E-Book currents

Citation

Falk, H. (2003), "E-Book currents", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 20 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2003.23920bae.001

E-Book currents

Better access to copyrighted materials

Licenses available from www.creativecommons.org allow copyright holders to define the conditions under which their works are available for copying and other uses. Without these licenses, current US copyright law requires specific permission from the owner or payment of a mandatory licensing fee to use copyright material. The license forms offered by Creative Commons provide new ways to distribute creative works on generous terms and the forms are available free of charge. For example, there is a license that can be used to allow copying and distributing online photographs so long as users give credit to the copyright owners. Or, if owners are willing to let everybody copy their recordings but do not want them to profit from it without asking, they can use one of the licenses for that purpose. Using the licensing tools, copyright owners are able to select such preferences from a menu of options. They can even dedicate their work to the public domain, where all is permitted.

O'Reilly Associates, a publisher of commentary about technology and society, has a contract with Creative Commons to guarantee that some of their work will enter the public domain after 14 years and some will be released to the public immediately. In a similar development, Prentice Hall is publishing seven e-books under a license that allows teachers to annotate and add to the text. Under the license it is recommended but not compulsory that users notify the author of changes they are making. The first three titles are on software development topics. Prentice Hall plans to sell printed versions for several months and then release the electronic versions. Book authors retain the copyrights. The license requires that the author's name must appear on the book cover. Citations must be acknowledged, modifications must be identified, and derivative works must identify the original unmodified source document.

DMCA looks less formidable

On December 17, 2002 a jury in the US District Court in San Jose, California acquitted ElcomSoft of all criminal charges in a case that tested the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The government lost its case, but to set a precedent that would broadly affect how the DMCA is interpreted, a similar case would have to reach an appellate court. So far, that has not happened. Although prosecutors say that the ElcomSoft result will not stop them from pursuing further DMCA cases, it may well make them think twice before they do so.

Media companies that support the DMCA have emphasized the losses they face when "pirates" are able to sell unauthorized copies of e-books, movies and music recordings. ElcomSoft was accused of using their software to disable security measures that protect recorded material from such pirates. But the defense successfully argued that the software merely allowed owners of digital recordings to exercise rights to "fair use" usually embedded in copyright law.

The foreman of the ElcomSoft jury said, after the case was over, that users seemed to have no rights at all, and that troubled the jury. He also said that the jurors agreed ElcomSoft's product was illegal but acquitted the company because they believed the company didn't mean to violate the law.

An Adobe Systems employee testified at the trial that his company had hired two companies to conduct surveillance and search for unauthorized e-books on the Internet but had been unable to find any unauthorized e-books created by ElcomSoft software.

If the Justice Dept becomes increasingly shy about enforcing the DMCA, software researchers will be able to go about their business with little fear of arrest. However, Vladimir Katalov, the owner of ElcomSoft, said after the trial that his company would not be selling the disputed software, despite the decision in its favor.

Rep. Rick Boucher, (D-Va), who has been working to change the DMCA, said the law remains a problem even though the jury ruled to acquit ElcomSoft. He believes the need for changing the DMCA is as great as ever since the law calls for conviction in circumstances where no harm has been done. Boucher said he will reintroduce his bill in the 108th Congress in January. The Boucher-Doolittle bill calls for changes to the DMCA to permit people to bypass copy-protection schemes for legitimate purposes. Included is an exemption for anyone who acts only to further scientific research into protection measures. This would allow researchers to publish their work without the threat of lawsuits. Under the bill, bypassing technological protections would be allowed for legitimate "fair-use" purposes.

Cleveland offers OverDrive e-books

The Cleveland Public Library is planning to offer an e-book lending service that provides popular titles for viewing on patron's own computers and personal digital assistant devices. The service is set to begin in March and will include about 1,000 titles, many from best-selling authors such as Michael Crichton, Neil Gaiman, Tony Hillerman, Clive Barker and Joyce Carol Oates. The library paid a $50,000 set-up fee for the service, called Digital Library Reserve. The vendor is OverDrive Inc., a company that distributes e-books for such publishers as HarperCollins, McGraw-Hill, Oxford University Press, Scholastic Inc., John Wiley & Sons, and Penton Technology Media. The service also allows patrons to download and so borrow audio books. When a loan period is complete, the e-book becomes unusable and borrowers do not have to worry about late fees. The Cleveland Public Library will be buying a limited number of copies of each e-book, and there will be patron waiting lists for the popular titles. As with ordinary loans of printed books, borrowers will be able to renew, but only if there is no waiting list for the title. The library will try to ensure that no more than five people are waiting for a given copy. A kiosk will be provided at the library for patrons who want to download books on the premises.

Patrons wishing to download the e-books must hold a Cleveland Public Library card.

Borrowing system for Palm e-books

Palm Retail Encryption Server Software (www.palmdigitalmedia.com) provides libraries with a way to let patrons check out Palm Reader e-books. The software uses a hardware identification number (ID) assigned to a handheld device or desktop computer. This ID allows the software to lock an e-book to that specific device and to then assign an expiration date after which the Palm Reader program will refuse to open the book. To find their ID, patrons open a library-enabled version of the Palm Reader on their computers or handheld devices, then tap or click on "About Palm Reader". This will display the device ID number that must be provided to the library in order to borrow Palm Reader e-books. The software and service will be available early in 2003.

