So, whether you’re looking at one or not, chances are an e-book reader is in your future. As we discussed last week, there are different hardware options, each with their own format. Fortunately, the software options – the formats you download the books in – are “fungible,” and for the most part can be converted between formats used by different devices at the touch of a button (one of the formats is a bit more work – requiring three or four clicks). The magic comes courtesy of a free application called Calibre, perhaps the greatest boon – and bargain – for e-book lovers on the market today.

First, a word about PC reading: If you aren’t ready to sink money into an e-reader just yet, you can download Amazon’s Kindle for PC or Mac for free, and read all the books you care to from the Amazon bookstore. The Kindle application strives to give users as close a look and feel experience to the real thing as possible; if and when you get a “real” Kindle (or iPad, as there is also a Kindle app for Apple’s device as well), you library automatically gets synced up. As of now, there is no way to read Apple iBooks on a non-iPad device, so computer users who want to try e-books before they buy will have to make do with the Kindle desktop app (with hundreds of thousands of book choices, including thousands of free e-books on hundreds of topics, we won’t cry too hard for them).

If you’ve got an e-reader, though, Calibre can help you navigate the wild world of e-book formats successfully. The list of devices Calibre supports is too numerous to reproduce here, but suffice to say that it includes readers neither you nor I (and probably nobody else) has ever heard of! Calibre automatically converts between the e-book’s present format and the format used by the device; all you have to do is import the book into your library and sync your device; your e-book is there, nicely formatted for whatever device you have. Among the other wonders of Calibre is its built in news downloader. Far from a simple RSS downloader, the Calibre news reader lets you access hundreds of newspapers and magazines from around the world, delivered to your device nicely formatted, with table of contents, etc. The news downloader alone is worth the price of Calibre!

Note that some purchased books (like from Amazon) come DRM protected, which is no problem if you’re using a Kindle, or an iPad or laptop with a Kindle application, to read. If you want to load up the book onto your Sony or other e-reader, though, you need to remove the DRM (in this situation, the old adage – “Google is your friend” – comes in handy). Amazon e-books come in two flavors – .AZW format (DRM removable) and .TPZ formant (DRM not removable, from what I have read).

But you may not need to be doing much DRM stripping, once you get through this list of sites where you can download free e-books for your device, for uploading to your device by Calibre or reading on your PC (you can use Calibre’s built-in reader to display any format the application handles). If you have an iPad and use Calibre’s sister app for the device, called Stanza, you have built in access to free books from Feedbooks. Feedbooks has e-versions of the classics, as well as newer self-published or otherwise non-copyrighted material. Similar in content and policy are Bookyards and Memoware. And if you like science fiction, check out the select offerings at the Baen Library.

Wowio has an interesting take on e-books, offering freebies while operating a store, with an emphasis on comic books and graphic novels. The offerings at Wowio are different than what you would find at more traditional sites. When you sign up, you’re allowed to download some of their for-sale comic books for free, and every once in awhile they give away an for-pay e-book to readers, usually sponsored by a software company or book publisher (for example, they’ll give away a previous title of an author whose new book they’re trying to promote). Note that many of the for-sale books are just a buck, so if you’re willing to part with a few shekels, you can build an impressive library of cookbooks, reference, novels, and any other type of book you can think of. Eventually these e-books will be replacing the real thing; think of how much shelf space getting rid of your “analog books” will save!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Calibre Is an All-Purpose, E-Book Swiss Army Knife (switched.com)
• E-books, Piracy Peril or Promotional Possibilities? (torrentfreak.com)
• WOWIO Launches Enhanced Website Offering Improved Navigation and Content for Readers, Publishers and Sponsors (eon.businesswire.com)
• 3 Good Online Sources For Free Ebooks & A Free App To Read Them (makeuseof.com)
• Is Calibre the ‘VLC’ of eBook reader software? (omgubuntu.co.uk)

And who are the people we rely on for movie and TV reviews? Well, traditionally, they have been “professional” reviewers writing for newspapers and magazines, or hosting TV or radio shows. For many people (including me), that goes even now, in the internet era; when I want to check out a movie review, for example, I’ll usually surf to Rotten Tomatoes, which gathers up reviews for movies from major newspapers and well-known blog sites. I feel I can “trust” the writers of those reviews.

Until the internet, most publications restricted their reviews to entertainment items – movies, plays, music, etc. But there was surprisingly little peer-review of consumer items (except for cars). What did you do if you wanted to know whether a particular TV set, video camera, refrigerator, etc. was worth the money? Why, you’d “shop around” – a term which consumers took to mean doing things like asking friends, quizzing salespeople, etc. But for the most part, buying a major appliance was an act of faith, because there were only a limited number of friends who probably bought the same item you were interested in – and of course, the salesperson wasn’t going to knock his/her own product.

