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What Will It Take For eBook Adoption?
zmcnulty writes "Gizmodo has a new weekly feature that appears to be off to a great start: their first 'Feature Creep' writeup (by Sanford May) is an excellent overview of some of the obstacles standing in the way of adoption of eBooks, and more importantly, a handheld device that supports them. We've probably all heard of the Sony Librie's lukewarm reception, but if you're not familiar with the somewhat stunted eBook market, this is an excellent essay to get you on your way."
Good books that people want to read and which will only be ported to this medium.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
The common wisdom is that eBooks will have a hard time for two reasons: bad reader devices and book junkies opting only for the hard stuff, the dead-tree form factor.
There will come a day when there is a generation of folks who use ebooks and consider printed books cumbersome and an anachronism. I'm not part of that generation but I see it coming.
I do remember doing some research back in the early 80's with kids that had reading disabilities and we found that there was a difference in comprehension when reading from a monitor (more or less direct light) versus a printed page (reflected light). Direct light seemed to yield better comprehension. We controlled for a lot, but not all, contravening variables so I don't know if this is cogent to the ebook debate.
Cheers!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Cory Doctorow (who reasonably knows a thing or two about electronic publishing) has a pretty good piece disassembling the Gizmodo article here: Ebook column that gets it all wrong
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I'm going to go to my grave preferring paper, regardless of what technology comes along between now and then.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I will buy an ebook when I can read it as comfortably as a normal book. High contrast, high resolution, readable in daylight.
Realy, it makes good senses
Visit Tutorials & guides collection
If there was a truly comfortable, intuitive, and usable reader with a wide selection of books then I might be interested. You need to be able to read under any light, and it can't be any more cumbersome than your standard novel. The graphics would have to be print quality.
And obviously the price would have to be reasonable, probably less than $100.
E-books fail for me because I would rather read somewhere else than infront of my computer screen.
I spend all day at work in front of this screen, why would I want to read a book on it when I can sit in a nice relaxing place without fans humming away or a CRT brightly lit in my face..
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It needs to be as cheap, or cheaper than a book. Hardy, so it can survive getting wet/dropped. And readable, like a book, not a flickery CRT or expensive LCD. Let's face facts, it's not going to happen for a while. It's a materials problem, not a software or standard hardware one.
And I agree with his interpretation from his article: " Ebook column that gets it all wrong Gizmodo has a new column called "Feature Creep," and they kicked it off with an editorial about the future of ebooks that is striking for its complete disregard for the actual marketplace experiences with ebooks. It's full of hoary chestnuts about ebooks that have been emptily mouthed for 10 years ("Call it digital paper or electronic ink, it's the future of eBooks.") and aside from the occassional iPod comparison, there's hardly a paragraph in there that couldn't have been written in 1997 -- nor one that takes note of any of the events since then (well, to be fair, there's also a lot of puffery stuck in there to promote an ebook company called Vertical that probably didn't exist in 1997, but that's beside the point). Take DRM. The author asserts on the one hand that DRM can work, and that it won't be so invasive that it turns readers (whom the author insists on calling "consumers," an odious buzzword that invokes Gibson's description in Idoru, "...a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed") off. This despite the actual marketplace fact that all DRM becomes invasive (ask any copyright policy maker in a country that allows parallel importing how he feels about the "lightweight" region-coding DRM on DVDs that reverses the laws he was elected to enact). This despite the actual marketplace fact that DRM is generally broken within a few days of engagement with the public, often by teenagers, grad students, or people with ready acccess to sophisticated DRM-cracking tools like Google and the sinister Shift key (for more on DRM, see my DRM talk)" http://www.boingboing.net/2004/07/29/ebook_column_ that_ge.html
// Empires come and go we live forever
Although a good idea, I dont read e-books because I really cant stand reading large documents on a screen. It is much more comfortable for me to read on a page. Also, who thinks that e-books are such a good idea? We have paper documents going back 3000+ years (papyrus to be exact). But already disks from 10 years ago are obsolete. Electronic storage media is going obsolete so fast that I dont think I trust it to hold a record of humanity.
Personally, I prefer having a physical book in my hand to page through rather then trying to read something on a screen. An actual book just feels more "solid" and "real" to me. But, there are some advantages to ebooks, especially when used as a reference document. The good old ctrl-F makes finding specific information much faster then looking in an index or table of contents. Also, If you forget your ebook somewhere, it is just a matter of connecting to your home computer to download it wherever you may happen to be.
