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Doctorow: Ebooks Neither E Nor Books
xanderwilson writes "Author Cory Doctorow has released his paper/speech for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference this year into the public domain. A very interesting read about his experience with Magic Kingdom (which he is soon re-releasing under a more lenient Creative Commons license), the failure of e-books, and filesharing as a tool for creators."
I can't think of many examples where I've prefered an e-reference over printed matter. The paradigm is that paper is portable and requires no power (aside from a light source) to read, never expires, never needs an upgrade (other than me needing glasses, which would apply equally in either case) and is durable (drop my Zaurus or laptop and I'll cry, drop my book and I'll just pick it back up.)
Complimenting e-books and paper seems reasonable, though I'll go to the paper first every time.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm a regular Ebook purchaser, mainly PeanutPress which is now owned by Palm, but also a few for MS's book reader. I read them on my PC and on my PocketPC. It's quite a good Ebook reader platform, nice bright screen and fast paging. Marc
Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004 February 12, 2004 San Diego, CA Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com -- Forematter: This talk was initially given at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference [ http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004 ], along with a set of slides that, for copyright reasons (ironic!) can't be released alongside of this file. However, you will find, interspersed in this text, notations describing the places where new slides should be loaded, in [square-brackets]. This text is dedicated to the public domain, using a Creative Commons public domain dedication: > Copyright-Only Dedication (based on United States law) > > The person or persons who have associated their work with this > document (the "Dedicator") hereby dedicate the entire copyright > in the work of authorship identified below (the "Work") to the > public domain. > > Dedicator makes this dedication for the benefit of the public at > large and to the detriment of Dedicator's heirs and successors. > Dedicator intends this dedication to be an overt act of > relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights > under copyright law, whether vested or contingent, in the Work. > Dedicator understands that such relinquishment of all rights > includes the relinquishment of all rights to enforce (by lawsuit > or otherwise) those copyrights in the Work. > > Dedicator recognizes that, once placed in the public domain, the > Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, > modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any > purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including > by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived. -- For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions I've had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a short story collection online under a Creative Commons license. A parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the presentations at this event called this talk, "eBooks Suck Right Now," [eBooks suck right now] and as funny as that is, I don't think it's true. No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I'd call it: "Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them." [Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them] That's because I think that the shape of ebooks to come is almost visible in the way that people interact with text today, and that the job of authors who want to become rich and famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape. I haven't come to a perfect understanding. I don't know what the future of the book looks like. But I have ideas, and I'll share them with you: 1. Ebooks aren't marketing. [Ebooks aren't marketing] OK, so ebooks *are* marketing: that is to say that giving away ebooks sells more books. Baen Books, who do a lot of series publishing, have found that giving away electronic editions of the previous installments in their series to coincide with the release of a new volume sells the hell out of the new book -- and the backlist. And the number of people who wrote to me to tell me about how much they dug the ebook and so bought the paper-book far exceeds the number of people who wrote to me and said, "Ha, ha, you hippie, I read your book for free and now I'm not gonna buy it." But ebooks *shouldn't* be just about marketing: ebooks are a goal unto themselves. In the final analysis, more people will read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer pages and when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be the way that writers earn their keep, not the way that they promote the dead-tree editions. 2. Ebooks complement paper books. [Ebooks complement paper books]. Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good. Having both is even better. One reader wrote to me and said that he read half my first novel from the bound book, and printed the other half on scrap-paper to read at the beach. Students write to me to say that it's easier to do their term papers if they can
Looks fine to me. It's a plain-text file. If you don't like the way it wraps and such in your browser, maybe you should try using a proper text editor to view it.
As the important part of the document is the content, there's no need for it to be in HTML. It is a speech, after all, and not a press release.
He runs a fairly popular blog at BoingBoing.net where you can read about his exploits at the ETCON conference.
Also, his book is actually titled Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. More information about his original release of the book, and re-release with the Creative Commons license can be read on his blog, and give good insight into what authors can expect when they release a book with a less restrictive license.
To say that releasing under the Creative Commons is less restricive is certainly disingenuous. While this statement is true, it totally disregards *how* lenient it is.
Basically, anyone, anywhere, can take this work and do anything (noncommercial) with the work. Write a screenplay. Make a rap version of it. Write fanfic. Anything.
Although some franchises turn a blind eye to such activies (startrek fanfic, for example, is allowed to exist), Doctorow is, literally, giving us all a license to whatever we want.
In today's world of "sue first, ask questions later", this move is amazing and should be applauded. Good job! I hope that this proves to be a success, both from a creative perspective and an economic one.
see you're missing the point
the article is free but the word wrapping is offered as a premium service.
The peanut is neither a pea, nor a nut. ...oh wait, it is a nut.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
Several open source projects like MySQLhave found a way to make money by selling their maunal as a printed book, even though all of the content of said book is already available online. Some people just like having their documentation on paper so they have more screen space for other things.
Perhaps it is the general preference for the printed page that gives the electronic release its power. It may tease the reader into buying the whole book later on. Also, it can't hurt the buzz.
Of course some say print is dead. But if print is dead then so too is the novel. No one wants to read 300 plus pages on a screen. And more importantly, no one wants to re-read a novel on screen. Very little interaction with the object there. No sense of "consumption."
I work for a large corporate library with a large collection of eBooks. They are easily more popular than the hard copies. For quick reference they can't be beat!
having gone to your web site, it reads:
Slashdot is a lie. While its purpose is to advance the cause of OSS and Lunix, its users overwhelmingly use Microsoft products to surf the web. Recently I put forth a challenge to slashdot my site in my sig file. The idea of turning a server into a smoking pile of metal is irresistible to the average Slashdotter. The hits began pouring in. Now you'd think that my referral logs would show that the visitors coming from Slashdot would be using Mozilla under Lunix. You'd be wrong though.
So, the people that came to your site represent all of Slashdot? The people that read your sig...which by the way, I personally never saw at all until now, represent all of Slashdot?
How can you make a sweeping generalization like that? Also, where in the offical Slashdot headlines or titles does it say "to advance the cause of OSS and Linux"? I look at it now, all I see is "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters". Plus, a ton of the stories here don't even have anything to do with computers!
