Fusion View

When we use the phrase “Indian Summer” these days, it conjures up images of a long, lazy summer miraculously extending into late September and maybe even the early weeks of October. It is a luxury and a gift of sunshine in the Northern Hemisphere, even as the evenings grow shorter and winter is inevitable. For a few extra weeks, we can bathe in sunshine and delay putting on our cardigans or turning on the central heating.

I used to think that the phrase was derived from a likening of this long summer in the past to the then British colony, India - as in this summer is so long and hot, it’s like being in India. But, no, “Indian Summer” has a more sinister derivation - and it’s not from the East but from the West, from America.

I’ve been reading Daniel Boorstin’s cultural history of America “The Americans” and in the first volume, “The Colonial Experience”, which tells the story of the American colonials from the Pilgrim Fathers to the American Revolution, he explains the derivation of the phrase “Indian Summer”. It goes like this:

Picture the American backwoodsman and his family settled in homesteads in the Eastern States of America from the 1500s through to the 1700s - around Massachussetts and Pennsylvania in the days before the West was discovered. They would be farmers, mainly, living in isolated country, with the occasional garrisoned fort as the main fortification in an otherwise wilderness area. The Native-Americans, then known as Indians, populated that wilderness that had up till the arrival of the white man had been theirs.

The Indians would often raid the homesteads in the summer when the weather was favourable for such activity, much in the same way as armies would fight in the summer and generally bed down in the winter - especially as the American winters could be harsh, with thick snow hampering swift movement. So in the summers, many homesteaders would be fearful for their lives, either holing up in the forts for safety or exposed back at the farm, watchful for attack and exerting limited resources to fight off the Indians. They looked forward to the winters which, although harsh, gave them respite from the Indian attacks.

As the weather turned cool, the homesteaders would return to their homes from the fort and drop their guard, trusting to the snow to discourage the Indian attacks. But when the Indian summer unexpectedly revived the warmth and melted the first snows - those extra weeks of warmth and sunshine gave the Indians fresh opportunities to attack the vulnerable colonials. So when people back then spoke of an Indian summer, they did so with dread and fear.

I won’t be able to use that phrase again without thinking of tomahawks, scalps and the smouldering ruins of log cabins…

Picture: thanks to Harry Richardson from flickr.com (CCL)

When I visit someone’s home, I can’t help but checkout the books on their shelves. Often, I find that with very good friends, we have many books and interests in common. But what is the most interesting is when I visit the home of someone that I get on pretty well with and like a lot but there’s just something that I can’t put my finger on - for some reason, we do not connect at a very deep level and I just have a sense that we’ll never be the best of friends. When I visit their home, it all becomes clear - they do not have a single book in their home, apart from maybe a few cookery books or travel guides. In my house, every single room, including the hallway is full of books - and I’ve just given a whole pile to Oxfam to make space for new books.

It’s not that I talk about books and writing very much with my friends, even with those who do have a lot of books nor is it that I am only interested in making friends with people who like books. I think it’s just the fact that I read a lot and with the friends who also enjoy reading, we have a connection that is about exploring ideas, analysis and arguments that books can give you. Books also offer a perspective on time, space and people in that they tell you about history, landscape, context, psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics and just plain old human stories. People who don’t read miss out on that opportunity to travel beyond the immediate extent of their own experience and so I guess when we come together, we can laugh and enjoy each other’s company and give emotional support as friends would do - but we just do not have an overlapping breadth of interest.

Since I’ve been exploring ebooks and audio books in my Going Shelfless experiment, I have wondered what the future holds for us readers when we can no longer explore the full extent of each other’s libraries because everything is a digital file on a laptop or iPod or ebook reader. Will an aspect of friendship and social connection be lost?

Many book lovers have probably discovered this social network already but I’ve only just come across it. LibraryThing enables you to put a list of your books online - books you own, books you are currently reading, books you’d like to read etc - to show to the world and also to see who else has the same reading taste as you.

