COSLINE eBook Workshop
by Jason Griffey
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Workshop presentation for the COSLINE Library group, Oct 21, 2010
Workshop presentation for the COSLINE Library group, Oct 21, 2010
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The Kindle 3 is available in two versions. One of these, the Kindle Wi-Fi, is initially priced at US$139 / GB£109, and connects to the Internet exclusively via public or private Wi-Fi networks.[39] The other version, considered a replacement to the Kindle 2, is priced at US$189 / GB£149 and includes both 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity.[39] The new Kindle with 3G is available in two colors: classic white and graphite. Both models use the new E-ink "Pearl" display, which Amazon claims is 50% better in contrast - a claim that is backed up by early user reports. [40]
Among other hardware changes, Kindle 3 has a larger 1750 mAh lithium polymer battery, AnyDATA DTP-600W 3G GSM modem and Atheros AR6102G 802.11bg WiFi chip.[41]
The third-generation Kindle is 0.5 inches shorter and 0.5 inches narrower than the Kindle 2. It supports additional fonts and international Unicode characters. An experimental browser based on the popular WebKit platform is included, as well as text-to-speech menu navigation. Internal memory is expanded to 4 GB. The battery can allegedly last for up to one month of reading with the wireless radios turned off.[39]
The original Kindle supported only unprotected Mobipocket books (MOBI, PRC), plain text files (TXT), Topaz format books (TPZ), and Amazon's proprietary DRM-restricted format (AZW). Version 2.3 firmware upgrade for Kindle 2 (U.S. and International) added native Portable Document Format (PDF) support.[32] Earlier versions did not fully support PDF, but Amazon provided "experimental" conversion to the native AZW format,[56] with the caveat that not all PDFs may format correctly.[57] It does not support the EPUB ebook standard. Amazon offers an email-based service that will convert JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP graphics to AZW.[58] Amazon will also convert HTML pages and Microsoft Word (DOC) documents through the same email-based mechanism, which will send a Kindle-formatted file to the device directly for $0.15 per MB or to a personal e-mail account for free. These services can be accessed by sending emails to @kindle.com and to @free.kindle.com for Whispernet-delivered and free email-delivered file conversion, respectively, but these are services available just for those who bought a real Kindle device, not available for those who just own the digital Kindle application (iPhone, iPad, etc.). The file that the user wants to be converted needs to be attached to these emails. Users could also convert PDF and other files to the first-generation Kindle's supported formats using third-party software. The original Kindle supported audio in the form of MP3s and Audible audiobooks (versions 2, 3 and 4), which had to be transferred to the Kindle via USB or on an SD card. However there is software available (e.g. Calibre) which can convert a non-DRM EPUB file into the Kindle Format.
A book may be downloaded from Amazon to a limited number of devices at the same time. The limit ranges from one to six devices, depending on an undisclosed number of licenses set by the book publisher. When the limit is reached, the users have to unregister some devices in the Manage Your Kindle page in order to add new devices.[59]
E-books of unencrypted .MOBI files, .TXT files, or .AZW formats can be transferred to the Kindle over a USB connection and read, but any other e-book formats are not supported. The original Kindle and the Kindle 2 firmware before the 2.3 firmware update cannot read e-books or files in the PDF format. However, PDFs and several other file formats can be converted using a number of downloadable applications, free conversion by email, or a similar method that sends the converted content to the owner's Kindle for a fee.[24]
Amazon owns Mobipocket,[60][61] and the Kindle AZW file format and DRM scheme are similar to the Mobipocket file format and DRM scheme, yet Kindle is not able to read DRM-protected Mobipocket books without resorting to third-party conversions tools.
Initially, Kindle 1 only supported the ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1) character set for its content; Unicode characters and non-Western characters were not supported. A firmware update in February 2009 added support for additional character sets, including ISO 8859-16.
Kindle 2 added support for Audible Enhanced (AAX) format, but dropped support for Audible versions 2 and 3. Using the experimental web browser, it was possible to download books directly on the Kindle (in MOBI, PRC and TXT formats only). Hyperlinks in a Mobipocket file could be used to download e-books[62] but could not be used to reference books stored in the Kindle's memory. Kindle DX added native support for PDF files.
The original Kindle and Kindle 2 did not allow the user to organize books into folders.[63] There is an option to select whether documents, subscriptions, books, or everything on the device appear on the home page. Another option orders the items on the home page according to title, author, or download date. Books may also be tagged with one or more keywords by inserting the tags into notes added to the book. Users can then search for books by tag.[64] Kindle software version 2.5 (released July 2010) allowed for the organization of books into "Collections" which is roughly correspondent to folders except for the fact that one book may be added to multiple collections.
eReader PDB with Barnes & Noble's eReader DRM, sometimes called Secure eReader format
EPUB with Barnes & Noble's eReader DRM, used for ebooks downloaded wirelessly to the nook
EPUB with Adobe ADEPT DRM, sometimes called Adobe EPUB or Adobe Digital Editions format
PDF with Adobe ADEPT DRM
The EPUB with eReader DRM combination is a new format created for the nook. Adobe has undertaken to include support for that combination in future releases of Adobe Reader Mobile software, to allow other reader devices to support that format[8].
