Speeds and Feeds

Oh, for heaven's sake. Everyone from CNET to The New York Times is up in arms over Amazon's recent decision to remotely delete copies of two George Orwell novels it sold to Kindle owners on behalf of an independent publisher.

But not even the usually sensible David Pogue of the Times appears to have done any actual research on the subject. Am I the only blogger in the world who cares about getting the facts right instead of just going for the quick and easy chance to smear Amazon? Or just the only one who can see the obvious?

It was instantly apparent to me what must have happened, so I looked into it. From stories posted on other sites, and from my own research on Amazon.com, it's clear the books in question had been published illegally--and not by the publisher with U.S. rights for these books, which are still under copyright protection in this country.

The listing for the illegal copy of "1984" is still present on Amazon, though it can no longer be purchased. The page for "Animal Farm" from the same publisher still appears in Google's listings, but is no longer available on Amazon--though another pirated copy is still listed but not purchasable. (I'm not sure these are exactly the same copies at issue in this case, but at least that copy of "1984" was yanked in the same way, according to an Amazon customer discussion.)

Note the caveat placed on the 1984 page by the publisher:

This is the second part to my early analysis of the new Kindle DX large-format e-book reader. In the first post ("Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: Overview") I discussed the physical and software features of the new device. In the third post, "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks", I'll talk about how the DX will fit into the educational market.

The new Kindle DX is larger than the Kindle 2 with more than twice the screen resolution.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

But here, let's talk about the DX's suitability for reading electronic newspapers.

Newspapers are about text, and there's only a moderate need for interactivity. For each story, the reader views the headline and perhaps skims the opening paragraph, and if it doesn't look interesting, moves on to the next story.

Even with these relatively undemanding requirements, the Kindle DX isn't as good for reading newspapers as a real newspaper. We're all used to the ability to glance over a full newspaper page worth of articles at once. You can't do that with the Kindle.

This issue boils down to the amount of time we spend reading articles vs. the amount of time we spend glancing at headlines and turning pages. Call that the "reading ratio." A real newspaper offers a very high reading ratio even if we're not reading much of the paper, because it takes so little time to flip through the pages looking for articles to read.

On the Kindle DX, the ratio will depend very heavily on how much of the paper we're reading. For those who just read through the whole paper, the ratio can be fairly high, probably 90 percent or better. It'll still be lower than a real newspaper because it takes a certain amount of time to turn the virtual pages of the Kindle, and page turning is much more frequent.

(Demonstration videos seem to show that page turning takes about the same amount of time on the DX as on the earlier Kindles.)

For those who read only a fraction of the stories in the day's paper, the reading ratio of the Kindle DX will be much worse than a real newspaper because the experience will be dominated by page turning. Since most of us can't simply increase the amount of time we spend reading the paper each day, I'm afraid that the Kindle approach to e-news will actually reduce the amount of news we read.

It's also worth comparing the Kindle e-news experience with that of the iPhone and a laptop. These devices have active displays with fast update rates, greatly reducing the page-turning delays. I use The New York Times application on my iPhone pretty regularly (once or twice a week, at least), and it's really quite easy to flick through the day's top stories, which appear on the iPhone with the headline, a thumbnail photo, and usually about half of the lede.

On the other hand, the delay to read the story itself is quite long, since the Times' iPhone software is not designed to pre-load the stories, as the Kindle does. The iPhone takes about 10 seconds to bring up a story once selected, but once it's in, there are no further delays. The rest of the story scrolls past as fast as I want to flick through it.

At home, on my laptop, The New York Times Web site is even faster. It's easy to skim the titles and ledes of about a dozen stories on the main page for each "section," and loading a story takes no more than a second or two. Once loaded, again, there are no further delays.

The Kindle DX simply can't deliver that kind of e-news experience because the screen technology is inherently too slow to support scrolling or fast page-turning.

In fact, it looks like the Kindle DX isn't even taking full advantage of its own capabilities. The newspaper interface is very basic: one wide column of text, not the multiple narrow columns that help us skim through real newspapers. I wonder why?

But again, I think the DX will do an adequate job for people who like to read most of the day's news stories. How much of the market that is, I can't guess, but I suspect it's a higher fraction among older, wealthier customers.

(Now, continue on to "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks", or return to "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: Overview".)

This is the third part to my early analysis of the new Kindle DX large-format e-book reader. In the first post ("Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: Overview") I discussed the physical and software features of the new device. In the second post, "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-news", I described the limitations of the DX for news reading.

