Tras veintiséis meses de apoyo de Google a este blog, nuestra relación toca a su fin.

Declaración.

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Ebooks Just Published es un espacio web tipo blog donde los autores pueden promocionar sus nuevos ebooks sin DRM, y los lectores descubrir nuevos libros de forma cómoda.

El espacio responde a las necesidades de su creador, Mark Gladding, que desde su start up australiana ha lanzado la aplicación Text2Go.

Text2Go convierte los ebooks en audio, de manera que puedes escucharlos en cualquier sitio con gadgets como el iPod.

Para que esto funcione, el libro debe estar desprotegido (sin DRM), lo que finalmente llevó al Mark Gladding a crear Ebooks Just Published, un lugar donde concentrar los libros que cumplan estos requisitos o una buena idea para promocionar su herramienta, que sólo cuesta 25 dólares.

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Como sabéis los ingleses tienen un peculiar sentido del humor a la hora de conceder premios literarios. Uno de los más destacados es el Bad Sex in Fiction Award, que cada año entrega la Literary Review a la peor descripción de una escena erótica en literatura. El premio, que el año pasado recayó póstumamente en Norman Mailer, ha sido para Rachel Johnson por su libro Shire Hell.

Los motivos que han llevado al jurado a decidirse por Johnson han sido dos. En primer lugar, las incongruentes metáforas sacadas del mundo animal que usa para describir actos sexuales (hay una polilla en un farol y un gato lamiendo leche; no digo más). Lo segundo es que la narradora se refiera al pene de su amante como a una tercera persona, en un momento aterrador en el que tememos que cobre vida propia. Juzgad vosotros mismo este festín de malsexo:

JM se acerca y me empuja delicadamente sobre la piel falsa. Intento levantarme para besarle – es tan encantador, el besarse – pero vuelve a empujarme. Le gusta besarme por todas partes antes de hacer lo demás. Empieza por mis ojos, y planta un tierno beso en cada párpado.

Pasa a mis orejas, un beso que hace que mis pezones se pongan erectos, y me hace emitir pequeños gemidos que ahogan en mis oídos el pesado, distrayente sonido de las hojas del muelle de Cumberbatch y las lacrimosas ortigas y las altas hierbas muy cercanas que se encorvan y tambalean.

Las manos de JM acarician mis pechos, ahora, y se me permite devolverle el beso, pero no por mucho tiempo, ya que se zafa para dar a cada pecho la atención que se merece. Mientras mordisquea y tira con su boca, sus manos encuentran mi matojo, y con dedos ligeros revolotea por ahí, como si fuera una polilla atrapada en un farol.

Casi gritando tras cinco minutos agónicamente placenteros, lo agarro para meterlo, mientras golpea furiosamente contra nuestros dos vientres, dentro, pero él sujeta mis dos brazos y mete su lengua en mi núcleo, como un gato bebiendo de una escudilla de nata para no perder ni una gota. Me encuentro agarrándole de las orejas y tirando de los bucles que lo coronan, a pesar mío, y extraños sonidos animales se me escapan mientras que el culminante crescendo wagneriano se apodera de mí. Deseo realmente en este momento que todos los Spodders estén, como requerido, asistiendo a la reunión sobre limpieza de babosas o lo que sea.

John Updike, cuatro veces nominado al premio, ha recibido una mención de honor por una escena de su reciente La viudas de Eastwick. Se trata de una descripción de sexo oral llamativamente grumosa que mi delicado estómago me impide transcribir.

Vía | The Guardian

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Two services that track the iPhone App Store - AppShopper and 148Apps, announced on Saturday that there have been over 10,000 iPhone applications released on the US App Store. The number of currently available applications is just shy of 10,000 due to discontinued apps and a few that have been pulled by Apple (e.g. trademark disputes, terms of service violations, etc.). AppSherpa believes that it will only be a few more days until there are 10,000 iPhone applications available for sale on the US App Store. Total international App Store numbers are not being tracked by anyone outside of Apple, as far as I can tell.

Quick stats highlights from the first 10,000 iPhone applications:

• Games are the leading category, accounting for one in four of total applications. This reinforces Apple's recent marketing campaign around games.
• $0.99 is the most common price point, although one in four applications are free.
• The most expensive application currently for sale is iRa by Lextech Labs for $899.99. This is video surveillance application that integrates with a number of CCTV systems.
• The entire iPhone App Store catalog could be purchased for just over $30,000, although there's only room to fit 129 of them on your iPhone or iPod touch at any given time (148 apps in total, but that includes the default applications from Apple).

