The US Copyright Office has just spoiled the fun for that elite cadre of hackers known as Jailbreakers.  Where’s the satisfaction of breaking and entering an Apple iPhone if the authorities tell you it’s fine, be our guest.

But that’s pretty much what happened today, according to Nicholas Deleon of Crunchgear.  The Copyright Office’s decision took him so aback he was all but speechless:”This is easily the biggest tech news I have come across in quite some time—we’re talking years here.” he gasped. “I’m actually going to need a few moments to digest all of this.”

For you boring law-abiding hardworking taxpaying nine-to-five citizens, Jailbreak is a technique for hacking an iPhone to free it from Apple restrictions. “Because the iPhone is far from flawless as Apple created it,” one website explains it, “thousands of iPhone users have flocked to Jailbreak in search of iPhone changes and improvements. iPhone has been held back by limited customizability, text message privacy issues, and a lack of multitasking capabilities. But Jailbreak can solve all of these problems with apps and fixes available in Cydia and Installer. Cydia and Installer are the unofficial “App Stores” of the Jailbreak world. Developers create apps and tweaks and different utilities and upload them to these package managers, which organize everything into categories. The differences between Cydia and the App Store are the lack of an app approval process, and the lack of access limits on the iPhone software — i.e. you can do things Apple did not design the iPhone software to do.”

Is Jailbreak legal? Well, it is now. At least in a number of ways, says Deleon. According to rule updates created by the Copyright Office under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, six classes of jailbreaking are now exempt from prosecution:

1. Defeating a lawfully obtained DVD’s encryption for the sole purpose of short, fair use in an educational setting or for criticism
2. Computer programs that allow you to run lawfully obtained software on your phone that you otherwise would not be able to run aka Jailbreaking to use Google Voice on your iPhone
3. Computer programs that allow you to use your phone on a different network aka Jailbreaking to use your iPhone on T-Mobile
4. Circumventing video game encryption (DRM) for the purposes of legitimate security testing or investigation
5. Cracking computer programs protected by dongles [defined as "hardware that connects to a laptop or desktop computer for the purpose of copy protection or authentication of software"] when the dongles become obsolete or are no longer being manufactured
6. Having an ebook be read aloud (ie for the blind) even if that book has controls built into it to prevent that sort of thing

Before you rush to hack that antenna problem in your iPhone 4 you might want to consider advice offered in a tutorial by iPhone Apple iPhone Review

1. *The folks at Apple know what they are doing. They have not enabled multasking — the ability for apps to run in the background, simultaneously — most likely because it is a huge battery drain. By controlling the user experience, Apple ensures that your iPhone “just works,” and you don’t have to worry about managing battery life or any other technical details.
2. *Jailbreak could (maybe?) brick your iPhone. “When someone develops something for an Apple product and that development isn’t sanctioned by Apple, you run the risk of it not working as it should, conflicting with the device itself, or just all-around bricking that iPhone,” warns Chris Pirillo, who prefers not to Jailbreak his iPhone because “my iPhone just works already.” But I have never heard of Jailbreak completely ruining an iPhone. The consensus at this forum seems to be that the chance is “extremely slim.”
3. *Every iPhone update from iTunes disables Jailbreak. Every time Apple comes out with an update for iPhone, they find a way to prevent hackers from cracking the code again. Hackers then scramble to Jailbreak the iPhone again and release the new methods. That means if you like to download Apple’s iPhone updates, you are going to have to figure out each time how to Jailbreak your iPhone yes again. Do you really want to play this cat and mouse game?
4. *Jailbreak might increase your risk of getting a virus on your iPhone. The only two iPhone viruses ever reported have spread across iPhones that have been Jailbroken. That’s not to say the iPhone platform as Apple built it is totally secure. In fact, some say compromising an iPhone’s security is “child’s play” (i.e. easy).
5. *Jailbreak voids your iPhone warranty. If your iPhone is bricked because of Jailbreak, or if your iPhone has another problem and it happens to be Jailbreaked, your warranty becomes void. I once saw a sign at the Genius bar of The Falls, Miami Apple Store that warned customers not to Jailbreak iPhones or they would void their warranties. Harsh.

Richard Curtis

If you think clearing permissions is a nightmare today...

The word is “Greed”, says author Tony Woodlief in the Wall Street Journal.

Is that the right word? We can agree on it as a working hypothesis, but in truth the issues are far too complicated for such oversimplification, and unfortunately they’re about to become even more complicated. Fiendishly, maybe even insolubly, complicated.