Supported ebook file formats without DRM include:
EPUB
eReader PDB
PDF, including password-protected PDF
Supported sound file formats for music and audiobooks include MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, but not WMA.
Image-file formats—used for wallpapers, screen savers, and book-cover thumbnails—include JPG, GIF, PNG, and BMP.[6]
The nook provides a "LendMe" feature allowing users to share some books with other people - depending upon licensing by the book's publisher. The purchaser is permitted to share a book once with one other user for up to two weeks.[9] Users will be able to share purchased books with others who are using Barnes & Noble's reader application software for iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Blackberry, Mac, Android OS and Windows as well as other.[10]
The nook system recognizes physical Barnes & Noble stores; customers using the nook in the Barnes & Noble stores receive access to special content and offers while the device remains connected to the store's wi-fi. In addition, most e-Books in the catalog can be read for up to an hour while connected to the store wi-fi network with the 1.3 software update.[11]
Size: 104.3 x 145 x 8.5 mm
Weight: 155 g
Screen Size: 5 inch
Resolution: 800 x 600 pixels
16-levels of gray
Built in flash memory: 2 GB
Font Size: 6 sizes (XS - XXL)
Supported e-book formats: EPUB, PDF, Microsoft Word, TXT, RTF, BBeB
Available case colors:
the interface of the future is touch
Microsoft releases Windows 7 Touch Pack as a free download
the Looking Glass, a seven-inch big brother to the Streak 5 that's due out in November. For starters, it's running Android 2.1 on a Tegra 2 processor, with an optional TV tuner module so you can watch ATSC or DVB-T programming on the seven-inch 800x480 display -- the same resolution as the Streak, which is sort of weak. In addition, the render on the slide shows an AT&T U-verse browser, though, which is interesting -- too bad there's no more info about it. RAM is pegged at 4GB, with another 4GB of flash for storage and an SDHC slot for up to 32GB of expansion, and there's a 1.3 megapixel camera.
Open Publication Structure (OPS) 2.0, which describes the content markup (either XHTML or Daisy DTBook)
Open Packaging Format (OPF) 2.0, which describes the structure of an .epub in XML
OEBPS Container Format (OCF) 1.0, which bundles files together (as a renamed ZIP file)
Currently, the format can be read by the Kobo eReader, Apple iPad, Barnes and Noble Nook, Sony Reader, BeBook, Bookeen Cybook Gen3 (with firmware v. 2 and up),COOL-ER, Adobe Digital Editions, Lexcycle Stanza, BookGlutton, AZARDI, Aldiko and WordPlayer on Android and the Mozilla Firefox add-on EPUBReader. Several other reader software programs are currently implementing support for the format, such as dotReader, FBReader, Mobipocket, uBook and Okular. Another software .epub reader, Lucidor, is in beta. Additionally, the Stanza application for the iPhone and iPod Touch can read ePub files offline.
Adobe Digital Edition uses .epub format for its e-books, with DRM protection provided through their proprietary ADEPT mechanism. The recently developed INEPT framework and scripts have been reverse-engineered to circumvent this DRM system.[13]
DSLibris, a Sourceforge.net project, is able to decode e-books in .epub and .xht format for reading on Nintendo DS systems.
The track may be copied to any number of iPod portable music players (including the iPhone).[2] (However, each iPod/iPhone can only have tracks from a maximum of five different iTunes accounts)
The track may be played on up to five (originally three) authorized computers simultaneously.[2]
A particular playlist within iTunes containing a FairPlay-encrypted track can be copied to a CD only up to seven times (originally ten times) before the playlist must be changed.[3]
The track may be copied to a standard Audio CD any number of times.[3]
The resulting CD has no DRM and may be ripped, encoded and played back like any other CD. However, CDs created by users do not attain first sale rights and cannot be legally leased, lent, sold or distributed to others by the creator.
The CD audio still bears the artifacts of compression, so converting it back into a lossy format such as MP3 may aggravate the sound artifacts of encoding (see transcoding). When re-ripping such a CD one could use a lossless audio codec such as AIFF, Apple Lossless, FLAC or WAV however such files take up significantly more space than the original .mp4 files.
At this time, it appears that the restrictions mentioned above are hard-coded into QuickTime and the iTunes application, and not configurable in the protected files themselves.
