Category Archives: long tail

Exciting e-book progress from Amazon and Google

It’s been over two years now since I first starting writing about electronic books and e-book readers on my blog. At the 2006 introduction of Sony’s reader, I was concerned that the “long tail” of niche and out-of-print content was being ignored in favor of making the latest John Grisham best sellers available on an inferior platform:

Sony should quickly reposition the Reader by striking deals with Google and as many publishers as possible to get out-of-print and niche books available online in a proper format. The device would also be great for reading blog posts, news feeds and other web content offline. Sony should add features to its software to highlight that use and make it it one-click simple (like subscribing to podcasts on iTunes).

In January 2007, I got excited about Google’s bookscanning project as a possible supplier of exactly the kind of hard-to-find content I wanted.

But for the past few years, the book scanning project and Google’s resulting book search engine turned out to be more than a little disappointing. For one thing, until the recent blockbuster deal with publishers, there was no way to access most of the books in the search index without visiting a university library that might be thousands of miles away and/or not allow access to the general public.

Even more annoying, out-of-copyright books were only available as PDF files or in a PDF-like display in your web browser. That made it difficult to read the books on your computer, impossible to load them onto an ebook reader and horrendous for printing out. Even though the copyright had completely expired and the works were in the public domain, there was no good way to read them.

In the meantime, Amazon came out with its very fine Kindle reader, which you might notice allows access to hundreds of thousands of books still in copyright, plus thousands of free older books on the Internet, plus one-click access to blogs, newspapers and magazines for reading even while offline. Just what I was asking for!

Now it’s time for the next wave. The other day, just minutes after I was despairing about the Kindle’s lack of progress and improvement, Amazon announced it had a big announcement to make on Monday, February 9. Looks like an improved Kindle is on the way. Then Google Books unveiled a new feature allowing you to read books in an unformatted text version instead of just the less than great PDF-y way. And today, the New York Times reports that Amazon is making deals to offer Kindle-formatted books on a variety of mobile phone platforms. A-list blogger and publisher Rex Hammock and I have gone back and forth a couple of times about whether Kindle or the iPhone will triumph in the realm of e-books but maybe the real answer is “both.”

Here’s what a free copy of Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Tom Sawyer looks like under the new plain text formatting. Note that Google is using optical character recognition software to produce this format, so there are a few spelling glitches:

sawyerjpg

Further comments from around the web:

jkOnTheRun points out one flaw in the new Google mobile format: “There’s also the offline factor: you can’t read the titles in Google’s library without a connection. Commercial platforms only need a connection to initially download content.”

Marshall Kilpatrick at ReadWriteWeb is perusing the available non-fiction: “The business and economics section is a charming selection of very old books. You have to remember that only works old enough to be in the public domain can be viewed in full for free, but if you can accept that then there’s lots of fun to be had.”

(AMP adds: A bit too much is being made of the Google plain text library for mobile phones. This is mainly out-of-copyright stuff and I would say that the few tens of thousands of such books that people most want to read, like Tom Sawyer, have long been available from other sources like Manybooks.net in formats that work with Kindles, iPhones etc. This horrid PCWorld coverage doesn’t even mention that the Google books are limited to out-of-copyright)

Russell Buckley on Mobhappy says the book search needs better…search: “Anyway, back to Book Search. Strangely, given the parent of the project, the one main criticism I have of it is that it’s actually not very good for ummm…searching for a book – or displaying its wares for discovery either.”

WordPress 2.7 is the best WordPress yet

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Wordpress 2.7's new dashboard When WordPress 2.5 came out a few months ago, there was a lot to like but there was also a lot to not-so-like. The layout of key parts of the program, including the dashboard and the editing page for new posts, didn’t seem very well thought out. The overall design was visually noisy and distracting, as well.

This week we got the next big thing from WordPress and the programmers clearly felt our pain. WordPress 2.7 fixes almost everything that went wrong in 2.5 and adds a bunch of new goodies to boot. Sure, there’s a few glitches but it’s definitely the best WordPress yet.

Start with the new dashboard screen (pictured above). As has been much praised, the redesigned dashboard has toned down useless visual noise and amped up things you need to see, with smarter color and layout decisions. I appreciate the new greyish tone that recedes out of mind so you can find what you’re looking for quickly. And the functions along the left side roll-up or down as needed. For example, in the picture above, I clicked on “Tools” and WordPress rolled out choices like “Import,” “Export” and “Upgrade.” Click on “Tools” again to roll them up. There’s even a handy quick post section for writing a quickie without leaving the dashboard.

The main page for writing and editing posts has likewise gotten less busy and more useful. Thankfully, lists of tags and categories have moved back to the right side, next to where you compose your posts. I was always forgetting to use them after they got buried below the post writing area in 2.5. One glitch here, at least using Firefox and a Mac, is that I have to keep my browser window open pretty wide. Otherwise, the box where you actually do your writing doesn’t narrow itself correctly and cuts off the display, as in “hey, where’s my cursor?”

