E-Book currents

Citation

Falk, H. (2002), "E-Book currents", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 19 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2002.23919dae.001

E-Book currents

Howard Falk

Libraries test Ebrary

Public and community college libraries in Northern California, and academic libraries at Stanford and Yale, are pilot users of the Ebrary (http://www.ebrary.com) online system. With Ebrary, patrons get online access over the Internet to 5,000 titles in key subject areas such as language and literature, social science, medicine, history, science, technology and philosophy. Almost all of these titles can be browsed free of charge by any number of simultaneous users. There is a small per-page copying charge, which libraries may absorb. Ebrary Web sites, created and maintained by the company, can be customized with library logos and names. Ebrary charges an annual license fee for implementation, technology license and maintenance. Exact pricing varies depending on the type of library and its size. In the first quarter of 2002, Ebrary plans to release an advanced version (ebrarian 2.1) with special features for libraries. Full MARC records will be available for all Ebrary titles. Real time Ebrary activity reports will be designed to help libraries make collection development decisions.

Ebrary continues to expand

Penguin Classics (http://www.penguinclassics.com) has licensed Ebrary to make e-book versions of its titles available. On the Ebrary site (http://www.ebrary.com) users can search for documents or read pages at no cost, but must pay to copy or print a page. Publishers that supply the documents set copy and printing prices, which are typically 25 cents per page to print and 50 cents per page to copy. About 80 publishers currently supply material to Ebrary. With Penguin Classics, Ebrary has added over 1,600 literary classics to its online collection. While most of these classics are already available online at no cost from free sites such as Project Gutenberg (http://promo.net/pg), Ebrary provides a quick method to browse and locate individual pages users may wish to copy.

Sale of netLibrary to OCLC approved

In January 2002, a federal bankruptcy court approved the sale of netLibrary assets to the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). The new owners plan to continue netLibrary services and netLibrary will give back pay and incentives to keep key employees on the payroll during the transition. OCLC hopes to operate on a break-even basis and does not envision profiting from the acquisition, which will cost about $10 million. Costs to libraries who use netLibrary services are not expected to increase. With this purchase OCLC acquires some 40,000 e-books, and the sale includes virtually all of netLibrary e-book operations. MetaText, netLibrary's digital textbook group, will remain in Boulder, Colorado, and operate within OCLC. netLibrary creditors will get an unusually generous settlement. They are expected to end up with slightly less than half of what they are owed. The usual settlement in bankruptcy cases is about 10 percent.

New library services for corporations

SkillSoft Corporation (http://www.skillsoft.com) is buying a Web-based e-book supplier and plans to provide online e-books to its corporate clients. SkillSoft has been offering online courses that teach corporate and business skills to 2 million online users. For a purchase price of some $30 million, Books24x7.com will become part of the services SkillSoft offers. The 24x7 e-book offerings include about 1,700 reference books, journals, and research reports that users can search, browse and read. Books24x7 has acquired its materials from over 65 information technology and business publishers, including Amacom, Harvard Business School Press, McGraw-Hill, Microsoft Press, MIT Press, Sybex, and Wiley. Current 24x7 customers include Bank of America, Lockheed-Martin and Hewlett-Packard.

US digital preservation plans underway

The US Congress voted $100 million for the Library of Congress to develop a national strategy for preserving digital materials over a year ago. So far, the effort has been moving ahead rather slowly at a time when the number of digital works is rapidly increasing and the need for preservation is becoming urgent. To prepare for discussions among content creators, distributors and users of these materials, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) held preliminary sessions attended by 130 individuals concerned with e-books, electronic journals, digital TV, sound recordings, Web sites, film and video. These people, who were from commercial entertainment companies, publishers, the arts, colleges and universities, information technology, libraries, federal agencies, and funding agencies, were asked what should be included in digital materials preservation plans. Questions then raised included: what will be the roles played by the Library of Congress, other libraries and archives, content creators and owners? What standards are needed? Who will pay for preservation? How will rights management and protection be addressed? Computer scientists felt it is feasible to preserve everything but information professionals did not agree. All agreed that a distributed system was needed, in which commercial, nonprofit and government groups would work with the Library of Congress, but the needed system remained undefined. Librarians working on archives for digital works are invited to contact CLIR (http://www.clir.org) if they are interested in involvement in the ongoing national effort.

Rights negotiation

Libraries and archives seeking to preserve e-books and other digital works often need to obtain permission from copyright holders. The following suggestions about negotiation for such permission were presented at a CEDARS Conference in York, UK by Mr Ellis Weinberger of the Cambridge University Library.

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  Discover who can authorise the preservation of the digital object in question. Obtain accurate contact details for this person, taking into consideration the possibility that there may be several rights owners.

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  Discover and document actions one needs to be able to take in order to preserve access to the intellectual content of the digital object.

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  Find out why the person who could authorise a request to preserve an object might refuse to do so. Prepare reasoned arguments, and explanations of technical preservation methods, to persuade them that authorising preservation will not cause them, or their institution, commercial harm.

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  Request permission to preserve access to the intellectual content of the digital object.

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  Keep detailed records of all steps in the negotiation process.

