Slashdot Mirror
What if Harry Potter 5 Was an E-Book?
hakkikt sent a link to a highly speculative what if story on Harry Potter 5 as an E-Book.
The suggestions are pretty extreme- going so far as to saying that this
one book could change the fates of the publishing industry, book stores,
and could even make E-Books more then a pipe dream. Personally I'd
love to see it available digitally, but I still want a real hardcover
copy, and I can't imagine hundreds of thousands of kids staying up
late at night with laptops under their covers instead of the far more
traditional book & flashlight. Food for thought, but I can't really
take it seriously.
Were eBooks? I think that would be fine, but, I do like my paper textbook when it comes to calculus!
No one would have ever heard of it because no parent in their right mind would buy an expensive gadget just to read the damn thing.
If the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew was good enough for the parents, it's good enough for the kids.
At least Taco's man enough to stand up and tell us that he wants a dead-tree Potter 5.
I could never have imagined ebooks being any good. But My friend said it was great, so I read "The Big U" on my m100. It was amazing. Sounds crazy, but it is easy to pick up/put down real fast since it holds your place automagically. Your arms/hands don't crap trying to hold it open in various contorted ways. Reading in the dark is really easy on your eyes (and spouse) with the backlight. I recommend everyone give it a try.
Didn't Stephen King have a series of these out exclusively for E-reading? Besides, are we to coin the term "Curl up with a nice E-book on your laptop"?
thelikesofwhich.com
I know there's all this hype about computer literacy and such, but e-book format would probably shut out a lot of people.
This is hype. There's no way the publisher will go for this option. I mean, publishers are for-profit organizations last I checked.
Once again, this is nothing more than wishful thinking. I agree though, it'd be interesting.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
I have to ask: why do you want to commit Karma-suicide?
I just don't see any reason for it, myself.
... what's it doing on my hard drive?
Well, if nothing else this would give conservative parents who are freaked out by Harry Potter a chance to further ostracize their kids from computers and technology.
--Chag
Something that wasn't (I think) clear from the
I think you'd find a vast amount of interest in hacking e-books, putting the documents online (or at least on a local hard drive), and then printing them out for distribution among one's fellow fifth-graders. Not everybody's mommy and daddy can afford to buy an electronic bookreader.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Paper books are great for kids and basically anybody else who wants to "curl up with a good book". And they are surprisingly hard to break.
I think if the eBook thing had a future with existing tech, it'd have happened already with Stephen King or someone else.
There's just something about a book. I'd much rather have a nice solid physical book than an ebook. Sure, it's nice to have text in electronic form, but for me books have a certain mystique (for lack of a better word).
I agree that laptops are a poor way to read books, but what about handhelds? There are many advantages: ability to store multiple books, being able to set it down without losing your place, and built in reading light. Reading books while walking around was one of the primary reasons I started building a wearable computer, actually.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
If you have an ebook you want to read the it the "old skool" way; print it out, take it to Kinko's and say "bind this". Takes about 5 minutes and costs just a few bucks. Looks pretty nice too!
Personally, I think book's should be published electronically (PDF and HTML please) and the old way, freedom of choice.
Geoffeg
That's one of the first Slashdot topics in a while that's made me stop and say, 'wow.'
I might even buy one of those gizmos.
I have long hated the concept of e-books. They're expensive, they forgo all of the benefits of a book, a pile of e-book ram cards is nothing like a shelf full of paper books.
But I might buy one if that was the only way to get the next Harry Potter book, and I suspect that a lot of other people would, too. I'd hate having to do it, mind you, but it would be an amazingly cunning, effective way to get the readers into a broad range of people's hands.
God, I hope it doesn't happen, but "wow," nonetheless.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
What would they call it? Harr E-Potter and the Magic Monitor?
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
Battery power is no longer an issue, flat screens are cheap, displays come even close to the contrast and resolution of ink on paper, and content producers get comfortable with the truth that they can never prevent all copying. When that all happens, this may be possible...
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
How can you even talk about this when REAL TRAGEDIES are occurring in the U.S.?!
Propz to all logged in trollz....
./ was so hard-up for a stroy they published crap like this.
I think the idea is great, but I agree .. I would still want both a paperback and hardback edition.
...that i got from the college bookstore owner the other day when i said, "Man, all these engineering books are heavy. Are they available in pdf?"
He about had me arrested for even thinking such a thing.
thirsty*i^2
"Ya I finished that last week, it just doesn't work"
The four existing Harry Potter books exist in bootleg PDA-format editions. I bought the hardcopies because of ethics, but at my age, sometimes I prefer to read from a discreet Palm Pilot screen rather than from a large, gaudy paperback that says "CHILDREN'S LITERATURE" in every design element. It's also easier to carry.
I would sign this, but don't want emails wanting to know where to get the bootlegs.
Quote: The suggestions are pretty extreme- [...] Personally I'd love to see it available digitally, but I still want a real hardcover copy, and I can't imagine hundreds of thousands of kids staying up late at night with laptops under their covers instead of the far more traditional book & flashlight
Then why are you posting it?
Hey, while you're at it: what if all babies born on October 14, 1967 were put to sleep and replaced by those Sony android dogs? IT'S POSSIBLE!
Jeez.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
and Harry Potter and all his friends went to hell for practicing witchcraft!
Let's give it up for the definite integral. Riemann sums for life!
I could see an eBook as well as dead tree version, but no way in hell as an exclusive release. On a book scheduled to make millions (and millions) for the publisher, author, printer, and everyone and anyone associate with books, there is way too much at stake to lose with such a "radical" idea.
Th
I'm involved with eBook standards development (check out www.openebook.org), and I'm not very optimistic about the future of eBooks as they stand. There is really no standardization in terms of reading devices, and no real consumer market for an eBook. What's going to make eBooks run is added-value, not great content - if the Harry Potter eBook contained video, sound, games, etc., THEN I'd be looking to buy an eBook. My guess is that for eBooks to exist mainly as books, their future is going to be in academia and reference - things that really can be better with a searchable interface, or other technological enhancements. Current fiction, unless given some sort of sensory enhancement, won't cut it in the eBook world.
"What we have here, is a failure to communicate." - Cool Hand Luke
Bravo. That's the sentiment -- I wish I had some mod points handy.
(For many breakthroughs, the killer app is either pr0n or some military application. The latter might work; some U.S. Navy ships carry literally a ton / tonne of paper documentation. I think we can rule out the former.-)
Did I mention it won't happen?
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Plus, what will all the religeous groups burn/ban out of the libraries? Nothing makes a scene more than someone burning a book.
Burn a cd/compact flash card? Doesn't seem the same...
Then I guess we could expect a lot more little kids running around in glasses, eh?
I'm not totally kidding. People are always saying how its not that original, not that good. Well ok, but it *is* oddly compelling. I didn't really think the writing was great, or the story, or anything. But I was totally addicted. I couldn't explain it. I have talked to many other people who had similar experience.
It was like having a hypnotist whispering "you love this book" in your ear while youread. Really odd.
Making the books electronic would make their mad schemes even easier, since they can actually flash subliminal messages, which is a lot easier than encoding them with some arcane method into the text of the book.
Its true! I'm sure it is! How else could I get so engrossed into a kiddy book?
Why not! Nice reading on the way to work. I think E-books are nice because you can have the bookshelf in the pocket.
Why not make Harry an open source project! In that way the books could evolve and the story get even more exiting (ehhh).
I still find that *any* e-screen is more difficult to read on... I have problems focusing on the poor text of most displays, which, for me, interrupt the flow of the book that is easily maintained in print. I don't deny that it works in some forms... I hear on-Palm is good... But it won't be replacing my book collection anytime soon. There's something to be said for the collectability of books, as well. You won't see a "first edition" ebook print available on Ebay in ten years!
E-books are great! You can usually search for a phrase!
Well, you can copy and paste long sections! Well... usually not, when I come to think about it.
Hey, I know, you can print out a couple chapters to read at leisure! Oh wait, you can't do that very often either.
At least you can copy them onto your PDA and read at will... can't you? No? Oh.
It'd be better if it spoke, then it could read to us.
would not be the same with an e-book. For something like Harry Potter (we are working through Philosopher's Stone) only a real book can project the right sense of magic and involvement in the story
She looks over my shoulders as I read and when I'm finished I place the bookmark back in and slowly close the book. Her eyes are closed before I can put the book down.
Try THAT with a laptop.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Chicken and egg... Far too few core Harry Potter fans are willing to spend a minimum of $100 (cheapest Palm, or other eBook device) to read a $25 book. JK Rowling knows who buys her books, and the vast majority are kids with limited allowances and school bus rides to read the books on, NOT computer geeks. Sorry, this will not happen, at least not yet.
sulli
RTFJ.
From the article:
The consequences would be threefold and immediate. First, many nice neighborhood bookstores would curl up and die overnight. More than one bookseller has recently confided that in this economy, if it weren't for Harry Potter, their stores would already be vacant commercial real estate by now.
Second, those same nice booksellers would have plenty of company in bankruptcy court. Good candidates for extinction might include many of the publishers who rely on those stores to sell their books, plus such online stores as Amazon...
Yeah, and then global temperatures would drop like stones as the rampant and sudden preservation of millions of trees would offset global warming. The seas would freeze over! Cats and dogs would start living together. MASS HYSTERIA!
