Nate Hoffelder

IFA-Berlin is going on right now and Charbax is in the thick of it. A couple days ago he got a few minutes with Sri Peruvemba, the head of marketing at E-ink, and as usual Charbax got a look at gadgets that no one else has posted.

Do you remember the dual sided dual screen smartphone? It turns out that the second screen was just a dummy. The device everyone has been looking at is more of an idea piece than a functional design. Charbax gets that detail out of Sri at about 15:40 into the video. Surprisingly, the dummy screen is the LCD screen, not E-ink. But on the upside Sri does say that real phones using 2 real screens are only a couple months away. E-ink is working with partners to finalize designs and get them into production.

Charbax also got the first look at E-ink’s newest prototype, the one with a color lighted E-ink screen. No one is producing it yet, but as you can see in the video (at 10:36) it looks rather cool. It’s almost cool enough that the glare from the frontlight layer doesn’t bother me.

Elsewhere in the video you’ll find E-ink’s flexible screens, including the Wexler FlexOne, E-ink signage (26:10), a sample piece E-ink screen for that dual sided smartphone (20:30), and more.

The Nook Touch might be over a year old now, but thanks to the combination of Android OS, a decent hardware design, and an enthusiastic development community it is still the best 6″ E-ink Android tablet on the market (in spite of the lack of sound).

Actually I’d call it the only 6″ E-ink Android tablet, because while the Kindle Touch can be turned into a decent tablet  type device it runs a proprietary version of Linux, making it a little hard to develop apps. And the Sony Reader T1, while it looks very pretty, is limited by the amount of space to install Android apps.

Today’s video shows a hacked Nook Touch running a PS1 emulator app. It’s likely also running the fast refresh hack as well as other hacks.

BTW, if you’re not impressed yet by the Nook Touch, watch this video. It shows the NT playing video at 20fps or higher. While the resolution isn’t all that great and there’s no sound, this is still an impressive accomplishment considering the Nook Touch was never intended to play video. This and most of the other great new abilities were added via software hacking, and that just goes to show the original hardware design was brilliant.

via Hackaday

News is breaking today that apparently European regulators take as dim a view of anti-trust conspiracies as in the US.

Reuters is reporting this morning that Apple and several publishers are in talks with the European Commission. The conspirators are reportedly trying to stave off a criminal prosecution (and the attending fines).There’s no public info on the parties involved but according to sources the publishers are Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette Livre and Holtzbrinck.

There aren’t any specific details on the settlement, but it would reportedly involve releasing Amazon and other ebookstores from ebooks price controls for two years. As much as that might dismay some in publishing, I’m sure the conspirators would prefer this option to the fines, which could reach as high as 10% of their global revenue.

Is it just me or does it appear that Apple and a number of publishers broke the law? I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but it would seem that we wouldn’t have all these settlements without some serious rule breaking involved.

Several publishers have settled a US antitrust lawsuit while Apple and 2 others are going to trial, and that makes me wonder if this Reuters report is true. I tend to think it is; when it comes to corporate governance Europe has harsher laws than the US and the rumored penalties would best be described as painful.

On the other hand, given the current state of European book pricing laws I’m not sure how much of an effect this settlement will have. Quite a few countries in the EU have fixed price book laws (Germany, France, Spain and more) so even if Amazon is allowed to discount ebooks under a new contract with publishers they would be blocked from doing so in most of the national markets.

This very issue of discounts came up a couple weeks back when Apple tried to sell discounted iTunes gift cards and ended up having to block those cards from being used in the iBookstore.

In fact, given the current laws in Europe I really don’t see the point of an anti-trust conspiracy. Publishers already had laws on the books which gave them what they wanted: a way to stop Amazon from discounting ebooks.

Then again, I thought that the publishers and Apple would never be able to get away with the US conspiracy, and yet they tried it anyway. Perhaps they’re not as smart as I thought.

via

Yesterday Amazon was awarded a patent for a dual screen LCD/E-ink tablet which had a screen on both the front and the back of the device. It was a cool concept, but at the time all i had to show you was a diagram. Today I can show you this.

