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Okay, I've seen lots of reasons so far why ebooks suck, so I'll toss in a few things I like about them.

Device: I tend to read ebooks on my Pocket PC, which I tend to have along with me most of the time. At any given time I have 8 or 10 novels loaded (some are just favourites, others are new that are 'in queue). I enjoy reading, so having a mini-library with me comes in handy when I have a few minutes to kill (gassing up my car, waiting on lines, etc). I personally don't seem to have any problems with eye-strain, but as always YMMV. The screen is quite legible in sunlight, and I like the added bonus of being able to read in the dark without turning on a lamp.

Software: I like the Palm reader, available from Peanut Press (it goes by another name now, but I can never remember as they've changed a few times). To me, the prices aren't all that bad as I look at it as a trade-off....no physical copy, but I can re-download anything I've bought when I like, and my bookshelf is available to me anywhere I have an internet connection. The books are DRM'd, but it's not a particularly onerous form of DRM (again, IMO). The key to unlock the book is the credit card number you used to pay for the book. I've had no problems moving books from one device to another, and it's a fairly easy way to remember the code (I just look at my card). For those that like to loan out their books, I can see that being a problem, but I don't tend to loan many out myself. I suppose though that if it's someone you trust with your CC number, you could do it that way (I'm not recommending this though).

You can also software to format text files in the Palm format (do with that information what you will).

Anyway, I enjoy them, and while they're far from perfect you may find them worth looking into.

I've noticed that Peanut Press sells books for Palm devices for less than retail for new books, at least. I picked up all three volumes of Stephenson's latest for $26 and new books only in hardcover seem to run around $15-20 .

Maybe ebooks will eventually be read on e-ink paper and such. But for now the PDA is the best way to read them, and for a traveller like me, it's the best way to read in general.

Some of your conditions are almost reasonable, but others are less so.

I would buy ebooks if:

1. The ebook readers looked and felt like a book. Meaning they would have the same shape, size, and weight of a book (perhaps with different sizes ranging from small paperback size to 8x11 hardcover size, depending on the preference of the customer), with a cover that looks like a book. When I open the cover, I should see two screens, similar to how I would see two pages when I open a book. That way I'll be able to relax and read it on the sofa just like reading a regular book.

You do realize that the LCD screen for PDAs and ebook readers accounts for something like 90% of their cost, right? How much do you think it would cost for such a device with two? Maybe when digital paper comes out in a few years we might see something like that...

It doesn't seem to make much sense to me to want a two-page reader anyway. You're only going to be reading one page at a time.

2. Ebooks would cost at least 30% less than their paper counterparts. They aren't going to sell much if the savings in printing and distribution aren't passed on to consumers.

Some ebooks do. Baen Webscriptions, for example. And Palm Digital Media typically marks its ebooks down over the cost of the paper version (though in some cases, that paper version is the hardcover...but their prices generally do go down when the paperback comes out).

3. Ebook readers would cost less than $150.

You can get some of the low-end Palms and Clies in that price range, and they make great e-readers.

4. Ebook readers could hold over 100 average books. I really wish I didn't have to have bookcases that took up so much space. When I was in school I would have really preferred to carry one ebook reader instead of lugging around a backpack with 40 pounds of books.

Two words: Memory Card. I've got a 64 meg memory stick in my Clie that will hold at least a couple of hundred average-sized books (depending on their size).

5. You could highlight a segment or page(s) of text and transmit it to your computer or a standard printer.

With Baen's ebooks and a web browser, you can do that from your computer. It'll probably have to wait a few years before that capacity comes to a handheld within your price range, though.

6. An industry standard format existed for ebooks or at least a small number of standards that could be implemented by every ebook reader.

My Palm and my desktop computers do every single format I care to mess around with--Palm Reader, HTML/iSilo, PalmDoc. I could even do MobiPocket or Embiid if I wanted to, but I don't want to. Of course, I couldn't do Microsoft Reader on my Palm...but I have yet to see any MS-Reader-exclusive title I cared enough about for that to feel like a problem.

There are a few readers that do satisfy one or more of the above, but I don't find ebooks worth it unless all the conditions are met.

A few more years, and maybe we'll see...

I honestly never knew B&N was selling them online. Whenever I've wanted to look for eBooks, I've headed to PeanutPress.com. At least they use Palm Reader documents, a format that's actually useful.

