One thing I’ve missed in switching from paper books to ebooks is the way I used to browse bookstores. I’m one of those people who pick a random book off the shelves of the SF section and read it to see if I like it, and that’s just not possible with most ebookstores.

Sure, most ebookstores have samples, but there is no element of randomness in choosing a sample and I miss that part. That is why I was thrilled today to read about a new ebook discovery site called No Names, No Jackets.

This site, which I heard about via Jane Litte of Dear Author, offers up random chapters of books and nothing else. You’re not offered the title, author, book cover, or blurb. You just get to read a chapter.

How cool is that?

You can either request a completely random chapter, or pick one from a specific genre, including Crime, Horror, SF, alt hist, and many more. There are only about 700 excerpts on the site so some of the categories are still rather thin, though I expect that will change. All the chapters were submitted by the authors or publishers, and at the end of each selection there is a link that leads to more information about the book.

This type of ebook browsing might not appeal to all readers, but I like it. It fits with how I used to browse for books, and that makes it an enjoyable change from the usual sales pitches that are often presented as suggestions for books I might buy.

No Names, No Jackets

image by zimpenfish

Amazon has just officially confirmed the story I broke last week.

They’re expanding Kindle Worlds beyond fanfic, and in addition to signing Blake Crouch and Barry Eisler they have also signed 2 other well-known authors and a publisher of graphic novels.

The publisher in question is Valiant, and they have licensed a number of series to Amazon including Bloodshot, X-O Manowar, Archer & Armstrong, Harbinger, and Shadowman. The press release say they’re planning to add more later.

Amazon Publishing has also signed new licensing deals with Hugh Howey and Neal Stephenson.  AP is looking to writers to contribute stories set in Howey’s Silo Saga and in Stephenson’s Foreworld Saga. (Are you familiar with a book called The Mongoliad? That’s the Foreworld Saga.) And of course I introduced Blake Crouch and Barry Eisler last week (two successful authors, with multiple bestselling novels and a tv series and a movie between them).

There’s not much in the press release today that I didn’t already report last week, but some of the half-truths are rather interesting. Amazon is trying to spin Kindle Worlds as an open program, when in reality it is closer to being one of their publishing imprints. For example:

Kindle Worlds is the first commercial publishing platform that will enable any writer to create fan fiction based on a range of original stories and characters and earn royalties for doing so.

Yeah, that’s only half true. While any writer can create stories, they’ll only be paid if the story is accepted.

When Kindle Worlds was announced a few weeks ago, I took the position that Amazon had legitimized fanfic. One of my readers took an opposing view, and I think it’s worth repeating:

I draw a major distinction between what Amazon is doing and fanfiction. Fanfic is by definition not approved by the creators, it’s fiction in the same universe written by fans. What Amazon is offering is for self-published authors to submit their fanfiction to be approved by the rights holders and then be published – the exact same process that normal licenced works go through. Authors have always been able to do so without Amazon’s involvement, all they needed to do was contact the publisher or rights holder with their pitch (manuscript) and get approval.

So it’s not fanfiction publishing, it’s publishing licensed works.

If Amazon had a blanket licence that allowed anyone to publish in-universe fiction and make money off of it this would be different. But as it is this is simply another publisher getting into licensed works.

I don’t usually agree with flyingtoastr, but in this case I think he is right. That approval step changes this from being a fanfic free-for-all to simply being yet another licensing deal. Rather than bypass existing publishers and enable more writers to be paid, Amazon is setting themselves up to be a publisher.

That puts Kindle Worlds in the same category as Kindle Singles, Amazon’s other stealth foray into publishing. Kindle Singles is pitched as a type of content, but it is a publishing imprint in all but name. The same can be said for Kindle Worlds.

Edit: If you need more proof, go check out the Kindle Worlds page on Amazon.com. It has been updated to include quotes from 10 writers who are contributing to one KW property or another. Guess what? All have at least one novel under their belt, putting them a step above your average fanfic writer.

Of course, we probably should have figured that out from the very beginning. Kindle Worlds was built out of Amazon Publishing, not KDP, and that should have suggested that Amazon was thinking like a publisher, not a distributor.