Just like happened with the CD industry, right? I mean, CD stores are going out of business right and left. Right? Umm...
best web host ever
I can see the clause in the EULA now...
Infringement of copyright:All readers are warned that acceptance of this license (which you agrred to as soon as you even thought of reading this book) means you agree to abide by Hogwarts Rules on copying. As copying is a very serious offense at Hogwarts, a first offense will reult in immediate defenestration from the Headmaster's Office. Subsequent offenses will be punished by expulsion and exile to the role of Jar jar Binks for all eternity.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
some people might be worried about pirating, but FYI, all of the harry potter books are available digitally (albeit illegally)... OCR works wonders...
so that wouldn't have much of an actual impact on the economics of the situation
without which TV might still be duking it out with ham radio for market penetration.
If it had any market penetration at all, it wouldn't be ham radio. Ham radio is excruciatingly non-commercial, and does not even intercept the idea of "market penetration". What is he thinking of? Certainly not ham, not even CB!
To me, at least, a large portion of why these books are so great is the fact that they get kids to read books, not just point and click at some eye candy that's barely interactive; it gets them to think creatively, rather than just accept what's already there. If HPV is an ebook, some of the magic will be gone, at least to me. Sure, ebooks are great for reference, but books aren't dead.
The Publisher?Baen Books
Check them out.
The Crazy Finn
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
While I don't particularly regret the decision, I have noticed that there is definitly a considerable amount of eystrain associated with staring at a screen for a few hours at a time, even on a LCD. It really is easier to read stuff on paper, and I actually think I comprehend stuff better when it is less stressful.
Also, you could make the point about just printing out ebooks....but unless you have access to cheap/free printing, that kinda negates the purpose.
While I thing etexts/ebooks are cool, I would choose a real book over an ebook anyday.
An e-book appliance device is far superior to a laptop for these sorts of things... that's the real goal: encourage people to shell out $300 for the REB1xxx ... which I think they should... it's quite nice to be able to download RISKS digest, The Onion, Freshmeat daily round-up, Slashdot/K5 articles, &c. &c. and read it in bed or outside or on Bart.
In the next book in the Harry Potter series, Hagrid's character will take a much larger role in the school children's education. First, he will use his experience with magical creatures to create a magical, furry, living device that can be used for the output of architectural CAD drawings. Malfoy tries to get Harry expelled by hiding a hollowed out book with several dozen hits of extacy in Harry's bedroom. Finally, near the end of the story, Dumbledore hears of Hagrid's printing monstrosity, and demotes Hagrid to the role of Professor of Ceramics.
So, it will have both a hairy plotter, an E-book, and a hairy Potter.
- Freed
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
You just have to release it as an e-book and then release it as a dead-tree book 3-6 months later. There are enough hard-core fans who will refuse to wait the 3-6 months to make it successful. I just hope whoever publishes it considers that there are multiple types of e-book readers out there and doesn't try to tie it to only one format :-(
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
If you really want a technology to watch, keep an eye on the publishing on demand thing. That one could radically change things, as it would mean an end to the phrase "out of print", and books would remain available, in new condition, forever.
Yup, what it sais in the subject. I read all four of them as e-books. Not because I wanted pirated versions, my bookshelf prooves I don't pirate books (in general, except for a couple of books in college). But because I wanted to know if the concept would work and I had just bought a Visor. So while looking for a text, any text (could have been rfc's or the bible) I stumbled across those books and I loved them.Even though I am an adult.
The first one I read partially as a microsoft e-book in their clear type font. I must say the font really rocks and on my 6 year old 15" screen I could easily read at a meters distance in my lazy chair. The rest of that book and the others I read on Visor. It was very well doable.. Now I just feel guilty that I don't own the books. So I'll probably get them soon. But it reads very well, if the formatting is right. The concept works... but unless it is really cheaper, I want the cover to show that I have it...
Use Adsense for Charity
For me, Harry Potter 1 was an e-book.
Sure, it was a pirate copy and full of OCR introduced typos, but I sure as hell wasn't going to go spend my money on a kid's book, despite the hype.
I figured, what the hell. Let's see what's so interesting.
Much to my surprise, I was blown away. Harry Potter was a morality play couched in terms of a fantasy novel. There were some rough moments... like at the end where the bad guy gives away the plot.
(Rowling's writing has improved since)
Still, I was fascinated. I downloaded the second and the third, quickly reading through them and finding scathing comments about the classism, the futility of punitive imprisonment, and the state of charity in the world.
When I went to look for the fourth book, it was not available. Instead, I went to Barnes and Noble that evening and paid 21.95 for the big hardbound copy of 'HP and the Goblet of Fire'. Since, I've put down money for all 3 of the others as well.
If Harry Potter 5 is an e-book, neither Rowling nor her publisher should fear piracy. The people who would have bought the book will buy it anyway, and the electronic copies floating around will inspire a few more to buy it as well.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Man, Quake makes you kill people, and Harry Potter makes you worship satan.
It's becoming increasingly difficult not to single out the computer as the tool of the devil! (Move over alcohol, drugs, and any sexual position other than missionary!)
"Old man yells at systemd"
I don't think the writer really understands the point of a "killer app." It's not any particular document, but rather an APPLICATION. that said, I think he makes a very valid point. If people HAD to buy eBooks to get crack (or harry potter, or whatever may happen to be "hot" at any given moment... think tickle-me-elmos or pokemon) then the market would take off. Until the fad died out, that is.
:)
:) but to get back on point, let me re-iterate what the author of the article, and about a billion other people surely know.
eBooks will *never* catch on this way, though. The likelihood of any author (especially one so popular as JK Rowling) publishing a potential best-selling book ONLY in the fragile and pretty much non-existant eBook market is virtually nil.
Plus we'd all have to boycott Harry Potter because of the eeeeevil eBook maker's coalition (ya know, that whole adobe, FBI, dmitri skylakarov, and DMCA stuff
eBooks will, in my not-so-humble and actually quite arrogant opinion, never catch on until you can read them just as well as you can read books. This means terrific resolution, the ability to throw them anywhere, and definately cheaper readers. Resolution is really the key thing though. I much much prefer to read a newspaper, even with the nasty ink it ges on my hands, than a web page. Its just easier on the eyes. And my monitor is a not-too-shabby Apple LCD display. The digital-ink thing seems to me to be the key to this. But thats far off in the distant future (oh, sure, they have prototypes for bill-boards now, but nothing nearly good enough for, say, a newspaper).
Okay, so most of that was ridiculously offtopic (what was the question again? oh yeah. Harry Potter
As the author puts it :
"Jo Rowling [...] absolutely loves dear old-fashioned, manually operated, non-electronic storybooks."
Yeah, and from what I heard about the movie she isn't particularly affectionate with other technological "magic" either. So I don't anticipate a Potter eBook rollout soon.
Plus, what will all the religeous groups burn/ban out of the libraries? Nothing makes a scene more than someone burning a book.
Burn a cd/compact flash card? Doesn't seem the same...
Did you hear that Jerry Falwell went out and bought a 16x CD burner? He was disappointed when he found out it was not designed to incinerate 16 "Two Live Crew" rap CD's at one time.
"What if Harry Potter 5 Was an E-Book?"
should instead read:
"What if Harry Potter 5 Were an E-Book?"
They will not do this because:
1) 5 minutes after it's released, it'll be warezed. Total profit $100
2) You can't sell a special leather-bound edition of a text file or a collecters edition set of 7 books with one 4 on paper and 5 on floppy.
Follow the money, everyone else does.
Blaze a trail to the New World
LOL. I know exactly what would happen if Harry Potter would be released as an e-book: it would shrivel and die.
It would not be considered the legitimate sequel.
It would be the dreaded asterisk, as in: "Harry Potter has spawned 5* sequels" Then: "* Including one 'electronic' version of Potter's adventures."
There is nothing compelling about e-books. Nothing. As someone who has 1500+ books in my house -- everything from Faulker to Stephen Levy -- I can categorically state that the e-book is now, and forever will remain, a bastard child.
There's a reason "books" have survived for over 500 years. They're almost perfect: portable, lightweight, cheap. Easy to buy, easy to trade, easy to sell.
Indie bookstores will not shrivel up and die if Harry Potter 5 is released electronically. They'll just keep selling what they're selling, keep doing what they're doing.
Much as some folks would like to think it, Harry Potter is not the be-all and end-all of literature. The article seems to forget that books have a 500 year history. Rowling is today's top-selling author (or whatever she's considered) but she's not *tomorrow's top-selling author.* There will be plenty more J.K. Rowling's over the next decade or so.
And I think that's fine. More power to 'em.
BTW, can anyone actually imagine reading Proust as an e-book? I mean, maybe it's just me, but I find e-books incredibly difficult to read for sustained periods of time. It's not unusual for me to spend 8, 10, sometimes 12 hours reading a book cover-to-cover. It's hard enough to do with a "real" book (I can't believe I'm writing that -- a "real" book -- LOL) but can you do that with an e-book? Do you even *want* to that with an e-book? And imagine forcing yourself to read an large, long e-book for a class -- by an author you don't care for but that you're forced to read.
Faulkner as an e-book? Can you imagine it?
Hemingway, maybe. But Faulkner? Melville? It would drive one batty.
Anyway, this article is nonsense. No, that's not me spouting flame-bait, it's me just giving an opinion.
J.K. Rowling may be popular, but -- please -- she's in no position to "kill" the book. Or drive booksellers out of business.
