Nintendo To Start Publishing Ebooks On the DS 216
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."
First ebooks (Score:5, Interesting)
The first ebooks should be should be of old Nintendo Power [wikipedia.org] magazines!
Re:$30? Seriously? (Score:5, Interesting)
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... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:First ebooks (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:DRM? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:$30? Seriously? (Score:3, Interesting)
You could write one. I would have written one if I knew there was any demand for ebooks on DS. Didn't realize that gamers were into Dickens.
Re:DRM? (Score:3, Interesting)
US book piracy before 1986 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:$30? Seriously? (Score:2, Interesting)
Are "gamers" the only people who own a DS?
Re:Those are two things that go together naturally (Score:3, Interesting)
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.