Wordpress 2.7's new edit post page

Another even more serious problem remains from the past few upgrades. It used to be when you uploaded a photo that one of the fields you could fill in immediately was the alternate text. That’s where you are supposed to put a textual description of the photo that can be read by browsers for the blind and that appears even if the photo itself doesn’t load. But WordPress changed the upload box so you can only fill in alt text if you write a caption.

I don’t want a caption to appear under my photos. The only way to get just alt text and no caption is to upload the photo, place it in the post, click on it in the post editor and then click on advanced settings to reach the old alt text box. Since every photo needs alt text but not every photo needs a caption, this is backwards. Please fix, WordPress!

Back to the positives, another huge improvement is the new page listing all your existing posts. There’s a menu that appears under each listing now if you mouse over the post’s name. You can choose to quickly jump to edit, preview, delete (with confirmation) or quick edit. The new “quick edit” choice allow you to change or add to the most important fields and metadata without having to open the whole post back on the editing page. It’s great for adding tags or categories you forgot the first time around. One tip – you can use the search box to find all posts about a certain subject and then easily make sure you tagged and bagged them consistently. Quick editing is also available on the list of your existing pages.

Another handy new feature is the display options menu, available on many pages under a light grey button near the top, right side called “Screen Options.” Under this menu you can chose to display or eliminate different headings in lists or boxes on pages. I never use custom tags on my posts, so I can switch off the box for custom tags and not have to see it on my new posts pages. I’m the only author on this blog, so in the list of all existing posts, I can get rid of the useless column displaying authorship.

You can also drag and drop all the boxes on each page to re-arrange the layout. Want the tags list back underneath the editing box instead of on the side? I’ll call you crazy but just drag and drop it where you want it.

WordPress can also run some of its functions from your own computer instead of making your web server do extra work. This feature relies on Google’s Gears program, which you have to install first. Then click the “turbo” button in the upper, right corner of your dashboard to get WordPress geared up.

And that’s all I can rave about for now. I’ll update this review as I discover other cool stuff or find useful write-ups elsewhere.

Harvard Bookstore gets solid new ownership

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Harvard Book Store in Cambridge

Back in May, I fretted a bit about the future of the Harvard Bookstore (not affiliated with the university), one of the last great indie bookstores left in these parts. Today comes news that a retired tech executive and his wife have bought the store and intend to keep its operating philosophy intact. New owner Jeff Mayersohn says he’ll continue to focus on great service. “It’s a great store, profitable, and extremely well run,” he told the Boston Globe. “Coming from the high-tech world, I have noticed a trend away from companies that don’t offer customer service, toward those that do, and that is what a local bookstore offers.”

As I argued back in May, despite the proliferation of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle and all that, there is still a place for an intelligent bookstore. To repeat:

Amazon.com is fine with its computer generated suggestions and Barnes & Noble has all the best sellers fit to print. But only at HBS and its ilk do I find tables of recently released obscurities in the spotlight, staff-written recommendation notecards taped on shelves across the store and a cadre of knowledgeable, intellectual staffers ready to assist if I look the slightest bit lost or needy.

UPDATE: The Boston Globe ran a sweet profile of the new owners.

Amazon-Tivo ecosystem works for me

Useful info getting out on new iPhone apps like e-reader

Kindle or no, we still need great book stores

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(UPDATE: In October, 2008, new ownership promised to maintain the store’s essential character – phew!)

Woke up and received a slight slap in the face as I read the morning paper today. Seems that Frank Kramer, owner of the very fine Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Ma., is planning to sell his establishment. Make no mistake: Kramer’s smallish store, founded by his father in 1932 and not affiliated with Harvard University, is one of the remaining great gems of the neighborhood.

Used to be, when I was a young lad paying 25 cents for the bus ride in to Harvard Square, that the place was an intellectual hot house, with book stores and record shops and all sorts of grungy, character-building one of a kind, hole in the walls. But 25 years of intense yuppification has completely changed the environs. Reading International, Penguin Books and the Paperback Booksmith were early casualties, followed by the tightly-shelved but well-stocked Wordsworth across the street which finally gave up the ghost in 2004. Plenty of less bookish Harvard Square institutions that I frequented regularly have disappeared as well, like the tiny Tasty Diner, Pizzeria Regina and Elsie’s Sandwiches.

There’s no guarantee what will happen next to HBS. Maybe it will turn back the tide of history. I’m sure Kramer wants to sell to somebody who’s simpatico with his tastes in books and retailing. But you never know. My darkest fear is that the store is sold to some real life version of Joe Fox, the ruthless book superstore owner played by Tom Hanks in the movie You’ve Got Mail.