ROTLMAO.
Think of it. If they threw in a bunch of Easter Eggs that had a built-in Quidditch match or chasing Voldemort down or something? That'd be pretty good.
The thing is, what makes it a technological breakthrough isn't the technology, but the quality of literature that wants to use the technology. In other words, it's an idea that would grow old if every other piece of crap book wanted to do it...
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Cause: The magic floating around Hogwarts kills electronics.
I'm only half kidding here. Maybe it's too soon for the next Harry Potter to go Ebook only but I'd wager that maybe releasing the next one this way might not sound so funny.
And they maybe could add some region encoding so that people couldn't read a book in England that was meant for sale to Americans.
In my day we had music disks made of Polyvinyl Chloride. And I didn't hear anyone complaining. And if you scratched one too bad. And you couldn't play them in your car either.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
The reason I don't buy e-books is more than just what titles are available. I read alot of research PDFs, but I still print them out (at least 2-sided printing, though). Better screens need to come down in price, this includes the LCD e-book viewers.
First, they hurt my eyes to look at for entended periods of time. I hear that it is the refreshing on standard monitors and that LCDs are better since they do not refresh, but even LCDs give me eye strain.
Second, on LCD screens, they tend to be too small vertically, especially e-book handhelds. In dead tree format it seems like I get more vertical lines, but less width. Maybe it is just that I am used to that, but I find reading on a screen with the extra width more difficult than reading thinner columns. I think it is the retrace to the beginning of the line that my eye does and on longer lines it tends to be difficult (and I get lost frequently). I even wish that more web pages would be double columned.
Third, I think that there might also be a problem with the light eminating from the screen, too. I just notice that I am sensitive to how much light there is when reading and the direction of it. While a back-lit screen does provide light it is like a light bulb shining on your face when you are trying to read.
My fourth problem is glare in the screens. It is very easy to read a book with a light behind you, but you get nasty glare off the screens. Even with what would be ideal lighting for reading paper, screens still suffer glare.
The final thing keeping me form buying e-books is that you cannot mark on them. In literary book I tend to underline certain passages and make little pictures/doodles. In reserach docs, I make notes to understand it better as well as diagrams. As far as I know this is not possible with an e-book. Typed notes are okay, but not the same as a pencil.
I don't think that quality is a problem and I don't think that I need print quality to read comfortable, but I could be wrong on this too, all well as any of my other comments.
I read a lot of books on my Palm Pilot (an m505, if you must know), and I would be delighted to have Harry Potter V (or I-IV (er, um, legally, that is *cough*)) on my Palm Pilot.
I don't see any reason why they wouldn't want to. The publisher would do well (since there's no paper cost) and can even reduce the price a few dollars (see "there's no paper cost"), Ms. Rawlings stays the Richest Woman in All England, and I'm happy, because I can read Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix in my meetings while looking like I'm taking notes on my Palm.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Kids with the letter "e" in their domain names would be legally assaulted by the Harry Potter franchise.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
This would be great because dogs can't eat information!
For this to really take off, there needs to be an affordable reader which cost next-to-nothing. The money that would be saved on distribution methods (download vs. brick-and-mortar stores) should be more than enough to subsidize these readers.
-prator
(I am just throwing a thought out there. I really don't know the finances of distribution or the cost of readers.)
A bold move, certainly, but not a smart one, particularly because for books which sell in dozens of countries and in the tens of millions of copies, only a fraction of readers would have access to the electronics to read ebooks.
A fanciful notion, almost as far fetched as Hogwarts itself.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...that Ebooks will never completely replace paper. Reasons:
- Paper books don't require batteries or wall warts.
- OS crashes, hardware failures, hard disk head crashes, software rot, etc., can't affect your ability to read the book.
- Once you own a paper book, no digital "rights" management scheme can abridge or otherwise interfere with your ability to read the book where and when you want. Or to lend it to a friend.
- You don't have to back up paper books. They'll last for 100 years on their own, and they're damn hard to erase. Especially by accident.
I do think there are legitimate uses for Ebooks, however. It would be very, very nice to have all of my books in a single, small device (much like my current music collection) that can be taken anywhere. There would be a certain utility to such a device that can't be denied. Especially if you could cross-reference all your books together for easy searching, etc.
There's a reason "books" have survived for over 500 years. They're almost perfect: portable, lightweight, cheap. Easy to buy, easy to trade, easy to sell.
I recently read "Lord of the Rings" on a PDA. In all aspects that you mentioned, it the e-book beat the paper book.
Portable and lightweight? The PDA containing all of LOTR was much smaller and lighter than just one of the two LOTR books. Cheap? It was free. Easy to buy? Free is easy. Easy to trade? Come on, who would argue that a file is harder to trade than a pile of paper?
Easy to sell? Ermm.uh. you might have one there. Pretty hard to sell a ubiitous e-mail file.
Ah. And to think that I figured it was some sort of protest of the "bad editors and moderators" around here.
Not that I agree with this sentiment wrt ed. and mod., but I've seen enough obviously poor moderations I can certainly understand somone feeling that way.
Hell, I've lost count of the ammount of times I've completely disagreed with somone through metamod. In fact, metamod's the reason I read at -1 anymore. There are too many worthwhile comments that get modded down for differing from popular opinion.
To paraphrase, "I may disagree violently with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
That's how old my brother is and he reads the thing like it's...it's Harry Potter.
But still, kids with laptops?! That is where the whole scheme collapses.
I've thought a lot about what would make me buy an e-book... it would have to be something that really differentiates it from standard books. Automagic bookmarking is all well and good, and additional content would just be distracting (for fiction... other stuff might need it). Nope the killer feature IMO would be...
Water-proofing.
I would love to sit in a pool or hot-tub and read... you just can't do that (comfortably) with real books.
Well, provided that you're willing to spend 100 times more than you should, it allows you to use one less device! (in this case, the flashlight).
SAVE HARRY???
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms,
Correction: As an book, I like to open and read (boot up time: <1.0 sec.) and stop when I've read enough (shutdown time <1.0 sec.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
if we're talking 'e-books' the adobe format then i don't see what the big deal is. it's just another format. if we're talking about e-books as in electronic form of a book then i think it would be safe to assume a lot of techies (including myself) are increasingly relying on it. i almost never keep a hardcopy reference book. especially on something about computers where the book is outdated before it's proofread. i rely on hardcopy for learning something new and use the electronic form (mostly web-sites) for reference. as for e-book the format -- i'm really not that interested. what's the point of trying to create a feel of a book when we can do better nagivation with web-pages. i mean, a book is a sequential read thingy. web pages are random access that can be made sequential. why recreate the limitations of hardcopy books? i remember back in the day when they had those multiple scenerio hardy boys books. i forget what they were called. you had to flip to a specific page depending on what you decided they boys were going to do. those people had the interactive part down. maybe we need to leverage that further and create books with that kind of interaction to close the gap between books (scripted) and games (multiple path scripted.. unscripted). that would raise the bar on authors, the readers... not only do you have to come up with a compelling story but you have to come up with a maze of stories... now that is what would suit the capabilities of e-books (not talking about the format.. but e as in electronic book). you could read those many times and would actually interact with you.
Harry Potter is bad example. Target audience is kids.
You should have seen what they do with paper books before suggesting their partents to buy them $300 E-Book reader to read it.
It is a neat thought experiment -- certain books are in enough demand that they could drive widespread adoption of whatever medium was necessary....
On the other hand, the economics to the publisher will never bear this out. E-books aside, realistically, the publisher could publish the book at a $299 cover price and many people would buy it, but they won't make nearly as much as they would for a $29.99 hardcover.
The thought experiment gets much more interesting if some vendor with a vested interest in establishing an e-book standard buys an exclusive publishing agreement with the publisher. You'd need to do that deal with an author who cares more about money and less about children than Rowling, however.
The Matrix did it for DVDs, why not Harry Potter for e-books? Come on, admit it! How many of you finally gave in and bought a DVD player because that was the only way you could buy The Matrix?
Release it as an e-Book only.
That way, they will sell precisely ONE copy before it is cracked and distributed round the Internet, freely available to all.
So the publishers and Ms Rowling get the money from the one single copy sold, decide there is no money in it, and abandon the bloody Harry Pothead series, thankfully sparing us from any future installments.
(And yes, I have read the first book - very basic plot, even for a children's book; definitly NOT a "grown-up's" book, and certainly not deserving the hype).
Go ahead, flame away...
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
Count me as another Samuel T. Cogley, for I just don't see a day where I'll find it preferable to hold a handheld instead of a bound paper book. Yes, eBooks can be indexed and searched faster, can be updated without reprinting costs, yada yada yada. But there's just something... comfortable, substantial about hold a book in your hand, turning the pages. Definitely for pleasure reading, and probably for technical as well, I think paper books will still be preferred for a long time.
Besides, with an eBook, what's the author going to sign...?
Harry Potter is bad example
So said Severus Snape
I can't imagine how anyone in their right mind would want to read an E-book.
.. I spend 8-9 hours at work in front of a moniter, and another 2-3 at LEAST at home. [be it contract work or Counter Strike]
.. is for about an hour before I go to sleep, I read. I read .. and I read like the wind .. [120 pages an hour EASY .. sometimes up to 300]
.. will never replace a simple $6.99 paperback.
