Like Amazon’s Kindle web app from last August, the Kobo web app is really a website that can store data on your device even when you’re offline. This means you can download and read ebooks without a live connection. It also means Kobo can offer it to (for example) iPad and iPhone users directly, instead of having to request Apple’s permission first.

But unlike Amazon’s Kindle web app, the interface is designed to benefit Kobo more than its customers, by reserving about two thirds of the screen for Kobo’s own use. The difference is striking when you look at the two web apps side by side, so let’s do just that:

The green parts that I’ve marked indicate the “store” section of the interface.

On the Kindle web app, it’s all about creating a user experience that emphasizes reading — it’s all about your ebooks, your library. You’re in control of what you see each time you open the web app. And when you’re ready to shop, you tap the button and the entire interface switches to the Kindle Store. Amazon’s approach is more sensible, because if you’re a customer/reader, your primary need when you open an ereader app is to read; shopping for more ebooks is important, but secondary.

It’s true that there are lots of ereader apps that can fulfill that primary reading need, but unfortunately for the vast majority of us, each retailer’s DRM/format scheme prevents us from straying beyond their custom apps. We’re stuck with the app that the retailer provides — and that means if you’re a Kobo customer, more likely than not you’ll be reading your ebooks “within” Kobo’s store.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a new path for Kobo. Here are side by side comparisons of the current App Store apps for Kobo and Kindle:

Again, green indicates the “store” section; again, Kobo claims the majority of the interface for itself, leaving you just one third of the screen to browse your own library.

I don’t know why Kobo keeps doing this, other than I suspect the company is aggressively trying to boost sales. By contrast, I imagine Amazon enjoys strong enough sales that it can afford to hand over the full interface to its customers. But I also suspect that Amazon intentionally keeps the private library and public store concepts separate in order to provide a more intimate experience for its customers.

With this and my last critique of Kobo, it’s starting to look like I really don’t like the eternal third place runner in the ebook retailer race. That’s not true! I just don’t like it when a business pushes too far into its customers’ personal spheres, and that line is very easy to cross when we’re in the digital world. No matter how “e” publishing becomes, a quality reading experience is still essentially a private experience — a silent connection between the reader and the author that takes place in the inner world of the mind. I wish Kobo would take that concept more seriously.

• Murasaki ← this one has the comparison chart
• BookReader
• Bookle

I’m happy to see some new EPUB solutions hitting the marketplace. If you use a Mac, you probably already know that EPUB readers have been scarce around these parts. Sure, there’s the EPUBReader plugin if you use Firefox, but Chrome and Safari don’t have anything as good. There’s also the built-in reader from Calibre, but it is only a reader of last resort. Otherwise you’re stuck with overbuilt solutions like Adobe Digital Editions or B&N’s Nook app (which requires a B&N account even if you’re just using it for personal EPUB files).

I’ve tried two of these new apps, and in my opinion they’re not bringing enough quality to warrant a purchase price just yet. But at least they’re trying! The first app that can offer deep customization, broad EPUB compatibility, and sophisticated annotation tools will find itself at the head of a pretty empty market segment, so there’s still plenty of room for improvement in the coming months. For now, this is a great start.

I no longer enjoy launching the Kobo app on my iPhone or iPad. I stopped looking forward to interacting with it a few updates ago, and now I actually avoid it.

This has been building for a while. A year ago, I praised Kobo for being ahead of the curve when it came to adding entertaining new features to its iPad app (the features were later extended to other platforms). “Best app,” I wrote then, and I meant it. But over the past six months—well, ever since Apple crippled all the competing ebook retailers’ apps for strategic reasons in the summer of 2011—Kobo has been adding new features to make its app more and more “social” and “networked” and “fun”, with the consequence that the app has started to become less and less enjoyable to use. The latest upgrade (version 5.3) has simply made it not worth bothering with anymore.