I get them from Peanut Press and the price is reasonable -- cheaper than the dead-tree edition. Check out Sherlock homes as an ebook versus hard cover. The only DRM is that my credit card number is the decryption key, so I can't go posting the thing all over the place, but I can back them all up to a CD and load or unload them as I please. I keep my screen set on large print, so I have to "turn the page" (i.e., touch the bottom of the screen) more often, but I think it's a good deal.

Actually I don't want it for free.

I want it easily accesible, portable and priced reasonably. This isn't about artists rights or copyrights as much as it's about distribution control.

Just today I Tivoed a movie called No Man's Land. It's an 80s flick with Charlie Sheen. Ebert gave it 3 stars, so I thought what they heck. Later on I went down to check on it and it was actually a 2001 movie about Bosnia or something.

Now, I wasn't able to get the movie I wanted. Why not let me hope on the internet, let me buy/use the movie for 30 days. Charge me a buck. Heck, encrypt my credit card in it. I don't care. But let me get it A) Right now. B) Let me move it to my laptop to watch on the plane. C) Don't gouge me on the price. It's not costing you anything except some bandwidth.

Palm does it right. They offer topical, up to date ebooks for purchase. They encrypt your credit card in it. This makes sure that you don't pass it around, but also makes it portable. They don't care where you read it. It's a very nice, easy solution for me to buy books for those long flights. I think some of their prices are too high. I think they should pass the savings of not having to publish a book onto me, but that doesn't matter. I vote with my money. I choose reasonably priced titles.

The cat is out of the bag. People want easy, convinient access to digital media. The companies better get in front of this.

As for the movie industry bitching ... why? Hasn't the success of videotapes and DVDs shown them that they can make a ton of money. I would suggest to them that they get in front of this.

The RIAA is just lost. They can't seem to grasp the fundamental fact that their market is moving away from them.

Huxley, however, painted a much scarier picture of a future society that is already coming partially true today. The best kind of servitude is that where the servant loves to serve the will of the master and knows no better, but a drone is a drone is a drone. In Huxley's world, all that the government and the powers that be have to do to retain control and shape things in the way they want is to use basic psychological principles such as someone responds better towards reward than punishment, placate them with their soma, touchie-feelies, etc, and they will want no more, or not think outside the system.

I highly suggest you check out Brave New World Revisited It is a collection of essays Huxley wrote on the topics of Brave New World, later in his life. I think you will be frightened and suprised.

Description from website:

In 1958, Aldous Huxley wrote what might be called a sequel to his novel Brave New World, published in 1932, but it was a sequel that did not revisit the story or the characters, or re-enter the world of the novel. Instead, he revisited that world in a set of 12 essays. Taking a second look at specific aspects of the future Huxley imagined in Brave New World, Huxley meditated on how his fantasy seemed to be turning into reality, frighteningly and much more quickly than he had ever dreamed.

That he had been so prophetic in 1931 about the dystopian future gave Huxley no comfort. He was a far more serious man in 1958 -- at the age of 64 -- and the world was a very different place, transformed by the catastrophe of World War II, the advent of nuclear weapons and the grip of the Cold War. Looking behind the Iron Curtain, where people were not free but dominated by totalitarian power, Huxley could only bow to the grim prophecy of his friend (and, briefly, his student at Eton) George Orwell in the novel 1984. In the free world, however, the situation seemed even more to be one for despair. For it seemed to Huxley that people were well on their way to giving up their freedom and the sanctity of their individualism, in exchange for the illusions of comfort and sensory pleasure -- just as they had in Brave New World.

Huxley heard, in 1958, a world full of the noise of what he called singing commercials, flooding the mass media, much like the hypnopaedia that shaped conscious thought in the world of the novel. He saw people everywhere in greater numbers taking tranquilizer drugs, to surrender to the unacceptable aspects of modern life -- not unlike the drug called soma that everyone takes in the novel. The power of propaganda, he believed, had been validated by the rise of Hitler, and the postwar world was using it effectively to manipulate the masses. Overpopulation was already a critical issue in 1958, and Huxley saw the emergence of an overpopulated world in which the chaos was, more and more, being countered by centralized control -- closer, it seemed, to the future of Brave New World, where the ultimate controlling capitalist of Huxley's early years, Henry Ford, had become the equivalent of God.