But today, when you can ask anyone you want about anything, you’re not limited to checking out an item among people you personally know; you can find out what people think about consumer items on thousands of websites, where millions of people have posted tens of millions of opinions on hundreds of millions of items! Theoretically, no one should ever make a mistake buying anything anymore; when considering a product, all one has to do these days is check out the internet and see what “the cloud” has to say about the item in question. No longer does spending money have to be an act of faith; all you have to do is take your own online poll of what others who have spent money on the same item you’re considering say. How can you go wrong?

Here’s how: Have you ever posted an online review at a site like Amazon? Probably not; most people don’t unless they have some kind of motivation. Amazon.com has become one of the premier review sites for products of all kinds today. The site sells everything, and the product page (for every product) has useful information of all types about what you’re buying – including, and most important for our purposes, reviews of the product.

Who’s doing the posting? Well, we assume it’s people who have bought the item. But how do we know? Maybe a negative review was posted by someone working for a company making a rival product who is seeking to push sales in their direction – or who is afraid of losing their job?

While it’s hard to believe that someone would bother “gaming” review sites like this, it makes sense when you begin to realize just how pervasive internet shopping is – both for those who buy online and those who check out products on sites like Amazon before buying retail. In one sense, posting a review in an online forum can amount to free advertising – both positive and negative – when used astutely. And apparently there are some who do use review forums astutely, posting reviews for any number of reasons – promotion (self or product), revenge (against hated corporations, etc.), on-line socializing (participating in the “review community”), etc. Doesn’t anyone post a review for its own sake? Of course – but you have to be plenty motivated (or bored, or angry, etc. ) to bother with reviewing products, imho.

The possibility (and possible phenomenon) of product opinion manipulation has been noticed by others – including noted author Stephen Dubner, who co-wrote the book Freakonomics. Dubner notes in a blog posting that he checked out one particular reviewer whom he says, redates reviews in order to keep them near the top of the review list of chronological reviews on Amazon (the left review column), as well as on top of the overall review list for a product (the right review column). “I noticed this only because the same two-star review of Freakonomics kept magically appearing near the top of the reviews page,” Dubner writes, adding that the reviewer, for his own motives, posted a negative review of his book which, citing a scholarly study, may have impacted online sales.

I checked out the reviewer in question and discovered that, indeed, he was at the top of the Freakonomics review list – as well as at the top of reviews on dozens of other pages! Books, movies, CDs – the reviewer in question has over 2,000 to his credit, many of them quite extensive and well-written. Interestingly, every couple of days, five or six reviews appear under his name, many of them for older movies or books. Is there “redating” of reviews going on, like Dubner says? It’s impossible to know (unless you’re an employee of Amazon and have access to their server data). But it certainly makes you wonder!
This is not to imply any nefarious intent on the part of the reviewer, by the way; his profile indicates that he’s retired, so it’s possible that Amazon reviewing is this gentleman’s second career. But even if he’s on the up and up, is it not possible that others are gaming the system – for fun and profit? Most disturbing to me is the fact that Dubner’s blog posting is from 2005, while the reviewer is still hard at work, with his name still at the top of the review list on all the products he’s reviewed, for all I know (I didn’t check out all the 2100 plus product pages). And he’s not even the number one reviewer on Amazon, meaning that if there are “tactics” at work here, there may be a couple of thousand other people who are using them even more effectively You’d think Amazon would want to do everything it could to assure consumers that they can rely on reviews appearing on product pages. I didn’t look too deeply into other review sites, but if Amazon can be manipulated, others can be as well, cant’ they?

Related articles by Zemanta

• 1 reviews of quirky (rateitall.com)
• okay, let’s review (text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com)

Why that doesn’t appear to be the case when it comes to the new crop of electronic book readers, then, is a mystery – especially since one of these newly announced products was at least partially developed in Israel! (I’m sworn to secrecy, so don’t ask). But regardless, the rest of the world is on the verge of a revolution in the way it reads books – while we are, at least for the time being, left behind.

And I mean “the rest of the world” literally; Amazon’s new Kindle 2, which goes on sale next week, will be available in over 100 countries all over the world. Not in Israel, though. After the Kindle 2 announcement, American book giant Barnes and Noble announced its own e-book reader, the Nook. Not here, though; you can’t buy a Nook in Israel, either.

It’s not, I’m sure, because they don’t like us; there are plenty of English language readers here in Israel who would be more than happy to plunk down the ten dollars or so Amazon and Barnes and Noble charge for e-book versions of bestsellers available for download. The Nook is a brand new product, and isn’t available outside the U.S. anyway – so we can’t fume over being left out of Barnes and Noble’s e-book party, at least just yet; every non-American is being excluded as well. But the Kindle 2 is another story; If it’s good enough for the residents of Andorra, Belarus and Papua New Guinea, it should be good enough for us, no?