All upsell, all the time

The new home screen for the Kobo app

(I don’t even want to talk about the fact that, because the last book I’d opened in the app before this update was erotica, now Kobo thinks that ALL I WANT TO SEE are self-published Smashwords-style M/M book covers with titles like “Marked Men” and “Temptation Castle”. That’s my fault for opening books in an app that clearly intends to track everything I do for all time. It’s embarrassing, I guess, but it’s not even what I’m upset about.)

There is a time and place for book ads, and it is: WHEN I HAVE CHOSEN TO SHOP FOR A NEW BOOK. Guess when I haven’t chosen to do that? When I launch the Kobo app for the sole purpose of reading a book I already own.

Again, my complaint put in even simpler terms: The Kobo app is was designed to let me read my ebooks. It is was not a catalog I launch to browse for new purchases.

One more time, in visual form, in case someone at Kobo sees this rant but is pretending to be too busy to read it:

Look at the screencap above again. Jeez. The new recommendations section takes up HALF of the display area now. Your own books–the ones you’ve added to the Kobo app so that you can read them (in many cases, you even paid good money for them)–are swept aside into a secondary section, reduced to one cover image (unless that slot is filled by a sample you recently opened, sigh) and a four-pane mini-thumbnail collage that together take up only one-third of the display area.

Imagine if the next time Apple updated its iOS for your iPhone it replaced half of your home screen with “trial apps” that you didn’t ask for. You’d think Apple was insane, or maybe had turned into a U.S. cellular carrier circa 2007. In fact, Apple does look at your past purchases (if you give permission) and offers up recommendations. But it does this within its App Store, so that you, the customer, have to deliberately choose to look at the list when you’re good and ready–the digital equivalent of walking into a store to browse the merchandise.

Try to buy this book, we dare ya

So that’s the first problem, and it’s a big enough “screw you” to customers to make me worry that Kobo now suffers from what I call Tivo-itis, which is when all the smart people who made a company visionary leave and are replaced by second- and third-stringers.

But the second problem with the new Kobo update is that this new “recommendation” advertising doesn’t even work. Here’s what it’s like to reach the end of a sample book.

Remember when I mentioned that Apple had zombified all competing ebook apps? Those competitors, including Kobo, have to hand over 30% of their profits if they want to include crazy cutting-edge things like links to their own websites. This means Kobo, Nook, and Kindle have all been forced to offer dumbed down apps that can display files, but that can’t enable any sort of shopping experience.

Kobo still has to follow this rule, even with “free sample” books. The result is what you see above: If you do tap on one of their recommended titles, what you’ll end up with is a “free sample” that just stops at the end of the sample. There’s no message. Nothing. Not a quick “End of sample!”, and certainly not a “Buy this book on Kobo’s website!” because Apple would reject that functionality in a microsecond. Just a blank screen, and an error message if you try to turn the page. It’s true you can “share” the name of the book via email or social media, but let’s look at how you can do this.

So technically, if you really want to sell yourself the ebook sample, by emailing it to yourself you can then get an email with a link to the book on the Kobo website, and from your email message click through to buy the book. Wow. It looks as stupid illustrated here as it felt doing it.

[Update: A Kobo representative has told me that if your Kobo account is set up to permit email communication, you actually receive this email automatically the first time you open a sample within the app. It turns out I had this option unchecked, which is why I ended up having to figure out the manual way to do it.]

The other ebook retailers have similar problems with samples–for example, Kindle samples offer “buy this book” links that simply don’t work. The difference is, because the customer has pre-selected a Kindle sample, the non-functioning link serves as a reminder that the title can be purchased from Amazon. On Kobo’s app, the experience is more like, “Here’s a bunch of context-free excerpts from books you probably don’t care about. Good luck with that.”

