As described in an article by CNET's Greg Sandoval yesterday ("Discovery hits Amazon with Kindle patent suit"), the parent company of the Discovery Channel (Discovery Communications) has filed a lawsuit against Amazon.com, claiming that the Internet retailer's Kindle e-book reader infringes Discovery's U.S. patent 7,298,851, titled "Electronic book security and copyright protection system".
I read through this patent in some detail, and honestly, it looks formidable. It was filed in 1999 as a "continuation in part" from patent applications dating back to 1992. Among the prior-art disclosures listed are 52 U.S. patents or applications, 34 foreign patents or applications, and 15 nonpatent publications. It has 171 claims, three of which are independent. Those are all signs of a strong patent.
Just some of the logos of the 100-plus broadcast networks owned by Discovery Communications.
(Credit: Discovery Communications, Inc.)I'm inclined to believe that the eight years of pendency and all that prior art is evidence of a mighty battle between the inventors and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office--a battle that Discovery Communications eventually won when the patent was granted.
Claim 1 in the Discovery patent is long but reasonably straightforward:
1. A method for encrypting, sending, and receiving electronic books upon demand, comprising: creating a list of titles of available electronic books; transmitting the list of titles of available electronic books; selecting a title from the transmitted list of titles; communicating the selected title to an electronic book source; supplying a selected electronic book corresponding to the selected title to be encrypted; supplying an encryption key; encrypting the selected electronic book using the encryption key; supplying the encrypted selected electronic book; supplying a decryption key; and decrypting the encrypted selected electronic book using the decryption key.
For this claim to cover the Kindle, each step in this process has to be performed by the Kindle, Amazon's servers, or the Kindle's user (as appropriate). There are many steps, but most of them are necessary, or implied by other steps, so the total complexity of this claim isn't really that bad.
I could quibble about some of this claim language, but it does seem to describe the process used by Amazon and other e-book sellers. If that's true (and only Amazon can really say for sure, at this point), Amazon's best hope to invalidate this claim may be to find some as-yet unnoticed e-commerce patent or publication that describes the same process, as applied to some other kind of electronic content, then base an obviousness claim on that, uh, discovery.
The real issue here isn't so much whether this method is or isn't obvious; I think it is. It's that the patent has been examined in light of so much prior art that it has acquired a reasonable presumption of novelty and nonobviousness. Amazon would find it very difficult to say anything in the listed prior art invalidates this patent because the Patent Office has already said it doesn't.
The vast majority of the dependent claims built on Claim 1 are not relevant, and if Claim 1 were invalidated, I doubt that they'd matter. Claims 96 and 129, the other independent claims, are weaker than Claim 1, and it seems less likely to me that they are being infringed, but as always, courts can make unexpected decisions.
I bet we'll be hearing a lot more about this suit because it's going to affect a lot of companies that haven't actually been sued yet, including at least Adobe Systems and Sony, both which seem to use something like this process. Sony sells e-books for its Reader, and Adobe's Digital Editions software may be covered by this patent.
And I'm sure that there must be other companies that should be concerned, though the precise manner in which e-books are sold is crucial in this case, and different companies have different implementations.
One of my quibbles with the patent's Claim 1 is that it doesn't describe the situation in which the e-book itself is pre-encrypted, and the only thing that happens at the time of purchase is encrypting the book's decryption key. That distinction could become a major issue in the lawsuit.
Another quibble is that the claim seems to require that the whole e-book be encrypted with a single key, which may not always be the case. The patent's specification does mention cases in which only a portion of the book is encrypted or decrypted; these mentions, though minor, may also prove significant.
Comments on Sandoval's article point out that e-books and e-book readers were on the market before the 1999 filing date of the Discovery patent application, but that doesn't mean that they used any of the methods described in the patent's claims. For example, they may not have encrypted the e-books. It's also possible that some of those older patent applications, going back to 1992, might establish an earlier priority date for the Discovery patent's claims, though that's less likely.
At any rate, I'll be keeping my eye on this one.
It's been a big week for small systems.
On May 29, VIA formally announced (here) its "Nano" family of low-power x86 processors. These chips will be especially valuable in small laptops, UMPCs, and so-called mobile Internet devices (MIDs).
Then on June 2, NVIDIA announced (here) its Tegra 600 family, which is also being marketed for MIDs. But Tegra is a very different animal. It's based on an ARM11 processor core, which can run Windows Mobile or Linux but not Windows XP or Vista.
VIA's Nano processor. The chip itself, the silver rectangle in the center, is about 7.7mm x 8.3mm.
