Binary or Bust

Green Credentials

noreply@blogger.com (hedro) — Tue, 13 May 2008 08:50:00 +0000

For a long time now I have been wondering about the green-ness of e-books. The basic concept is "look at how much paper we will save", but there is still the nagging thought that the e-reading device will create more damage to the environment in the long term, and I am sure there are people out there who have already tried to use this argument.

It is with some relief that I have read an article online from the Environmental Science and Technology journal that reaffirms my long held belief that e-readers are better for the environment.

It really boils down to this view quoted in the article from research done in to replacing university textbooks with e-readers.

over its life cycle, a paper textbook created 4 times the greenhouse gas emissions of an e-book reader and several times more ozone-depleting substances and chemicals associated with acid rain. Conventional books also required more than 3 times more raw materials and 78 times more water consumption than e-books.

So get your green credentials sorted and buy an e-book reader today.

The Big Value Added Tax Problem

noreply@blogger.com (hedro) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:44:00 +0000

I will get back to comments about the London Book Fair later, right now I want to post about the biggest obstacle to e-publishing in Ireland, the UK and most of Europe.

When we address the VAT issue on books we have to look at what the tax authorities consider to be a book. To qualify for the zero rate of VAT a book must be printed and bound, or as the Irish Revenue Commissioners say on their website:

In order to qualify for the zero rate, a publication must
meet the four requirements listed hereunder:-
it must consist essentially of textual or pictorial matter,
it must have a distinctive cover, that is at least the outside of the front cover must be devoid of text,
it must comprise not less than four leaves (eight pages) exclusive of the cover, and
it must be bound (loose-leaf or otherwise), or stitched or stapled.

The European Union is involved as point six of Annex III of the Council Directive 2006/112/EC of 28 November 2006 on the common system of Value Added Tax says:

supply, including on loan by libraries, of books (including brochures, leaflets and similar printed matter, children's picture, drawing or colouring books, music printed or in manuscript form, maps and hydrographic or similar charts), newspapers and periodicals, other than material wholly or predominantly devoted to advertising;

So it is not enough for us to get our own tax authorities to change their mind about what a 'book' is; we need to work on Europe as well (but who thought this was going to be easy ;-)).

Sweden is engaged in this battle already in relation to audio books and the matter will probably end up in the European court.

We need to fight this battle for the e-book, and we need to find allies who have louder voices than we do.

Environmentalists please take note, if you want to save the planet buy an e-book, after all the paperless world is just around the corner.

Digitising old books.

noreply@blogger.com (hedro) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:31:00 +0000

There is a book on the shelves at work (we're a publishing company, so no suprise there) that I have always looked at and said when we have a way to digitise that book without having to type the whole thing in again we will be able to do pretty much anythiong in the digital arena.

The book I am talking about is actually part of a three volume set last published in the early 1970's, so no computer files to work from like we might have if the book was published in the late eighties.

Now before someone starts talking about book scanning, I know it exists but until recently I had not seen a device that would give you the book back undamaged. A scanner that does not require you to destroy the book in the digitisation process is a real boost to the digitisation og the printed word. What we need is a book scanner that works like a human, turns a page at a time and 'reads' it.

I saw a machine like the one I have described above at the London Book Fair. It was being showcased by the Book Scan Bureau and was developed by Kirtas Technologies.

It used suction to turn a page, a process which is no harder on the paper than the feed of most printing presses and more gentle that most human contact. It also had clear plastic tabs for applying pressure at the edge of the page beside the spine ensuring as flat a surface as possible is presented to the 16 mega pixel cameras for imaging.

While this is of more use to libraries and archives as they pursue digitisation. spare a thought for the books that were last printed before the computer become common in our field that may have a new lease of life thanks to this technology.

Books, more books and a little bit of digital content.

noreply@blogger.com (hedro) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:15:00 +0000

The 2008 London Book Fair is over, and it was an interesting event.

I met briefly with Eoin Purcell (he was delayed getting to the book fair by this unfortunate incident), we will meet up again when he is next in Dublin.

While I was slightly disappointed with the amount of digital at the fair while I was there, looking back, I have enough information to drive several blog posts over the next week.

My next few posts will cover the following:

One noticeable absentee was Google, I had a pleasant chat with Microsoft but I would really have liked to talk with someone from Google.
The non destructive book scanner was an amazing piece of kit, kind of like a reverse printing press.
After living in Thailand for seven years, it was interesting to find a Thai company with an e-book product.
And of course there was the company in my last post, interesting product but their sales technique left me gagging.
I mustn't forget the free whisky either.

DRM scaremongering @ London Book Fair

noreply@blogger.com (hedro) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:14:00 +0000

Using the threat of Internet piracy to push yet another e-book format. I will blog more on this later.

