eBooks Heat Up
Kindle 2 photo by awrose
There is a lot of very interesting recent activity in the eBooks arena, and it’s been generating a lot of comment in the new and old media. Here are four recent events that I found particularly noteworthy:
Google Book Search Mobile
Google has released a mobile version of Google Books, with over 1.5 million public domain volumes available. You need to be on-line to take advantage of this one, but it is simple and works really well. Some of the public domain works digitized from Cornell’s collection are now appearing on Google Books and on the mobile version too. Google has clearly taken advantage of all those Computer Science Ph.D.s they’ve been hiring, because they are getting very good OCR text results from some very challenging originals.
Take a look at the full image-based version of the “Handbook of the Flora of New South Wales” by Charles Moore and compare it to the mobile version. If you scroll through both side by side, you will get a good sense of how well their OCR is holding up, and how readable the mobile version is – and how easy it is to fall back to the image if the text seems to be in error (just click on the text). As connectivity becomes more ubiquitous, and as many, many more titles become available through the Google Settlement, this may become a really compelling way to get access to books – or at least all the books that used to be out-of-print.
Kindle 2.0 and Reading Aloud
The Kindle 2.0 itself is a nice but incremental upgrade to the Kindle platform. The big issue surrounding the Kindle 2.0 turned out to be its ability to read books aloud using computer-generated male and female voices. Here’s David Pogue on the new capability: “The Kindle will also read aloud to you through its tiny stereo speakers or headphone jack, and even turn the pages as it goes. But if you have visions dancing in your head of turning every book into an audiobook, forget it. The Kindle’s male and female voices are very good, but nobody will mistake them for the voices of humans, let alone the professionals who record audiobooks. Kindle voices have some peculiar inflections and pronunciations — they sound oddly Norwegian, sometimes — and, of course, they’re incapable of expressing emotion. They read Hemingway the same way they read Stephen Colbert.”
The Authors Guild went ballistic, although the legal consensus seems to be that they don’t have a case under copyright, since private performance is not one of the enumerated monopoly rights under the law. Amazon backed down, to the extent that they now allow publishers to turn off the ability to have the Kindle read books aloud. This is certainly disappointing, but I hope that in the longer term the publishers and authors will realize that allowing this is probably in their best interests – and that the computer-generated voice is unlikely to compete with Barack Obama reading “Dreams from my Father”.
Kindle iPhone App
The newly announced Kindle iPhone app, on the other hand, is potentially a real game changer. Unlike Apple and the iPod, Amazon has decided that it is primarily a retailer of books, on whatever device they may reside, and not a hardware manufacturer. Since I have an iPhone (although not a Kindle), I went ahead and downloaded the app and then purchased my first Kindle book. The presentation and reading experience seems to be close to on par with other iPhone reading apps. I found it quite usable, and others agree.
Interestingly, Amazon is positioning the iPhone app as a “sometimes” alternative to reading on the Kindle. Both the app and the Kindle will automatically sync your reading location in each book, so you can read the Kindle at home, and then pick up right where you left off while standing in line with your iPhone. I’ve been willing to read complete books on the iPhone in Classics and Stanza, and I expect I’ll be happy doing so in the Kindle app as well. Books and book applications have been selling well on the iPhone so far – will Amazon sell more Kindle books on Kindles or iPhones? Jeremy Frumkin has a nice post on his blog on why libraries should pay attention to what’s happening here.
Barnes & Noble Buys Fictionwise
In the latest in this series of eBook developments, Barnes & Noble has bought Fictionwise for $15.7 million. Fictionwise is one of the major “paid books” providers for the Stanza iPhone app. Right now, Fictionwise ebook titles for the iPhone tend to be more expensive than Kindle editions, although the DRM is potentially more flexible. It will be interesting to see if that will change with this purchase. It will be even more interesting to see if B&N can really compete in the eBook space, or whether Google and Amazon will just divide the spoils (or duke it out) by themselves.
Summing up
So, what does this mean for academic libraries? Right now, eBooks tend to be available through specialized providers like ebrary and NetLibrary. It seems clear that the eBook world is changing very rapidly. Both library users and the libraries themselves are likely to have a variety of new options in the near future. With the Google Books settlement, it is clear that Google will be providing subscription eBook services to academic libraries. Will Amazon do the same? How much demand will we get from our users to deliver them books on Kindles or iPhones? My crystal ball is somewhat fuzzy, but the next few years seem likely to be very, very interesting, and eBooks may finally fulfill the promise that’s been glimmering on the horizon for over a decade.