The High Cost of Permissions

In a cautionary anecdote Woodlief voices a complaint about the high cost of clearing permissions: “When I asked to use a single line by songwriter Joe Henry, for example, his record label’s parent company demanded $150 for every 7,500 copies of my book. Assuming I sell enough books to earn back my modest advance, this amounts to roughly 1.5% of my earnings, all for quoting eight words from one of Mr. Henry’s songs.” Woodlief spurned the record company’s price and elected instead to use a quote from a public domain source. In a masterfully understated phrase, he muses “it’s not clear that his interests —or theirs—are being served here.”

The debate over permissions has gone on for as long as copyright protection was established by statute, including the American Constitution, centuries ago. These laws attempt to navigate the tension – or perhaps conflict is a better word – between rewarding content creators for their works and satisfying the public’s need to benefit from those creations. Woodlief phrases it cogently: “While we want to give artists incentives, we don’t want the costs to be so high that art appreciation—a difficult cultural attribute to re-establish once it is lost —declines.”

Publishers and agents daily walk this tightrope, setting prices for licenses for properties under their control that recognize the licensor’s intentions and budget on the one hand and the value of the artist’s work on the other.  To the seller the price may seem reasonable, to the buyer exorbitant. The battle is never-ending.  Except that in the Digital Era the battle is intolerable and will simply have to stop.

Permissions clearance a disaster in the Digital Age

The reason it has to stop is the emerging species called Enhanced E-Books. Unlike simple print anthologies of an earlier, quainter century (the 20th), enhanced e-books draw on film, video, music, photographs, and other art forms. For which reason they are also known as “vooks” in contemporary parlance, a hybrid of “videos” and “books”. (See If They Asked Me I Could Write a…Vook?)

So? What’s the problem?  For a recent webinar on the subject I stated it this way: “The challenge of clearing rights for enhanced e-books is so dauntingly complex that nothing less than an overhaul of the current antiquated system is necessary if enhanced e-books are not to die aborning.”

“Though an enhanced e-book would appear to be a digital product, in fact most of the processes necessary to produce it rely on the traditional and extremely tedious tasks of clearing rights and permissions, something publishers and agents have been doing for a century. For nothing more than a single image you will have to track down the credit line for the photographer or artist to give proper attribution; then you need to ascertain the source – where was it originally published? Then you must examine the contract to learn the terms by which the image was acquired. One time use only? Or did the purchaser buy rights in perpetuity? If the latter, you need to locate the purchaser to negotiate permission. If you’re using the image worldwide you need to clear permission with copyright owners in each territory (North American, UK, foreign language publishers, etc.

“And that’s for one image. If you use dozens, plus copyrighted texts, plus YouTube videos, plus movie clips, music and other protected works, the clearance process can be so daunting as to be not worth it.”

The solution?  Become a Renaissance man

“There’s gotta be a better way,” I concluded.

Is there? Bartering isn’t practical, though Woodlief actually tried it. “Will you,” he asked some poet friends, “give me a poem in return for a book and dinner?” Some of them agreed, and their poems ended up in his book.

Marc Aronson took a stab at a more realistic approach in a recent NY Times op-ed. “For e-books, the new model would look something like this: Instead of paying permission fees upfront based on estimated print runs, book creators would pay based on a periodic accounting of downloads… If rights holders were compensated for actual downloads, there would be a perfect fit. The better a book did, the more the original rights holder would be paid.”

Unfortunately, Aronson doesn’t address how the book’s creator would divide payments among movie companies, music composers, photographers, videographers, and garden variety authors.  Nor does he venture into the question of how to place comparative values on a one paragraph quote from an obscure journal versus a three minute clip from a blockbuster movie versus a top-of-the-charts hit song. Nor does he tell us how a humble little vookmaker will be able to afford the permissions cost of all that imported content when even a few minutes of music will bust his budget.

In all likelihood Aronson didn’t venture into this territory because it’s radioactive. It’s hard to imagine how we will come up with a solution in the foreseeable future, even though the success of this exciting new genre desperately depends on it. Unless…

Some years ago as the Digital Age dawned I wrote a piece called Author? What’s an Author? suggesting that the author of tomorrow would have to become more like the breed of filmmaker called “auteur” who writes, produces, directs, edits and scores his or her own movies.

“The day is coming—and much sooner than you may think—when authors will no longer be able to define themselves simply as creators of literary works,” I wrote. “As electronic technology hurtles too fast for even futurists to keep up with, a generation of readers is emerging that will not accept text unless it is interactively married to other media. The twenty-first century’s definition of ‘author’ will be as far from today’s definition as you are from the town scribe of yore.”