Cory Doctorow, EFF-staffer, SF writer and co-editor of Boing-Boing, has written a strong critique of this article and its lack of attention to the market experience.
Respectfully, David Tallan
Cory Doctorow has a fantastic commentary on how wrong this article is, concentrating especially on the authors credulous assertion that DRM is an absolute requirement for the ebooks market. Says Cory: "But the author goes further and asserts that without DRM, there will be no market for entertainment product ever again ("If publishers stop wanting DRM, it's the end of popular creative arts. Not as we know them, but period.") despite the fact that the software industry got bigger when it abandoned DRM, and despite the fact that no new medium has ever succeeded by appealing to the virtues of the medium before it [...]" Well worth a read.
Openness.
I should be able to buy an E-book and used it on ANY reader, my palm, my Zaurus, My Wince device, I should be able to also read it on the PC,MAC,etc...
If e-books are not in a standard and universal format then they are absolutely doomed.
The best ebook reader I had was a Rocketbook. only because I had a program to create my own Ebooks for it from guttenberg texts or other ebooks I cracked so I could convert them.
Although the device has more technical books in it than anything else.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm reading Andre Norton's Time Traders from the Baen Free Library using Mobireader on a Palm Zaire 72.
I'm not thrilled with it, preferring a real book, but it is readable and the ability (if I actually bought a dictionary for my palm) to look up words right there and make annotations is pretty cool.
Tech books seem more likely, but the convience of having a number of books at no additional weight is really nice, especially when I travel.
The biggest thing killing ebooks right now? High cost and DRM. I don't want to pay more (or even the same) for an e-book and I want to be able to read it on several devices.
Audible.com has better pricing (and they have to pay someone to read the thing) so I'm not sure why e-books don't.
Well, nothing can match the tactile feel of pages in your hand. It's just something that i will always like.
;)
Now, for reading docs on a computer screen (ebooks included), i wouldn't have thought i'd ever like it much....until i got dual displays. One for holding whatever i was reading and one for doing whatever i was doing. It's made my life much easier. i still don't really enjoy reading a book on screen though. Just something about it i don't like.
Maybe it's just me, but when i get a really, really, really tough bug, i'll print out the code and go for a walk, reading the code with pen in hand. Dunno why that helps sometimes, but it sure has solved some very sticky stuff for me in the past. i might be just odd though
Just some tweaks to the interface. Every 500 wor words should be displayed on an individual sheet of e-paper (double-sided) with the PGDN and PGUP functions controlled by turning the page. Oh, and it should also be portable, and rely on solar energy for illumination.
"It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created." Dr. Richard Wallace
The media is wrong for books.
What I do see happening with extreme speed is on demand paperback publishing.
The big publishing companies are presently not in the business of book creation. They are in the business of manufacture and distribution of wood products. Instead of varnish, they cover theirs in ink.
It makes MUCH more sense store the books electronic at a site, and use a credit card (or cell phone) operated printer that can produce a good quality bound paperback in a matter of ten minutes or so.
"Bookstore" will be the place you go to get the book. They'll be able to have one or two on the shelves of popular books for browsing and tens of thousands of browseable book jackets as well. You'll also be able to go online and decide what book you want and have it "sent" to that printer or possibly even bring your own home-made or open source book on flash or thumb drive or something and have it printed.
Wired: Kinkos
Tired: Borders
Expired: Using Wired Magazine to sound hip.
--AP
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
easy as soon as the publisher of the book can only authorize 1 person to view the book and only on 1 device then e-books will take off.
think broadcast flag for reading.
eBook UI is a major problem. Part of the pleasure of reading a book comes from the tactile quality of handling the pages; there's no equivalent for that of reading on the screen. Books are a convenient medium, they don't need a power source, you can curl up with a good book in bed (OK if you're a serious geek you can probably curl up with your laptop in bed also, but you get my point). You can take them on holiday and not be too bothered if they get lost/damaged. Bring back printed software documentation, I say.
I guess we all agree that curling up in a big comfy chair for a nice read with an e-book would be unpleasant. There is something nice about the feel of real paper on your finger tips.
I do agree with the writer of the article that there are a few good books that I would like to be able to have with me all of the time. I would have more use for that than a laptop, if you can believe it. There are quite a few books I simply use as a reference, and they would be much nicer in e-book format.
