I’ve not had a chance to read it myself yet, but George Anders at Forbes likes it:

I spent hours this past weekend flipping through an early copy of “The Best of Quora,” and it’s a fascinating, enchanting, exasperating book. The topics are an eye-catching blend of things we already care about … as well as the outlandish and the unthinkable. The writing is unfailingly lucid and zesty.

Quora has been criticized in recent months for taking a Facebook-style approach to privacy by publicly sharing its users’ reading histories without warning, which makes the PDF even more attractive; now you can enjoy the contributions of some of its best writers without the need to give up control over your privacy.

[via The Next Web]

But anyone who bought one of the Harry Potter ebooks from the Kindle store discovered that regular DRM was being applied to Amazon’s copies.

The reason: Dutch company BooXtream, which provides the social DRM service for Pottermore, didn’t have a Kindle-friendly version of its service ready yet. But BooXtream’s manager Huub van de Pol told Publishing Perspectives that they’re ready to launch a mobi version “later this month”:

“Since sideloading e-books on a Kindle is very easy, publishers really do not have to publish their title in the Amazon shop. They can sell it from their own website instead. But these .mobi files are unprotected. Having their titles watermarked and personalized will be a big plus for them,” says van de Pol.

This doesn’t necessarily mean Amazon will drop its in-house DRM any time soon, but as van de Pol notes, it will give publishers a way to sell socially DRMed Kindle format ebooks directly to consumers without going through the Kindle store.

At about $0.12/book at bulk sales rates, it could also be a little cheaper — at least for big publishers — than using Apple or Amazon’s built-in DRM or Adobe DRM for Nook and Kobo. Apple and Amazon bundle the DRM fee as part of their 30% cut of each sale, while Adobe DRM costs around $0.22/book plus server and licensing fees.

“BooXtream on ‘Social DRM’ as a Better Option for E-books”

You might remember The Grifters for its popular movie adaptation in 1990. I’ve often tried to pay my rent the same way Annette Bening does in the movie — by giggling and rolling around naked on my bed in an attempt to seduce my landlord — but so far it has never worked out for me; twice my rent was actually increased. The movie also taught me that if I need to beat someone for an insurance scam, I should use oranges wrapped in a towel. I’ve learned a lot from The Grifters, I guess.

As of this morning, it looks like Barnes & Noble and Nook aren’t discounting The Grifters yet, but you might want to check back later today or tomorrow as sometimes they take a while to catch up. However, if you want a cheap pulpy read right now then Thompson’s most acclaimed novel, The Killer Inside Me, is just $2.99 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.

To scan your handwritten notes and search them in Evernote

You can already do this! It’s part of the free membership plan.

And just to be clear, Evernote never displays a full OCR version of the entire document, not even with this new Moleskine product. Evernote uses OCR to index all the text it recognizes in any image you send to your account, so you can then search your images using text strings.

To de-skew and otherwise improve your page photos for greater legibility

Your iOS device can already do things like crop an image, rotate it, and “fix” contrast (with limited success) — just tap the Edit button when you’re viewing an image in your Photo roll. For all-purpose image corrections that are a little more sophisticated than what the Photos app offers, use the free Aviary app.

However, if you want more OCR-centric tools, try something like ABBYY’s FineScanner ($3), which lets you de-skew and fix contrast issues before sending them out.

Or try something like FrontView ($1), which lets you de-skew images and then save them to your Photo album.

By comparison, the Moleskine notebook makes this process a little more dummy-proof by using dots and lines to automate the de-skewing, and by bringing contrast tools directly into the Evernote app. Unfortunately, you’ll have to pay $25-30 for the added convenience.

To tag pages quickly

I like the sticker idea that the Moleskine notebook uses, but I don’t like that you have to rely on a pre-printed set that can be quickly used up, or that you can only use the seven icons included. (You can remap the tags, but you’ll still be stuck with a bunch of little airplane icon stickers.)

For more flexibility, don’t use the Evernote app to upload photos! Instead, email them to your personal Evernote address, and use the Subject line of your email to tell Evernote which notebook to add the image to (@notebook), then which tags to apply (#tag1 #tag2 #tag3).

To get offline access to your Evernote notebooks

Evernote Premium is definitely worth the upgrade if you want to collaborate with others, make your PDF documents searchable (the free OCR feature only works with JPGs), increase your monthly upload quota, or get offline access.

However, if the only thing you need from the Premium level is offline access, there’s a cheaper option. Buy the $4 Awesome Note app for iPhone. (The iPad version is separate, and $5.) Under Awesome Note’s sync settings, you can connect it to your Evernote account, and then you’ll have an offline copy that you can sync whenever you like in order to keep the content up-to-date. You can also create new notes in this third-party app, and when you sync they’ll be uploaded to your Evernote account.

