Alert! 
Tonight, Exclusive Books launches its new web retail portal, Exclus1ves, at a gala do in Fourways, Johannesburg. Follow my and others’ livetweets at #x1s to learn more about the online retail revolution that Exclusives hopes to bring SA.
Alert! Tonight, Exclusive Books launches its new web retail portal, Exclus1ves, at a gala do in Fourways, Johannesburg. Follow my and others’ livetweets at #x1s to learn more about the online retail revolution that Exclusives hopes to bring SA.
Alert! SA’s perspicacious man-about-digital-lit Arthur Attwell was the first to spot it: Kalahari.net has launched its ebooks store, softly-softly, just a few days ahead of the big debut of its rival Excluisve Books’ new web retail portal, which is also set to include an ebook component.
Kalahari’s ebook system appears dependent, like parts of Scribd.com’s (and Little White Bakkie’s), on Adobe Digital Editions (ADE), a version of Adobe’s popular Reader that allows publishers to create digital works with full “DRM” (that’s short for Digital Rights Management). DRM, in turn, determines how the content may be used and shared (or not) across devices. The upshot is that you won’t be able to read your Kalahari ebooks without ADE – a platform that also limits where you can read the book. (Some eReader devices don’t support ADE; at the moment, your best bet is to read the books on a laptop or netbook.)
So far, Kalahari appears to have imported ebook catalogues wholesale from third parties – there doesn’t appear to be a locally-driven component, at first glance at least – meaning that a fairly random selection of international titles will now be available to readers, but no local ones. Moreover, these titles come with equally random pricing. Compare, for instance, the ebook version of Michela Wrong’s It’s Our Turn to Eat (one of the few Africa-centric books we could find in Kalahari’s ebook store): buy the digital edition for R204.26 from right now; or order the softcover, currently going for R171.00 on Kalahari, and wait 5 days for delivery. The choice is yours!
Local tech website e-relevant offers excellent further analysis:
Kalahari.net eBook offering & pricing:
The available eBooks cover a broad range of categories, the Fiction category appears to have over 2,000 eBooks (based on 86 pages and 25 eBooks displayed per page). 500 of these titles fall into the Romance sub-category which tends to dominate the eBook Fiction market.
Searching for the keyword ‘ePub’ (dominant eBook format) returns 2,797 results. The price ranges (no. titles in brackets) of ePub format are:
Less than R100 (973)
R100 – R250 (1650)
R250 – R500 (168)
R500 – R1000 (4)
R1000 – R2500 (1)
More than R2500 (1)Searching for the keyword ‘PDF’ (eBook format often used for academic & travel publications) returns 49,337 results. The price ranges (no. titles in brackets) of PDF format are:
Less than R100 (348)
R100 – R250 (1752)
R250 – R500 (9765)
R500 – R1000 (9837)
R1000 – R2500 (21285)
More than R2500 (6350)
BOOK SA very much looks forward to covering the SA ebook wars (just as much as the Cape Town indie bookshop wars). Here’s hoping some heavy local ordnance arrives sooner rather than later!
Book details
Alert! BOOK SA’s busy week will culminate in a frenzied bout of liveblogging on Thursday, Friday and Saturday – and all in the name of keeping you as up to date on matters SA and Africa Lit as possible, gentle reader.
First up, BOOK SA is the official media partner for the announcement of the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize – Africa region winners, which will take place on Thursday morning. We’ll liveblog the affair direct from the Johannesburg presser, using the hashtag #cwp10africa. Tune in from about 10:45 am – and click here to see who’s shortlisted.
The same day, in the afternoon, we’ll be coming to you live from the launch of the new Exclusive Books web portal, which will take over from www.exclusivebooks.com at a catchy new URL to be named very, very soon. Speakers at the launch will include Pippa Tshabalala, presenter of MNet’s The Verge, Terry Morris of Pan Macmillan, Yoel Kenan of Africori and editor of Stuff magazine Toby Shapshak. Watch for coverage on BOOK SA’s front page from about 3:45pm.