In the end, Brave New World Revisited despairs of what has come to pass, primarily modern humankinds willingness to surrender freedom for pleasure. Huxley quotes from the episode of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov -- "For nothing," the Inquisitor insists, "has ever been more insupportable for a man or a human society than freedom." Huxley worried that the cry of "Give me liberty or give me death" could easily be replaced by "Give me television and hamburgers, but

I've had a Palm V, then replaced it with a Vx when those arrived, and now I'm seriously considering moving to a Palm m515 for the extra storage space (8MB is no longer enough; 16MB plus a 128MB MultiMediaCard should do for a little while...).

1. Scheduling. My office uses one of those shared calendar systems (not Outlook), and it includes a Palm conduit. (Hey guys, ship the Palm Desktop 4.0 Mac version already!) I'm at the point in my career where meetings happen to me more often than they used to, so this matters a lot.
2. E-books. Between Peanut Press (now Palm Digital Media) and Baen Books (Webscriptions, the Baen Free Library, and the War of Honor CD-ROM), I've got plenty of books to cycle through.
3. Password vault. Strip is a great tool for sysadmins.
4. Other reference info. Lists of IPs, machine serial numbers (handy for making service calls without having to look behind machines), etc.

In the book, an accidental massive nuking of clathrate deposits causes a runaway greenhouse effect. Not pretty...

I think he was talking about much larger deposits than this, though, and a heck of a big nuke (well, antimatter, I seem to recall. Details...).

In any case, it's a pretty good story for the weather effects, but there are some very disturbing sexual scenes, so you've been warned...

There's an excerpt (from the grossly-overpriced ebook version) here.

Either Piers must approve of ebooks (or not oppose them) to some extent, or his publisher must...because his Xanth books are available from Palm Digital Media, nee Peanut Press.

• Yanoff a GPL'd Palm OS NNTP client, I love reading my newsgroups on the go (I also read them in bed on my m130)
• Datebk 4 an enhanced datebook app, great features!
• OnBoard C a C compiler that creates native applications on the Palm itself! Write code in the memopad or in a Doc file (I use QED on my HS Visor and SrcEdit [find it at the prededing link] on my m130)
• PalmReader I love to read Sci-Fi on my Palm, books are cheap too, browse the link
• Games by Astraware I have bought a few games by Astraware, they put out great products! Favorites are Mahjong and Zap2016!.

There are many many more but you get the idea. I have Pop3 email, Ftp, telnet, WWW browser, wordprocessing, spreadsheet, etc... loaded on my devices.

--
BAS

I would venture to suggest that the main reason dedicated e-book devices haven't taken off is that there isn't all that much you can do with them other than read an e-book...and in some cases, you can't even read any e-book you want, only the ones you buy from the manufacturer. Thanks, but no thanks.

Now PDAs, on the other hand, have a zillion uses...including e-reading. And those have shot right through the roof sale-wise, and there are apparently enough people who enjoy e-reading on them to keep at least a half-dozen major and who knows how many minor PDA-compatible or PDA-only e-book vending sites in clover.

For instance, I've been in correspondence with Lee Fyock of PDA-only e-book site Palm Digital Literature (nee Peanut Press), and while he can't reveal figures, he can tell me that business has been very good. Note that Peanut has been around for several years now, is adding new titles and authors constantly, and has been viewed as such a desirable property that it's been bought out not once but twice, the second time by Palm itself! That doesn't sound like strictly a publisher's dream to me.

I don't see Peanut, or Alexlit, or Fictionwise , or Baen Webscription, or any of the others as being in any danger of shutting down soon. So, clearly, there's more to this e-book thing than some people seem to think.

(Oh, and as for e-books being strictly a vehicle to impose content control, that's not necessarily entirely true either. See the Baen Free Library, Prime Palaver #6.)

When did Bruce Sterling write The Hacker Crackdown? Ten years ago? This isn't exactly news. Incidentally, read Sterling's book if you haven't already -- it covers the early days of hacking AT&T unix systems, phone phreaking, the history of the US Secret Service and more. The EFF has it in a dozen-odd formats, there's an ebook version for the PalmReader, and just for grins you can even get it of The WELL's Gopher server(!).

