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A U S T
R A L I A N E - B O O K N E W S L E
T T E R
***Vol.II No. 4, November 2002 ***
<<< for local and international digital book news - to subscribe see information at base>>>
This page last updated 7 November 2002
Latest - check out our six Buy Books pages
Features of the new website will include Freebooks, Buy Books, Resources, Software, Links for Librarians, Kidz Korner & much more...
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Tablet PC Conference to Spotlight ePublishing. Thursday, December
5, 2002. A one-day event at the McGraw-Hill auditorium, Avenue of
the Americas New York City. Organised by the Open eBook Forum.
The conference will showcase the new Tablet PC platform and how book,
magazine, newspaper and other publishers can provide digital versions
of their publications for the device. Sponsors include Microsoft Corporation,
OverDrive Inc., McGraw-Hill, New York University Center for Publishing
and Palm Digital Media. www.openebook.org/tabletpc
Pathways 6 Conference 1- 4 December 2002. Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre, Darling Harbour, Sydney, Australia. Annual conference on disabilities in education, sponsored by seven NSW universities, TAFE & the Australian National Training Authority. The e-connection? The conference is organised by William Jolley, Secretary General of the DAISY Consortium. DAISY is the worldwide organisation creating and implementing an international standard for digital accessible documents‚ narrated audio and text with synchronisation and navigation. Speakers include NSW Governor Marie Bashir, Dr Jerome Bickenbach of Queen's University, Canada, Simon Darcy of the University of Technology, Sydney, and disabled lawyer & rugby aficionado Matt Laffan. http://www.usyd.edu.au/disability/pathways
5th International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries 11-14 December 2002, Grand Hyatt Hotel, Singapore. Speakers will include Christine Borgman of UCLA on Challenges in Building the Digital Library for the 21st Century; Zhang Xiaoxing of the National Library of China on Introduction of China Digital Library Project; Edward Fox of Virginia Tech on Building Digital Libraries Made Easy: Toward Open Digital Libraries; San-Yih Hwang & Ee-Peng Lim (National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan) on A Data Mining Approach to Library New Book Recommendations & Gobinda G. Chowdhury (University of Strathclyde, UK) on Digital Divide: How can Digital Libraries Bridge the Gap? http://www.cais.ntu.edu.sg:8000/icadl2002
Information Online 2003 Conference and Exhibition 21- 23 January 2003 Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre South, Darling Harbour, Sydney, Australia. Topics will include: Adapting to New Technologies: PDAs and Wireless (Mary Peterson); and Electronic Books: Not Dead Yet (Donald Hawkins). Meanwhile The Answer to All Our Problems (David Groenewegan and Simon Huggard) sounds too good to be true, alas. The list of intriguing topics is huge, so if interested take a look at the programme for yourself at: http://www.alia.org.au/conferences/online2003
ALA pre-conference: Making E-books Work: Librarians and Publishers Exchange Needs and Solutions.Thurs Jan. 23 2003 The ALA Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) is sponsoring a pre-conference in Philadelphia on institutional challenges and opportunities presented by the acquisition of e-books in libraries. http://www.ala.org/events/midwinter2003/specialevents.html
PS: We welcome news on e-book events in any country: Email the editor at the adddress at the base of this page.
The site
*It's bad journalistic form to open with your own news, but we're so pleased we'll defy that convention to report that our new "Freebooks" webpage, and the six "Buy Books" pages (Australian, US, UK, Other International, Children's and Speciality e-books), are proving popular. Meanwhile research continues for further web features, & we hope to soon release "Links for Librarians" & a general e-book "Resources" page.
*You'll also notice on the website that we're currently including an "Opportunity for an e-publisher" webpage. This title Mickey Slabdabber is one your editor has been personally involved with in a painstaking effort of scanning, OCR & extensive pre-editing over many months. If you're interested in matters Irish at all, do take a look.
3. Gutenberg to e-Books - Ambitious Oz Project now in early stages
Funded by the Commonwealth Dept of Industry, Science and Resources,
the " Gutenberg to ebooks" GASAA* project aims to establish a "leading
edge, online publishing community" in Australia, for the design, pre-media,
print and publishing industry. The project is planned to be in three phases,
information collecting (current), establishing a successful working model,
& promotion of e-publishing strategies to the graphic communications industry,
along with cost effective tools.