Bonus feature: Awesome Note also lets you assign PIN passwords to individual notebooks, which is comparable to Evernote Premium’s app PIN lock feature.

It was published in 2006, and after disappointing early sales Watts put the full manuscript online for free under a Creative Commons license. This earned him some public, if indirect, disapproval from an outgoing officer of the Science Fiction Writers of America*, but it didn’t seem to harm the book’s prospects; Blindsight went on to earn a Hugo nomination, and his publisher continues to sell it in print and ebook formats (here’s the Tor edition of Blindsight on Amazon.) However, if you enjoy the book and want to pay Watts for it directly, there’s a donation button on his site.

As a sporadic reader of sci-fi, I missed any mention of this six years ago. Oddly, though — or not, considering my interests — I’d seen and loved a satirical faux-PowerPoint presentation posted online by Watts back in 2006. Designed to look and sound like a corporate presentation from a big-pharma conglomerate, the presentation provides a modern biotech context for vampirism. It was a sort of early online book trailer before such things became commonplace, and I remember passing the link around to friends and telling them, “You should watch this, it’s awesome.” Ever since, whenever I see a TV/movie vampire recoil from a crucifix, I think, “Ha ha, you just got pwned by right angles.”

Sadly for many modern tablet/smartphone owners, the multimedia presentation was built in Flash, but the Notes section of Blindsight has much of the same info. Here’s a taste:

Homo sapiens vampiris was a short-lived Human subspecies which diverged from the ancestral line between 800,000 and 500,000 year BP. More gracile than either neandertal or sapiens, gross physical divergence from sapiens included slight elongation of canines, mandibles, and long bones in service of an increasingly predatory lifestyle. Due to the relatively brief lifespan of this lineage, these changes were not extensive and overlapped considerably with conspecific allometries; differences become diagnostically significant only at large sample sizes (N>130).

Don’t worry, the vampiris — brought back via gene therapy — is only part of the story, which is really about zombies! Ha ha just kidding! No zombies. It’s actually a hard sci-fi story about mankind trying to establish first contact with a potentially hostile alien intelligence.

But most important when deciding whether to grab a free book these days, Blindsight was nominated for a bunch of awards it didn’t win, and it continues to receive good reviews from both critics and regular readers.

Via io9

So is it? My short answer: mayyybe, if (a) you absolutely love many of the titles they offer and (b) you want to continue experiencing them with as much fidelity to the print version as you can manage on a tablet — no matter the trade-offs.

And there are some real trade-offs. Such wholesale reproduction of the print experience introduces significant usability problems, and it forces users to abandon more natural consumption patterns on tablets in order to honor an older analog format.

I’m coming up on the end of my free trial, and I’ve decided the cons outweigh the perks. I may miss out on some good articles now and then without a subscription, but ultimately, it’s just not much fun to get magazines this way.

The Netflix of magazines, or the Kabletown?

When I first heard about Next Issue a few months ago, I thought of it as the magazine world’s answer to Netflix. The similarities to Netflix, as well as other content subscription offerings like Hulu Plus, Spotify and Amazon Prime, are easy to identify: you pay a flat fee, and you get wide access to a pool of content that would cost far more if purchased à la carte.

But then you look at Next Issue’s $15 monthly fee, and the comparison fails, and in a big way. Look at what these other services charge:

• Netflix – $8/month
• Hulu Plus – $8/month
• Spotify Premium – $10/month
• Amazon Prime – $7/month ($80/yr)

Netflix, Hulu and Amazon give you access to lots of movies and TV shows. Spotify gives you unlimited music streaming. Amazon even throws in free shipping and a free ebook rental each month. Setting aside any discussion of the “real” value of the participating magazines, why is a Next Issue plan so much more expensive than any of these four offerings?

To the consumer side of my brain, there’s a lot of missed savings in this $15 monthly fee. Unless I’m a power user, I’m probably only going to consistently read a couple of titles each month, which makes Next Issue a risky investment of my entertainment dollars.

Let’s say I want Entertainment Weekly and The New Yorker. I might occasionally check out some other title throughout the year, but the hurdles to downloading issues (I’ll get to that below) make “impulse shopping” in the app less and less likely once the shininess wears off.

Those two titles together would cost me $85 a year on my iPad if I subscribed to them through the App Store. Under the Next Issue plan, I’ll have to pay $180.

Maybe Next Issue has the market research to back up its $15 fee, but to me it looks too high, and it makes me wonder if the fee was set to meet publisher demands and not to compete aggressively in the marketplace.