I don't really see what you're point is. Also, where is the "lie" you speak of. A lie means a deliberate falsehood, so show me where the people accessing your site SAY they're using Linux, but are lying and using Windows.
Anyway, thought it was interesting, and this post will probably be modded down to bedrock.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Indeed, I just cut and pasted it into KWrite and it looks great.
Then I really got into the spirit of the thing:
I printed it and read it on paper.
KFG
E-book publishers fail to take into account the fact that for many readers books are an object of beauty in themselves - we love the smell, feel, and character of a well made book. As things stand I can only see one or two future uses for the medium outside niche markets such as computing textbooks.
1)Electronic versions of books included with the printed version in place of an index - with an html or similar interface for searching.
2)If some genius could come up with a device which stored ebooks on a drive, and which was capable of having an old book put in the top (to be pulped, recycled, then reprinted with the text of a new ebook and re-bound). Can't see this happening though!
"If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments." Earl Wilson
I paraphrase your front page:
"Slashdot is a lie because most of its users surf from Windows XP".
And I answer thus:
"Democracy is a lie because the most fanatical supporters of democracy choose to live in countries dominated by brutal dictators."
That subject line is par for the course when talking about Cory Doctorow.
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
Why should someone have to take extra steps beyond using a standard web browser to read content provided *on the web*? Perhaps the provider of the content should make the text available in a standard web format that all web browsers can read properly?
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Hey, if we're doing a spot of shameless plugging here, i'll risk a few karma points ;)
My partner has written a book, which after failing to get it off the ground by selling it, we decided to make into an e-book and give away for free. It's a bit different to almost any other books, in that it's laid out from articles and clippings from assorted fictional magazines, books, and newspapers, with lots of pictures. Nice and easy to read on a computer screen, though.
More info, and download as a PDF, at http://pigpog.com/mblm/. There's also the option to just read it online, but only part of it is up there so far - enough to decide if it's worth the download, though.
It's the story of a boy band from the 80s, based in the UK. They rise to reasonable fame, then fall back to obscurity. Except one of them can't take the obscurity, and hatches a plan to return...
Our vague plan for getting anything back from this is that she's working on the second book in the story, which will hopefully be sold in a slightly more conventional way.
PigPog.
I prefer my references to be electronic and my reading-for-enjoyment material to be paper.
:P
I am not entirely sure why I prefer paper for enjoyment reading, but the reference material should be obvious (Ctrl+F).
I've tried reading eBooks for enjoyment, but while I can sit and read an 800 page book in one sitting I often find that I can't read an eBook for anywhere near as long.
One of the reasons, of course, being that unless I want a workout I can't lie on my back on my bed and read an eBook, my monitor is too heavy
Another being the distraction level on a computer is a lot higher, email coming, games at my fingertips, etc.
And then there is the brightness factor, maybe it is just psychological, but I find that trying to sit down and read an eBook after already staring at a screen for 14 hours not only makes my head hurt, but it doesn't de-stress me nearly as well because I am still sitting in front of the computer...
Whee signature.
Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004
February 12, 2004
San Diego, CA
Cory Doctorow
doctorow@craphound.com
--
Forematter:
This talk was initially given at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference [ http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004 ], along with a set of slides that, for copyright reasons (ironic!) can't be released alongside of this file. However, you will find, interspersed in this text, notations describing the places where new slides should be loaded, in [square-brackets].
This text is dedicated to the public domain, using a Creative Commons public domain dedication:
> Copyright-Only Dedication (based on United States law)
>
> The person or persons who have associated their work with this
> document (the "Dedicator") hereby dedicate the entire copyright
> in the work of authorship identified below (the "Work") to the
> public domain.
>
> Dedicator makes this dedication for the benefit of the public at
> large and to the detriment of Dedicator's heirs and successors.
> Dedicator intends this dedication to be an overt act of
> relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights
> under copyright law, whether vested or contingent, in the Work.
> Dedicator understands that such relinquishment of all rights
> includes the relinquishment of all rights to enforce (by lawsuit
> or otherwise) those copyrights in the Work.
>
> Dedicator recognizes that, once placed in the public domain, the
> Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used,
> modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any
> purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including
> by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.
--
For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions I've had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a short story collection online under a Creative Commons license. A parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the presentations at this event called this talk, "eBooks Suck Right Now," [eBooks suck right now] and as funny as that is, I don't think it's true.
No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I'd call it: "Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them." [Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them] That's because I think that the shape of ebooks to come is almost visible in the way that people interact with text today, and that the job of authors who want to become rich and famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape.
I haven't come to a perfect understanding. I don't know what the future of the book looks like. But I have ideas, and I'll share them with you:
1. Ebooks aren't marketing. [Ebooks aren't marketing] OK, so ebooks *are* marketing: that is to say that giving away ebooks sells more books. Baen Books, who do a lot of series publishing, have found that giving away electronic editions of the previous installments in their series to coincide with the release of a new volume sells the hell out of the new book -- and the backlist. And the number of people who wrote to me to tell me about how much they dug the ebook and so bought the paper-book far exceeds the number of people who wrote to me and said, "Ha, ha, you hippie, I read your book for free and now I'm not gonna buy it." But ebooks *shouldn't* be just about marketing: ebooks are a goal unto themselves. In the final analysis, more people will read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer pages and when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be the way that writers earn their keep, not the way that they promote the dead-tree editions.
2. Ebooks complement paper books. [Ebooks complement paper books]. Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good. Having both is even better. One reader wrote to me and said that he read half my first
I don't know about e-books as a marketing tool for books or method to mkae money, but I do not think you can say e-books are a failure truthfully.
Just look at Project Gutenberg. I know I, and other college students, use it often to read books that are public domain yet sold at amazingly inflated prices at the college bookstore. With such a large selection of interesting topics it is easy to find most of the classics and select ones you want to read.
Perhaps e-books aren't the great moneymaker of the Internet, or it might be that no one has found the right business model. Either way they are from failures at promoting higher literacy and education among students.