The textbook market represents an even greater challenge for the Kindle DX. There's a lot of variety among textbooks. Some textbooks will work well enough on the DX's display, but most, I think, will not.

The new Kindle DX is larger than the Kindle 2 with over twice the screen resolution.

(Credit: Amazon.com, Inc.)

I think the key issues here are how each textbook is used, and what kind of illustrations are present in it.

Textbooks that are fundamentally like collections of stories, such as those in sociology, history, and literature, will likely be most suitable for use as e-books. These texts are read sequentially, so that the reading ratio (the time spent reading vs. the time spent finding the next thing to read or waiting for the display to update) can be high, and they can usually be written so as not to rely on complex color illustrations. (Though complex color illustrations are still valuable, and the Kindle DX doesn't support them.)

Texts for the natural and formal sciences will not work so well.

A biology textbook without color is almost inconceivable, except that if you have a Kindle, it's pretty easy to see how that works. Just download the sample for the Kindle edition of Steven Daniel Garber's "Biology: A Self-Teaching Guide".

Right up front, you'll get a hint that all may not be well. The e-book includes a disclaimer: "Due to the nature of digital conversion, some of the images included in this e-book may lack the detail and clarity of the originals."

And indeed, that's true. Much of the fine detail that would be visible in a printed copy of this book is lost here. Remember, textbooks are commonly printed on offset presses with more than ten times the linear resolution of a Kindle display.

And even if a reader were willing to zoom in to see the fine detail on an illustration (and if the Kindle DX allows it, which the earlier Kindle models often don't), the lack of color is utterly crippling. Biology textbooks rely on photomicrographs of cells in which subtle color gradations are essential to understanding the cell structure.

Perhaps some of these figures could be replaced by line drawings carefully crafted to communicate the same facts without relying on color, but some photographs are irreplaceable.

And line drawings have their own problems. I downloaded the Kindle sample version of "History of the Ancient World" by Susan Wise Bauer and looked at the book's maps on my Kindle. Some are fine, but many have notations that are virtually illegible at a normal reading distance, to the point where I can be sure that 50% more linear resolution isn't going to help enough.

For math, science, and engineering, I think the Kindle DX will also be inadequate. I remember studying these subjects, and what I remember about using the textbooks is frequently flipping back and forth through the pages to compare new material to old and find the applicable explanations and formulas when answering review questions at the end of each chapter.

The Kindle DX simply doesn't support page flipping. Backing up twenty pages takes two seconds with a paper textbook, but most of a minute on a Kindle.

Amazon has made deals with several major publishers to bring texts to the Kindle DX, and with several major universities to support the DX in some classes next fall. These are encouraging announcements, but these are just experiments, not evidence of the DX's suitability.

I'll be interested to see whether Amazon, its publishing partners, and these universities initially limit themselves to the low-hanging fruit in history and literature classes, or go after some of the more challenging courses.

Ultimately, I don't think any e-book reader is really the right answer for educational use. The better solution is to adapt textbooks and other educational materials such as exams to notebook computers, which can support more types of content (including full-motion video) and provide valuable interactivity.

And the even better answer, in the long run, is to develop systems that are even more tightly focused on education, with long-life batteries, rugged construction, and specific software and hardware features that aren't generally found in laptop PCs. I've been studying this problem for a long time (since I was in college myself!) and if there's interest, I'll go into more detail in a future post.

As expected, Amazon rolled out its new large-screen e-book reader, the Kindle DX. See Caroline McCarthy's coverage of the announcement here on CNET: "Amazon's big-screen Kindle DX makes its debut." I've spent much of the day reviewing the available information, and here are my first thoughts on the announcement.

Inevitably, the DX isn't exactly what I expected when I wrote my predictions earlier this week ("What to expect from Amazon and Apple"), but I got most of the major points right.

The new Kindle DX is larger than the Kindle 2 with over twice the screen resolution.

(Credit: Amazon.com, Inc.)

Here are the basic facts:

It's 7.2" wide and 10.4" tall, just a little smaller than I expected. With so many things in our lives adapted to the size of a standard 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper, it seems to me that would have been a better target for the DX. (Internationally, A4 paper serves the same purpose at 8.3 x 11.7 inches, so perhaps 8.3 x 11.0 inches would have been a good compromise.)

The DX's monochrome E Ink display is much smaller than I was hoping for, only 9.7" diagonal. Like the original Kindle, much of the space on the front of the unit is occupied by page-turning buttons and a physical keyboard.