You sign up for a free account (which allows you to list up to 200 books - after that, you need to pay for an annual or a lifetime account at pretty cheap rates) and you can then list your books by finding them on various online bookstores which have been intergrated with LibraryThing - clicking on the book link automatically inserts them in your library. There’s a Talk forum where you can discuss a particular book. There are also different book Groups you can join sorted by genre eg there’s a Science Fiction group and a Crime, Thriller and Mystery group.

In true social media fashion, you can also put a widget on your blog that shows random books from your library. You can see mine below:

You can see my full library (or at least the books I’ve gotten round to listing) at: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/yangmayooi

You can also add other LibaryThing members as Friends, as you might add Friends on Facebook or MySpace. One way to make friends is that you can see how many other people have a book that you have in their library - you can discover who they are if they have a public profile by drilling down through the numbers to specific profiles, and you can invite them to be your friend that way. Or you can search for your friends using the Search function.

I don’t have the time to catalogue ALL the books I own but I may use it to log current books as they have a short cut button you can put on your browser bar to add books to your library as you purchase them from Amazon and I usually buy my books from there anyway.

I wonder if members of LibraryThing list all the books they own and have ever read or is there the temptation to omit the more soically unacceptable ones - the low brow bodice-ripper, say, or the more desperate sounding self-help books that you might hide behind another layer of more worthy titles or even keep under your bed….

If you’re a member of LibraryThing, add me as a Friend. Also, please share your experience of this network and how it may have added to your enjoyment of books and reading. And whether you “censor” your list for public consumption…!

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For those who would like to see all modern gadgets destroyed, this little video will confirm their belief that within the heart of technology there lives an evil monster…

It’s actually an ad for No-Evil.net, a US cellphone carrier that offers no contract accounts - a clever use of viral video for marketing! I’m showing it here not because I have any reason to advertise their product for them but because it’s a fun video - and that’s the key to creating a good viral video.

One of the joys - and also problems - of books is that they are physical objects, which means they take up space. Taking up space has a cost in today’s crowded world. To get a book from its publisher to you, the reader, requires it to be printed, stored and distributed to the book shops - with all the associated printing presses, paper, bindings, warehousing and transport and fuel costs that are involved. Where a book is globally distributed, you also need to factor in the air fuel and freighting costs and The carbon footprint implications of that. On top of it all, the bookshops where we, the readers, go to finally get our hands on the book have to cover the cost of their premises - and you can imagine how much that could be in the centre of a major city like London: which inevitably means that they can never stock all the books ever published. In addition, there’s the army of people to pay for - from the literary agents to the editors and sales and marketing team to the printers and truck drivers and warehouse workers and bookshop staff. All this huge economic machinery is supported by the humble book, scribbled by a little lone writer in his/ her garrett. Let’s say that each book is sold at an average of €10 per unit. That is an awful lot of books each author must sell to give the publisher and distributor and book shop a return on all those costs.

Which is why in today’s market, it is usually the populist mega-sellers that will be taken on by the agents, publishers and book retailers. The result is that it is increasingly difficult for an unknown writer to be published and authors who are doing only moderately well (the Mid Listers) are finding themselves being dropped. The keepers of the machinery cannot risk poor sales - it’s a business after all.

My recent exploration into ebooks has got me thinking: can they offer new opportunities for writers and publishers so that there is less reliance on this clunky, inefficient process?

OK, the technology of the dedicated ebook reader isn’t quite there yet with a number of functions that still need to be fine-tuned. They are also really too expensive for mass appeal to consumers at the moment. There are also too many conflicting formats - like the early day of videotape where there were the incompatible formats of VHS and Betamax. And, yes, as Margaret Atwood pointed out at the Frankfurt Book Fair recently, you can’t read an e-book in the bath.*

But let’s say, in a few years time, they manage to improve the technology and we have ultra-portable e-readers with great screens that are easy on the eye, pages turn easily and quickly and the price falls to something sensible. Let’s say they come to an agreed format so we can read any ebook on any e-reader or device. And there’s a waterproofing accessory (as there is for iPods) so you can take your e-reader into the bath or swimming pool. At the point, it will be more likely that the average non-techie consumer will buy an e- reader in the way that many people now have an iPod or mp3 player and this will make the market for ebooks truly sustainable.