.. an e-book reader runs about $269.00 when i last checked [a pal bought one]. Assuming that E-books were either warez or free .. I would have to read about 40 books to make that cheaper than buying paperbacks. [about 2-3 months .. i read over 120 books a year easy].
.. if i know they destroy books, its cheap enough to buy them their own copy.] Unless my pal's family all have e-readers, thats pretty hard to do with a digital book.
.. but not for long .. there is still the classic charm of a physical book to consider.
As a programmer/Web developer
My one love of the evening
I consider this *RESTING* my eyes after a day of irradiating them. E-books, not matter how much the geeky quirky appeal they have to me
First off
For me that give it a chance at being a $$ savings (if we forget about the pleasure of holding a book), but what about my fieance` who reads like 5 books a year ? would never be worth it!
The other big selling point of a normal book, is i can give it to someone else. [or
e-paper would make me doubt my stance
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
This is already entirely possible and at least somewhat done by websites with Flash or Java applet front ends... of course, I'm not aware of anyone who's done an entire book this way before....
In the Dot-Com era that actually might have been quite an idea for VCs to invest in.The point is, sometimes companies and individuals try and push technology when suitable technology already exists. E-books are one of these cases. Perhaps in the future the technology could become easier to use, more accessible and cheaper, and it will become widespread. At this time, I don't think it's quite ready for prime-time. (Suitable for the masses). No doubt it'll get there, but given current technology? Unlikely.
2DUP * ;
Recently I saw a review of Xerox working on electronic paper. Yes, it's been around for a few years and will still take a few more to be useable. The demo was for signage in a clothing store. Each 6"x9" piece would be "updated" via a wireless connection from a handheld device. The text on the paper instantly changed to a new price. Pretty good stuff all around.
So what does this have to do with Harry Potter and eBooks. I don't see eBooks surviving for the plain reason that I'm not going to sit at my desk, lug around a lap top or even squint at a palm top to read a book. Not only that but the storage involved for a full book isn't small potatoes on my 2mb Palm. Keeping around 100 novels that I could read at will isn't going to happen.
However, with some more advances in the technology I do see electronic paper as a substitue. By downloading the electronic book from Amazon.com then sending it to my electronic paper, I can now read it like it's a real book. The advantage is that a) it's lighter because it can be a single sheet that just flips between pages b) it can have some features like remembering where I left off or giving me a summary of the book to jump around in and c) it's cheap (or should be by the time the technology gets there) and I can carry it around and even buy a book at a real bookstore, except that they'll just beam a copy of Harry Potter X to my electronic paper instead of getting a disk or paper copy.
I still don't think this will ever replace the traditional kill-a-tree approach to publishing, but it might be more acceptable than a traditonal ebook.
liB
As an aspiring author, and a reader, I have doubts as to whether this will catch on.
;)
People complain about staring at the monitor too much now, especially those with contacts (I've friends who have to take eyedrops to lengthy college courses!)..
Part of the nice things about books is you can sprawl out on a bed/couch/whatever, under some blankets, and if you pass out, nothing's going to happen.
I'd hate to fall asleep while curled up with a nice laptop, only to wake up to a busted screen and glass shards sticking into my body.
Don't expect dead trees to stop being produced any time soon.
People such as myself like catching up on reading when we're in the crapper. I want a physical book in my hand when nature calls.
:)
Worst case scenario I accidently drop the book in, and not the laptop
I live under the bridge, in a pile of feces.
Not if you can't or don't want to crack the encryption first.
:-) in any format you can actually use.
E-books packaged in the Gemstar, Adobe, or Microsoft formats are encrypted and only decryptable with their special client software which doesn't allow for save-as-text, printing, or any such other useful feature that they think might allow users to violate their copyrights.
Microsoft's is especially bad, as it doesn't even allow screen readers to operate. Blind? Want to read books available electronically but not in Braille? Too bad. Furthermore, they encrypt the ebook against your Passport ID, so it can only be read on computers or PDAs that have been set up with that passport.
Adobe's is a special encrypted PDF that has similar "features", but I don't think it's quite as onerous.
In any case, you won't be getting any newly released books published (officially
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Well, that would make it a hell of a lot more expensive for those book burning religious zealouts.
Now I know why God needs all that money they ask for on TV.
When I read, you could set of a small nuclear device in the same room and i wouldn't notice. Actually, when reading boring stuff, I often LIKE distractions. They seem to soak up enough of my brainpower that my mind dosent get bored and wander, if that makes sense.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
I'd love an e-book, if i could buy it for the price of the royalty... no sense paying the printing and distribution costs if they are nearly non-existant. for example, if a book costs $12.95 and $10 of that is shipping (making up numbers) then I'd consider $3 a fair price for the electronic version.
of course, if it's in some proprietary format, i don't want it. give me straight PDF, PS, or txt.
could track your IP address and ultimately
your home address and shopping habits at
www.amazon.com.
Baen http://www.baen.com publishing has been offering free ebooks from selected authors as a way to drum up sales for a while now. I'm not sure how well it works (I'm not associated with them) but I've found it to be a great tool, personally. Folks should check it out.
One of my favorite authors, David Weber, participates and a couple of his books are available.
That said, I don't think a Harry Potter ebook would change the world. Schoolastic isn't going to release it in that format exclusively because it would be a bad buisness decision. After the relative flop that was Stephen King's ebook foray I doubt we'll see a major publishing house try it with one of their A list authors any time soon.
As it stands now, a UK company most people have never heard of publishes the book, but that company doesn't have the distribution capability of a giant like Scholastic, so Scholastic distributes it in the U.S. and makes a bundle as a middleman. An e-book could be sold directly from the publisher's Web site, cannibalizing Scholastic's sales in the U.S. and souring relations between the publisher and its biggest (to my knowledge) distributer.
The greater fear would be piracy. An item as hot as Harry Potter and as small as an mp3 file would quickly find its way to P2P file-sharing. Heck, AOL users could email it to each other. To circumvent piracy, the publisher would implement some kind of digital rights management, but once it has its fingers in that pot and it realizes that technology can be used to charge people per read...
Bottom line: it's too messy an issue for the publisher to touch. They're sitting on a gold mine -- why risk tainting it?
You went to all the trouble to pirate a book that is now less than $13US? This isn't a troll (not really) but I can't believe you'd pirate for pirating's sake.
Sounds kinda silly.
Not sure why it should be considered embarassing for adults to read "children's" books. I know at least as many adults as I do children that have read Harry Potter. It's definitely not just for kids. I actually have to wonder just how much it's really intended for kids, due to the sometimes-gruesome nature of the stories. For example, the ending of the last book was pretty darn nasty (no spoilers here).
As would anyone else who loves to read. There is more to a book than simply the text it contains, and I can't imagine very many people not wanting a hardcopy to match the previous four.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
This would be a pretty good use for the laptops, that the state is giving to 7th and 8th graders up here in Maine.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
But with an iPAQ you can snuggle down and read away
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? - Joshua (Wargames)
You could have text-to-voice software read the book to you. So if your kid has a hard time reading this could be used as a good learning tool. Right?
Yes but every time I try to see it your way, I get a headache.
BTW, that should be "embarrassing". How embarrassing.
I have recently gotten into listening to books on tape. They are very convenient and you can "read" a book while driving or performing tasks that don't require full concentration (like painting my house).
Now that I have an iPod, I can fit a whole bunch of books on one little device and take it wherever I go without having to change tapes/CDs and such. When I'm on long car trips, I hook the iPod up to the car stereo and can either listen to music or one of the books I've downloaded/ripped.
I would *love* to see the next Harry Potter book (or any interesting book for that matter) to be released on a single CD with mp3 files that I could listen to anywhere. I think that is much a more reasonable way to distribute the book because it doesn't require that I purchase yet another single-purpose gadget like a eBook reader (that is bound to be obsolete in a matter of months anyway). It also doesn't require that I strain my eyes to read tiny print on a PDA that is much less comfortable than an actual paper book, and only mildly more portable/flexible.
I have also just found a site that has a bunch of books available for download in the mp3 format. You can pay to get the books without ads, but you can also get the books for free with little ads inserted into them. There aren't many good books there, but I've found a few: audiobooksforfree.com. I really hope that more publishers start providing books through sites like this.
So why on earth would Rowling ensure that the book costs an extra $200 per copy? Whats in it for her? Is she going to buy one of these ebook companies, too?
Just hop on #bookwarez
Stephen King published "The Plant" in .pdf about two years ago. It was available for download at $1 per installement, for a total of $6. I remember that it generated a lot of press, including predictions of death of a publishing as we know it. However I don't see any dramtic changes. Even if things are going to be different, it will take a long time. Remember, it took 20 years to transition the majority of viewers from b/w to color TV.
I thank you for defending the subjunctive mood.
I read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina on my Palm V. The biggest problem there was that the entire book did not fit on my palm, so I had to install part 1, read it, then install part 2. The second problem was I was constantly flipping back trying to remember who this character was, which wasn't at all easy. Actually, it was a royal pain and almost turned me off ebooks.
But then I gave it another shot, reading Twain's Huck Finn. Much better.
I agree with the original post- give it a try, it's enjoyable. But don't pick Les Miserables as your first ebook. Pick something shorter and lighter that doesn't require a lot of backpaging to figure out what's going on.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
But a text document is easy to alter, and the changes would be difficult to spot. How would you know you were reading the "real" version? I wouldn't waste my time downloading and reading a book from gnutella for example, because of the risk of receiving an altered version. This is one of the reasons I think that the book publishers don't have some of the same worries that music publishers do when it comes to distributing their products electronically. I can imagine ways around this problem, but it all comes down to being able to trust your source.