My conclusion is that Next Issue’s model is really a lot more like cable television, where lots of low-value channels are bundled together under an expensive monthly fee, and where the most popular premium content is only available at an even higher-priced tier.

Unfortunately for Next Issue, consumers can unbundle this offering pretty easily, so is there another compelling reason to use Next Issue? Well…

The overall user experience is kind of clunky.

If you force a publisher to choose between usability and business goals, guess which one will win most of the time?

Below are some problems I had when testing out Next Issue. I’m sure some of these problems will be mitigated through future app updates, or with the help of new technological advances. But as long as magazine publishers try to replicate the print world in the digital space, there are going to be some big problems.

Do we even want traditional magazines on tablets?

There’s a lot of work that could be done to remedy some of the problems above, especially the problem of massive file size, which would in turn improve download times and responsiveness. But maybe the real question is, should anyone bother? The high-value content of magazines are articles, and maybe in the digital world those articles shouldn’t be forced together without a more compelling reason than to drive ad sales.

As Mathew Ingram at GigaOm has noted, the way people find, consume, and share content online doesn’t follow old patterns of media consumption. Digital readers incorporate social networks and aggregators, two methods of content discovery that run counter to the closed, tightly controlled presentation style of print mags. In this sense, using Next Issue feels a little like locking oneself in a small reading room in order to read magazines, while the rest of the world engages in an open exchange of information.

Ingram also points out that Next Issue doesn’t offer any truly innovative service, which perhaps reveals the ultimate business goals of its publishers, which is to simply preserve the old business model for as long as possible:

If Next Issue were to pull individual articles out of its magazines and collect them based on popularity or some other algorithm — or made it easy for readers to share individual articles and other content outside the walled garden of the app itself — that might make it more appealing to those who have gotten used to a Flipboard-style model for consuming content. But it’s not clear that magazine publishers would be interested in doing that. For them, the game is about increasing circulation figures so they can try to keep their advertising revenues from bottoming out as print-based revenue continues to decline.

So instead of competing with the highly engaging UX of apps like Flipboard or Zite, a Next Issue customer is stuck with a digitized variation of a print model that was built to sustain giant full-page advertising. It’s not fun to use, it’s not very engaging, and it doesn’t take much advantage of the medium.

Next Issue may appeal to hardcore magazine readers who can wipe out four or five separate subscriptions with one monthly fee. For the rest of us — the occasional reader, or the reader who sticks to just a couple of titles per month — it’s an expensive and not very fun solution to a problem that doesn’t need to exist.

TED is a technology/entertainment/design conference behemoth that over the past two decades has become sort of the Comic-Con of brainy technology types (although one of my favorite TED Talks is actually about puppets). It’s been publishing ebooks for a year and a half now through existing ebook retailers, but the new iOS app, based on the Atavist platform, is its first solo TED-branded ebookstore.

As we’ve come to expect in the ebook marketplace, pricing for TED ebooks is consistent no matter where you shop. Each title in the TED app costs $2.99, the same as the Kindle Single version and the Nook and iBooks versions.

The app brings one big pricing difference, however, via a new exclusive subscription offer. If you agree to a recurring $14.99 fee every three months*, you get access to six new titles spread out over the duration of the subscription period. The model is designed to help fund a more aggressive publishing schedule; although currently there are only 15 TED ebooks, a rep told PaidContent that moving forward, the organization plans on publishing a new title every two weeks.

Anyway, back to my headline. Anyone who subscribes during the next 90 days will gain access to all 15 current titles in TED’s catalog. It would cost $45 to buy them individually,so it’s really a great deal if the material interests you.

A word of warning, though, to those who usually strip the DRM from their ebook purchases in order to maintain a private library: so far as I can tell the titles will be stuck in the TED app, so this may not work for your needs. Also, a fair number of customers are complaining on the App Store that the latest version is behaving erratically, which may have to do with the wave of attention the app got yesterday when every ebook blog in the universe posted about it. (Not me! Delayed response FTW!) If you run into problems with it, you may want to wait a day or two and try again.

 
* You can cancel app subscriptions through your iTunes account page.

You know, like the Kindle 3.1 update for iOS.

I don’t know what happened at Amazon. Maybe some of the iOS team is on vacation. Maybe this update got outsourced and the quality control dropped. Maybe — to be less sarcastic — Apple has made it too damned hard to thoroughly bug test anything before submission anymore. (Having done QA for a couple of major iOS apps recently, I have strong new opinions on that topic.)

What I do know is that the latest iOS update is not fun.

On my iPad, after the update all of my books disappeared, and I had to reinstall the app before I could access anything again. Just to make it more annoying, I only discovered this later when I launched Kindle while offline, so I couldn’t do anything about it for the day.

