Slashdot Mirror
Why Nobody Likes E-Books
CybrGuyRSB writes: "In today's Chicago Tribune, there is an interesting article about the total unpopularity of e-books. It seems to partly tie their failure into their copyright protection and briefly discusses the Skylarov case."
"You could download a whole book series from Gnutella in a matter of SECONDS, text would fly through the electronic ether faster than music ever did."
It's already happened. Use your fav file sharing tool (or course, you only use it for legal reasons, ha ha ha ha) and search for e-books or ebook. Not enough? Try some ebook websites/ftps. Try alt.binaries.ebook. Lots of stuff there. I COULD (*cough* could I said) get:
everything Douglas Adams has written
almost every O'Reilly book
All the works of Poe and Shakespeare
Fear and Loathing is Las Vegas
Steal this Book (by Abbie Hoffman) (heh)
Army Manuals
Tons of Lovecraft
Everything by Stephen King and Clive Barker
and about 200 compressed MB of other fun stuff.
Is it legal or right?
Meh.
People have been trading ebooks for a long time. Longer than MP3 trading has been around. Who DID'NT get a copy of The Cucoo's Egg from a BBS?What has the impact been?
Maybe none?
They must have said that about the Light Bulb, The first flying device ever created, and tons of other stuff we now use in every day life.
I unfortunately use Microsoft's reader format .lit, it's an extremely capable format, but proprietary.
The clear text function really makes it easier to read books; I sit up at night and read from my Pocket PC now instead of a paperback book, it had some really cool word search dictionary functions as well.
I recommend you look up the word "proprietary". A format doesn't need to be proprietary to be secure (see encryption algorithms). What you seem to want are "bloated" formats that can't be downloaded in a reasonable amount of time. In my opinion, a more sensible approach would be to price books low enough that fewer people pirate them.
One last thing: the works of William Shakespeare are in the public domain. No amount of copying of his works could possibly be illegal.
I have done this as well -- my Palm IIIxe has carried some of the worlds best literature on it, and I've used iSilo to read it, and loved it. It's especially great to read in low-light (or even in the dark), because you can turn the backlight on and continue reading under the stars without a 400 watt sodium lamp spoiling the atmosphere.
But, I also like my well stocked and well-thumbed library, which I intend to keep adding to. When I'm looking for a book to read in bed, or in the tub, or indeed in the hammock on a lazy spring day, I browse better in the library than on a computer. Plus, I enjoy the feeling of knowing that on my shelves are dozens of friends that I can call on at anytime to whisk my brain away to another place, another time.
My thinking is, put your novel or text online, and let me try it on ebook for a buck or two. If it's particularly good, and worthy of being a long-time friend, give me the opportunity to buy a nice hardbound copy at a reasonable price. You'll get two sales from me! Winner!
Remember those books on demand machines? Here's the perfect opportuninty for authors -- put a better binding and stock in the machine, and I can take my e-book on my Palm to the local Borders and get it printed immediately for $10-15, maybe even with a credit for the ebook I already bought.
The opportunity is there, it will take a brave company to truly embrace the concept in order for it to work. I have no doubt that Random House will *not* be the company to do it. I doubt it will be some failing dot.bomb either -- but some visionary will do it, and will convice a real author to participate, and it will happen.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
I buy around 50 books a year, and I would happily get them in the eversion instead of dead trees if they were no priced as or MORE expensive than hard cover versions. That really hurts when you begin to think about production and distribution costs. Damned if I will up their profit margins by 200-300%
- I can't flip through it.
- I can't dog-ear it, or use my bookmark collection.
- Books smell good and feel good (okay, this is nostalgia).
- Screens hurt my eyes, paper works fine.
- eBooks run out of power, books don't.
- eBooks might have access control, books don't.
- I own a book, not a license to it.
- Books are cheap - I can forget one at the beach and not lose too much cash on it.
- I'm unlikely to be mugged for a book, even on the NYC subway.
- Reading in bed doesn't get in the way of hot sex.
- And finally, with a book, no one can take away my right to read.
What did I miss?(Hold on honey, let me unplug my eBoo - bzzzzzzzzt aaaaaagh!)
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
You like to curl up with regular books on the toilet? Either it's a really comfortable toilet, or you have some interesting bodily habits that are probably tricky to explain...
The consumer loses too much fair use and convenience for the meager gains in search capability. eBooks are a move toward pay-per-veiw, which is a take-away for the consumer.
I used an eBook in a college course. Today, I have no reference for that course. I will avoid courses which rely on ebooks in the future.
It boils down to this. The book business was not broken. This "fixes" it. Most people know a raw deal when they see it.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I appreciate my volumes of O'Reilly, FSF/GNU and 'great big wall of grey' VMS documentation when I need to use the bathroom.
Otherwise, I'd have to purchase a laptop just to take a dump, and risk dropping it in the bowl as well.
I think ebooks will only take off when we have a display medium that compares to good old paper. Some promising technologies are here
I did this when Judge Jackson's findings of fact came out. Works like a charm!
Only if they're a good speller.
Well that leaves me out...
Of course there could be a spell check on the find command. Or wildcards. Or find similar. When I use my Franklin Spelling Ace and mispell a word I gives me a selection of correctly spelled words to choose from. I often use this feature to find out how to spell a word.
With paper, I can scan the previous and next hundred or so entries at a glance.
You're assuming an ebook won't do this. Or that there won't be a browse mode. I see no reason for there not to be, except maybe poor design. Even my aforementioned Franklin allows me to see previous and next dictionary entries. With a full screen ebook I would expect entire dictionary pages to be displayed. I'd also expect to be able to put in the first few letters of a word and go to the page of words beginning with those letters.
For me, ebooks will only work if they improve on the things paper books are good for. I expect that there will be some trade offs but overall ebooks will be better than paper books, in the same way word processing is an improvement over typing.
Steve M
Why would I buy a $200.00 text reader?
Mmmmmmm. Floor pie!
You know, I was gonna buy some steaks for a little barbeque get together I am having soon, and I decided I'd try to save some money and instead of getting Choice or Prime meat, I'd look for Good, or Fair rated meat.. does anyone know where I can find such a thing? Thanks in advance.
Hell, your not even buying electrons, for the most part all the electrons in your computer stay there, when you download a book, its just their servers telling your electrons what configuration to take.
One disc to carry around 18 O'Reilly books! Now, thats ebooks done right.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
The hardware size and copyright bs are definitely two of the main problems holding it back. But, I think eye strain associated with current display technology also comes into play.
I just can't relax staring into an LCD. When E-ink comes out, assuming it really meets the claims they've been doling out, that could change it enough that I'd consider using e-books more.
Life is but a mist upon the horizon.
Actually, they shouldn't treat them the same way paper is treated. The potential of e-books (above and beyond uses of paper books) is
1. easy to search
2. easy to cut and paste favorite passages
3. does not require much storage space
4. is easily portable
And those are only a few of the potential advantages over paper books. Instead of using these things as a selling point, a fear of illicit trading (which would not happen if the e-books were priced reasonably - i.e. $1 per book maybe) they have not only locked out the potential advantages, but they also lock out many of the traditional uses.
Don't just complain - DO something about it!
Hmm. O'Reilly Press doesn't seem to have any issue with this.
e-books don't smell like old books do. Most of the mystery stuff that you read, are based on old books kept in some corner of a library.... In the case of a e-library, the only aging you can probably see is the version difference. We might have gone from MS word doc Ver 1 to MS Word Doc Ver 10000000.
I am an atheist, thank God!
I read a LOT of books on my Palm, but I don't pay for proprietary, access-controlled expensive e-books. I convert texts from Project Gutenberg, download freely available texts and e-books from other sites, get free books from the Baen Free Library....
...and once in a great while I buy un-protected books from Baen's Webscriptions service. I refuse to buy access-controlled e-books that lock into a particular machine or limit my usage. When I buy a book, I buy a book, I don't license software.
Oddly enough, I haven't run out of books to read, nor am I likely to anytime soon; my backlog is huge. I also still buy hardbacks heavily (I have cut way back on paperbacks because they are too fragile for the long-term--I always end up replacing them in a few years.)
Don't give financial support to the publishers who come up with schemes you don't like (access-control, proprietary hardware requirements, etc)--i.e, don't buy their e-books. Support the publishers who do things the way you like (in my case, Baen Books). Publishers will pay attention to what sells and what doesn't, or they will go out of business. Remember why copy-protection on PC software, which was once ubiquitous, mostly went away? (Until recent attempts to revive it...) Because people wouldn't buy it if there was an alternative!
Publishers: if you make it a major hassle to use your product, people won't bother and will go to your competitor.
---dragoness
I've heard the guy who started Book Club was born in an asylum and only sleeps for two hours a night.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
There's a real easy solution to this.
It's called use an open format!
If everyone published in PostScript, or even PDF, or just opened the reader so that different interpreters could be loaded onto the same platform, there wouldn't be this problem.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
that the author is correct. Just think about it for a moment. How is it easier to read for the eye, reading from a computer screen or a book. a screen is always harsher to the eye than paper. Personaly i like to read my books when i'm laying down. the computer takes this away, unless if i nail my screen on the ceeling. ....
the other point i would like to make is that, people if they are going to spend money to buy e-books have better to make sure tthey don't loose those books. I mean just look at how many people are formating their hard drive every 6 months. do you think that anybody likes to buy the same book over and over again? i sure don't. When i buy a book i like to have it on a book shelf. maybe i wanna read that book 10 years after the day i bought it. I'm sure i'm going to change hardware at least 3 times within the next 10 years. I'm going to have to call adobe every time i change hardware to let me copy MY copy of the book on my new machine?
just pondering and wondering
The Association of American Publishers, however, continues to hail the government's action, saying Sklyarov's software "facilitates theft, and makes it less likely that e-books will soon become a popular reading format."
The association of American Lockmakers, however, continues to hail the government's ban on paperclips, saying that they "facilitate lock-picking," and make it less likely that doorknobs will soon become a popular entry mechanism.
This is under the understanding, of course, that electronic encryption is at the same level of evolution as locks were about 70 years ago. Don't blame the lockpick just because he can pick a crappy lock, blame the lock company for making a crappy lock!
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
Holy smokes! That's cool. The Free Library actually had books I would like to read, and the Webscriptions deal is pretty cool too. Four books a month, in a plain text format, for $10. That's a deal.
I just went from e-book skeptical to very enthusiastic about the format. I think that it's time to get me a palm pilot so that I can read these away from my computer.
Thanks for the info.
It's the Kill the messenger mentality, and it comes from the organization who has a member who thinks that reading an eBook version of "Alice in Wonderland" out loud is a violation of the copyright!
I long for the good ol' days when doing the right thing all of the time was enought to keep a person out of prision. I had to explain to my wife that taking a picture of my grand-daughter bare butt on the rug would get us put in prision for a very long time and those pictures her mother took of her could too. Now I cann't read out loud to my grand-kids from an e-book
Shakespeare was wrong, Don't kill all of the lawyers, leave one alive so we can watch him starve to death!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
IDG (in particular, their Dummies Press imprint) regularly does dual-publishing of several of thir titles. Practically every Linux distribution does dual-publishing of their manuals. (RedHat and Mandrake not only publish their manuals in MAN page format, they also publish the manuals in HTML....in several languages.) Even (of all people) Microsoft Press has taken to dual-publishing (the *Running* series and the *Step-By-Step* series are almost entirely dual-published). The thing is, not everyone has a Palm or PocketPC (or equivalent); further, there are still some places where neither is appropriate. In these situations, there is still no substitute for words on paper.
We've gone from writing words on huge tablets of stone to etching microscopic paths on electrically charged (albeit purer) stones. Not all that far off, it's just that the infrastrucure they're putting in place is radically new. You have to really love books to bend that far over and give up your rights for the publishing industry. Somehow that goatse.cx guy is appropriate here.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
> Are we all supposed to spend a large portion of our lives catching up on reading stuff written so long ago? Where does it stop? How far back do we have to go to be considered an intellectual? Why does it matter? Why do you believe that everyone should derive pleasure from the same sort of subject matter or author?
Well, I can't speak for the original AC poster, but my own take is: there's nothing wrong with reading new books (I do it all the time). But at the same time, having all those great old books freely available is a wonderful thing; and they definitely aren't all the "same sort of subject matter or author." Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, War of the Worlds, Huckleberry Finn, Heart of Darkness... lots of fine reading out there ripe for the pickin'.
Quite simply, reading a piece of text onscreen and reading words printed on a page are two *totally* different things. I have a eCopy of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy on my computer, aswell as a paperback version on my bookshelf, and 19 times out of 20 I'd rather go for the paperback. Why? Because reading a book isn't just putting information, words, descriptions etc, into your head, its an experience in and of itself. I can't wrap a blanket around myself and snuggle up with a good text file, can I? I can't *thumb* through a text file looking for my favourite paragraph and get distracted by another piece that can keep me enthralled for hours. I can't throw my text file into my gym bag to show my frields on the way back. What I'm trying to say is that a book isn't just words; its something which cannot be simply replaced by pixels on a computer screen; an actual real experience.
Yeah, too bad they don't look like real books.
Now, if only they were written in an easy-to-use, consistent, archiveable, open typesetting format like, oh, I don't know, could it be... TeX?
Seriously, they should set up some simple macros and produce documents in TeX format. Or maybe LaTeX, since there are exporters to make plain crApSCII text out of sweet, sweet LaTeX.
Ahem. My point: TeX r0x0rz.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
why bother with a seperate machine for your ebook files, and why have them in a differnt format at all?
just convert them all to .txt or some other word format.
hell i use my old 486 50 mhz laptop (with a hefty 4 megs of ram, and a large 8" b/w screen) for reading all the slashdot articles. i save the article as a text file to a floppy pop it in my laptop, and whala, instant E-BOOK. i have M$office on it, and im all set!(it was given to me just 5 months ago)
btw i am a geeky 15 year old, and my favorite game is Continuum (replica of SubSpace... avalable at http://subspace.net)
Why would you want to buy an ebook when you could buy a paper copy? Because you CAN'T buy most books in paper. That's why. 99% of what's been published in the last 100 years is out of print because paper publishing is incredibly inefficient and not very cost-effective. Always has been. And getting even more so as the cost of paper continues to escalate. I too prefer paper books for the 1% of the books available in paper, but for all of the rest I'd rather read them in ebook format than not read them at all. Another reason would be the simple concern for the planet and the desire to preserve what few trees we have left. And another reason would be to provide literature and textbooks to the billions of children and other folks who can't afford paper ones. That's why!!! :)
Remember everyone hated trains when they first came out and people said they'd rather travel by horse-driven cart than a train. But then a new generation grew up who didn't see it as a problem and actually appreciated the fact that it could get them where they wanted to a lot faster and a lot more comfortably.
You going to give a cite for that?
The only eBooks I'm interested in are those from Project Gutenberg.
Last summer, out in the woods with the new popup camper, it was very enjoyable to reread Huckleberry Finn (which I do every few years) whenever I could grab a few minutes. I carry it anyway (work, spreadsheets, phone #s, etc.) so I might as well load up a book or three for those spare moments.
I purchased and read all the installments of Stephen King's The Plant (first time I've ever read anything by him). I'm looking forward to the conclusion of the work (if he ever decides that the 6-figure _profit_ he made from the early portions justifies writing some more).
Specialized readers? NO! Useful and/or entertaining documents? SURE!
I carry around the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, FIFA Soccer Rules, Unleashing the Ideavirus!, and others ...
Having the exact quote at your fingertips is sometimes quite handy ...
For most purposes, 355/113 is close enough.
For some things perhaps. Not all. An ebook library would take up much less space. Which is a problem I currently face in my one bedroom condo.
It allows someone to move through the book faster (mainly reference books, like Java in a Nutshell), ...
I suspect that someone using the find or search command would more quickly locate info then someone using the index or table of contents on a paper book, with the discrepency increasing with the size of the book. Exceptions might be searching for illustrations.
That said I much prefer paper books to todays ebooks. The are numerous problems with the technology (poor screens, clunkly units), the software (limited catalog, lack of standards), the legal environment (DMCA), and the lack of respect the companies have for the consumers (copy protection, greed, thinking everyone is a pirate).
But the problems all seem correctable. And I look forward to the day when book readers are as cheap as gameboys, my entire library is available to me where ever I go, and I can back up my books (ever drop one in a pool, leave one on a plane?).
Steve M
"Enthusiasm was stoked by an Andersen Consulting study done for the Association of American Publishers. It concluded that by 2005, 10 percent of book sales, or $2.3 billion a year, would be electronic." --I always knew that Andersen was full of shit... Leave it up to Andersen to fabricate a $5,000,000.00 solution to a $.05 problem!
"...[treat] every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?"
I can't believe some of the nonsense I'm reading. Digital paper? Who the hell needs digital paper when the old analog variety is right here, right now, and has a terrific support structure behind it?
Ebooks are like trying to jam the Fifth Symphony into a music box: pointless and redundant.
Sometimes progress is not the answer to everything.
instead of every book me and my family has ever read taking up whole walls with shelves, I could have a microdrive about the size of a matchbox.
most of my reading is done from a computer monitor anyhow. But then again, I haven't tried reading a novel this way (unless you count How-Tos)
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
>
> This is an argument that courts will listen to (hopefully at least). EFF lawyers, write this down. It is the perfect analogy, as far as I can tell.
Agreed.
(And DMCA arguably goes so far as to criminalize plans for photocopiers...)
The tie-ins with Russia - the former USSR required licenses for posession of photocopiers and printing presses, with heavy fines and penalties for owners of such material - are not just ironic, but highly appropriate, given the First Amendment implications of DMCA.
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.
But consider how many manuscripts are submitted to publishers. I'd guess there are at least 10 for every one that gets published. I'd also bet that at least half the rejected ones are utter garbage. Publishers hire many editors to deal with these. And they really do have to at least look at them all, since, otherwise, they'd never discover new authors.