Part of me wonders if this is the first sign of the New Face of Kobo, now that it’s been bought up by Rakuten. Software updates don’t happen overnight, so this was likely something Kobo had in the works for a while. Rakuten surely had enough time to kill this update but chose to release it anyway, which is a good sign that this is the way things will work with Kobo from now on. Who knows? By the time summer comes around the Kobo iOS app may be nothing but an impenetrable billboard of book samples, Facebook alerts, infographics, help screens, pop-up windows, slide-out sheets, and “share this” badges. (I haven’t even discussed the increasingly overstuffed social sharing features, but if you haven’t experienced them for yourself, just imagine how cool it would be to combine an ebook app with the slot floor of a casino.) Good times.

What Kobo should have been working on the past six months was a decent web app alternative so that it could escape Apple’s ridiculous iron fist. Then it could reinstate the original web catalog that it used to have, which was both useful and non-intrusive.

What Kobo has been doing instead is steadily ruining the customer experience for some of its best customers–the ones it already has.

(Photo: jot.punkt)

Too many restrictions

About a week ago, a study about ebook buying and reading habits reported that teens find current ebook platforms too limited when it comes to social sharing:

The E-Book Market for 13- to 17-Year-Olds

• Teens lag behind all other age groups in e-book adoption. Sixty-six percent of 13- to 17-year olds say they prefer print books to e-books, 26 percent say they have no preference and only 8 percent prefer e-books.
• One reason for this resistance: Teens like using social technology to discuss and share things with their friends, and e-books at this point are not a social technology. An increasing number of teens surveyed says there are too many restrictions on using e-books: 14 percent said so in 2011, compared to 6 percent in 2010.

That’s been my overall takeaway, too, while test-driving these various social reading apps recently. There are just too many restrictions to make the experience enjoyable.

But “too many restrictions” is a pretty general complaint. What about some details? Okay, here are two fatal flaws I see in the social reading experience right now:

1. The ebook landscape is too fragmented.

From retailers to technology companies to publishers, every company involved in ebooks today is spending a massive amount of resources trying to simultaneously lock in customers, block competition, and thwart piracy. None of these goals serves the needs of the customer. In fact, progress in any of them makes it increasingly harder for an individual to use his ebooks freely.

2. DRM ruins everything.

I know, it’s always so easy to bash DRM, and how else will you prevent customers from making copies etc? But when it comes to social media, DRM truly is a lethal additive. Social sharing requires a frictionless environment to work–think Instagram or Pinterest–and DRM is almost pure friction.

Imagine the ghostland that Instagram would have become if you had to authorize and unlock each photo, then sideload it into the Instagram app before uploading.

See the restrictions in action

My favorite social reading app of the moment is Subtext, and yet unless those two issues are resolved soon, I fear Subtext is a non-starter, along with every other social reading attempt currently being tested or developed.

Why? Because right now, to use Subtext you have to:

1. Own an iPad.
2. Buy your ebooks from an exclusive subset of retailers such as Kobo and Google Books.

Let’s look at the fragmentation problem: You can’t use Subtext on your smartphone or on an Android tablet. You can’t use Kindle or iBooks or Nook or library ebooks with it. You can’t even review your notes and highlights on the web, for instance from a regular computer or laptop. And about that pesky DRM: If you do buy ebooks that work with Subtext, they won’t work on any Kindle devices or apps, and your notes won’t carry over to Kobo or Nook or Overdrive.

Why would a teenager go through so many hoops, and deal with such an unnecessarily hamstrung “solution” just to talk to her friends about a book? For that matter, why would an adult? Why would anyone? Life’s too short for that sort of nonsense.

I still think social reading apps point out an interesting future for, say, book clubs and classrooms, but until the industry kills DRM for good and stops trying to carve up exclusive little corporate fiefdoms, it’s going to be too much trouble to bother with.

(Photo: niallkennedy)

I’m not going to comment on the software, as I’m still downloading it as I type this entry. And other sites are doing a great job of covering today’s Apple press conference, so I’m not going to give Apple more free PR if I can help it. I mean, unless they want to pay me.