Cheap!? $7.99 for the average paperback, an average of $40 for a hardcover. If you read a book a week it gets to be pretty expensive.
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
Are very interesting. Not just for software, articles, books, but also for music and art.
Basically this is the extension of the GPL into other domains, based much on the same premise: I license you my work to use if you agree to license your derived works on the same basis.
It's a wonderful thing, and I believe it's workable, even in commercialized fields like music and publishing. The number of artists who are unable to get their (good) work published is extraordinary. Using a CC license they can publish it, and while making no less money than if it was not published, create many more opportunities for fame and fortune.
The established media businesses are as much a barrier to sucess for new artists as they are a source of income to established ones. The CC licenses provide the basis for a change.
It remains to be see whether we will see a creative explosion in other fields as we have seen in software. Finally, Free Music, Free Art, and Free Words.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I get it now. At the end of that his article, he states: "As you can see, Linux is dying".
I fell for it, you got me. Good one.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Ebooks aren't dead. People just haven't caught on to the real reasons to read ebooks on your palm pilot other than a real book. Compactness, you can cram about a 100 ebooks on an average 128mb memory stick. This is the eqivilant of carrying a small library with you every where you go. An this is very important. Nothing is worse than being suck on the can with nothing to read.
This goes to my second reason with compactness. You can stick a palm pilot in you pocket when you head to the can at work. It looks less suspicous when you head to the head to take a shi than if you had a book under your arm. Boss won't notice as much.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
ebook will fail along they still expensive. you can buy a cheap edition of some book, even a best seller, read it during an airplane trip and discard it. you can't do it with a ebook reader.
ebook reader's are expensive. I remember a model that had a cover with "leather smell", to appeal to paper book readers, another marketing moron displaying it's stupidity: a reader reads a book because of the contents. judging a book for it's cover is for illiterates... or marketing morons.
reading on a gorgeous wide and tall screen of a palm sized device doesn't fit in my sense of confort.
an last but not least, random access... you can flip through the pages of a book as you wish, looking for random passages or particular points of the text. the close to a book flip that you can do with a ebook reader is the fast forward, backward, or select a given page... not that bad.
ebooks can be a huge success when cheap reader appear. something with a screen the size of a pocket book, with good contrast, backlight could be a plus, but not essential. also an ebook not tied to some proprietary DRMed format. I want to download some of the classicals available at the project Guthenberg or simmilars and read it. and a cheaper price tag. if the costs of distribution, stocking are being cutted, I want my share.
paper, rock, scissors...ebook?
My rock killed your ebook.
Technology cannot beat the durability of paper; for the time being that is.
The big problem with ebooks lies in the readers; devices capable of reading ebooks are bulky, fragile, expensive, and nominally not as easy on the eyes as paper; in addition, most of them are read-only, which means that you can't write notes in the margin or hilight passages for later use.
Personally, I'd like to see a low-power (eight to sixteen hours on a single charge) tablet-PC-like device, one which is as easy on the eyes as a normal book (not that hard, really[1]), has a small-but-useful amount of storage (say, 8M of RAM and 512M of compactflash), and into which I can upload textbooks and course notes for all of my college courses. It has to be durable as well; I should be able to accidentally knock this thing off a table into an aquarium, and it should still work.
Give it some simple handwriting recognition, some decent calculation software, and the ability to link up with a desktop via a USB cable, and you could sell tons of these things to college students. I know I'd jump at the opportunity to not lug around a 40lb backpack, laptop case, two-inch binder filled with notes...oh, and a rew reference manuals...even if it cost me a few hundred bucks. Textbook publishers could also get in on the game; charge half as much for an E-book (which can't be resold), and use this as incentive to sell the tablet devices. Everyone wins -- the publishers make more money (no printing, shipping, or warehousing costs), the tablet maker wins, and the students win (less back strain, cheaper textbooks, ability to have an entire library in a satchel).
[1] If you're willing to keep it black-and-white, just use a farly high-resolution LCD, and use a plain white sheet of paper as a background; the paper will reflect ambient light properly, except where the LCD is active -- presto, paper-like black-on-white text, just like a book.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
I am a phd student and as a result I am often writing research papers with lots of references. I know that I would LOVE to have ebook versions of the books I read so that I wouldn't have to spend so much time trying to find one line or one paragraph in a book that talked about something I want to cite. I would love to be able to do a keywork seach for these books. It would help sooo much.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Open speech in Firefox. -A -C Open Word processor -V Click "little-r" (for ebook reader) Conversion to eBook & sync'd to iPaq. Now I can read why eBooks didn't make it on my handheld, like I have for all of his books, as well as about 3 dozen others.
Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books --Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004
February 12, 2004 - San Diego, CA
Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com
--
Forematter:
This talk was initially given at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology
Conference [ http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004 ], along
with a set of slides that, for copyright reasons (ironic!) can't
be released alongside of this file. However, you will find,
interspersed in this text, notations describing the places where
new slides should be loaded, in [square-brackets].
This text is dedicated to the public domain, using a Creative
Commons public domain dedication:
> Copyright-Only Dedication (based on United States law)
>
> The person or persons who have associated their work with this
> document (the "Dedicator") hereby dedicate the entire copyright
> in the work of authorship identified below (the "Work") to the
> public domain.
>
> Dedicator makes this dedication for the benefit of the public at
> large and to the detriment of Dedicator's heirs and successors.
> Dedicator intends this dedication to be an overt act of
> relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights
> under copyright law, whether vested or contingent, in the Work.
> Dedicator understands that such relinquishment of all rights
> includes the relinquishment of all rights to enforce (by lawsuit
> or otherwise) those copyrights in the Work.
>
> Dedicator recognizes that, once placed in the public domain, the
> Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used,
> modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any
> purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including
> by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.
--
For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions
I've had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a
short story collection online under a Creative Commons license. A
parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the
presentations at this event called this talk, "eBooks Suck Right
Now," [eBooks suck right now] and as funny as that is, I don't
think it's true.
No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I'd
call it: "Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them." [Ebooks: You're
Soaking in Them] That's because I think that the shape of ebooks
to come is almost visible in the way that people interact with
text today, and that the job of authors who want to become rich
and famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape.