Further Reading

Amazon Brings Disintermediation to the Tie-in Industry  | The Digital Reader

Where Words Become Worlds | Hugh Howey

Q&A With Philip Patrick, Head of Kindle Worlds | The Heart of the Matter

Are you eager to get an early look at your favorite author’s next book? Then I have good news and bad news for you.

Penguin has just announced a new program called First to Read. According to the press release this is an "exciting new program that will grant readers free sneak peeks of some of Penguin’s most anticipated books – months before they are available in stores and online retailers", but what we’re really looking at is Penguin’s latest marketing foray.

They are hoping to harness word-of-mouth advertising to build buzz for  their upcoming titles, only instead of using a service like NetGalley to get review copies into the hands of book bloggers First to Read is targeted at the average booklover.

“First to Read is a program created for all readers, providing exclusive, early access to our upcoming books. We know people love to talk about and recommend the books they’ve read and are reading, and to encourage that, we’ve integrated social sharing throughout the site,” said Suzie Sisoler, Sr. Director of Consumer Engagement.

The program is live now and it includes titles like Hotshot by Julie Garwood, The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert, Sister Mother Husband Dog by Delia Ephron, A Disloyal Prof by Pilar Lofos, The Childhood of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee, and many more.

The ebooks are available in unproofed copies and are regrettably encumbered by Adobe DE DRM. Yes, Penguin has launched a program that implicitly assumes that the readers Penguin is trying to sweet talk are all thieving pirates.

And given how easy it is to remove DRM, there’s also the implied assumption that the readers participating in First to Read are too stupid to figure out how to remove the DRM that is stopping them from sharing the ebook.

Smart move, that.

P.S. This would normally be the spot where I would suggest using a less user-hostile form of DRM, say digital watermarks. But I already made that suggestion a few weeks ago in a post about HarperCollins' new digital galley program and I don’t see a need to repeat myself.

If you’ve been following the ebook news this past week then you’ve probably read about Joyland, Stephen King’s latest novel, and how it has already been pirated and released digitally.

Now, Mr King had decided not to release Joyland as an ebook (he wants you to buy the paper book in a bookstore, or Amazon), so I was all set to write a post showing the pointlessness of his decision. I was going to explain how he has no effective control over the digital release of his novel; he can only control whether readers pay for the copy.

But I have already written that post, so today I wanted to take a different angle on the story. I was comparing all the different pirated copies of Joyland when I noticed something. Of the 4 distinct copies I found on The Pirate Bay, one was a PDF made with an Adobe Acrobat plugin, while the others were made with Calibre, the best free ebook library management and conversion tool.

Yes, 3 out of 4 ebook pirates prefer Calibre. I trust you see what this means.

Calibre enables ebook piracy, and users of calibre are enabling it. I hope you feel ashamed of yourselves.

I can only hope that Kovid Goyal, the developer of Calibre, soon feels the full wrath of the US government. His role in encouraging ebook piracy is incalculable, and so is the damage caused. No punishment is too severe for this malefactor, and one can only hope that justice is swift, thorough, and absolute.

I think we should take a lesson from the demise of Osama bin Laden and the dragged out extradition and prosecution of Kim Dotcom, and act accordingly. Working within the justice system, even when  many laws are twisted into a pretzel,  is probably going to prevent one of these evil, evil men from being brought to justice. Clearly we must act outside all laws and legal framework, otherwise this evildoer will go unpunished.

Who’s with me?

image by fuzzcat

P.S. If you cannot tell that this post is satire, I don’t know what to say.

The Readerpocalypse is only 14 days away, and many news reader app developers are doubling down in their efforts to survive the shutdown of Google Reader.

The developer behind gReader, an Android-only news reader app, announced late last week that the app now had beta support for 2 of the smaller RSS feed services, with support for more services in the works.

There are a lot of great services beside Feedly that many of you would like to use. That’s why we have decided to support them as well. I want to introduce you a new app which is called News+. News+ is developed based on gReader great functional features. It also has an Extension system so that services could be integrated into News+.