That is a dual sided smartphone prototype. E-ink is showing it off this week at IFA Berlin. I don’t have any details yet on whether the second screen has a touchscreen as well, but it looks to me like this gadget is running Windows Phone, not Android.

There’s no word yet on which device maker has committed to the idea, but E-ink is saying that someone has a similar design in the works. And I’m sure more will release their own version. You can just look at it and know that someone will want to buy it.  But will it be cheap enough? That’s another question.

via

If you’re a US resident who bought any agency-priced e-books from one of the major e-book sellers and don’t live in Minnesota, rejoice! A $69 million settlement between 49 states (plus five territories) and three of the five agency publishers means you stand to receive at least 25 cents per e-book you bought. Woo-hoo, you’re in the money! (Minnesota opted out of the settlement.) Assuming the court approves, the publishers will pay out the money into a fund and e-book stores will start notifying their customers within 30 days.

The payout per agency-priced e-book bought will be valued at $1.32 if the book was a New York Times Bestseller at the time they bought it, 32 cents if had been a NYT Bestseller during the first year of its publication, and 25 cents for non-NYT Bestseller backlist titles. If you bought the books from Amazon, B&N, Kobo, or Apple, you’ll get an account credit unless you state you’d prefer a check; if you bought them from Google or Sony you’ll just get a check. And about $10 million of the settlement will be set aside for administrative costs. Any money remaining after everyone’s been compensated will go to literacy charities.

Of course, anyone who did buy an agency-priced book probably spent a lot more than 25 cents or even $1.32 more than they would have on it if it weren’t agency priced. And while there are still two non-settling publishers plus Apple to shake down for pennies, it’s doubtful that even if they doubled the payout it would still bring those prices down to pre-agency levels.

The bright side is that it will be a lot easier to find and compensate the people who qualify for the payouts, given that all the stores have computerized records of who bought what e-book. But in the end, all this really means is that you’ll get some store credit that might entice you to buy another book, and give the publishers more money. Really, class-action suits are generally worthless for anything except enriching lawyers. (For example, I got a 55-cent check a few weeks ago for something to do with Google AdWords ten years ago. 55 cents! Was it even worth the cost of sending that check out?)

So what do you plan to do with your 25 cents per e-book?

While Apple, Asus, Lenovo, et al, are looking at designing the best single screen tablet, Amazon has been thinking outside the box. Today they filed for received a new patent for a dual screen tablet.

As you can see from the diagram above, the concept device has a screen on both the front and the back. Now that’s relatively novel; past dual screen tablets like the Entourage Edge, original Nook, or the SpringDesign Alex had the screens side by side so the user can see both of them.  While that offered more screen real estate it also led to a bulkier device which sometimes took up more space than desired, particularly when you’re only using one of the screens.

Amazon’s concept also has a pair of cameras, a mike, and g-sensor. It’s not clear from the filings exactly how you would use the device (other than the obvious details) but I bet Amazon has put some thought into it.

What I find most interesting about this patent is how closely it fits a rumor I heard last year. According to an unnamed source, Amazon was working on a dual screen tablet, a device with an E-ink and an LCD screen. I didn’t think the rumor was real at the time, but it does agree with this patent to a surprising degree.

So it looks like Amazon really did have a prototype dual sided dual screen device in their labs last July. Who knows, that could be the Kindle Fire which will be unveiled next week.

That’s actually not such a wild supposition. The FCC paper has suggested that the new KF2 is a slab style device without a hinge. The demo diagram above shows a device with a screen on the front and the back.  They could be the same device – if not for the placement of the FCC label in the middle of the back of the device.  That kinda kills the possibility that there’s an extra screen.

Still, this is an interesting patent. It’s also Amazon’s second patent for a dual screen device; the first covered the original Kindle, and we all know how that turned out. But unlike that earlier patent I don’t expect to see this device hit the market.

The thing about patents is that companies usually only receive them after the related device is on the market. Filing for a patent usually takes years (the average is 7+ years), and working the bugs out of a device can almost always be done faster.  Of course, that rule might not apply in this case; Amazon only applied for this patent last February and they got it today. That is exceptional turnaround.