I haven't come to a perfect understanding. I don't know what the
future of the book looks like. But I have ideas, and I'll share
them with you:
1. Ebooks aren't marketing. [Ebooks aren't marketing] OK, so
ebooks *are* marketing: that is to say that giving away ebooks
sells more books. Baen Books, who do a lot of series publishing,
have found that giving away electronic editions of the previous
installments in their series to coincide with the release of a
new volume sells the hell out of the new book -- and the
backlist. And the number of people who wrote to me to tell me
about how much they dug the ebook and so bought the paper-book
far exceeds the number of people who wrote to me and said, "Ha,
ha, you hippie, I read your book for free and now I'm not gonna
buy it." But ebooks *shouldn't* be just about marketing: ebooks
are a goal unto themselves. In the final analysis, more people
will read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer
pages and when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be
the way that writers earn their keep, not the way that they
promote the dead-tree editions.
2. Ebooks complement paper books. [Ebooks complement paper
books]. Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good.
Having both is even
You don't need to.
:)
It's a text file, and I assume the server sent text/plain as its type. Worked fine in Firefox, I thought maybe the OP meant "IE" when they said a standard browser, so I checked in IE6. Looked fine there as well.
At about 12 words per line, it's even easy to read as well, so I have no idea what they're whining about
As someone who recently purchased his "Down and out in the Magic Kingdom", I would say the e-book had almost no influence on my purchase. I knew about it being available online, and it did give Cory "cool points" for being involved in the creative commons and other excellent projects. But, I never even looked at the online version.
I purchased in the traditional way.. I browsed it on the shelves of my local small bookstore. I then checked if it was available at my local used bookstore. When it wasn't there, I returned to the small bookstore & purchased it there. (The two stores are next door to each other.. very handy.)
As Cory acknowledges, noone is going to read a text of significant duration online. Until there is an e-book reader device that can better replicate the look/feel/portability/durability of paper and won't strain my eyes, then I'm sticking to paperbacks.
Why require a text to have a formatting language (HTML) applied to it at all, when plain-text will do? It's providing information in the simplest form possible. Anythig on top of that is just adding bytes.
The Holy Roman empire was neither holy, nor was it Roman. Discuss.
/Coffee Talk
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Because sometimes the web is legitimately used as a transport mechanism for files, rather than as a provider of "web content."
Ebooks and papers, in particular are commonly formated as plain text for web distribution, allowing the reader to use whatever text editor they choose and to format the content in any way that pleases them.
As well as having formated the text for printing I have also now put a copy of the file on my laptop which I use as an ebook reader, which does not even have a browser installed, along with my "pile" of books from Project Gutenberg, all in plain text, where I will be able to view it in vi.
Sometimes distribution of text as text be good and shit.
KFG
I have converted his article into a few more familiar formats.
== This ANTONY has Super Cow Powers.
E-books are great and all, but they pretty much destroy the simplicity of a regular book. It doesn't matter if I'm laying in bed, walking around town, sitting in a car (not while driving like some idiots do), or waiting for a class to start, I can open up a book and never have to worry about battery charge. The boot up time on a regular paperback is lightning fast, too. Plus the most expensive accesory you need for it is maybe a $5 bookmark, or a bookbag if you want to get really fancy. There are some things that technology just can't replace.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
What is it you don't like about Cory Doctorow? 0wnzered seems quite good, if a little soft, sci-fi; Unwirer was very good and didn't seem at all soft; Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is great stuff in the spirit of Gibson and Stephenson. Sometimes his stuff is off (I thought the basic premise of Eastern Standard Tribe was pretty lame. Sure I can see your group affiliations affecting your sleep schedule, but it makes no sense to say you will have a group called "Eastern Standard"; lots of groups are based in the EST time zone) but if you ignore the name of the group, it's a cool story. See http://www.craphound.com to read some of his stuff.
He has some insight on copyright. It's really not much more than you get pretty commonly at slashdot, but he's out there living the "right way" wrt copyright as an author, which is a pretty uncommon thing.
So, what's the problem? Maybe he gets more press in geek circles than he quite deserves, but not by a lot.
I read books only on my Palm anymore. I certainly would prefer to read on paper instead of my IIIxe's greenish screen (I'm upgrading soon), but I never carry books around with me, and if I do, just in my bag so I only have them at my desk.
With 3 or 4 books in my Palm, I've got a book to read everywhere. I've read 10 times more books since using the Palm than when on paper.
Also we're way over capacity on paper books in our house; we just don't have room for what we have. We have about 300 linear feet of shelf space, much of it double-shelved, and another couple hundred pounds of books in boxes. I'm just not going to add to that by buying more paper.
Thank God for Baen books. I'd decided not to buy from Peanut Press anymore because I dislike having to remember credit card numbers from 5 years ago to unlock books, and I dislike paying as much for eBooks as for paper; I should at least get a few bucks off.
Baen publishes much of their catalog electronically, in open formats, at reasonable prices.
Now that "Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom" (DaOitMK) has been released under the least-restrictive Creative Commons licence, the possibilities of completely legal fanfic emerge. You know what? It's a good thing.
Cory Doctorow created a very interesting "universe" that other writers can play around in. A society where nobody really dies, where we've outgrown the need to work to earn our food and shelter, and where a person's reputation is more important than their net worth? Think about it: it's a very rich world to write stories in.
Yeah, most fanfic sucks. But sometimes people write fics that are as good as the movie or TV show they are riffing on. I can think of two people who wrote "Daria" fic who have a great future ahead of them as writers: CE Forman and Kara Wild. If there ever is a revival of the series (which won't happen and there are very good reasons why it shouldn't) they should be brought on board as official writers for the series.
Fanfic is often a way for a less-than-secure writer to exercise their writing muscles without the fuss, muss or bother of creating characters and environments for the characters to interact in. I know...I've written a little in my day, although I'm not proud enough to link to it so that you can see it.
Who knows what will happen once the DaOitMK universe starts expanding thanks to the work of fanfic writers? I suspect this endeavor might even spawn some writers who might not have gotten into writing otherwise.