(Credit: Courtesy of VIA Technologies, Inc.)VIA's Nano processors are based on a new microarchitecture that is a giant step beyond previous VIA products and not far behind that of competing parts from AMD and Intel. Unfortunately, in this business, third place isn't a good place to be. VIA's older processors sold in relatively small quantities for low prices. Fortunately, they were very small and thus economical to make and sell.
The new Nano family offers much higher performance, with clock speeds from 1.0 to 1.8 GHz... but it's difficult to know what these clock speeds mean by comparison with AMD's or Intel's, and VIA isn't telling us, at least not directly. In this white paper on the Nano family, VIA only compares the performance of the new chips to its older C7 series.
But VIA does publish some numbers, so I was able to make some comparisons.
Take, for example, the Nano L2100 at 1.8 GHz vs. AMD's 2005-vintage Turion 64 ML-34 at the same speed, as found in the famous Acer Ferrari 4000 (reviewed here by PC World). The single-core ML-34 was much faster despite the clock-speed parity:
| Worldbench 6 test | VIA Nano L2100 | AMD Turion 64 ML-34 | AMD advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Windows Media Encoder | 585 | 467 | 25% faster |
| Adobe Photoshop | 809 | 412 | 96% faster |
| Roxio VideoWave | 507 | 381 | 33% faster |
Of course, the ML-34 consumes much more power than VIA's processor; the ML-34 has a 35W TDP (thermal design power) specification, whereas the L2100 has a 25W TDP. The L2100 idles at a mere 500mW, but the ML-34 probably consumes at least ten times as much when idle.
To be fair, I'm not sure these are entirely fair comparisons, since VIA didn't publish the details of their system configuration. Also, VIA's performance position probably looks better on simple productivity applications, but I prefer to look at multimedia performance since that's what we usually find ourselves waiting on. It's been a while since we had to worry about out-typing our word processor...
I'm looking forward to seeing some good performance and power figures for Intel's Atom; I think the VIA chips will turn out to be effectively faster but run a little hotter. When I get more data, I'll post a comparison.
But considering that the Nano is generally 60% to 200% faster than the C7 and much more power-efficient than competing products from AMD and Intel, the new product family will likely improve VIA's market position significantly over the next year.
NVIDIA's Tegra, a high-integration processor for handheld gizmos such as mobile Internet devices.
(Credit: Courtesy NVIDIA Corporation)NVIDIA's Tegra, on the other hand, offers no compatibility with existing PC systems or software, and its performance isn't even in the same class. The Tegra 600 family's ARM11 processor core runs at a maximum speed of 800MHz and, because it's a much simpler design, it offers a fraction of the effective performance of VIA's Nano.
So how can it possibly compete with Nano in mobile Internet devices?
Well, one answer is that Tegra is meant to deliver a much more complete solution with much lower power consumption. Instead of being just a core on a chip, like the Nano family, the Tegra 600 and 650 consist of a CPU core, a GeForce GPU, special-purpose hardware for accelerating digital video decoding and camera functions, and a dual-display controller that supports HDMI, LCDs, CRTs, and NTSC/PAL video. All of that on a chip the size of a dime, as you can see in the photo.
But the real answer is that what NVIDIA means by "mobile Internet devices" is different than what Intel (which coined the phrase), AMD, and VIA mean by it.
What NVIDIA means is basically any device with a size somewhere between that of a smartphone and a laptop, which can be used to access the Internet. But this doesn't strike me as a very useful definition; it boils down to encompassing anything like a smartphone with a larger screen. It's one thing to claim the Tegra 600 family supports a "full Internet experience" as NVIDIA did in advance briefings last month, but with the wide variety of sophisticated Web 2.0 websites out there, it really takes a PC-compatible system to deliver that experience.
Now, there's no doubt that the Tegra 600 and 650 will enable fun and interesting gizmos for people who buy lots of gizmos. (And honestly, I'm exactly that kind of person.) But I believe most people are not going to be interested in them. Anything larger than a cellphone is too big to carry around all the time. Anything with a screen smaller than about 7" to 9" isn't big enough for comfortable web browsing and movie watching. Anything with a screen that large might as well be a full Windows-compatible system.
Now, over time, these segments will inevitably blur together. Moore's Law will let us squeeze more performance into handheld devices. Software technologies like Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight will allow more websites to work on simpler systems. Hardware like high-resolution LCDs and OLEDs and tiny projection displays will help solve size problems too.
But for now, I believe the Tegra 600 family is aimed at a market segment that isn't ready to develop, whereas VIA's Nano has a big market ready and waiting for it. The Nano won't sell as well as competing PC processors from AMD and Intel, but it should help raise awareness of VIA among PC buyers and encourage PC makers to keep pushing more functionality into smaller packages.