Ben Lorica and Roger Magoulas in the Market Research Group at O'Reilly Media have been doing an excellent job tracking the iPhone applications market. You can see some of this work on Ben's Radar posts. I am looking forward to seeing an update from Roger and Ben now that we're crossed the 10,000 mark.

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This morning, Slashdot had a link to a blog post pondering the ethics of downloading illicit (”pirated”) e-books of out-of-print books that are not available as legitimate e-books. The post generated a large number of comments, both on the blog post itself and on the Slashdot discussion of it.

[A]ccording to Russell Davis, former chair (and now president of the Science Fiction Writer’s Association) of the SFWA’s Copyright Committee, “electronic infringement is theft”. From a legal perspective, I suppose that is true.   And given that as an Open Source programmer, I depend on Copyright Law to assure that my wishes as an author are upheld, it would be hypocritical for me assume that I should be able to ignore Copyright Law just because it is inconvenient.

The blogger lists several possible alternatives—just buying the dead-tree version, buying it and OCR’ing it himself, buying it and also downloading the illicit version, just downloading the illicit version and sending the author a money order for what it would have cost—and solicits readers’ advice. He gets quite a bit of it, and much of it seems to be tilted toward going ahead and downloading it, whether he buys the dead-tree version or not.

Of course, the entire problem might possibly be avoided when Google Books’s settlement finally comes through and Google is able to sell electronic versions of out-of-print books that they scan. (Although Google’s books would be PDFs, perhaps they could be converted into the blogger’s preferred format of choice.)

Chris Meadows, Fictionwise, Google, Uncategorized, book publishing, books, copyright, e-book, e-books, ebook, ebooks | No Comments »

Most readers of this blog are opposed to DRM. But publishers continue to be enamored of it, and continue to say that if you really are a legitimate customer, doing nothing wrong, you shouldn’t even notice it, so why should you care?

Well, publishers have it wrong. They clearly have no understanding of how the average customer’s computer set-up, and life, works.

My latest headache, from one of the gentler forms of DRM, is proof of this.

eReader system explained

The background: I do not support overly restrictive DRM formats, but I have in the past (and more so recently, since my iPod Touch purchase) tolerated secure eReader files, because it’s the only way to read many new releases. Iit seemed to the least intrusive of the options.

eReader DRM uses a scrambled version of your credit card number as the encryption key—you technically can share the book if you want to, but you’d have to share your credit card number, too, so its use as the unlock code is for nearly all customers an effective deterrent against sharing. The software for the iPod Touch even stores the code for you so you don’t have to reenter it every time you download a new book.

Sounds great, right? Until you have a problem with your credit card.

When credit cards get compromised…

I found out last week that my credit card had been compromised. These things happen. I get excellent customer service from Mastercard, and when the company noticed suspicious activity on my account, it froze my card and notified me. Mastercard will be sending out a new one and all is well. But what about all my ebooks?

Some poking around on eReader FAQ pages and MobileRead boards (time spent: 30 minutes) offered a few solutions. I can continue to buy books with the new card, and keep the old card number handy to unlock the older titles. But I can only have three credit card numbers on file with eReader, so that might not be the safest way to preserve my purchases.

Or, when I get the new card, I can notify eReader and have them convert all my past purchases over to the new code—but then I have to re-download all my past purchases again and re-unlock them (time spent: who knows, given we’re looking at more than 40 books here).

DRM as a Time-waster

How is all this time that I, a paying customer, am spending on all of this nonsense contributing to the noble cause of promoting reading and promoting legitimate purchases?

It’s actually deterring purchases, because the more I buy, the more work I have to go to in terms of re-downloading and re-unlocking when the new card arrives. How is  subjecting paying customers to all of this manual labor serving any purpose other than annoying the very people who, by purchasing in the first place, are proving that they are not the problem as far as piracy goes?

Reward for playing by the rules: A massive headache

For many new releases, I simply don’t have a choice if I want to read them. It’s eReader, or something worse. But I’m thinking I may need to do some more investigating as to author websites, Baen Webscriptions or other places where DRM-free options might be available. or, perhaps, to investigate ways to hack my eReader files so unlocking them in this way is not necessary, even if such hacking is technically not permitted.

I am not a pirate, or a criminal, or a person who wants to deprive the author of their due. But all my “playing by the rules” has gotten me so far is a massive headache and daunting, tedious manual labor looming over my head when my new card arrives.

These things happen, with credit cards. If it happens again in another few years, I may have a hundred books by then. How long would it take to re-download that amount? I shudder to contemplate.