Thank you, Cory Doctorow. You have given quite a generous gift...maybe more generous than you will ever know.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Well @ least the free pdf or text type. last two books I've read are Underground (http://undeground-book.com) and Free as in Freedom (http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/). Man I cannot get enough! I love reading while drinking listening to music so reading E versions of book is a natural step for me (since I'm in front of the screen most of the time anyway doing just that). Two reasons why I love them (just like games((yes I rip them off))), the first is the fact I can actually read them first (even if @ the time I can't/won't buy it) then decide to purchase/donate. The second one is they look great as part of my digital archive (think of it as a digital library that not only holds books but movies music etc).
Love them Love them, wuold love some links if anyone's got any!
Was to an Empire.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is great stuff in the spirit of Gibson and Stephenson.
That's my problem; I've read a number of the short stories he's made available and it's "in the spirit of Gibson and Stephenson" the way the Soviet space shuttle was "in the spirit" of the US design. (Sorry for the obscure reference, it was the first to come to mind.) The themes of his stories are pedestrian, even by sci-fi standards, and his writing style is all the style of Dick and Gibson with none of the substance. He tries to converse in these languages (sci-fi topics, and worse, actual tech issues) the same way a parrot might try to converse with Spaulding Gray. He knows the buzzwords because they are buzzwords, but that's about it as far as his talent goes.
So he's a mediocre sci-fi author who has deigns on the tech world, what's the big deal, right? Right, except for, as you mention, he gets more press than he quite deserves. I don't understand why so many slashdotters get in such a tizzy about him when there are a thousand of his analogs out there that nobody cares about.
As for the copyright issue, that's a YMMV debate. Some authors might want to keep tabs on the stuff they've written, and I don't see why they should be castigated or thought to be morally inferior to people who don't care if their names are attached to a given work. If Doctorow wants to give his work away, hey great, but not every author is an internet dilettante. Some people need to feed their families this way. Nobody harps on Asimov for doing the same thing.
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
eBooks can work, and will work as soon as someone gets all the pieces in place. The obvious model would be to follow Apple's iTunes / iPod. Make a hardware reader that has a great screen, light, and relatively inexpensive, and is a joy to use. Have it read as many formats as possible: HTML, RTF, Word Docs, don't dick around with DRM and proprietary formats. Have it read saved web pages. Have an internal hard drive. Next, have software on the computer that acts as a library much like iTunes. Make it easy to share and even read on your computer if need be, via a web browser.
Get all this crap in place and you will make a mint. Sell the books for 99 cents even. Heck I bet Apple is already working on this (They do audio books).
1. While I haven't seen it myself, a professor of mine in college got a chance at some research lab who did display/rendering work to read a document rendered on-screen at 600 DPI (yes, six HUNDRED)! That's the exact same density as the pages your printer typically spits out. Consumer systems at the moment do what, somewhere between 72 and 96DPI on-screen? He said that all of his objections about eye-strain completely vanished in a moment.
2. Even for those of us who won't have access to on-screen densities in the 600 DPI range for another 20 years -- if you haven't looked at font-rendering on a Mac in the last 5 years -- do yourself the favor! I hadn't done so in several years and the quality of fonts on the Mac is stunning, even (especially?) on their laptops. When I turned back to my own computer (someone had brought in a new Powerbook at work), my eyes instantly started tearing up. It really bothered me to look at my own screen for the next 5 minutes.
That said, I recently had an optometrist (mother of a friend of mine) claim that exposure to long amounts of screen viewing (TV or computer) at an early age was proven to do something to how one focusses one's eyes that later proves detrimental. *wry grin* Now admittedly, she had no actual article to cite, so that information may be suspect. Much like how your parents used to claim reading in low light would hurt your eyes. Possible explanation here.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
One of the big problems I have had with the idea of e-books is that there is no agreement in the industry on how we should accomplish the sale and distribution of those texts. I am a fan of the Safari website, but I know that I can't get those books for offline reading. I like to download some books for Microsoft Reader, but I know that I might not always be able to access that book, and have no guarentee that I will be able to read it on more than one computer.
E-books are a wonderful tool for research and to help some unknown authors get works out to the public, but with the uproar that MP3's have made, I can't forsee any publisher really pushing to make this a force of format. It reminds me of a technology that is very useful, user friendly, easy to produce and even fun to use, but is sidelined because the people that could make it happen are too afraid to step on any toes.
The one thing that I fear about this, though, is a format being pushed forward and then patented and soon, you end up basically paying another tax, just to read a book, because the format is locked in stone. What happens when all of the works of Shakespear are now avaliable for $19.95, and only from Adobe GreatWorks(TM).
If I could get a firm grip on reality, I'd choke it...
Remember to bring your public key and a couple forms of ID!
Seriously-my palm zire 71 was just too small [although for reading in the bathtub it can't be beat]. But my motion tabletpc works great for this. the screen is big enough, and its among the lighter tablets-meaning its truly workable for reading with. My favorite author sold a hardback book with a CD of all of his older books-I was in heaven. You can even read comic books without the size relationship being distorted. They have a close out fo older motion m1200's going on for like $1300. yeah its spendy-but it truly makes e-books worthwhile, and reading is one of my major hobbies. Not to mention you can go out on your porch at night, grab a soda and surf the net under the stars.
This is an exceptionally fine piece, and I greatly enjoyed reading it.
g g=1&mg=2
Some impressions:
Although I'm happy that Mr. Doctorow has made a profit off his creative commons releases, I have a feeling that his case is an exception rather than the rule, and that once the the novelty value of creative commons content released by commercial publishers die down fewer people will be inclined to try first, buy later. (That is not worse than the status quo however). As pda's and ereaders become more user friendly, the temptation not to buy the hard copy will become irresistable for creative commons works.
I advocate a tip-based model of artistic compensation http://www.geocities.com/bigbadlinux/. Perhaps voluntary "pay-what-you-want" scenario is unrealistic, but compensation becomes viable when the pricepoint is low enough to seem insignificant.