Before I finish my review of the new Sony PRS-505 Reader (you should probably read part 1 first, here), I wanted to mention that Sony itself has a corporate blog, hosted by corporate-communications manager Rick Clancy.
Peter's new Sony PRS-505 Reader.
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)
Clancy apparently has permission to stray slightly off-message, and a recent result of this permissive policy was a funny blog entry about an ill-conceived marketing slogan for the Reader: "Sexier than a librarian." Explaining the slogan, Clancy said:
Please be assured that this was a tongue and cheek effort on our part, playing off a certain stereotype or a fantasy, depending on how you look at it. With a little humor in mind, our aim was to draw attention to the style and the appeal of this unique device. The ad was never meant to be taken literally. In fact, I have a cousin who spent several years as a librarian, and I certainly would not want to make such an implication about her one way or the other.
Now that's comedy.
Anyway, I haven't spent as much time with my new Reader as I'd like-- too much other stuff going on-- but I figure I've waited long enough to complete this review. Today, I'll talk about the software aspects of the system... and leave one major topic for later.
The short summary is that the new Reader works pretty much like the old one except for a couple of significant improvements.
Like the PRS-500, the new model provides all the basic functions you need to read ebooks. You can view your collection sorted by title, author, or by the date each book was added to the Reader. For those of us with large collections of ebooks, the biggest improvement is that the PRS-505 supports named "Collections" of books stored on the Memory Stick Duo and Secure Digital flash-memory cards. The PRS-500 supported collections on its internal storage, but not on flash cards. This limitation was very annoying, since the flash cards are more likely to contain large book collections.
Unfortunately, collections can only be maintained through Sony's eBook Library application, which is only available for Windows. Books can be transferred directly to the Reader or its memory cards on any machine when the Reader is attached via USB, but only the Library software can associate books with a collection.
Also, collections are still just a one-level hierarchy. I can't have a "Fiction" collection with subdirectories for "Science Fiction," "Classics," and so on. Even with only about 400 titles in my Reader, I could really use a bit more flexibility in categorizing everything.
This wouldn't be a problem if the Reader was faster. Scrolling through a list of 100 books in a web browser to find a specific title wouldn't take more than a couple of seconds. On the PRS-505, like the PRS-500, turning the page in a Collection takes about 1.5 seconds, and you can only see ten at a time. You can't even go backwards from the first page to reach the last page, which would help significantly. (In these tables of contents, short titles end up displayed with larger fonts, which I find annoying. It makes it look like short-titled books are somehow more important than the others.)
In the "Books by Title" and "Books by Author" lists, there's a shortcut page for titles beginning with 0-9, ABC, DEF, and so on-- but there's no such page for Collections.
The real slowdowns kick in when you open up large files, especially PDFs. Bad PDF rendering was the PRS-500's biggest weakness, and I'm sorry to say it hasn't been improved at all in the PRS-505. Rendering large PDF files takes a long time, and most PDFs don't even look very good. In fact, PDFs meant to be printed on 8.5" x 11" paper (or A4 size, or anything larger) are often entirely illegible on the Reader.
The problem is that there's just no way to zoom in to a PDF page very far. The best you can do is switch the display into landscape mode and use the "Medium" zoom setting to put the width of the printed area across the screen. But that isn't good enough for many textbooks, product brochures, maps, etc.
In order to provide us both with a common point of reference, I did a quick Google search for textbooks in PDF format, and found one that is available free from the authors: the third edition of "A Heat Transfer Textbook" by John H. Lienhard IV and John H. Lienhard V.
Opening this book on the Reader only takes a few seconds, but the limitations in the Reader's PDF rendering are immediately apparent. Text on the copyright page, for example, can be displayed no larger than 0.050" in height (for capital letters) in portrait mode, or 0.080" in landscape mode. By way of comparison, the fine print on my latest AT&T cellphone contract was 0.095" in height, and the AT&T contract was darker and thus easier to read.
On page 289 of this textbook, there's a figure approximating the velocity function of a laminar-flow boundary layer. Capital letters in the caption for that figure are a mere 0.045" tall in landscape mode, or 0.035" tall in portrait mode. And in fact, some of the really thin characters, like the letter "i," disappear entirely, apparently falling between visible pixels. This textbook isn't even the worst case; I have other documents in which much of the text is entirely illegible regardless of viewing mode.
And once you get into them, these big PDF files are really slow to turn pages. Click the "page forward" button, and it takes 7 seconds to see page 290.
