Making eBooks Work, Part 3: Palm Digital Media20 May 2002 Palm Digital Media has been around longer than just about any other handheld ebook provider, and their catalogue is packed with big names. What keeps their customers coming back for more? I still remember the beginnings of Peanut Press (they changed their name to Palm Digital Media after being bought out by Palm, Inc.). In late 1998, I heard about a new company trying to sell new, secured books readable on PalmPilots. I went to their site, downloaded their reader, installed it to my PalmPilot Professional and started reading H.G. Well's War of the Worlds, the first book they offered. I loved the experience, and went back a short time later to buy Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, which I'd loved in paperback a few years before. Thus began a relationship with Palm Digital Media that continues today. I've bought more ebooks from them than all other ebooksellers combined, and I keep going back. Palm Digital Media was the first commercial ebookseller I'd noticed, and I'd been looking. I didn't care for Adobe PDF offerings because, like most people, I prefer to read away from my PC. Rick Bram's PalmDoc format was a revelation to me, in that it allowed me to read things longer than 4k memos on my PalmPilot. But the only things I could find in PalmDoc format were classic public domain works. Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of classic novels, but I wanted to read modern works as well. Palm Digital Media gave me and all other PalmPilot users (and eventually Pocket PC users as well) that opportunity. PalmDoc was an open standard with no security. Palm Digital Media used a different ebook format designed to allow two things PalmDoc didn't: real book-style formatting (italics, different font sizes, page breaks) and security. When you buy a book at Palm Digital Media, the name and number on the credit card you use to make the purchase are used to generate an encryption key that's then stored in the book. While your credit card number itself isn't stored in the book, you do have to enter it once to "unlock" the book for reading on your device. Regular readers of this column know I'm no fan of Digital Rights Management, but Palm Digital Media's version of DRM is so simple, so effective and so unobtrusive that I have absolutely no problem with it. I don't have to "activate" my reader, I can read the same book on as many devices as I want (I own three Pocket PCs and a PalmOS Sony Clié, so it's nice to have this ability), and I can "lend" books to friends and family if I trust them with my credit card number. Basically, Palm Digital Media's DRM doesn't rely on technology to lock down the book, it relies on the self-interest of the buyer. How many people would post "warez" serial numbers on the web if the serial numbers were their own credit card numbers? The genius of Palm Digital Media's DRM is that they make the decryption key for a book out of a number the buyer doesn't want to let out. While this form of DRM isn't as oppressive as the DRM used by other ebooksellers, it is sufficient for Palm Digital Media to establish relationships with most of the big publishing houses. You can find books on Palm Digital Media's website from Random House, St. Martin's Press, Alfred Knopf and other New York heavyweights. They carry quite a few books by Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Mary Higgins Clark, Jeffrey Deaver and other denizens of the New York Times Bestseller List. There are still some holdout authors that don't authorize their books to be epublished by anyone -- Tom Clancy, LucasArts (the novelization of "Star Wars: Episode II" is not available as an ebook) and the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien come to mind -- but if a book is available in an electronic edition, chances are Palm Digital Media carries it. Fictionwise has recently started to carry some of these "big name" titles thanks to their Secure Mobipocket format, but for a long time, Palm Digital Media was the only way to read current best-sellers on your handheld. By the way, they may have the rights to a book even if you don't see it listed on the site. Palm Digital Media has a sizeable backlog of ebook titles to convert to their format and post to their site. If you want a book that you don't see, the best way to get it is to send an email to requests@peanutpress.com. A book can get a significant priority boost for conversion and posting if they know someone's looking for it. Greg Bear's new nanotech thriller Vitals magically appeared for sale about a week after I asked for it. Requesting books works. Prices vary, ranging from a few bucks to more than twenty. There's actually very little Palm Digital Media can do about this. The prices are set by the original publishers, not Palm Digital Media, and they're usually set to coincide with the current print edition. For example, Star Trek: The Eugenics Wars, the Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Book 1, which is currently available in paperback, is priced at $7.99. Star Trek: The Eugenics Wars, the Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Book 2, currently on the stands in hardcover, costs $18.99 as an ebook. When it's released in paperback, the ebook price will probably fall to the paperback price, but the publishers don't always authorize this. Some novels on Palm Digital Media are still priced at hardcover levels even though the paperbacks came out quite a while ago. Basically, it pays to shop around, and consider what you're getting. I bought Pogue and Butter's Piloting Palm for $20.95 -- well, a little less, see below -- which is pricey for an ebook but it's still cheaper than the hardcover's price of $27.99. I wanted to read the book now instead of waiting for the paperback -- if a paperback edition is ever released, not a given for nonfiction -- so the price was worth it for me. By the way, I highly recommend the book for anyone interested in the handheld industry. Why didn't I pay full price for Piloting Palm? Truth to tell, I almost never pay full price for anything I buy at Palm Digital Media. When