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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."
Dickens and Austen, eh? So what sort of DRM is Nintendo going to use to "protect" this "IP"?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The first ebooks should be should be of old Nintendo Power magazines!
So I get to pay $30 for books I can legally download for free?
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.
jaymz
Yes, I can see it now:
Call me Ishmael
*Turn Page*
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
This sounds like the ultimate excuse for playing your DS during class / at home when you're supposed to be doing homework. Now there just needs to be an alt-tab equivalent so you can flip over to the ebook and pause playing tetris long enough to convince them that you're reading.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
I know I was just clamoring to get my my hands on the Jane Austin books when I was a kid. If only there was a way to get it digitally, and in a form where I could read it while making people think I was playing video games! Oh, that would have been too much to ask.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
The DS has a decent screen, but I think I (and most everyone else) would start getting a headache in about five minutes if they tried to read lots of text on it. After five weeks, I'd be lucky to see anything at all!
and it'll be like a DS RPG, but with better stories and fewer boss battles.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Damn! Sure I can buy it on Ebay, but I speak American.
-- Boycott Shell
Oh, so it's like tomshardware.
This guy's the limit!
I imagine that this product is not geared to twitchy eight year old kids, but a bid to capture older generations (35+). First they came out with their memory enhancement games that had broader appeal to non-gamers. This is just another step in that direction.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
The article submitter (Miracle Jones) just posted a good article on this here.
Is anyone else sick of proprietary ebook formats?
I have an N810 that I bought primarily for an ebook reader since it runs it runs Linux, the theory behind my purchase was someone out there had or would probably would create something that could read most formats, or I could find converters that could convert many things to some format it could read.
And then Amazon released the kindle with it's ultra-proprietary ultra-PITA format. There's mobi, Microsoft's format, and I'm sure Sony has something since they have a reader, and Sony is the biggest proponent of proprietary formats ever.
My personally preferred format is OEB which is really just html with an xml document specifying book information. That FB reader that my N810 uses renders beautifully and pre-populates author/title information for me.
Does anyone know of a converter for some of the DRMed proprietary formats that convert to OEB? I have Linux (Ubuntu) and windows available to run things on.
Question everything
I thought the DS had a lot of interactive books already available. Namely all of the Phoenix Wright series.
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:
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.
Eric Baird
Well, Nintendo has pushed the Brain Age games and "keeping your brain young", so this seems like a logical step for them. Targeting only Britan with it's initial launch (which doesn't currently have Kindle available locally) seems like an interesting way to gauge the market in areas that don't have a worldwide-known competitor.