Okay, so we'll just have to accept that the PRS-505 still isn't very useful for many kinds of PDF documents. That being said, it works pretty well for pure text when the PDF file is properly optimized for the Reader. When I was experimenting with the PRS-500, I figured out that the perfect page size is a width of 3.57" and a height of 4.59" with a font size of 8 or 10 points. I prefer 10-point text, but younger eyes will need fewer page turns with 8-point text.
But the easiest format to deal with is RTF files, which can be made by almost any word processor these days. When I download books from Project Gutenberg, for example, I get RTF files whenever possible. RTF files are better than text files because the Reader scans for the title and author information in the document properties, making the tables of contents look better. Unfortunately, there seems to be one new issue with RTF files on the PRS-505.
Some RTF files now go through a "formatting" process the first time they're opened... and then again each time a new zoom level is selected. Not all of them do, and I don't see what causes it.
A large RTF file can take a long time to format. The Gutenberg version of the Complete Works of Shakespeare took seven minutes and 45 seconds to format before it could be viewed; changing the font size triggered another formatting. Oddly, changing from portrait to landscape didn't require reformatting, even though the actual font size on the Reader's display changes. Once a given font size was formatted, the Reader seemed to remember the formatting; re-opening the book was much faster, about nine seconds.
The PRS-505 also shares its predecessor's ability to play MP3 audio files and DRM-free AAC files too; the latter are most commonly produced by Apple's iTunes. (My advice is not to transcode MP3 files to AAC files, but if you rip CDs to your hard disk, the AAC choice will sound better than MP3s for any given bitrate. An AAC file at 256 kbps will sound indistinguishable from the original CD except on the very best audio gear.) But like the PRS-500, once you start music playing on your PRS-505 and switch over to read a book, you can't pause, rewind, or skip tracks without going back through the menus to the music controls. Personally, I just don't use this feature.
Sony's eBook Library software, which I use under Parallels Desktop on my MacBook Pro, is much like the older Connect Reader software. It allows the user to add, remove, and read books from the Reader and flash cards. It works pretty well, performing all of its functions much faster than the Reader itself. Copying files to or from the Reader can be a little slow, but that's because of USB throughput limits.
I'm not sure when Adobe and Sony will get Adobe's Digital Editions software running on the Reader, but I'm certainly looking forward to that. I'll review that separately when I can.
Anyway, I'm happy with the PRS-505. It's better than the PRS-500-- although not enough better to justify upgrading if yours still works. The one thing I haven't been able to test is whether the PRS-505 is more rugged than the older model. My PRS-500 display died under suspicious circumstances (suspiciously free of physical trauma, that is). I sure hope the PRS-505 doesn't.
This week, Sony introduced the new PRS-505 Reader for ebooks. I've already ordered one to replace my PRS-500, which I used a lot before it broke not long ago.
Update: my PRS-505 has arrived. The review, in two parts, begins here.
Glaskowsky's broken Sony Reader PRS-500.
(Credit: Peter Glaskowsky)That's my old Reader there. The damage was internal, somehow. I have no idea what went wrong. I didn't sit on it or anything like that. I just turned it on one day and that band on the left side of the screen showed up. You can see that the band doesn't extend to the top of the screen except in one spot, and even within the band, some of the pixel columns still work normally. There's also a horizontal band of dead pixels. All in all, the damage makes it impossible to use the unit, although it still works in every other way.
The photo also illustrates the really abysmal placement of controls on the PRS-500. The pair of buttons on the left edge turn the pages. The top one moves forward a page, but unless your elbows are hinged differently than mine, you'd probably find it easier to hit the bottom button of the pair. In normal use, the bottom "page back" button is just in the way.
The standard way of attaching the folding leather cover puts the hinge on that edge, which makes it even more difficult to get to those buttons. Even folded all the way around, the cover is bulky and spongy along the spine. Fortunately I discovered it's possible to put the cover on backwards, allowing me to hook a finger into the space between the front and back covers. This works great for holding onto the unit; though in that configuration, the magnet that holds the cover closed no longer works.
The other button on the left edge changes the font sizes on the screen. In some documents, there are three sizes: small, normal and large. In practice, they're more like "too small," small, and medium. In PDFs, you only get two sizes...and the largest size still limits the display of any PDF to the width of the window. So if you have a PDF from a textbook, you probably won't be able to read the text no matter what you do.
This isn't just about how sharp the user's eyes are; the screen only has 600x800-pixel resolution, so small text is inherently fuzzy. Also, because the E Ink screen has lower contrast than paper, text has to be larger to provide the same legibility.