I suppose it might sound a little odd for this developer to use external plugin system, given that most developers would integrate support inside the app, but the idea is beginning to grow on me.

It all comes down to how many developers can get involved with expanding support.

Feedly, for example, is going to support an app ecosystem of news reading apps, but they are unfortunately limited by the number of developers they have on staff. gReader, on the other hand, won’t be limited by the number of developers they can hire but by the number of outside partner developers that get interested in the idea. Potentially that could be a larger number than the developers hired by Feedly.

Right now only the only plugins available include Tiny Tiny RSS (a self-hosted solution) and Bazqux (I’ve mentioned it before), but that will hopefully change.

You can download the plugins here. Testing the beta support is not for the faint of heart but early use reports indicate that the plugins are working right now, though there are still a few bugs to work out.

Germany’s answer to the Kindle is reportedly having a lot of success in its first 100 days. Weltbild and Hugendubel, 2 of the retailers that make up the Tolino consortium, put out a press release this morning touting just how great the past 100 days have been.

They’re pleased to tell you that the Tolino Shine, the new generic 6″ ereader that launched with the Tolino platform 100 days ago, has seen sales in the "high five figure range". The press release doesn’t get into specifics on the sales figures, but it does note that sales exceeded expectations.

The Tolino ebook catalog has also grown in the past 100 days, and it now stocks over 500 thousand titles (up from 300,000 German language titles at launch). As impressive as that might sound, that is a paltry number compared to the 2 million titles that Amazon is showing in the Kindle Store on Amazon.de. And no details were released on how many ebooks were sold or downloaded from Tolino, making me wonder if ebook sales didn’t meet expectations.

Tolino is a cooperative ebookstore platform supported by 4 German retailers (Thalia, WeltBild, Hugendubel, and Bertelsmann) and Deutche Telekom. The 5 partners sell the Shine ereader in 1,500 retail locations across Germany as well as on their websites, and they also maintain 5 ebookstores with nearly identical content and (thanks to German book pricing laws) nearly identical prices.

That’s a rather thin press release, isn’t it? It makes me wonder  if Tolino is really all that successful in absolute terms. We know that the German ebook market was miniscule in 2012 (2.4% of the book market), and we also know that selection is still limited. Just over half of the current releases are available as ebooks, and only around 29% of publishers' backlist.  With that in mind there might not be any great news to share for some time.

Mashable, ABC News, and a bunch of other sites are all reporting today that Facebook is holding a press event next week. No one has any leaked details yet, but it is more than likely that Facebook’s new product will have something to do with the code references to RSS feeds that showed up yesterday.

Update: Nope. The event focused on Instagram adding 15 second video uploads.

I don’t have any inside info either, but I have a couple guesses about the topic of next week’s Facebook event.

It’s my guess than Facebook is going to revamp their existing social reading apps and offer users more sources, a tweaked layout, and possibly the ability to import RSS feeds. In short, I think they’re going to unveil something like Zite, Flipboard, or the like.

Remember last Spring when Facebook unveiled the branded social reading apps?

Me neither. In fact, I thought the apps had been shut down late last year. But no, they still exist. The hot story of Spring 2012 was Facebook and social reading. Many, many publishers were signing on to create custom social reading apps that handing their readers over to Facebook. Eventually some realized that they were losing out on page views, and dropped out, but there are some social reader apps still functioning.

Based on the coverage of yesterday’s RSS feed story I think most bloggers had forgotten about Facebook’s social reading apps (even Techcrunch failed to make the connection), but as you can see from this page social reading isn’t dead. Facebook is still serving up articles from any number of websites, and they are showing the full article (and not just the excerpt plus link you would see in your timeline).

Don’t look now, but those social reading apps are only a half step away from being Zite or Flipboard. Just about the only difference between Facebook’s reading apps and its competition is that Zite and Flipboard pull content from the web; Facebook looks to be still set up to only display content that has been submitted by publishers.

In spite of my best efforts I couldn’t get Facebook to show me any posts from this blog. Given that my posts show up in Flipboard and Zite I would guess that Facebook is the one news aggregator that isn’t scraping this blog.

That could be what is going to change next week.