The screen has 1,200 x 824 pixels, about the number on the LCD of a 12" Dell Latitude E4200 laptop, so the Kindle DX's linear resolution is significantly higher than that of most notebook displays. However, it's about 10% lower than that of the 6" E Ink display on the Kindle 2 (150 dpi vs. 167 dpi).

As Amazon says, the DX's display is about 2.5 times larger than the Kindle 2's screen. But that's in square inches. In pixels, it's only 50% taller and 37% wider.

That's a key point, I think, because of the markets Amazon says the DX was developed for: newspapers and textbooks. I'll deal with these topics in two subsequent posts ("Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-news" and "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks").

The Kindle DX does have a few unique advantages over the earlier Kindles. It supports rotation, providing a landscape display mode, a feature long available on Sony's Reader. Also like the Sony Reader, the DX has PDF support. On the Reader, PDF documents support zooming to a certain point, but even when zoomed in all the way in landscape mode, illustrations in PDFs of technical books are often unreadable. I expect the same will be true of the Kindle DX.

Oddly, Amazon isn't retrofitting these features to the Kindle 2. The Kindle 2 may lack the position sensor that makes rotation automatic on the Kindle DX, but it could still allow manual rotation. PDF support should be even easier to add.

Perhaps Amazon is holding these features back from the Kindle 2 to promote sales of the DX, but if so, I think that's extremely short-sighted.

Although it isn't particularly a Kindle DX feature, I'll mention something disappointing that I came across while browsing through Amazon's Kindle pages just now. Since the Kindle was launched, users have been able to email documents in various formats such as Word, HTML, PDF, and JPEG to their Kindles to name@kindle.com, where they go through an Amazon server that converts them, if necessary, into a Kindle-friendly format and downloads them automatically to the user's Kindle.

The fee for this super-convenient conversion and download service was ten cents per document. But now, Amazon charges $0.15 per megabyte, rounded up to the next megabyte. For PDF files and image-rich Word documents that exceed a megabyte in size-- a common situation-- the cost of this convenience has tripled or worse. Fortunately, Amazon still supports the "name@free.kindle.com" method, which results in the converted documents showing up in the user's email, from where they can be manually moved to the Kindle via USB.

I'm surprised that Amazon didn't equip the DX with an improved web browser. As far as I can tell, the DX has the same browser as the Kindle 2. It's still called "experimental," at least. The screen size of the Kindle 2 (800 x 600 pixels) is a little on the small side for effective web browsing, but the Kindle DX's screen is big enough to display almost any web page, especially in landscape mode.

Now, I'll move on to the two new markets for which the Kindle DX was developed. See "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-news" and "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks".

The New York Times reported this weekend, in an article titled "Looking to Big-Screen E-Readers to Help Save the Daily Press," that Amazon.com is on the verge of introducing a new larger-screen Kindle e-book reader.

A blog post from CNET's David Carnoy ("Amazon to introduce larger Kindle this week?") says that Amazon has scheduled a press event for Wednesday that may be the venue for this announcement.

The larger Kindle (which I think of as a "Kindle Pro," although I really have no idea what Amazon might call it) should be about the size of the Plastic Logic e-book reader I've written about here ("E-books: The flexible future"), with a screen in the 12-inch-diagonal range. Apart from the larger display, it's expected to work just like the current Kindle 2, sharing its paper-like E Ink display and software, perhaps with another round of improvements that could apply to the Kindle 2 as well.

Carnoy also mentions the recent spate of rumors that Apple will be introducing a new "media pad" this spring or summer--rumors he covered in an earlier piece ("Apple prepping two wireless devices with Verizon?"). This gizmo (I'll call it the iPad, following the lead of some other stories on this subject) is said to be smaller than a Kindle 2, but with a larger screen--a combination not difficult to achieve given the Kindle 2's large keyboard.

Amazon's Kindle 2 e-book reader

(Credit: Amazon.com)

That suggests dimensions around 5 inches by 8 inches with a 7-inch screen, similar to the Viliv X70 I wrote about in January ("The mobile Internet device: In search of itself").

As I noted at the time, the Viliv X70 is actually a little smaller than the Apple Newton MessagePad 2100 I carried for seven years during my time with the Microprocessor Report newsletter.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about the relative merits of these two device types, so I figured I'd go on record here before Amazon and Apple make their announcements and try to explain what kind of applications and customers will be the best fit for each type.

Here are the major differences I expect to see:

• Displays. Monochrome E Ink for Kindle Pro. Color LCD for the iPad.