The project is targeted at the needs of small and medium sized businesses in the graphic arts industry. It's launched in collaboration with BinaryThing.Com, so you can be sure of a strong PDF current. Larger fingers in the pie are likely to include Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, & Fuji Xerox, plus graphic arts specific businesses such as Heidelberg, Agfa, Indigo, CreoScitex, & Screen. Major ISP's, particularly Telstra, Optus and Ozemail, will also be "invited to contribute" to the research.
Declares the project summary, "Australia is ideally situated to be a major regional player in the growth industry of content tagging and ebooks." It warns that "Australian print based book publishers must begin to understand, and in time master, electronic book publishing to protect their domestic market from offshore, net savvy publishers." But with danger comes opportunity, for " Innovative book printers in Australia can, through complimentary epublishing, compete for valuable export earnings." Go get 'em, tigers. Read more at: http://www.gasaa.asn.au/ebooks
* Graphic Arts Services Association of Australia.
*Marilyn Ottoy of eInfo Solutions
informs us that they have been appointed as Australian representatives
for Ion Systems Inc, the e-Monocle & Galaxy Library people. Ion develop
software for the presentation, distribution and sale of e-books. Their
products are targeted at publishers as well as public and private libraries.
* Galaxy Library lives at http://www.galaxylibrary.com
by the way - on their "Free eBooks" page you can try out eMonocle for
yourself on books such as Robinson Crusoe.
*Ion's public library e-book package, called Constellation Library, manages an entire lending process and provides "unlimited simultaneous access" to titles, including large-type capability. (e-Monocle, while fine for ordinary readers, is exceptionally useful to the sight-impaired). Also on offer is a related software package for the vision impaired, for use on desktop PCs to enlarge text & images without distortion or loss of formatting. This software can also be used for making web sites suitable for viewing by people with sight impediments.
5. Fictionwise
Alternative
eInfo has also been working with US company Fictionwise
to establish a beta test site for the latter's rival package for public
libraries, which was launched on October 7. Fictionwise's product allows
anyone with a hankering for starting an online e-book library - e.g. public
libraries, corporate libraries, special interest groups of any sort, or
even just an interested individual -to loan e-books to a membership using
a customized, automated website.
Fictionwise claims that setup is easy, taking as little as an hour, and all hosting and customer support is handled for a "low monthly fee". No technical expertise is required either. The system also enables libraries to lend out e-book titles and share them amongst networks of libraries. Content may be selected from "thousands of contemporary titles...in dozens of categories, both fiction and nonfiction".
These books are then available for library users to download onto PCs and also PDAs (Palms, PocketPCs, other WinCE devices, Psions, & even some Nokia cell phones). The new system can also allow patrons to purchase titles, with credits for the acquisitions going to the library. If they wish, patrons may then also donate the book to the library. See the US press release at: http://www1.internetwire.com/iwire/release_html_b1?release_id=47001
If any librarians or companies are interested in having a look at the Fictionwise trial, eInfo can provide a password so you can get into the site, which is at: http://www.libwise.com/ozebooks . To obtain a password or learn more contact Marilyn by emailing her - marilyn.ottoy@einfosolutions.com.
6. The Planet's Moving - to a new orbit
Which are the two best general e-book sites in the world? That would be first EbookWeb, and next Planet eBook (originally known as Digital Worm). The latter is one of a group of sites emanating from the BinaryThing company, which prides itself both on being based in Melbourne, Victoria, & having become a global focus for PDF-related software development.
Planet eBook (http://www.DigitalWorm.com) has hosted stupendous amounts of quality information about all aspects of e-books. And as regards software info. they are unexcelled. So it is with regret that we pass on the news that BinaryThing has decided to eventually phase out the Planet eBook website (we don't know when, so keep on using it meantime, folks).
BinaryThing are planning to focus just on Adobe Acrobat and PDF in future. So far they've moved their "eBook Community archive" across to Planet PDF (http://www.planetpdf.com). The latter is another of their sites & one they'll be concentrating on in future. News and articles will be next to follow there.