In short, if you possess the filmmaking gifts of a Hitchcock, the song-writing skills of Rogers and Hammerstein and the photographic genius of a Cartier-Bresson, and – oh yes – if you’re as good a writer as Tolstoy, you’ll be able to create your own enhanced e-books without laying out a dime for permissions. You’ll be nominated for a Vookie, which is undoubtedly what they will call the award given out to auteurs of vooks.  Just make sure you have your speech ready if you win.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

iPad is good for a lot of things but it could really screw up your sleep. The head of the UCLA Sleep Disorders Center says that the luminescence inhibits the production of melatonin in the brain.  Melatonin is a key chemical in sending you drifting off to beddy-bye.

Bill Ray, reporting on the effects of e-reading on vision (Don’t try to sleep with your iPad, doctor warns), says that e-ink screens like Kindle, Sony and Nook do not have that melatonin-inhibiting glare, but users may develop another problem. “Apparently the limited contrast of e-ink screens can cause eye-strain, but at least those with strained eyes are well rested.”

Ray also reminds us that if you do doze off while reading, it’s cheaper to drop a printed book on the floor than a device you paid hundreds of dollars for.

Richard Curtis

Another study confirms our suspicions that reading books on computer or e-book screens compromises learning and retention. Experiments with children and college students have pointed to the conclusion that screen media are more distracting than their paper counterparts.

Now a study conducted by product development consultancy Nielsen Norman Group has quantified these conjectures. Participants were asked to read some stories by Ernest Hemingway in printed form and on a variety of e-reading devices: an iPad, a Kindle and a desktop PC.

The results, as reported by Lauren Indvik of Mashable, were eye-opening: reading speeds were 6.2% slower on the iPad and 10.7% on the Kindle. “Participants also complained about the weight of the iPad and the Kindle’s weak contrast,” Indvik writes.  Comprehension suffered, too, especially on the PC, where readers complained that it “reminded readers of work.”

The sampling was modest – 24 participants  (Indvik says that “10 is about average for a usability survey”) – and is far from conclusive. But the indications are ominous. “I can see universities and businesses taking less kindly to e-readers if further studies prove that they handicap reading speed,” says Indvik. This comes just as schools and governments consider switching from paper to e-textbooks. See Hasta La Vista, Textbooks.

For further reading see Watching Books, The Medium is Screens. The Message is Distraction, More Evidence that Screens=Distraction, and Students Give E-Textbooks Failing Grade).

Richard Curtis

Hard to read e-books on this cooler

Damn! The Cool-er may die before we  learn how to pronounce its name. Martin Daniels on the Bookseller Association blog says the “Cooler reader looks to be another casualty of the squeeze that is inevitable in the ‘lookie likie’ E Ink reader market. They follow iRex in what may be a growing queue of dead technology failures.” Don’t forget Skiff, which dropped out of the e-device market a few weeks ago.

What’s going on?  The front-running e-readers – Kindle, Nook and Sony – all sit on large bodies of content, whereas many of the upstart gadgets have been counting on succeeding strictly on the merits of such competitive qualities as thinner, cheaper, lighter, brighter, more colorful etc. But they also have to beg, borrow or scrounge content. The only outsider holding its own is Apple’s iPad, and one good reason why is that it aggregated a lot of content soon after launching.

So – what went wrong with the Cool-er? Daniels says that it “entered the market in full color with a spectrum of cases, but forgot to make the screen color too. They also misjudged their launch with a stand and presentation more geared to a car show than a book show and their one trick pony was just a color case.”

And of course there was the dumb name. Daniels calls it the “Cooler” but it was introduced as the “Cool-er”.  “Aren’t consumers going to be confused by a b&w reader that sounds like “Col-or”?” we asked (See Another E-Book Reader with a Dumb Name)  “Or is it supposed to suggest the device is cool. Do you pronounce the word like the refrigerated water dispenser commonly found in business offices? Or do you come to a full glottal stop, thus: Cool. Er. No matter how you say it, it’s awkward, cacophonous and meaningless.”

Now it looks like we may never know. Same goes for the Plastic Logic device which, after tormenting us endlessly by withholding the name, finally announced the “Que”.  Is that pronounced “Cue?” “Kwee”? Or is it “Que” as in “Que pasa?”  However you say it, the Que’s release is seriously delayed and it too could be an also-ran in the e-reader sweepstakes. In fact Daniels says “We doubt we will see E Ink readers as we know them today in 2012…The only stay of execution will be a drop to $99 a unit.”