• Size. About 8.5 inches by 11 inches for Kindle Pro. About 5 inches by 8 inches for the iPad (less than half the size).

• Software. Amazon's port of Linux for Kindle Pro. Apple's port of Mac OS X for the iPad.

• Media types. E-book and audio support for Kindle Pro. Video, audio, and e-books on the iPad.

Everything else follows from the display choice. I've seen E Ink's color prototypes with video-friendly update rates, but they can't match the quality of an LCD, and I wouldn't watch a TV show on one. I don't expect to see a fast color display on the new Kindle.

With a larger but otherwise familiar monochrome E Ink display, the new member of the Kindle family will not be able to play video or support a wide range of PC or smartphone applications (regardless of the underlying software), at least not with results that would be acceptable to most users.

Still, the smaller display expected to appear on Apple's media pad could handle lightly modified iPhone applications, but the need for a backlight means it can't match the low-power characteristics of an E Ink display. An iPad might get only four to six hours of operation on a charge--enough for a couple of movies and some gaming, but that's about it.

That's probably enough, though. A laptop might be used all day at work and for hours in the evening, but few people would spend that much time staring at a 7-inch LCD. I expect Apple has done its research, designing in a battery just large enough to satisfy most users without making the iPad (or whatever they actually call it) any bigger or heavier than necessary.

One thing I'm really not sure about is whether the iPad will be based on an x86 processor like Apple's MacBooks or an ARM processor like the iPhone. If the iPad was a Windows machine, there'd be no question: x86 all the way, to provide compatibility with Windows 7. Windows Mobile just doesn't have the features or the third-party app support to compete.

But Apple's done a fine job adapting Mac OS X to the iPhone platform, and with iPhone OS 3.0 coming soon, this would be a fine time to apply this OS to devices other than the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The iPad's likely superior variety of software gives it an inherently larger market, but the Kindle Pro's focus on text display could still make it the preferred choice for e-books.

Newspapers--the ostensible reason for a big-screen Kindle--are an interesting in-between case, though. Reading a newspaper isn't like reading a novel. It's a far more interactive process. Most newspaper readers generally don't proceed from the first word of the first story all the way through the last word of the last story; they skim headlines and opening paragraphs and pick only some articles to read fully.

The still-hypothetical Kindle Pro would do a better job of displaying newspaper-style content than the current Kindle 2. Readers would have more headlines to choose from and more text to read between the relatively slow page turns. But the process still can't be as quick as it is with a real newspaper. If newspapers are part of the plan, I hope Amazon has figured out how to take full advantage of the Kindle's underlying compute platform, for example, with intelligent article sorting and highlighting against keyword lists. Will it be good enough? I can't predict that, but we may find out soon.

One rumor I simply don't believe is that the new Kindle might also handle textbooks. Even an 12-inch E Ink display doesn't have enough resolution for most of the textbooks and technical books I've seen. The fine details in figures and the fine print in captions and equations simply wouldn't work out. Also, color would be absolutely necessary for that application, and E Ink's color displays have lower resolution than the monochrome versions. In theory, publishers could be willing to create Kindle-optimized editions from scratch, but I just don't see the business case for such a deal. So I think textbooks are out of the question.

In the long run, I think it'll be possible to merge these two products into one device that can do a good job with text and still support movies and full-featured software. OLED displays consume energy only for "on" pixels, so text display is much more efficient than on an LCD, yet OLEDs can update fast enough for television. (I wrote about OLED and e-paper displays here a couple of years ago; see "Displays have a long way to go".)

In the meantime, the market will remain divided between e-book readers and media players, so watch the news and make your choice. Or just keep reading books and watching TV--there's nothing wrong with that!

I got an e-mail from the folks over at O'Reilly Media mentioning that keynotes and other presentations from the company's ETech 2009 conference, held earlier this month, were now online at the ETech 2009 site. I missed that show, but I was interested in one of the keynotes, so I surfed on over to take a look.

The keynote I was looking for was indeed online: Mary Lou Jepsen, CEO of Pixel Qi and formerly CTO of the One Laptop Per Child organization, talking about "Low-Cost, Low-Power Computing." You can watch a video of the presentation on Blip.tv or download the PowerPoint slides direct from O'Reilly.

The talk is well worth watching, but it's flawed in many respects. Jepsen still has the over-the-top attitude displayed all too commonly by participants in the OLPC initiative, who often act as if they had actually saved the world instead of merely doing something good for it.