Apparently not, and it’s instructional to take a peek at the Kindle 2 homepage and try to figure out why Mongolians are eligible to buy a Kindle, but Israelis aren’t. The Arab world is out (fear of possible fatwas for immodest content?), as is China (well-founded fears of copyright infringement), and some poor countries in Africa (although many, like Kenya, Madagascar, and even economic basket-case Zimbabwe. are in).

It’s not clear what problem Amazon has with Israel, but I suspect that it has to do with import licensing rights for physical books, and the desire of large importers of print books into Israel for a piece of the e-action (this Hebrew site provides a good summary of the legal issues in Israel regarding “hard” and “electronic” copies of licensed works). It’s similar to the issues surrounding MP3 downloads. vs. physical CDs; the current licensee (or licensed importer) has first crack at making a deal for the same work in electronic form. And judging from the way the Israeli rights issue is being handled at the iTunes store (you can buy an iPhone for hundreds of dollars here, but not a 99 cent song), we’ll probably be waiting awhile for Amazon to iron things out with the publishers and importers.

Proof? Amazon is happy to sell you anything on the site to customers with an Israeli credit card, and although it won’t necessarily ship everything here, it will ship physical books and CDs. But try downloading a free e-book or MP3 at Amazon, much less buying one, and the site will turn all apologetic about how it cannot serve people in your geographical area.

So what are the alternatives? Well, of course there’s that old standby, the book – but you haven’t read this far just to hear that there’s no hope for e-reading here. Actually, there is an e-reader that you can buy, right here in Israel, at http://www.ebookshop.co.il, one of several Israeli sites that sell Hebrew language e-books. The site sells the Foxit eSlick, which lets you read PDF format e-books (note that the Hebrew site charges NIS 1,499, close to $400, for the eSlick, while it’s listed at the Foxit site for $259. Are import duties really that high?).

So, right there you have an e-reader alternative that’s “kosher” for Israelis, and it certainly looks like a nice device. But there is a trade-off; you’ll be investing in a device that is definitely outclassed by the “big boys,” Kindle and Nook, which are state of the art – including wifi connections to download books anywhere, and a touchscreen, also a feature of Sony’s PRS-600 reader. The Sony device is sold independent of content, unlike the Kindle and Nook (ie you are not expected to purchase books directly from the Sony site, although there is a bookstore you can access). The eSlick doesn’t have any of those things – you connect the device to your computer and manually upload books.

As mentioned, the problem for Amazon and B&N is connected to content downloads. The Kindle is more or less tied to the proprietary format e-books you get from Amazon, so there’s little point in their selling a device you can’t buy books on yet. The Nook is a little more loose, in that it allows you to read books in a variety of formats (more on that below), but B&N is of course interested in selling its content, so again there’s little point in selling an e-reader we can’t buy books for.

Another drawback for the Foxit device is that it only handles PDFs. There are many e-books available in PDF format, but there are just as many, if not more, in ePub (aka open e-book) format, the format read by many e-book computer readers, and used on a host of devices, including the Nook and iPhone (but not the Kindle). Most commercial bestsellers will be available in multiple formats (ie PDF and ePub), but some more esoteric works may not be, so if your device doesn’t handle both, you’re missing out. A battle royale may be shaping up between Amazon and the rest of the e-book world; Amazon sells its e-books in its own proprietary azw format, while B&N, Adobe, Sony, and most everyone else has committed to ePub and other open formats. Amazon, of course, doesn’t have to worry about anyone else, but not all the players (like Google?) have weighed in on the format issue yet.

If you’ve got a cellphone with a decent sized screen, I would suggest using that as an e-book reader for now, until one of the more advanced devices “makes aliyah.” Granted, a cellphone screen is not an e-book reader, but some of the newer phones have screens big enough to make reading less of a hassle. There are ePub readers for nearly all smart phone platforms (except Symbian – sorry, Nokia fans), but I’d suggest sticking with Adobe PDF Reader LE (mobile) edition, which, if your phone doesn’t have it already, will cost you $15, far less than a dedicated PDF e-book reader. What about content? Besides the hundreds of free places to download PDFs from (they’re all over the place), I found a site that has thousands of best-sellers in e-book format (PDF, ePub, and others) that doesn’t seem to have a problem – but don’t tell a certain book importer that you did!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Video: Nook, Barnes & Noble’s Answer to Kindle (casesblog.blogspot.com)
• Rumor: B&N Nook to run Android Apps? (mobilecrunch.com)
• Kindle Everywhere: Amazon Launches Windows Application (readwriteweb.com)
• Amazon’s Kindle to launch in UK (news.bbc.co.uk)