Richard Curtis

Cover design by Nathan Fernald

As books pass from the Tangible to the Digital Age the value of cover design is being called into question.  At least by Ben East, blogging on TheNational.ae in an article called Cover story.

Riffing on the cliche “You can’t tell a book by its cover,” East wonders whether cover design means anything any more. His conclusion? “The future of good book design looks decidedly bleak.”

East likens the state of book jackets to record albums. “Not long ago, a good looking album cover was a vital part of the image of a band and its fans; unsubtly leaving beautiful, sought-after records around your living room was like a window into your cooler-than-thou world. Now, such designs are hidden away in hard drives.”

Cover design by Nathan Fernald

If you no longer display your books in your library or living room, or even on a bus or park bench (see Can You Tell a Book Reader From its Cover?), is there any point for publishers to labor over designing striking covers? It’s tempting to say no, especially because all e-book covers show in black, white and grayscale on the E Ink screens of Kindle, Sony, Nook and their lesser kin.

But remember that that was the first generation of e-book reading devices. The next one, led by Apple’s iPad, sports full color screens.  Your e-book’s text will still be black and white but the cover will be fully saturated color, and it will definitely make a difference when you’re deciding whether to buy that e-book. Obviously e-book covers won’t employ foil and embossing but any publisher that believe consumers don’t choose e-books by what’s displayed on the screen is probably losing business.

Cover design by Andy Ross

E-Reads’ designers put a lot of creative thought into producing selling covers.  Embedded in this posting are a few recent ones. We’re revisiting our early covers and plan to replace them in due time.

So – who cares if you can’t tell a book by its cover?

We do.

By the way, did you figure out where .ae is?  Uh-uh – no fair googling!*

Richard Curtis

* .ae is The Arab Emirates

Oops. We meant Mobi, not Moby

Mobipocket is a cross-platform e-book format developed by a French team at the dawn of the e-book revolution.  It was the earliest attempt to make a one-size-fits-all program and for years the most successful.  Then Amazon acquired it and reversed its polarity, turning it from a universal format to an exclusive closed system. That system became the Kindle. E-book publishers wanting to convert files for the Kindle use a variant of Mobi called eBookBase.

According to Diesel founders Scott Redford and Kelley Allen. you can kiss your eBookBase goodbye. “Last month,” they report on the Diesel website, ” eBookBase informed their client base that they had no current or future intentions of renewing their contracts with the Agency Five (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster) and that they were pulling all A5 books off our site.”

Redford and Allen have looked at some other examples of a fading MobiPocket presence and wonder Are We Witnessing the Slow, Agonizing Death of Mobipocket?

It makes sense to us. A whole new suite of tools has burgeoned since the program was introduced and it just may be that the time has come to deep-six Mobi. Au revoir, cher ami!

Richard Curtis

Amazon.com Press Release:

***********

Amazon today announced a new update to Kindle for iPad and Kindle for iPhone and iPod touch, which allows readers to enjoy the benefits of embedded video and audio clips in Kindle books. The first books to take advantage of this new technology, including Rick Steves’ London by Rick Steves and Together We Cannot Fail by Terry Golway, are available in the Kindle Store at this URL.

“We are excited to add this functionality to Kindle for iPad and Kindle for iPhone and iPod touch,” said Dorothy Nicholls, director, Amazon Kindle. “Readers will already find some Kindle Editions with audio/video clips in the Kindle Store today–from Rose’s Heavenly Cakes with video tips on preparing the perfect cake to Bird Songs with audio clips that relate the songs and calls to the birds’ appearances. This is just the beginning–we look forward to seeing what authors and publishers create for Kindle customers using the new functionality of the Kindle apps.”

“We are truly excited to have collaborated with Amazon to launch Kindle Editions with audio/video,” said Peter Balis, Director, Digital Content Sales, Wiley. “Innovations like these represent the advantages that digital can offer. Advancing our content in this manner is important for our authors and our readers and it will raise the bar on what digital reading can offer for years to come.”

“In the new Kindle Edition with audio/video of Rick Steves’ London, the embedded walking tours allow customers to listen to Rick as they explore the sites of London,” said Bill Newlin, publisher, Avalon Travel. “Rick’s narration adds depth to the reader’s experience, while listeners can follow the routes more easily with the text.”

Technologist Jason Perlow has done an analysis of e-book reading apps available on your iPad, and it would be a good idea for you to see what he has to say before downloading any of them.

“The average iPad user may not be aware of features or limitations in the various e-Reader apps available on the App Store,” he says, “so I’m going to try to boil this down so that you can make the appropriate choices which best fit your reading lifestyle.”