In a world without publishers, would you want to have to start reading 10 books in order to find the one that's half-decent? Do you want to read 200 pages of a book, and then discover that one of the chapters is missing?
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
If while reading on the throne you run out of TP, the already-read pages of a cheap paperback are very handy. Your ebook display device is a little too expensive to be used that way.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
The article missed the boat by not looking at O'Reilly. They talked about horrible Amazon sales rankings. A more clueful reporter might have noticed that the unprotected Perl CD bookshelf has a sales ranking of under 1500.
The cake is a pie
Sure Its great that he was referred to as a "grad student" and not a hacker, but take a look at what the article implies about the lecture he gave:
To my knowledge he didnt WRITE a program, only pointed out that Adobe was using ROT13 as their only encryption
This implies that he was advocating cracking your E-books. Thats just flat out Bull. He wasn't trying to give anyone anything, besides the knowledge that E-book encryption is a joke. Read his lecture.
Sure they didnt call him a hacker, but they might as well have.
1) You do not own the ebook. You own nothing when you purchase one except "the right" to read the contents. You have no physical material to prove that you own the product.
2) You do not own the right to resell your right to read the content of the book which you do not own. You cannot trasfer this right to another. You cannot legally circumvent this. In fact, in today's IP intesne climate, you are worse than murderer, child molestor, or rapist, if you do in fact transfer the ability (not the right) to read the contents of the ebook.
3) The cost of ebooks, for something with no physical component and no resale rights, is as much or more than a paperback.
4) The resolution of printed paper is still far and away superior to that of ebooks. Though this will eventually go away. However, right now, it is a compelling drawback for many (such as myself).
5) Physical book can take a lot of physical abuse. The format is very robust, and inexpensive to replace if something goes wrong.
6) If a book dies, it doesn't kill every book sitting on the same shelf. If your eBook reader dies, which is far more likely than a fire large enough to destroy all of your books, then what do you do? You have no ownership of what it contained except for a few pieces of paper claiming that you have the "rights" to such and such materials. It is not only cheap, but it is convenient to replace lost or stolen physical books. For ebooks, at the moment, I'm sure they'd require a retinal scan before deigning to speak to you.
All said and done, the highway to ebook utopia is currently a game trail through a dense jungle. A jungle of IP paranoia.
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
my question is, aren't we then dumbing down the purpose of research in the first place, if we make it that easy to access the materials that one used to have to really dig for? how many students are going to take the format for its intended purpose rather than finding shortcuts and lazy ways of turning out the same quality of work in less time? how many professors are going to then require even more work for a course, since the hours spent in the library are no longer spent looking through volumes and volumes of dusty manuscripts without indexes?
for some of you, i'll state the obvious, that most of those questions are asked tongue-in-cheek....
and as far as ebooks for pleasure reading, forget it. research is one thing, curling up on the couch with a good hard-cover novel is quite another.
"Why is all this crap here?" -- 4-year-old Brandon
If I bought an e-book, I'd feel like I've paid for a nuisance, since I need to keep backups etc. not to mention the fact that in 5 years I'll almost certainly not have the device to read it. So it's basically like paying for a limited time of access, which simply doesn't seem worth it.
I read plenty of stuff off of my computer screen, but most of it is internet content, which is different in that I don't pay for it and I don't need to worry about storing it.
No, I've never used pay-per-view, and I'd feel silly if I did.
They're made for PUBLISHERS -- Didn't you read the article? They're just trying to stay alive, man.
Just fightin' off the day when somebody realizes that, if the Net is going to have an impact on literature, it will probably be related to its ability to allow AUTHORS, SMALL PUBLISHERS and LIBRARIES more options and latitude. They really don't want us to think of "publishing" as a market driven by Art--which is probably why they call it something as dry as "publishing"--because then it would seem really fucked up to have it DOMINATED by the same scuzzy handful of icky companies that pretty much dominates everything. But hey, we let it go on with music...
Of COURSE the e-book isn't doing anything for most readers; the suits sitting around in the boardrooms probably didn't think of a "human reader" more than twice as they excitedly ejaculated their e-book into existence. They were thinking about two things: "How can we keep control of all these books, when the 'Net is going to make publishing so much easier," and "How can we make more money?" End thought process. That's it.
The readers, by contrast, while some of them MIGHT be interested in the ocassional e-book (say for convenience's sake) are on the whole much more involved in issues like Quality, Artful Expression, Low Cost and NonCensoredness -- none of which are high on Random House's list of Things To Exploit For $$$.
Bow down before the one you serve, assholes. This is why small businesses (or, to go global, large networks of small businesses) are better than these 1984-ish behemoth corporations every time: A local business, run by human beings, often makes a priority out of something besides CA$H.
-ST
So help me, if these people piss me off one more time I'm getting my set of encyclopedias and hitting the photocopier!
My 3 beefs with E-books are:
1. Ease of use/reading, so much easier from paper than from a screen, better detail, no power problems, etc. etc.
2. Owning vs licensing. When the book-equivalent of RIAA makes us pay for each use.
3. Finally, in this day of $8+ mass market paperbacks, $20+ (or 2X that for "technical"
works) trade paperbacks and $30+ for hardbound...
why do E-books cost so much? Why doesn't an E-book not cost a $1-2 instead of $8..$10..$15?
Dr. Frank J. Nagy Fermilab Computing Division Authentication and Directory Services Group
Ebooks have failed primarily because they provide an inconvienent way to access content online as opposed to a convienent way to access the same information offline, without adding any value to the product.
People like books. I don't care how wired you are, a paperback book will keep you busy for hours without the need for batteries or rechargers or crashing operating systems. Its a medium that has stood the test of time and its unlikely to be replaced entirely for a long LONG time.
So offer to those people the option to read the exact same text on a screen thats hard on the eyes and needs batteries, then throw into that the fact that they're gonna have to read fast so they get it all in in their 10 hour limit and screw around with publishers so their can play their games to prevent any IP theft. They'll sooner go to a book faire and buy the damn thing for 50 cents and be done with it. And what have we accomplished?
Ebooks have an opportunity to offer a more fulfilling multimedia experience. I've seen fan fiction sites on the web that have pictures and play music while you're reading that matches the setting and mood of the story as you read through it. Publishers could have drawn quite a following from this, but instead they choose to quibble over how many people are going to steal their precious works to even bother noticing that nobody is reading them anyways.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I love ebooks, but they should be much cheaper then a paper book. You can't give them to people you can only read them yourself. You can't resale them. That's all fine but it makes the value of the ebook less then the paper book. Plus there is less cost in making the books -less resources, less distribution cost, less warehousing cost etc. If the book sellers priced ebooks in a reasonable way, then they would take off. I talked with peanut books and they tell me that some publishers do price the ebook to them at the same cost as the paper back version, but most price it at the cost of the hardback and some price it higher than the hardback price. That's dumb. They should obviously cost much less than a paper back.
I can agree with sentiments that ebooks with copy-control are lame. Thats why I really like Fictionwise (http://www.fictionwise.com). They offer all their etexts at extremely reasonable prices (most are around $1 to purchase). Additionally, and this is the biggest plus for me, all of their texts are downloadable in a ide variety of formats: .PDF, .PDB for Palm Readers, and more. I love the fact that I don't have to limit myself to one lame reader program that only runs on select platforms to read my books. Further, they allow me to download any of the formats at any time from the My Bookshelf section of their web site.
It's a quite convenient way to get some new short stories (my favorite form of fiction) or even something longer. I check back with them once a month or so to find new stories to put on my Visor Prism.
For anyone frustrated with the copy control and invasiveness of ebooks, I'd recommend checking out Fictionwise. Pretty much the only thing I dont like about them is they are mostly science fiction/fantasy. They have some other works on there, but by and large it is sci-fi or fantasy. They do have a lot of great stuff on there though, and they offer a wonderful selection of Hugo/Nebula award winners (including a selection that have won both awards).
>>>The tie-ins with Russia - the former USSR required licenses for posession of photocopiers and printing presses, with heavy fines and penalties for owners of such material - are not just ironic, but highly appropriate, given the First Amendment implications of DMCA.
This gets better and better! And don't forget that the DMCA also criminalizes informing people where to get the plans for the photocopiers . . .
Until we get some really good flat panel displays I don't think that I'll be getting into e-books. Paper is much easier on the eyes. And e-books are too expensive. I prefer to get my books from "Half-Priced Books" Great deals all around.
-- Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
"A Russian graduate student named Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested"
I was happy to see they used the term "graduate student" and not the ever to popular term "hacker" in their article.
The books should cost LESS than normal books. Why? Because it does cost less to make an e-book - you are just shoving bits, instead of printing, binding and distributing. Additionally people need a REASON to switch to E-books, making them cheaper might be a good incentive.
I personally think that this is the biggest point on the list. I own a Rocket E-Book (now owned by RCA) and am constantly put off on how expensive eBooks are. Dammit! If an eBook is going to cost me the same price as the hard cover, why the hell shouldn't I buy the hard cover? Worse yet, if I'm going to have to pay that much for that book, I'll probably just go check it out of the library instead. Then the book publisher will get no money from me. Currently there really is no incentive for me to purchase eBooks instead of regular books.
I do feel that I should mention that not all eBooks are outrageously priced. However, the majority of the books that are reasonably priced are usually the classics, many of which are freely available from Project Guttenburg.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
I consider myself someone who reads lots of books, and I completely disagree with this statement. I think the people who say they like the feel of a book in there hand have never tried any type of e-reader. They weight of enough books to last me for a two week trip is not pleasant. I would much rather put a few books on my Palmpilot, which I have with anyways, than carry around an extra few pounds of paper.
I have been reading books on my Palmpilot for several years now, and I am completely addicted to it. I even have a Palm III with the old low contrast screen, so I would probably like it more if I moved to a V or 500 with a proper display.
I think people who don't like reading e-books have never tried it. (This is making the assumption that the books these people want to read are available in an usable format. I can completely understand people not wanting to read e-books because they have no interest in 100+ year old stuff from the Gutenberg project or whatever annoying thing the publishers have decided to make available.)
Actually, I have a better idea......include a secured copy of the e-version with every book. Companies put all kinds of CD's, msot of which are useless. Why not put the exact same thign so if you want to carry 3 UNLEASHED! books you don't get a hernia! Plus you get the same experience, but you don't have to carry the freakin book around all day. OH, Microsoft Reader with clear type looks fuzzy to me.
Gorkman
"That's not a bug, it's a feature!"
- Some luzer marketroid who thinks copy control constitutes value-add.
I've actually been thinking about this. I looked at some of the comments and downloaded iSilo. To test it out I took the "Learning vi" book from the UNIX cdrom bookshelf and used isilo to convert it. Without any images it became a 167K file for reading using iSilo. Pretty damn cool if you ask me.
I'm going to buy a copy of the iSilo reader now and go to town with my fav HTML references.
I suggest you check it out.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Yes, definitely. _The_Wind_Up_Bird_Chronicle_ is an excellent book. I don't care much for his recent "romantic" books, though.
They were wrong. Shame on them... and shame on everyone who actually BELIEVED their ridiculous con-job. They're SUPPOSED to be harder on the eyes... they're on a COMPUTER SCREEN for God's sake! Who in their right mind would expect them to be better than print!? People who don't think and who swallow everything the media feeds them, that's who. This marketing hype has people expecting things that just won't happen. People are disappointed, and thus articles like this one get written.
The technology simply doesn't exist for ebooks to replace print, but that doesn't mean that ebooks are a dud. Ebooks are just another format for data with benefits and drawbacks vs. other formats for the same data. It's like computer images... comparing ebooks to print is like comparing a mid-quality JPEG with a high-quality Bitmap. With JPEG you accept lesser quality in exchange for smaller file size. With an ebook, you accept inconvenience and lesser quality in exchange for... what? What do you get in return? You are SUPPOSED to get a lower price, but that isn't happening because the media kept pushing the "CD vs. cassette" analogy that just doesn't apply. Retailers priced and marketed their ebooks according to the wrong set of assumptions, and thus those products don't move. Then they came out with special over-priced ebook readers that were a good 10 years ahead of the screen technology needed to make them viable... or even tolerable!
Ebooks should have been marketed as an ultra-low cost format so folks could get CHEAP books that they can either read on a screen or print out on their own paper. Instead, they were marketed and priced as being equivalent or even superior to print books. That's a ludicrous lie, and THAT'S why the market is tanking.
A better way to look at it is with Hardback vs. Paperback books. With paperbacks, you pay a lower price for the same words... but in a different package. You get a package that is smaller and more portable... but with smaller print and less sturdy construction. Now add ANOTHER format: Ebooks. You get those SAME words in a less-portable, less readable, (depending on your hardware) format... a format that you would expect to pay a whole lot less for. For this reason, ebooks should be priced MUCH less than hardbacks and considerably less than paperbacks. How much less? You tell me... ? Really... I'm a writer and I want to know how much the market will tolerate. How much would YOU pay for your favorite writer's new work in ebook form, if the hardback was around $20.00? How much for that computer manual that you want/need if it was in ebook vs. a $60.00 softcover?
Just my two cents.
DARK ICON
http://www.darkicon.com
http://www.infinitemultimedia.com
Dark Icon
we'll have to conform to a spelling standard! probably controlled by that power hungry church!
The spelling standard was much later....
The basic problem with the more modern ebooks is actually that they are tightly controlled. We are not including in this discussion Project Gutenberg, the whitepapers published by the NSA on network security, or freely available technical scecifications. These things do not have the same problems and can be printed out. We are only talking about ebooks published with the idea of making a profit by charging for the right to read them. This is the business that is dying, not the low-cost free distribution that some other entities have used.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
his little device...
It needs a light source. where am I going to get a light source thats always on?
we'll have to conform to a spelling standard! probably controlled by that power hungry church!
They're expensive!
they make my eyes hurt!
we'll have to pay a lot of money for one, and if I drop it in the mud it will be ruined!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The exact same article ran in the August 6 LA Times.
I've referenced it a couple times here already.
The Vonnegut comment at the end is great!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Pay $20 for an electronic book that:
Can only be read on the one device
Can't be loaned to a friend, unless you give them the device too
Can't be resold to a used book store
Won't necessarily be readable 5 years from now if the technology has changed.
Or Pay $20 for the hardcopy version of the book that:
Has none of those drawbacks and
Depending on the hardware, is probably lighter in weight
I would gladly pay $5-7 for the electronic version of a $20 hardcopy book, but I sure won't pay the same price for a 'limited license' version of the same material. It costs money to print, bind, pack, ship, unpack, sort and shelve a hardcopy book. It doesn't cost that much to run an ecommerce website (based on the roughly 2.836 x 10^9 SPAM mail messages I receive each month).
If the publishers would make ebooks affordable, then people wouldn't be so anxious to pirate them. I'm a voracious reader, I can go through 5 pocket novels in a week, easy. Since most new novels are at least $6 (and I've them seen as high as $8) I have to limit myself to shopping at used book stores, and whatever fiction e-books I can scrounge from the newsgroups, otherwise I'd have to turn to a life of crime to be able to afford my reading habit (ok, that's a slight exageration).
People want to pirate books for the same reason they pirate music or satellite TV, it's so damn expensive in the first place.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Which goes back to my first claim that proprietary formats are useless.
The formats themselves may be excellent(take PDF for example) but the commercialization of formats makes the company into just another money hungry corporation.
Long live ASCII, down with DOC!
hrrm.
I've pirated a few e-books, mostly books on economics and marketing. But I've found a new and better source of information (that's not 600 pages long, but condensed). Sparknotes.com, they're a free Cliff's Notes (ish) website. So far, they're the only good source of business education literature online (you'd be surprised at how few sites there are). Whether I need info on Macroeconomics, or a Chapter by Chapter summary of The Jungle, they're my only source. By the way, no I'm not affiliated in any way with Sparknotes.com.
You forgot to add that if you drop them, or sit on them, or the publisher goes bust, books still work.
DMCA, jackass.
What you seem to want are "bloated" formats that can't be downloaded in a reasonable amount of time.
That's a stupid design, I don't want that. I'm merely pointing out how small books are in comparison to the binary files we're used to. As for proprietary, that word may not be the best description, I merely used it because that's the reality of the situation. I highly doubt any publisher is going to accept an open solution, they'll buy it from a 3rd party company that will make certain assurances. The core of my argument is that this is not necessarly a bad thing.
One last thing: the works of William Shakespeare are in the public domain. No amount of copying of his works could possibly be illegal.
I know, I looked up the file sizes online to make sure that you could indeed fit the complete works in a file smaller than a standard mp3. With compression (16:1) you definately could. I just needed a suitably thick tome for my comparison.
I agree about your points above.
:)
I bought a Rocket Ebook about two years back, and I love the thing. Recently I got a Visor, and I use that as a bookreader sometimes, also, although its much easier to read on the REB.
Its very convienent to be able to do things like reorient a book, hold it and turn pages in one hand, read anywhere, in any kind of light, be able to bookmark and annotate, and then search on those bookmars and annotations. I can hit a button and bring up a dictionary. I can search on any word or phrase in a book. You can carry multiple books with you. Try carrying the whole Wheel of Time series, and Websters dictionary around with you the next time you go on vacation. I can guarantee you wont be happy
I think that copyrighting, or trying to make a "secure ebook" is fruitless. I have serveral hundred, if not over a thousand, books that I have downloaded from the net, various news groups, or gnutella. All someone needs is a scanner with some OCR software. Are they going to make all that illegal, too? If I wanted to, I could print out that secure pdf, and rescan it. Sure, it might be a pain in the ass, but it can be done, no problem.
Its a shame to see ebooks getting a bad rap, mostly because of security issues, and what I think is the fact that the publishing companies dont know how to market an ebook. Why not put a kiosk in borders where you can buy ebooks? It could burn a cd while you wait! What would it take, two whole minutes? Swipe your card, pick your books, and burn them. You would be out the door before someone who was waiting on line to buy a paper book.
I love my ebooks, and actually find paper books to be not as desireable (plus, they take up all that space!). That is just my opinion, and Im sure plenty of people agree, and plenty disagree.