But I would like to point out one important catch. The fancy new textbook authoring software that Apple is giving away, iBooks Author, comes with a big restriction in its license agreement, and it’s that you can only sell your textbook in Apple’s iBooks store. (Click image for full-size screenshot of the license from the App Store page.) If you want to give your new textbook away for free, Apple has no problem with that. But if you want to sell it yourself or use some other retailer, no dice. You go through iBooks, meaning through Apple, and you give Apple a cut of the profits. Or you don’t use iBooks Author to make your fancy new digital textbook.

That, of course, is why iBooks Author is free. It’s sort of like if the company started giving away Pages, but required that all novels typed with the app belonged to the Apple Store.

So download it, play with it, learn from it. But take a good look at the terms before you invest any real labor in using it, because whatever you end up producing is going to be under Apple’s control for a long, long time.

Whether such cases are due to idiocy or deliberate copyfraud, they hurt the consumer. It’s prohibitively expensive for the average private citizen to have to engage the Library of Congress as well as hire a copyright attorney (which, no kidding, is what the Copyright Office recommends) just to confirm that he has the right to do what he wants with something published in 1925. Even then, if the work was first published outside the U.S. then it may be nearly impossible to determine its true copyright status.

Which leads me to the problem of locked PDF versions of century-old works. I’m now in the possession of half a dozen PDFs of old short stories that various websites offer for free, and yet those files have been password protected to prevent me from printing, copying, or otherwise gaining direct access to the text. In the most extreme cases, the person who created the PDF file has, for reasons known only to him and the functionally retarded demon who guides him, added his own copyright claim to it. Seriously, people should just be hit with sticks sometimes.

Remove that PDF’s sham DRM with MuPDF!

(That may be the worst subheading ever written.)

Fortunately, Robert Brewer at Excited Curiosity explains that you can use a free open source PDF toolkit called MuPDF to unlock password protected PDF files. There are MuPDF viewers for Windows and Linux at MuPDF.com, but For OS X you have to use the command line (i.e., the Terminal app found under Applications>Utilities). Everything that follows is for OS X users.

First download the OS X binary from mupdf.com, unarchive it, and put the resulting folder wherever you like. Then in Terminal, use the “cd” command to navigate to that folder, and then run the “pdfclean” command on a locked file and in seconds, you’ll have a new unlocked version. Here’s an example of how to run the command if you have the MuPDF folder in your home directory and the locked PDF file on your Desktop:

./pdfclean ../Desktop/lockedfile.pdf ../Desktop/newnameforfile.pdf

If you’re not used to Terminal, here’s a quick introduction that will teach you the basics. Pretty much all you need to know to use MuPDF is how to type the full paths of the MuPDF folder and of the locked PDF file, and the command “cd” to change directories. (The command “ls” to list the contents of your current directory is also helpful.) You can also check out this comment on Brewer’s blog for more help.

Using OS X? Here’s a contextual menu shortcut for MuPDF

I was excited about finding this free solution to the bogus DRM problem, but I wanted an easier way to use it in the future without having to launch Terminal each time. I created a simple workflow service in Automator that I can access via the contextual menu when I click on a file. Now when I download a PDF and find that it’s locked, I simply right-click the document and select “UnlockPDF” from my Services menu, and a clean version appears next to the original.

Here’s the code I used to create the service. Note that I wrote this using Automator 2.2.1; when I shared a similar tip last year for KindleGen, I discovered that some readers couldn’t replicate my instructions because they were using older versions.

on basename(thePath)
	if thePath ends with "/" then
		set nameIndex to -2
	else
		set nameIndex to -1
	end if
	set ASTID to AppleScript's text item delimiters
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "/"
	set thePath to text item nameIndex of thePath
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ASTID
	return thePath
end basename

on getdir(theFileName)
	set theReversedFileName to (reverse of (characters of theFileName)) as string
	set theOffset to offset of "/" in theReversedFileName
	set thePrefix to (reverse of (characters (theOffset + 1) thru -1 of theReversedFileName)) as string
	set theSuffix to (reverse of (characters 1 thru (theOffset - 1) of theReversedFileName)) as string
	return thePrefix
end getdir

on run {input, parameters}
	set myFile to quoted form of POSIX path of input
	set newFile to basename(POSIX path of input)
	set newPath to getdir(POSIX path of input)
	set finalPath to (newPath & "/u-" & newFile)
	try
		do shell script "../../Applications/mupdf-0.7-darwin-i386/pdfclean" & " " & myFile & " " & finalPath
	end try
	return input
end run