A few years ago, memberships to porn sites cost 30-50$ a month; nowadays even most of them offer 1 day or 1 week memberships for gigabytes of movies. One could use emule to get these things, but when the price point starts resembling chump change, that's when people start voluntarily paying for online content.
If you look at this audio book site, for example http://www.audiobooksforfree.com/screen_main.asp?
downloading mp3 audios for entire novels cost only about $5. That's close to the level of chump change.
Right now POD books easily sell for $10-12, but 100% virtual content could probably go for $2-3. Content needs to be priced in a way that appears to be chump change for the buyer/reader but gains enough readership for chump change to add up to something substantial. Fortunately, the existence of weblogs like www.maudnewton.com and viral marketing make it easier to get your content out there.
The future is weblogs people.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Formats fine in Mozilla.
adeu,
Mateu
(Posting anonymously because I've already moderated here)
1) The vast majority of his stuff is worth reading. To me, that's fairly high praise.
;-)
2) The vast majority of his stuff is available for free and easy to find if you start from the slashdot/kuro5hin culture.
3) He gets the IP and tech issues that affect us today and tomorrow.
What it boils down to is that I haven't seen anyone else present a believable day-after-tomorrow view of how globalization, pc miniaturization, and wireless/minicam/etc will affect us. He seems to present that view in Unwirer and... hmm, whoah, little conflation going on here. Gah. My other one was actually Pattern Recognition, Gibson's latest.
Maybe you have something there
Regarding copyright, I (and I think Cory opines similarly) believe that a short term copyright would be for the good, and it is entirely the author's discretion to release under more lenient terms than copyright allows. However, our current 70 years+++ copyright is unethical, counterproductive, and unconstitutional.
Maybe you are not aware of it, but more and more ppl own a PDA.
I know every salesman in my company does, and so do most techs...
In my old Palm Vx, that I happen to carry in replacement of the paper one that I has to "upgrade" to newest year every year, I happen to have 3 years backlog of all my meetings, most of my contact, quite a few emails...and, as I already have the PDA, I take a few books with me whenever I have to travel or go to work (public transportation, 1 hour and then some, so time to read)
Remember that paper organizer are now becoming a rarity in my field (IT), because they are kludgy, hard to manage and they don't remind me of the next meeting by beeping...
So if I take as basis that paper organizer are down, and PDAs are up, I already have a PDA and I enjoy reading books on it as a bonus...
Tests have determined that people (even young people who grew up with computers) retain better from reading books vs reading from a screen. Which means the utility of ebooks and codexes are different. Ebooks are great for searching, quick reference look-ups, cut-and-paste, short browsing. Codexes are great if you acctually want to absorb (grok) the material.
I have doubts that the codex will actually be diminished by ebooks, I also note that Barnes & Nobel can make money by publishing classics that have been out of copyright for generations. Copyright was invented (after the printing press) to solve an economic problem in getting new material printed the first time. (see Copyright and Authors).
to further use the porn example, the lowering of price of online porn has NOT resulted in a decrease in porn quality. I realize this is a subjective opinion, but I think the same effect will apply to many kinds of content, not just porn.
Therefore, when I say, wait until the price point becomes chump change, I am not implying that reduction in price implies a reduction in content standards. It may not even imply a reduction in compensation for creators. (It really is amazing how many things we can learn about content just by looking at the porn issue).
btw, an essay I wrote about online types of adult entertainment: Pleasure Manifesto (work safe).
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
I wrote the O'Reilly book XForms Essentials and released it under the GFDL. I can say from experience that freeing the text has helped promote the book to audiences that would not have otherwise heard of it.
In order to deal with the rapidly changing technology, I launched a companion web site XForms Institute.
Particularly with technical books, "multimodal" publishing is smart. I'm glad to see Cory try it with fiction. -m
--- Learn XForms today: http://xformsinstitute.com
Didn't hurt that it got me to read a few of the classics that I'd never had the chance to peruse before...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
to further use the porn example, the lowering of price of online porn has NOT resulted in a decrease in porn quality. I realize this is a subjective opinion, but I think the same effect will apply to many kinds of content, not just porn.
Therefore, when I say, wait until the price point becomes chump change, I am not implying that reduction in price implies a reduction in content standards. It may not even imply a reduction in compensation for creators. (It really is amazing how many things we can learn about content just by looking at the porn issue).
Here's an essay about general issues of adult entertainment and content pleasure manifesto .
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
"The themes of his stories are pedestrian, even by sci-fi standards, and his writing style is all the style of Dick and Gibson with none of the substance."
:P
Sounds like most of Gibson's later novels.
(I liked Pattern Recognition, though.)
While releasing his books under a creative commons license worked well for him I wonder what would happen if a normal (read unfamous) person attempted the same thing. Would a CC license help an unknown writer or hurt their chances of getting a book deal?
If you have a pocket PC (or similar) already, eBooks make a lot of sense. Many many eBooks are free. Thanks University of Virginia Electronic Text Center! Try this collection: http://www.mslit.com/default.asp?mjr=FRE
With instant lookup for translations or definitions, they're more convenient than handling several books at once.
They're great for filling unexpected dead time. I'm not in the habit of taking a book with me, but I always have my phone PPC. That's as good as carrying a small library.
Less conventional topics are surprisingly nifty on eBook. Ever tried a cookbook eBook? Take it right into the kitchen, or use it at someone else's place without knowing you'll need it. There are several good ones for around 3 bucks!
I don't agree that he "gets the IP and tech issues that affect us today and tomorrow", but then, I don't think anyone really "gets" it. I mean, I've heard persuasive arguments from both sides of the issue, so I don't think, as it stands, there's a clear "this is the right way, that's the wrong way" to do it. I think the knee-jerk anti-copyright reaction of your average slashdotter belies a key ignorance or unwillingness to understand the complexities of the issue.
As for your "believable day-after-tomorrow view", if you haven't already, I highly recommend picking up the trade paperbacks of Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's comic Transmetropolitan. They present a much more interesting, funny and thought-provoking day-after-tomorrow view that is devoid of the subtle "I'm so clever" navel-gazing that goes on in Doctorow's writing. For me, that, along with Gibson's collection Burning Chrome are the benchmark for realistic near-future sci-fi. In light of those, Doctorow's work stands up as a pale imitation.