They did. Problem was, thos "other business models" prominently included giving away free services.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
They're a pain in the ass to lug around. I want something I can treat as a disposible product. Something I can jam in my backpack and not have to worry about it's safety.
Power management is also a pain in the ass. I don't want to have to prepare to read a book, I just want to open it to page X and immediately start reading.
Lastly - resolution. Read a traditional paper book and an ebook for about the same amount of time and you'll definately be able to tell how the ebook is hard on the eyes.
I am Providence.
Reading that 'old' stuff you're likely to find and appreciate new things in the 'new' stuff you read. Because the author did. It never hurt to have a wider frame of reference.
-
Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
The problem with most e-books is that the format they are published in is quite literally a value subtracted format. You can't share them, you can't market them up, and the FBI is likely to show up at your door if you develop a tool to read them on your Linux box.
Plain text and its derivatives HTML, XML, etc. don't have any of these drawbacks, and they have considerable upside as well, like being able to use grep and find to search your collection of books. If e-books were in a text-based format then annotations, bookmarks, and a whole list of other physical book benefits would be taken care of automatically (Emacs, for example, would allow you to mark up your texts in ways you never dreamt of with a paper book). You would also maintain all of your fair use rights.
Publishers, on the other hand, would lose a fair amount of control.
Because of this most publishers (besides O'Reilly) are not interested in plain text e-books because they think that people will just steal them. Maybe they are right too. All I know is that e-books are not going to take off as long as these issues are not sorted out. People are not likely to purchase e-books as long as the format is closed, and publishers are unlikely to release more books in open formats for fear that people will just steal their work.
It sort of makes me wonder how well O'Reilly's electronic manuals sell.
As long as we have the right NOT to buy them (which we still do, last time I checked... *knocks on wood*) let people make all the stupid, encumbering, doomed to fail proprietary formats they want to make.
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
Add to that this: the "book" as we know it has been around for over 500 years.
There's a reason for that. In fact, there's many reasons for that. Me, I've got 2000 books in my house. Sure, I've got a 40 gig hard drive, too -- in fact three 40 gig hard drives -- and could easily fit my books on one (probably less than 1) of those hard drives.
But why? Why would I want to sit and stare at a computer screen or Palm or PocketPC or iPaq or Rocket eBook reader or whatever is the gadget du jour?
I actually enjoy the physical book -- the paper, the way it smells, the way I can use it, abuse it, tote it, and carry it around. I also like the fact that I won't be arrested if, say, I decide to backwards engineer it -- if I take a peep at the binding, wonder if the leaves are glued, and even spot a couple pages that haven't been cut.
I can't do that with an eBook. I can't do that because Adobe and Microsoft will make sure I end up in jail. They'll claim that my "crime" is nearly as bad as murder -- more so, in fact, because I'm infringing on their "intellectual property" which, as we all know, is more important than anything else these days.
Yeah, eBooks rock, all right. Go ebooks. Wonderful.
And all these "screen reading" software that Microsoft is pioneering? Yeah, it's wonderful. Sit me down in front of a bigass monitor with Microsoft's Reader software. Software, by the way, which hasn't been updated in nearly a year. Software which is slow, buggy as hell, and won't even let me "register" more than twice.
Oh yeah, ebooks rock all right. Let's see. Don't get me started. How about the one time I decided to purchase an ebook? I filled out all the forms -- nearly had to give my driver's license number -- and then submitted all my credit card information only to -- get this! -- get a 500 Server Error when it came time to issue me the "digital verification" that I then had to "click" on then RESUBMIT just to prove that I'm who I said I was and that my reader was registered.
Love it! Let's see, now how does that compare with this:
Live in Ann Arbor (or any good college town with lots of bookstores). Go to Dawn Treader Books (or any good used bookstore piled high with thousands of books). Buy book. Buy another book. Bring book up to counter. Chat with clerk who says, "Hey, if you're into Thomas Pynchon, have you tried Gaddis?" "No," say I. "You recommend him?" "Oh yeah," says clerk who, within seconds, drops a copy of _The Recognitions_ and _JR_ on top of the nicely dog eared copies of _V_ and _Gravity's Rainbow_ that I'd already decided to purchase.
So exit I do, ambling down Liberty Street (or whatever street in your college town of choice that is lined with your used bookstores of choice) with my newly purchased used books. I can read these books anywhere. I can underline them. I can lend them to my friends. And -- imagine this! -- no matter what I do to these books -- read them, underline them, xerox a few pages from them for a presentation -- the FBI DOES NOT GET INVOLVED!
Now, compare that with digital books. Compare that with encryption, validation, verification. You tell me which is the better deal for readers?
Now, don't get me wrong. Maybe ebooks have their uses. You're Pre-Med, say, and can get a semester's worth of ebooks on a CDROM. Maybe that's a good deal. Or you're a law student and can get what you need a couple CDROMS and don't have to scout out estate sales of dead lawyers just so you can build a library of outdated law books. All right, fair enough.
But for book lovers -- and actual readers -- readers who like to discover an old Modern Library edition of Thackeray that was used by someone in 1941 who dated the book and even stuck a few interesting notes on the margin -- there's nothing to compare with actual, phsyical text.
My own opinion -- after years of haunting used bookstores and 'Friends of the Library' sales -- is this: that people who claim that ebooks are the best thing to come around since, er, the invention of the book are not readers. They simply don't read. They like to have the books. Or they like to have the electronic versions of books that they've read (I mean, really, how many copies of Joe Haldeman's 'Forever War' or Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation Trilogy' do you really need? If you check out the ebook groups on usenet, these are really the only books traded, posted, and pirated -- Haldeman, Asimov, some Sterling, Gibson (of course), and Heinlein. And the same pirated texts are posted day after day after day after day after day. But that's not the point, is it?)
I'm already carrying around my iPaq anyway, you Luddite. I'd like to deal with an e-book the same way I already deal with my combination electronic rolodex/ photo viewer /data base /media player /GPS /avant go /audio book player/ iPaq. An e-book is no more an additional burden to this set-up then it is a a burden to need a light source and my eyeglasses to read a paper book.
Reading this article, it's clear that publishers are blind as to why eBooks are not popular.
The Association of American Publishers, however, continues to hail the government's action, saying Sklyarov's software "facilitates theft, and makes it less likely that e-books will soon become a popular reading format."
The tighter locks on eBooks is killing the format. eBooks aren't offering anything to the consumer they really want. Publishers are the ones who stand with the most to gain if they can get us to accept it.
A while back there was an article about an eBook version of "Alice in Wonderland". If you read the user agreement, it said that you may not give the eBook to others to read, and you may not read it out loud. You'd be a copyright violator for reading a book to a child, or lending a book to a friend. The absurdity is incomprehensible.
The current model in which the industry is trying to fashion eBook distribution is anti-consumer. Because digital distribution is a new frontier for a media format, copyright holders are trying to create their utopia in which fair use rights are obsolete.
Why would I want to buy a format that gives me less rights and less benefits than the printed version?
I don't think that "nobody likes ebooks". But, right now most people prefer real books.
.chm format and the other was a .pdf.
I have to confess that I like real books better for most of the reasons posted. But, recently I have purchased two tech books that came with CD-ROMS that included an e version of the book. One was Microsoft's
I think that this is a fabulous idea and I hope that it catches on. For a reasonable price I bought the good old fashioned book that I like so much and at the same time I got the ebook that I could read anywhere. But, more importantly, I can do full text searches of the ebook. That's a lot quicker than finding something in the paper book.
I think that all books should come this way, a nice classic text, and a CD-ROM with the etext.
Legal? Almost certianly not. Right? Well, that will depend on who you ask!
I know I used to get stuff off BBS's a LONG time ago... but that was a different world. Part of the reason it had little to no impact is simply because BBS's weren't nearly as prevalent in society as the Internet is. Access to information... and pirated books... is WAY too easy!
On the flip-side, I see arguments on both sides. I recently downloaded the 5 books of The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy in HTML format, converted to an Ebook and dumped to my PDA (yes, a CE-based device, more's the pity) for reading! Now, the first reason I did this is because I was going on a lot of VERY long flights for which taking the entire 5 books just wasn't practical. I also OWN all 5-books in the series... and a bound edition of the first 4 before Mostly Harmless was released. Did I do something illegal or wrong? I downloaded material I already owned... was that illegal? Would it have been any different if I'd used a scanner and OCR software to convert the book to an Ebook?
The whole situation is actually pretty complex... and the more layers you add the more complex it gets.
I think though the original article kind of misses the point; that it's not necessarily a lack of demand for Ebooks that's killing them... it's the overwhelming attitude of those on the Internet butting heads with the old "Corporate Republic". We expect information to be free... nay demand it. I know, I'm guilty of that too! We're the antithesis of that upon which corporations were built. They want to charge money for ebooks? Are you going to pay it?
On the flip-side of THAT argument, I am also a writer. To-date I've never published anything through the monolithic press simply because I don't like their business model. I think ebooks will mark a change in the business model from the monolithic press to more self-published works. Unfortunately this is also going to mean more chaff and fewer diamonds in the world of publishing... but does some venture capitalist out there want to put some money into a site that reviews these works? Peer review is often the best method of selling books... not advertising. I personally would much rather put out a free copy of the first few chapters of a book (or the first 50 or so pages) on a website, then ask that anyone who wants to read the full story send a small sum to get the rest of the book by return email. Not a terribly effective business model, and it'll never make me rich... but I don't write for fame or fortune... simply for my own pleasure! If others get pleasure out of it too, then that's just dandy.
Keep an eye on this subject... in the next few years I predict this is going to get interesting.
geez, I just spent the last 6 hours rereading a few of Niven's short stories. It definitely reminds me why I started reading SF in the first place. Thanks for the pointer.
A typical technophile delusion. "Technology (foo) is just so wonderful, it's impossible for someone to try it and not like it! Impossible, I tell you! If someone dares to criticize (foo), they must be lying about having tried it! They must be! There is no valid criticism of (foo)! It is perfect in every way! Perfect, I tell you!"
The Association of American Publishers, however, continues to hail the government's action, saying Sklyarov's software "facilitates theft, and makes it less likely that e-books will soon become a popular reading format."
I think history shows that the opposite is true: free things become popular much faster than stuff that you have to pay to get (if they are very simple and equal in quality). How would MP3's have become so popular if we always had to pay? IE was the same: M$ gave it away, while Netscape still charged for their browser.
eBooks are very unlikely to cause a change until people can get them without hassle: free (as in free beer), and without copy protection (as in free speech). All the specialized hardware/software turns a lot of people off--a portable eBook has a much high initial investment than an old paperback.
Well, since we are talking about it, I thought I would throw this out there...
Have a look at a project that I have been working on.
It is very beta, but it is an HTML Etext reader for the standard Project Gutenberg files.
PG Reader
Like I said, it is beta, but it is a non-profit labour of love that will hopefully be making leaps and bounds in the near future.
I think this is silly. You know the same could be said of software and look what M$ turned into.
Companies have been building their software in recent years to make copying more difficult. They understand that copying is inevitable, but by using sophisticated install programs and liberal use of the Windows registry, they have made it tricky to simply copy a program. The software industry has been dealing with digital copying the longest, it makes sense that they would've gravitated toward some level of protection by now.
I'd like to expand on some points I made in the previous post. The first thing to consider about electronic books is how small they are. A single mp3 weighs in around 5 megs, which is quite a bit larger than a compressed version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. This is the root of my concern, books take up so little space that someone could download hundreds of books and store them on their home system. You may point out that someone who does this probably won't actually read the books (and you'd probably be right), but a massive copyright violation did just take place.
I also understand that there are books currently being released in unsecured formats and there isn't a problem with copying. My response is that the distribution channels aren't really there yet for wide spread piracy. When someone thinks of music they think (or used to) Napster; when someone thinks of books, no Internet solution pops in their heads, yet. As more books become available in electronic format, more people will look into copying them because the selection will be there.
As I stated before, it's my opinion that a proprietary format is needed to "keep the honest people honest". I'm not saying Adobe is the best solution for that, I personally would prefer a more open design, but it makes a lot of sense to me to keep heading in this direction. Just my two cents.
Aside from the very legitimate problems of reading e-books and publishing e-books, there is a much more depressing aspect of all this: The fact that more and more authors are getting drowned out by the industry and the mass consumerism which every consumer hates, yet buys anyway.
.05 and 180 degrees off of mainstream. Nearly all the groundbreaking books were self-published before big business took over in the middle of this century. Nowadays, a self-published book isn't treated like a "real" book at all, while self-mastered e-books get even less exposure.
If you don't believe me, do some searching for small publishers who have less than stellar resources. There are nearly none left since the publishing industry gelled into three or four conglomerates posing as separate "houses". This is relevant because it is the small publishing efforts which have traditionally brought us the content which was between
There are thousands of us authors out here, myself included, who will not likely ever get in front of your eyes because we do not have the money to do mass advertising, and our e-book efforts are ignored. The reason this matters is because nearly all of the content/entertainment you consume is recycled or technical.
So, I wonder where the author has gone in all of this, because the big publishers sure aren't interested, and those of us who've gone it alone are nearly universally ostricized. How is good content going to surface in the 21st century without giving it away on a website?? To bring this back on topic, if e-books are not an outlet for innovative authors, and since the publishers are less and less interested in risk, what are we to do?? It's not just a question of making money off of the work, but of the work ever being seen in the first place.
You will outgrow your usefulness - actual Slashdot footer quote
Advantages of paper books: 1. Don't need batteries
2. Don't have to worry about dropping it
3. If you lose it, it's no big deal
4. Don't have to worry about file format changing, so you can still read it in 10 years
4. is easily portable
How much more portable is a piece of electronic equipment that you have to put in a case, protect from water, dirt, being hit, etc?
One problem is that none of the e-book devices on the market today are really well-suited for the end users to actually read an e-book:
The only way that I see e-books catching on is if lightweight, "tablet" PCs (something along the dimensions of 8"x11") ever get made and catch on.
This isn't to say that the e-book idea is inself a bad one. There were a few novels that I've read where I come across a character about midway into the book, and say "Now, who was he again, and where was he mentioned earlier?", and having a hyperlink to the spot in the text where the character was introduced would have been useful.
Cheap, quick. I wish there were more titles.
Not true, you can make copies for personal use under "Fair Use" laws. It's not until you distribute those copies that it becomes a problem. -n
Actully I read e-books all the time, mostly cause I can fit 20-30 on my handspring visor. I think if they all pick one format, and go with it, and do something where the ebook costs less, or you get the e-book free with the purchase of the regular book, it might work. Of course then thiers the whole copyright issue, but thats somthing the authors, not the publishers should decide about.
Oops....you'll know what I'm talkin about in a bit.
I am doing something about it...unless the price drops I won't buy e-books. Publishers have invested in e-book technology; if they don't want to lose that investment they'll lower the price. Otherwise, they'll write it off as a bad investment. Personally, I hope for the former because my bookshelves are full and I have no more wall space available. I do have plenty of empty disk storage though.
Also in college I double majored in English and Computer Science. I like being able to write in the margins of a book with a pen. I did that quite often in my English classes. I can then add my thoughts to the author's thoughts and thereby increase the value of the book, and the thoughts it contains.
How do you annotate an ebook?
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.
It's perfectly legal to resell a copy of a book you bought, only first sale rights are granted to copyright holders, not all sales at any time.
This sig intentionally left blank.
In the United States you don't even need fair use to copy music to a casette. The Audio Home Recording Act allows everyone to make analog copies of music for personal use legally. The law doesn't contain any of the royalties or restrictions that it places on digital copies. Your post is nonsense.
I guess that explains why most readers don't handle those easy formats. I thought about getting an eBook reader recently but almost none could read ascii or pdf files.
`Perche non reggi tu, o sacra fame de l'oro,l'appetito de' mortali?'
My value in an e-book would be better left only to text books for college. I'd rather have all of my text books placed into a single portable. The whole market would be based on crazed college students with educards readily buying e-books so they don't have to walk out to their 120 degree car to swap books mid day. E-books, rather E-textbooks should be where the market plays out. I'd surely appreciate it rather than carrying a digital circuits book and a thousand page logic gate reference book to class.
As long as the reader for the format you have has a search feature. And provided the publisher didn't disable it.
My point being that with restricted-use formats, the features you get are precisely those that the reader manufacture thought you might like, limited by what the publisher decided to deny. And if you try to get a 3rd-party reader with the features you want, well, sorry, it's a circumvention device.
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
I think the reason that eBooks are unpopular is that they are not books. Books are portable, easy to use, easy to store, last for a long time, and have a fantastic "Refresh rate". I can't stand reading large amounts of text on a computer monitor, or LCD screen. Teh screens are ether too bright, and glare and reflections, or are just plain too flickery. With a book you can read it in bright light, low light, and by flashlight. The batteries never go dead ether. It's just so nice having an actual physical book there to look at, and reference whenever you need it.
This brings up an interesting point. I've heard that the right to space shift (ie: coppying from CD to casette) is allowed, would the same principal apply to ebooks too?
(Probably not, given that it gets in the way of big business, but meh)
Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!
quote: 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.
Don't get me wrong, I'm quite geek, but I don't even like the idea of using an e-book myself.
When I decide to read, which is something that I do fairly often, I like the feel of the book in my hands. I like the satisfaction of sitting back in a recliner or on a couch with some nice ambient lighting and turning the pages, being able to get away from technology for awhile in my reading, not relying on it. I like the sheer act of going to the local library and taking my time perusing the collection, hell, I even liked the old paper card catalogues before they were removed. If I want to read, I'm getting an escape. My work and much of my entertainment is spent in the company of computers, and I want something to give me a break from that.
If feel that if I am going to do something as an escape, it should _be_ an escape. e-books are not something that I would find to be an escape.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
I do not care that Dmitry Sklyarov at one time made software to support the heinous practice of spamming. Mind you, I don't like it any more than you do. But his spam software-writing is not the issue here.