When did Bruce Sterling write The Hacker Crackdown? Ten years ago? This isn't exactly news. Incidentally, read Sterling's book if you haven't already -- it covers the early days of hacking AT&T unix systems, phone phreaking, the history of the US Secret Service and more. The EFF has it in a dozen-odd formats, there's an ebook version for the PalmReader, and just for grins you can even get it of The WELL's Gopher server(!).

The Hardy Boys: The Castle Conundrum.

Nancy Drew: The Case of the Lost Song

Ebooks rule.

The Hardy Boys: The Castle Conundrum.

Nancy Drew: The Case of the Lost Song

Ebooks rule.

I asked Orson Scott Card to sign my Palm Pilot (in the Diddle Application) and he refused, saying something about "Reproduceable Signature." Like it's that hard to scan the real signature he put on my Tree-Book version of Ender's Game.

BTW: Orson Scott Card Rocks!

I agree with the EBooks Rock opion though. I've read over 20 books on my PalmV.

PeanutPress has been around for a couple years and has all the new release e-books, but it'll cost ya.

Memoware has a TON of free stuff, classics and the like from the Guetenburg project.

M@

• Alexlit
  
• Mind's Eye
  
• Peanut Press/Palm Digital Literature
  
• Fictionwise
  
• MemoWare
  
• Baen Webscriptions/Free Library

Palm for my Palm that I'd like to read on a different platform. That document seemed to be saying that I am allowed to reverse engineer the reader for the purposes of program interoperability. Does that mean I am allowed to crack the program (pretty trivial I guess seeing as all the decryption takes place in the executable itself and you can just single step through it) so that I can read it on a Desktop PC instead? IANAL but maybe someone who is knows the answer to my question.

AFAICT, there are only two features that e-books have over regular books:

1) You can use the same physical device for multiple content. Unless you are on the space shuttle, who cares?

2) You can download books from the Internet. Great, except has anybody here tried to use Napster/Gnutella recently? From the moment you first start looking to the moment you are able to use the (correct) file how much time elapses?

Gutenberg or Gnutella'd titles take a little longer, as I have to unwrap the text before running it through a converter--but even then, emacs makes it easy enough that it just takes a couple of minutes and a few Meta-X commands before I'm done. And if it's a Gutenberg book or otherwise freely available, I can even donate it to the Memoware free e-book library when I finish. (Search under "Meadows" there for all the titles I've donated so far.)

For me, reading books on my Visor is fast, convenient, and a sure-fire boredom fighter. But to each his own.

I use Palm Reader (umm just kidding) (formerly Peanut Reader) for books I purchase from them and iSilo for plain text, html, or web site downloading. Some also use AvantGo for web, but it is too slow syncing for me.

Most publiers are releasing only older titles on e-books. I have yet to see a new hardcover edition be simultaneous released on e-books.

You're looking in the wrong places, apparently. www.peanutpress.com has released at least several simultaneous with the hardback.

According to some inside info :-) King's Black House will be released as ebook the day it's available in hardback.

Forget the fact that you have to pay hundreds of dollars for a reader before you get any content....

Not. Already have a Palm.

Forget the fact that reading this stuff gives you a headache....

Not. I've read for easily hundreds of hours on my Palm without a single headache.

Forget the fact it's a pain in the neck to flip between pages....

Not. It's easier on a Palm than with paper. I can hold a Palm (sideways, using the Palm Reader) and flip pages with one hand, which is tough to do with paper, especially a hardback.

Forget the fact that there's so few books available in eBook format....

Not. There's more at www.peanutpress.com than I can keep up with. And people said the same thing about CD twenty years ago.

Forget the fact that the competing "technology"(paper books) is superior....

In some ways. (Heh, you thought I was going to say "Not") But ebooks are superior in other ways.

This should be a FAQ, since every ebook article on /. goes through the same cycle

• Read at night without a light that keeps your S.O. awake
• Keep a half-dozen books in your pocket so you can start reading something else if one book is boring
• Use "Find" to find the first occurrence of a character to figure out just who that person was again
• Read during a boring meeting when people think you're checking your busy calendar on your Palm
• Re-download a copy (for free) when the copy you had was trashed somehow (try that with a paper book)

People are going to have to face up to the fact that ebooks have (at least) a niche, and they're not going away. They'll change in form and capability, but they're not going anywhere. They're not replacing paper (yet), but paper is not the end-all and be-all of the written word. If it were, you wouldn't be reading /.

