From: Bruce E. Durocher II (bedii_at_qwest.net)
Date: Sat Feb 21 2004 - 17:36:00 PST
I have to stick in a comment here. The owner of Alexandria Digital
Literature <http://www.alexlit.com> uses a Newton daily, so all the
ebooks he sells are available in HTML as well as PDF, Microsoft Reader,
PalmDoc, and the variant of HTML that the RocketBooks use. Either his
royalty payments are so high that authors don't mind any possible loss
of payment through piracy, or his users don't pirate: I've not
discussed it with him but I *do* know several of the authors he sells
works by and they all seem happy with the arrangement. And I'm not
talking about minor league authors--he's got Hugo and Nebula award
winners in his catalog. (He started with SF and Fantasy authors
because he did his first editing in the SF/F field.)
The real joy of AlexLit is the recommendation engine, which is called
Hypatia. You go onto the site and register (no, your name isn't linked
to any other records but he needs a specific identifier, as you'll see
in a minute), and then rate at least 40 books of the thousands in the
database as ones you liked or disliked. Hypatia then looks through
several million records, finds those people whose tastes match yours,
and recommends the books they liked that you haven't put down as read
yet. It works much better than the Amazon process of recommending any
book of the same genre: my wife once bought a romance novel from Amazon
and ever since then they've automatically recommended another romance
novelist whose work she *loathes.* Hypatia, on the other hand, hasn't
suggested anything by that author *ever*. Since you have to register
for Hypatia, it's not vulnerable to the sort of ratings fraud that was
exposed over at Amazon last week. And Hypatia is *FREE*: the way he
makes money from the site is to offer to sell you the ebook version of
any of his catalog that Hypatia recommends. (And no, he hasn't
programmed it to recommend his entire catalog to you.)
Disclosure time: I know the owner of AlexLit, and if there's a sudden
upsurge in membership of Newton owners using the site because of this
post, he's probably going to buy me lunch...
On Saturday, February 21, 2004, at 01:24 PM, Dan wrote:
<snip>
> Microsoft Reader and Acrobat 6 can make non-encrypted files the others
> I
> mentioned *only* make encrypted files as far as I know. Often
> publishers
> will not publish a ebook unless it is in a encrypted format, and I
> know more
> than one author has switched publishers because they wanted to be able
> to
> offer a wider selection of ebook formats. Fictionwise.com (among
> other
> ebook sellers) do offer "mulitformat" for many of their titles.
> Basically
> "multiformat" is unencrypted ebooks in several formats (Palm Doc,
> Acrobat,
> rocketbook, franklin ebook, etc). Palm Doc is currently my favorite
> as it
> is easily converted to plain text and NewtonBooked (which I have done
> a few
> times now). Also Fictionwise.com has several free ebooks available so
> you
> can try your book reader (or method of conversion as the case may be)
> out
> before having to spend any money.
Bruce E. Durocher II
bedii_at_qwest.net
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