I do not care that Dmitry is a Russian citizen. Really, it doesn't matter WHO is in jail right now. What does matter is that our freedom of speech is being held hostage right now by a copyright act that infringes on our Constitutional rights.
Focus on the cause, and not the person.
History repeats...
-plagiarist
My idea for a standard, but very well-protected format is this.
:)
Every e-book reader (and computer, of course) has a way of generating a PGP-compatible key set. (This would be built into e-book readers).
When you order a book, you give the web server your PGP public key. The web server that you download it from sends you the book, encrypted with your public key.
Of course, you need your private key to decrypt it, right? (Or am I misunderstanding how PGP works?)
So if only you have your private key (which is the nature of private keys, isn't it?) and they encrypt it specifically for you, then there can't be any piracy, can there.
Only one problem: after about an hour, some wiz3-azz will decide to decrypt the book and distribute it on the net. But I doubt most people would go through the trouble when e-book readers only read _your_ encrypted books...
Thank you very much
realkiwi
While I agree that technology is a tool, and a useful one at that, that I well know ( I'm a 25yr EE ) but after dealing with it all day long, 10 hours a day I have times that I just want to dump it all and retun to something simple, and a good paper book is somthing I enjoy. one does not have to be Old to enjoy something that refreshes the mind and spirit.
for some people it may be that e/books are great but I don't think that they have the staying power that real books do. besides i like to OWN my book to do with it as i please, not to license it for 30 days.
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
...If there is no demand for e-book there will not be any, back to paper books. Simple as that.
I've said this before, but publishers are only hurting themselves with this insane obsession with spending millions on consumer-hostile "protection" schemes.
Look at Baen Books, which (in addition to dead trees) publishes books in electronic format, which uses good old documented and portable formats such as HTML and RTF with no passwords, encryption, "digital rights management", monitoring, locking the book to a single computer, or other nonsense, and which seems to be the only publusher of e-books that's actually making money at it.
I don't believe this is a coincidence. It may be time for other publishers to remove their heads from their asses, stop paying buckets of money to the concocters of baroque DRM schemes and various Congresscritters, observe Baen's experience, and learn. Imagine! A company that makes money, not by threatening its customers with legal action and hamstringing them with Evil Code, but by providing them a useful product at a reasonable price that yields a profit!
Benefits:
- Portable; can fit many on a device
- Can download new books without going to the mall or waiting for Amazon to deliver it
- Can potentially do text searches
Problems:- Expensive: have to buy the device AND have to buy the books; higher risk of being stolen
- Breakable; can't just toss it in my backpack
- Harder on the eyes
- Not standardized.
- No low-cost "paperback" edition
- Limited selection and very few current releases
- Require power source
- Can't give to a friend when I'm done with it, or sell it at a yard sale
- Lacks that distinct feel and smell
Mind you, I don't think electronic books are dead, though, but I doubt they have widespread success for MANY years... Unless they can figure out some way to make it "feel" like a paper book in the transition to a fully electronic tablet.I went to the Baen books site and checked out the link to the Baen Free Library.
Jim Baen and Eric Flint get it when it comes to ebooks and intellectual property.
Check out the site, it's worth the read.
Steve M
When discussing E-Books, we should look at O'Reilly, and how they do E-Books. While true, it's just on a CD-ROM, it still very much applies. Yet O'Reilly doesnt encrypt it in any way. They make it very easy and portable to read the content, and they are successful. Then you look at why. They dont have to force stuff down our throat, or force us into submission, or tell us how we can read the book that we pay for. They just have good informative content, and give it at an acceptable price, and people respect them and buy the product. Now if all E-Books decided to work in this way, they would be much more successful.
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
James Brents
If libraries were routinely able to convert their collections to digital formats, and then offer their patrons remote access to that material, they would essentially become and maybe even replace publishers.
Sounds like a system that's a hell of a lot better than what we have.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
...I load ASCII and then I read it. :)
Why isn't a laptop a MUCH better ebook and
isn't that what we use them for anyways
Well, what you are saying does make sense. And I agree. I was mostly referring to the formats themselves and not the illegal distribution of any type of media, but you have valid arguments. I, myself, was always one to buy the books I needed(in PRINT) and if I didn't need to own it, I would use that wonderful thing known as a public library. :)
As I stated before, I just wish things would be easier and more compatible.
hrrm.
"It sort of makes me wonder how well O'Reilly's electronic manuals sell."
FWIW I just (well a few weeks ago) signed up for O'Reilly's safari service. Basically you pay a X dollars/mo for access to Y books ($9.95 for 5 books in my case). At the end of the month you can swap out any or all of the books for any others. I wasn't so sure I wanted to encourage this whole renting books thing but three things tipped the ballance for me:
1. It really did seem like a pretty good deal for me. I already have a small collection of O'Reilly books but there are some that I just don't need to keep and others that I'd like to preview in depth before buying.
2. The books are in html so I can easily read on any system I feel like, dump a chapter onto a floppy to take with me, or whatever.
3. The license was streight forward without any nasty Easter Eggs.
The way I see it is if they can trust me not to screw them over and respect me enough to use a sane license then I'm willing to their business model a try.
--
Ray
I agree. I'm an avid reader, and typically read 3 or 4 books a week. I don't buy ebooks because they are locked into one device, and the ebook readers are way too heavy, bulky and expensive. I prefer ebooks on my Palm. I can fit in 7 or 8 book, and I can read them at any time, anywhere. Before I got my Palm III, I would usually carry a paper back around with me, now I just use my palm.
I would buy ebooks if publishers would just market for palm, rather than for stupid formats such as adobe and microsoft that are bulky, stupid and ill-concieved, and limited to PC's.
eBooks by their nature aren't bad. But there are some problems. - Old fashioned physical books are better at what they do right now. They have better resolution, they can do things that electric ones can't, and they have a bit of history and object quality about them. - eBooks are currently harder to use in many ways (you can't just throw it in a your backpack and go), and are harder to read (which is of course the point). So the problem is price reversal. It's ok if you have an inferior product if it has some other advantages (you can get it right now over your internet connection, it's easily searchable, etc) BUT this should be treated as a lesser version of the product. Why does an electronic book cost the same as a paperback? Does anyone know? You aren't getting a paperback. It just so happens the publisher doesn't have to print the thing either, so the lower quality thing also costs less to produce. So why are they charging so much? If eBooks were offered at say $1 a piece, the disadvantages would be balanced by the price, and someone could fairly consider which was more important to them... quality or price. Having an eBook priced at $10 or $5 is insane. If publishers realized this, they would have many more buyers. -trout
For small paperbacks, however, I usually only read them once anyway, so E-books aren't that hot an Idea for them. But if I could get my full collection of perl/apache/mysql/linux/security, etc books on a single tablet with a nice crisp display, and that tablet was in the $100-$200 price range? Hell yeah, I'd buy into that!
I am a slow reader, maybe 30 pages an hour, thats 240 pages in 8 hours, which is somewhere near the average novel length, on the outside the 16 hours would get me through a 500 page behemoth which is about the max I will consider reading (short of Colleen McCollough's wonderful 'Ceasar' series, which has 5 books all in the 900+ page range, and I've read every one of them).
-josh
A bit off-topic but:
One of the things I've notices, is that there are soooo many different eBook formats, I have 3 different readers on my palm at the moment. And I feel it's only going to increase.
So why dosn't someone make a format with something that we all know, is open, and will do the job just fine?... HTML
A limited version of HTML that is, alow tags like: <I> <B> <A> <P> <BR> <OL>/<UL> <H1> <H2> <HR> <BLOCKQUOTE>(when the screens get a big bigger).
That would give you everything you need to format a novel. And maybe add <TABLE> and CSS1 for techincal documents etc. And then have some form of compression maybe (most e-book do, don't they?).
You could also read it on your PC, no special program needed.
Like what? Are we all supposed to spend a large portion of our lives catching up on reading stuff written so long ago? Where does it stop? How far back do we have to go to be considered an intellectual? Why does it matter? Why do you believe that everyone should derive pleasure from the same sort of subject matter or author? Get over yourself.
C'mon, the average American reads one book a year. That same median person buys 5-6 CDs per year too. That same median person spends a lot more in the movie theater than on books. What's the business model in something so expensive and so poorly implemented?
Sometimes you really want to browse or flip pages (many reference books like atlases, dictionaries, encyclopedias, manuals, cookbooks, etc. benefit from readers being about to scan papers quickly) and nothing online can help out.
Also paper breaks a lot less easily than any of these gadgets. Yes, my copy of Larousse Gastronomique can fall off the kitchen counter to the tile floor with little damage. Will a Palm Pilot or laptop survive the same fall? Will it survive being splashed by tomato sauce?
Maybe in a few years when there are more compelling titles, screen technology improves (paper is still easier to read), and the prices drop. If you read a book like Bringhurst's "The Elements of Typographic Style" or any of the Tufte books, you know how much work these eBook people have in front of them.
14. Open standard. I want to get an ebook from any vendor, and view it on any reader. I want to download from Gutenberg and read that. I want to create my own content, and let other people read it - if they want to. It should be the MP3 of the written word!
What will stifle ebooks more than anything else is a plethora of competing, closed, proprietary formats.
"Sorry, you can't buy Stephen King in Sony, only Adobe..."
This sig left unintentionally blank.
I'm still reading the books on my PC or laptop as I haven't found the "Bookman" of my dreams yet. I find the screens on the Palm and Palm like devices to be too small (always seem to be paging forward).
Has anybody out there found the perfect ebook reader?
The protected content, OTOH, may come later -- as a second-generation offspin.
As for usability, they have failed, utterly , in providing the advantages of paper -- let alone exceeding them.
Publishers are not stupid. Publishers want e-books to fail. They want the public to think that e-books suck. They want the makers of the e-book readers to take a bath. This is a staged flop! They want the public to think that paper is the only viable media for publishing. If e-books ever really took hold, the publishers would be out of business. Every writer would be there own publisher. The publishers know this! So publishers have conspired to do the only reasonable thing--staging the biggest flop since the PS/2 by keep the availability of e-books low, the cost high, and introduce as much hassle as they possibly can. By doing this, they are assured that e-books will be a fail brilliantly, and they will be guaranteed another ten years of business pushing paper.
Anyway my main point was simply to refute somewhat the previous poster's statement that materials cost was irrelevant in the publishing industry.
I agree with those who feel that an eBook should cost a lot less than a paper back. I'm getting less in my opinion and there is no materials cost for an eBook, just the same type of prepwork that would go into a paper book and the bandwidth to download it.
Why does the electronic copy require more (inhibiting) protection than the paper? Of course, it's because the electronic copy is much more easily transmitted, changed and reformatted than the paper. But still, if you're going to charge a premium price, and only let me read it using propritary hardware/software... then I'll take the paper. Thanks anyway.
Mmmmmmm. Floor pie!
when I see a good appliance designed specifically for ebooks, I might start to take them more seriously, but right now I can't make it more than 10-20 pages into a 300 page book.
where's the wonder paper they promised us a few years back?
I resell my paperbacks all the time. that why there are used book stores.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Gee, why didn't some of the other dot.com outfits try doubling their prices? It makes as much sense as their other business models....
Uh, they did. The problem is that twice zero is still zero. So, it didn't help much.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
People who read lots of book, those that would see the greatest benefits of a portable reader, actually love books themselves! They like personal libraries, the weight of a good book in their hand, and honestly have some kind of tactile fixation with page turning. Most everyone but the geeky fifteen year-olds (god bless their hearts) mentioned in an article below are actually trying to get away from the monitor at the end of the day.
feints within feints, wheels within wheels
I think e-books are a great idea. I sit and stare at a computer screen 9+ hours a day for work, and I'm pretty used to it. It doesn't give me a headahce. My big gripe is the copy restrictions-- they essentially remove all the convenience of a normal book, and add the additional high cost of a reader.
The solution? Buy paperbacks. Install your favorite file sharing client, and download the books you bought in a useful format (like text or html) and stick 'em on a Palm. An 8Mb palm should hold a dozen books or so. Plus, your whole library will conveniently fit on a couple of CD-ROMs.
If the publishers released their books in plaintext or HTML, the effects would be disastrous.
I think this is silly. You know the same could be said of software and look what M$ turned into.
I just bought a copy of Design Patterns by GOF on CD. It is in HTML format. It was cheaper than paper - probably because it is easier to copy. It's more convenient for me because I can read it at work and no one will notice! I certainly would not have bought it if it was in e-book format.
people like to hold things
staring at a computer screen is strenuous
scrolling can be a bitch
it's much easier to keep your place on the page with paper
it doesn't take forever to download a book on paper
cover art is friendly
books on shelves are aesthetically and socially pleasing
closing a window on your browser is not as satisfying as replacing a book on the shelf
i can throw a book if it is frustrating- i'm not gonna fscking kick my computer or damage it in any other way
books are cheaper than computers
bending covers and dog-earing pages are therapeutic activities
i can go anywere with a book
i don't have to pay an electricity bill to read a book(except at night when i need light)
i can fall asleep in bed with a book, but not so easily a mouse and keyboard
if i spill my tea/coffee/soda/beer/water on a book, it's not the end of the world
the list goes on
we should just ban all books. That way nobody gets hurt by papercuts, or powercuts....
The various formats do suck (I'm up to seven now with two or three more in the works)--
But it's not quite that simple: Gutenberg gets millions of visitors each month to their main site and various mirrors, while UVA, myself and a few others are in the hundreds of thousands.
People don't mind reading free books online, as long as the content's there (and you keep adding).
Bigger problem is, the market for printed books is predominantly female, while the market for online books is heavily male, so things like the old Rocket eBook (which was popular) were destroyed when the company that bought 'em said: screw it, we'll sell this thing on Oprah and dump the free library.
They're--the amorphous 'they'--not going to be shipping much in the way of hardware this year, either. (Franklin's eBookman was a failure that may result in the company's demise...)
But the number of people who read online does continue to grow rapidly. They're just not going to pay a lot for it (and they shouldn't... the public domain belongs to everyone, while authors should expect greater-than-hardback royalties on books sold at a less-than-paperback price.)
If the publishers of books and music and software and movies would get ONE, just ONE, only ONE, point through their head, we'd all be better off.
If you publish something, anything, in digital format, it can and will be reproduced. PERIOD.
All this mess, all this money spent, all this pointless effort. Nothing you can do will stop it, no matter how hard you try, no matter how much money you have, no matter how many stupid laws you get passed. And I think that everyone who reads Slashdot knows that it's futile.
-jason
www.dangercrew.net
That paper owns the Chicago Tribune right?
I think this is a case of putting something into an electronic form just because we can. Not because there is any big demand for electronic books, or any huge advantage to them. There might be a few advantages over printed books, but there are also plenty of disadvantages.
Sure, they'll probably sell a few, mostly to people who absolutely must have the latest and greatest gadgets. Other than that, I cant imagine ever buying one, myself.
-J5K
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
It was very interesting that they biased the article in favor of critics of the Dimitry nonsense. No mention of the fact that he was held without bail for violating a law that didn't apply in the jurisdiction where he violated it, but the article seemed very anti-DMCA for a large media organization. After reading about evil "hackers" whose primary goal is to steal what people worked hard to make, and Palestinian "freedom fighters" who blow up Israeli civilians (and many children recently) at random in response to targeted military assasinations, it's nice to see an article that doesn't sound like it's being paid for. Now if we could just get someone to write something that wasn't one-sided in general...
what is that book with the camel on the jacket doing right by your mousepad?
mt
Adobe PDF format is the reason I shy away from ebooks. Adobe files are bad to look at, and Adobe readers are hard to use. The copy-protection does make it worse, since it means I cannot move the file into another more usable format, such as .txt.
There's nothing wrong with ASCII. Do you think it's impossible to encrypt a text file with strong encryption? All the publishers have to do is encrypt the plaintext with one of many available strong encryption techniques. Of course I think it could be good marketing for the publishers to actually encourage trading the first couple of chapters of all of their books on the net. As with music it could be a way for people to see if they would really like it. BTW, don't forget it is possible to read entire novels sitting in a bookstore, especially at the big ones with cafes etc. You can also look up reference materials etc. I've read entire novels sitting in a bookstore, usually because I'm uncertain if I want to buy the book. And of course, there's the library. Also, your assumption that free e-books on the internet would trade like music is absurd. Most people don't even read books. And many of those that do, have no interest in staring at a flashing CRT for hours and hours. I for one, think e-books are a bad idea. I like nice crisp paper, real printed text, the smell of a new hardcover book. I don't want to have to worry about a power source just to read text. It's ridiculous. The only purpose would be to sell e-books for a fraction of the price of the real thing, because the publishing costs are virtually zero. It would be a good way of selling marginal books.
Mainstream society isn't even really aware of the copyright issues surrounding e-books. Put your 1337 weberati selves aside and think about the average mainstream consumer. E-books aren't catching on because people still like carrying dead trees around with them. They're familiar with the feel and sense of permanence that comes with a real book.
/. really a representative cross-section?
Sure, there are adequete electronic replacements for most typical real book functions, but people(who aren't geeks and comprise the majority of the mainstream) prefer being able to run highlighter pen over important passages and earmarking pages that interest them. If they can afford the good stuff, they want leather bound acid free pages with gold embossing. I doubt a similar e-book reader would convey the same sense of value.
I'm sure most of us agree that e-books or something like them are the way to go for replacing portable printed matter, but is
Flaccid sales aside, publishers face even bigger challenges.
I'm trying to think of a funny comment to go along with this quote from the article, but I just can't stop laughing...
~ now you know
And to add insult to industry, e-books tend to be as expensive as their paper counterparts. You know a group of marketing drones whose combined IQ still didn't break into triple digits were sitting in a room somewhere, and thought they could sell books for the same price while pocketing what would usually go to manufacturing and distributing.
This story was in the LA Times on Monday,August 6.
0 63 863aug06.story
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-000
You can get 16:1 compression on text files? What compression program is that?
