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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?
Maybe it's just me but I am still waiting for the thermal/electric re-writable digital paper. I don't like reading large volumes on a screen. Show me the digital paper and I could be interested. Till then, I am still reading the old fashioned way.
You'll have that sometimes...
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.
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.
bookwarez. Tons of titles available. Can read on a PDA (even an old, used, feature free one), laptop, print to hardcopy, etc.
Even better, you can send them to text-to-speech and braille displays for the blind. This is what I do for my wife (deaf/blind) if I can't find a title in the libraries. Now, just to be fair, I'll buy a copy of the book. I just figure my dl'ing a warez version is excercising fair use rights (fair use meaning I could buy the book, scan it, OCR it, and then let her read it, but why not take advantage of the work of someone else?)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
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.
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It's very sad. The Rocket eBook device itself got a lot of things right. I can't enjoy reading from a PDA screen, but I can and do enjoy reading all sort of things, including very long 19th-century novels from Project Gutenberg, on my Rocket.
.HTML files on your PC, UPLOAD them to their Website, and IT converts it on the server to .RB format which you can download over a phone line with your REB1100. Or something like that. I haven't tried it.
.HTML, only on a specific Rocket-defined "subset" of HTML 3.2. And it has various problems there. Which I've figured out ways of working around (I have a collection of .mpw scripts to convert Project Gutenberg text into .html that's acceptable to the Mac version of RocketWriter, which is even buggier than the PC version). This supporting software isn't being maintained very well. Indeed, the Mac version hasn't been maintained at all since the last version was released in the year 2000.
The original Rocket had two ways of working. You downloaded purchased material to your PC or Mac, then downloaded from the PC or Mac into the Rocket. Or, using the included "RocketWriter" software, which was a little buggy but functional, you could convert straight ASCII text or HTML, either residing on your PC/Mac hard drive OR _directly from a Web URL,_ into RB format. This latter way of operating was referred to as "personal content."
Unfortunately, Nuvomedia was acquired by Gemstar which then went through a series of nutty changes in policy. The brilliant businessman, Henry Yuen, who brought Gemstar to the great success it enjoys today (insert ironic smiley here) was totally opposed to supporting "personal content" at all. Gemstar stopped including RocketWriter with the software bundle (although you could and still can download it from the Web). At one point, they encouraged people to download a sort of Trojan Horse firmware upgrade that stopped the device from accepting "personal content" altogether. They reversed that in a later firmware upgrade.
They then produced revised models, the RCA and Gemstar-branded ones, which were intended for purchased content only. They connect only a phone line, and only for the purpose of downloading purchased content.
Recently, they restored a "personal content" capability in which you take
By the way, the number of bookselling websites from which you can download "mainstream" material has shrunk from over a dozen down to exactly one--Powell's. A lot of small indie publishers, mostly of "genre" titles, have purchasable material--at very fair prices--but I'm sorry to say I personally haven't liked much of what I've found there.
It's been reported in the trade press that Gemstar is thinking about discontinuing their eBook division, which should make things even worse. I wonder what will happen to the server on which your "personal bookshelf" of purchased material resides?
Did I mention that the RocketWriter software is buggy? It doesn't work on full
In short: great devices, what a pity that the marketers couldn't figure out what to do with them.
By all means, if you can get a used Rocket eBook (NOT a REB1100) at a good price and just want to try playing around with what is a decent, well-designed, dedicated eBook reader, go for it.
People tell me that the REB1200, which is actually a completely different design, is much better than the 1100, and I _think_ that _perhaps_ it allows personal content.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!