Alexlit, one of the first e-lit sites, which started out with an ubercool collaborative filtering book recommendation system and added on from there.

Mind's Eye Fiction, which Alexlit subsequently bought.

Fictionwise, another e-lit publisher, which, if I'm not mistaken, actually has a contract to publish some of Harlan Ellison's works.

Peanut Press, which publishes e-books for Palms & PocketPCs--and was bought by NetLibrary.

Now, granted, most of what these sites deal in is reprints, and save for Peanut Press, they focus more toward short stories than entire books. But they seem to be doing rather well, even in the age of the dot-com crash.
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There are several readers available, many of which are freeware or open source. Http://www.palm-press.com/ has more info, as does
http://www.peanutpress.com and there's even a Slashdot article on it

Don't forget:
http://www.memoware.com/
http://www.tomeraider.com/

www.matthewmiller.net

My father, a clockmaker himself, enjoyed the book enough that he immediately had me look up Dava Sobell's address via an Internet phone book, just so he could thank her for it directly. This startled me at the time, because I had no idea he knew such a thing was possible. :) I haven't seen the A&E version yet, but it stars Jeremy Irons so it must be good. I mean, how could a movie starring Jeremy Irons be bad?
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I think it's dumb that King expects us to pay for different editions. But there is a certain amount of precedent.

Frankly, I think King's set his e-book up to fail, with unrealistic expectations.
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I do agree with you, though, that Palms would be great for RPGs. I recently found that the Fudge RPG kit has been palmdoced--and there's a nice Fudge die-roller out there already . . .
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I think one may now be shipping with IE4+. On both my work machines (W2k, and NT4, both with IE5), I haven't installed any extra java goodies, yet I've had no problems running the Peanut Press java book maker program.

And for those that want it, here's my quick and dirty PeanutPress version.

My two favorite e-book sites, Alexlit and Mind's Eye, both offer e-books for download in a variety of formats--text, HTML, Rocketbook, Palm(Aportis)Doc, and so forth. My third-favorite, Peanut Press, is closed-format, Palm-only, but my Visor is easy enough to read it from. I've read whole novels that way--including A Fire Upon the Deep, which is one of the longest novels you can find these days.

There's also the Peanut Press .pdb format, which is very good for PalmOS or WinCE machines.

For me I would think that the pdf format would be the best since I can transort it to just about any platform. But I am wondering how they enable the copying protection that they mention. I have never heard of any type of copying protection like this available through a pdf file.

The new Acrobat Reader 4.05 includes 'WebBuy', which allows you to sell encrypted PDFs which unlock when the proper code is entered. And of course, you get the code when you buy it online.
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There is... it's called a Palm Pilot. ;)

Seriously though, I just bought this story from Peanut Press last night, and I've bought several other books from them before. It's great, because their books work with either PalmOS or WinCE portables, meaning my Handspring Visor is now a portable library. And the selection is pretty good... it could stand some more stuff, but they're growing rather quickly for such a small establishment.

Now, I just have to wait on Peanut to release their Springboard book collections, which, according to an email I got yesterday, are due out 'in two weeks'.
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According to this review in USA Today, it is a worthwhile read.

To add my own comment, I purchased the text in Palm format this morning from Peanut Press and had no problems with the download or installation (aside from having to free up some space on my Palm V). $2.50 is a small chunk of change if it will encourage other authors to follow suit. I don't have the time to read King's longer novels, but a 66-page short story that I can carry on my Palm V is right up my alley.

If you want to read the King story on your Palm organizer or Windows CE device you can get it from PeanutPress.

I've purchased a lot of ebooks from PeanutPress and have been very happy with them. PeanutPress has the best book reader for the Palm, and they even provide a Java based tool for converting text documents into a format compatible with their reader.

I keep hearing that company x is releasing an electronic book that you can fill up via the Internet. I have yet to see such a device. What I have dealt with is PeanutPress, which is a nice service. They let you buy books online, and download them to your Palm or WinCE device. I've read quite a few books this way. Also there's Audible, which does the books on tape thing for WinCE devices.