Oh yeah, nothing compresses better than text files. Grab a pure text file and compress it into a .zip file, you'll see what I mean.
The key is that most lossless compression algorithms generate a dictionary of common patterns, then replace the file with an ID representing the pattern. This is really easy to do with the english language, essentially you can replace each word with a binary number. More over, common words and patterns can be represented by smaller binary numbers. I don't want to get too technical (and at this point it gets harder to explain without drawing pictures) but you get the idea.
Text files are so small that we generally don't worry about compressing them, but it's certainly a viable thing to do. And if you're trying to send large amounts of text all over the place, it will certainly make things run faster for you.
As for books I agree with one poster that people like the tactile response of turning the pages of a book. I can't imagine getting one of those dumb RCA eBook devices and pressing that snooze bar to turn the page...
Paperless office my ass.
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
...unfortunately I have to "steal" them. Even though I can buy the paperback for $6, the companies wants me to pay hard cover prices for electronic copies. Forget that. I'll buy the paper back, then download a copy of the book from a newsgroup and iSilo it onto my Visor (which I feel that I have a right to use with my ownership of the paperback). It is great reading a part of a book anytime you have a free moment. With my Visor always with me, I always have 4+ books at my disposal. When I finish a book, I delete it and give the paper back to the library. Wouldn't it be much simpler to sell me the electronic copy for $6?
Gee, why didn't some of the other dot.com outfits try doubling their prices? It makes as much sense as their other business models....
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Everybody has a lot of opinions about ebooks. Those that like them like them a lot, and those that don't I guess won't ever like them. Not much point in arguing with opinions. But as far as the Herald-Tribune's claim that "nobody" likes them, or that they're in trouble, that's just not so. They are very definitely growing, and people are very definitely making money on them. Every day there are more and more ebook writers and publishers out there. And every day the number of sales grows. Those are facts and not opinions. It takes years to establish new businesses and a new industry, but it's happening. Don't doubt it for a minute. And plenty of savvy business people who are investing in them. They'd be doing a lot better if they weren't copy protected and encrypted, since obviously nobody wants to do business with someone who openly calls them a thief. But real ebook publishers don't copy-protect them or lock them up at all, and they're doing great. Actually, it seems to me that it's newspapers like the Herald-Tribune that "nobody" likes any more and which are in trouble. They're the ones who are laying off people and having trouble surviving. Not the ebook companies, which are growing and HIRING. Which is why they (and the paper book publishers) are so desperate to keep people from moving on to modern forms of communication, and continue to perpetuate these myths that ebooks are hard to use or read, and that they're not selling. I too prefer paper books to ebooks. But I also prefer paying $2 to read something rather than $20. Just like I prefer a steak dinner, but usually get a hamburger or something cheap. And I'm investing a lot of money on the assumption that most people will also feel that way. I'd also like to point out that one of the major problems facing ebook publishers these days, are the never-ending articles like this one coming out saying that ebooks are no good and printing lots of inaccurate information. This is very definitely having an effect. Articles like this are to a certain degree a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it won't stop the future, only slow it down a bit, and meanwhile deny some folks an opportunity to enjoy some interesting reading. BTW, ebooks are no more going to replace paper books than recorded music eliminated live music. On the contrary, they'll help save them in the same way that videos helped the movie industry.
I totally agree but authors (I am one BTW) need to make money or they will do something else with their time.
One company that seems to get it right is Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com). They sell popular books at a low price in a wide variety of formats and most books are not copy protected. They specialize in Science Fiction with many former Nebula and Hugo nominees. Almost all books are under $10 with many under $1. Many of the ebooks are also short stories, which are easy to read during spare moments.
This is probably why Fictionwise is thriving while other ebooks sellers are still trying to find a viable business model. They have found a way to deliver cheap, popular ebooks to the readers and still pay the authors for their work.
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
In a world without publishers, would you want to have to start reading 10 books in order to find the one that's half-decent? Do you want to read 200 pages of a book, and then discover that one of the chapters is missing?
Welcome to the wonderful world of online fanfiction! That's exactly the way it is in the fanfiction world... and as another poster suggested, if you don't want to wade through a lot of crap, you learn to listen to "word of mouth", and links from sites that review stories or personal picks by authors who seem to have a clue, that sort of thing. Jerry Pournelle long ago predicted something like this would happen when the Internet made self-publishing viable for anyone with the time to write. He was right.
---dragoness
Kurt Vonnegut is right in the article. The world won't accept e-books because they just aren't as comforting and nice as real paper.
That's why I think e-books will have to wait until digital paper becomes cheap and easy to use to become popular.
Imagine plugging in a book made with digital paper (that looks and feels like your favorite physical books) and downloading any book in the Library of Congress to read in the comfort of your reading chair, or the beach, etc. Until this happens, e-books will be nothing more than a lark, a curiosity.
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
Online publishing is only dead if you're a publisher.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The tactile pleasure of a book is being able to make it look and feel well read.
The content rarely merits the respect due learned tomes kept in archives and handled with white cotton gloves. Face it, with the acid washed paper used by publishers now, the books will all be dust in 50 years anyway.
I buy paperbacks because I can afford them and don't want to pay much because I know they're going into the land-fill eventually when I'm done with them unless the author is particularly entertaining.
I have kept my Terry Pratchett books and have reread these because I liked them. But Border's charging US$11.95 for a re-issue of "Dark Side of the Sun" was sheer exploitation. When the price goes too high, I don't buy.
What the publishers are trying to do is change the medium to something that is evanescent, hang on to the content and charge us for every time we look at something we thought we'd bought.
I can reread a book wherever, whenever and why-ever I want to. I'm not going to trust an e-book to let me finish a book unless I've got enough batteries. The technological dependency is too high.
Its the barely veiled attempts to dig craters into our already depleted bank accounts that are really insulting.
Do they honestly think we're that dumb? We've seen what happens to content with television. Fear of the cost of talent development why they stay the safe course of Seinfeld reruns rather than giving somebody else a crack at entertaining us.
That's why I'm only buying the hard copy.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I used SmartDoc, but now I've been using gutenpalm a lot more. I like it because I can get a more compression with books. It's at http://gutenpalm.sourceforge.net/
It uses it's own format currently, but it should start supporting palmdoc soon. It's opensource, and it's pretty good.
Not with publishers, they wouldn't be!
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
If e-books are failing as miserably as the article leads me to believe, why are the publishers and software companies spending even more money to sue others for trying it?
Here's what I would do if I was in charge of one of the big publishing houses. I would look at how much money we wasted trying to develop a secure e-book format and distribution partnerships. Compare that with the success, or lack thereof in this case, of the product. And cut my losses. If some other company wants to try to make money with e-books, let them waste their own money; who cares?
I have a different opinion than the author of this article. I think ASCII text e-books are very popular. I have around 30 e-books. They are ALL ASCII text or HTML formatted. I don't want to limit myself to a specific static format that I can't use any way I want. The downside for capitalism is that I didn't pay anything for these and I probably wouldn't.
Here is a message for musicians, writers, entertainers. I don't want to enjoy your art if you're only interested in making money. If you aren't willing to give your art away for free, then you haven't put your entire soul into the work and, as a consequence, the art will not be as good.
_.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._
ASCII art?? I thought it was a REGULAR expression
Sklyarov's software "facilitates theft, and makes it less likely that e-books will soon become a popular reading format."
Heartily disagree with the American Association of Publishers here. Sklyarov's software facilitates theft and makes it MORE likely that e-books will soon become a popular reading format.
Compare with print for a second:
Publishers are under mistaken impression that people LIKE the way book prices have been increasing and WANT to pay for it. Have you seen the prices on that new, larger paperback format? It's scarcely cheaper than the hardcover verison. And unfortunately, many of my favourite authors' books are exclusively published in this format -- sure, it make a nice-looking book, but it's often 2-3 times the price of the old paperback format. I really don't care about the pretty cover -- I just want the read the words inside.
I'm a book lover. I have a hard time entering a bookstore without blowing my book-buying budget. I spend more on novels than food. I spend more on books than computer components. (I spend more on books than I can really afford.) As much as I believe the authors of books should be compensated, if I could get copies to keep for life for free I'd probably go for it.
Look at software -- few private individual users have legal copies of all their software. Most often, it was copied or installed off a friend's CD. Yes, it's illegal, but it's unlikely that home users will be caught, so people do it because software is expensive. If this was true with paper books (prefer to read off paper than a screen) I would do it. I'd still buy books, but not as many.
I imagine that the same is true for e-books -- after all the tech issues are resolved satisfactorily.
I can spell. I just can't type.
yeah, exactly...
One of the big difference I see between normal books and ebooks is that for eBooks you need software and hardware to read it, that means you are locking yourself into a certain system. If this system is non-standardized or proprietary you basically are at the mercy of the availability of hardware and software to continue reading your books. One of the nice things about real books is that I can pick up a 100 year old book and I'll still be able to read it. With eBooks I can see how soft/hardware manufacturers will make my ebook collection obsolete by 'upgrading'/'versioning' and stuff like that which forces me to buy the same books over and over.
Ebooks will be a reality at some point. Think back to your school days, wouldn't it have been nice to have one ebook that could hold all your text books? I had calc and chem back to back. Talk about muscle strain. Yes we need to work out the copyright issues and we need a better reader but their time will come....soon.
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
Or maybe these are people who think I'm one of those wierdo's who enjoys the eyestrain and inconvenience caused by reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and the like on a computer monitor.
If they want to fight technology, let them fight the creation of useful eBooks. It's better than the alternatives...
I've been working primarily on computers for the last 12 years and I'm just done with reading from the monitor. I find that I'm more likely now to print off my email, PDF files or other things requiring lots of reading. It's not about the love of paper, but more that my eyes get blurry and tired after looking at the screen for too long. So what would tempt me to get an eBook? I thought Stephen King's idea of the eBook-only release was pretty compelling, but I don't want to read every page off the monitor.
Maybe I'm different from most people...but we've got a ways to go before staring at the piece of glass beats the old tried and true.
Besides, doesn't it bother anyone else that we've got a ray-gun pointing at our heads all day?
---- Please be nice in case my Slashdot karma ~= my real life karma.
True enough. I'm currently reading "Slaughter House 5" grabbed from an IRC channel. It's got plenty of scanning errors which I'm correcting while reading - but where do I send the diffs?
You can't have a Gutenberg for this sort of thing because it would quickly be shut down. Maybe we need a Freenet book repository where definitive versions are sent... lot of work though.
Not quite so.
The Rocket ebook I have is slightly larger then a paperback. Not much so. You can also use a Palm, which is much smaller then a paperback.
Memory is cheap. I have a (nowadays) scant 16 meg in my Rocketbook. That can accomodate 20+ books. So, if I run to the bathroom, I can actually choose what book I want to read out of many. This is great on trips. You can go on vacation, and in the space of one book, bring 30.
As for my Visor, I have 72 meg of memory in that. I can store more books then I could read in there. Keep in mind that readers (at least the ones that I have seen) store books compressed. Text is very easy to compress, so, you can fit quite alot in there. If the reader comes with a memory card slot, forget it. You could practically store a whole library with the larger cards nowadays (ok, not quite, but you know what I mean.)
As for uploading stuff to your book, with space like that, chances are you dont have to do it often. Its been a couple of months since Ive uploaded stuff to my Rocket. I have The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings series, the whole Wheel of Time series, and some other stuff I havent gotten to on there. Thats about a good 10,000 pages of text, easily.
There are plenty of converters for different formats, so, whether you have a book in pdf, lit, rb, html, doc, pdb, or text, its not a problem to swtich from one to another.
Its not as much of a problem as you would think.
I was wary of all this when I first decided to spend 250 bucks on an electronic book, but Im quite happy I did now.
Reading in bed doesn't get in the way of hot sex.
Woman: "Would you close that thing already!!" *SLAM!*
Man: AIEEEEEE!!!!!!!!
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
Battery life in the 16 hours range (most people could read two average books in this amount of time).
... Hmmm, speaking of comic books, e-book readers should eventually allow for full-color displays so you could read comics on them. Imagine storing a full year's worth of your favorite monthly comic in full color. Granted, it's not exactly the same thing as the real thing if you're an avid collector. But if you're a casual fan, 'twould be quite cool.
Uhh.... What books are you reading? Archie comics? Maybe I could read the two latest Hardy Boys Mysteries in 16 hours, but good luck reading the latest best-selling novel (S. King, Grisham, et al) in that time span.
Think about O'Reilly and Assoc., aren't all of their book's freely available in electronic format. More than once I've bought a book like N.A.G only after read big chunks of it off the hard-drive! The hard-copy is great for skimming to get an idea or two, then back to the e-formated version to get the current version for technical details right.
If book publisher's realy needed all of the IP rights to survive then why was the Bible one of the first book's published and is still being published? Actualy I've got more paid for copies of the Bible around the house then any other book and I still haven't actualy read the whole thing.
If what the author really wants is to publish his baby well get a life; you don't need to know that much HTML to publish a book or article and you can still get 100Mb of free webspace. guestbooks and messageboards are free to and you can just cut and paste to put them up, that way you get feedback from readers. If your self-published book is that good people will find it, recomend it to others, and if it gets big enough, a publisher will seek you out rather than vica versa.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I've bought several printed books so far because I found the full text on the Web and liked what I saw. Most recently C++ In Action.
- The encyclopediaes, dictionaries and maps of this world. Here people are making lot of money from selling these. All are reference works, so the computer adds a lot of value from better search capabilities and more up-to-date material. On the other hand we do not look long the text, so the panalty from inferior screens does not count.
- Newspapers. The publishers have not yet learned how to make money, but for many people the web has become their premier news source. Here the advantage is timely delivery.
When in five years time we have readers that provide 300dpi resolution, a complete day of battery life and are robust enough to be taken outside, a lot of material will go electronic. But this requires the publishers to loose their fears. Unless you need the search capabilities of a computer, you will only accept an electronic version when the price/performance ratio is at least as good as that of a book. A book allows me to- make notes
- copy individual pages
- lend it to someone else
- share the notes with someone else
- and it can be used along side any other book
If I cannot do one of these things, I need to be compensated by the price. If I got The Art of Computer Programming for 5 dollar without the ability to copy it, that would be OK. But not for 100 dollar. Also, when will the page paradigm for e-books die? It is interesting that all the good e-books I know do not regard themselves as books, but are modelled on the browser interface.I have quite a collection of books at home. Some are literature, aome philosophy and some are technical books. I like having all my books out in the open on my shelf. I like staring at my shelf when I have a few free minutes and choosing a book to read. Who want to have to run to the computer to download a new book onto your ebook reader when you have to go to the bathroom. I'd rather grab one off the shelf and run. I'll admit, I've never used an e-book before. Yet I've heard the screens are hard to read. Reading on a monitor is a pain, who wants to move their head just read one line of text, plus you can't curl up in bed with a CRT (even a 14 inch one). Not all books are available in al formats. To read multiple books I would have to buy multiple readers or have some hardcopy others not. This does not solve the "only carrying one item" problem. On the other hand ebooks are useful for technical references. Ever read something in a textbook or manual and not be able to find it again. Sometimes I've wished for a grep that works on paper. Well enough pointless droning. This was just my $.02
...including the fact that they are more expensive than a cheap paperback novel usually, they usually hurt your eyes more and are more difficult to read. Until digital paper becomes much more widespread, I don't see many people buying ebooks. Aside from all the normal drawbacks, there is the fact that they typically lock the book onto one device, which is probably the biggest drawback to Ebooks...
Shit adds up at the bottom...
Another shameless self-promo. You can download the freeware yBook reader for Windows from http://www.spacejock.com. It'll read TXT or HTML files after reformatting them to look more like book pages. (Yes, I'd like to write a Linux version. No, I can't yet) Cheers Simon
Personally I have issues with most e-books. While I have never gotten my hands on a true e-book rader, I've read various free ones on my PC... and I can't manage to read much. I hate the acrobat format for one thing. Thing just get too easily mixed up. The flicker gives me a headache. Finding books in simple TXT format is even better, at least formatting wise. I like to read.. I mean a good paperback I can read in 2 or 3 hours easily, and start on a new one without trying to deblur my eyes. It's paper for me. Expensive habbit, and takes up a lot of space, but I'd rather search for a physical book than wonder if I deleated that e-book.
I have been buying (yes *buying*) eBooks from Fictionwise
These nice people supply a range of ebooks in Palm DOC format, PDF, Rocket, eBookMan and Microsoft Reader. Not encrypted. You can download any or all of these formats for books you have bought.
I only buy eMagazines of short shelf life from eBook suppliers (like palm) that sell me encrypted books
I have over 150 ebooks on my HandEra 330 compact flash card which I read during the odd minutes in queues, in taxis, wherever. The higher res screen makes them much easier on the eyes.
- Paul
Poe and Shakespeare are, of course, in the public domain. I suspect the army manuals are as well. Maybe even Lovecraft is?
You forgot changing color schemes. The ebook should change color depending on what you read. Dummies and Idiots books should be bright yellow or orange, classics should look like bound leather, and linux books should have pennguins. Maybe something like GUI wallpaper?
Heh. Yeah. I send you this file in order to have your advice huh?
Stupid Microsoft. Can't they make something that works right OUT of the box without having to shut down everything that could cause problems automatically?
I don't mind spending the extra time configuring all my Unix boxes, because I know they are powerful enough to do what I want. But for Windows? Please! I wish they would just work right the first time.
hrrm.
I hate reading lengthy documentation or books on my computer screen. When I need to read 150 pages of documentation or a spec., I print it out. I've actually tried reading e-books on my Palm, my PC monitor, a borrowed e-book device, etc. and I just don't like it. I have an awesome monitor, so eyestrain isn't really an issue when reading on a PC, but I just don't like it.
I wish people would just get it through their heads that everything that isn't digital or that seems antiquated(the paperback or hardcover novel for example)...doesn't have to be updated/transformed to digital media!