You may be surprised, maybe even shocked, by his conclusions. Here in condensed form are his takes on some of the more prominent apps.

iBooks

“While there is no doubting iBooks’ success in terms of its widespread use, of all the reader applications we’ve looked at, it is actually the least functional. Apple designed iBooks to behave and act like a real book, and focused more on the aesthetics and UI than actual App functionality with the initial release….”

“iBooks supports syncing of DRM-free EPUB and PDF content directly to the iPad thru iTunes. This is an excellent feature, but essentially locks the user down to using iTunes as the primary data transfer mechanism and thus requires a host PC or Macintosh in order to maintain the library…”

“Unfortunately, iBooks doesn’t scale very well as the size of your EPUB library increases. While iBooks is perfectly fine for a few dozen or perhaps a hundred or so books purchased from the iBooks Store or synced into iTunes, it is extremely unwieldy once you approach 300+ titles loaded into the database.”

[One issue Perlow doesn't mention is cited by blogger Thomas Baekdal, who writes: "You've already purchased this book but it isn't available for redownload. To purchase it again at full price, tap OK" and his comment is, "ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!?!?"]

Kindle for iPad

“Amazon still has the widest array of paid ebook content in existence, with well over 600,000 titles in inventory. However, from a feature perspective, the Kindle software is pretty weak when compared to its hardware counterpart — you can’t import other file formats into it (such as PDFs or .MOBI files) and it only works with titles you’ve purchased in the Kindle store.”

Barnes & Noble eReader

“Of all the paid content readers, by far the best one in existence is probably the Barnes & Noble eReader application. About the only negative thing I can say about it is that like Kindle for iPad, the application is limited to content purchased on the B&N website, and uses the same Safari web interface for purchasing.”

“Other than that flaw, I love this app — the reading experience is far superior to that of the Kindle application, as it has five customizable themes for different colors of text and background and has the best reading fonts I’ve seen in any of the apps I looked at, especially when viewed in the ‘Earl Grey’ theme that almost has me convinced I’m looking at e-Ink and not an LCD.”

“Margins can be adjusted directly from page view to make maximum use of the screen if you’d like. The content browsing interface is also much more elegant than that of iBooks or Kindle for iPad.”

Kobo Reader / Borders eBooks

“Kobo Reader for iPad is…extremely polished and very well-designed.
Kobo’s main benefit is that it supports many different computing and smartphone platforms, so you can have all of your content available with you wherever you go. Like Kindle and B&N, your content is stored in Kobobooks.com’s cloud, so it doesn’t matter if you are using Kobo for iPad, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Palm, PC or Mac…”

“The Kobo reader application is one of the nicest looking on the iPad platform, although it isn’t nearly as feature rich as B&N’s or Stanza from a pure reading perspective. However, the text display is very nice, and you have four scalable fonts to choose from plus a White-on-Black “Night Reading” mode.”

Stanza

“Of all the applications listed here, Stanza is actually a very mature e-reader app, this despite only very recently being made iPad-native with version 3, in early June…
Stanza is by far the most sophisticated e-Reader application for iPad, as it supports not only the open EPUB format but also the legacy Mobipocket, PalmDoc (DOC), Microsoft LIT formats as well as HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word and Rich Text Format (RTF). This built-in compatibility eliminates the need for book conversion to EPUB with applications such as Calibre…”

“In addition to its connectivity features, Stanza has access to a wide variety of free book feeds… It has a wide array of font styles and color themes, and many options for text layout…”

“If you have lots of content that you’ve collected over the years, Stanza is definitely a must-have app. There’s absolutely no downside, it’s free to use and does more than any e-book reader app on this list.”

For the complete article, check out Apple iPad Showdown: Battle of the eReader Apps

Richard Curtis

E-Reads has responded to the surge in new e-book retailers with an upload of more than 200 titles to Apple iPad, Kobo, Diesel and Google editions.  The ten year old publisher, a leading independent in the e-book and print on demand space, is currently converting its 1000+ title inventory to the specific specs of these and other newcomers in the retail field, as well as older customers.  And of course, you can visit your favorite retailer where you’ll eventually see all E-Reads titles on sale.

Among authors in E-Reads’ upload are Harlan Ellison, Greg Bear, John Norman, Dave Duncan, William C. Dietz, Fritz Leiber, Sean Williams, Janet Dailey, Nancy J. Cohen, and Hannah Howell. Click here for the complete list of June uploads. And remember, that’s just the first of many. So…watch this space for news of new uploads