London Book Fair

noreply@blogger.com (hedro) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 10:17:00 +0000

As mentioned in an earlier post I come from an e-commerce background not a publishing one, so this will be my first visit to the London Book Fair. When I looked over the seminar program I was amazed to see that there was a very high profile for digitization, e-books and e-reading. After talking to some colleagues I discovered that this is new, as there wasn't a mention of e-books last year, and that is a problem for the industry as a whole.

What seems to be happening at the London book fair in particular and the industry as a whole, is technology is trying to drive business and not the other way around. Amazon launched the Kindle and, notwithstanding the fact that there have been e-book readers around for a while, everyone now has to come to grips with this new way of thinking. This reminds me of the what happened in the middle of the dot com bubble, the 'isn't this amazing, lets do it now before everybody else, the money doesn't matter as long as we get there' kind of euphoria. We all know how that ended.

While the new technology is great, and we need to keep an eye on the horizon, we can't forget the realities of business. Books, as they currently exist, are going to be around for a long time, the new technology we want should add value to the book or provide better ways to market the book. Everything else is expensive window dressing and while we can all be awed/inspired/carried away with neat technology we have to take a step back and say it's nice but do we really need it.

Having now slated unneeded technology, I will be updating my blog a little via my mobile phone while I am at the book fair, more as a method of rembering things to blog about later than as a method of posting inshighful comments but it will give you an idea of whats there.

Testing mobile blogging

noreply@blogger.com (hedro) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:30:00 +0000

Just a test of mobile blogging in preparation for my visit to the London Book Fair. If any readers are going to be there leave a comment and maybe we can meet up.

DRM or no DRM, that is the question - Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (hedro) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:59:00 +0000

Social is a big word on the internet these days; most notably around the rise, alleged fall, then rise again of social networks. There is also social commerce, this is the kind of commerce practiced by amazon, where you are invited to leave reviews for the benefit of other consumers. And all the other sites and services rushing to embrace the "Web 2.0 revolution" (as James Goldsmith said "if you see a bandwagon, it's too late").

There is another use for "social" in todays world and one that is very pertinent to the DRM discussion, let me introduce you to Social DRM.

In my last post I wrote about how restrictive DRM will have a negative impact on publishing as all you will do is negatively impact your customers. There is no DRM system that is hacker proof so what you are doing when you implement one of these systems is to prevent casual theft and have no impact on commercial piracy. And the price way are paying to prevent casual theft is to force our customers to work harder to spend their money with us.

This is where I start to hear alarm bells, my experience is in e-commerce rather than publishing, and usability is the key to increasing sales on an e-commerce site. My own mantra has always been that ordering off a website should be easier than phoning your order in, because we all know how to pick up the phone, if a system is to complicated to buy from then that system will bleed customers and ultimately revenue. So as I see these DRM systems that require you to register devices, jump through hoops when you buy a new device to read on and limit the number of devices you can use as a barrier to sales and just adding cost to both the publisher and the reader.

The best DRM they say is invisible to the consumer, so the examples from my last post are not examples of good DRM, Social DRM while highly visible in a literal sense does not affect usability and so in that sense is invisible to the consumer.

Here's how it works:

I visit a website to order a book
The website requires me to register (not perfect in terms of web usability but a fair compromise and fairly universal these days)
I order an e-book from the site in my choice of format.
The site back-end takes the XML source of the book and starts the process to create my copy of the book in the format I chose.
While creating the copy of my book it pulls information from the membership database to add to selected areas in the book and to create a custom header (This copy of RUINAIR has been personalised for XXXXXX).
The customised e-book is placed in a digital library linked to my member ship account for me to download at any time.
An email is automatically sent to me letting me know that my book is ready for download.

The data we pull from the membership system can be your name, billing address, email address, phone number, order number or any combination of these. Its not a device locked DRM but how many people will be willing to share files that have their email address or phone number in them.

Social DRM is as usable as a real book to the consumer, and provides piece of mind to those in the industry who want the safety net of some form of DRM.

This is not a new concept, and I know that people involved in digital publishing have been talking about it for a while but there is always pressure to lock everything down. If you are one of those people applying pressure to lock everything down, please stop and think about it, it will work out more cost effective and drive better sales in the long term.

DRM or no DRM, that is the question - Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (hedro) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 10:12:00 +0000

Its not breaking news, but I have been thinking a lot about how over protective Digital Rights Management, or as some people will say Digital Restriction Management, will, in the long term, hurt the publishing industry.

Some students at Columbia Law School have done a wonderful bit of research and the nice people at Gizmodo did an even better job of presenting it in plain english. This was then highlighted by SlashDot so you might have seen it already, the Gizmodo piece was titled "Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader Locked Up: Why Your Books Are No Longer Yours".

Early adopters of reading devices have been shouting about this for some time, its nice to see that some more mainstream communities are beginning to sit up and take notice. Its not too far fetched either as Amazon have abandoned e-book readers before.