Quick instructions:

1. Launch Automator and create a new Service workflow.
2. At the top of the composition area, change “Service receives selected [dropdown]” to either “files or folders”, “folders”, or “PDF files”. Change the other dropdown to “Finder”.
3. In the Library pane on the left, click the Utilities directory, then find the “Run Applescript” action and drag it into the composition area.
4. Select all the default code in the “Run Applescript” box and delete it.
5. Paste the above code in. Be sure to edit the path to the MuPDF folder so that it’s correct for your situation.
6. Click the hammer icon to compile the code.
7. Save the service under whatever name you like. I chose “UnlockPDF” to make it easy to find months from now when I’ve forgotten all about how I did this.

Because I’m a pretty bad scripter, I’m sure this isn’t the most elegant way to do this. If you can improve on it—particularly if you can fix it so that it can batch process an entire folder of PDF files—please let me know and I’ll update the script.

(Frozen book illustration credits: Ice Block, Risager; Old Book, HoskingIndustries)

Update: Forget all of this! Stanza delivered a surprise update to the Apple app store on November 10th, 2011, that restored functionality on iOS 5. But only update if you need to: this latest version breaks the app if you’re running an older iOS like 4.3 (thanks to Paula for pointing that out in the comments below.)

Lexcycle’s Stanza, the once mighty ebook reader app for iOS devices, doesn’t work on Apple’s latest mobile operating system iOS 5, and as development and maintenance on the app appears to have stopped, it likely never will.

Eulogy

Stanza was my first and most favorite ebook app for the iPhone, and later the iPad. When it was first launched, it had better features than any competing third party app, and over time it consistently beat the big players like Amazon, Kobo and Barnes & Noble on things like openness and customization. I loved Stanza for subway rides—I used a giant font size in landscape view and was able to flick through screens like index cards, which made it easy to keep my place while being jostled and interrupted constantly.

For a while, Stanza was my catch-all app for ebook files, and it let me standardize my library around the EPUB format despite Amazon’s anti-user push for azw/mobi and tpz. Whether it was a title I’d downloaded from an author’s website, or a classic I’d grabbed off of Project Gutenberg, Stanza could handle it. I stopped caring that Amazon and Barnes & Noble were taking baby steps with their branded apps, because the scrappy alternative was far better. Worst case scenario, I could always remove the DRM on books from those retailers and shift them over to Stanza.

But best of all was how Stanza worked with my Calibre ebook library. I exported my entire Calibre library using OPDS and uploaded it to a private server, then connected to it from Stanza over the Internet. I was able to browse my library—and instantly download titles to my app—from anywhere I could get a wireless connection.

I always knew that Stanza would eventually go away after Amazon acquired it back in 2009. Frankly, I was pleasantly surprised the retailer kept Stanza available for as long as it did, although I suspect Amazon’s motive was purely strategic: it prevented Apple, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo from acquiring what was for a while the iOS platform’s most famous and popular ebook app, while at the same time it gave Amazon a way to indirectly offer an EPUB reader without having to sully the Kindle brand.

I suppose, if you want to live in denial, you can imagine there’s a slim chance Stanza will wake up from its comatose state one day and start working again. But it’s time to move on. From the day Amazon purchased Stanza, we knew in our hearts that it wouldn’t last forever.

We, the survivors

If you’re a Stanza user on an iOS device, what’s next for you? Here are some quick tips:

Getting your files back from a broken Stanza

The simplest strategy is to not upgrade to iOS 5 if you can help it, although by doing so you’ll miss out on some really nice features that Apple has introduced, like system-wide text expander shortcuts, an elegant (but extremely limited) to-do app, and the ability to update and sync your device over Wi-Fi.