Perpetual access & ownership
No DRM (Digital Rights Management)
All on one platform, whenever you need
Nearly 40,000 eBooks available.More than 4,000 New eBooks and eReferences every year.
Can download PDF, but only by chapter/section
Springer provides its electronic book and journal content on its SpringerLink site, which launched in 1996. SpringerLink is operated by MetaPress, a division of EBSCO Industries.[7]
NetLibrary while a provider of library like services is better classed with institution database providers because of how their service is setup. Like the institution database providers the user must login before they have access to the content and like the database providers it is accessed through a single website (NetLibrary.com). However because of the type of content it offers, namely ebooks and audio books, NetLibrary falls in the same niche as OverDrive’s Digital Library Reserve.
Just look at the Harry Potter books; J.K. Rowling has never agreed to allow any of the Potters to be sold in digital form, ostensibly fearing that piracy would follow. Of course, it is beyond trivial to find any of the Potter titles in digital format online; the last one was available digitally before it was for sale in print. Digital rights management (DRM) techniques do no better in protecting books from piracy; even the largest digital bookseller in the world, Amazon, had its DRM broken in days.
This divide between how publishers want ebooks to behave and how digital files actually work is a problem. There is no chance that digital information is going to get more expensive, harder to copy, and more difficult to access. Anyone who tries to control information in that way isn't really thinking clearly—and this includes many librarians.
What are we protecting?As Clay Shirky says in his most recent book, Cognitive Surplus, "...an organization that commits to helping society manage a problem also commits to the preservation of that same problem, as its institutional existence hinges on society's continued need for its management."
Libraries, especially public libraries, exist in order to balance the inequality of information access owing to economic or other pressures. No single average member of the public can afford to purchase all of the potential information he/she may want to access, and so libraries distribute that financial burden across the public as a whole, acting both as collective buyer for their community and as access point.
Libraries are clearly managing a problem in society. We need to think harder about what we are doing that commits us to the preservation of those same problems.
A misfit between modelsOn the one hand, I believe that publishers and authors will, in the digital age, benefit from freely sharing information and that DRM and other protection mechanisms are crazy. On the other, I have argued on behalf of libraries that ebooks and other digital content deserve the same First Sale rights that physical purchases have—we should be able to loan them in the same way, use them to fill interlibrary loan requests, and more. But that expectation makes me guilty of exactly the same category of mistakes for which I have called out publishers: confusing the digital world of information with the physical world of print.
How does the digital distribution model break our existing print-based models? The first, and most obvious, is the DRM-driven limitations placed on digital media that mimic the physical. Limitations on number of checkouts is one of these; digital information is infinitely reproducible at effectively zero cost. Why should anyone have to wait on a digital copy? The answer is that they shouldn't.
The second is that when you divorce the content from the container (a refrain I've used a lot in the last year), libraries are often ill equipped to deliver the content in device-neutral ways. Again, this is almost entirely because of the necessity of the existing economic structures of the producers of the information. Publishers desire to keep making money, so they impose limits via digital lockboxes that prevent true content portability.
The only way that I can see to resolve these mismatched views is to consider the idea that the First Sale principle doesn't apply to ebooks and other digital content. Maybe this is the fact: information in the digital age is such a different beast than in the print age that we not only shouldn't draw analogies but we actually can't.
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argues that when a paradigm in science shifts, as from the geocentric to the heliocentric understanding of our solar system, people on either side of the paradigm use the same word, but they shouldn't be understood to mean the same things at all. When a geocentrist says "planet" and a heliocentrist says "planet," the context is so different as to render them unable even to communicate with each other. We may be at a point in publishing/producing that we are actually talking about different things and we don't even know it.
Beyond the First Sale principleWhat would it mean for libraries? Let's assume that there is and will be no First Sale rights for digital media and, further, that copyright law continues to be written by lobbyists. That leaves libraries with just exactly the rights that we can get written into the licenses we sign. It also means that we need to stop looking at our current, print-based models and seriously examine what the model for the distribution of digital information should be. We need to determine where the library fits in that ecosystem and put our efforts into making the licenses that we sign have obligations toward those ends.
If we don't, we continue to impose an outdated set of beliefs on the digital. There will be no shortage of new media over the next few years, as audio, video, text, and interactivity blend and merge. This will cause even more licensing issues, as these blended media objects overlap more and more with the world of the "book." Now is our chance to position ourselves for the future, to reimagine and reinforce our place in the information ecosystem—and we need to be willing to fight for some sanity in this new world.
The camera operates at 500 frames per second, with a resolution of 1280 by 1024 pixels. For each frame, the system alternates between two capture modes. First it shines regular light on the page and captures text and images. Then a laser device projects lines on the page and the camera captures that as well.
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