In this context, I think these might be some of the opportunities for writers and publishers:

# Many writers are already today trying out self-publishing, especially if they are having difficulty getting their work accepted through the conventional publishing process. As I’ve reported on elsewhere on this blog, self-publishing can mean that you end up with boxes of your books piled up in your house, which you are then responsible for distributing to bookshops or selling directly to your readers. Self-publishing your work as an ebook cuts out those storage and distribution problems - your ebook can be easily downloaded direct by your readers either from your website or an online store like Amazon. In fact, Amazon.com in the US already offers a service to authors for creating an ebook that can be sold direct from the Amazon site to readers using the Amazon Kindle ereader device. Another company Yudu offers a service to authors to create multimedia ebooks. I haven’t tried either service - if you have, or if you’ve published your book as an ebook, please do add a comment and tell me about your experience.

# The problem for any self-published author is getting noticed - whether your work is published as a physical object or an ebook. Marketing your ebook is going to be the biggest time commitment you are likely to have to factor in. However, strategic use of social media and other online platforms as well as the traditional methods of flogging a book will all help. The advantage of the ebook format is that you can give away the first chapter easily by email or pdf as a free sample to entice your readers.

# Physical books typically have a shelf life of around 6 months, after which the bookshops send them back to the publisher for pulping or to be sold at the discount stores. This is to make way for new titles and is entirely due to the limitations of space in the retail units. Ebooks take up very little digital space and can be made available forever online. Publishers can take advantage of what author Chris Anderson called The Long Tail but maintaining books in e-format so that they can reap the profit from occasional sales into the distant future - with many backlist titles continually building up, the long tail principle indicates that the sum total of the occasional sale of individual titles will add up to quite a lot. This will help the Mid Listers who may find their books all out of stock in the conventional publishing cycle and who may also be able remain profitable for the publishers since the cost of maintaining their physical books is taken out of the cost-benefit equation.

# Physical books will never disappear, in the way the CDs are still around in spite of music downloads - and in fact, vinyl records are even making a comeback. If publishers move towards issuing any book in both physical and e-format, it will be immediately available for the two different kinds of consumer and in the long term, the ebook will remain purchasable even when the stock of the physical one runs out.

# At the moment, ebooks are electronic versions of books written for paper. As the electronic medium itself becomes more sustainable, can its strengths be exploited by writers to create texts that are multi-layered, multi-linked and multi-media? Blogs incorporate links to other blogs or websites, pictures, audio or video within the text of the particular blog post. Can ebooks evolve the nature of writing so that it encompasses a wider experience beyond the immediate text through including links and other multi-media? For factual books, this is could potentially add to their usefulness in e-format by enabling the reader to click on a link to go direct to the cited reference, for example. For fiction, it might lead to, say, the floor plan of a building being made available in a thriller if the protagonist is looking at a floor plan in contemplation of carrying out a heist in the building. Or could jazz music be incorporated to evoke the mood in a noir detective story set in the 1940s?

# In the way that DVDS include bonus features around a movie, could ebooks include similar special items such as an interview with the author, research notes along the lines of “The Making of….” and other location, historical or background information, especially where the novel is set against the backdrop of real events or an interesting locale?

# Purists might argue that this is not what reading books is all about - but all you need to do is look at the popularity of the Harry Potter franchise, or even the Jane Austen one where there’s the book but around it, there are the movies, the spin-off books, the museums, the memorabilia, the TV series, the location tours etc. It is clear that fans of book based stories want to carry on living the experience in other ways and to offer multi-media and other “added value” features can make that ebook an attractive option to its physical counterpart.