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
I read tons and tons of chinese novels online (illegal OCR copy though) when I was in 2nd year undergrad. I'd often stare at the screen for more than 3 hrs and I'm ok with it. I don't see how that is different than staring at the screen for 3 hrs playing computer game.
In fact, I find it more comfortable (posture wise) reading on the screen than having to hold the book in your hand and read it.
It is even better if you want to eat snack at the same time you read. How many of you can hold the book in your hand, flip pages, and eat dinner at the same time without worrying about food staining the pages? But with e-book, you can read and eat at the same time, and all you need to do is to press the "Page Down" button whenever you want to flip pages on a e-book. (ahhh... lonely bachlor life...)
Of course, that is just me. My girlfriend still can not get used to reading it on screen.
The unfortunate part is, when I made that comment, I had Gibson's later books in mind. I happen to agree completely (that Gibson's earlier stuff is better, and I liked Pattern Recognition too).
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
The Holy Roman empire was neither holy, nor was it Roman. Discuss.
Nor was it an Empire.
Epigram by Voltaire.
-kgj
-kgj
CspotRun is a very good reader program that word wraps and has a free document preparer so any text document can be converted to e-book format. The Palm is neatly backlit so you can read at night and it is small, portable, and very convenient on mass transit of all sorts. Batteries last a long time too which makes it an excellent light weight book to take along backpacking.
I happen to really like ebooks because of their great convenience. I read Down and Out on my Palm Pilot as well as lots of other books. On the other hand, I don't buy a lot of e-books because the price is altogether too high. If I had the least bit of faith that the author got any significant percentage of the e-book price I would be more likely to buy. So far, only the dead tree version justifies the price for purchase.
I think that more than half of my reading, apart from what I read to prepare for class, is older books that I can get in ebook format and that are in the public domain. The only things I like paper books more for is being able to read in the bathtub (oh, for a waterproof Clie), ease of marginal annotation, and ability to flip through quickly (my Clie screen is too small to find things quickly by flipping through).
Searching is helpful. Having a book in one's pocket always is great. Some of the things I read are parts of enormous multi-volume sets that I wouldn't have room on a bookshelf for. For instance, dozens of volumes of Cardinal Newman or of the Jesuit Relations. Various classic books, too, are greatly improved by hyperlinking. For instance, Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae which has lots of back-references.
At one point my wife claimed to find it to be more fun to read in ebook format on a Clie NX60/70 (using Plucker) than to read the dead-tree editions. Autoscrolling was particularly nice when our baby was small and we had no hands free while doing things for the baby.
And, yes, it's nice to have a big library with one. I've got some 600mb of flash on my NX70. It's expensive, but when one considers the cost of printed books, it's not so bad. (For instance, I bet the complete works of Cardinal Newman would set me back a couple of hundred dollars in print format for the books themselves, and more when one considers the cost of another bookcase.) I just wish everybody published in ebook format. Then I wouldn't have to buy physical books almost at all.
Something I wrote back in May 2003.
The failure of E-books, Downloadable software, and Online Music.
We all have seen the many publisher provided services for purchasing E-books, E-Music, and Software Downloads.
These services try to limit your options and choices or even to remove them from you totally. With many of these services you must agree that you do not even own that which you wish to purchase in order to buy it. Instead they license you right to use their private property.
We see the prices on the virtual which rival that of the physical. We instinctively know that the production cost of a E-book, Downloaded software, or MP3s is so much less than the cost of a compact disc or a printed book both of which require paper, ink, artwork, packaging and so much more that is totally lacking from the ethereal versions.
Their sales decline. "Stop the thieves" they cry out into the night! Make more and harsher laws to protect that which is already protected they demand of our governments. Protect our property and damn their rights is their idea of an ideal. I am a honest person is my vehement reply. So why attempt punish me for the crimes of others.
They attempt to smother new technology on the premise that it may possibly be used for illegal activity.
While it is not my intention to justify the theft of their material I must point out it's their own fault really. I blame their lack of foresight and their lack of anything resembling common sense. They do not exploit the markets available for them or if they do it's a halfhearted attempt. In the real world people are not buying what you sale one common step generally taken is to consider lowering your prices until your sales pick up. This also applies on the Internet.
In a concise conclusion I state that I personally prefer to compensate the authors and composers of the material that I so enjoy in my daily life. Currently I do so off-line. So Publishing and recording industries I say make it worth my while and convenient to do so and I will be one of the first in line online.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
All I want is a nice portable device, preferably with a low-power light display by eInk (http://www.eink.com/) to read eBooks, or one of the many RTF versions of books that I have. Is that too much to ask?
I used to have a PDA, but it died, and I really can't justify spending the money for a PDA just to read a book again.
In 2001 my film archives and stock footage company partnered with the Internet Archive to put 1001 (ultimately 1800) of our most popular films online (http://www.archive.org/movies/prelinger.php) for free downloading and reuse. Until then we'd been extremely protective of these images. Since starting to give footage away, our stock footage sales are way up, our income increased, and people stop me on Valencia Street to thank me for making the archives available. Hundreds (maybe thousands) of producers have made cool and interesting work that would have been hard to make without free footage. Most don't have any money to spend, so they wouldn't have paid anyway. Others doing higher-profile work need written license agreements, so they can and do pay.
I'm convinced that the gift economy can generate returns. Cory is right.
I kept expecting your post to be a joke, since you were exactly describing how I read ebooks, on my Handspring. Light, I have dropped it alot, easy on the eyes LCD, the reader software does let me write notes (which I have never done), and so on. Also, the books usually sell for a bit less than the printed versions (at peanut press).
The real problem with ebooks is that the technology just isnt "there" for them yet. Screen resolutions just arent good enough for the small type that is required for a typical paperback book. Technologies like ClearText are ok but after long sessions, the effect wears off and your brain starts seeing the fonts as the crap resolution they really are. I predict that when screen resolutions start getting good enough to actually display smaller type without having to trick the brain into thinking that it is in focus, then ebooks will take off. Also I would love an ebook if it simulated the book experience, think the size of a paparback and the thickness of a greeting card. The most comfortable position I can think of is my elbows on my knees with the book being held in both hands. Now that is quality time. Its just not the same with a palm pilot (no pun intended).