Children's e-book site for high-speed users only

The International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) Web site went live in November 2002 to provide free e-books to the world's children. Users quickly learned that access to the site (www.icdlbooks.org) requires a high-speed Internet connection. The ICDL site is colorful and designed to be child-friendly, but the computer science professor at the University of Maryland who designed ICDL's software, acknowledges that the site is not accessible to everyone because it requires a broadband connection and at least 256 megabytes of computer memory to operate. In addition, users must install Java Web Start and Adobe e-book Reader software to view the books. School and library computer networks that operate behind firewalls may also have trouble accessing the site.

The site was created with $4.4 million in grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and others. It allows users to view books in three different formats. The initial library collection includes about 200 books in 18 languages. The books are intended for ages three through 13.

Site for e-mailing e-books

BookFeed (www.turksheadreview.com) is an experimental site that sends e-book text by e-mail to subscribers. At the Web site, users must first register by submitting their e-mail address and password. Then they can log in and select the e-books they would like to receive by e-mail. The availability of upcoming books is announced on the site and also through e-mail announcements to registered users. If users see something that interests them, they should try to subscribe before the start date specified for the book. When the start date arrives, one piece of the book will be sent to their e-mail address each day. The daily chunks will be small and digestible, so they have time to savor the text without getting swamped. If users miss the start date, they can still subscribe to a BookFeed at any time until the book completes its course. However, they will have missed all the pieces from the start date up until the day they subscribed. To cancel a book, users log onto the site, pick the book they want to cancel and submit their changes. Books available on the site are public domain texts from Project Gutenberg and other sources on the Internet.

New Google services tested

New prototype services at the Google research-and-design site (http://labs.google.com). include Google Viewer, which generates pictures of search-result pages and displays them as a continuously scrolling slide show. The user can control the delay time between page images and can also manually move backward and forward among search results. A snippet of descriptive text accompanies each image. A second prototype service is Google WebQuotes, which annotates each search result with comments from other Web sources. The idea is to get third party opinions about each of the returns from a search. A third service on the site is Google Glossary, which finds definitions for words, phrases and acronyms. There is also a prototype Voice Search service, which allows searching by telephone and a Google Sets service that accepts a series of keywords, figures out what they have in common and generates a list of similar subjects.

Index to 65,000 e-book titles

A substantial body of literature is available on the Internet in the form of downloadable or online books. Subjects range from the highly scholarly to the contemporary and popular. The Digital Book Index (www.digitalbookindex.com/about.htm) provides access to more than 65,000 titles. It gathers commercial and non-commercial e-books from more than 1,800 publishers and private publishing organizations. A reference section includes more than 2,000 dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesauri, glossaries, bibliographies, timelines, chronologies, literary histories, and a section on writing and style guides. Tens of thousands of indexed titles from public archives are available free, and many others are available at modest cost. Thousands of contemporary titles are also available, from many leading publishers.

Disappearing US data

Taxpayer-funded information is disappearing from US government Internet sites. The vanished information includes airport safety data, chemical plant risk-management plans, environmental impact statements which have alerted local communities to potential dangers from nearby nuclear energy plants, and information on the transportation of hazardous materials. These and similar erasures appear to be motivated by fear of providing data to terrorists.

There has also been some wholesale removal of large collections of data. At the Los Alamos National Laboratory Web site an entire database of unclassified technical reports was removed. The reason given was that it would have taken too much time to examine each database document for potential security risks. Over 6,000 documents were deleted from the Defense Department Web site. Some 9,000 research papers from the Department of Energy, containing keywords such as nuclear, chemical, and storage have been deleted from laboratory Web sites while these documents are reviewed for security risks. At the Defense Technical Information Center thousands of documents have been removed.

The disappearance of information is impeding efforts to improve health conditions in the USA. For example, when the US Geological Service asked libraries to destroy CD-ROMs containing information on surface water, a study of hazardous waste facilities by researchers at the University of Michigan was undermined; in addition, data on chemical plants that violate pollution laws was no longer available to community activists.

In some cases removal of information seems more related to ideology than to security. Reports on the effectiveness of condoms in AIDS prevention have been removed from the Web site of the Centers for Disease Control, along with reports on programs for prevention of tobacco use, pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases among young people. A National Cancer Institute report countering the claim that abortions increase the risk of breast cancer has also been removed.

According to a story in Insight Magazine, résumés of senior government officials are being censored by some agencies. The magazine found that EPA had brought in some former Enron employees and was looking for more evidence of questionable hiring. When they asked for more information, what they got was résumés with blacked out education levels, awards, affiliations and job experience. Deletions on government Web sites are being monitored by OMBWatch (http://www.ombwatch.org).

Howard Falk(howf@hotmail.com) is an Independent Consultant based in Bloomfield, New Jersey, USA.