Then, down at the lower-left corner of the unit, about three inches away from the pair of page-turning buttons, there's a big round rocker button. Guess what it does? It also turns the pages. Its active positions are toward the upper-right and lower-left directions, so it works equally badly in portrait and landscape orientations. But since the other page-turning buttons are basically out of reach in landscape mode, this rocker button is pretty much mandatory for that mode. And of course, Sony stuck another button underneath it. (That one's for marking a page for later reference. I never found a use for it.)
Over to the lower right, there are two more kinds of control-- a tiny little joystick surrounded by a one-way rocker switch in the shape of a ring. The joystick controls menus-- although menus are strictly linear, not hierarchical as implied by the joystick's four-way movements. The joystick is also a pushbutton. Finally, the PRS-500 has a set of 10 buttons along the bottom edge of the screen. These also work for selecting menu items; there are never more than 10 on the screen. (But menu items are arranged vertically when using the device in its primary portrait orientation.) When viewing the book text, however, hitting one of these buttons sends to the beginning, end, or intermediate page numbers within the book: 11 percent, 22 percent, 33 percent, etc.
Do you ever find yourself wishing for a fast way to get to the 44 percent point in a book? Me neither.
Seriously, it's like there were four different committees at Sony, each fighting for a different user-interface model for the PRS-500...and they all won. How Japanese.
Sony PRS-505 Reader Digital Book
(Credit: Sony)OK, here's the new PRS-505. (It's also available in blue, like my PRS-500.) Some things have changed. The 10 buttons are now disposed vertically along the right edge, next to the primary pair of page-turning buttons, which are tucked into some kind of cosmetic crease that seems pretty weird to me. The other buttons at the bottom of the unit have been redesigned a little, but some of the basic problems haven't been fixed. All I can do is hope the PRS-505 is actually easier to use than it looks.
I should know pretty soon; I ordered a PRS-505 as soon as it showed up on the SonyStyle online store. Sony said it'd be able to ship the unit within a couple of days.
Here are some things to note about the new gizmo. The price has dropped from $350 at the debut of the PRS-500 to $300 for the PRS-505, but you can still get the PRS-500 from some retailers, typically for $280 or less. However, the PRS-505 doesn't come with an AC adapter, as the PRS-500 did. You can charge the unit from any USB port. But the PRS-500 could get into a situation when fully discharged where it couldn't wake up enough to start charging from USB, requiring the user to plug in the AC adapter. If the PRS-505 has the same issue, customers could find themselves with a "bricked" Reader. I'm betting Sony has fixed this problem, though; I didn't buy the optional AC adapter for my PRS-505. (I still have the AC adapter from my PRS-500, too, so I may be OK anyway.)
The PRS-500 came with a $50 credit for the Sony Connect ebook store online, at least at first, when I bought mine. The PRS-505 doesn't. Sony still offers a credit for 100 free titles from the "Connect Classics" series, but these are all available on Project Gutenberg anyway-- and in fact, at least on the PRS-500, the Project Gutenberg versions work better.
On the other hand, Sony offers free engraving when you buy the PRS-505 online. That's pretty cool. Apple does the same thing for online sales of iPods, and I've always taken advantage of it. I did the same thing on the new Reader, supplying my name and e-mail address, so if I lose the thing, there's at least some chance I'll get it back.
Of the software improvements, a Sony press release states:
More advanced users will appreciate the new USB-based mass storage capability that allows them to use the device as a portable drive for the direct transfer of documents, images and other files to the Reader. A new auto sync feature also lets users set up folders with books and documents that can be automatically synchronized when the device is connected to a PC.
These are significant improvements. Probably more important is that Sony plans to add support for Adobe Digital Editions, a new software platform for viewing PDF and XHTML (aka ePub, a format defined by the International Digital Publishing Forum) documents--later, that is; it apparently isn't in the PRS-505 yet. Since the PRS-500's built-in PDF reader is so awful, I'm sure the Digital Editions software can only be a big improvement.
I have to say, if you already have the PRS-500 or any other good e-book reader, the PRS-505 is probably not worth upgrading to. But for myself, I'm looking forward to getting the PRS-505 and getting back into my e-book groove.
I learned today that Intel has a Mobility Group and an Ultra Mobility Group. There's a sensible explanation for the difference: notebook PCs are defined as "mobile"; smaller systems are considered "ultra-mobile."
Intel further divides these ultra-mobile machines into two smaller classes: ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs) and mobile Internet devices (MIDs). Traditionally, the former have 7" screens; the latter category goes all the way down to the tiny screens of smartphones.
Intel's Anand Chandrasekher, senior VP and general manager of the Ultra Mobility Group, took the stage for the second keynote of the day to talk about "Unleashing the Internet Experience."
His primary contention is that ... Read more
- prev
- 1
- next