This is all just speculation on my part, but given the timing I really think that I am right. Facebook is holding this event only 10 days before the Readerpocalypse, and I do not think that is a coincidence.

In any case, let’s see what happens next Thursday.

Google Reader is back in the news again today with announcement that yet another news reader app was escaping certain death in the Readerpocalypse. TwentyFive Squares, developers of the Press app, posted on their blog yesterday about a new update to their app.

Press is a $3 Android-only news reader app that was originally designed to work with Google Reader, but with the new update it can now sync with a number of other news reader services.

Yesterday’s update adds support for Feed Wrangler and FeedBin. These 2 services are paid RSS feed readers, not free like the 9 alternatives that I have listed here, so they had not crossed my radar before. Other improvements in this update include:

• New, streamlined phone interface (check Settings for default behavior)
• UI refinements
• Several bug fixes and performance enhancements

The last major update to Press added widgets, support for Readability, and support for a couple new gestures (swiping between articles, long press articles in the list to reveal quick actions).

Press is still under development, of course, and the developers are promising support for Feedly and Fever.

You might recall that Feedly had announced earlier this week that they were building an app ecosystem; Press was one of the apps mentioned (along with Reeder, Nextgen Reader, Newsify, and gReader).

Google Play

source

Do you like to read authors that write with a subtle mastery of the English language? Then you’re probably going to hate this new idea.

The Fraunhofer Institute, a German research firm with the motto "we forge the future", is now working on a new type of digital watermark DRM. They want to move beyond the existing techniques of adding digital watermarks to the metadata and extraneous text of an ebook and instead embed identifying details inside the body of the ebook.

In short, this new DRM (SiDiM, or "Sichere Dokumente durch individuelle Markierung") would make changes to the story as written by the author with the intention of changing each customer’s copy in a unique way. The goal would be to find identifiers so that a copy could be traced back to the original buyer.

On a technical level it is an interesting idea, and one that isn’t exactly new. This kind of security has been used on a small scale (for example) when firms wanted to track who was leaking documents. I do not know that it has ever been used on a large commercial scale before, however.

I read about this over at lesen.net, and was lucky to find that they had linked to a example sheet from Fraunhofer. The example sheet was in German, of course, but the possible changes were presented in A/B pairs and that made it easy to see the differences. Possible changes could include inserting extraneous returns, reordering items in a list, and altering the negation element used in the story (inconsistent to not consistent, etc).

I don’t know about you but I think this is a terrible idea. SiDiM is nothing less than security at the expense of art, and I do believe that the solution is worse than the problem.

Never mind that this would completely screw up the art of literary analysis; it could also drastically and randomly change the reading experience.

I don’t claim to be a terribly gifted writer but I do know that a change as subtle as reordering a list can change the intended emphasis of that list or the cadence of a sentence; it can lead a reader to think the author is implying something different. Splitting up a paragraph so the first or last sentence stands alone can emphasize that sentence in a way the author did not intend.

And as for negation, I have the strong suspicion that whoever came up with this idea doesn’t have a subtle enough grasp of the language to know that words like inconsistent, unarmed, and invisible have subtly different meanings from not consistent, not armed, and not visible, respectively.

Fortunately this DRM is still in the developmental stages. There is a consortium that is working on the design, implementation and validation, of the SiDiM architecture. Curiously enough, one member of the consortium is a law firm specializing in IP. It’s not clear what that firm contributes; perhaps the developers had ethical objections to testing on rats.

I don’t have any info on when this DRM might see widespread use, but if the early response is any indication I doubt that we will need to worry. This story might not have gotten a lot of coverage in English but it has been heavily debated on German digital publishing blogs.

Few book lovers liked the idea, with many raising the same objections I have raised in this post. I hope that will be enough to prevent very many publishers and ebookstores from adopting SiDiM.

source

image by bensmawfield

The market research firm GfK has a new report out this morning with a new estimate of the German ebook market, and depending on how you look at it the report is either good news or bad news.

Gfk now believes that ebook sales accounted for 2.4% of the German book market in 2012. That is a significant increase over the estimated 1% market share in 2011, but it still falls far short of the growth seen in other markets.

