Will Books Be Napsterized? 350
langelgjm writes "An article from yesterday's New York Times asks the question: will books be Napsterized? So far, piracy of books has not reached the degree of music or movie piracy, in part due to the lack of good equipment on which to read and enjoy pirated books. The article points to the growing adoption of e-book readers as the publishing industry's newest nemesis. With ever-cheaper ways to conveniently use pirated books, authors and publishers may be facing serious changes ahead. This is something I wrote about three months ago in my journal, where I called the Kindle DX an 'iPod for books.'"
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
One fundamental point ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not for a while (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Already happened (Score:5, Informative)
Re:More on the "iPod for books" (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Textbooks (Score:3, Informative)
"Authors don't usually make much money from the publishers anyway, and do the writing to further their own career, rather than for cash.
I can definitely add an 'amen' to this. As a newly-minted phd in a field in which book publication is a normal part of achieving tenure, here's how it works (in the US anyway; other countries vary slightly): you get your first academic job. In 4-6 years you go up for tenure review, at which time you've either met publication requirements for tenure at your institution (varies widely, but "two articles and a book" is pretty common at a teaching-oriented institution), in which case you get tenure and a $10-20k salary bump. Or you didn't meet tenure and you get fired. So the pressure to publish is, shall we say, quite high. Because it's assumed your book will be an academic book, and as such probably only of interest to other scholars in your sub-field, tenure committees pay absolutely no attention to book sales. A book on the role of the western crop weevil on the Tongan famine of 1832 which sold 1000 copies (mostly to academic libraries) 'counts' just as much toward tenure as a book on the contemporary opium trade in Afghanistan which, being of interest to policy makers and journalists as well as academics, might sell 10,000 copies. In either case, royalties for academic books are negligible - you'd be lucky to make a couple of thousand on any book, even a reasonably well respected one. However, as I mentioned, getting published does have a large financial impact in that it contributes significantly toward getting tenure and other steps up the academic career path. In short, getting a book published is potentially worth tens of thousands of dollars to you, but with almost zero connection between this fiscal impact and the number of copies sold.
From my point of view as an academic writer, I want the ideas expressed in my articles and books to be available to anyone who is interested in them - having those books or articles cost money does not significantly benefit me, and actually blocks access to my ideas. Given that the cheapest way to make work available to everyone is to put it on the web, the only motivation I still have to go through a publisher is this publication process (and the peer review which goes with it) is necessary for my work to 'count' to tenure committees and the like.
Re:Not for a while (Score:1, Informative)
The price is dropping. I expect in 3-5 years you'll be able to get them for ~$100.
Agreed with the e-ink suggestion, but I think the $100 price point will be hit in more like 1 to 1-1/2 years. In the past few months alone they've already dropped down to $200 for a 5" device (already seen on specials for <$180). Hell, a "refurbed" Kindle 1 (refurbed in quotes because they're actually "new old stock") goes for $150 on the Amazon Outlet. A friend bought one less than a year ago for $360 when that was the current model.
Re:Already happened (Score:4, Informative)
Free library of Baen science fiction books http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm [baen.com]
This is run by Baen but carries other publishers books. It is a no drm subscription service. You can also get electronic advanced reader copies of some books.
http://www.webscription.net/ [webscription.net]
You can buy individual books or a monthly offering.
http://www.webscription.net/c-81-2009-webscriptions.aspx [webscription.net]
Re:Not for a while (Score:2, Informative)
Many style guides recommend using apostrophes in plurals of acronyms and initialisms. It makes them easier to read, as you can tell whether the s is part of the acronym.
Re:Already happened (Score:3, Informative)
O'Reilly online http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/ [oreilly.com] | http://sysadmin.oreilly.com/ [oreilly.com] Computer books and manuals http://www.hoganbooks.com/freebook/webbooks.html [hoganbooks.com] | http://www.informit.com/itlibrary/ [informit.com] | http://www.fore.com/support/manuals/home/home.htm [fore.com] | http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/webbuy/freebooks.html [adobe.com] The Network Book http://www.cs.columbia.edu/netbook/ [columbia.edu] Some #bookwarez.efnet.irc links http://www.extrema.net/books/links.shtml [extrema.net] Some #bookwarez.efnet.irc fiction http://194.58.154.90:4431/enscifi/ [194.58.154.90] Pimpas online books (Indonesia) http://202.159.16.55/~pimpa2000 [202.159.16.55] | http://202.159.15.46/~om-pimpa/buku [202.159.15.46] Security, privacy and cryptography http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/crypto-security.html [mit.edu] | http://www.oberlin.edu/~brchkind/cyphernomicon/ [oberlin.edu] My own misc online reading material http://www.eastcoastfx.com/docs/admin-guides/ [eastcoastfx.com] | http://www.eastcoastfx.com/~jorn/reading/ [eastcoastfx.com] Computer books http://solaris.inorg.chem.msu.ru/cs-books/ [chem.msu.ru] | http://sweetrude.net/~cab/books/ [sweetrude.net] | http://alaska.mine.nu/books/ [alaska.mine.nu] | http://poprocks.dyn.ns.ca/dave/books/ [dyn.ns.ca] | http://58-160.skarland.uaf.edu/books/ [uaf.edu] | http://202.186.247.194/~ebook/ [202.186.247.194] | http://hooligans.org/reference/ [hooligans.org] Linux documentation http://www.linuxdoc.org/docs.html [linuxdoc.org] FreeBSD documentation http://www.freebsd.org/tutorials/ [freebsd.org] Sun documentation http://osiris.imw.tu-clausthal.de:8888/ [tu-clausthal.de] | http://uran.vvsu.ru:8888/ [uran.vvsu.ru] SGI documentation http://newton.unicc.chalmers.se/ebt-bin/nph-dweb/dynaweb;td=2 [chalmers.se] | http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/init.cgi [sgi.com] IBM Online Redbooks http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/ [ibm.com] Digital Unix documentation http://www.unix.digital.com/faqs/publications/base_doc/DOCUMENTATION/V40D_HTML/V40D_HTML/LIBRARY.HTM [digital.com] Filesystem Hierarchy Standard http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.0/fhs-toc.html [pathname.com] | http://www.linuxbase.com/ [linuxbase.com] UNIX stuff http://ww [ed.ac.uk]
Re:One fundamental point ... (Score:2, Informative)
It takes about an hour of actual effort from paperback to the proofing stage (ie. reading the thing on your PDA to clean up the couple of dozen errors).
2 min 1) Use a paper cutter to cut the book up
2 min 2) Send it thru a duplex auto feed scanner (got mine for $300 on ebay...before that I used a single side ADF that took a little more effort (like 5 more minutes).
1 min 3) Assign a reading block to exclude the page numbers and page header and load it for all pages.
3 min 4) Quickly scan thru all pages to make sure the reading blocks look good (can do it in like 1-2 minutes for 300 page book rapidly paging down). Otherwise adjust.
0 min 5) Start the OCR process and wait til it is done.
30 min 6) Scan thru all of the pages looking for obvious OCR problems and the highlighted 'unsure' words.
5 min 7) Go thru and look for hyphenated words that need to have them removed.
1 min 8) Export to Word/HTML/Whatever you feel comfortable with.
15 min 9) Recreate the ToC, and run some specialized spellchecking (only looks for words that aren't used repeatedly to deal with proper nouns or uncommon subject matter), and run script to join page breaks.
Start reading and highlight any formatting errors for later correction.
I'm not saying it isn't tedious, but it isn't 'really tedious' with the proper tools. An hour spent before you spend 6-10 hours reading.