Finally, on Friday and Saturday, BOOK SA will head to Durban for the tail end of the 13th Time of the Writer litfest, where we’ll be tweeting mainly the concluding evening events with #tow10. Of course, you can expect ongoing coverage of the TOW on BOOK SA from its kickoff tomorrow.
Don’t miss out on all the literary action!
Alert! Sarah Ruden, acclaimed translator of Vergil’s Aeneid, and friend to many a Cape writer – Ruden lived in Cape Town for many years – has just released The New Places, a collection of her new and selected poems.
The New Places is currently only available in ebook format – and it can be purchased online from lulu.com for just ten US cents per poem, as the author puts it. The book follows on from Ruden’s debut collection, which won the CNA award, Other Places (Justified Press, 1995).
Here’s Sarah’s email advising us of the news:
***
Target
(With grovelling apologies to George Herbert)
Yesterday I was shuffling through a store
And choosing several things I didn’t need:
Lipstick, conditioner, a candy bar,
A gel pen, Tupperware, ceramic beads—
But at the orange cheese popcorn I was sighing
About professed ideals and tedious jobs.
Was this the best my long hours could be buying?
I peered at several carts of other slobs—
Then heard a laugh, and turned, and Love was there:
“How could I mind you buying some cheap thing
Out of your costly work—how would I dare?
I bought you out of all My suffering,
In spite of what it said about My taste,
And the endlessly more worthwhile things to do—
And no, I’ve never thought it was a waste:
I’m Love, you idiot, and though you’re you,
I hold you in extravagant compassion.
No yard sale browser ever gave less thought
To use or charm or storage space or fashion—
And yet I never part with what I’ve bought.”
*
Hello, everybody!
With the help of your friendship, advice, teaching, and prayers, I’ve had some success in commercial publishing during the past few years. However, when it comes to poetry book publication, a line of Dante applies best:
Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.
[Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.]
I’ve now done what I never expected to and published a lulu.com ebook, The New Places, which is a collection of my new and selected poems.
My poetic oeuvre has been celebrated at the All-Alberta Musical Saw Festival’s Lyric Competition/Moose Cook-Off with the judgment “People who like stuff like this would like this.” In case you think you would like it, the new book is available for $5—that’s 10¢ a poem—and does not need to be printed, so that you can save toner and trees.
http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/the-new-places/8204747
Yours truly,
Sarah Ruden
***
Book details
Image courtesy Johns Hopkins Magazine
Alert! Arthur Attwell of Electric Book Works – who has just founded the Digital Minds Network with fellow publishing entrepreneurs Ramy Habeeb (Egypt) and Octavio Kulesz (Argentina) – appeared on stage at the recent Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York, as South Africa’s sole indie rep there.
For those of you slow to pick up on it, this is a big deal. #toccon, as the conference is known on Twitter, is arguably the world’s most important event for publishing innovation. As one of SA’s most innovative thinkers in the sector, then, Attwell fit right in.
He carried a message with him across the Atlantic: the message that it’s possible to sell more book content into Africa – and, within Africa, to new parts of the continent – if one embraces the possibilities afforded by two key force multipliers, curation and easy licensing.
In effect, Attwell is proposing that publishers adopt a new distribution model for Africa. His invigorating, fresh ideas will keep those watching developments in digital on the edge of their seats. Take a look at what he says:
When you give someone else a licence to take your content to a new market, they’re curating your work. So, you’ve got to make licensing easy for people, if you want your content to reach customers you can’t reach directly, and to make some money from that.
So that’s what I’m going to talk about today. I’m going to talk about some technology you probably already know about, and then take the principles behind that technology further, and try to explain how anyone in publishing is going to sell meaningful amounts of book content into Africa.
Image courtesy Arthur Attwell
Alert! Rumour has it that Exclusive Books’ new online retail portal will be unveiled next month (but not necessarily at ExclusiveBooks.com).
Now Fred Withers, who oversees retail for EB’s parent company, Avusa, answers one of the current questions related to bookselling in SA generally: namely, when will a major retailer start selling ebooks?