$Bartley\'s and the Hong Kong$ As an aside, that little block of the Square around Mass Ave and Bow Street seems to have a powerful anti-yuppification field. In addition to the HBS, its neighbors, Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage and the Hong Kong chinese restaurant also stand just as they did 20 plus years ago. Nearby, Oona’s used clothes (loved by Yelpers) and Cafe Pamplona (famous enough for Wikipedia) are equally untouched. There’s not many other blocks within a mile or two in any direction that remain as they were, thanks to the endless expansion of chains like Starbucks, CVS and Origins not to mention the innumerable bank branches which have spread like Kudzu.

Three survivors worth mentioning: the amazing imported chocolate selection at Cardullo’s Gourmet Shoppe, the delish ice cream at Herrell’s and the comic book fan’s paradise Million Year Picnic. Giant newsstand Out of Town News still stands, though I no longer need a fix of out of town news on dead tree pulp.

But I digress — the great value that HBS provides, and that Wordsworth and its kin also offered, is focused squarely on reading, specifically what to read. Amazon.com is fine with its computer generated suggestions and Barnes & Noble has all the best sellers fit to print. But only at HBS and its ilk do I find tables of recently released obscurities in the spotlight, staff-written recommendation notecards taped on shelves across the store and a cadre of knowledgeable, intellectual staffers ready to assist if I look the slightest bit lost or needy.

I had high hopes that the Internet, or more recently, the socially-oriented Web 2.0 Internet, might somehow aid me in the never-ending search for what to read next but my dreams remain unfulfilled. After almost a year of using GoodReads, and its Facebook widget, I’ve gotten a total of zero new leads of what to read. Seems it’s more like a book club for people in disparate locales and none of my friends are on it. I haven’t given up hope — I’m still logging books there, writing short reviews and even added a blog widget (look right) so you all can see what I’m reading right now. But so far it’s been all give and not much give back. Hrumph.

Perhaps some will take me to task for bemoaning the potential demise of an old-fashioned bookstore when I’m a raving electronic-book loving fan of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. But those folks are missing everything that I’ve tried to say is great about the Kindle — its primary audience is avid readers who happen to use gadgets, not gadget geeks who happen to read a few books. I want books on paper, books on screens, I’ll even read books printed on blue jeans (cheap joke for a rhythm, I know)

And by the way, one big part of shopping at HBS is almost exactly the same as shopping at the Kindle wireless store. I see an interesting title, I pick it up and open to Chapter 1 and start reading. Of course on Kindle, I have to wait the 1.5 seconds to download the free sample first chapter. Then again, Kindle also lets me see reader reviews, other books by the same author and so on. I can only hope that technological, Internet-y progress picks up the pace or I’ll be left wandering the virtual aisles with a glazed look and no one to guide me.

p.s. Refreshed some of my memories of the old Harvard Square here. The guy has pictures! Blogger Richard Tenorio also reminisced about the demise of “old” Harvard Square.

(All photos snapped with the trusty Canon SD400. More here.)

Yelping for fun and profit – well, fun anyway

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True to my astrological sign, Taurus, I’m always on the look out for some new, fancy-shmancy restaurant or coffee shop or paper store or whatever. As such, I’m starting to get more and more into the local review site Yelp.com. I’m adding my Yelp profile page to my links list here and dropping the Facebook application Yelper to my FB profile page, too.

Yelp is a very long-tailish sort of Internet destination. Here I am in Needham, Massachusetts, reviewing and reading reviews for the local joints and establishments that I like best. I’m swimming in a pretty small pond of Yelp’s hundreds of thousands of reviews from cities all over the country. But I can see the amount of effort most reviewers put into their postings of places I know first hand and that makes me trust Yelp all the more if I’m going someplace new or looking for hot spots in a different city. It’s also another example of Facebook’s social network tying things together. With Yelper, my reviews show in my FB news stream for all my friends, hopefully encouraging them to become yelpers too and then feed me with their reviews. It’s a virtuous circle. Sweet.

Sometimes you eat the long tail, sometimes it eats you

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The explosion of the Internet and e-commerce and the interconnectedness of everything is generally A Really Good Thing. As Wired editor Chris Anderson has explained ad nauseam on his blog, we’re in age where more different things sell to fewer people and the collective weight of all that less-popular stuff is growing. The “long tail” is a reference to a sales distribution graph’s thinner, outer region (hint: the yellow area of this picture from Anderson’s web site).

So when I got all excited about the song “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” in Wes Anderson’s short film Hotel Chevalier, I was fascinated to learn via Wikipedia that the singer, Peter Sarstedt, had also recorded a sequel. A little sleuthing around Google uncovered that the later track, called “The Last of the Breed,” was on Sarstedt’s 1997 album England’s Lane. It wasn’t on any download service I checked at the time, so some more sleuthing around found the entire CD available for purchase with a four week wait from a vendor on Amazon.com’s UK site.