Back a few years ago I had to write something similar to an ebook. A company I worked for wanted all of their manuals online, this was before the ease of HTML (ok dating myself). Anyway what we found is that the employees complained the most over the fact that we used a white (#FFFFFF) background. Have you ever seen a book printed on white paper? I didnt think so they are always printed on papers that are off-white colors (actually whites in the yellow spectrum). We ended up using a combination of sepia and white and everyone was happy.
But if you have to read a lot of text at once- for either work or personal use- paper still wins, because paper isn't just a little bit faster: reading speeds are significantly faster for paper.
Electronic text formats that try to make e-pages look just like paper pages don't help. You'll often be much better off reading small chunks of text with big fonts and very wide margins.
The promise of eBooks was that books would be
a) much much cheaper
b) widely available
None of the industries involved (publishers, electronics manufacturers, countless middlemen) have worked toward that direction.
They refuse to drop the pretense that eBooks are somehow better than real books. They aren't and won't be for some time. All they have is the potential for convenience - give us the convenience and we'll deal with the flaws.
I'll look for eBooks when I can buy a reader for $10 - $20 and books are $1 each. Until then, there's the used book market.
Out of necessity (I couldn't find anything to do it for me), I wrote a little command-line program called TextBath. It takes text like this and re-formats it into proper paragraphs and such. If somebody can point me in the direction of something better, please let me know. I'm yet to find anything. I use this all the time with eBook conversions, so it's got features specifically for doing that, like only joining lines if the next character is lower-case, re-joining split hyphenated words and so on.
The link above is a win32 executable. If anybody wants the C++ source code (it's only small), just give me shout (you'll have to remove/edit the Win32 clipboard stuff).
I catch you reading while driving and I'm going to swerve at you or get in front and slam on my brakes. No matter how desolate the road, reading a book is totally inexcusable while driving a car.
Take a fucking bus if you want to read on the road, or have someone else drive.
My Zaurus SL-C750 has completely changed the way I read. I'm starting to get really annoyed by the physicality of real books now, in the same way that my jukebox MP3 player has made me get annoyed with CDs. There is an excellent reader program which reads all sorts of formats (including Plucker and AportisDoc), and the smooth text scrolling is supremely smooth because of the 640x480 display. And of course, I can use it in portrait or landscape mode (when the screen is rotated, the display auto-rotates).
It's so much better having a small, compact auto-scrolling backlit display to read from. Holding a book and turning pages is annoying.
...Is neither fish, nor a stick. It is a fungus. -Matt Groening
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
So if the goal of an ebook is maximum flexibility, what is the standard base format? SGML? A collection of already-processed formats, all digitally signed and timestamped? Java?
Also how do you make a profit off of providing it, once selling dead tree copies tapers off?
Has anyone tried the books in itunes? I was never a big fan of e-books on the PC or the Ipaq/handheld but I always liked Audio books. There was a time when one of my family members lost their sight for half a year and we had a bunch, so I gave them a try and really liked them.
Has anyone tried them yet and what's your experience?
- Ebook hardware is crap. The screen is to small, &c &c.
- EBook files are far too restricted -- I don't want to lose all my books when I upgrade to a new machine or reader.
- EBooks are far too expensive.
- You can't fold down the page corners on an ebook.
All these complaints are about some current implementations of ebooks, not inherent in the format. Yes, some reader hardware isn't good, some ebook files are overly-protected, and some reader apps are limited. But all this is changing, and will change more in future. There's nothing that says you have to have dedicated hardware; many different types of pocket computer are already good for reading ebooks, and I expect many more will become available. There's an awful lot of books available as plain text, both legally (free like Project Gutenberg, or paid like Fictionwise), and otherwise (P2P &c), which is both platform- and future-proofed. And some reader apps already handle bookmarks, annotations, &c. Most of these objections may seem silly in a few years.- No-one would ever read an entire book on screen. Paper is much easier on the eye.
- There's nothing like being able to pick up a book and hold it.
- You can't give ebooks as presents.
These are mostly a matter of personal taste. Many people find that a good screen (whether desktop or palmtop) is easy enough on the eye that the other advantages of ebooks outweigh that objection. If you can pick up a book, then you have to have some space to put it into in the first place; some people have far more HD space available than bookshelf space. And people already give 'virtual' presents -- just think of book tokens, for example.In short, almost all the objections people are making are valid but limited -- to certain types of people, and/or current technology. I doubt ebooks will replace dead-tree books in the foreseeable future, but there's no reason why they may not provide a popular alternative.
Personally, I've read far more on the screen of my Psion than I have on paper for the last few years; my library is over 80MB of compressed text. I always have something to read, wherever I am, and I can edit things as I wish (e.g. converting to British English spelling). The only place where paper is still better for me is on the loo; elsewhere, ebooks are more useful -- especially for reading in bed, where the backlight lets me read in the dark!
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Did he say he was driving? You assume too much.
Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books, by Cory Doctorow
Subtitle: Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004
Link: http://www.gutenberg.net/1/1/0/7/11077
Thanks to Cory Doctorow for making this public domain eBook available!
As the lovely Linda Richman would say: I'll give you yet another topic. Slashdot is not a slash nor a dot. Discuss.
Cozinha para as massas (e para geeks)
If he wasn't driving why would he care about "red lights"? I see people using their PDAs while driving all the time.
The meme police, They live inside of my head
Cory Doctorow posts a version of his book at his website that displays the text, one and only one word at a time, in a sufficient size and resolution that allows for quick and easy reading, which can be displayed at a speed selectable by the reader providing a new reading experience. After reading in this manner it occurred to me that if the speed were to be varied in a subtle manner such that it might impart to the reader a since of timing and pacing, perhaps similar to music, which would, if probably applied, enhance the experience of the read. My guess is that such a single word by single word approach would make reading poetry much easier that I often find such works to be.