I'll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize Missourah!
* A reader that is light, inexpensive, with excellent graphics, that can easily be read in the sun.
* The reader must allow me to upload any text, not just from its own selection. This includes raw text files, html files and pdf. If I can't use it for papers, references and public domain/copyright expired works, it's not much good for me.
* The books need to be _mine_, in the same way that dead-tree versions are today. I can keep the copy for as long as I want, I can make backups to my hearts content, and I can sell it on, or give it away if or when I tire of it. No tying it to a particular reader in other words. I would not appreciate having to rebuy my library, just because my reader up and died.
* Neither books nor reader is to require any kind of interaction with the manufacturer or seller in any way, once I purchased it. I on't want to feel tied down, and I don't want to feel like I'm just borrowing the thing, not owning it.
I'm waiting...
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
This is a little tainted because the inital DRM efforts, in addition to being almost completely useless, were also extrememly draconian. It's no wonder people weren't buying the readers if the industry is treating them with that much hostility.
One more thing I'd like to point out. I don't know how well it's doing in the grand scheme of things, but the Baen Webscription Service doesn't seem to have killed their paperback production, even though their books are completely without DRM.
I read the internet for the articles.
- Palm-sized handhelds are too small for convenient reading of large amounts of text.
- Larger LCD screens (say, 6 in. by 8 in, about the size of a paperback book cover) are still too expensive to use in a device intended solely for reading books, magazines and newspapers.
- Most people will not pay for a device that costs more than US$100 if all they can do with it is read.
- Making such a device multi-purpose, as a Palm or PocketPC handheld is, would either raise the price too high, make it too heavy to be portable, or both.
Simply put: we have the technology to make a portable eBook reader, but it's either too expensive for typical consumers (who aren't usually big readers to begin with) to buy or too large to be easily portable.
The entire issue over DRM really isn't an issue at all. Apple's iTunes Music Store shows that people will tolerate DRM provided that it doesn't interfere with casual copying. In addition, the cost of a music CD is $15-$20, even if you only want one song -- which you can now buy online for just $1. The issue is that there's just not a demand for books in this format, and there never will be as long as paperbacks can be bought for $7 while a downloaded eBook merely costs half of that.
They are dumb.
I'll take a heavy hardback with all of it's tactile experience over reading stuff on a palm, newton, clie or monitor any day.
Want to search? Use the index. Want to make annotations? Get a pencil. Want to cut-n-paste? Well, too bad.
eNough already.
I have yet to see any good ebook hardware. I see some that's decent, but overpriced, short battery life, crappy screen, too big, etc.
Then comes the books, this is less of a problem, because there are actually a lot of GOOD books out there in the e-book world. I would be buying and reading a lot of them if I had hardware to use to do so.. but I don't want to sit at my computer monitor to read, I do that to work. I want to take my ebook device out under the shade of a mangrove tree by my canal and enjoy hearing the birds, water, and wildlife. Or be able to stretch out in my recliner and read... etc.
I would LOVE to be able to get all of my library on ebook, I'd get like 200 square feet more usable space out of my apartment.
but I think it's just a flawed concept. I love reading, I like gadgets and gizmos, but I'm not remotely interested in ebooks.
Rampant piracy.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I've always thought that if they could get school textbooks realeased on these things at reasonable prices ($20 instead of $90), there would be an instant market that would nearly guarantee success. It amazes me this hasn't been done yet. It's possibly the ideal market for these devices.
Well maybe if they were book shaped, with a cover and pages, and worked like a book? Kind of like a book really.
My Portfolio
To catch on, e-books will need to be neutral as to the medium they are read on, like MP3's. They should be readable on a PC, Mac, Laptop, PDA, Phone, e-book reader, or whatever you have handy. Right now the "official" e-book schemes tie text to hardware in a way that ensures the market stays fragmented. But if you look at the amount of free or paid books available for the PDA / PC, it becomes clear that e-books aren't a failure, e-book hardware is.
The ______ Agenda
TeleRead and ODP and Books of the Future are also good reviews.
I can give a visitor a book and they can read it without having to remember whether they brought their reader with them, and without worry about DRM or compatability (apple e-books vs M$ e-books vs sony e-books anyone?).
I can take a book with me and drop it in a puddle and not worry to much because it will probably dry out and still work, and if not it's not too expensive an accident.