# Do writers in the future need to see themselves not as merely text-bound narrators but as multi-media storytellers? Personally, I think this is a potentially exciting time for a writer who is able to embrace the multi-format style of telling their story. An interesting and highly profitable experiment in multi-format, multi-media narrative has already played out through the franchise of The Matrix - the full arc of the story encompasses the three movies as well the video game versions and film shorts. You can enjoy each separate medium without knowing anything about the storylines going on the other media but if you watch the movies, play the games and take in the short films, you get a deeper, richer experience of the world of The Matrix and its characters. I’m not saying that the humble ebook necessarily can take on a highly complex and sophisticated Hollywood narrative such as The Matrix project - I think that knowing that such a form of storytelling has been a huge success for the creators of The Matrix can inspire writers to play with how to convey their message via new and different media.

The one thing I haven’t mentioned is copyright, DRM (Digital Rights Management) or a viable business model for ebooks, especially multi-media ones. These issues are going to be key to the success of not only the attractiveness of the eformat to content creators but also to consumers embracing the medium. I haven’t analysed these aspects in sufficient detail to say more than that, at this stage, and there are greater experts than me grappling with this complex problem out there who have yet to solve it! All I would say is that ebooks offer exciting creative and commercial possibilities for writers and publishers and many of the problematic issues are likely to be resolved over time and through trial and error - as with the adaptiation of any new technology.

Photo: from iliadreader.co.uk product page

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Nicholas Bennett is the creator and founder of BooksInMyPhone.com - and also husband of my fav cousin. Whenever we’ve visited them in Melbourne, Australia, Nick has always had his nose in a book, magazine or computer. I never really knew what he did - only that it was something clever involving computer code. So when he unveiled BooksInMyPhone.com, a project he had been working on alongside his day job, I was really Wow-ed! Continuing my current investigation into ebooks and the future of reading/ publishing, here is an interview with Nick which we conducted by email.

Can you tell us something about yourself?

A life long bibliophile, I am renowned / infamous for reading while walking. I always get shtick for the time a family fireman friend happened to be driving past with the boys in the fire engine. He started up the sirens to attract my attention so he could give me a ‘hale well met my friend’ wave - I was of course oblivious, engrossed in some book and unable to imagine the passing siren could have anything to do with me. Apart form loving books my day job is creating large complex internet delivered software systems.

How did you come to get the idea for BooksInMyPhone?

Since I was the archetypical 13 year old SciFi reader I’d know that one day you’d be able to carry ‘the library of congress’ (the international unit for ‘large amounts of information’) in a handheld - they just never seemed to arrive.

My wife gifted me a new phone and I noticed the specs mentioned “Java Capable” - it just made me wonder if I could write the reader I wanted. After a few prototypes I realized that it was actually a really good reading experience.

The future had arrived.

There is huge amount of information available on the net, and more and more each year. Initiatives like archive.org, Project Gutenberg, distributed proofreaders project, and Google’s book scanning are digitising mountains of texts. I love that, I love that it’s there. But I’m never going to sit down and read
a book at my computer - I spend too much time there as it is - and I’m never going to lug a laptop wherever I go.

Everything really flowed out of those two sources.

What did it take to build the site for BooksInMyPhone?

There was a LONG list of capabilities we had to get up to speed on: MySQL, PHP, Sun mobile java, Web Hosting, copyright law, international law, html, ccs, ip geo location, sourcing books, choosing books, reviews, licensing, cryptography, browser architecture, phone capability models, over the air provisioning, …

While modern phones are powerful they are often ‘hobbled’ in mysterious ways, even high end phones with file systems and .doc file viewers are not really suitable for reading books - “was I on page 2506 or 2605?” They also tend to waste screen real estate on info junk. I wanted a spare clean experience that made the most of the phone to connect with the author’s voice. I went through many prototypes; playing with different feature sets till I found something I really enjoyed reading with. Once I’d decided to share I cut it down to make it as simple as possible to use: ’start it up, turn the pages, back and forward by chapter’.

Given a reader the next question was ‘which books?’ 100,000 is ‘better’ than 50,000 - but sometimes less is more, we decided to focus on works that had stood the test of time and formed the core of the western literary tradition. Tiny phone screens are very unforgiving, source texts are not guaranteed to read well; tables, quotations, and odd typographic usage can destroy readability; large files can ‘choke’ phones or make the reader feel lost in a Kafkaesque stream of text. We wanted to provider blurbs/reviews to help people find book they did not already have in mind. I think an important part of the site is supporting this ‘content discovery’.