She started out with a series of very squishy claims that overstated the importance of her work, including references to the "digital divide" (a term of propaganda) and statements about how "97 percent of adolescents live in the developing world." Both claims rely on entirely arbitrary definitions.

Jepsen's 97 percent figure in particular assumes that all populations outside "Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan" are part of the developing world, but of course that isn't true. If I lived in Hong Kong, Riyadh, Shanghai, Tel Aviv, or various other places, I would probably resent Jepsen's implication.

Jepsen singled out power consumption as the most critical requirement for success in laptops for the developing world, but I think an equally strong case can be made for cost, ruggedness, or ease of use. All of these elements must be in place, or the machines aren't worth the effort of deploying them...as many countries approached by OLPC have decided over the last few years.

Jepsen also said that "Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Craig Barrett, and Michael Dell said it was impossible" for the OLPC project to deliver on its early promises.

I don't know that they did, and she didn't exactly cite references. But after all, it was impossible. And, in fact, OLPC did not deliver what it promised: a $100 laptop. It still hasn't done that and shows no sign of doing so anytime soon.

But most of my problems with Jepsen's presentation stem from her claims about technical matters.

For example, she said that the OLPC XO-1 laptop--for which she was the lead designer--is a "1 watt laptop," "more than 10 times lower (power) than the next laptop up."

But the XO-1 certainly is not a 1 watt laptop; on an apples-to-apples basis, it's more like a 4 watt laptop, and the best traditional PC laptops consume only about 50 percent more power--in spite of larger screens, faster processors, and a complete array of external interfaces. The Thinkpad X series (originally from IBM, now from Lenovo) has included several models down in this power range, according to my own laboratory testing.

Jepsen wanted her audience to believe that the key breakthrough in the XO-1 design was the screen, but the fact is that low-resolution, low-quality, low-power displays have been widely available for years. They aren't used in PCs because they don't meet the expectations of PC users. And frankly, the display in the XO-1 wouldn't meet most PC users' expectations either.

Speaking about the component consuming the most power in PC laptops, Jepsen said this: "It's the screen, not the CPU, not the motherboard." But this is not true in most laptops, especially in the size range of the OLPC XO-1, or in most usage conditions. A 12-inch LCD may consume only 2 watts to 3 watts, usually less than the motherboard in the same system. While an x86 laptop processor may consume less than a watt when idle, it will generally consume over 10 watts when busy.

The purpose of Jepsen's remarks was to create the impression that the display has become more important than any other component in a laptop computer, but I don't think that conclusion is supported by the facts.

Why would she want people to believe the display is so important? As she said in the presentation, she's still working to raise funding for her display start-up, Pixel Qi.

It's traditional for CEOs to overstate the significance of their start-ups, but that doesn't mean they ought to get away with twisting facts in the process.

And it's just not necessary, either. As critical as I've been about Jepsen's hyperbole here, I still think that the work Pixel Qi is doing will be valuable to the industry. Pixel Qi does seem to have a very narrow focus, but I certainly appreciate the fact that start-ups have to start somewhere.

From what I can see on the company's site, Pixel Qi's first product will be a 10-inch LCD that appears to bridge the gap between the E Ink display used in Sony's Reader and Amazon's Kindle e-book readers and the LCDs commonly used in PCs and TVs. With both a high-quality reflective monochrome e-book mode and a "fully saturated color" mode, such a display could be a good choice for many small notebook and tablets. In her speech, Jepsen said the company is also working on a low-power (under 10 watts) HDTV screen, which is also likely to be popular.

But more generally, I believe there's still room for plenty of improvement in CPUs, chipsets, and other laptop components, not just displays. I see no reason we can't eventually get $100 laptops, but it'll take improvements in all these areas to get there.

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.

Last September, I wrote a piece about a new e-book reader under development at Plastic Logic (see "E-books: The flexible future").

At the time, the company was hoping to ship its still unnamed e-book reader in the first half of this year. I was really looking forward to it, since it provides a unique combination of two valuable features: a big screen and enough flexibility to tolerate a little bit of bending. (I worry about my Kindle getting crunched in my briefcase.)

Plastic Logic's prototype e-book reader

(Credit: Plastic Logic Limited)

Monday night, I was watching the local news from KGO-TV in San Francisco, and caught a story on Plastic Logic. The reporter mentioned that the reader was due out "next year"-- so I sent an email to Plastic Logic's media-relations contact to check on that.