Meantime, Planet PDF has recently started a "Free eBook" area. These are popular classic novels. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Wuthering Heights, The Jungle Book, The Island of Doctor Moreau and Ulysses are among twenty-five so far available. That's in PDF format only of course. Access them from: http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=2311
World News:
7. Gemstar: Bucket Empty, Henry Bails
Henry Yuen, founder and chief executive of Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc., has resigned as Gemstar CEO. Yuen had been under severe pressure from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Ltd, which owned the largest bloc of shares in Gemstar. His departure was cushioned by a $US22 million golden handshake
. Mr Yuen has long been a bete noire to much of the e-book community, & was frequently bucketed by this newsletter in the past. He bought out the two fledgling -e-book device companies NuvoMedia & Softbook in a sudden development that stunned observers. But his later strategy - shutting down manufacture of the popular & technically excellent Rocket eBook device, closing eBookNet, & restricting the new REB e-reader devices to expensive tied proprietary content - dismayed many & shattered the hopes of most e-book device boosters. As predicted by this newsletter the strategy was a dud, and it was all down hill for Gemstar's e-book hopes from then on.
Editorial: So now we call for the new head of Gemstar (Jeff Shell) to take note. Please consider seriously the resurrection of the Rocket eBook, a once & we hope future device capable of propelling itself through the barriers of public indifference & lighting up the e-book sky. It needs to be priced right (as in inexpensive!), promoted well & sold everywhere. And if you don't want to take the risk - please sell the rights to someone else who will. Go the Rocket!
*BOL weeviled. BOL (Bertelsmann online) shocked some with the news that most of their European websites may be on the way out. Rather than stick with their online e-book experiments, the new powerbrokers at mega corporation Bertelsmann (who also own Random House in the USA) have announced that all non-profitable operations will be sold or dismantled. Vale BOL.
*On the topic of helpful software it's pleasing to note that second generation Pocket PCs support much improved voice recognition programs. Busy folk, people who compute too much & others with arthritic or ailing hands will appreciate the ability to access and modify data by voice. See a review of three such programs at: http://rd.bcentral.com/?ID=151106&s=32472738
PC World magazine (who by the way have a range of great free email newsletters available for computer enthusiasts -but beware of daily ones, they're difficult to keep up with) are offering a free software download for converting Word documents to PDFs. So if you're planning on creating your own e-books in PDF format, here's a spot for a free trial run. Because yes, you do need to practice. http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,22292,tk,picks,00.asp
Coming Soon From Palm - or Already Here
In addition to a new operating system (OS 5.0), Palm's been busy readying new hardware devices which are expected to launch later this year and early next. Some are already available in the USA in fact. All the details aren't out yet, but first here's some background:
*Palm is now engaged in a ferocious head-to-head struggle with Microsoft's Pocket PCs for dominance in the PDA market. Bidding for the support of the young & PDA beginners by offering a much more affordable baseline product is a powerful market strategy. It seems likely for example that huge numbers of secondary & tertiary students of limited means would buy a Palm if they were cheaper. Indeed their opposition might find it hard to counter this tactic in that market segment. The inexpensive Palm may well be the device by which the e-book enters the youth market in a big way.
*However the contest in the business end of the market, where price is less a sticking point & the elaborate Windows CE operating system might appeal more to some, could prove a lot tougher. Anyhow, Palm has now acknowledged the different markets by dividing its PDA family into two brands.
*There'll be the Palm Tungsten range for business. These models will emphasize greater security and reliability, in an apparent dig at Microsoft. The first product in this range, a server-side software upgrade to the Palm Wireless product, was announced a while back. It's called the Tungsten Mobile Information Management Solution. And that's got to be a pompous enough name to compete with anything the MS people can offer.
*For individual consumers there'll be the Palm Zire collection. "User-friendly" and "less expensive" will be the watchwords here. Remember these distinctions, they'll eliminate a lot of confusion when studying all those Palm model numbers.
*Entry-level Palm PDAs will cost as little as US$100 in the United States. Hopefully such cheaper Palms will be available in Australia too. Todd Bradley, CEO of Palm Solutions says that Palm will launch three new consumer products this "fall" (i.e. southern hemisphere spring).
Actually, some of them are already out. There's the Tungsten T at $US499. It boasts the first Palm OS 5.0 operating system, built-in Bluetooth wireless network capability & is powered by an ARM 144-Mhz processor. Meaning it can run multimedia files as well as a Pocket PC does. It also has voice-recording capabilities. Later there'll be the Tungsten W, which has a Blackberry-esque keyboard. However the Model W runs only Palm 4.1,& has a feebler 33-megahertz Motorola DragonBall processor. Yet it will still cost $US549. But you do get GSM/GPRS wireless connectivity.