Then again, if Amazon really were planning to release this device they would likely have stalled on the paperwork so as not to leak details.

Update: According to a reader I misread the paperwork. It looks like Amazon doesn’t have the patent yet; the reason we saw the filing yesterday was that Amazon chose to have it revealed to the public, not because the patent was awarded. So I guess I was right; Amazon probably isn’t going to make this device.

via

Here’s a story I didn’t expect to have to write.

Lendink, on of the many sites set up to arrange for Nook and Kindle owners to lend ebooks to each other, got another DMCA notice yesterday. It’s the first such notice since the site restarted last week, and it’s a doozy.

I’m sure you know that Lendink is a legitimate website which a few weeks was taken down by a lynch mob of uninformed authors. The authors never really understood what the site was doing and they all sent threatening emails (ranging from mild to scary) to Lendink demanding the impossible: that their ebooks be removed.

I had been hoping that the enormous public spectacle of the authors being wrong would be enough to educate everyone about sites like Lendink as well as Lendink in particular. Nope. As we can see from this latest DMCA notice, my hopes were in vain.

Tim Cushing of Techdirt tipped me to the notice, which was posted yesterday on Lendink’s Facebook page. Dale Porter, Lendink’s owner, is planning to post all such notices in order to shame the senders. This particular notice was sent not by an author but by an unlicensed attorney, and that’s where this story gets deliciously entertaining.

Hank St James describes himself as an attorney (even though he has not passed the PA bar exam) and for the past few years he has been running an anti-piracy service for self-published authors. I’ve never heard of him before, but I found a reference to him in a 2010 blog post on the e-reads blog. He was then calling himself the "pirate sinker", a monicker which he still uses today.

Update: Someone on Slashdot has turned up the detail that  this lawyer might be operating under a pseudonym. There’s a lawyer by the name of Hank James Clarke who lives a few miles (52 miles) away from Wilkes-Barre, PA. If that is the same guy then he is likely also committing an ethics violation. But given the distance it seems unlikely.

He seems to be running this operation out of his house Wilkes-Barre, PA, which should tell you a lot about his lack of success. He doesn’t even have a website that I could find, but he does appear to have conned a number of authors into signing up for his service.

And I do feel that he is conning authors because this guy doesn’t seem terribly competent. He sent a DMCA notice for some 80 to a hundred titles (I lost count) to a site which patently was not hosting or pirating the ebooks. Furthermore, this fool didn’t bother to read the FAQ for Lendink before perjuring himself with this bogus notice.

But the most damning detail in this story is that the guy clearly missed all the coverage of Lendink in the past few weeks.  If his anti-piracy work is his job then you would expect him to keep up on the news, right? I have difficulty figuring out how he could have missed Lendink. I’ll grant you that an author could miss the stories (and I would not blame them), but a businessman has an obligation to his customers.

Speaking of his customers, I’m not going to call out the authors who hired this bozo; they probably thought he was competent when they hired him and at least some will be appalled at the bogus notice. Please do not hold this against them or drag their names through the mud.

But you can say whatever you want about Hank St James. The service he offers is clearly defective and deficient. His work is about as sturdy as a deck of cards, and we really should share that detail with his potential customers.

Unfortunately, that’s about all we can do. PA can’t exactly take his license away from him if he doesn’t have one, and there’s not much we can do about the perjury. No one has ever been prosecuted for a bogus DMCA notice.

Update: It turns out I was wrong. There’s at least one case of a bogus DMCA notice costing the sender money. Jane Litte of Dear Author reminded me of Lenz vs Universal, the bouncing toddler case. In that situation the parent of said toddler had recorded a short clip of the kid dancing to background music and then posted it to Youtube. Universal had the clip taken down under a DMCA notice. Lenz responded by hiring a lawyer and suing Universal. She won.

Second Update: A reader pointed be at OPG vs Diebold, another example where a bogus DMCA notice ended up costing Diebold money. This one is much more complicated, though.

Would someone please do us all a favor and sue this attorney. He needs to be shut down.