Copyright search site

The US Copyright Office has launched a new Web site offering copyright information on books, music recordings, movies, software, and other works. According to the office, users can search copyright records back to 1978, divided into three categories: general works, consisting of books, music, films, maps, and software; serials, such as magazines and newspapers; and documents, such as contracts, licenses and wills that relate to copyright ownership. The site can be accessed at http://www.loc.gov/copyright/search

Small e-book publishers flourish

With a Web site that now offers over 100,000 titles by 8,000 authors, 1stBooks (http://www.1stbooks.com) did $10 million worth of business in 2001, up from only $118,000 in 1997, and the company expects revenues to double again in 2002. The number of 1stBooks employees has tripled since 1999. 1stBooks charges authors $399 to publish each e-book (in PDF format). If the book sells, the author gets a 100 percent royalty until $300 of the initial fee is recovered. After that, the book earns 10-50 percent royalties for sales through the 1stBooks Web site. The titles are also sold through outside retail outlets and the royalties for these sales are lower. Print-on-demand (POD) paperback editions have become very popular, with over 500,000 sold thus far. Authors pay an initial fee of $199 for publication of a POD title.

iUniverse (http://www.iuniverse.com) has 8,500 authors of e-book and POD titles. The company has sold over 750,000 books. Authors pay a $99 fee for publication of each e-book (in Microsoft Reader, Adobe Acrobat e-Book Reader, or POD format). Authors get a 50 percent royalty for each copy sold at the iUniverse Web bookstore. The titles are also sold through outside retail outlets and the royalties for these sales are lower.

Web sites like those of 1stBooks and iUniverse have their origins in the world of vanity publishing, but the convenience and favorable economics of e-book and POD publishing have propelled them into a much wider world. For example, organizations that have published cookbooks to raise funds can now turn to the convenience and speed of online POD paperback publishing to produce these books and also to extend the audience for the books.

Questia flops

After more layoffs, only a maintenance crew of 28 is left to keep the Questia Web site going. The company has been offering online research and writing services aimed at college students. It raised $135 million from Enron Executive Officer Ken Lay, Compaq Computer Corp. and others. Like netLibrary, which ate its way through investments of $110 million, Questia apparently thought that there would be no end to the flow of money. Over 300 employees were hired, and there were plans were to attract 100,000 subscribers at $19.95 per month during its first year. But, not much more than 5,000 users actually signed up. Now the company is looking for smaller offices and trying to wiggle out of its long-term contracts.

Yahoo sells e-books

E-books from Penguin Putnam, Simon & Schuster, Random House, and HarperCollins are now offered for sale on the Yahoo! Web site (http://shopping.yahoo.com/books/ebooks) in either Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader or Microsoft Reader format. Best-selling titles from authors such as Patricia Cornwell, Stephen King and Lisa Scottoline are featured. E-books can be searched for by author's name, title, category or ISBN.

CD firm disdains restriction technology

Many new CD recordings include restriction features designed to keep them from being played on computers. The idea, as with e-book reader restrictions, is to keep users from copying the recorded material. Philips, the Dutch firm that helped create CDs, has refused to use any restriction features because it believes them to be troublesome and cumbersome. Initial sales of CDs with restrictions triggered numerous consumer complaints in the UK. Philips maintains that disks with restrictions are not actually CDs and must bear warning labels to inform consumers. The company is likely to sell machines that can play restricted CDs, and make unrestricted copies. Philips claims that the US Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) does not apply to restricted CD disks.

Restriction indictment in Norway

The creator of a program to unlock DVD restrictions, Jon Johansen, has been indicted in Norway for unlawful access to data and could be imprisoned for up to two years if convicted. The law was previously used to prosecute thieves who broke into bank or phone company records. Johanson was investigated at the urging of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) because he posted his program, called DeCSS, on his father's computer. The MPAA fears that the program could be used for unauthorized copying of DVD movies. The Norwegian indictment was preceded by two US lawsuits. One found that publication of DeCSS software is protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. The second decision banned a magazine from publishing DeCSS because that violated the US Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).

DMCA revision bill introduced

A bill to change the US Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) has been introduced by Rick Boucher, a member of the US House of Representatives from Virginia. The bill would allow consumers to defeat restrictions on e-books and other electronic media that deny them legitimate personal uses. Boucher expects strong opposition to this bill from the recording and movie industries and he is working to line up support for it.

DMCA restricts the Library of Congress

To register a copyright in the USA, the copyright owner must deposit copies of the work in the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress. Recently, the first deposit copies of e-books were accepted at the Copyright Office. As e-book copies accumulate, the Library of Congress will find its shelves filling with works that cannot legally be open to the public without agreement of the copyright holders. If the library follows its mandate and simply makes the works publicly available, like all the other works it holds, it will violate restrictions imposed by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).

E-textbooks in Egypt

Schools in Egypt, 100 of them, will soon make e-textbooks available to their students over a network of computers and handheld readers. The plan is to allow the readers to be checked out by students who will be able to take them home for further study. K-12 courses will interactively teach students about use of PCs, e-books, e-book readers and using the e-library system, as well as how to get e-books on the Internet, and even how to create their own e-books. BookZone.com, a Scottsdale, Arizona company, will help create the e-library and e-publishing system. Also participating in the project will be Microsoft and Compaq as vendors for the operating systems and hardware.

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