Publishers, please wake up to the reality that your paying, purchasing customers are not the problem. Let them buy DRM-free books that they can use and enjoy without all of these shenanigans.

Moderator’s note: The eReader screenshot is from me, not Ficbot, though I think she might enjoy Scoop, the book shown. Meanwhile Ficbot’s misery serves as a reminder to the IDPF that it’ll be playing with fire if it tightly couples ePub with DRM. Think revenue, as opposed to ideology. DRM is a sales toxin. The good folks at eReader would be the first to acknowledge customers’ hatred of it—they offer DRM only because certain publishers demand it. - D.R.

DRM, E-books and all that, Ficbot, Uncategorized, e-book, e-books, e-books and other digipubs, ebook, ebooks, ereader | No Comments »

La Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara es una de las citas más importantes del año para todos los que nos ocupamos del mundo del libro y la edición. Frankfurt, la Liber y Guadalajara, seguidos muy de cerca por la Fil de Buenos Aires, son las oportunidades en las que editores, distribuidores, autores, libreros, críticos y lectores se encuentran. Cada una de ellas tiene características que la diferencian de las demás pero en América Latina, Guadalajara es la gran fiesta. Y aquí estoy, al menos por unos días, para la sección profesional, asi que trataré de traerles cada día, un poco de todo lo que se realice por acá.

Antes de eso, sin embargo, quisiera compartir un vídeo que muestra muy bien cómo es la feria de Guadalajara. Se trata del vídeo institucional de este encuentro que, además, tiene una página web en permanente mantenimiento donde pueden ver día a día qué es lo que está ocurriendo y va a ocurrir.

Ayer fue la inauguración y hubo dos personalidades resaltantes: Antonio Lobo Antúnes y Carlos Fuentes. El primero de ellos por haber sido el galardonado con el Premio Literario de la Feria, el polémico ex Premio Rulfo, y el segundo porque es el gran homenajeado de estos días por su cumpleaños número 80 y por los cincuenta años de la publicación de su novela La región más transparente. El país homenajeado en esta Feria es Italia y estará abierta al público hasta el 7 de diciembre. Habrá mucho que contar y comentar.

Sitio Oficial | Fil Guadalajara

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Kindle sellers are aiming for “Buy It Now”  prices as high as $1,495 on eBay.

The $1,494 is hardly typical, but it still reflects the demand, now that customers must wait weeks and weeks for new Kindles to arrive from Amazon itself.

Related: Get a Refurbished Kindle—in Stock Now!, from Bees (Books) on The Knob. Alas, when I checked, the $329 refurbs were sold out, and used units began at $696.

Related: Parts I and II of an e-book-gizmo buying guide from DearAuthor.com. The first part deals with dedicated machines like the Sony Readers, while the second discusses multifunction devices,including Asus-class notebooks. Also see a TeleBlog item on an interesting $350 Asus now on sale.

Amazon Kindle, E-books and all that, Uncategorized, e-book, e-books, e-books and other digipubs, ebook, ebooks, kindle | No Comments »

If you go by Google’s search reports, interest in the ePub standard has rocketed in recent months. Switzerland, Belgium, Brazil, France and Russia and India are Regions 1-6, with the U.S. coming in at Number 7 and the U.K. at Number 8. Here’s a glimpse into Google Trends’ methodology. ePub usage is just a speck of, say, the popularity of Adobe PDF, but graph shows terrific potential.

ePub could be on its way to becoming a true international, multilingual standard, and I hope that publishers industry will not shoot themselves in the foot by cluttering things up with silly DRM-based regionalization schemes. E-books inherently lend themselves to global marketing. Let’s not hurt them by trying to impose paper-book models on them. While I love the idea of regional editions of international best-sellers, let them compete on merit, as opposed to a DRMish approach.

DRM, EPub, Uncategorized, e-book, e-book ergonomics, e-books, eBabel, ebook, ebooks | No Comments »

The Android incarnation of FBReader, which can handle ePub among other formats, now has “more Androidish scrolling,” according to Freshmeat, which is offering downloads.

Also see the FBReader site for the latest on FBReaderJ, the Android version. “In future releases the list will be extended to support the same formats as the original FBReader. Direct reading from zip, tar and grip archives is supported.”

While cheering on FBReader, I’m also wondering when Stanza will make it to the Android phones.

If I were Lexcycle, Stanza’s developers, I would regard Android development as a at least a partial precaution against possible future moves by Apple to get in on the software action.

Android, E-books and all that, EPub, FBReader, Uncategorized, e-book, e-books, e-books and other digipubs, ebook, ebooks, iPhone and Touch iPod, iPod Touch, ipod | No Comments »