P.S. If you ever meet me at a conference, ask me what I know about Attributor’s anti-piracy service. I can’t post it here, but I do have some interesting details.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9280842894530460095

If you’re a self-published author who is still struggling to get noticed, now might be the time to swallow the rest of your pride, jettison your code of ethics, and start buying reviews. (Hey, everyone is doing it.) The NYTimes interviewed the owner of a paid book review service yesterday, and business was good.

Todd Rutherford is the owner of a now defunct web site called GettingBookReviews.com. For a low price of $99 Todd promised to review your book. If you needed a chorus of reviews, Todd could arrange 20 reviews for $499 or 50 reviews for $999. The reviews would be posted on Amazon, B&N, or other ebookstores by the reviewers and would look for all intents and purposes like a real review.

And business really was good. The NYTimes article says that he earned $28,000 a month. Customers included authors who have since made it into the best seller lists, the most notable of which was John Locke. You probably know him as the first self-published author to sell a million Kindle ebooks. He got his start by buying reviews.

Locke commissioned Mr. Rutherford to order reviews for him, becoming one of the fledging service’s best customers. “I will start with 50 for $1,000, and if it works and if you feel you have enough readers available, I would be glad to order many more,” he wrote in an Oct. 13 e-mail to Mr. Rutherford.  “I’m ready to roll.”

and

He also asked that the reviewers make their book purchases directly from Amazon, which would then show up as an “Amazon verified purchase” and increase the review’s credibility.

Locke ended up buying 300 reviews from that service, and god only knows how many he bought elsewhere. And from what I can tell, the reviews he bought probably weren’t written by someone who even read the ebook. Heck, they not have even been all that well researched. Here’s how one of Rutherford’s reviewers described her work process:

For a 50-word review, she said she could find “enough information on the Internet so that I didn’t need to read anything, really.” For a 300-word review, she said, “I spent about 15 minutes reading the book.” She wrote three of each every week as well as press releases. In a few months, she earned $12,500.

“There were books I wished I could have gone back and actually read,” she said. “But I had to produce 70 pieces of content a week to pay my bills.”

But at least the service promised a 5 star review and the option of editing that review before acceptance, even though they were only paying "reviewers" $10 per review. That really moves it beyond the pale, doesn’t it?

This service was dishonest and deceptive but still effective, so I have to say that I’m glad when I read the reason Rutherford shut it down. One author (or several authors) didn’t like his service and responded by posting negative reviews on various consumer protection sites (here, here).

Once Rutherford’s service was exposed to the light of day, it was dead. The writing blogs took up the torch of shaming him into shutting down (here), and then Amazon took down some of his reviews and Google cancelled his Adwords account (so he couldn’t buy advertising).

If there’s anything I’ve learned from this it’s that I have always been right to trust negative reviews. Paid reviewers are far more likely to give a book 4 or 5 stars and only say nice things.  I would not expect to see as many negative reviews from a paid service (otherwise they might piss off a customer).

Rich Adin posted a few weeks back that perhaps uneducated  reviewers were a serious problem because we did not know whether they had read and understand the book. Perhaps Rutherford could add that to his next review service?

As for me, I’m sticking with Rebecca Allen. Negative reviews are currently more reliable than positive reviews due to the simple fact that the reviewer feels strongly about the book. When that emotion is cogently conveyed in the review it can give you valuable insight into whether you want to read a book.

via NYTimes & elsewhere

image by mikeymckay

Yesterday Evernote announced new integration with the budget scanning service 1DollarScan, and today they’ve launched a new partnership with Moleskine. And this isn’t the usual slap a brand on the product kind of deal; on a technical level this is rather cool.

I’m sure you know the name Moleskine. This company designs high quality pens, notebooks, and accessory. I’ve never used one due to the price tag (I like the 15 cent spiral notebooks), but these beautiful notebooks are the go-to choice for creative individuals of all types. And now they’re going to appeal to the creative techie as well.

Moleskine and Evernote have just launched the Evernote Smart Notebook. The Smart Notebook comes in both lined and grid, and they’re designed to work with a new feature which has been added to the latest Evernote iOS app.

The app will of course let you photograph your paper notes and add them to Evernote, which is itself a cool feature (especially when you consider the OCR abilities of Evernote). But there is a limitation to capturing your notes this way; camera angle, lighting, or other issues can distort the notes.