While I wholeheartedly agree that this technology is incredibly useful for archiving, I fail to see how the general public would ever accept or even want this advance(as shown in the article). I personally enjoy being able to turn the page of a book, as well as having the attractive dust cover or paper back cover.
I believe that the commerical push e-book should take some time off and resurface in say...10 years when the technology has matured more and become more affordable.
To quote zpengo:
"The biggest problem with [eBooks] is the same one that affects [online comics] and other online reading -- Monitors on which reading and viewing are actually comfortable have not yet filtered down to the masses. Joe Sixpack won't read lengthy [eBooks] because it makes his head hurt after a while.
Paper is still a beautiful medium."
Right on.
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
It is a terrible injustice, and the DCMA just may be the pinnacle of corporate interests taking away personal rights, but I don't really care if Skylarov never gets out of jail. I wish that the charges would be dropped against him and that people would realize he is being persecuted for sharing information, but he is an author of many SPAM tools, and is one of the people that makes hiding your email address on slashdot necessary. I just don't feel good about making him the martyr for the DCMA because I want him to be put away and heavily fined, just not for this.
Onto e-books. I think they are a great idea, mainly because they have so much potential, which isn't being used because publishers seem so greedy and intent on making huge profits off of them. No one is going to pay the same price for an e-book, they just aren't. I am reading Advanced Renderman right now, and it cost $55. That's pretty fucking steep for paper and ink, but is well worth it in this case. I would have bought it in some kind of e-book format if I could have had it for $10-$15. That is still practically all profit once the system gets going, but publishers seem so intent on selling e-book for only slightly less than their paper counterparts, and that just isn't going to happen. Book piracy has already been happening for quite some time, and if they keep this shit up, the only reason anyone will buy an e-book is to crack it and distribute it.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Why? Because I can stick the paper in my pocket, I can scribble on it, I can read it in an elevator, I don't have the change the batteries...
I can do a lot of that with my HP Jornada too, but it's just not as convenient and it's just not as easy on the eyes to try and read a lengthy document (or annotate it) on the little screen.
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
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.
I can buy the book for $14.95... or the reader and the material for $200... pure economics... all geek factor aside... I cant photo copy out of an reader electronic reader either
The two biggest issues with them so far for me is:
1. The book readers.. are huge.. way bigger then palms or pocketpc's... make them tiny and maybe..
2. Damn copyright bs, if I can get popular books by paying for them, and older ones by downloading them (you know shakespear old) then maybe.. but if EVER title has to pass though hand's then forget it... but.. to all the "secure" book things will be cracked.. so who knows... maybe they just need to bring the cost WAY WAY WAY down..
DeCSS
If they can get the whole book for free why would they bother buying it? Some may do it out of support for their favorite author/publishing group (as I do in buying copies of Linux rather than downloading them for free) but most likely would not.
I think the reason CD sales increased was that users would find a bands latest hit online then decide that they would give that album a try to get the rest of the groups work. I don't think most people digitize their entire CD collection to their hard drive (at least they don't share it with others) but they do digitize and share the latest hit of a band. It's like a preview of what the band is like.
If there were a way to limit it so that a user could read the first few chapters, get hooked, and have to buy the e-book to find out the ending, then you may have something.
I have tried to read things on my Palm III before, and I have to stop after about 15 minutes because my eyes can't take it anymore.
Obligatory plug for the Baen Free Library".
// TODO: fix sig
I personally have never liked reading online content. I prefer printed materials for several reasons. (Yes, this includes computer related books.) I print out man pages when I am going to be reading them at length. I print out software manuals. Hell, I even print out web pages sometimes. I give you a few good reasons for this behavior.
1) Eye strain. I get eye strain easily from monitors, but not from printed pages.
2) I like to be able to read while laying in bed. It is kinda hard to do that with my desktop computer. No, I am not going to buy a laptop or PDA with ebook software just so that I can use technology in bed.
3) I don't have to worry about a hard drive crash destroying my library.
4) I like being able to put my finger between two pages to hold my place and filp around through other parts of the book.
5) No batteries required!
6) I can actually exercise ownership and fair use rights.
7) I like going to Barnes and Noble, grabbing a few books and sitting in their comfy chairs to read a little before making my purchasing decision.
Let's face it, the PUI (Printed User Interface) is simply more elegant, useful, and comfortable.
I own hundreds of books, perhaps over a thosand by now. I love the paper smell. I like fliping pages. I love going to the bookstore and being surrounded by millions of words and ideas. Ebooks will never have a place with me because they can not provide the same experience.
-LN
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.
Yes, this means that "new" books won't be distributed that way. So what? We'll have some paper books, some e-books, all will be happy - except the Adobes of the world, who will waste $millions on a technology that will turn out to be useless.
sulli
RTFJ.
At least with books, I have something that would have to be pried from my cold, dead fingers.
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
While I'm at it, I *highly* recommend Haruki Murakami's books.
and.... if you drop it off a 50-floor building,
it still works just fine.
and.... the total cost of the content and the
reading device is about $30-40.
and... no one can monitor what content you choose to
read with it.
I've been reading eBooks since I owned a Newton 100 (The Hacker Crackdown was my first). It's extremely handy, for several reasons:
1) I can carry around many books in the space of a PDA (currently a Palm);
2) You can read the book with one hand (get your mind out of the gutter) - I can hold the palm in one hand and turn the pages with my thumb on the scroll button. Sure, it's not much, but that's just that little bit of convenience that paperbacks don't have;
3) Low light conditions - I can just turn on the backlight, and I have an instant built-in reading light;
4) It goes where I do - since I keep the Palm with me, it's always right there if I happen to have a few minutes or more free and I didn't think (or feel like) bringing my book.
However, I have no need of a specialized eBook reader nor Adobe's format. I buy my books and magazines from Palm Digital Media (used to be Peanut Press) at http://www.peanutpress.com/ They have a decent if not overwhelmingly complete selection, they don't overcharge, and everything's quick and easy. I'm not going to give up on paper books any time soon, if ever, but I have easily integrated eBooks into my life.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
No one wants to sit on the toliet with a laptop. Things might get a little toasty from the heat...
In some ways they must, because they don't know whether this market will take off or not. They can't afford to be left behind when the wind changes. But it is expensive and wastefull to do so when it doesn't work out. Even if the E-Book market never really takes off, publishers still have to fight for control of the channel simply to maintain monopoly on their titles.
Sort of damned if you do and damned if you don't.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Doesn't weight like a ton when packed in a suitcases (I buy many non-digital books on holidays).
Easy to carry arround.
Doesn't get worn out.
Easy to navigate, easy to bookmark, easy to search through
Customizeable view (make font larger if needed)
One of the only problems is the availability. Most books doesn't exists as ebooks (in any legal form), so I still read new releases from my favorite authors in traditional paper-format. And then there's the nostalgia, the smell, the fact that you can take the book down from the shelf and look at the cover.
The first problem can be solved by the publishers (I think). The second problem can be solved by selling ebooks bundled together with traditional books. That's already common with dictionaries and the likes. Why not fiction as well?
The DMCA seems to be *discouraging* the adoptance and use digital technology rather than protecting it or making no impact at all.
/. in the last few days noted how big a PR disaster the new wave of copy-protected CD's is shaping up to be. Despite the fact that people hate copy protection, I have personally heard the rumour repeated that there is a possibility these copy-protected CD's have the potential to destroy your speakers or audio equipment. This kind of rumour is like slow poison to the record industry, who is starting to lose sales now that Napster's offline, because who in their right mind would even consider buying a CD that might explode your walkman?
Of course this has been noted before, but how many times does the idea that 'this product is unpopular with consumers because of the copy protection it contains' before the marketroids at the companies who are pushing take the hint and realize that the DMCA is hurting their bottom line and start arguing against it?
The publishers are the best, most prominent example right now. Random house and the others have invested millions into different E-Book technologies, most of the money going into making sure that nobody 'rips them off'.
As with the RIAA and Napster, however, the publishers have failed to recognize that broader exposure, even in the form of fair-use 'piracy', increases sales.
Case in point: I thought that the Harry Potter books were for kids only and couldn't possibly have any value until I stumbled across the first three in 'ripped' versions online. After reading them, I went to the bookstore to buy the fourth. Scholastic publisher gained a customer because of Piracy. Since, I've bought paper copies of the first three.
The record industry is next. One of the articles linke to on
It's not going to be very long at all before there is enough documentation and public opinion to indicate that copy control and DMCA restrictions are bad for business. Shareholders will start clamoring. The question I see is this: Will the companies involved listen or start to go under?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
A single very well-selling and very well-liked e-"book" comes to mind.
God's Debris by Dilbert author Scott Adams has apparently sold like bread. It's the only e-book I've ever invested in, and will probably remain that way for a long time... at least until Mr. Adams writes something else that is exclusively published on the web :-).
Aside from the huge instant publicity it got by being featured on the front page of Dilbert.com, one catch is probably that it's very short, and therefore not a cumbersome read on-screen. Given the drawbacks of current e-book technology (or the means of reading them on screen), the novella format may just be the only feasible form of e-text until one of the ultrathin paper-like text presentation platforms currently in development become widely available. I know I couldn't be bothered to read anything significantly longer than G's D on my screen. Printing out a novel isn't exactly my cup of tea either :-).
I still don't see any reason to have a separate format for eBooks, when HTML would work just fine. Then any eBook reader with a modem or wireless data connection would double as a web browser, and you could read the "book" of anyone who wanted to post text, instead of just the ones "published" by some commercial entity.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Why would I want a restrictive eBook when I can go to Project Gutenberg, grab plain text files of any number of classic works, and dump them on my Palm Pilot?
This is presuming that I'm interested in an electronic book at all. Cheap paperbacks are so much more pleasant to read.
-John
Now if only they would lock up the insane people instead...
Well, lets see.... books are portable, easy to read (and make notes on if you want), permanent storage of masses of data. And you can keep it forever or pass it on to a friend (unless you borrowed it from the libary for free). When someone can explain what is so great about an ebook that overcomes all that I might look at them. Its another technical solution to a problem that is already solved better, cheaper, etc.
FunkyDemon
that, and i can't read it on the sh!tter.
i could live a little longer in this prison
Tried that; did not work very well.
http://www.nami.org
To quote Bruce Schneier - "Trying to prevent copying of bits is like trying to make water not wet."
You don't NEED to know the format to copy, all you need is access to the bits. For reference - the # of DVD's copied in the Far East WITHOUT DeCSS. The only people hurt by proprietary formats are the home folks (i.e. their customers).
When the day comes (hah) that I can go into a bookstore and purchase both a 'real book' and an 'E-Book' at the same time, I will be happy.
E-Books are nice when you need to search for something, or you need a quick reference. I think it is quite handy that most of my $60 programming books come with the entire text and examples on CD. Yes, I could copy that cd and give the information away, but nobody wants it because it is asthetically worthless in non-paper form.
Paper books will always rule. We all function with a linear mindset. If you read something in a real book and later need to find it, you don't have to page through the entire thing. *Oh, it was about 1/3 through the second chapter* You flip to about where you thought it was, and find it. I hate searching EBooks by clicking or paging. I haven't seen any ebook devices yet that have any decent search interfaces.
The E-Book is a good idea for publishing companies, it eliminates the only major contribution they make to a book. (aside from editing) It is quite sad that their goal now is to find the most secure format to restrict access to a book. Any system based on mass distribution and individual 'licenses' for something as trivial as a book seems like a waste of time.
And has anybody thought about how, once E-Books take over the world, a person would check a book out from a library? I would hate to even imagine. Since it would be easy for you to make a copy of the electronic book (we are all inherently evil), you probably would not be allowed to leave the library with it.
Bah, humbug. Give me paper or give me death. I'm sick of this computers are taking over the world crap.
-S
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
"This is the root of my concern, books take up so little space that someone could download hundreds of books and store them on their home system. You may point out that someone who does this probably won't actually read the books (and you'd probably be right), but a massive copyright violation did just take place."
Hm. That's funny. I downloaded hundreds of books from Project Gutenburg, and NO copyright violation took place. I also made copies of some stuff on my home computer for backup. No copyright violation. In fact, in Russia, it is ILLEGAL to sell stuff that can't be backed up by the user (a sane policy).
Again, the issue isn't the copying, it's what a person does with the copy. The correct answer is to punish the folks who break the law (the pirates). Of course, that requires spending the money for lawyers, vs some "technological" solution that can't tell the difference between legal and illegal copying, but that only requires intelligence.
I didn't used to care for them much, but lately, I've been reading them on my Palm PDA a lot and I've really grown to like them.
.lit format is useless (especially on Palms), and I don't want to use a proprieatary reader to read $PUBLISHER's book.
The problem with e-books as I see it is the same as the problem with music. The publishers don't release new material in an open format.
MS's
When publishers quit trying to over-control the format, they'll make money at it. Look at Stephen King's book. He made like $500,000 off it, even though it was heavily pirated, but aside from bandwidth, there were no publishing costs.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
I've read a bunch of the Gutenberg texts in my iPAQ, and have really enjoyed them. So far:
_Life Among the Lowly_ (Uncle Tom's Cabin)
_Hound of the Baskervilles_
_Pilgrims Progress_
a bunch of shorter Sherlock Holmes stories
etc.
I've found that the format is very nice, since I'm already carrying my iPAQ, and I can get some reading done wherever I'm at (Taxi cab, subway, etc.)
I must admit that I don't like the copyright "features" that companies are trying to peddle, but I've only really read stuff from Gutenberg.
It's much harder to take a E-Book into the crapper as opposed to a normal paper book. And the consequences of accidently bending over the toliet to flush and dropping my paper back version of "Lord of Chaos" is much less than that of accidently dropping my laptop.
"Can't sleep. Clowns will eat me"
And the reader is very nice for travelling, since it holds a number of books, and ends up taking up far less room and weight than the equivalent paper copies.
I can't see paper vanishing any time soon, and I think the download to PC style of ebook is a pain, but the dedicated reader devices are really good, and have their place in the market. And if nobody likes ebooks, why does a Google search turn up more than ten pages of ebook sites?
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
The book is here, if you're curious: http://www.relisoft.com/book/
Adobe _has_ a .pdf reader for Palm/visor. Try http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readerforpal m.html (but remove the spaces). It even does images.
Although, it does use Acrobat 5's content control. Anybody know where I can get a ghostscript workalike for my Visor?
examples: my tickets from ticket master are now licenses that permit me to attend the event provided i do not subsequently broadcast any descriptions of it (i would have thought that telling people about it would be in ticketmaster's interest ...); microsoft going after school boards to see if they have illegal copies of word 6 on their computers; and general talk of limited term licenses.
it's all mainly general corporate lawyer blah at the moment (although the ms cases are real) but once people get used to accessing stuff on screen and have not grown up browsing bookshops (new or second hand) they might be less concerned about it than we are, and it will be adopted by default.
this is a radical way in the way we approach information and the public domain, and the answers are not yet clear. if you want a great book about how an earlier communication technology radically changed the ways people think in unexpected ways, try elizabeth eisenstein's 'the printing press as agent of change,' 1979, cambridge university press. it's expensive though, so try 2nd hand ... ;)
my usd 0.02 ...
- Easy to read: No flickering, small font size, incessant scrolling, or popup ads.
- Cheap: An average book costs about $10. At this rate, you can afford to lose it, destroy it, give it to friends, etc.
- Portable: All you need is a little light, and you can read the book. Does not require a power source. Anyone who knows how to read can read the book.
- Unlimited: When you buy the book, you can read it as many times as you want, for however long you want. You can read it out loud, upside down, you can listen to someone else read it - whatever. That is, of course, if you actually own the book. If you borrow the book from a library, there is an additional restriction: you need to eventually return the book, in good condition.
Until eBooks can satisfy the 4 requirements above, eBooks will be useless.>|<*:=
Like most geeks I read a lot. When I saw the dedicated readers they looked very promising. The ability to hold a small library in memory, and they solved the 'pain in the eye' problem that monitors produce. The reason I don't have an e-book reader. Selection and copyright. Basically the books I read are not on the bestseller list, somehow I think BGP routing is a rather limited circle of people. Though I do go in for fiction it is not the bestseller fiction. Consequently most of the books I would read are availble in dead tree format only. As for the copyright problem, well I don't even have to explain that.
I may be a pool man, but I am f@#*&ng Jon Bon Jovi's pool man!!!
E-books do get a lot of criticism, which is not surprising considering the fact that they are revolutionary (that is, they stop the custom of printing that dates back to Guttenberg and the Chinese), and also that they are located at the bleeding edge of modern copyright disputes. I'd like to explain why I think E-books are good:
First of all, E-books save space. That is, instead of a whole cabinet full of various books some of which I access very seldom, I get one small and elegant device (plus a few gigs of computer storage). Also, I get the ability to cross-reference, that is, for example, if I read some Latin texts, I can look words up in a dictionary. Also, one can take much of his library with him, without having to carry books in luggage (books are generally very heavy).
Secondly, they spare paper. I don't really need many of the books, and some others I need for a brief period of time. For each course I take in the University, I get at least 8 centimeters of A4 format books and brouchures. I really need them for 5 months; afterwards they become a static excuse to my ecological conscience.
Often complaints are heard over PC-displayed E-books. Of course, CRT screens irritate the eyes in almost all conditions, and therefore make time-intensive occupations (such as reading books) a torture. Also, the CRT screen is not designed to contain lots of readable type, even when anti-aliasing is used. However, the forthcoming designs of next-generation PDAs show us that they will have a big-enough, readable but not irritating LCD screen. Reading an E-book with a PC is difficult; however reading one with a PDA will be much more convenient.
Reading this way or other is a habit, and I think that E-books will soon become parts of our households, and indeed of our lives.
These guys sum up pretty much every bitch or moan you're likely to read here on Slashdot, and offer som REALLY interesting solutions, not to mention some freely downloadable books!
Click here.
**>>BELCH
Ebooks would be a LOT more popular if there were more titles, and they were easily traded like music via an interface like napster.
Look on gnutella using your gnutellium of choice. It's got tons of ebooks.
