Penguin is worried about piracy. What?

From a Financial Times article published on May 20, 2010:

Tom Weldon, deputy chief executive of Penguin (part of Pearson, which owns the Financial Times), said: “The only way to fight piracy is to publish digital content across as many formats as possible, through as many channels, at a fair price. If we go for exclusive or proprietary formats, we’re completely screwed.”

So then what is the hang-up between Penguin and Amazon? Does it occur to Penguin that people might be pirating Penguin books which are currently not available on their Kindles, like John Sandford's Storm Prey?

Click here for the full article. You need to be registered with them to read it. Sorry about that.

Kindle v. iPad: Can't we all just get along?

Ever since the announcement of the iPad, many seem to expect everyone to choose sides. If you want an iPad, you must not like your Kindle. If you have an iPad, you will not want a Kindle. If you have a Kindle, you will not want an iPad.

Hey, people, they are not the same type of device. Did Steve Jobs say it was an e-reader? No, he said you could read books on it—not the same thing, You can also watch movies and sports, get e-mail, play games and more. I am perishing for an iPad and have to wait till "late April," as Apple puts it, to get a 3G model, thus will not even be able to join the happy band of brothers and sisters on April 3rd in their delirious joy over the new toy.

On the other hand, I happily read on my Kindle and know that I will continue to do so long after I receive the iPad. To be without my Kindle for even one day would be sheer torture to me since, besides books, I read newspapers, magazines and blogs on it. One blog is the NY Times Latest News which is updated many times a day. I only care about the content and it doesn't matter that the pictures are in black and white. On the other hand, if it were National Geographic, with colored pictures, it would be best on the iPad—no contest. Technically I can read e-mail on my Kindle through the experimental web browser, but I don't, and do not know why any one would put themselves through the slow torture. E-mail is always with me on my phone and will be even better on the iPad.

Why do I love the Kindle for sustained reading? Because its e-ink screen is easy on my eyes and I literally read faster using it, possibly because it takes less time to click Next Page than it does to turn pages in a real book. Also, if the ambient light is a little dim, I can up the font size to make it easier. Backlit screens make my eyes burn after a short time, so I am unlikely to do much sustained reading on the iPad. Someone is bound to comment that a backlit screen does not bother HIS eyes. Well, good for him. I've been light sensitive all my life and it only gets worse.

The Kindle that I think is dead in the water when the iPad launches is the DX. It appears at this time that textbooks and college material in the form of pdfs will work much better on the iPad. The DX does not deal well with pdfs because it does not make them re-flowable. Since I can already re-flow a pdf on my iPhone, I know that it will be possible on the iPad.

To wrap up: my 6" Kindle and my iPad will co-exist just fine.

I don't understand e-book sales restrictions

We are hearing more and more from Kindle buyers outside the US that they are unable to purchase certain e-books and are given the message on Amazon that the book is not available in your country. I have run into this many times with print books from the UK which are not available here, so I just buy them at Amazon UK and they are sent to me. If I wanted a book published in France, I assume that I could do the same from a French site. Or any other country in the free world. If I can buy a print book which has not been published in the U.S., why not an e-book? Can anyone point me to the explanation of this?

Hallelujah! You can now delete books from your Amazon account!

How great is that!

This ability has been rolled out quietly and to no fanfare despite the fact that not being able to do so is an issue which has engendered much anger and comments on this blog, in lists and on the Amazon forum.

There are lots of reasons to permanently delete books. Let me name a few:

You took advantage of a free book offer. The book was terrible.

You would like to share your Kindle account with your teenager or your grandmother and there are books in your account which might prove embarrassing or inappropriate.

You have read the book and will never read it again, nor will anyone in your family. Let it go.

The physical books I hang onto are those which, for whatever reason, I may refer to again—arts and crafts, computer manuals, poetry, spirituality, self-improvement, history, etc. This would include very little in the way of fiction. As one who reads well over 100 books a year, to keep everything I read, I would need to have a very big house and more bookshelves than I already do. And dusting them can become daunting. I don't have to dust the virtual books, but keeping titles I will never read again makes for a long and more confusing list to scroll through.