A little history lesson, back in the mists of time before Amazon bought MobiPocket they sold e-books. Around the time they acquired Mobi they discontinued selling their own e-books.

Thats OK, you think, they had a new e-book store with MobiPocket and didn't need to continue with there own e-books.

The problem is they didn't just stop selling Amazon e-books, they stopped supporting Amazon e-books full stop.

The Amazon e-book was supplied with DRM that was just as restrictive as those that are available for the Kindle, you had to register the device that you wanted to read the book on, if you bought a new computer/other device after Amazon e-books had gone away there was no way for you to read the book you had "bought" from Amazon on your new computer/other device.

But, and this is hard to believe, it was actually worse than that. You could only download your books for a year. So if you changed your computer/device 366 days after "buying" a book, tough.

DRM from Amazon, Sony and Mobipocket does not have time limited download windows but its still device restrictive, and that only punishes regular consumers.

As publishers we need to forget DRM or find a more open DRM that does not involve us making our customers jump through hoops.

I'll let you think about this for a while and then I will present the solution.

Irrational fears are the biggest obstacle

noreply@blogger.com (hedro) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:30:00 +0000

Read the Times article Internet book piracy will drive authors to stop writing.

All content owners like to bleat on about lost revenue due to online piracy, it is something that has affected the music industry because of the general portability of music files and the ubiquitousness of hardware to play those files. The written word does not face the same problems.

The biggest challenge facing authors' intellectual property is not stopping the spread of content over the Internet, but finding ways to get payment after the fact.

Yes, everything is available for free on the Internet if you know where to look, but finding it and downloading it can take up a lot of time.

The question that needs to be answered is, would those who are spending time finding and downloading illicit copies of your work go into a shop and buy it.

Reading on a computer screen leaves a lot to be desired and very few people are going to be willing to read a novel that way. If you are really interested in a particular book, you are going to buy it in your local bookshop or online rather than spend hours trawling the dark recesses of the Internet for it. The things that are available through peer to peer file sharing tend to have a high profile, in a sense they are victims of their own success. (I invite commenters to let me know how many childrens books, excluding harry potter, they can find on P2P networks)

Four people download a book from the internet, the all have heard of the book through marketing and publicity,

Person A reads a couple of chapters, then moves on to something else
Person B reads the same chapters, having liked wat they read so far now goes and buys the book
Person C reads the book on his computer, likes it and tries to remember the author so when a new book comes out he can find it in his local bookshop.
Person D is a serial downloader and will proably never actually read the book in its entirity.

From the above examples we can see that no sale was lost, one sale was made, and the potential for future sales was increased.

Just as with Daniel Defoe in 1701, authors have more to gain than lose through internet piracy.

Its not all bad

noreply@blogger.com (hedro) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:24:00 +0000

In my last post all I did was point out the negatives associated with the portable e-book reading devices, but they do have some positives.

Lots of books in one small device
If you like the classics get them all for free online
Use utilities to collect your favourite blogs for offline browsing and copy them to the device.
Worry no more about the damage we are doing to kids backs with the weight of school bags.

I see these devices being of real benefit in the education sector, after all where else do you need to have continuous access to eight or more books in the same day.

Is the book dead?

noreply@blogger.com (hedro) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:22:00 +0000

For many years now some people have been shouting about the book being dead/about to die as technology replaces it. I work for a publishing company and I am mostly concerned with bringing content to digital platforms/media from the traditional printed page, so you would be forgiven for thinking that I might have some support for this concept.

But I don't, I belive the book, as we all know and love it, will be around for at least another couple of thousand years. There are several reasons for this but most importantly I would say that digital files stored on CDs, SD cards, USB memory sticks or other devices just don't look as good on a shelf as a few books.

Thanks to my job, I have been able to mess around with several ebook reading devices, that I would not have payed my own cold hard cash for, and I find them useful and annoying at the same time.

As these books are new technology they are quite expensive

They are the only books I have read that had to be stowed away at take off and landing on a plane

If you drop one of these books into the pool while you are on holiday you are out a serious amount of cash.

Enough negativity (its too early in the morning), I'll post the reasons I like these devices later.

Why am I doing this?

noreply@blogger.com (hedro) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:15:00 +0000

The question I have asked myself several times when I am halfway through setting up a blog, I then of course promptly give up.

I have now followed through on my original intention from a couple of years ago and not only created a space for me to publish my ramblings but even decided to create my first post. and the reason for this is . . .

I have to admire the bravery of several UK based bloggers who risk their careers by blogging, something I wont have to worry about, and as a result of this they probably have to spend a considerably longer time thinking about what they type in than I do.

However, as I dont want to come accross as an uneducated sloth, I suppose I will have to think a little about what goes onto these pages.

So some of the reasons that I have now taken this step are below.