I think the most amazing part of the whole experience was the fantastic range of resources / capabilities available through the Internet. With some starting skills, an awful lot of trial and error and research in the middle of the night (day job! family!) anyone with perseverance can go from a vision while sitting at the kitchen table to providing a service with global reach. It’s really mind blowing…and it’s really just ‘the end of the beginning’.

What are the most popular downloads?

In no particular order: Lena Rivers from our ‘Best Sellers’ collection, Charles Stross’s Accelerando, Hamlet, Cory Doctorow’s works, A Christmas Carol, Peter Watts Blindsight (which I’d highly recommend - diamond hard SciFi with tight plot and characterizations caught up in an explosion of novel ideas), The Importance of Being Ernest, Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, Anna Karenina, Madam Bovary, Ben Hur, Pride and Prejudice, Moby Dick.

Our ‘most downloaded authors’ are: Jules Verne, Charles Dickens, Cory Doctorow, H.G. Wells, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Leo Tolstoy, and Oscar Wilde.

You focus mainly on out of copyright books. Why?

There are a number of reasons.

One is that there is a huge resource of public domain texts that people don’t really appreciate can be freely used for any purpose. Lawrence Lessig wrote a great book Free Culture that charts the trajectory of copyright law (recent massive expansion of copyright duration) and where it is heading. He discusses the big difference between a free (as in speech) culture and a permission culture (don’t do anything till you have spoken to some lawyer$). One of the reasons to focus on out of copyright works is to promote free culture by making free culture available and compelling and demonstrating the potential of free culture.

Another reason is rooted in law. Current copyright law says that as soon as something is ‘fixed in a tangible medium’ it is protected from unauthorized copying for the life of the author + 50/70/90/… years. That means that unless the work is explicitly licensed for free distribution or the copyright has lapsed you need to negotiate with the rights holder before distributing the work. Negotiation with rights holders can be complex and time consuming, out of copyright works gave us an immediate critical mass of (great/timeless) works.

We have a small but growing collection of Creative Commons licensed works. The Creative Commons set of licences were created by Lawrence Lessig to allow creators to quickly and cheaply control which rights they reserve in a legally binding way. For example we have many ‘Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives’ licensed works - anyone can copy and distribute these works as long as they attribute the author, do not make money from the work, and do not make derivatives of the work (see the Creative Commons site for the full legal ‘code’). These works are a little harder to source as they are scattered around, but once found we know we can share them.

What is the future / scope for current authors who would like to distribute their books via digital means? What issues do they need to consider?

I think we are at the point where ‘distribution’ is solved; right now you can distribute directly to billions ‘from your living room’. The hard parts are making sure you get paid, making sure people find out they want your work, and making sure people will actually read digital works.

There have been a number of hardware approaches to liberating text from the computer, Amazon’s Kindle being only the latest in a long line of reader hardware. I think the phone as reader will eventually win out, your phone will become so powerful you will think it is a laptop, your laptop will become so small you’ll call it a phone - but right now as you read this there are literally billions of mobile phones that people could be using to read your work on - as soon as they stop fetishizing the book/codex form.

I think Tim O’Reily said something like ‘authors don’t need to worry about piracy, they need to worry about obscurity’. With our current technology it’s easy to set something free, but it’s hard to ensure that you *actually get paid* for *every copy*. One approach to this conundrum is to use free as part of the climb out of obscurity, use freely sharable work to drive buzz and allow social networks to spread the word about you. There is a whole spectrum of this approach from Penguin UK’s ‘Taster’ program of first chapters only, through Cory Doctorow’s ‘all my books are creative commons non commercial as well as proper/paper books for money’. It seems like the biggest decision point in digital distribution is where you want to sit in this spectrum.

