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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
...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"
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
(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
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?
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.
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.
Even better. Couple it with a device that has voice recognition. It could read itself to itself. That removes us from the equation completely.
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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.
I think you are dead wrong. Parents buy their kids expensive things all the time just to occupy them. PS2, Gamecube, X-Box, computers, Gameboy, Bikes, TVs, VCRs, etc etc etc etc... This isn't even the extent of it, every Christmas parents nearly beat each other trying to get the newest, stupidest fad so that their kids will love them. Parents would pay for this without even blinking.
-These aren't my pants.
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
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...
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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!
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.
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.
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
This has opened up the world for me. I thought I was well-educated until I realized how many classics I'd never touched. And FREE. To buy them would have cost me a couple thousand dollars--and many are just not available any more.
I have some information about a special place for you - you may have even heard of it. They have these great places called libraries, where you get to borrow a book and read it for free. All you have to do is get a card and agree to return whatever you borrow, and you can read all of the classics that you want for FREE.
Ahh, but this isn't if the whole series was always e-book only, this is if one of the latter books in a very popular series was e-book only. Few parents would spend $100 for a e-book reader and $15 for a book (sounds like reasonable prices) when it is new, but if a book everyone expects is ebook only they would! Of course they would want some assureance that other books would be avaiable for their e-book reader, but that can be delt with.
Of course you have to be careful here. I would consider book-4 in ebook format based on how good 1-3 were, but considering how horribal book 4 was, I'm not even sure I'll bother reading book 5 in any format. (most people think book 4 was the best, but I hated it. YMMV)
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.
You're talking about the Dursleys, aren't you? Not everyone's parents are like that.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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
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."
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 $13US? This isn't a troll (not really) but I can't believe you'd pirate for pirating's sake.
Sounds kinda silly.
This would be a pretty good use for the laptops, that the state is giving to 7th and 8th graders up here in Maine.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& 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)
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.
Ok, I'm sick.
Someone you trust is one of us.
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.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
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
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.
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.
You forgot "the earth would stop spinning and we'd be thrown into space", and "a plague of locusts o'er the land". (With apologies to Scott Adams).
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Good point. If I had a reader of some sort, I'd be willing to pay extra for a bundle of the deadtree version and the e-book.
There needs to be some sort of model similar to that with MP3: buy the physical copy because you like it... rip to e-media for personal use only.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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.
[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?
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.
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?
In Britain, the books are available in the "adult paperback" format. The covers are a bit classier than those of the American versions. More importantly, the original "jumpers", "biscuits" and "philosopher's stones" of the original are preserved.
It's called college. And yes I only want knowledge clustered around the wealthy. They tend to vote republican and I intend to run for public office some day. I want the rest of the country to be dumb as a bucket of wet hammers. It makes it easier for the TV to tell them to vote for me.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
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
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
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
In that case, where can I get a PDA for free?
This is slashdot. Many people here couldn't concieve of not having a PDA.
How is a minor (i.e. Rowling's target audience) supposed to afford a PDA
You'd be surprised at what kids have today (especially with Palm devices now costing under $100),
and you'd prolly also be surprised at how many adults read Harry Potter.
(I'm 21. I've read all of them. It's a rather fun series.)
C-X C-S
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
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!
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!
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 ?
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