The first Palm Zire is also now out & about in the States, at a wunder price of $US99. It's the heir to the Palm m100 & looks quite similar. But it lacks a backlight, tsk tsk - an error they'll hopefully reverse in the next model. However it does feature a reasonable lithium ion rechargeable battery, & the screen contrast is dandy. Also it HotSyncs to a PC with a no-fuss, no frills USB cable operation. It weighs in at only108 grams (3.8 ounces) the lightest Palm ever.
The Palm Zire is not exactly a luxury model - it's low-powered, monochrome, has no expansion slots, & not much memory either (only 2MB). This is definitely yer basic handheld folks, but as a simple PDA & primitive small e-reader it's quite acceptable .Mind that there is no Palm Reader installed or on the accompanying CD, so you'll just have to download it. Above all what you're getting for your money is a Palm that's inexpensive, & that's a first.
Update re Toshiba e740 Pocket PC
Now SD (Secure Digital) cards for this device are also available in 256
MB and 512 MB capacities, to store more e-books still. Altho' you'll pay
an arm & a leg for the 512MB ones, at least until a bigger size yet comes
along.
* And wondrous to relate, such storage cards are developing their own spinoff industry. First up is a "storage card management utility" for the Pocket PC, which will monitor your card, scan it for errors, fix problems & even defragment the storage memory. Price is $US14.95 from www.softwinter.com. In response to that free plug let's hope they'll include a virus scan in the next version because yes, that's another thing to worry about. After that, fret like crazy about the parlous state of security in many wireless networks.
Oh, an Oz price for the e740 itself? $1,499 (Bluetooth); $1,549 (WiFi). Learn more at: www.toshiba.com.au
By comparison, the Handspring Treo 270 Communicator (see www.handspring.com.au) will set you back even more at $A1,599. It's Palm OS, and for so much money is a mobile phone & wireless Web browser as well.
Meanwhile the queen of the Clie range, the Sony Clie Super VZ 66
is a little more modestly priced at: $A1,349. It's also Palm OS, and throws
in a digital still camera, digital music player and ability to operate
as a remote control for other Sony products as well. That's versatility!
Just don't forget what it is you're doing. www.sony.com.au
The Clie makes the ring-in Nokia 7650 look modestly endowed. The latter can only be used as a phone and to take pictures. Cheesh! Although admittedly it will also phone the pictures to people you call, or you can even attach a pic. to a caller ID to make it a virtual still videophone. For such limitations pay only $1,299. www.nokia.com.au
But hey, I'm still hanging out for the 199 Oz dollar Palm. Now that'll be true value for a no-nonsense PDA & e-reader.
Web Tablets
Why is Palm Digital Media a sponsor of December's Tablet PC Conference? The Tablet PC is very much Microsoft's plaything at present. Well if you think about it, web tablets will cost more than any Palm - a lot more in fact. So Palm evidently mused, why not have a free entry into that market by flogging Palm Media titles to proud Tablet owners anyway? With quick thinking like that in evidence, anyone who predicts Palm's demise before the MS juggernaut may up the proverbial gum tree without a koala in sight…
* Oh, and Tablet PC devices will be available on November 7th from a wide range of leading industry manufacturers, including HP, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Acer, ViewSonic and Motion Computing. We're considering them as yet another wave of e-book readers…
WiFi
Wot's Wi Fi? If you've seen that word a lot lately and feel that it seems
to have come from nowhere, well yes, it did. You see it used to be called
802.11b, not exactly a glamour tag.
IEEE 802.11b is an industry standard that dates from late 1998. It denotes
devices that have been certified by the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility
Alliance to conform to the "industry standard for wireless networking"
specification.
So Wi Fi (Wireless Fidelity) devices will connect wirelessly to ethernets - for example local area networks (LANs) or even the Internet itself - at up to 11 megabits per second. They require a networking node or "hot spot" within about 300 feet, i.e. around 100 metres. (We often have to keep talking feet and pounds folks, because the good ol' USA can't seem to let go of the Imperial-isms inherited from Mother England. Sigh).
Now to confuse you thoroughly. There's also another standard IEEE 802.11a. No it's not the predecessor to Wi Fi, it's actually newer & faster, with theoretical speeds of up to 54 mbps. Is there an Oz connection? Of course - Bell Lab's Australian research team has just designed a high-speed wireless chip called BLAST, which can deliver up to 19.2 mbps in reality. Bell has rushed the prototype off to Noo Jersey for further development.