The only way to ‘*make sure* you will get paid for *every copy*’ is using Digital Right Management, essentially using technical means backed by laws against breaking the protection (DMCA anti-circumvention - pioneered in the US of A and rolling out worldwide) to lock the digital content. This approach has a long history of putting out content under one protection scheme and then cancelling it leaving consumers unable to access content they paid for - this means it has a bad reputation with the consumers who are aware of it. There are also all sorts of strange double standards and grey areas; for example iTunes has some DRM scheme protecting music downloads but they tell you protected works can be written as an audio CD and then ripped DRM free - is that circumvention under DMCA? did they authorise you by telling you? did they not? what’s the DRM for then?…. Some hold that in the long run DRM is bad for both producer and consumer, some that without DRM the economics of content production would collapse.

The most important thing of all is getting mind share, putting that spark in someone’s head that makes them need to read your book. That is a big area and fairly well out of our scope and experience. What we can do is help translate that spark into an action - if someone hears about your work and has internet connectivity on their phone they could literally be reading it within minutes. We also aim to help people go from a book they enjoyed on our site to other books they might enjoy.

Are there any upgrades you are working on?

There is so much one could do, and only limited time and resource - knowing what people value before build out the functionality would really help. I’d really value any inputs and comments on what we currently do and what we could do. I’d encourage everyone to take a look at the site and try reading on their phone. Here are some of he possibilities I have in mind:

• A site makeover is in the final stages. This will give us a new look, improve ‘content discovery’, and open up some space for collaborative / user driven contributions.
• We would like to include collaborative filtering and inputs for tagging and reviews.
• User sharable reading lists might be interesting, see who is reading and has read what and why.
• There are a number of things that we are looking at to extend the current reader:
• nice typography / formatting in the books - plain text is a great start, but sometimes authors use italics etc to good effect.
• ‘Read Aloud’. I think I’d love this, the idea would be to let you seamlessly switch between reading the book and having the book read itself to you from where you left off. Imagine; you can snuggle up in bed reading till you fall asleep, wake up early and have the book continue reading itself to you while you do a morning run, and then pick up where it left off on the train as you go to work. Audio files have a quality voice synthesis won’t match for a long time but can be 80MB (that will bulk up your mobile bill).
• Java on phones has ‘hooks’ to open a web-browser, for example to open wikipedia on some word or phrase from the book. However the support for this is so patchy that we would have to build a simple web-browser within the reader. I have played with a prototype - but I’m not sure how compelling it would be relative to the effort to bring it up to a ‘beta’ standard.
• Distributed tagging - from within the book rate it, tag it, bookmark it, comment on it, have all the inputs posted to the web and incorporated in the ongoing user experience - sort of a twitter + bookglutton = ‘booktwitt’?
• Distributed proofreading - readers could click to ‘mark’ a page that does not format well or has some errors.

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We’re all suckers for kiddies giggling and this is a very cute one that will get you smiling in spite of the rain on this bank holiday Monday.

I wouldn’t like to be there when all of them are bawling their heads off…

For ebooks to succeed, the creators of digital versions of books need to think about books in a new way.

I’ve been checking out the different ebook softwares that you can download to your PC to read ebooks, since my post the other day about ebooks generally. I professed then to be a fan of the MobiPocket reader and after testing out Adobe Digital Editions reader, my views have not changed - Adobe’s reader is miles behind in its concept and that shows in its lack of usability.

MobiPocket seems to have succeeded in thinking about books in a new way in order to offer a multi-faceted experience of reading books on a digital device. It uses reflowable text so you can control not just the font size but also the line spacing, the actual font itself and you can zoom in and out on both text and images. All of these functions are intuitively laid out on the navigation pane and you can also use the mouse to control the page movements - which means you can sit back at a distance with your laptop on a coffee table and use just the mouse on one arm of your armchair to control page turning and accessing the controls.

Adobe has its main strength in creating pdfs of print documents - what you get on screen with a pdf is a copy or replica of the print document. Its Digital Editions readers shows that heritage. You can increase the font size but not to such a great degree as in MobiPocket. And you cannot zoom. At all. You cannot choose the font and you cannot change line spacing. Essentially, you get a glorified replica of a print page. There is no easy way to get a full screen - you have to click a few times through a menu to get there - whereas on MobiPocket, a simple button gets you to full screen mode and you can easily get back to the dashboard by hovering your cursor at the top of the screen.