There are two big problems with PDA's today, battery power and input. Most of the color devices that chew through batteries use rechargeables, but that still means you need to dock it daily. And I've never seen a great input method for palm-sized devices (though, some good ones, like calligrapher).

Fix those two things and I think you'll see the market change rapidly.

This isn't the only thing Gemstar's done recently that should concern us.

Gemstar also just bought NuvoMedia, the makers of the Rocket eBook platform.

I wonder if they'll be suing Peanut Press next for using an encrypted method of delivering electronic literature?

A client program that can suck an etext out of PG (et al) straight (or nearly directly) into a PDA (palm3 here, etc)

Doesn't Peanut Press already have a system for generating Palm OS and Windows CE files? They offer some for free too. Why not use their system?

I like the idea of taking the original file from ftp or http somewhere and filtering it into the right format on the fly. That way the original document doesn't have to be saved in all sorts of different formats for different users. Thus the idea of putting some program on the server end seems a little farther off. For example, distributing books in a brandnew format is what Microfsoft plans with its Microsoft Reader software--but the files will be locked up too.

Doesn't WebTV (also partly owned by Microsoft) use an on-the-fly filtering system for HTML files, basically converting the file with another style sheet more appropriate for that medium, such as using sans-serif fonts. Doing this on-the-fly would avoid potential copyright problems in distributing the work derived from some other source (even web pages are copyrighted, as your posting here was).

But I don't think the Project Gutenberg files larger than 150KB will display on a WebTV. And I don't see the practicality of downloading such large files to a small screen such as Palm OS or Windows CE. Better to wait until these device manufacturers realize they need to have standard web browsers that can use regular web pages.

As long as we're dreaming, I'd like to suggest that the next movie be based on Peter David's novel Q-in-Law . They wanted to make this into a TNG episode, but there was too much red tape in the way or something; I don't know the whole story. With the two most memorable recurring guests in the franchise around, it would be an absolute blast.

Too bad it'll never happen. Oh well. At least I have the book.

• Handheld "communicators" with which we can reach out and touch anyone on the planet, or be thus reached. Heck, we have cellular phones not much bigger than a mini-box of matches now--way smaller than the original Old Series communicators, and approaching the "wearable badge" size of TNG.
  
• Pneumatic hypodermic syringes.
  
• Handheld textual display and computing devices with touch-sensitive screens, some of which can even tap into our data networks via wireless communication. (It is just so wickedly appropriate to be able to read Q-in-Law on a PADD-like device (my Palm IIIe), courtesy of Peanut Press)
  
• Paperless books (q.v. Peanut Press)...will physical books soon become the rarity that they are in Picard's day?
  
• Hand-held sensory devices (well, okay, they aren't actually here in widespread use in the consumer market yet, but I've heard of some such gadgets that are gradually getting there).

• Handheld "communicators" with which we can reach out and touch anyone on the planet, or be thus reached. Heck, we have cellular phones not much bigger than a mini-box of matches now--way smaller than the original Old Series communicators, and approaching the "wearable badge" size of TNG.
  
• Pneumatic hypodermic syringes.
  
• Handheld textual display and computing devices with touch-sensitive screens, some of which can even tap into our data networks via wireless communication. (It is just so wickedly appropriate to be able to read Q-in-Law on a PADD-like device (my Palm IIIe), courtesy of Peanut Press)
  
• Paperless books (q.v. Peanut Press)...will physical books soon become the rarity that they are in Picard's day?
  
• Hand-held sensory devices (well, okay, they aren't actually here in widespread use in the consumer market yet, but I've heard of some such gadgets that are gradually getting there).

If you don't need portability, use your desktop. If you want the best in functionality (and ease of use) to portability ratio the Palm wins hands down. (palms down?)

Admiral Yamamoto

My dream machine is this - a Pilot like the Palm V, but with an attachable large format screen.

Your dream has been partially realized. Peanut Press's ebooks are for the PalmPilot. The site also provides software tools to make any of your content work on their reader.

As far as higher prices for ebooks, I read -- sorry, can't remember the url -- that it's the paper book publishers that are setting the prices, since they own the rights and just license them to the online retailers.

Last time I checked their site they had a few good sci fi books by Greg Bear and Vernor Vinge.