The new notebook improves on the existing feature. The pages of the notebook are covered in a pattern of dots which are design so that the app can use them to correct for the distortion introduced by the camera. This enables you to add a page of notes as a rectangular note and not as a photo.

Pretty cool, huh? But wait, there’s more. Each notebook ships with a set of stickers. After you upload a page of notes, the app will recognize the stickers and instantly associate them with one of your predefined tags. There’s also a set of arrow stickers so you can call attention to specific parts of your note.

The new notebook is scheduled to hit store shelves on the first of October, with a retail price of $30. That price includes a free trial to Evernote Premium. You’ll find a code in the back good for 3 free months of service which gives you greater upload capacity, more sharing options, access to note history, faster image recognition, top priority support, offline notebooks, PIN lock, and more.

Do you recall how I said there was a new KF and Kindle coming this fall (FCC paperwork)? Amazon is probably going to announce them 2 weeks from today.

I just got the invite, and the press conference will be held in Santa Monica this time around.  Amazon is breaking with their past habit of scheduling launches in NYC. I’m still thinking about going, but if I do I expect to see that 10″ Kindle Fire, a new Kindle, and the new dock for the Kindle Fire. That last item is going to work with the larger KF, I think.

The new location suggests other possibilities, like a greater emphasis on the media abilities of the KF. That would fit well with the new dock.

A couple weeks back I showed you that the Lendink lynch mob was caused by a bunch of authors who didn’t understand law, technology, or the contracts they had signed. Today the Author’s Guild once again reminded us that those problems can exist on an institutional scale as well.

Publisher’s Weekly is reporting the Author’s Guild, publishing’s own rearguard Luddites, is now objecting to the services provided by 1DollarScan.

This company is the US spinoff of an immensely popular Japanese service called Bookscan, and like its parent company 1DollarScan offers a cheap book scanning service. You mail them the book and they scan it and email you the PDF. Their process usually results in a destroyed book, so it isn’t of much use for rare and valuable books. But it does offer an opportunity to get an ebook for a title that might not be available digitally.

Update: 1DollarScan is  in not related to the Japanese company Bookscan.

The company is in the news today because of new Evernote integration, which Chris covers over here. While that topic is interesting on a technical level, I’m more interested in what others are saying about the service.

According to the Author’s Guild, what 1DollarScan is doing is illegal. PW reached out to Author’s Guild executive director Paul Aiken, and this is what he said: "If the information on its website is accurate, this is a copyright infringement service. Their fair use defense is laughable."

I love it when someone in power spouts off about topics they clearly don’t understand, and Paul proceeded to dig himself a deeper hole: "There are differences between digitization projects of 1DollarScan and Google and HathiTrust, but they share this: each is subverting the author’s fundamental right to choose whether or not to make a work available digitally, and under what terms. Though it makes sense for most authors to enter the digital book market, digitization has clear risks. It’s not up to unlicensed third parties to choose whether to take those risks with an author’s work."

Yeah, if you believe that authors can effectively control whether their work gets digitized, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. That control went out the window over a decade ago.  I’m sure you recall the dedicated efforts to scan the Harry Potter books as each was released?  Those fans aren’t the only ones who can scan books.

What’s more, I seriously doubt that any copyright infringement suit against 1DollarScan will succeed. A  basic reading of the website will tell you that the customer gives up the original book in order to get the PDF. As I see it, to show that a copy was made you’d have to show the judge the original book as well as the PDF. That’s going to be a little hard, given that the original book was likely destroyed as part of being scanned.

I don’t claim to be a lawyer, but I will bet dollars to donuts that so long as 1DollarScan maintains a process that’s one to one it’s going to be rather hard to convince most judges that they’re committing copyright infringement. But more importantly, it’s going to be hard to convince most readers.

Think for a moment about all the people who have ripped their CDs.  No one objects to that anymore (none besides the terminally clueless), and it’s not unreasonable for readers to make the jump that scanning a book is okay. From there it’s only a small step to paying for their book to be scanned. After all, no one would blink if the reader did it themselves. How could a service that does the exact same thing be illegal?