Unfortunately, there appear to be many more digital books in Adobe format than in MobiPocket format. This is bad news for the reputation of ebooks - if it’s clunky and awkward to read and maneovre round an ebook because of ill-thoughtout software, then people are not going to take to ebooks as readily as if the digital reading experience is a joy. For me, MobiPocket reading is a joy - because of the control I as reader have on the formatting of the text to make it the most ergonomically suitable for my personal comfort and of the ease of usability of the dashboard. Publishers of ebooks need to think in a new way about books - forget the old paper version and focus on how the content of the books can best be delivered to the consumer in a new medium.

We as consumers are becoming increasingly used to controlling our user experience. Think about movies, television and radio. At one time, it was expected that we had to go to the movie theatre at the specific time the movie was being shown, or organise our evenings around a TV show we wanted to watch at a certain time, or tune in to listen to our favourite radio program when the broadcaster decided to put it on. Now, we can choose where and when to watch via DVDs which we can pause, rewind and also personalise in terms of sound and colour etc. We can download podcasts of radio shows to listen to whenever we please.

With ebooks, we can be freed from the constraints of the font size, the layout, weight of paper, and choice of binding selected by the publisher and the reading experience can be transformed into a much more user-centred one, especially if embedded links and other additonal electronic data are included in the digital version of the book. For example, I was reading a physical book (p-book) the other day and it mentioned the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem - there was no accompanying photo and I could not remember what it looked like. Imagine if I had been reading an ebook version which enabled me to go online with a click on the phrase to see some photos and also to find out any other background information. As we all get used to reading blogs and online newspapers etc, that active way of reading - to follow links or go online to search for more information - is going to become an increasingly instinctive and natural response. If publishers want to tap into the digital book market, that is the way to go - rather than trying to replicate the experience of reading a p-book.

Photo: thanks to trishalyn.com

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Continuing my experiment to “go shelfless”, I’ve been checking out ebooks, inspired by one of my readers Nicola, who left a comment about Mobipocket books. I blogged about listening to audiobooks which don’t take up any shelf space and which allow me to multi-task a few weeks ago. So it made sense to check out this other option for non-physical books, especially as my house is already brimming full with books and I’m going to have to move to a mansion if I continue my current rate of book-buying - or at any rate a giant warehouse.

Mobipocket offers ebooks for download which you can read on your PC and also PDA/ mobile phone via their MobiReader software. At first, I wasn’t convinced - yes, I would save shelf space by converting to electronic books but surely, it would be very uncomfortable reading tiny print on my mobile phone or tiring on the eyes reading on a computer screen. Well, I was in for a surprise.

More ergonomic than a paper book

The MobiReader allows you to increase the size of the book font and also zoom in so that the text is huge on the screen. Reading an ebook this way on my desktop or laptop means I can sit back in the chair, my head and neck straight (instead of hunched over a paper book) and turn the pages by clicking the arrow key on the keyboard. The page changes rather than scrolls down so the experience is closer to that of non-computer based reading.

You also don’t have the problem of trying to keep the pages open that you have with a paper book - and worrying about cracking the spine if you try to get the physical book to open at more than a 90 degree angle. I set the font to a huge size on my laptop, place the laptop on the coffee table a little bit at a distance, sit back in my armchair with the wireless keyboard nearby. My hands and arms are free until the moment I need to click the arrow to turn the page.

So no more cramped hands and arms or crook neck and shoulders.

Also, being at the age where I need reading glasses, I am finding some small print in physical books a drag. Being able to increase the font size and zoom has minimized the squinting and headaches that can come with poring over tiny print.

Moving about the ebook

You can also move about the book by using the “go to page XX” function. Embedded chapter links mean you can go to the contents page and click on the chapter you want to be taken straight to that chapter. You can search the book by keyword as well. And there is a cute function where you can add bookmarks which are little page creases in the top right of the virtual page, just as you would turn the corner down in a real book.