Withers, it turns out, plans to have 6 000 in his shop by the end of the year:
Withers says Exclusive Books will begin selling e-books from next month to coincide with a relaunch of its website. Initially, the company will offer a “small range of e-books for download”. To start with, the catalogue will focus on romance fiction, a selection of mainstream fiction and nonfiction, and some locally published material.
This catalogue will be expanded throughout 2010, Withers says.
Image courtesy Techcentral
A fresh, cogent piece on ebooks from one Jason Norwood-Young, who points out in the Mail & Guardian that literature’s digitization has been going on since the early 1970s – and that it doesn’t pose as dire a threat to the contents of our beloved “treeware” (superb coining!) as one might expect:
There seems to be a perception among bibliophiles (some of them, at least) that the ebook is a solution looking for a problem. That the only reason digital books are being foisted on the public is that the Silicon Valley corporates want to sell us something new. That ebooks are a stupid idea that will inevitably raise the cost of the printed word while cutting into the profits of traditional publishers and authors.
Allow me to retort.
The Guardian's Ian Jack wrote in his lament for the printed page, the second-hand bookshop and publishers (Mail & Guardian, February 12, “Kiss books goodbye, here's the iPad”): “Why is the ebook coming? Because a lot of capital has been invested in it.”
First of all, the ebook has come. It’s here. It’s been here for a long time.
Alert! Following yesterday’s notice of the London Book Fair’s focus on digital, the LBF has released further details on the Digital Conference that will take place the Sunday before the fair (18 April).
The conference’s strapline is “Strategies for Transformation” – which, if set in South Africa, would have an entirely different ring to it, but we can assure our readers that it’s everything to do with moving publishing operations into the digital age, and nothing to do with the political-organisational dilemmas and struggles that face South African companies in this, our second decade of democracy.
Notes from the press release:
The 3rd London Book Fair Digital Conference, Strategies for Transformation, is building up to be the best yet. Covering key issues under the overarching themes: Readers of Today and Tomorrow; Bringing the Book to Life and Transforming the Core of your Business the day will offer transferable experience and innovation from a range of international media industries which delegates can take away and put into practise.
Here are conference programme and other details, including a link for registration:
| |||
| Book before 28th February to take advantage of the early bird rate | |||
 Keep up to date with the Digital Conference programme and book your place online |
| Digital Seminars during The London Book Fair |
| Taking place the Sunday before the fair, The Digital Conference will open debate which will continue through The London Book Fair’s free seminar programme. The digital seminar stream will be complemented by the Digital Zone and Digital Theatre where innovative digital production companies will showcase their digital solutions.
|
Alert! In a first for South Africa (correction: actually, it’s a semi-first; the Elonex eBook Reader has been in SA for about the same time), a local company has imported a large volume of ebook readers and is selling them on home soil, directly to consumers.
eSlick.co.za, which is owned by Oasis Computer Products and Services, is the local retailer for, yes, you guessed it, the Foxit eSlick Reader, a black-and-white device similar in shape and size to the Amazon Kindle that can display PDFs, text files, and, crucially, books formatted in ePub – which is the format that Sony’s Reader and Apple’s iPad support, meaning there are plenty of books out there to get and read right now, and there will be more to come. (The eSlick is in fact manufactured by the same company that builds the Kindle, so the hardware has a number of similar features.)
The devices are shipped from Johannesburg to other major centres overnight; you might have to wait a second day if you live outside a big city. BOOK SA spoke to a company representative, who said that they’ve been importing the eSlick into South Africa for about three months on a test basis, but have “committed to quite a large quota for the next quarter”. They plan to sell the e-reader through local tech stores like Incredible Connection and hope to crack the bookshop chains as well.
eSlick.co.za sells its device for R2996, which includes a cover and shipping; compare with Amazon.com’s $330 (approx R2500, not including cover, but including shipping) for the Kindle, which has a wireless delivery feature that the eSlick lacks (and arrives in SA up to two weeks after the order is placed). Foxit operates eSlickbooks.com, an online bookstore for its reader that frankly doesn’t compare with Amazon.com – but which might be developed into something bigger and brighter over time.