I’m not trying to browbeat any author, but in this day and age you really do need to be aware of what readers believe is right and moral. Taking a position against it, especially when you’re not being harmed by the situation, is self defeating.

This week’s infographic isn’t directly related to ebooks but it is fun nonetheless.

It looks back at the many changes to the web over the past 10 years, including browser we don’t use anymore and sites which have given up the ghost. We’re spending nearly 6 times as many hours online as a decade ago and there’s 4 times as many poeple online.

My how things have changed.

Last week I told you that Amazon sent their new Kindle Fire through the FCC, and today I think they decided to keep it company with a new ereader.

I’ve just found a new set of FCC paperwork from another anonymous LLC. This time around the company is called Hannaford LLC, and it has a different contact name and mailing address. But like the LLC mentioned last week, this one happens to reside in an office suite belonging to CSC. It also seems to be run by an employee of CSC.

Don’t you just love it when Amazon makes it easy for you?

While last week’s paperwork referred to a Wifi equipped tablet, this one mentions an "electronic display device" called the EY21. All the interesting details will be concealed until February, but there are enough hints in the tests conducted to suggest this is a device with both Wifi and 3g/4g (I don’t understand the frequencies) .

The tests mention that an iPod earbud was used, so clearly it has sound as well, but there’s no indication that they tested the frontlight. We can guess that this is an E-ink Kindle from the description (a tablet would be called a tablet), but I don’t think this is the frontlight equipped Kindle we had been hoping for.

So it looks like Amazon is planning to repeat their Kindle Fire event of last year. Some time in the next couple months we’re going to see a new Kindle Fire, a new Kindle, and a dock for the Kindle Fire.

Oh yeah, Amazon owns the trademark for the term Firedock. This word had originally been registered by Grace Digital Audio, and they planned to use it for their Kindle Fire dock (which is now called the Matchstick). The trademark now belongs to Amazon. Coincidence? I think not.

Now, I don’t know that the Firedock will be unveiled at the same time as the new KF and Kindle, but it would make a very effective Jobsian "one more thing" moment. And Amazon would sell a truckload. So I am pretty sure we’re going to see it soon.

FCC ID A8Z-2690

America’s largest retailer released their latest quarterly financial report today. The report covers the 3 months ending 28 July, and while the news was generally good there was also a time bomb buried in the details from the Nook division

Sales in the B&N bookstores and the B&N College bookstores were both up slightly last quarter, with the retail stores reportedly benefiting from "the liquidation of Borders’ bookstores in fiscal 2012 and strong sales of the Fifty Shades of Grey series", while sales via the B&N website continued to drop. And B&N College bookstores saw a fraction of a percent increase which was largely due to new contracts to run more bookstores; same  store sales dipped 2% over last year.

The Nook division, on the other hand, now that’s the fun part of the news today. B&N reported that the Nook segment earned revenues of  $192 million for the quarter, which is up about 3 tenths of a percent. That’s as near as flat as to be no increase at all. But the story gets worse.

Barnes & Noble also states that digital sales (ebooks and apps) were up 46%, while device sales were down significantly due to decreased demand and production issues for the Nook Glow. You have to wonder exactly how much B&N is losing on the Nook hardware, don’t you?

BTW, there’s an interesting discrepancy in the press release. Today B&N is claiming that the Nook division earned $191 million in the first fiscal quarter of last year, while last year they reported earning $277 million during that same period. That’s a difference of some $86 million, which is no chump change.

Okay, this could just be an accounting difference, but the description in the press release is the same. Both figures cover "sales of digital content, device hardware and related accessories". Do you suppose B&N is pulling a sleight of hand to hide how bad things really are?

Absent an explanation from B&N, I cannot tell. But if we look at the rest of B&N’s bad news today, I’d say there’s a better than even chance.

Update: Here’s B&N’s explanation:

The $277 million we reported last year was for the consolidated NOOK business across all of the company’s segments, on a comparable sales basis.  The $191 million of NOOK segment revenues we reported for Q1 this year was on a GAAP basis, not a comparable sales basis.  Comparable sales reflect the actual selling price for eBooks sold under the agency model rather than solely the commission received.