How to delete books permanently from your Kindle account:

Go to Amazon, click on My Account, sign in and scroll down to Manage Your Kindle. Toward the bottom of the page you will find a section called Your Orders. By default these will be listed chronologically with the latest order first. To change that to the earliest order first, click on the arrow under Order Date. Or you can sort them by title or author alphabetically with a few caveats: (1) It sorts by the author's first name (2) When sorting by title, it uses a, an, the as part of the title. Thus you will find The Blind Side with the Ts, not with the Bs. Nevertheless, you will be able to locate what you want to delete, one way or another.

Find the book you wish to delete and click on the plus sign before the title. This brings up a box with some options, one of which is Delete this Title. If you click that, it warns you that the deletion is permanent and should you want the book back, you will have to buy it again. If you still want to delete it, click OK. It takes a moment for the site to digest this and then you are back where you started with your latest purchase listed first. If you have a lot of books to delete this can become tedious, but liberating if this is something you have been wanting to do. For me it was.

While trying to delete books from their Kindle accounts, some have encountered problems which appear to be browser related. If you run into a problem, refresh your browser, or better yet, try Firefox. Many have said everything works fine for them with Firefox whereas it did not with Internet Explorer. Not a problem for me because I have a Mac.

Libraries and digital lending

The New York Times article, Libraries and Readers Wade into Digital Lending shows that libraries, at least some of them, are aware of their readers' changing needs. This is not true of all libraries, however, and many, perhaps most, have no e-book downloads available at all. Like everything else, libraries have to allocate their limited resources as best they can. If downloads are available, on what devices may they be read?

I live in a Chicago suburb whose library has no electronic books available for download, although it has many other outstanding resources, such as NewsBank which gives us archived editions of both Chicago newspapers as well as Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report and other magazines, including the current issues. A nearby library in another suburb has an unimpressive number of downloadable audiobooks available via Overdrive but no electronic books. As far as I know, Overdrive e-books, wherever they are available, are only downloadable to Sony e-readers leaving the rest of us out in the cold. Hardly an incentive to go out and buy a Sony, though, with only a few scattered books around. Anyone planning to buy a Sony thinking that they can download books from their library had best check first. Do you really want to read a book on your computer's backlit screen?

South of Broad

A train wreck of a book. Following all the excitement that after 14 years there would be a new novel by Pat Conroy, it has turned into a big disappointment. The book sits this week at #1 on the NY Times bestseller list. Of course it does: we all rushed out to buy it in one form or another, hardcover or digital. At least I only wasted $9.99 buying it for the Kindle instead of hard cover.

I did not really enjoy this book but wanted to give it a chance, so read it through to the end. Not something I normally do with one as off-putting as this. Pat Conroy has written better. His characters, for the most part, are cliches and have no depth. He strains credulity when his teenage protagonist meets in one day the 7 people who will turn out to be his best friends for life. Everything about it seems contrived. He jumps from 1969 to 1989 and we never find out much of what happened in between or why all of these disparate people are even friends. Why do they adore each other so much? Their conversations are pseudo-brilliant repartee, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The only characters nicely filled out are the protagonist himself, his father and Harrington Canon, the antique dealer. Why are the others so flat?

Some examples of his florid prose:

"It is the drawing that freezes my cells in all the dread of memory and history, in the secret mythology that forms the grotesque substrata that lies at the center of this search that has just turned deadly."

"His words soothe me and I taste their sweetness as they flow over me like the mountain laurel honey the wild bees make in the mountains where Starla was born."

"Nor do I have any idea when she started loving me, but the knowledge that her love is available in a boundless source had presented itself to me. I can use it as a sword on a pillow or a hermitage; a warm bath, a butterfly garden, or a flow of molten lava."

Did no one edit this book? Am I the only one who thinks it is way overblown?

Reply to Nicholson Baker

In Nicholson Baker's A New Page, published in the August 3rd New Yorker, he asks, "Can the Kindle really improve on the book?" When I first read this, I was annoyed at how snarky it was but let it go. As more and more people quoted him, I decided to respond.