This number may appear to be disappointingly small (ebooks were 21.67% of US market in 2012), but let me put it into perspective

Consider for a moment the growth of the US ebook market in the early Kindle years. According to the AAP, ebook sales made up 1.18% of the US book market in 2008 and 3.17% in 2009.

That 2009 figure is particularly important because it represents the US market when it was only 2 years into the Kindle era; that is where Germany is right now.

While Amazon did launch an international Kindle in 2009, Amazon, Kobo, and other ebooksellers only really started investing in the German ebook market in 2011. Kobo launched in Germany in July 2011, and Amazon launched a local Kindle Store there in April 2011.

Germany is really only 2 years into the Kindle era, so it should come as no surprise that the ebook market share is still as small as it is.

And given the recent investments in this ebook market, it is bound to grow. Most of the major ebooksellers (Apple, Google, Amazon) and Kobo have opened ebookstores in Germany in the past couple years,  and earlier this year a local coalition, Tolino,  formed and launched a new shared ebookstore platform and ereader.

But in spite of my hopes for growth, the German ebook market is still facing a serious supply issue. The selection of available titles is still limited, with GfK reporting that only 54 percent of all new titles and 29% of publisher’s backlist available as ebooks. Less than half of the ebooks that a consumer might want to buy are available digitally, and that is likely dampening the ebook adoption rate.

image by Robert Couse-Baker

source, source

Speculating about Apple’s next gadget is a popular past time in the blogosphere, and today Reuters entered the fray. They posted a story earlier this morning saying that they have numerous "sources" that indicate that Apple might have 4.7″ and 5.7″ iPhones in the works:

Apple Inc is exploring launching iPhones with bigger screens, as well as cheaper models in a range of colours, over the next year, said four people with knowledge of the matter, as it takes a cue from rival Samsung Electronics.

The moves, which are still under discussion, underscore how the California-based firm that once ruled the smartphone market is increasingly under threat from its aggressive South Korean competitor. Samsung has overtaken Apple in market share through the popularity of its bigger-screen Galaxy "phablets" and by flooding the market with a range of products at different prices.

It’s a good thing this rumor includes an unspecified release date of next year; it if had included a mention of this coming Fall I would have labeled the rumor bunk.

So far as I know, no components for new hardware have leaked, and that’s a solid argument against a new model being released this year. It’s now June, and if we were going to see a radically new iPhone this year then we would already be seeing leaked parts and schematics.

But even though this rumor speculates about a product to be released next year, I still would not read too much into it. From the way that Reuters phrased the rumor I think the plans for the new hardware are far more tentative than some might think.

The keywords are phrases like "Apple is exploring" and "still under discussion". The fact that the word discussion was used instead of the word development should be taken as a sign that this new hardware doesn’t exist yet.

There is a fairly good chance that the new larger iPhones referenced in this rumor are at best an idea which has been discussed in meetings. A bunch of people have discussed the possibility that Apple might release a larger iPhone, but so far as we know the idea is "still under discussion".

And that really doesn’t mean anything at all. Companies discuss things all the time, including ideas that are never carried out. New hardware is cool, yes, and I too want to see a larger iPhone. But I am not going to let my personal bias influence me – not in this case, anyway.

What do you do if you’re a screen maker with a 10.7″ screen no one wants to use in an ereader or tablet? If you’re PlasticLogic you convince signage manufacturer to cobble together a new product based on your screens.

PlasticLogic has just announced that Dresden Elektronik, a specialist in traffic management systems, is developing a new sign that is built around a pair of Plastic Logic screens. It’s called deZign, and it will be shown off this week at the Digital Signage Expo 2013 in Berlin, Germany.

DeZign is going to be used to display timetables and other info at transit stops. When it hits the market it will offered as an alternative enable transit companies to change the content of a timetable at the push of a button, instead of having to manually replace paper timetables at stations and stops.

The deZign will use less energy than a digital sign based on LCD screens, and the epaper screens will be readily visible in nearly as many lighting conditions as the existing digital signs.