Here are more on features, specs and pricing from a recent eSlick.co.za newsletter:
It’s the slickest eBook reader on the market. It weighs just 180 grams (that’s less than a Mills and Boon paperback) and is only 9.2mm thick – So it fits easily into a handbag, briefcase or jacket pocket.
Click here to see more pics of the eSlick
Why is the eSlick better than reading on a Smart phone or a notebook?
3 Reasons:
1. Screen - The eSlick doesn’t have a LCD screen like these devices. It utilizes revolutionary electronic-paper display technology that provides a sharp, black-and-white screen that looks and reads just like it would on real paper. You can read text just as easily in bright sunlight as you would in your own living room! The text is crisp and easy to read and the eSlick screen does not have the angle-of-view issue like LCD screens do. And because there is no back light you can read comfortably for as long as you like without any eye strain.
2. Battery Life - The electronic ink screen needs no power to maintain a page display and only uses power when an image is changed. A single battery charge provides up to 8,000 pages of continuous reading. (That’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” 61 times before a recharge is required!) It charges via USB port or external power supply (supplied). (The eSlick can be fully recharged in only three to four hours.)
3. Easy Reading - While in ” reflow” mode, the text is automatically reorganized to fit the screen size and you can also control the font size via the menu enabling the best reading experience. The zooming feature allows you to magnify the page size from 50% to 400%. The screen is the size of a typical paper back (188mm x 118mm), so its easy and comfortable to hold in one hand.
Click here to see the detailed Technical Specs
What is an eBook ?
An e-book is simply a document that can be read on a computer or other device, rather than on the printed page. They come in a number of different formats, ranging from the well known PDF format to proprietary formats that can only be read by specific software. Most of the publishing world is standardizing on ePub, which is like PDF but allows the text to be positioned by the reader depending on where and how it is being displayed.
The rules about how any particular e-book can be used are set by the publisher and can vary greatly from title to title. Publishers are concerned about piracy and some e-books are controlled by software that prevents users from moving their e-books from one device to another or even printing it out. This is called Digital Rights Management software – or DRM for short.
Where do I get eBooks?
You can download literally hundreds of thousands of eBooks for free from the Internet. Just Google “free ebooks” or visit our website for some links to other sites. (We also include more than 100 ebooks with the eSlick)
You can also make your own PDFs from your documents, proposals, contracts, manuals etc. (anything you can print) with your own PDF creation software. (When you buy an eSlick you get Foxit Software’s award winning PDF Creation software included)
You can also buy any books you get in books stores in electronic format – They are cheaper than the paper versions and you get delivery instantly, day or night – (because its all electronic) – no shipping charges either!
Visit www.eslickbooks.com to see our book store. (Foxit Software, the manufacturers of the eSlick, together with Barnes and Noble – America’s no.1 book store, have ensured that you can get any book you want at super low prices. – And we’re speaking to more book shops and publishers as well)
How many books can I store on my eSlick?
The eSlick comes with 512MB on board and a 2GB SD card. That’s 7441 copies of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. (Which is a 344kB file) (In paper this would weigh 2500 Kgs)
You can also use your own SD cards, making the number of books you can carry limitless.
How do I get one?
Simply reply to this email, call us on 011-784 9167, or place the order on our website.
You can pay via EFT or Credit Card and we can have your eSlick delivered to your door the very next day.
We also have a 30 day money back guarantee - so you have nothing to lose!
We are running a Valentine’s day promotion till this Friday only:
eSlick eBook Reader (with 1 year warranty)
R 2430.70
Synthetic Leather Cover (optional, but recommended)
R 140.35
Overnight Shipping to anywhere in South Africa
R 57.02
Subtotal
R 2628.07
14% VAT
R 367.93
TOTAL Including VAT and delivery to your door.