The motherboard manuals that come in the box are frequently available (I know Abit does this) online in spiffy full-color PDF versions... I know, motherboards aren't cars, but it's a start.
I swear, making a PS/PDF interpreter for an eBook reader would instantly make available a gargantual pre-existing library. So why don't they do it?
They're all useless bloody morons! Ah yes, *that* was the reason.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I like paper books so much that my hobby is bookbinding. However, being currently out of shelf space and being determined to read/reread classics, I have discovered that the many free/public domain texts schlep nicely via makedoc and a docreader onto the palm. Now:
:-)
*I can set a font size for my comfort
*read in the dark
*keep a large book in my shirt pocket
*hit a single button to turn the page
I also have the computer read to me while I am working on binding books
I read "crime and punishment" on the palm. I already had a paperback copy of "The Idiot", which I read afterwards. The experience of book absorption was pretty much the same.
So will e-books ever replace print? NEVER
Do e-books have their place YEP!
Will I pay top dollar for e-books? NEVER
Anyone remember that hilariously poorly thought-out technology?
eBooks suck. Well, at least it doesn't cost as much as one of those original Iridium satellite phones....
There are quite a few people in the forum complaining bitterly about ebooks. Have they actually tried reading a book on a computer? I have, and I liked it.
I read the Unibomber's Manifesto on my Palm Pilot, which gave me the additional pleasure of knowing the Teddy would have been pissed. ;-)
I read Snow crash on my laptop. I downloaded it from Gnutella. :) And if Neil has any complaints with that, he should set up a electronic tip jar, cuz that's life in the digital age and nobody knows it better than he.
I have lots of books on my computer -- and they come with movie clips, audio segments, etc, as well as the text. I can search for text, make the print bigger if I can't see it, and read in low-light situations where book reading could not happen.
People bring up the issue of copy control. Ok, so don't but those products -- I don't. Vote with your dollars.
AnonHm.. I can read ebooks on my iPaq, and the problem there is not that the reader is huge, its nice and tiny.. maybe a bit too tiny, and though I appreciate the screen technology it's still not paper. It's fragile, expensive and won't last as long as a ten dollar book..
Your second point is just true. Ebooks should cost less than a buck, or cost ten and allow you to pass them on like a 'real book'.. untill then, I don't see them getting popular real quick.
air and light and time and space
e-books (soon to be known as ebooks once they're more generally dispersed) is yet another in a long line of real-world things (like communication, business, news) that some moron businessman belives can be electronicized through a faulty understanding of human nature. As we continue to follow our inexorable decline towards a completely electronic society, most everything people really like and want will be eliminated -- like a good book.
I'm sure there will be lots of ads and force-fed mass messages to run it all too.
For an ebook to be truly useable it needs to have a display that is high resolution and reflective, not back lit. It needs to have a powersupply that never runs out, and it needs to be 1/4 millimeter thick or lessand it should be small too, less than or equal to 8.5"x11" The user interface should be easy enough to use that somebody could use it with out ever having seen a computer before. The lifetime of the device should be thousands of years. When i was in school, i actually got to use a few of these high tech things. We called them books, and they worked just fine. I even built up a little carrying around 70 pounds of this stuff.
The problem with e-books for me is permanence. When I read a book I place elements in order relative to each other. Important parts are "right at the start" or "halfway" through or "a few pages ago". I just don't get that feel with an e-book. I've had many discussions with people with some of them concluding it is just because I'm used to a physical book and that children raised with only e-books wouldn't need that permanence. Maybe.
They're great for a portable alternative. I love downloading a newspaper into my palm but I don't expect to refer to a newspaper the next week. When I feel I might want to go back to something only paper will do.
-CZ
Personally, I like the simultaneous release of the book AND an accompanying CD with an electronic copy of the book. Programming books are the most commonly found dual-release books available, and it makes the book so much more useful. I keep the book on in my office, and can tote a copy on my laptop to client sites: the best of both worlds.
I don't have a problem with this sort of release, and the publisher can lock down the electronic copy in any way they see fit, as my right of access to the book is not really affected, and I can still lend the hard copy out at will. It's just when you buy an electronic-only version that weird shit happens, and it's such a freaking pain to read, that I don't want it anyway.
I love this article, because it reinforces what I've thought all along: take the e-book and shove it if you don't want to give us the right of fair use.
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
I don't have any problems.
I've bought 6 eBooks for my Compaq iPaq, and I've only got 1 left to read.
My only problem is that the selection seems to suck a bit, but thats my only gripe.
I don't think it'd be particularly pleasant to sit at a desk and read an eBook on a desktop, or even a laptop, for that matter.
But, my iPaq is portable enough, is the right size, and Microsoft Cleartype kicks ass on LCDs too.
The main killer is the selection. There's only a handful of scifi novels on Barnes and Noble's website, and the non-fiction books are just a random spattering of self help books and stuff.
Well. Sometimes we don't. Sure, we can simply NOT use the format. But how many times has your boss handed you a word document, or a PDF? Talk about hassle.
Until everyone decides on a free, open format, we are stuck being forced to either A) Stop Bitching and Convert everything to ASCII, or B) Bitch and make everyone send things IN ASCII text.
I just wish things were simpler.
hrrm.
90% of people who post books on usenet are scum. They're scum because they don't respect the author and readers enough to proofread the damn things before posting. Often, they don't even spell check! This makes these books hard to read. And, because they're digital, they're hard to wipe out when newer versions (corrected) come along. These people could take a lesson from Gutenberg.
The proliferation of cheap web pads will change this. As soon as I can curl up with a nice e-book in bed, on the couch or the toilet, I will start reading in electronic format.
Until then, the newspaper is good enough for me!
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I'm a freelance writer/aspiring writer, but I'm also a hacker. When I first heard of eBooks, I was afraid. I didn't want these things to replace regular paperback books, if I was ever to be published. There's something about books that cannot be beaten. The feel of a new book; the soft-tissue feel of a thrice-read one; or the smell of a hometown library littered with volumes of the latter. eBooks, IMHO can never replace traditional books. You simply CANNOT curl up next to a fire, under a linux blanket with an eBook; it just doesn't seem right...
We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
"It always would have been a violation of copyright to photocopy dozens of copies of Dougan's novel and sell them on the street. Now, critics argue, it's as if the photocopier itself is illegal."
This is an argument that courts will listen to (hopefully at least). EFF lawyers, write this down. It is the perfect analogy, as far as I can tell.
There should be no proprietary text formatting options.
I disagree. If the publishers released their books in plaintext or HTML, the effects would be disastrous. You could download a whole book series from Gnutella in a matter of SECONDS, text would fly through the electronic ether faster than music ever did.
It's obvious to me that the publishing industry does need a proprietary and relatively secure format for sending out their books. They also need to grit their teeth and accept the fact that people are going to copy their stuff. Really you don't have to do much to "keep the honest people honest".
Anyway, the geek crowd who knows how to bypass this stuff is the same geek crowd that will wait in line to get their book signed by the author. I don't think too much worry is warranted.
What reader do you use for the PalmOS? Until recently I had been using SmartDoc (predecessor to Quickword) but I've since started using CSpotRun - I like that I can use the entire screen to read with.
Exocet Industries - Taking over the world, one computer at a
The Paper copy is better than the E-Book nowdays for quite a few reasons, for one, you can finish the paper copy and pass it on to a friend to read also without worrying that you're going to infringe on a copyright. Paper copy is YOURs to use and is freely distributable by YOU since you bought it, you just cant resell it but you can give it to a friend to use, you can copy a section to stick on your wall. With all that said, why the heck would you want to buy a E-book and get all the troubles that come with it, you cant copy it, you cant pass it on to another friend to read, you cant ( as far as I know ) donate it to the library..
Until the people who make these E-Books face up to the fact that people want the same rights that they get with their paper copy, the E-book is never going to be as popular. I sure as hell want my book to be mine and I want to be able to give it to a friend to read and enjoy too!
I've been using Gutenpalm, a GPL'd book reader that stores text files in zipped form on the palm.
You get the text (from project gutenberg typically) and use a desktop java program to compress it and put it into a palm db file, then just install it on your palm.
Since I spend a lot of time on the road, I can take a dozen or more books with me if I'm going on a trip without the weight. The palm's battery life means I have days of reading at a time without charging up (one reason I turned down a color palm from my employer).
I'v used fancier doc readers, but Gutenpalm is good enough and it compresses the content so I can carry a pretty good sized library around on my Palm. With a 16MB memory module, I could have literally dozens of books handy.
With respect to the issue of paper vs. e-book, I see absolutely no reason to prefer a paperback over a Gutenpalm book, except if you find looking at the palm's screen tiring, which I don't. The autoscroll feature is kind of useless, so if you like that sort of thing, I'd recommend the free readre "ReadThemAll", which does not scroll the text but "wipes down" the new page over the old one. However you'll have to use doc format books instead of zipped Gutenpalm format books.
So -- I'm basically a fan of e-books.
That said, I'll never read a non public domain e-book.
The reason is I don't want publishers to start treating books as "software" and to put the kind of onerous "licensing" agreements. That would be the beginning of the end of intellectual freedom.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Try this link.
Online publishing is only dead if you're a publisher.
Well, the really interesting question isn't whether online publishing is dead, it's whether the publishing business in general will be recognizable in 20 years.
Publishers will probably continue to fill some useful functions. For example, some people have wonderful thoughts to express, but their grammar and spelling are horrible; they're still going to need copy editors.
On the other hand, print encyclopedias for home use are pretty much dead already, and academic journals are probably going to go electronic-only within the next generation.
The really huge change would be if print-to-order ever became really viable. So far it seems to be mostly vaporware, or too uneconomical for the author and/or reader. The biggest single remaining justification for the traditional publishing model is that the setup costs for publishing an edition of a book are very high, so you need lots of professional filtering and editing before you make the investment.
Find free books.
It does get tiring to read it for an extended period. Much more useful for a fifteen minute break. And I always have it with me, unlike an Ebook reader. It's a nice add-on for a useful device, but a lousy standalone.
even if an e-book would allow infinite viewing of itself, having a hard copy is still better. It allows someone to move through the book faster (mainly reference books, like Java in a Nutshell), and also allows you space on your computer screen by not having the e-book viewer program there if you're using the book while working on something. I for one have a small number of books on my hd in pdf format (the author made them freely availabe, for any of you DMCA supporters out there), and it is tough to read them the same as you would a hardcopy.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
I'm surprised this wasn't obvious from the start! Let's look at the basic components of a paperback book. You get :
- A nice shiny cover
- A few hundred pages of printed text
- The ability to carry with you wherever you go
- The ability to share your good times with a friend, for free
Let's look at the basic components of an e-book :
- Non-copyable, non-movable bits
- uhhhh....
All this for the same price as a regular book. Nothing to pass on to your children, nothing to sell at a garage sale. $5 (and going up to $10, according to the article) for something that has about 10% the desirability of the original. Of course it doesn't sell.
Hindsight's 20/20, but you'd think that facts as self-evident as these would have been caught...
Last post!
I an a voracious reader. I also have a personal library totaling several thousand volumes. I've read a few ebooks.
I much prefer paper books. No doubt much of this is because of familiarity of the format. But it is mostly because of problems with the technology (poor screens, clunky or small readers), the lack of software (limited titles, lack of standards), the legal environment (DMCA), and the way publishers treat readers (everyone is a pirate).
But I see myself as a reader not a collector. I would gladly trade all my paper books for ebooks if I could find a reader I liked, if there were standard formats so that all books published could be read on that reader, and if I could back up my books.
It would also be nice to be able to access my entire library remotely.
I suspect that there will be some people who will always prefer paper, just as there are those that prefer LPs to CDs. And there will always be collectors, those who view the book as an object worth owning in and of itself.
But I'm mainly interested in the content. And ebooks have the potential to make the content much more accessible. I hope that happens sooner than later.
Steve M
This whole ebook/sklyarov/adobe thing reminds me of Ray Bradburys novel about the authorities trying to ban books, and forcing people to use different ways to ensure the survival of litrature.
Maybe another sci-fi story may become reality...
Well, apparently, the publisher and authors at www.webscription.net disagree with you. New Books published in html on a subscription basis. Really cool, and some execellent books can even be had for free (donated by the authors). Don't forget to read the FAQ, that explains the whole project.
IMHO, the only reason to go for e-books is the possibility of reducing the cost of the novel (or whatever) by eliminating the binding and ink/paper costs.
If I could get a book sized device that would allow me to download Joe Schmo's latest novel for 3$ less than the paperback, great !
If I can't (and this is what I predict), then give me my paperback/hardcover please.
Using the franklin ebookman- its got a nice screen. But the point is - I refuse to pay hard
cover prices for an ebook. The costs of mfg and
distribution are minimal. Ebooks should be priced
based upon the royalty to author + a very nominal
distribution charge + a fair (ie 10 or 15%) mark
up to publisher. If they were all priced in
the $3-5 range I'd gladly pay.
A) Because I want to quit my day job.
B) Because I PREFER reading off a screen.
Why quit my day job? I'm an author by night and a webmonkey by day. I publish online, distributing my work for free in text or HTML format (even though my peers balk at HTML, it's infinitely more flexible than 72 column formatted ASCII). I have little interest in traditional publishing models and all the rigamarole that comes with them; if I could self-publish, go indie with it online and make my work a complete user experience rather than just a long text string, I would. (And I do. But I can't do it for money beyond donations, because the tech and business methods haven't clicked yet.)
Why do I prefer reading off a screen? I don't care about the tactile paper and holding-a-real-object and such. It smacks of meaningless nostalgia to me. The refresh rate of reality and all the usual stuff people toss up to attack the idea of digital reading becomes a tired arguement with the same catch-phrase dismissals. The advantages to having books in digital form outweigh these conventions. I'd like to think I'm not the only person on earth who PREFERS reading from a screen, even if it seems that way at times.
If anything, online reading is far easier for me than normal reading; I have a physical disability (diastrophic dwarfism) which results in some hand deformity, making the act of holding up a book for a long period of time and reading from it very difficult. If I could download a small library to my PocketPC and browse it there nice and portable, I'd be in hog heaven. Instead, I have to handle huge, clunky hardbound books if I want to read the latest releases, which strain more than my eyes.
I've done my best to support eBooks, and support them the right way (no draconican digital rights management books exist on my computer, and yes, I want Dimitri free.) I've purchased and downloaded copies of Harlan Ellison's work and a few of the thousands of Star Trek books dumped to .LIT. I really want this to work; if I was a coder I'd lend a hand, if I was an economist I'd figure something out, but being an author the best I can do is hope for a good system to come along and keep an eye on things.
The E-book companies would end up selling a lot more if they removed the security because more people would use e-books and even if a certain percentage of e-books were illegally obtained, there would still be a great increase in the number sold legally.
Technical manuals are the only thing I see them good for, as long as they have a good search ability. Anything else, no thanks.
In my opinion it has nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with aesthetic. I read a ton of fiction, sometimes up to 4 books a week. I usually read in bed, or curled up on the couch or while waiting for the frenzied ghoul to spawn in Lower Guk. I don't want to read off a monitor in bed, and when I am waiting for that FBSS I am already using my computer. I like the idea of a hand held e-book reader thing, but it would need to look and feel like a book. Maybe something that cracks open like a book, with a quality LCD on each side and most importantly it needs to be comfortable. I read for hours at a time and don't want to hold something that weighs 5 pounds.
So, give me a eBook device that looks and feels like a $5.99 Dragonlance book, and I'm sold. I'd love to free up the 500 cubic yards it takes to store my books and I would certainly love to not have to move them around with me when I change locations.
There should be no proprietary text formatting options.
They just limit ease of use and make the world a crappier place.
hrrm.
I don't see piracy posing the same problem for books as it does for music. True, text will be a lot faster to transfer than MP3 files. However, a book takes a lot longer to consume than a song. Even if people did bother to download thousands of texts, who would have time to read them all? One of the few benefits of E-Books is that they are searchable. People are more likely to use them for research, to find quotes, excerpts etc. No one goes out and pays retail for a book to use in this way, so the industry isn't losing any money. This story suggests that the people who actually plan to sit down and read a book are more likely to go out and buy the paper edition.
The book industry should be praying that "piracy" (file sharing) brings the kind of popularity to E-Books as it has to MP3.
Ebooks would be a LOT more popular if there were more titles, and they were easily traded like music via an interface like napster.
Yes, quite right. One more point: Because of their small size, Ebooks are even harder to exterminate than mp3s - once a book gets on the net it stays on the net.
I have downloaded about 1500 ebooks from usenet and I only take those from authors I know or which otherwise strike my fancy. My estimate is that at least 10.000 titles (not counting Gutenberg) are in circulation and all of these get posted on Usenet regularly.
Admittedly, many of them are not proofread and/or poorly formatted.
On the other hand, I see hardly any cracked commercial ebooks. There are a few dozen people out there who scan and convert books as a hobby. These people make a difference. The ebook companies don't matter.
You think that's tough? Try carrying your 19" monitor into bed with you so you can relax in comfort while "enjoying" some pr0n.
Aside from content availability and format concerns, the other obstacle to e-books is handheld technology. Laptops are simply too big, cumbersome, and short-lived to be effective readers. The current crop of Palm devices are barely useable as readers due to poor screen resolution (speaking from experience with a Visor Platinum), although the iPaq type devices and Sony CLIE both look somewhat better. What I'm waiting for, though, is the webpad type device with at least a 640x480 color screen, Linux, less than 1 in. thick, a decent processor, and at least 8 hour battery life between charges. Now *THAT* will be a usable ebook reader!!! :-)
186,282 mi/s...not just a good idea, its the law!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Because there will be people who refuse to be controlled with hidden code, all in the name of protecting IP.
--the money is not in the IP, it's in the explotation powers that come with the hidden code which is protecting it!
Here is what an e-book reader needs to be to be successful:
1. Physical dimensions of a closed paperback.
2. >=200 dpi high contrast display.
