On the State of Today's eBook Readers?

ashkar asks: "With the constantly expanding selection of eBooks available today, I have been wishing for a dedicated reader more and more. Novels, computer reference books, man pages, and more could be readily available, but after searching around, I've realized that the market hasn't progressed much in the last few years. The popular readers either use proprietary formats or are too bulky. An ideal would be able to read HTML, PDF, ASCII, and any other eBook formats widely used. I have thought about getting a PDA, but I don't need the extra features they provide at a higher cost. Has anybody found a good solution to this, and if not, are there any companies out there working on providing such a solution?" AS PCs become smaller, and assuming eBook readers don't mature and become popular in their own right, how long will it be before we see the PC (in it's portable form) as the primary "e-reading" device?

Comments

PDA

[eric256]

PDA's give you the ability to read most, if not all book formats. If price is the only reason to avoid them, then I would suggest searching EBay for an older model.
Heres the current EBay listing for Palms IIIc (a nice unit i've used for this in the past.) Currently there are many that are 90$ and less for the 8mb color units. :-)

Re:PDA

[RevAaron]

You can get brand new, very functional PDAs for around $200 now a days. The Dell Axim PocketPC X5 is such a model- and unlike the POS device, can read MS LIT format, which the majority of for-sale ebooks are offered in (along with the Adobe EBook format- which isn't readable on *any* PDA).

I've read ebooks on my PDA for a while- starting on my Newton MP2100 and now my Jornada 720. The J720 runs vanilla Windows CE rather than PocketPC, and MS is dumb enough to have no MS LIT reader for their own platform. So, to read purchased ebooks, I use CLIT to convert from .LIT to HTML on my work windoze machine. (the J720 is my only windows machine at home) Works like a charm, and could get you reading LIT-format books on pretty much any device.

You can also get various ebook-specific devices for cheap. At OfficeMax the otherday, I saw a FranklinBook man or something like it- it has a big screen and was on sale for $50. It can be used for playing MP3s and a bunch of PDA stuffs, but I imagine there aren't many apps out for it- but it is good for reading books. And since you can give it HTML, you can always just convert those LIT format books and pass it on...

Funny, my iBook thinks it already qualifies...

[Creosote]

I recently got a new bottom-of-the-line 12-inch iBook (800Mhz, upgraded to 640MB memory) to serve as a kind of compromise between a PDA, an e-book reader, and a portable desktop computer. It handles all of those tasks admirably. Palm's Macintosh version of the Palm reader produces wonderfully legible text.

All in all, these days my iBook is my preferred reading device for most kinds of text. The main exception would be PDFs that are page images of print books, where the text can't be reflowed, especially when the original is in multi-column layout. But before too long (or maybe they exist already?) it should be standard for notebook computers to have screens that can snap out and be reoriented from landscape to portrait mode; that will make reading "legacy" e-text more comfortable.

Proprietary doesn't necessarily mean unusable

[swillden]

You mentioned that the Gemstar has a proprietary format. I'm not completely certain, but I believe it uses the same format as the Rocket e-Book, which preceded it.

Althout the Rocket book format is proprietary, it's not as limiting as you might think, since the proprietary format is basically just an HTML variant compressed in a certain way (Zipped, but with some proprietary headers) and you can download software from Gemstar that converts text and HTML into the format (it will even do a recursive web-suck and turn the result into a book for you). Further, people have reverse-engineered the format and built tools (Linux and Windows) which will allow you to do pretty much anything you like with the format, assembling and disassembling books. Well you can only disassemble them if they aren't encrypted.

If they are, well, there's even some solutions to that, but they require disassembling and probably destroying your device to dig out the encryption keys. After you buy a replacement book, though, you can continue purchasing books that were encrypted for the old device, then decrypt them and use them on the new one, or take apart the file and convert to HTML or whatever.

For technical books, I find the only real disadvantage of the Gemstar/Rocket books is that a lot of stuff comes in PDF format, as you mentioned.

For fiction, lots of stuff is available on bn.com or powells.com. I just bought Ellen Ullman's "The Bug" in Rocketbook format, yesterday. Lately I've been reading a lot of stuff from Baen.com, because they sell their books in unencrypted RocketBook format. I liked a lot of their authors anyway, but thanks to the combination of their support for my favorite way of reading and their great prices, most of my book money has been going to them for the last several months.