R 2996.00
eSlick.co.za told BOOK SA that they’re looking for resellers to help get the reader into more places around South Africa. If you’re interested in keeping eSlick stock, write to sales@eslick.co.za.
Meanwhile, how does Foxit’s device stack up against the competition? Here’s one user’s (largely positive) experience straight out of the box:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiEWol9ZgN0[/youtube]
Gizmodo calls the device sleek on design but skimpy on connectivity, while Engadget says it’s less pretty than the Sony Reader but more flexible [content-wise] than the Kindle. If you’re a customer of eSlick.co.za, we’d like to hear from you – post your review of the device as a comment below!
A special report by Mandy J Watson
This is an introduction to the iPad, and some of its significant features and possibilities that may most be of interest to the BOOK SA community, but it’s not written from first-hand experience – I suspect it will be months before we see the iPad in South Africa. I’ve heard that Kalahari may be bringing in limited quantities at the end of March, which is when the Wi-Fi version officially goes on sale in the US (with the Wi-Fi + 3G versions following in April) but I’ve yet to hear from the local distributors as to what the official plan or pricing is for South Africa.
The iPad’s launch was marred by two things: its unfortunate name (and I admit I happily joined in the fun on Twitter) and the lacklustre response as even Apple fanboys went “What is this thing supposed to do? #fail #fail #fail”. (I can’t decide whether the name was an unfortunate accident due to possible unbalanced hiring practises at Apple or whether it was intentional in order to create viral buzz – you never can be sure with Apple.)
Nevertheless, the negative response was soon dampened by an unexpected post Stephen Fry made on his blog (he is currently hermitting to finish a novel and has pretty much bowed out of Twitter and most other forms of communication until he is finished), as he attended the announcement in San Franciso, tweeted about the presentation live, and was one of the first – and few – people in the world to get a chance to experience the device first hand.
From the blog post:
There are many issues you could have with the iPad. No multitasking, still no Flash. No camera, no GPS. They all fall away the minute you use it. I cannot emphasise enough this point: “Hold your judgment until you’ve spent five minutes with it”. No YouTube film, no promotional video, no keynote address, no list of features can even hint at the extraordinary feeling you get from actually using and interacting with one of these magical objects. You know how everyone who has ever done Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? always says, “It’s not the same when you’re actually here. So different from when you’re sitting at home watching.”? You know how often you’ve heard that? Well, you’ll hear the same from anyone who’s handled an iPad. The moment you experience it in your hands you know this is class. This is a different order of experience. The speed, the responsiveness, the smooth glide of it, the richness and detail of the display, the heft in your hand, the rightness of the actions and gestures that you employ, untutored and instinctively, it’s not just a scaled up iPhone or a scaled-down multitouch enhanced laptop – it is a whole new kind of device. And it will change so much. Newspapers, magazines, literature, academic text books, brochures, fliers and pamphlets are going to be transformed (poor Kindle). Specific dedicated apps and enhancements will amaze us. You will see characters in movies use the iPad. Jack Bauer will want to return for another season of 24 just so he can download schematics and track vehicles on it. Bond will have one. Jason Bourne will have one. Some character, in a Tron like way, might even be trapped in one.
Read the entire blog post here.
Let’s Kick Off With A Little Bit About The Screen’s Technology
The screen is an LED-backlit 9.7-inch (25 cm) colour IPS LCD display. I won’t go into the acronyms and how the technology works, just a simple explanation of what this means: it’s one of the highest quality panel types currently available, especially for image quality and colour reproduction (rather than gaming, in which case there could be motion blur due to the speed at which fast-paced gaming images sometimes need to be displayed). It’s backlit so light from LEDs emanates outwards from behind, or from the sides of, the LCD panel placed in front (I’m not sure which in the case of the iPad), and this makes the screen easier to read in low-light conditions. This is not Amazon Kindle e-ink though – it’s best considered as a high-quality computer display. This is also because the iPad is a multimedia and gaming device as well as an e-reader. E-ink, even though it is superior for reading and minimising eye strain (certainly in the case of the Kindle), isn’t suitable for those kinds of tasks. However, in an e-reader context, where the iPad’s screen will shine – and totally surpass the Kindle’s present ability – is in the display of graphic novels, comics, and photo-heavy books, and there’s a huge market for that kind of content.