So why use 2 screens instead of a single larger screen (as one reader suggested)? It’s cheaper to use a pair of screens because the development costs are already sunk. A larger screen would have to be developed from scratch, with all the expenses that entails. The deZign might not look as good but it has the benefit of being quicker to market, too.

This new signage has a lot in common with a sign produced by one of Plastic Logic’s other partners. Serelec, one of Dresden Elektronik’s competitor’s in France, debuted the ZED sign in January. That sign also used a pair of Plastic Logic screens to display timetables, maps, and other transit info.

A little over a month ago Barnes & Noble quietly removed any mention of their Nook for PC and Nook for Mac apps, and today they confirmed to me that the apps are no longer being supported.

When my competition reported several days ago that B&N had quietly removed any mention of the Nook for PC, Mac apps from the B&N website, I was one of many that were puzzled by this inexplicable move. This story has already gotten some coverage in the blogosphere, but I held off in the hopes that this was an error of some kind. Unfortunately that is not the case.

It seemed to make little sense for B&N to remove the apps without providing a true replacement. But as unlikely as it might sound, that is exactly what has happened.

Earlier today I received an email from B&N which confirms that both apps have been retired:

We are no longer supporting NOOK for PC for Windows 2000/XP/Vista. To enjoy the NOOK content on your PC please use the NOOK for Windows 8 App or NOOK for Web. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/nook-for-web/379003594/

B&N sent me the same statement concerning the Nook for Mac app, but I don’t see a need to repeat it here.

TBH it should really come as no surprise. B&N stopped updating the PC app in November 2011 and the Mac app in March 2012 (according to the Wayback Machine at Archive.org).

That is over a year ago, meaning that the Mac app was already deadlined due to a lack of support for OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion. Also, there were no signs that either app supported all the content currently sold in the Nook Store. This now includes fixed layout ebooks (graphic novels, cookbooks, and other rich content), interactive children’s books, and more. Basically the apps had already been abandoned long before they were removed from the B&N website.

But even with the knowledge that B&N had given up on the apps long ago, IMO this move is still a poor choice. Readers might be able to use Nook for Web but they won’t be able to access all of their content. I just checked my Nook account and the majority of the ebooks I got from B&N are not compatible with Nook for Web. Of the first 120 titles listed in my account, a mere 32 could be read online.

Thrty-Two

I am lucky that I have alternate Nook apps and a Nook HD-, otherwise I would have lost access to something like 75% of the Nook ebooks I own (assuming I were dependent on the Windows app). Or at least it could cost me access to my purchased ebooks, and that brings me to B&N’s other example of mismanagement.

You see, B&N goofed a second time in that they forgot to recommend their other reading app for OSX and Windows. It’s called NookStudy, and it was launched in Summer 2010. NookStudy is more of a textbook app that a general purpose reading app, but it still reads all my Nook content and it is still available for OSX and Windows. At the very least it deserved a mention.

Update: A reader has told me that B&N has retired the support forums for NookStudy. That could be a sign that B&N is planning to get rid of that program as well. (Thanks, Tim!)

All in all, the manner in which B&N retired the Nook for PC and Nook for Mac app suggests that B&N doesn’t care much about ebooks any more. They’re not investing in the apps, they didn’t make any effort to make sure the content is compatible with the replacement, and they didn’t think to offer their other reading app for Windows and OSX.

At this point I am really hoping that the Microsoft buyout rumor is true, because B&N is cutting their losses. It looks to me like they are giving up, so I really really really hope that a white knight appears to rescue the Nook platform before B&N shuts it down completely.

Editor’s Note: The comments have been disabled on this post due to an overwhelm,ing abundance of spam. Sorry.

Here’s a story that is a couple weeks old but seems to have gone unreported.

If you’ve been following digital publishing news then you’ve probably heard about the Publishing Hackathon. This was a contest that was held at the same time as BEA 2013. A total of 30 contestants submitted project ideas which, following the true spirit of a hackathon, were developed over the course of a weekend.

I only got a chance to look at that contest and the entries today, and I am surprised that there seems to be no commentary on the fact that one entry truly is a hack.