I know that the books won't be distributed as plain text, but for the sake of this discussion I'm assuming that someone will find a way to convert it to text.
Check out AbiWord.
Personally I'd love to see it available digitally, but I still want a real hardcover copy
If it was under the GNU FDL, then you could have your cake and eat it to.
Ok, I'm sick.
Someone you trust is one of us.
What makes ebooks cool is that anyone can produce them and they are easy to make available to anyone, anywhere. They have none of the front end cost associated with printed books.
I've wanted to write some stuff and "publish" it myself. E-book format is a great way to do it. I certainly can't afford any other way.
If any of it ever became popular enough that a lot of people wanted it- the smart thing would be to immediately get a contract and get it printed as a real book.
E-books have great possibilities as facilitators of freeing up information but not as a replacement of 'real' books.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
New E-Books 2.0!
It's the size of a book, the weight of the book, and only 100 times more expensive cause you get a nice screen!
And even better! No pages to dogear!
Use our superior technology!
Who wants paper when you can spend more and get extra limits to boot!
I guess poor people aren't allowed to have their imaginations stimulated.
An eBook only release would raise the cost of access above what many would be willing or are able to spend. Do we really want this as a trend in our society? Knowledge only for those who can afford it.
This might be offtopic, but they might start making flashlights that turn off when the battery is low, rather than reducing the intensity gradually. This way we could care about the eyes of our children - we know we can't make them go to sleep for our parents could not make us either. 8-)
In this regard, e-books could actually be the way to go.
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
I own tons of books, both hardcover and paperback and even have a dream of quitting IT, opening a used book store and wallowing in happy poverty. Aaaaaah. One of my favorite smells in the entire world is "old book smell".
That said, I always have an e-book on my Pilot.
Waiting in line to return something at a store? I've got a book to read. Bored at lunch? I've got a book to read. You get the picture. Will it replace paper books for me... never. Does it have it's place... absolutely.
And now the recommendations. You know the "Wizard of Oz." There are actually 40 books in that series (from 1900 - 1965) and many of them are available free on-line in English, Japanese and Esperanto. Legal to download AFAIK as the oldest aren't restricted by copyright laws anymore. The only drawback is that the Illustrations in the dead tree versions are half the fun and the English e-versions are simple txt files.
More info on the OZ series and links to the downloads are available at http://www.welcometooz.net
And of course Project Gutenberg has plenty of free e-texts available for download. http://www.gutenberg.org
Happy e-reading!
- Allow AOL users to buy it online and receive it two-weeks before street date
- Put excerpts of the first two chapters exclusively on AOL
- Offer a deal to buy the book cheaper with an AOL contract
They used these tactics with the Madonna Concert, and it was highly successful.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.
as far as i can see, this link is total bulshit?!?!? I may be pissed but?
what if hollywood started doing ALL films on the net, wouldn't THAT show those celluloid film buffs>
WHATEVER!
What if the book came out as an e-book first, and the dead tree version could come out a few weeks later. This would get a lot of people talking about e-books. It would also encourage readers to buy the e-book version (since it is released earlier) thus exposing more people to e-books. Consequently, it would result in double sales to hardcore fans since they'll buy both versions of the book.
This would be a win-win situation for both e-books and the author (who would profit from the double sales and the higher profit margins of e-books). Popular music artists (like Pearl Jam) have been doing this for years by releasing an album on vinyl before releasing on CD.
Just a thought!
hmm, ebook readers or pdas are pretty cool to read books, you can take them anywhere, better than a laptop,
but not better than a real book, anyways you spend more energy reading a book from an electronic device than a paper book..
and not the percentage of people who read books on electronic devices is very small
text-e-books would be a great idea. I'm a skimmer and I've always dreamed of being able to CTRL-F and search for "war of 1812" rather than waste time skimming text to try and find what i need.
There's no "I" in Linux.. err..
Anyway, a cluster of all the Harry Potter books (assuming they are all published digitally) could be a powerful thing!
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
I'm not going to go into much detail, but Harry potter is a very evil series. It descibes witchcraft, and they're giving this stuff to kindergartners. Maybe you should think about why Rowling doesn't let her own 8 y/o daughter read them.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
This would be nice if the e-version was sold at about half the price of a hard-copy book and you could have one printed up for half the price of a book in the book store. Or just have the option to buy the book with the e-version included. Having *just* an e-version sold would be fine, I think, if you were able to get it printed up with the books-on-demand stuff. Getting it done at Kinkos is okay... but this could be a lot more practical. You know, just some way that I can have either one or both without having to pay twice what it would cost for the regular old book.
just a couple of ideas...
Everyone I've suggested using their little cheap Palm's to read an ebook, laughs at first and then they tryit, and *love* it. I don't even bother with paper books anymore they waste space and trees. I carry usually 15-20 ebooks on me tiny little SD card and could carry a whole lot more when was the last time you carried that many paper books. The truth of the matter is that people love to bash the palm's small screen, limited OS, etc. But this is a place where palm has it right *again*. Form factor, price, and battery life make Palm the only viable book reader on the market. Jesh you can get one for $90 now (m100).
I can't imagine hundreds of thousands of kids staying up late at night with laptops under their covers instead of the far more traditional book & flashlight
I'll be damned if my kids get a laptop before I get one, and I ain't getting one anytime soon!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
ebook only you say?
this will be great news for the ink and paper business!
$10 for the ebook. $5 for a ream of paper. $30 for an ink cartridge (do you actually think the average consumer is smart enough to invest in a laser printer?)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Currently, what keeps most e-books from taking off, other than the price, tends to be the format and design of e-book readers themselves. While the Rocketbook is a good format, it isn't perfect, and it tends to be impersonal - that is to say hard and cold, unlike a real book. What is needed is a new "reader".
This new "reader" is almost here - and when it comes, it WILL change the way we use and view books, provided it is cheap enough, can hold enough of the books, and that the books will be cheaper themselves. The format of the reader is ideal:
1) About the size of a paperback novel, but with hard plastic front and back "covers", and a plastic "spine".
2) Covers and spine hold battery, memory, and cpu for the reader, as well as a "docking" port of some sort.
3) Sandwitched in-between the "covers" are 100-200 "pages" of xerox (or similar) "e-paper". The paper is "bound" into the book in such a way to allow the book to lay flat (perfect for recipes and studying). Also, said e-paper contains stress/bend sensors along the spine edge to determine when a page has been turned, and which page it is. The e-paper also has touch sensitive spots on the upper and lower right hand edge of the page, both side (left edge on other "side"). This would facilitate bookmarking, zooming, scrolling and possible other features needed in the "book".
Such a book could have the text/images downloaded to it, and you could flip through it and read it like you would any other book. The e-paper would feel similar to a glossy style paper, and when you got to the end of the pages, if there were more in the book, close it, and open it again to see the rest (or hit one of the "tabs" to continue, perhaps). Flip the book around and you can read Hebrew. Flip it "vertical" and you can read one page with a picture above or below, landscape style - hang it on the wall, and it become a small calendar!
However, even though this is the "perfect" format (ok, even I know it isn't perfect, but it goes a long way, you have to agree), something that would make a lot of people want it and the books to go with it - there is a dark side to this technology:
Inevitably (actually, today) - if publishers could have their way, they would be charging and doing a "pay-per-read" system. They really hate the lending and reselling of books, in any venue - they hate the "first-sale" doctrine. What the new reader would give them could be a "pay-per-read" and "re-read" system: You turn the page, to read the next, flip back one page, and it is blank - need to pay for the whole book, or that page, to read it again. Or maybe they allow you to read each page only a few time, before it disappears. Suddenly, the book is no longer a "useful" thing anymore.
I don't know if such a development would cause people to drop it, or if it would be glibly accepted. I hope the former, I fear the latter.
Still, such a device could have an enormous impact, if it was kept open to use (to put your own books on, and no "pay-per-read" system), and cheap enough.
I suppose I should be glad that portable CD players didn't come out later - imagine having to pay each time you wanted to hear a track (yeah, I know - they are working on that, too)...
:(
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
That actually made me laugh out loud. Of course I snarfed beer all over my ThinkPad. Oh well.
This is still the worst idea I've ever heard. Assuming they would release Potter as ONLY an e-book, it would doubtlessly help e-book sales incredibly and make it a much more accepted product.
HOWEVER, if they didnt' releast it only as an e-book, clearly it wouldn't help sales too much. Many people will still by the paper edition -- most, in fact.
But that's not why this is a rotten idea. This is: COST. Right now I can go out and buy the paperback Harry Potter for five bucks. That's a price that's easily affordable to a lot of kids in the book's target demographic.
Buying an e-book display device is way out of the range of these kids. It's even out of the range of many parents. It's also ridiculous to give a kid a device like this to break, take with him tos chool to get lost or stolen, etc. Believe me, this isn't going to fly, and if the publishers think it's a good idea... well, they need to examine all the factors.