Let’s hope B&N’s plan to sell the Nook to 10 more countries bears fruit, because they’re not getting the same growth in digital that they got last year. This time last year B&N was reporting a quadrupling of digital sales, and that makes today’s new look like the growth in their digital sales are starting to level off. The UK Nook store is expected to launch in October, and adding 60 million consumers should ameliorate the plateau.

P.S. And in other news, B&N also mentioned that they’re still working to spin off Newco, the new subsidiary which they and MS launched earlier this year. That process should be complete this fall.

A press release crossed my inbox this morning talking about a new gimmick which can be integrated into ebooks.  While at first glance it looked like one of the worst ideas of 2012, there’s a potentially useful innovation buried beneath the marketing drivel.

The press release heralded the launch of a new book, 11 Days in May. The book is a spiritual journey, so it has little interest to me.  But the ebook edition was produced via Vook, and in addition to the embedded videos the Vook edition incorporates a new interactive component that I had not seen before. It’s called WeJIT, and the developer Democrasoft is pitching it as having enabled:

  the world’s first two-way interactive e-book, which features a new technology that allows real-time author and reader-to-reader dialog and collaboration from inside an e-book.

With WeJIT the author (or anyone) can create a discussion point on a given topic, and it will exist as a persistent webpage with a URL. Other users can respond to the topic with their own opinions, links, and more. While that sounds like virtually every community site, the one thing that sets this idea apart is that it can be integrated into ebooks. A total of 32 discussion points were embedded in this ebook.

You can see one of the discussion pages in this screen shot from my iPad. (Click to enlarge.)

Now, I went into this thinking it was one of the most poorly conceived ideas I had ever seen incorporated into ebooks. I like to read after midnight, so there’s really no chance that the author or most of the other readers will be online and interested in discussing the book. As described in the press release I thought the idea was worse than animation, worse than augmented reality, and was likely developed by someone who kicked kittens.

But then I started reading the debate points and I changed my mind. While I still don’t think there’s any value in real-time discussion, if the comments left by readers are persistent then they might be worth going back to later – much later.

Ignore the real-time aspect; that’s unworkable. Instead I think the real value of this embedded content lies not in the immediacy of the interaction but in what readers add over time – years, even.

Think of it as marginalia.

Old books sometimes accumulate notes from owners, and as they get passed from one to the next we sometimes even see new comments responding to older ones.  With WeJIT, we might be able to duplicate that idea inside ebooks.

A history ebook could have new comments added over the years which reference events that happened after the book was published or new interpretations of past events. A science textbook could benefit from links to recently published articles that refute or dispute the content of the book. And a novel might pick up explanatory footnotes from the author when she responds to reader comments. (I would love that 0ne.) You could even have the authors add corrections to printing errors (though I suppose that’s not nearly as important for ebooks) or addition explanations that grew out of later work. Or fans could add background details that the novel’s author mentions during interviews at cons.

While all the examples include info that you might find elsewhere, having the content accessible from inside the ebook adds value.  You might even have the author maintain a website that offers all the same extranea, but it won’t be as useful as being able to access it from inside the ebook.

If I knew that the digital marginalia was still available for a given title, that would make me more likely to buy the ebook. In the past I have bought the enhanced edition of ebooks just to read the author’s footnotes. This could be 10 times as good, and it might even get better over time.

But do you know what would make this idea even better? I’d like to see it integrated with an existing reading community. This would give the ebook access to all sorts of user generated comments.

Of course, by the time you added reader feedback and added background material, you’d end up with something similar to what Amazon already offers on the Kindle. That platform already has shared notes and highlights, and it has X-Ray, which is based on background material drawn from Shelfari.

Perhaps WeJIT is not all that innovative after all, but I think it offers a couple useful aspects which aren’t accessible on the Kindle platform. The discussion points are discrete pages, not just text embedded in the ebook. They feel linear and thus more like a conversation than simply a jumble of random notes. At the very least WeJIT is worth a second look. I think publishers should consider which ideas they might be able to incorporate using the tech they already have. There’s value here.