Is he really serious in some of his comments or is he trying to be cute? As a case in point, he says: "the wasp passage in “Do Insects Think?” just wasn’t the same in Kindle gray. I did an experiment. I found the Common Reader reprint edition of “Love Conquers All” and read the very same wasp passage. I laughed: ha-ha. Then I went back to the Kindle 2 and read the wasp passage again. No laugh. Of course, by then I’d read the passage three times, and it wasn’t that funny anymore. But the point is that it wasn’t funny the first time I came to it, when it was enscreened on the Kindle. Monotype Caecilia was grim and Calvinist; it had a way of reducing everything to arbitrary heaps of words."

Oh, please. I have had a Kindle (1 and then 2) since January of 2008 and have never had this experience. I fail to understand how the font used by the Kindle sucks the humor out of a passage. On the contrary, I have had to stop reading certain things in public on my Kindle lest I make a fool of myself laughing out loud.

I will agree that for me the text-to-speech is less than perfect. But it's not all about me, is it? There are those who need text to speech because of low vision or the inability to process words well, and I am happy that it is available for them. No one ever said that it was the equivalent of listening to Lisette Lecat read Alexander McCall Smith's Botswana novels. That is about as good as it gets. Even so, it's better to have text-to-speech than not. I applaud Amazon for including it, even though it has been crippled by publishers who think it robs them of income.

Mr. Baker's rant is overly long; he uses a lot of space to tell us about opening the box the Kindle came in. At that point we are no further along learning about the device itself. He also wastes a couple of paragraphs mentioning several books which are not on the Kindle. This hasn't been a deal-breaker for me. I've already read most of the books he mentions way before the Kindle, and if I want to read the rest, and other unavailable books, there's always the public library.

He writes: "But say you’ve actually found the book you’re seeking at the Kindle Store. You buy it. Do you get what’s described in the catalogue copy? Yes and no. You get the words, yes, and sometimes pictures, after a fashion. Photographs, charts, diagrams, foreign characters, and tables don’t fare so well on the little gray screen. Page numbers are gone, so indexes sometimes don’t work. Trailing endnotes are difficult to manage. If you want to quote from a book you’ve bought, you have to quote by location range"

If a book is formatted properly for Kindle, endnotes, indexes and tables of contents have live links and work just fine. However, many are not properly formatted and Amazon needs to address this. He rambles on for many paragraphs telling us about books which are inappropriate for a Kindle, i.e., those with color illustrations, charts and lots of photographs. It would never even occur to me to buy these for my Kindle. The only cookbook I have on it is the charming Cook's Illustrated How-to-Cook Library. First of all, it uses black and white drawings which work quite well. Second, it is well-formatted with live links from the index, chapter headings, and within each chapter to the individual recipes.

He says: "The company uses an encoding format called Topaz." That is patently not true. The Topaz formatted books are few and far between. I have 152 books either on my Kindle or in the archives and only one of those is in the Topaz format. For the most part, Topaz has not been popular amongst us Kindlers.

"A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor." Not if you are sharing an account and quickly switch Amazon payments to a credit card belonging to the survivor. Otherwise yes, it does. I am not sure that my survivors would be thrilled to inherit more physical books than I already have, so it's a non-issue to me except for the other Kindler on my account, and we have this covered.

"Undeterred, the folks at Amazon gave the Kindle 1 a hose blast of marketing late in 2007. And they had a lucky break. Oprah, who had been slipped a pre-launch Kindle, announced that she was obsessed with it." Ah, Mr. Baker, another factual error: Oprah trumpeted her devotion to the Kindle in October of 2008. I know this, because I was able to grab one then, using her promotion of $50 off to give my daughter for her birthday just before Amazon sold out and Kindles became unavailable for several months.

He mentions the one-star reviews during 2008 which must have been painful for Amazon. Probably not, because a large majority of them were written by people who did not own a Kindle, those who "love the smell of books," or had other reasons for not wanting one. Not wanting something does not make you an expert unless you have used the item for some time. I don't want a set of golf clubs but it hasn't occurred to me to leave a poor review of golf clubs on some website.

In touting the iPod Touch or iPhone as a better reading device than the Kindle, he says: "It serves a night-reading need, which the lightless Kindle doesn’t." And how about his paean to the paper version of the New York Times? Can he read that in the dark? And how long can you read on a back lighted screen without eye strain?

Only in the last page of his review does Mr. Baker approach the nexus of what the Kindle actually does—the book disappears and it is only the language and the thought propelling you forward. Isn't that enough?