Nintendo To Start Publishing Ebooks On the DS

Miracle Jones writes "Nintendo is going to start publishing ebooks for the DS in conjunction with HarperCollins. The first cartridge will go on sale December 26th in the UK, will cost around 30 dollars, and will feature 100 classic books — stuff like Charles Dickens and Jane Austen."

Comments

First ebooks

[Smelly Jeffrey]

The first ebooks should be should be of old Nintendo Power magazines!

Re:First ebooks

[Beyond Opinion]

I agree. I might even buy it if they did that.

Re:$30? Seriously?

[Lumpy]

No actually you pay $19.95 for a R4 and then $11.95 for a 2gig miniSD card then download everything you can from project Gutenberg.

If you own a DS, you NEED to own a R4.

about time, but...

[jaymz2k4]

I'd prefer a PDF reader for homebrew. ComicBookDS is quite a cool little application that will let you read CBR files, you'll need to convert them first but its essentially just scaling & rar'ing them in a particular way.

Re:DRM?

[meringuoid]

Wouldn't the fact that the material is by Dickens and Austen be enough to stop copying? I, for one, wouldn't pirate it if you paid me.

As a matter of fact Dickens faced enormous problems with piracy at the time. It seems that certain rogue countries in that pre-Berne Convention era saw fit to disregard Dickens's copyrights and allowed pirate printers to profit by his works without paying the author so much as a penny.

Re:DRM?

[TheSambassador]

I don't know, I tried to jam a CD with a bunch of PS3 roms on it into my DS and the damn thing broke!

US book piracy before 1986

[ErkDemon]

You mean like the United States?

As far as books and the Berne convention are concerned, I think the US was probably a rogue state until, what, ... 1986?

Until then, the US had a thing called the Manufacturing Clause, which (as far as I can recall) meant that the US refused to acknowledge copyrights on any books that weren't physically made in the US. Basically, it meant that if you wanted to sell a book in the US, you had to employ a US-based printer ... if you didn't employ one of them to produce copies of your book, the US printing community had a legal green light to print as many pirate copies of your book as they liked.

Basically, the US printing lobby lobbied the government to protect them from foreign imports, and they got their way (and copyright be damned).

There are two slightly shocking things about the Manufacturing Clause:

• One, that the US was technically a safe haven for (non-US) book piracy as late at 1986. This is at odds with the image that legislators typically present of the US as a country that has historically been a strong believer in copyright law. When we criticise China as a rogue state for not following international copyright conventions, it's important to remember for context's sake that the US also didn't respect some key international conventions on copyright until comparatively recently.
• Two, that because the Manufacturing Clause is kinda embarrassing, most people today don't seem to know that it ever existed. It currently only has a brief single-paragraph entry on Wikipedia with no discussion page, and it didn't seem to be mentioned in any of the general histories of US copyright law that I've just googled (until I specifically set "manufacturing clause" as a search term).

  For a while, I think that some overseas publishers were getting around the Manufacturing Clause by sending their books to the US in unbound form, and paying a US printer just to put the covers on in the US, on the basis that this counted as "manufacturing". I think this was considered by some US printers as cheating.