The iPad also has a wide viewing angle, which is a normal feature of the screen technology that it utilises. If you’re sitting directly in front of a screen the viewing angle is the maximum angle that you can tilt the screen to the left or right while still being able to see what’s being displayed. Wide, therefore, is always good. However, will you be tilting this iPad in all sorts of directions? That I can’t answer.
The touchscreen display supports Apple’s famous Multi-Touch technology, which enables you to manipulate objects using more than one finger by pinching, swiping, and flicking. The keyboard is an on-screen QWERTY keyboard, with some contextual pop-up keyboards, such as a numerical keypad, that will also appear when necessary. Both of these features will be familiar to iPhone owners and they are both demonstrated in the Engadget video below (the keyboard is at around 3:50; the Multi-Touch gestures are used throughout the video). I don’t think the on-screen keyboard is really suitable for heavy, or quick, typing (more hunt-and-peck typing using a couple of fingers) so your alternative will be to buy extra hardware, which will be made available, that enables you to dock a physical keyboard into the unit. (In other words you may as well buy a laptop if you’re looking for a device on which to type your next novel.)
You may also notice in the video below that the screen seems rather reflective, though I don’t know for sure. That just caught my attention (as did the ubiquitous fingerprints and fingersmears, a problem shared by all touchscreen devices).
E-Reader Capabilities
A new (free) app called iBooks was launched with the iPad. It is enables you* to buy books from the new iBookstore and it is also an e-reader application. Books that you buy are placed on your virtual “Bookshelf” and you access a book by tapping it. To turn the page you drag it across the screen and if you watch the video from Engadget above (around 1:30) you can see that Apple has put quite a bit of flair into that process to make it mimic the real experience as much as possible.
The e-books use the free, open-source ePub publishing format and PDFs are also supported. In terms of storage, there are various options: 16 GB, 32 GB, or 64 GB (flash-memory storage rather than hard-disk drives). The storage capacity of the device will obviously determine how many e-books you can have on the unit. It is still unclear as to whether there will be DRM attached to the e-books and whether you will be able to move them around from one device to another (either onto or off the iPad, and either iBook books or your own e-books you may have downloaded elsewhere). If you can, it certainly will be a tedious exercise, as the unit does not have a built-in USB port (but, of course, you can buy an extra converter cable for that!) so it would mean zapping files around with the help of the Wi-Fi or 3G capabilities and possibly email.
* The Big Question: What Can You Do With It In South Africa?
Well, so far, not a hell of a lot if you’re interested in it as an e-reader. The iBookstore, which is, arguably, the most exciting development to come out of the whole iPad announcement (along with the device’s support for iWork), is only going to be available in the US in the beginning, and no one knows when, or if, it will be made available in other territories, which often involves partnering with local operators (or, I would imagine, publishers, in this case). In the US HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster have signed on and I suspect more will follow shortly due to the recent Amazon/Macmillan debacle.
Meanwhile, what will happen here? Who knows. Considering that the iTunes Music Store is still not available in South Africa, and we only have a limited selection of iPhone/iPod apps in the app store, I’m not sure that there will be much that we can do with an iPad unless you want to install the iTunes U[niversity] app and have your kids use it as a mobile-learning device that might have access to some of what iBooks will have access to.
In other words, interesting technology with the best potential – the e-reader technology – being something for which we probably won’t have much use unless Apple considers us a priority country and sets up partnerships.
(In other news, Google is now also talking about a tablet… in the vaguest of terms. It doesn’t exist yet. When it does, perhaps we’ll be able to use it….)
If you’d like to know more about the iPad, its specifications, and its capabilities, there’s a “definitive guide” at Engadget (which is very interesting to read) or there’s the official iPad section at Apple.com and its accompanying specs page.
Photo courtesy Engadget