I ordered and waited and waited and waited. It took so long I almost forgot I had ordered it when it arrived. I ripped off the plastic, pushed the disk into my CD player and skipped ahead to the song. And — ugh — it was horrible. Whatever happened to poor Mister Sarstedt between the two recordings, he completely lost the charming and entrancing style that made “Where do you go to” so great. Oh well. Sometimes you eat the long tail, sometimes the long tail eats you.

Ignore the static: Kindle is great for reading

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Wow, the new electronic book reader from Amazon, Kindle, sure is getting a lot of absurdly misguided and factually incorrect criticism. My fingers are getting sore from responding to such a tide of disinformation in comment boxes scattered across a zillion web sites. Just this morning, I’ve been writing a lengthy comment to a Kindle critique on Rex Hammock’s usually excellent blog. (And actually, Hammock — unlike others — makes clear he’s not reviewing the product but giving a first blush reaction to the specs and marketing spin. I just happened to be commenting on his post when I decided to write this post! A more annoying example would be this silly attempt to review via photos).

So in the interest of saving my carpal tunnel, here’s a summary of some of my rebuttals, refutations and excoriations. Bottom line: the Kindle rocks. If you love to read, if you’re on the go, if you like gadgets, get one.

The biggest mistake Hammock and others have made is dissing the Kindle’s feature set without actually having used one. Turns out, the e-ink screen, FREE wireless broadband connection, open publishing platform and FREE web backup storage are all innovative, useful, well-designed features. The experience of using a Kindle is fun and adds to, rather than detracts from, the experience of reading.

With the mobile broadband connection, not only is the bookstore always with you but the collective knowledge of the Internet is always with you. While reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book “Team of Rivals” last night, I came across a passage about Samuel Chase arguing an anti-slavery case in the Supreme Court called Jones v. Vanzandt. Wanting to know a bit more, I shifted over to the Kindle’s Internet browser and within a few clicks and hops from Google, found a copy of Chase’s Supreme Court brief. Reading history, it’s transformative to be able to flip to original sources and related material without getting up off the couch.

You can also access free ebooks on the Internet. I have a copy of “Pride and Prejudice” found via Google and downloaded a few seconds later. Amazon stores all your purchased books and notes “in the cloud” so everything is backed up. You can delete a purchase and re-download it anytime later. You can also associate up to six Kindles with one Amazon account and freely download any purchase to any of the Kindles simultaneously. Unlike iTunes, Amazon also has opened its Kindle publishing platform so anyone can upload a book, set a price and start selling to Kindle users. I also heartily endorse the decision to make it PC-free. Mac users, Linux users, all are welcome. Connect the Kindle via USB and it’s just a drive. All of these features seem smart, useful and decidedly now.

In terms of the form factor and design, the e-ink screen allows loooong battery life and very crisp text in a font that’s especially easy to read. There is no noticeable eye strain or the feeling of tired eyes I get reading long documents on my laptop. The keyboard comes in handy when you want to search, use the Internet or take notes, but the most of the keys are inert or inactive while you’re reading a book, so you can put your fingers on that part of the device for comfort. Used in its little leather portfolio, the Kindle becomes very natural to hold comfortably for reading at several angles. It’s much more convenient that propping up a weighty hardcover, not to mention lighter to throw in your briefcase.

Some people have wrongly said that you can only read ebooks bought from Amazon on Kindle. Not true. You can put any text document on directly, like any of the thousands of ebooks on Project Gutenberg. You can also quickly and easily convert any HTML, PDF or Microsoft Word file for use on Kindle, either by emailing the files to Amazon or by using the free software Mobipocket Creator on your own computer. You only pay a 10 cent fee if you email a document for conversion to Amazon and want it delivered wirelessly to your Kindle. Converted files sent back to your computer are free.

And ebook vendors like Baen are selling unprotected files you can convert for Kindle reading. Once the Kindle builds a sizable audience, as I expect it will, the publishing and ebook elephants will start dancing to Amazon’s tune. Why can I only download out-of-copyright books from Google in a PDF image format? How about HTML? The biggest current online ebook sellers offer a variety of competing, incompatible DRM download formats. That could all change quickly. The reason the record labels started to allow DRM-free music sales was because Apple had become so powerful and was never going to allow others to use its Fairplay DRM format. When Kindle users likewise dominate the world of ebooks, and sales of ebooks start rising faster than ever before, other companies will be pushed to change.

To be continued…for all my subsequent Kindle coverage, see my Kindle tag.

Back in the New York Groove thanks to HBO

Gravitational Pull

A blog about technology and other things I'm interested in