Being used to moving about Word and Excel documents using “search” and moving about the internet by clicking on links, I found that it was quite intuitive moving about the ebook using similar techniques.

Active reading

The other great thing I’ve been enjoying is the note taking function. You can select a word or phrase and click “add a note” - a dialogue box will open up for you to type your note (and on my touch screen phone, I can even add the text as a handwritten note using the “draw” function). You can then see all your notes for that book collated together and clicking on a note will take you to the selected word or phrase in the book. I’ve used this function to remind myself of other books and authors referred to in the book I am reading so that I can check them out later.

Alternatively, if I am online at the time and feel like taking a break from reading the book, I can immediately check out Amazon or Mobipocket or other online bookstore for the books and authors mentioned. Or I can google to find out more about a topic mentioned in the book.

If you had an e-dictionary installed, you can also select a word or phrase you did not understand and look up the word. I am thinking about getting a French/ English dictionary to help me out as I read Le Monde and other French magazines.

All this seems quite natural to me as I am now so used to active reading online - when I read blogs or newspapers online, I may follow links or google to find out more about a topic or look up words or information on Wikipedia or I may bookmark an item to return to later.

Software for ebook reading

I like MobiReader but there are also other formats - Adobe Reader, Microsoft Reader and eReader are some of them. From what I can tell, MobiReader has more of the active reading options as I’ve described above than the others and can be used on a variety of devices including dedicated ebook readers.

Range of books

There are not as many ebooks out there as physical books at the moment but the range seems to be growing. A number of bookshops in the UK are reportedly going to be pushing ebooks this year. WH Smith already has an ebooks store online. Borders is revamping its website and the new one will apparently include ebooks and also trumpet the dedicated ebook reader the iRex Iliad. Waterstones has a few ebooks and is apparently going to be selling the Sony Reader. Blackwells, the academic bookshop, has a ebook store that focuses mainly on academic books. There are also online stores that sell only ebooks - check out BooksOnBoard, MobiPocket itself and also eBooks.com.

You can also get out of copyright books for free download from a number of specialist online websites like ManyBooks.net and Feedbooks.com.

What ebooks am I reading?

I downloaded “1968: the year that rocked the world” - about the revolutionary year 1968 - from Mobipocket.com for around £5. It seemed appropriate to be reading that on the 40th anniversary of the May 1968 riots in Paris.

From Blackwells, I discovered “The Internet - A Philosophical Inquiry” on special offer for only £1.

From ManyBooks.net, I’ve downloaded for free Walden by Henry David Thoreau, The Prince by Machiavelli, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (in English, though the French version is also available) and The Art of War by Sun Tzu.

Limited sharing

The only thing about ebooks that are digitally rights protected is that you can’t share them or give them away as easily as you might with a physical book. You can read them on up to 4 devices (ie PC and other device) so if you want to share them with someone, that other person will have to be given access to your main library/ account to access all your books via their PC/ device which would become one of the four that you are allowed to have. Not being able to share or give away ebooks is not a problem in my book (ha ha) because I don’t like to lend or give away my books unless they are not ones that I’ve enjoyed and are taking up too much shelf space. With ebooks, I can just leave such books in my digital library without their inconveniencing me by taking up too much room - or delete them altogether.

Conclusion

I’ve been quite taken by ebooks, I have to say. My first choice is likely to be audiobooks, still, for the reasons discussed in my blog post about audiobooks but the choice of books available in audio is even more limited than the choice of ebooks. If I must read a book with my eyes, then I like the active reading opportunities for ebooks and also the ergonomic aspects. I will definitely be adding to my eLibrary and may even consider buying a dedicated eReader (another gadget!). Unfortunately, I cannot switch entirely to ebooks yet and there are still some books that I will have to buy in paper form as they have not yet been made available digitally but I am hoping that that will start to change and that publishers will start to release books in multiformats in the near future.

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Following on from the short film made by Ed Saunders in 48 hours over one weekend, here is another film challenge short made by his friend Ben W over that same weekend.

It’s interesting that over that weekend the two films made focused on the theme of how men and women are just soooo different…