Eric Hellman showed off an idea that, assuming someone wanted to use it maliciously, could be used as the first step in hacking your tablet, smartphone, or ereader. That is not how Eric used the idea, and that’s not at all how he described it, but it is still one possible use.

What Eric showed off was a new way to generate an "about the author" page inside Epub3 ebooks. Rather than create a static page when the ebook is published/updated, this project created the page from scratch by pulling content from external websites and displaying that content inside the ebook. This idea only worked in the Readium Epub3 reading app, and it pulled content from the Open Library and other safe places.

On a technical level this is very cool, but it should also be raising red flags.

Eric’s idea involves code being executed inside an ebook which goes to an external website, gets content, and displays it inside your ebook.

Do you see the problem?

This might sound a little paranoid, but how do you know that the external website is safe and that the content it downloaded into your ebook is not doing something nefarious behind the scenes?

You don’t know, and that’s a problem. For all we know the code inside a given ebook could lead to a site that will try to hack your ereader, tablet, or smartphone.

Update: A reader has pointed out that this security concern is mentioned in the Epub3 spec (here). Good; let’s hope developers take it seriously.

Second Update: Baldur Bjarnason has raised this issue a couple times before(EPUB javascript security, Javascript in ebooks). Those posts are well worth a read.

Before you decide that I am completely off my rocker, let me point out that I am not the first person to identify this issue. Apple, for example, supports JavaScript in Epub3 but does not support letting JavaScript inside an ebook call for external websites (according to Eric).

And I also know that Apple wasn’t the first to consider the possibility that an ebook might access external websites. Liza Daly of Threepress Consulting (now with Safari Books Online) was blogging about the idea as early as June 2010. Her demo involved a location-aware ebook, so it was not any threat to users, but it stands as proof of what is possible.

Are you scared yet? Good.

I’m deeply concerned that Readium has such an obvious security hole, but I also know that there is a relatively simple way to fix this issue. App developers are going to need to either block external connections or at the very least they will need to make it optional and include popup warning messages.

This reminds me of an old trope about ebooks which is becoming more true as time goes by.

eBooks have often been described as web content wrapped into a file, and while that analogy doesn’t quite work with the simpler ebook formats when it comes to Epub3 it is almost literally true.

Given the HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript support in the Epub3 spec. an Epub3 ebook is effectively a website inside a file. While this can be quite useful, it also means that we need to start treating Epub3 ebooks with the same caution that we apply to our web browsing activities.

Readers are going to need to be careful where they download ebooks, and more importantly reading app developers are going to need to start thinking about how their apps can behave like the security firewalls found on most computers.

Reading apps are going to have the first responsibility of controlling malicious ebooks. If nothing else they will get the blame should something bad happen, and that is why I think the developers should start planning for the worst.

image by walknboston

Amazon might be getting all the press but they’re not the only ebookseller in China. The online retailer Dangdang has been operating an ebookstore in China since late 2011, and next month they plan to ship their second ereader.

The rather unremarkable new Duocon is going to come equipped with an HD E-ink screen, Wifi, 8GB of storage, and will cost 699 yuan (about $114 USD).

Like its predecessor (as well as many other ereaders), the second-gen Duocon has a touchscreen, and it improves on that earlier model with a faster CPU, higher resolution screen, and a frontlight.  This ereader is running an unknown OS on a 1.2GHz CPU with 256MB of RAM, and it also has a speaker and headphone jack. Screen resolution matches the new standard of 1024×758, and like the current Kindle ereaders this ereader is missing a card slot.

eBook format support includes Epub, PDF, Mobi, and PRC. This ereader can also play MP3, Wav, and OGG audio files as well as display common office formats like DOC, PPT, txt, html, and XLS.

The Duocon is supported by an on-device ebookstore, which is stocked with around 100,000 titles.  That’s more than double the number of titles Dangdang carried when the ebookstore launched in December 2012, and it is also more than twice as many titles in the Chinese Kindle Store.

Dangdang is pricing this ereader at 699 yuan, which a decent discount from the Kindle Paperwhite’s retail price of 849 yuan. The Duocon will ship on 15 July.