To sum up, wireless networks are already all around you folks, & multiplying as we speak. Yes, people will soon be downloading e-books from them, possibly at a table in a coffee house near you (think Starbucks so far).
Bluetooth You'll also have heard of Bluetooth as a "coming thing". For some time. Actually Bluetooth has been coming since 1994. So not surprisingly it's got less of everything. The Bluetooth networking specification operates only within about 30 feet (around ten metres), with transmission speeds of a modest 800 kilobits per second.
So Bluetooth is not too hot for large projects or Internet purposes, but is useful for communicating wirelessly at home with a gaggle of devices. Such as, from PDA to PC or laptop, printer, mobile phone or indeed any device with wireless capability. Sad to say, due to its slow rate of deployment, a fair guess is that it will be pretty well obsolete in the face of Wi Fi before it becomes common. Hmmm….
Palm Digital Media Top 10 Best-selling Fiction Books August 2002
1. "The Bone Collector" by Jeffery Deaver, Signet Books
2. "The Winner" by David Baldacci, St. Warner Books
3. "The Paris Option" by Robert Ludlum and Gayle Lynds, St. Martin's Griffin
4. "Godplayer" by Robin Cook, Berkeley Publishing Group
5. "Total Control" by David Baldacci, Warner Books
6. "Isaac Asimov's Robot City #1" by Michael P. Kube-McDowell and Mike
McQuay, iBooks
7. "God's Debris" by Scott Adams, Scott Adams, Inc.
8. "The First Billion" by Christopher Reich, Bantam Dell Publishing
9. "T2: Infiltrator" by S. I. Stirling, HarperCollins PerfectBound
10. "On A Wild Night by Stephanie Laurens, HarperCollins PerfectBound
Palm Digital Media Top 10 Best-selling Non-fiction Books August 2002
1. The Holy Bible, New International Version from Zondervan
2. "The Procrastinating Child" by Rita Emmett, Walker Publishing Co.
3. "The First-Time Manager" by Loren Belker, AMACOM
4. Webster's New World College Dictionary from Hungry Minds, John Wiley
& Sons
5. Webster's New World Compact School & Office Dictionary (from as above)
6. "Crypto" by Steven Levy, Penguin Books
7. "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen R. Covey, Franklin
Covey
8. "No More Mr. Nice Guy" by Robert A. Glover, Barnes & Noble Digital
9. "Slander" by Ann Coulter, Crown Publishers
10. "The Multi-Orgasmic Couple" by Chia, Chia, Abrams & Abrams, HarperCollins
PerfectBound
Special
feature:
Bruce's Red-Hot Web Tip:
How to Prevent Viruses & Spam Reaching Your PC*
Everyone with a shred of sense should have anti-virus software on their PC (Zone Alarm is a good free one, or, if you can afford it, Norton is another goodie, particularly as part of their Internet Protection software). Still, such software as a one & only line of defence may not be enough these days, with so many twisted souls out there determined to wreak havoc.
Then there's also the problem of ever-growing amounts of unwanted spam (junk email) cluttering up your Inbox, which if you're out & about on the Web can grow to plague proportions. So I want to give a free plug to a great new program I can personally recommend, called MailWasher. This is designed to prevent emailed viruses & spam from ever actually reaching your PC in the first place.
Basically, it allows you to look your email over on the mail server before downloading it, so you can eliminate all the unwanted ones. It also alerts you there to possible viruses & known spam. Even better, it enables you to bounce viruses & spam back to where they came from with just a click, & put previously unknown spammers on your own personal blacklist. If you read any emails in MailWasher they will only open as plain text files, so if they contain a virus they cannot endanger the server. Truly fabbo.
Amazing but true, you can get MailWasher for free, legally & no strings attached, from http://www.mailwasher.net. Or you can make a donation of your own choice to the developer, which if you find it really helps you might be an honourable thank-you for such a useful public service.
If unsure of anything, or you have any problems with it, check out the FAQ at: http://www.mailwasher.net/faq.php#_Q._How_do
Images Below:
Top left: Palm Zire
Top right: A web tablet
Lower left: Rocket eBook
Lower right: Palm Tungsten T