If you updated your device already, and you have ebook files in your Stanza app that you really want to salvage before moving on, you can try using the Stanza Book Restore tool that Lexcycle created. It’s a Java app that will scan your most recent iTunes backup, find the Stanza files that were saved there, and extract them as files with human-readable names.

Finding a decent alternative

Based on the suggestions in this Get Satisfaction thread on Stanza’s iOS 5 issues and this Mobileread wiki page on ebook software, I tried a few other apps to see if I could find one that would work with my private OPDS library and provide some decent functionality. Here are my observations.

Best premium bet: MegaReader ($1.99 at time of post)

Pros:
• handles OPDS catalogs nicely
• good basic customization options
• some great built in catalogs, so if you just want to find a good book to read fast (from a public domain collection, naturally), you can do that within seconds of launching this app

Cons:
• doesn’t handle some basic font styles like bold or italic
• no way to take notes or look up words
• limited layout options (what is has are nice, but there aren’t many)

Based on the suggestions users are making on the app’s user forums, there are some other missing features that could limit its usefulness to some users: there’s no way to drag and drop files into it using iTunes, and it can’t handle really large (1000+ titles) libraries.

I’ve been using it for a few days, and I’ve found that for basic reading and public domain book discovery, I’m pretty happy with it. However, if I’m doing a closer reading of a book—which often includes taking notes, highlighting passages, making lots of bookmarks, and looking up unfamiliar words—I much prefer to use iBooks or the Kindle app.

Best free bet: iBooks

Pros:
• free
• simple but elegant UI
• handles PDF files as well

Cons:
• not many customization features
• no access to catalogs–only the terrible iBooks Store, which you should avoid at all cost unless you like having your ebooks locked to iOS devices and nothing else (not Mac desktops)
• I’ve had trouble with the app running sluggishly if I add a lot of notes and highlights to a text.

To get EPUB files from other online catalogs into iBooks, you’ll have to access them from Mobile Safari, then choose iBooks when you download the file. Alternately, you can drag-and-drop non-DRMed files into the Books section of iTunes and sync that way. Fine, it’s not a great solution, but it’s free.

Not recommended (except perhaps for public library checkouts):

Bluefire is more or less useless to me. Its choice of catalogs is paltry and locked down, meaning you can’t add your own, and its key functionality—the ability to read titles locked to your Adobe Digital Editions account—is duplicated in other apps. You can annotate your books, but you can’t export any notes, which makes the feature rather pointless.

Overdrive is only good for accessing library ebooks and audiobooks, and it doesn’t offer basics like layout options, the ability to annotate, or a dictionary. If you use the Kindle app, and your library has the title in the Kindle format, you’ll find it’s a much better option—Amazon will back up your notes so you can access them later, and you can take advantage of the Kindle platform’s bookmark syncing.

(Image credits: casket, wickenden; frame, John Loo)

The website Mac OS X Automation reported it first, so far as I know. From that site:

Mac OS X Lion includes an Automator action, named Text to EPUB File, that is designed to make it very easy to convert selected text or text documents into EPUB books, ideal for transferring to iPads and iPhones. Additionally, the created EPUB books can include images, MPEG audio, or MPEG video files.

NOTE: If the source documents for the action are in Rich Text Format (RTF), any formatting they possess will be preserved, and display correctly in the EPUB document. Also, the action includes full Unicode support, so Asian and Arabic characters are preserved as well.

By default, there’s no way to access this Automator action from any apps because there aren’t any default Services written to take advantage of it. But the website above provides four Service scripts that you can use to give your copy of Lion super EPUB creation powers over groups of files, text selections, or content copied to the Clipboard.

The site also offers some tutorials on how to install the Services and how to use them, if you’re curious but not sure how to get started.

“Text to EPUB File” [Max OS X Automation]