep an eye on this for a while. There is general agreement about the benefits to be expected from the availability of millions of books online, but that’s about where the agreement stops. Everybody is leery of Google, and the DOJ, after years of indifference, is watching very closely. Reports I’ve seen so far are a bit sketchy, but some things emerged: books from non-English speaking nations are excluded, more attention is paid to the problem of “orphan” works, etc. But, more substantial account will be coming out soon. In the meantime, read this summary from WIRED:

Deal2

Concurring Opinions is a blog for law profs, and I look in on it from time to time to see what’s going on there in terms of copyright, patent, IP and similar considerations. A recent post has a discussion of the revised Google book deal, with an embedded link to another story on CNET.
Concur

If you steal, steal big. That’s a good motto. After all, why waste all that dishonesty on some petty stakes. Aim high. The same held true for young Dr. Jan Hendrik Schoen. Only for him, the operative word was “fake”. Fake big. Back in the crazy Nineties, Dr. Schoen was the Wunderkind of venerable Bell Labs. In what seemed an absolute blizzard of creative work, Dr. S. zipped out major articles for prestigious journals such as Science and Nature, the two vying to get submissions from him, so hot a property was he. In one particular mens mirablilis, Schoen zipped out seven papers, a rough average of one every four days, and shot them off. His area was conductive properties of unusual materials, and there was a great desire for good news on that front, which he provided. Apparent breakthroughs rained, Bell Labs managers were dizzy with joy, and rushed for photo ops with him. Alas, alack-a-day. There were no breakthroughs, but a great deal of very creative phonus bolonus, smoke and mirrors stuff which got as far as it did for a number of reasons, all of which are clearly set forth in a new book reviewed in the American Scientist:

PLASTIC FANTASTIC: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World. Eugenie Samuel Reich. iv + 266 pp. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. $26.95.

Exactly how Schoen managed it is pretty well laid out by the author, who makes some interesting comparison to the history of frauds and fakes in early Humanism, following the lead of Anthony Grafton, who wrote the classic text on this matter. Some of the parallels are downright eerie. The major journals don’t come off too well, and Schoen was clever in using the reviewiers’ comments as a tool to increase the plausability of his own “finding’s. Of course, there were questions and doubts. Who writes seven major papers in one month? But it all looked so sweet and so hot, that the skeptics were told to hush, or worse, to be more like Schoen and get great results without a lot of pricey gear. Management chaos at Bell Labs didn’t help either. Too many turnovers, too many new people who know too little about bench work. In all, it was a Perfect Storm, to use yet again that much overworked comparison. Anxious, gulllible people wanted something new and hot. A clever guy gave them what they wanted. Then, it all went bang. End of Story.

It sounds sort of Russian, doesn’t it? But it’s a nonce word, I think they call them, and it’s a blended form, describing a new combination of book and video. Today’s New York Times has an article on this mini-trend. The publishers Simon and Schuster are launching four vooks, and other publishers, and authors, are fiddling with the idea. In the case of a fitness vook, the reader can call up demonstrations of the various excercises. Prof. Robert Darnton of the Harvard Libraries and himself a scholar of French popular songs, has embedded, I guess is the right word, performances of some of them in his work on the subject. It’s all very intriguing in a speculative sort of way. Some authors and critics are skittish about the idea. Blending two different media formats has usually meant bad news for one of them, but that was then and this is now. I have to say that I would have appreciated a little real time demonstration at various times over the years when I was wrestling with something I wasn’t getting…junior algebra for one thing. And in the case of music or art, the case is easy to see. So, I’m all for it. It won’t work everyplace and people should fight the temptation to stick graphics into a text just because they can. There is probably a market for something like this, a big one, and that market will sort itself out fairly quickly. In the meantime read/watch your vook.

Vook

SONY showed that it wasn’t being scared away from the ebook market, when it announced the newest member of the SONY reader family, one called the Daily Edition. This is a a newbie, in fact I don’t think it’s in production yet, but at an event held in the New York Public Library, SONY showed a prototype. Free wireless service is included in the deal. The Daily Edition is the biggest of the three Reader models, will sell for $199, and be available in December. I’ll bet the SONY execs are begging and pleading to get models out faster than that, in order to maximize whatever advantage the Christmas season might give them. If things are the way they were last year, that won’t be much. The name, Daily Edition, suggests but does not prove that SONY is gunning for the newspaper/magazine market in addition to books. Just a thought, that.
So, let’s see who’s in the running. Amazon, of course, with its Kindles, then SONY with its three machines, then Barnes and Noble with PlasticLogic, maybe, then AUSA, and then TIME, INC. That’s five groups developing or selling dedicated readers. In addition, there are apps for various hand-held units, like Iphones and Ipods and such. Add in the market formed by laptop owners only, not desktops, and you start to come up with some pretty impressive numbers of people who might be willing to pay to download books, enough to make the little hearts of publishing execs go pitter-patter at a rapidly accelerating rate. Of course, there are problems. None of the current dedicated readers will do color. Relatively small screen size is not good for technical materials, or for anything that requires demonstration or illustration: art history, how to manuals, engineering or science texts, etc. But, for the new Dan Brown, any one would do just fine. Ye pays yer money and ye takes yer cherse, as the pitchman says. Two years or so ago the ebook reader arena was empty. Now, gladiators are pushing in from all sides.

SONY