you go to their website, you can sign up for their weekly newsletter. At the end of each newsletter is a discount code that can be applied to any title that week, not just the titles spotlighted in the newsletter. This discount code will give you 10% off any title that costs $3.00 or more. I spend hundreds of dollars at Palm Digital Media every year, so this saves me a lot of money. I suppose it also costs me money, in that it calls to my attention books I end up buying, but I think it's worth it. Palm Digital Media also offers a separate newsletter with weekend specials, specially discounted books if you buy them that weekend. Just the thing if you're headed to the beach this summer. Palm Digital Media has one of the slickest and easiest ecommerce systems I've seen, right up there with Amazon and Fictionwise as far as I'm concerned. In addition to the standard shopping cart system, they also provide access to your account at any time -- where you can change your credit card information, download the latest version of Palm Reader for your device or re-download any book in your library -- and they provide their own "express" ordering. If Palm Digital Media already has your credit card on file, all you have to do is log in to their site with your email address and password and then you can purchase books without having to type another character. About the only thing I'd like to see added is either an Audible-style "wish list" so I can tag books for future purchases, or a column of "buy now" checkboxes in the shopping cart -- a la Fictionwise -- so I can leave books in my shopping cart that I don't want to buy today. Palm Digital Media tells me this is an often requested feature and that they're working on it. It's probably just as well; I spend way too much money there as it is -- I'll go bankrupt if they make buying books much easier. I mentioned above that one of the things that sets Palm Digital Media's ebook format apart from standard PalmDoc is that it provides a higher-quality, more "book-like" presentation. On both the PalmOS and Pocket PC platforms, Palm Reader renders books with illustrations, real page breaks (at chapter boundaries, for example), text indents, italics, boldface and other typographic conventions that help the make an ebook seem more like a paper book. While I've certainly read my share of essentially "text only" PalmDoc books, I have to admit that I like the additional formatting that Palm Reader provides. It really adds something to experience to have a page break before a new chapter, or have emphasized words in the text italicized. Reading in Palm Reader tends to be more comfortable than reading a plain Doc file. Of course, part of that is the reader as well. Palm Reader is supported on both PalmOS and the Pocket PC, and each platform has two versions: a free Palm Reader and a $9.95 Palm Reader Pro. The free Palm Reader is sufficient to read virtually all -- see below -- of Palm Digital Media's books, complete with formatting, etc. Palm Reader Pro adds the ability to use color "themes" -- red text on black is easier to read at night for many people, for example-- have full-justified text (rather than a "ragged right" margin), and to look up words in a dictionary or thesaurus just by holding your stylus on the word. Palm Digital Media offers several dictionaries from the relatively useless Webster's Vest Pocket Dictionary, which isn't likely to contain any words you don't already know, to the mammoth Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, containing over 160,000 definitions. I've got that one installed -- on my storage card, it takes up just over 10MB of space -- and I've been using it to increase my vocabulary ever since I bought it. (Note: Even if you don't use them for contextual lookups, Palm Reader Pro is still required to use any of the dictionaries.) Lastly, although the Pocket PC allows you to read in any TrueType font, with or without ClearType, the PalmOS version of Palm Reader Pro allows PalmOS users to also read in other fonts with optional sub-pixel font rendering. This looks really slick on a Sony Clié. Currently, Palm Digital Media books can only be read on both Palm OS handhelds and Pocket PCs. Baen and Fictionwise books can also be read on PCs and (usually) Gemstar's REB dedicated readers, but it should come as no surprise to my regular readers that I think the vast majority of ebook reading will be done on PDAs, so PalmOS and Pocket PC covers the bases nicely. I'd like to see Palm Digital Media release a reader for Windows, so that they can take advantage of the new Tablet PCs running Windows XP later this year. As it stands, I read almost all of my ebooks, be they from Baen, Fictionwise, Palm Digital Media or elsewhere, in Palm Reader Pro on my Pocket PC. Palm Reader can read "vanilla" PalmDoc files from Fictionwise, Memoware, etc. without conversion, and Palm Digital Media offers a Word macro that makes converting RTF files from Baen to Palm Reader format a trivial task. Palm Digital Media books use "Palm Markup Language" to provide rich text, and it's really easy to use it to mark up and convert your own books. Palm Digital Media has a whole section on their website devoted to explaining how to make your own books. According to Palm Digital Media Director of Marketing and Business Development Mike Segroves, the secret to their success is that everyone in the company is a rabid reader. It shows, and I think that "ebook fans making ebooks for ebook fans" attitude is why I go back to Palm Digital Media again and again. Disclosure: In the writing of this article, I had my "ebook enthusiast" hat on, and this is, I believe, and honest assessment of one of the best ebooksellers on the net. I do, however, have other hats, and one of them is that a novelist published by Palm Digital Media. I don't believe that affects my judgment of them in any way -- I was a happy customer long before they published my book -- but I feel it necessary to disclose that bit of information so that you can make your own informed decision. Thank you and good afternoon. Jeff Kirvin
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