It turns out the report was correct. There are three reasons for the delay:

1) It's taking longer than expected to prepare Plastic Logic's factory in Germany to produce the devices, and the company wants to have plenty of inventory so that early buyers won't be disappointed, as many Kindle customers were in 2007.

2) The product itself is evolving with "more features and functionality."

3) Plastic Logic decided not to press for a product launch in the middle of the current recession.

I imagine the decision to wait a year was difficult for Plastic Logic, but it makes sense to me. The e-book market is still developing, and it barely exists at all for business users, the company's intended market.

Being the first to market with a large-format professional e-book reader hasn't given Irex Technologies any obvious advantage. The Irex 1000 series models (described in depth here on CNET) are fine products, but most people I talk to haven't even heard of them.

Similarly, Sony's Reader beat Amazon's Kindle to market by over a year, but today the Kindle is pretty much synonymous with the consumer e-book market.

So in summary, I don't think 2010 is too late. Plastic Logic will get its chance to succeed. All it has to do now is deliver a great product.

Amazon yielded to the inevitable on Friday when it announced (in this statement) that it would no longer enable the text-to-speech feature on its Kindle 2 e-book reader by default; publishers can make the call.

Instead, publishers may enable the text-to-speech feature on a title-by-title basis, if they believe that choice is in their best interest.

Amazon's Kindle 2 e-book reader

(Credit: Amazon.com)

I have been sorely tempted to write a response to some of the factually incorrect and even grossly deceitful pieces I've seen written about this issue since the Kindle 2 was launched, but fortunately, Amazon has made that unnecessary. Nevertheless, there are still a few points worth making.

Amazon's latest statement on the issue opens with a flat declarative statement:

Kindle 2's experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given.

Amazon may believe that this is true, or it may just be taking this position as a way of defending its original position.

But the truth of this position is not so clear to me. I have two issues with it:

First, the Kindle 2's text-to-speech function is certainly copying and transforming the original work into a derivative of the original, and performing this new work for the listener. That can be fair use, or it can be a crime.

Under U.S. law, fair use depends on at least four factors:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substance of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Reading a book to your child is fair use. Discussing a book in a book club is fair use. Buying one copy of a book and reading the whole thing to an audience is not.

My opinion: the Kindle 2's text-to-speech function, as originally proposed, failed on all four counts. It had a commercial purpose (to help sell the Kindle 2); it applied to commercial copyrighted works in their entirety; and it would have cut into the market for commercial audiobooks. Now that Amazon has backed down, the legality of this feature may never be judged by a court.

If it is a violation, it's certainly true that the violation is being committed by the operator of the Kindle 2, not by the device itself. But as the U.S. Supreme Court observed in deciding Sony of America v. Universal City Studios (1984), also known as the "Betamax case," the manufacturer of a device may be guilty of contributory copyright infringement, if the use of the device is inherently infringing.

Sony was cleared in that case because its Betamax VCRs could be used to make legitimate copies, and Sony had no control over unauthorized use.

But Amazon does have that kind of control over the Kindle 2. The Kindle 2 knows when it's working with commercial, copyright-protected e-books purchased from Amazon, and it can behave accordingly.

If technically enabling an audio production of a book, as if it were an audiobook, is a violation of U.S. copyright law, as I believe it is, the Kindle 2's text-to-speech function--enabled for those books--has no "substantial noninfringing use," the key criterion of the Supreme Court's decision.

My second problem with Amazon's position is that it's utterly irrelevant. The simple legality of text-to-speech functions is not the important issue here.

Amazon isn't just some random company making an e-book reader. It's one of the world's largest booksellers. Amazon sells books from every major publisher in the United States. Amazon even has two subsidiaries that make audiobooks (Audible and Brilliance Audio).

How could Amazon have been so stupid as to introduce an e-book reader with a feature that undermines a major portion of its business?

Never mind the relatively poor quality of the text-to-speech function on Kindle 2. It's obviously not on par with a performance from a professional reader. The Kindle 2 can't show emotions or do character voices. And never mind whether the Kindle 2's text-to-speech function will ever actually diminish audiobook sales.

It's enough that Amazon disregarded the wishes of the authors and publishers providing the content that justifies the very existence of the Kindle. That was stupid.

So now Amazon has figured that out and will do the right thing, going forward. I hope that most publishers will leave the text-to-speech function enabled. I believe that's the right choice for most books and that it won't interfere with audiobook sales enough to matter. But it's the publishers' call to make, not Amazon's, and now they get to make it. Good.