-Chris
I read the first four Harry Potter books on my palmtop. I bought the originals in hardcover, and found myself downloading them in illicit ebook format anyway. Why? Becaus the books were huge and wouldn't stay open when placed atop the elliptical climber, which is the best place to get some good reading done (whilst ignoring the burn). The palmtop is bright, has adjustable fonts for when my glasses get too fogged with sweat to read, and easily switches between books (i was reading "Hills of Killimanjaro" in parellel at one point).
Being able to grab the new potter book on ebook would just legalise the sort of content repurposing i'm doing already. And I'd probably still buy the hardcover for the wife and others who don't dig the digital.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Surprise, a book with a best before date!
I sent email to Adobe asking them if this is how all of their eBooks worked and have yet to receive a reply.
I certainly learned something about eBooks from this experience, not sure if it's the lesson Adobe wanted me to learn when they offered the FREE! FREE! FREE! eBook ...
I love books, I read them several times, I lend them to friends. I've lent books to my nephew as he grew up and I look forward to the day when my own kids will read my Heinlein Juvies, Asimov's Lucky Starr series, and when they will be old enough to read Dune, LotR, and finally, when they are mature enough to "get" it, Bradbury and Zelazny.
I shudder to think of my Heinlein collection suddenly disappearing in a poof of license expiries or half of my Clark collection going bankrupt or Adobe deciding not to support my James Campbell on Windows ZP due to a lack of interest.
The concept of trusting things I love this much to a protected and encrypted and transient medium is just plain abhorent to me.
Then:
A.) Sales of PDA's and E-Book readers would skyrocket, especially considering parents whould have to buy replacments every time their kid drops it on the playground.
Or
B.) The book wouldn't sell at all.
But bookstores, publishers, Amazon.com etc. going out of business, and the E-book industry thriving, as this article suggests, just because of one book? Highly unlikely.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
Harry Potter 5:
A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
Seriously, it's not quite nanotech, but imagine incorperating a book of this calibur with...say...icq?
--
Mike Nugent
Programmer/Author
-- Mike wildcard@illuminatus.org
The media middlemen, such as publishing firms, want to keep themselves firmly entrenched in a world where their middleman position is becoming less useful to the consumer. They're doing a good job of it so far. The technique they are using is to use patent and copyright to control not just the content, but the way in which you are allowed to view it. But they've got to give those of us who give a damn about fair use a reason to ignore our convictions and accept the middleman's control.
The way they seem to be doing it is to force their control over all new forms of technology, thus leaving those who care about fair use with the awful choice of "stay obsolete, or accept our control - your choice". E-books and DVDs are both doing this. Since the new technology is also the restrictive technology, when people start adapting the new technology because it's really cool and neat, they end up giving up their control unwittingly. Eventually the old technology stops being supported. Movies start being available ONLY on DVD and not on tape anymore. Books start being available ONLY on E-book and not on paper anymore. Soon even those who are willing to stick with old technology to avoid the hedgemony don't even have that option anymore. The choice becomes one of "accept the hedgemony, or totally forego every work of culture and entertainment being put out and stay out of the loop."
This sucks. What do I do about the upcoming 4-hour director's cut of Fellowship of the Ring on DVD? I want very much to have it, and I don't mind one bit giving the money in the form or royalyties to those who created it, and to New Line studio for having the guts to put their necks out on the line financing it. But how do I do this without simultaneously supporting their part in the engineered the DeCSS slander, er, I mean "trial"?
And that's just the way they want it. They want to make sure that I cannot seperate the two. And thus, an obsolete system of middlemen who aren't needed anymore in today's economy get job security by forcing me to pick between giving up on fair use, versus giving up on participation in modern culture.
And of course, as a side effect of this, open source software *also* has to give up on participation in modern culture, and I think that's what irks me the most, actually. I don't think the media execs are really interested one way or another in open source. But they are interested in preserving the hedgemony through content control, and as a side effect that ends up meaning there can't be open source methods to access the content they put out.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Rich white, Anglo-Saxon people are just as clueless as usual. Not everyone is going to be able to buy a damn Palm or a computer. Heck, many can barely have one full meal per day, leave alone affordding electricity to power one of those 'cheap' peecees.
(deadtree) Books are universal. Sharing is easy. Your rich subburban kids can share the same book as some starving children in the warring zones. (hopefully after your kids threw away his books, he threw it at a donation center or something)
Talking about E-book as the exclusive method of publication for a children book is so pretentious that is expected of clueless rich liberals of the Bay Area. Just like the plan for "a computer in every home" of Gore and others. How about two or three meals per day for every kid in the US for starter? For the poor kids whose mothers were on welfare but kicked off cuz of the "reformed" policies? For the homeless people battling the cold under the freeway bridges? And another billion or hungryon some other places that ain't the US too.
Talking about universal access tothe Internet while people's stomachs are grumbling and chilling to the bones.
Sad!
Moejoe
You are really not doing any good with that attitude. What do you think all the monks said after Gutenberg invented the printing press? I'd imagine it was something like, "Oh, those ugly little books are so shoddy, and they're downright illegible." I don't count my books, but I've got enough already to keep me busy until the day I die. OTOH, I really like e-books. Your disdain might lie in your aesthetics. Because while e-books as objects aren't compelling (they are virtual and intangible), the format works well. After initially being put off by the idea, I've found that I'm a much more efficient reader of an e-book than of the bound version. HTML kicks ass for presenting content. I can read then entire book as one page if I want, and a hyperlinked index is better than anything a printed book can offer.
This works amazingly well with laberinthian computer books. I zoomed through the 900+ page JavaScript Rhino book, whereas the sheer density of the bound version put me off. Granted, that's not pleasure reading, and it is more than a convenience having a browser available while reading about JavaScript. Still, I have read several literary classics on my Palm (Frankenstein, some Mark Twain stuff). Have you even looked at Project Gutenberg? Why, there are six entries for Proust. Can you still not imagine it? I downloaded the complete works of Mark Twain (702K!!! ~25MB unzipped!!). I discovered a lot of material I had never heard of before (Hilarious stuff like "Fennimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"), and I have two huge sets (25+ volumes) of Twain's work! So you do disservice both to literature and the WWW with your comment.
Here's the problem: non-indexed PDF and PostScript e-books. This is so not the way to go. These are far inferior to printed books. Some of the e-books I have are PDFs pirated from the publishing industry, before the books had even been properly edited. Also, a fucking text file is a more flexible version than PDF and PS. Then again, I use xpdf and gv, which may lack some 'Find' feature that Adobe or other viewers might have. But I really love Safari. I just wish you could download them, and that they wouldn't try to pad their selections with multiple editions of the same book, outdated books, other crap, etc.
Also, why would Hemingway work & not Faulkner or Melville? It took me months to read Moby Dick, and it sucked to keep having to return it to the library and check it out again. Melville would love the Web, with all of his little digressions.
I think "real" books as we know it have many advantages over e-books. They are easier on your eyes, are easily portable (for those of us who don't have a pda), cheap, and acceptance in the market. They have been around for over 500 years!
E-books will not eat into the market for books until they are at least as good as real books. And I think that will only happen when electronic paper becomes a reality.
Very cool. I was not aware of that. I wish more publishers were as enlightened as Baen is.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Take the toaster, since it's the perennial example of futuristic wired appliances. Sure, you could hook your toaster up to the home network so that your alarm clock starts it, then it goes out to the Internet to check the relative humidity so it knows the precise settings to use for your personal toast preferences.
Would that be cool? Heck yeah!!! Will we ever see them in large numbers of kitchens? Almost certainly not. Why? Because toasters, as they are now, are Good Enough at what they do for most people.
Books are the same way. Granted, for information stores like dictionaries or encyclopedias, searchable electronic versions are the only way to go, but for normal use and basic recreation, plain old paper books are Good Enough for 99.9% of the people in the world. Sure, there's some room for improvement in the format, but it is Good Enough at its basic function that most improvements would only be ancillary at best.
Noone in their right mind would think that E-books have any chance of displacing regular books in the forseeable future. They have very little charm and are very expensive, especially in the sense that you need several expensive units to let the whole family read a book each at the same time.
In addition, books are a very well established symbol of status. People love to have lots of books in their shelfs so they can give the impression that they are well-read people. How can E-books ever fill up your bookshelves?
What CAN be argued is that E-books might become a success in the way that it becomes a reasonable supplement to regular books. I can see this. Instead of bringing several heavy books with you on a trip, you can just bring one reasonable unit.
The books will still have to be considerably cheaper in electronic form, and not just a way to make more money, as the music companies seem to think about downloadable music.
I don't know about ebooks that much so maybe you could answer this for me. Are you able to create book marks that are easy to flip to ?
This is trivial in any e-book system that allows the user to make annotations, but unfortunately, copyright owners have the power to prevent users from annotating their works.
Will I retire or break 10K?
[WHOOOOSH!] Notebook's fan goes into super-turboblast mode
[BING!] Low battery warning
[WHAAAAH!] Kid gets a priority interrupt and awakens from sleep.
[WHIrrrr....CLICK!] Notebook shuts itself down in a last gasp of self-preservation, leaving you with a screaming kid in a pitch black room.
or even better... you drone away endlessly and suddenly realize you are no longer reading about Sir Arthur, but are halfway through reading off the BSOD of a general protection fault.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
The major headache with any form of electronic book is that you cant put a bookmark on it....
Blame copyright owners for turning off annotation in the e-books you, erm, licensed.
(Im forced to remember a phrase/number and search for it to get something similar to a bookmark ...)