But the iPhone is where things really went off the rails. First I lost all of my books. Since I’d already gone through this with the iPad version, I deleted and reinstalled the app. Upon reinstallation I was able to download ebooks, but the graphic novel I purchased as a test case consistently triggered a crash as soon as the app tried to download it. (Officially, Amazon doesn’t even say the iPhone version supports graphic novels yet, but on the other hand it showed up in my list of downloadable titles, so I figured it was worth a shot.) After all that, any downloaded ebook title with DRM refused to open and I got a warning that I should try re-registering the app, so I deregistered and re-registered, then re-downloaded my books once more.

Then it worked. To my surprise even the graphic novel downloaded and opened, after a couple of attempts where it seemed to stall out right at the end.

My advice: if you don’t intend to view Kindle graphic novels on your Apple device, avoid this update and wait for the next one, which I have a feeling will be coming along any day now. If you decide to go for it, then make sure you have syncing turned on so your bookmarks and highlights will be backed up first, and be prepared for the possibility that you might have to reinstall and/or re-register the app.

Mary Wallstonecraft Shelley’s original handwritten manuscript is just one of its primary source treasures. You’ll also find scans from a scrapbook started in 1795, a journal of early poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence, Nelson Mandela’s first official African National Congress statement, and various 19th century engravings. Oh, and the 1831 edition of Frankenstein in case you’d like to just read it (you fetishist).

There’s so much Frankenstein-related content — about 50 articles, interviews, comics and slideshows, plus a couple dozen polls and discussion forums — that it’s hard to describe the app without resorting to a features list, which I sort of just did. In that sense it certainly feels like the kind of app a library would produce, because it offers a little something for everyone, and the longer you poke around the more interesting things you find.

For example, I didn’t know that the cult of celebrity around this group was so intense that a man actually tried to steal Shelley’s heart while he was being cremated. Thanks to this app, now I do.

Sure, it’s not perfect. All that content adds up, and like many enhanced ebook apps this one crosses the 1 GB threshhold, which just highlights how quickly the smaller-capacity iPad models are becoming obsolete when it comes to the latest apps.

The dual-mode navigation concept is also more complicated than it should be, and unfortunately the intro makes matters worse by advising you to rotate the iPad back and forth to jump between new articles and source material. But that way lies madness. It’s better to just approach it as two separate apps stitched together, like, oh I don’t know, an iOS abomination that will forever haunt its master. (I’m hilarious.)

Stranger still is the underbaked ebook functionality, considering the app’s focus. You can mark favorite articles, but if you want to bookmark or highlight the actual book, you’re better off grabbing it from Project Gutenberg or another free source and then reading it in a more suitable app like Readmill.

And finally, I know it’s not really “free” if you first have to pay Apple $400 or more for an iPad. For those of us without iPads, the content is also available online in a more trditional website format, although I had a lot of trouble finding all the primary source content even after poking around the site for half an hour.

The two navigational structures of the app.

Despite these complaints, if you own an iPad you should check it out. I think it’s a great early experiment at how to bundle a lot of disparate content around a central theme and present it in ebook format. I’m still amazed that as of last week, I can now sit on my couch and browse through Mary Wallstonecraft Shelley’s original handwritten manuscript, then cross-reference it with an early print edition, then flip over to a transcript of a discussion about the book by a prison reading group, then look at engravings of automata. I didn’t know I wanted to do any of that, but that’s the magic of the library I guess.

For the next few days I’ll be posting the occasional BEA update over at The Digital Reader, so be sure to check it out this week if you’re interested in this topic.

Here’s what I posted yesterday, which was sort of the pre-show day when the International Digital Publishing Forum presented a bunch of e-related talks for BEA attendees.

• Case Study: A Window Into the E-Future — the World’s First School to Go Full E-Only
  South Kent is a small boarding school in Connecticut that just wrapped up its first year of going iPad-only in the classroom.
   
• IDPF Publishers Roundtable: Thoughts On DRM, Direct Sales, and Digital-First Publishing
  Three publishers, one table, some pointed questions from the audience about DRM and library lending, and then the general “publishers must try harder than ever before” commentary.
   
• Indie Author Bella Andre Gives BEA Tips on Selling eBooks
  I’m not sure what to make of Andre’s exhausting-just-to-listen-to approach to self-publishing, but she’s making a fortune, so she must be doing something right.
   
• Inkling to Release O’Reilly eBooks This Fall With Functional Demo Code Included
  Inkling was founded by a former Apple employee, and while it’s primarily a digital textbook publisher, it’s starting to expand into travel guides, and soon, O’Reilly titles.