3. Internet/wireless enabled. Should be able to plug in a phone line or ethernet cable, or use 802.11b at the book store to download new content.
4. E-Books should never 'expire'. I want to be able to re-read a book ten years from now. I can do it with printed books, why not an e-book.
5. Huge storage capacity - at least 1000 books.
6. Battery life in the 16 hours range (most people could read two average books in this amount of time).
7. Should function on it's own. I don't want to HAVE to use a PC to load books onto the damned thing, see #3 above.
8. Not neccessarily fully voice enabled, but it should be able to listen for something like 'bookmark', 'next page', etc...
9. The books should cost LESS than normal books. Why? Because it does cost less to make an e-book - you are just shoving bits, instead of printing, binding and distributing. Additionally people need a REASON to switch to E-books, making them cheaper might be a good incentive.
The author of the book cited in the article is missing the point as well. People want to read best-sellers. If there had been some publicity about his book, maybe it would have sold some as an e- or p-book. Chances are it would have sold just as badly if he hadn't listed it electronically.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
...but you have my OFFICIAL permission to correct spelling errors (Sklyarov) for the sake of accuracy in reporting. Spelling the guys name right shows that you care enough about the issue to at least spell his name correctly.
I don't know why this doesn't happen, since some of the editors have no problem with introducing their own spelling and grammatical errors as commentary.
The Association of American Publishers, however, continues to hail the government's action, saying Sklyarov's software "facilitates theft, and makes it less likely that e-books will soon become a popular reading format."
According to that logic, Napster prevented MP3s from becoming a popular format.
Why would I want to buy an E-book that could lock me out of the book I want to read at the publisher's whim when I can buy a paper copy that I can always read?
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
-NeoTomba
Successful businesses are based on adding value to something, then selling it. E.g. you turn $1000 worth of sheet metal, parts, and paint into a $20000 car. ... like attracting mindshare by getting innocent people thrown in jail, perhaps.
The Ebooks idea is a value-subtracted business model. You turn a copyable, lendable, read-anywhere, permanent book that people will pay $10 to own, into a copy-protected, time-limited, restrictively-licensed, inconvenient "ebook" that very few people will pay anything for. You do all that work, and what you end up with is worth less in the marketplace than what you started with. Show me someone who thinks this is a rational basis for a business, and I'll show you someone who's likely to have other nutty ideas
With paper books, I can look smart by filling a whole bookshelf with stuff I haven't read. With one trip to the used bookstore, I can cheaply purchase a whole 6 feet of classics from the past, and look like a well rounded person. Ebooks need to include some sort of packaging that fills bookshelf space, like the computer game boxes.
Technical references are too easy to use in a well-implemented electronic format. Why would I want to search text electronically when I could visually scan for it, page by page? There should be three ways to find something - Table of Contents, Index, and post-it-notes. Oh - and you shouldn't be able to click on the index entry to jump to the page, you lazy bastard. Navigate there yourself.
It's also too easy to correct errors in electronic books. I have fond memories of spending the first day in class fixing the errors introduced in the 11th edition. Errata should be sent on paper, by mail, so you can make the changes by hand. Think what the children are missing!
One thing that should be implemented is textbooks that change every year, in such a way that they can't be upgraded. This encourages students to keep their textbooks, since they can't sell them to next year's students. My shelf has many inches taken up with important sounding books like "Elements of Style", "Thermodynamics, 3rd Edition", "Calculus Made Easy", and "Learning Programming (with C)", that protects my shelf from getting dusty.
The best thing about reading the newspaper is the feeling of getting up, throwing on a bathrobe, getting your slippers wet with dew, and retrieving the daily paper from your neighbor's yard. All ebook media should be delivered by throwing it on your lawn, preferably at 5 AM, so that the dogs can tell you the moment it arrives. Or shipped in two weeks, the way Amazon does it. Again, don't forget the packaging - I want evidence that I've been getting the daily paper in my trash.
Size is also important - how will the folks across from me on the bus know whether I'm reading Dostoyevsky, Hacking Exposed, Playboy, or Harry Potter? The e-book should be huge, so that it requires a backpack, and should include, in a bright red LCD display on the back, what you are reading. The back-pocket is an unreasonale design goal. Weight is also a good thing - you need a counterweight when you are taking a dump.
Also, current ebooks are a bit too waterproof, and a bit to easy to backup. If I spill a little liquid on the display, I should see the waterspot five years from now. If I lend it to a friend, I want the electronic equivalent of a marked cover and bent spine. Books are a precious thing, and should be fragile, easily transferable, and should age with an old-book smell. Or, just put mold in a aeresol can, I don't care which way you go.
Are any design engineers listening?
I just recently picked up about 1,300+ "ebooks" via the Gnutella network. They're in ASCII text format. I'll be converting them to .PDB for use on devices running the PalmOS and making them available via a sub site of mine that I've recently started.
The reason I like "ebooks" or, more specifically, books that have been converted into PDB's, is that I always have my Visor with me. I don't mind reading books on it at all - in fact I've read through five or six books on my Visor in the last year or so. This doesn't mean I prefer ebooks to the real thing - far from it - but they're nice when I'm waiting around for a meeting, at the airport, or generally just sitting around waiting for something to happen.
Exocet Industries - Taking over the world, one computer at a
I don't think you missed a thing! When edocs in general first appeared, I used to always bitch about many of the items in your list, but secretly I felt it was an age thing of mine - despite how much I was computer-friendly - it *isn't* a book. I always thought younger kids would embrace it and I'd be left in the dust. Now that the ebook "revolution" has happened, I feel vindicated re: my initial instincts. :)
The Tribune article commented on the industry control over content - I honestly don't think the potential audience out there gives a shit about that(seems to be mostly info/net geeks that care). They want the convenience of changing their location, flipping(VERY important!), and not worrying that their book will "run out."
Print works!
Oh - and the reason the kids don't embrace them?
They don't read!
DT
But it will never serve for me the real function of my library: my trophy room.
That's what it's all about for many who love reading. Remind ourselves of all that we've learned, read, understood. Show any visitors what makes us tick, what we're interested in - and by absence what we're not. I'll admit it's even slightly arrogant: "See what I've read." For music lovers, it's their CD collections or Vinyl, for art lovers their walls or sculptures, for geeks their collections of totally obsolete computers and tech manuals. The trophy room.
Now, sell me a paperback that includes a free download of the text for the book, or let me download a book and have a copy shipped along later, and I'll pay more, happily. But an ebook on its own? For reference use only.
--Any sufficiently reliable magic is indistinguishable from technology.
If you are looking to replace current novels, this isn't for you. The selection of eBooks is limited, and they are often more expensive than their "normal" counterparts. If you are looking to read a bunch of classics, this might be for you.
I bought it, and use it, for reading technical materials off-line. You can import HTML, but lots of things, most notably frames, really confuse the importer. Fortunately, this still leaves me lots to pick from, even if it often doesn't cover what I want. There are rumors in the documentation about this getting better over time, as well as PDF support, but I'm not holding my breath. Physical eBooks (readers) are aimed at making money from eBook sales. They don't want people to just buy hardware.
Pros
- Much better battery life than a laptop.
- Much cheap than a laptop.
- Much more portable than dead trees.
ConsTake a look at any of the ebook usenet groups one day and you'll see that ebooks aren't dying, rather they are only viable as an underground were people digitize all of the greatest new releases (and older classics, and older not-so-classics) and distribute them in easily read formats. You can get nearly any modern book from these people in plain old text, which you can slap on a Palm or simliar device and read on the bus/train/whereever you want.
Contrast this with "official" ebooks, where you have to buy an expensive and proprietary reader for your expensive books from exceptionally obscure authors. Worse, these readers have all sorts of annoying "copy protection" built in that makes you a thief for even trying to give your book to a friend (like you can do with regular old paperbacks), and the publisers treat you like the enemy when you buy one of these.
I think the truth is in the article. Ebooks are the future, unfortunatly that's a future without publishers, so the publishers of today have every incentive to make ebooks look as bad as possible and makes sure that everybody knows that "everyone else prefers the tactile sensation of books over any of those crappy ebook things that you want to stay away from."
Of course the publishing industry is slow to change, so we probably won't see the publishing industry die anytime soon.
I read the internet for the articles.
Every E-book I have seen will not let me upload guttenberg texts to it.. I have to use "special" texts from "special" sources. This is what is killing it. How about my technical manuals? not availabie, a haynes manual for my Pontiac fiero? not available, how about some decent science fiction? not available.
So I can buy a E-book, and it can sit on the shelf with my ever useful sony data-discman... the Ebook of 1987.
No thanks. Until the solve all the above problems, an Ebook is just a joke.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If a drop a book, its unlikley that it will be un-usabele, and if it is I can buy another for 25 bucks (obviously less if its a paperback). If a drop an e-book, I'm out hundreds of dollars PLUS the cost of the written material.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If you want to know what content people want to download and use, take a look at the list of the most popular short films on Yahoo: http://movies.yahoo.com/shorts. It looks "Digitopia" is probably not as good a title as "Five Sex Scenes" when it comes to grabbing consumers attention.
I've held in my hands a book printed before 1500. Turned the pages, smelled the paper, looked at the illustrations, picked out a few words in latin. I've seen (in Hereford) a manuscript in use in 800. How worthless the old IBM punch cards, 8 inch floppies, disk-packs, etc. seem in comparison. ebooks might have a place, but they seem like the end of literacy to me.
Bingo! The library.
. ps
What if getting an e-book was as easy as going to the library and plugging in your Universal E-paperback? Or better yet, going to
book://local.lib/By_Author/M/Melville/Moby_Dick
or somesuch? Hell, it's not like the publishers get kickbacks from the library for every person who rents their books. And better yet, they'd have no reason to worry about everyone pirating a copy---there'd be no reason to, when you could just fetch it from the local (or not so local) library.
Ah, bliss. Probably never happen, but it would be *very* cool if it did.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This is the first mention of the Sklyarov case in the Chicago Tribune. I'm a subscriber, and I've been watching every day, wondering if the generally pro-business, conservative-leaning paper was going to even cover the story.
I was very pleased to find that not only did they finally publish the story, but they actually did a great job of presenting the opposition case to the DMCA!
Kudos!
First clay tablets, then pressed plant leaves,
then animal skins. Then tables and scrolls.
Even Gutenburg spent 30 years trying to get the
printed book right, but his was bulky.
And his secrets were immediatedly pirated.
(Story in Boostin's Discoverers)
Damn it, my book ran out of batteries! You got any AA batteries?
SIG: HUP
Unless e-books can satisfy everything we expect from paper, they will not be popular. For example:
1) How do I highlight important passages with e-books?
2) How do I make margin notes to record questions and thoughts as I read an e-book?
3) Can I write anywhere on the page using any color? Can I write at an angle or upside-down if I wish?
4) Can I lock the e-book away so no one else can read my margin notes if I don't want them to?
5) Can I look on my bookshelf/harddrive 15, 25, or 35 years later and still be able to read the e-book complete with highlights and margin notes?
One problem with e-books is that they don't give me the impression of timelessness. A truly classic book is timeless--its ideas are valid and valuable for eternity. A physical low-tech object--a book--is independent of and transcends trendy storage media or encoding techniques.
The only technologies that address the timelessness issue are the lowest-tech formats I know of: ASCII or UNICODE. I can write an ASCII viewer, if all else fails, because the format is trivial. I will always be able to read ASCII.
Unfortunately, ASCII and UNICODE do not satisfy the other requirements above, especially highlighting and margin notes. What now?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
This explains why nobody has bought my e-Book: The Emperor's New Publishing Business Model... It was a great book, outlining how to make billion$ with e-publishing, but the catch was, only those capable of making billion$ could read the text, to the others it would appear in ROT-13, which is illegal to reverse engineer, which everyone is so kindly to honor, and thus have not made any money. ;-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I suppose people like you won't be satisfied until we have little blank paperbacks that words swim onto in electronic perfection...
Then again, I'd be really, really happy with that.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
...on college campuses. If the academic presses would wake up (they won't - they're academic, after all), and align with a couple of large universities, maybe Barnes & Noble's campus stores, and maybe RCA they could deliver an eBook reader to an incoming freshman for $400 and, each sememster, the freshman would pay $100-$150 for their course materials, which they could download at B&N (which would keep a record of the download so, in the case of loss, malfunction or theft, the student could redownload for free). B&N could also have a secure website where studffents could download patches - addendum, errata, etc. In the end, time, backpack space, paper and money, etc. is saved and the technology is used to a good end - as opposed to publishing Michael Crichton novels...
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gutenbrowser/ Using Project Gutenberg. Screw that proprietary stuff. Linux, and Windows versions.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
Wish the gov't would ban paperclips.. I can't take that clippy bastard anymore.. he keeps making noises.. and asking me if I'm writing a letter.. I didn't want an animated clippy thing, I just wanted an overpriced office suite! Agh!
I read book on my Sony Clie S300. After a few chapters of getting used to it, I find it preferable to a paper book. I find I can read much faster and easier. But it did seem weird at first. I can see why people wouldn't buy one after trying it at the store.
People go on and on about the features they lose by switching to e-books, but I don't find that relevant. Imagine a perfect e-book--it looks, smells, feels and acts like a book, including writable, foldable pages. But there's a little port on it for uploading content. Even in this "perfect" world I wouldn't want one. Why? Because it adds no features that are practically useful.
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? For me the average for even mildly popular titles is probably a week, assuming I ever DO get it. I can go the library and back in 30 minutes. I can get an InterLibrary Loan in 2 days.
324006
I'm sure this has all been said before, but I need to get my 2cents in. First you have to buy a reader. Books are portable. I read them on the subway, on the bus, in the line at the bank and lying on my couch. I can't remember ever reading a novel sitting at my desk. The cost of this reader is never recovered. If the books were cheaper I wouldn't mind paying for a reader, but they COST MORE than a paperback. What is the reason for this cost? How many novels written today are not originally written in digital format? Not many, I'm sure. I'm a writer and I get cramps just thinking about using a pencil. Second, when I'm reading a really good book, before I finish it I'm already thinking of what friend would find that book as enjoyable as I and I pass it on to them as soon as I'm finished. They do the same for me. This is how I'm introduced to new authors and genres. I understand that releasing ebooks without some kind of protection will lead to 'napsterization', but thats not my problem. I want convent, affordable and swappable books. I have that now with paperbacks. With Ebooks I don't.
There are zillions of authors like Clive Cussler or Tom Clancy who slave away for years just trying to get that first book deal. Most drop out for lack of perseverence. Some drop out for lack of talent. Some only sell a few books because of the vagaries of the marketplace.
Why? Because editors are too busy to read many novels and quit reading at the first excuse. Or they hire undergrad english majors to read for them and report back. Nobody ever got fired for not finding the best-seller in the slush pile. The author shows the manuscript around to a few friends and a dozen people total read the novel.
My Recommendation: e-books should be freely distributable. Napster them early and often. That increases the number of eyes looking at them from a dozen to a few hundred. If it sucks, those bits can sit untouched on a server somewhere forever. If it rocks, those hundreds of people will want a paper copy. It's hard to read an e-book on the toilet, in a hot-tub, on the beach, or in bed.
How many of you would prefer a hardcopy listing to a bound book? So, count on freely circulating and copying e-books, and plan on getting paid when folks buy it in dead-tree format. This also allows the purchaser to choose how much to pay for his book. Suppose I'm old and my eyesight is bad, I get the large-print edition that's one-off printed. Suppose I don't want to lug around 800 pages of Stephenson's _Cryptonomicon_ or Clancy's _Bear and the Dragon_, I buy the 5 or 10 volume set. Suppose I want the book bound in leather... The technology allows all these things.
The wider the novel is freely circulated, the more free advertising it gets, and the more marketing data the publishing data have as to whether the story will be a best-seller or a flop. The publisher loses e-control over e-titles, but those e-dollars are an e-illusion. Name one non-lawyer who's gotten rich in e-publishing.
I would like to go into a book store, and ask for any book, which would be printed on demand.
Or, I would like to go into a book store, transfer my ebook token, for which I paid $4 for to the book store. Then for an additional $3, I would receive a cheap pulp/paperback print copy of the same book. Or I could add $11 for a original printed copy from the publisher/printer, which normally would have cost $15 withot the token.
30 years after, the print copy would still be functional, while all the other gadgets and content delivery schemes would long since have been obsolete and thrown away.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
I don't think it's necessarily because they've never tried it. With some it may be, but for me at least, staring at a monitor for long periods of time gives me a headache and hurts my eyes. Believe me, if you stare at a monitor for 8 hours at work and then go home and read off of a monitor, even if it is a Palm Pilot, your vision is going to suffer sooner or later.
The text book came with a CD that had the same stuff on it. The book print was small and hard to read, so I took the CD and dragged the text onto my hard drive. Using netscape and suse 7.1, I made the text larger. I ran Htdig and indexed the entire text. Using plugger and xv, I was able to view all of the diagrams and animations. It also had an interactive test with immediate feeback. I never cracked the text book and got the highest grade in the class. This is how I plan on studying from now on. Now, I'm looking for a good speech synthesizer for text on netscape. Anybody doing this?
Exactly. They would be going for an extremely good market if they'd release college textbooks as E-books. College students have to spend hundreds of dollars each semester. I'd spend $200 for an Ebook reader in a heart beat if it'd mean I'd be saving money by avoiding paper. Imagine a majority of college students ending up with these readers. And then they'd be graduating and prefering Ebook versions for future book purchases.
Notice how the Chicago Tribune refers to Dmitri as a "Russian Graduate Student", as opposed to what we see at CNN and all the other 3l33t media organizations calling him, the "Russian hacker"?
Sure, you and I may know that we're all "hackers" (people having fun writing code and solving problems), but to everyone else in the world, it's the colloquial form of "online criminal" who steals their credit card numbers and attack people's computers.
The long-standing uncorrected issue with the Media's use of the term "hacker" is causing a real world problem, preventing the common people from getting an unbiased view.