If you can annotate an e-book, you can simply name your bookmarks BMBM and then do Find Again until you're at the right spot. A good reader will display the text surrounding each annotation.
Will I retire or break 10K?
So what do you do when you read a book that *does* require backpaging?
If you install Spark Notes, Barron's Notes, Monarch Notes, or Cliffs Notes for the book you're reading, you have summaries of what you've already read at your fingertips.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Have you guys ever tried to read a book on a PDA. Belive me it's a lot better do have it on a PDA than a hardcopy. You don't have to change position in bed three times for every page and you can have 20 books with you everywhere. I've been reading more books on my Palm on the airplane, tram, train and busses than I've read books entirely before I got a Palm :)
While I don't particularly regret the decision, I have noticed that there is definitly a considerable amount of eystrain associated with staring at a screen for a few hours at a time, even on a LCD.
Have you tried Windows XP, recent XFree86, or other color display systems that allow sub-pixel rendering? They look three times sharper than traditional square-pixel displays.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Then it would be free.
Thats probably redundant, but theres your answer anyway - it would be cracked in seconds, it would be free.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
All of the current Harry Potter books have been scanned in and are available on gnutella. I still buy the books, to ensure that J.K. Rowling is paid in full (she deserves every penny). Then I download the text and dump the text to my Visor Pro via iSilo, storing the books I'm not reading on flash memory modules. Since the text is pure ASCII there is no problem with DRM hassles.
Although I read constantly, my life is so chaotic that I seldom finish a complete book due to the logistics of carrying a book with me. With the palm 'e-books' I finished volumes 1-4 over the holidays. The new 9/11 security measures actually worked in my favor, in that I had no space for regular books in my carry on, but huge amounts of time waiting in lines at the airports. The compact form factor of a palm and the tolerable backlight provided me with reading under any condition. I actually looked forward to delays!
Personally, I'd prefer if the current situation persisted for volume 5, I'd happly buy the dead tree edition on the first day and download the text in flat ascii form. This way JKR gets paid, I don't have to put up with brain dead DRM issues and I get to use my favorite text reader on my Visor.
I suspect that if 5 comes out as a 'kosher' e-book it might not even be available on the Palm and will incorporate one or more annoying 'feature' in the proprietary format used. As it stands, I suspect Macrovision will convince the publisher to OCR proof the text by printing the thing in puce on fuschia in a ransom font.
If you want to read Harry Potter buy the books from an independent brick and mortar bookstore and download the text to your palm.
I prefer a simple book.pdf to a book/ with tons of jpg's and html files.
Then get an HTML browser that can handle zip files. Galeon and Konqueror may be able to because their underlying widget sets come with file system wrappers that can transparently peek into zip files.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Cheap? [A novel on a PDA] was free.
In that case, where can I get a PDA for free?
The files themselves may be cheap, but the hardware isn't. How is a minor (i.e. Rowling's target audience) supposed to afford a PDA on which to read e-books?
Will I retire or break 10K?
should be:
"What if Harry Potter were an E-Book"
The Slashdot editors should be jailed for crimes against english. If you are going to post stories at least do it correctly.
books allready have region encoding, its called language.
And I have its DeCSS, its kryptonite. It's called SYSTRAN, the engine behind AltaVista's Babel Fish.
Even then, if you're willing to accept a language barrier as access control, your analogy completely falls apart. DVDs produced completely in English should be viewable in Canada, Australia, USA, UK, South Africa, or any other place that has English (or an acceptably compatible dialect thereof) as one of its official languages.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Imagine if a unversity switched to ebooks. With textbooks taking about $300-$500 a quarter...students could very quickly reach the break even point.
Some subject, like history, might be better suited for electronic books. You could give the students a ton of public domain source material.
What kids really need for nighttime reading is genetically engineered paper that is backlit! Not laptops to read e-books, and not that old fashioned paper and flashlight. When I was little, the flashlight always ran out of power right in the exciting sections...
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
The kids in Hartford, CT get laptops with their schoolbooks in electronic form.
No, I'm not making this up. http://users.ntplx.net/~hphs/index.html
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The libraries in Salt Lake have public access computers, and are getting more traffic than ever before. The media is simply getting more interesting.
IMHO, the biggest problem faced by libraries it that there is some much more information published each year, that they cannot keep up with the growth. Storing information on remote servers will be a welcome boon.
Project Gutenburg [gutenberg.org] put up free ASCII versions of out-of-copyright books.
So what if by 2050, OCR technology has progressed so far that PG has put every significant piece of pre-1923 literature into electronic form, and the copyright term has been extended to 150 years or longer? What will they do then?
Will I retire or break 10K?
In general, I think e-books are trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist, except in one case: college textbooks. It would be great to have all the books for your entire degree in a single e-book reader thing, fully searchable and with animation/video as appropriate. Surely that would end up cheaper than the hundred and hundreds of dollars people end up spending every term. They could even set the books to expire after your degree ends, since in general few people use them after that anyway.
Ok, this was one of _the_ most intelligent things I've ever read on Slashdot. The mark of a True Hacker, who is probably only posting as an AC to disguise his or her well-known and notorious Real Name.
Freedom: "I won't!"
See, I'd think it would be *lick* *blink* *lick* *blink*, but that's just me...
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Plain brown wrapper, if you will. (green, actually)
If you want to check out an excellent ebook site goto http://www.fictionwise.com
They have great free books toget you hooked. They have everything from alternative history to scifi.
Worth a look if you are wondering the state of ebooks today.
Let me get this straight. They have a fancy file format to represent the text of a book, yet this fancy file format doesn't support any sort of hyperlinks to/from the footnotes? *boggle* Come on, even Windows .HLP files support this! Who designed the ebook format, anyway?
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
Technology has been dropping the price of publishing. Meaning that everyone has more access to moe works published in more forms than at any time in history. This is due largely to the hard working people that you loath and hate.
In many third world nations, the cell phone infastructure is outpacing the line technology. I would really not be surprised to see the same thing happening with ebooks, since the cost of delivery is a fraction of the cost of delivery of a printed book.
I've done more reading since a friend showed me some e-books on his Clie than I have in a long while. I had no desire to purchase a PDA (too expensive for keeping track of appointments and contacts) until I realized that I could keep a veritable mountain of reference and fiction works on there (and MP3 functionality was Icing on the cake). So now I own a Casio E-200 and listen to my MP3s while I read. BTW, the ClearText technology on the PocketPC 2002 handhelds is a vast improvement over the Palm handhelds...
Oh, was that my outside voice?
You're right, there is a pressure placed on consumers to buy new technology. But you still have a choice. Print your ebooks out and stick 'em in a binder. Take your VCR 'round to a mate's place & record it onto a couple tapes.
Sicne the world isn't quite ready for the eBooks yet, the more intersting question is what if HP5 could be self-published and only available online.
She probably has a lock-up with her publishers, otherwise Joanne Rowling would be well advised to consider it.
She would do it by also cutting a deal with amazon.com or bn.com as EXCLUSIVE distributor for the first while. If you wanted to get the book, you would have to order it online from them.
In fact, this would deprive nobody of the book, except bookstores, since I doubt there is anybody who buys a children's book in hardcover who can't find a friend able to place an online order if they can't do it themselves.
However, Rowling would get all $20 of the sale price, instead of the $3 she probably gets now. She would probably have to pay a few bucks for printing, but would otherwise have just Amazon's margin between her and the whole amount. I would estimate that Amazon might be quite willing to do this for very low margin.
(In fact, when I thought about this back in the boomtimes, I figured they would do it at a loss just for the publicity and getting so many new customers with accounts on amazon and used to ordering books there.)
As such, she might keep $15 instead of $3, and thus only need to sell 1/5th books to make the money, but I think should would sell almost as many and thus rake it in.
Later, bookstores could order it, she would have no problem cutting a special deal with the book distributors, though normally an author or new small publisher can't do that.
Unless they lived in fear of how she was turning the industry upside-down.
She would become a very rich woman, and make history in new ways that might be remembered well after Harry Potter.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
What if Spartacus had a TriPacer?
I move to eradicate the common phrase "curl up with a good book," based on the simple but important fact that nobody ever does this. Curling up while trying to read is uncomfortable and counterproductive.
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
I do, sometimes. It mostly depends on what I am reading. For me, reading an ebook on my palm III involves pushing the scroll button every few seconds or so. It just so happens that the amount of text shown on a palm screen is what I can process that fast. If I were to do even a small percentage of the reading I do in a given day on such a device, I would have massively musceled digits, not to mention the thing would fall apart due to mechanical strain!
Whats my point, then. Well the point is that for many people the size of display, and it's resolution, are just not there yet, on any of the devices I have examined (quite a few, at circuit city a few weeks ago). And until it is I just can't see ebooks taking off for pocket readers. On the other hand, the amount of text, etc. on a computer monitor has always seemed about right, probably because it is large enough to read comfotably. I believe that the reason for this is that the smaller the screen the higher the resolution must be for the letters to be percieved easily. This is based on the assumption that the same number of letters will be on various sized screens. And as I said before, none of the screens on pocket sized readers that I have seen yet support that, making them very uncomfortable for me to use. Perhaps when reasonably priced high resolution screens appear on the market....
Slackware: old school feel, new school gear.
...Harry Potter was a book for adults. Would Burrito Boy post this topic?
So now we know he reads children's books and yanks off to cartoons.
Can you really read it outside with bright sunlight? This has been a problem for me with trying to do something outside with a laptop. Totally unusable...
load "linux",8,1
Because there's more money to be made if they kill the trees. That is to say: it wouldn't be exclusively an ebook, because there are some who would normally buy it who would not otherwise.
If it were released early as an ebook, though, I'd be lined up outside the firewall (bad analogy, I think, but it's cute) waiting for my pseudo-copy.
Most of us, no matter how much we enjoy a "good read" on the computer, still really enjoy having the book. This makes us normal humans. The "modality" of books has been proven over a period of -- what? Thousands of years?
For some people, there's just something about sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee and holding the newspaper up for a morning read. For others, their lunchtime wouldn't be complete without the daily crossword puzzle, with the Living section quad-folded just so and the pencil worn to a nub. Many others read in bed, or in their favorite chair... or in the park, away from everything but their story.
The Harry Potter franchise will not risk it's success on making a statement about e-books. It will, and should, be available in print.
Besides, doesn't anybody else get really tired of reading on the computer? After a day full of reading the computer screen, my eyes can sometimes just barely crawl away from the monitor after going through one last Cringely piece or Drudge story. I absolutely can't imagine reading a whole book on a computer.
RP
1. eBook encryption and associated restrctions
2. Macrovision
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Books are still paper, at least old ones. I can't stand staring at displays trying to read screenplays I find. If it weren't 100+ pages most time I'd print them off.
I like books as they are. Hopefully e-books don't catch on.
No sig for you!!
The only reason I haven't read any Harry Potter is that I haven't gotten around to it yet. It'll happen.
The last used bookstore I was in I was delighted to pick up a hardcopy of _James and the Giant Peach_. It's at the top of my "to read" pile. It'll have been 40 years since I read it the last time.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
I seem to remember that being a porno mag under that blanket... er... wait.
Anyway, isn't it more likely that kids these days will have a handheld 3" TV before they'll have a book under the covers?
Do kids even read any more these days, or have they all gone illiterate?
Jake
Dating: while( 1 ){ call_girl(); get_rejected(); drink_40(); } return 0;
You people don't actually read this crap do you? A story of a confused and rejected young boy who learns about the occult because he believes it's a source of power that will somehow fulfil him.. If that's not screwing around with the minds of children, what is? And it's disguised as a cutesy fantasy. I call it sick. I'm not one of those raving lunatic censorship people, but this is not the kind of thing impressionable kids should be filling their minds with. It disgusts me that so many people support it, let alone for the open mouth / jam down throat corporate culture aspect of the marketing involved.
/., only popular opinion gets the limelight. Because uh.. that's what open media is all about right? Uhm.. No.
And no, the occult is not the slightest bit geeky. But likely this post will get modded down because it's an unpopular opinion and, here on
E-books will never replace "real" books for me until the day I can have a "book" full of flexible paper-like pages that I can turn, and I can cause any of a number of texts to fill the pages. Ideally, the backlight of the "paper" should adjust itself to always keep a steady illumenation (dimming when you put it in normal light, brightening when you're in the dark).
Hey, anyone remember those little photocells they used to put in televisions to adjust the brightness? Why don't any current PDA's or laptops spend the extra 25 cents for one of those?
People are starting to make flexible LCD panels that act like paper, but they're still a long ways off and very expensive... certainly binding a couple hundred into a "book" would be insane for the moment.
Maybe in 20 years, I'll be able to have a handful of books on my shelves that contain (or download) all the texts that currently fill a room in my house, but I'm not holding my breath!
Yeah, J.K. Rowling is going to change the way we look at books. Just like Stephen King did!
I can understand how publishing HP5 as an e-bok will attract attention to a somewhat ignored industry. However, my wife received all 4 HP books as a wedding present, which she absolutely loves. I couldn't image telling her that she can only read the latest version on an e-book. After spending at least $300US to buy a reader. I don't think that would revitalize the e-book industry, just alienate a loyal fanbase. Just my 2 cents. Cheers!
Sorry to make a star trek reference, but how hard would it be to make ebook readers convenient, like the Padds were in ST:TNG? I mean, PDAs are about the closest we've come, but their displays are far too small for the intended purpose.
I could see ebooks eclipsing books, and causing reading to slowly build among people. I mean, this could have a good effect, by causing people that wouldn't normally read to say, "Hey, look, shiny new toy...hey, it has words...these words mean somehting" and from there, utopia (in little steps of course). You never know. People stopped being able to listen to a lot of radio shows when the TV came out, now all the radio is good for is music. Why? Because it's the most efficient medium for music to be transmitted on. TV, is the most efficient video interface. Ebook readers/laptops/PDAs may become the most efficient text interface. This doesn't mean they'll remove the nostalgia of paperback/hardcover books, and I doubt that traditional publishing will ever truly die. It just can't continue in the face of new technology. Whether the killer app is Harry Potter 5, or an independent book that comes out in 6 months that makes Harry Potter look like Larry Potter, it'll come eventually.
-1, Disagree is not a valid option. Troll, Flamebait and Offtopic are not a substitute.
lose moneyt compared to the rest. I've read them up to the present, and would skip the next one if it was an E-book. The whole medium stinks...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I could make hundreds of copies, AND THEN DELETE THEM! :-)
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
That's just what we need... discourage underprivileged children from reading by putting interesting books in a format they can't get to because their parents can't afford a computer.
Let's not be selfish, okay please?
spacefem.com
Travelling, it is easy to get through a lot of books. A long haul flight is enough to finish HP4. A few evenings in a hotel and the necessary books for a journey becomes the dominant item by weight. With EBooks, they seem to take less than half a meg as a .lit version so you can get a lot on an IPAQ.
If given a choice between EBook and dead-tree, then sorry guys, until I get electronic paper - I stick with dead-tree. If I have to pay for both, then again, unless the EBook was really cheap, again I would stick to dead-tree.
Sorry, I'm not a native English or American speaker. English is only my third language, so sometimes I make mistakes. But I'm glad that there is always a member of the spelling police, willing to correct me. /sarcasm
Use Adsense for Charity
Oh, your stupidity quite amusing! Please continue.
>Here comes some comments about [...]
Nope, they won't. Instead, let me take this opportunity to place my comment relatively top of page: thanks to usenet still working like it should, I already have HP 1-4 as ebooks, and already uploaded onto my HP (ermh!) Jornada, too. Not that this fact would make it more likely for me to actually read these buggers, but it feels good anyway. Got LOTR on there, too, so it could be a while before I'm intrigued to try some pages...
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
We don't want that to happen.
If eBooks are the beat-all end-all, why are Mark Twain's works still selling for as much as $70+ when the Gutenberg Project exists? Sure, they're vanilla-formatted, but you could pay thousands for physical versions of everything they have there.
What if harry potter was released first as an E-book. Many people simply wouldn't be able to afford the technology to enable an E-book. However, if it were released first in said format, it might spur those with the economic means to purchase the E-version.
Only problem being, you can't really share most E-books. Just think how many people borrowed a Harry Potter book from a friend, but didn't think it worth their effort to buy their own.
I started reading Stephen King's E-Book "the plant"
. I'm not exactly sure why but he took it out of the sun and let it dry up and die. King was distributing this short novel online for a buck a download. I paid for 2 installments (through Amazon) and now I'm stranded with no ending in sight.
...they kind of combine the worst of both worlds.
Now, I love electronic technical documentation. I am the only geek I know who doesn't collect O'Reilly and other technical reference books except for the 5 or 6 I couldn't resist. Most of my friends have bought personal laser printers and have shelves full of 3-ring binders of printed-out man pages and other unfathomable wastes of pulp and toner. I can't stand having to get up out of my chair, walk over to the bookshelf, find the textbook I need, find the index in the back of it, then find the page with the information I need -- IF it's indexed at all. I read man pages and README's and if all else fails, Google works 9 out of 10 times.
But e-books, even technical ones, aren't generally plain text. In the best case they're HTML, like the O'Reilly Perl CD, and searching a ton of HTML files is a lot tougher than typing "/" in less. More often they're PDF's, which require me to either install Adobe's awful reader software (in which searching may or may not be useful) or forego any worthwhile search capabilities by using gv or xpdf. I end up trying pdf2txt or something similar with fugly results, or using Google's spotty PDF to HTML translation.
And that's nothing compared to fiction. I got Goblet of Fire off of some ebook newsgroup the same day it was released. It was a PDF, and I never read it even though I'm dying to after reading the first three books in hardcopy. (I'm now stubbornly waiting for the trade paperback so it'll match my other 3 HP books.) There's something about fiction, especially fantasy and science fiction, that needs soft lighting and a place to curl up and enjoy it. There's just something wrong with hitting "page down" as opposed to physically turning a page. And underneath it all, reading something onscreen just makes me feel like I'm wasting time and I'd better get back to work, even when I'm on vacation.
These are just my biases, of course. In a decade they might seem as quaint as someone who misses radio drama and couldn't understand all the fuss over TV. But to get there, the ebook publishers need to get some early adopters who aren't just pirates with OCR and palmpilots. Early adopters are usually people like me, and I am not interested. I'm sure the time will come when paper will seem wasteful and outmoded, but I don't know how they'll escape that initial catch-22.
In case we run out of Charmin
If you were a real Harry Potter fan you would buy the book, and that would be Hardcover. It's better to read with the book than staring at the computer.