I can stick a bookmark in a book and it is there when I come back to it 3 years later.
If a book drops down the back of the bed, I can read another one, and fish the dropped one out next month when I happen to be fetching something from under the bed.
ISTM, to get close to this I would need a reader which is cheap enough that I can own as many of them as I own teaspoons or pencils, and they all need to share state (for bookmarks, and so losing one isn't painful). So not only do we need display, battery and other technology beyond the state of the art, we need it to sell for pennies.
We haven't yet reached this level of simple omnipresence for things as simple as TV remote controls. Next time you're hunting for your RC, imagine doing this every time you wanted to read something.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
eBooks could really use an improved visual experience. Real paper is just superior to LCD/CRT displays in price, durability, resolution and contrast.
One example of display tech could help eBooks are the new electronic paper coming out of labs the last few years. The two great things about this stuff is it is a reflective display (like real paper) which will show up well outside and it has much higher resolution than LCD/CRT displays (again, like real paper). Another possible answer is the new OLED displays since they have the potential for cheap production and high resolution.
The simple reason was that there simply isn't enough screen real-estate and so I spent the entire time continually scrolling downwards which subtly interrupted the flow of the book.
When I read a book, I want to sink into the story. However continually flipping the page every 50 words means that you can never get that much into the book before you're jolted out of it because you have to hit the "page down" button.
I know there are readers which auto-scroll but that it almost as bad. You're now forced to read in a slightly different way and although I'm sure its possible to train yourself to get used to it - for the time being it feels odd and detracts from the whole point. That is, the story.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
The eBook industry may be stunted for some, but we're doing just fine selling PDF versions of our Pragmatic Bookshelf titles.
/\ndy
*Many* of our customers choose to buy what we call a "combo pack", that gives them both the dead-tree version and a searchable, non-DRM restricted PDF file. While I think the dead-tree form has the best ergonomics, the PDF is really handy for reading on airplanes, etc.
Paper is better in some ways and eBooks are better in others. Use the right tool for the job!
--
I usually buy books because I'm hanging out at the local Barnes and Nobles drinking a cup of Starbucks. I'll flip through a book, maybe it'll be interesting, maybe I'll buy it. If it stinks, I can throw it in the trash, I don't need to carry around hardware or be bothered if my batteries die. I hate reading computer screens, let alone a little eBook reader.. Why bother. This isn't an improvement at all.. What is wrong with a book that this thing is even necessary? Just because you can make an eBook doesn't mean anyone cares..
If you haven't read the Thursday Next books - you're missing a treat. Not just because the author is a genius (Think the love child of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett) but because the book can be UPGRADED and has SPECIAL FEATURES!
How cool is that!
I read loads of content on my (black and white) RIM Blackberry. It's fine for casual reading - but the screen needs to be a bit bigger.
Ebooks need to have all the convenience of "real" books - but address all their failings. Like VHS to DVD.
Real Book - fixed font (hey, you'll be old one day, too!). EBook fonts will go up or down depending on what you want.
Real Book - can't read 'em in the dark. Ebooks, lovely backlighting!
Real Book - can't carry 10 of them on the plane. Ebooks, you can fit all of Shakespeare in less than a MB.
It's not enough to give people the same old content in a fancy wrapper - people need a tangible reason for swapping formats. Especially if you're going to be taking away some of their original benefits (book sharing etc)
T
If a square is really a rhombus, why aren't all triangles purple?
When I can buy a Ebook for a fraction of the price of the hardback or paperback. Until then they can forget me buying any ebooks. They have no paper, no artwork, no shipping, and negligable downloading costs. So why do they think they have to charge the same as a paperback for something I might loose forever in the next computer crash.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
We'll have to run out of trees.
Maybe I'm just a gadget freak but, frankly, I've never understood the problem. I read paper books and a few magazines as well, but don't much care how the words get in front of my eyeballs.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Personally, I own two PDA's, including the new Dell Axim X30 high.
.html, which sucks for some reason. (I can play quake 2, but not read a html page > 500kb?)
I was shocked at the lack of simple software for e-Books. I tried loading a html book into it. IE slows down more than a sunday driver at a crossing.
It was painful to use. A pda is not much smaller than a flimsy paperback. I am talking about travel reading, making the most of those flights, taxis, trains.
We can get content from the web - that is fine. We can read enough news - but some good books wouldn't go amiss.
I downloaded copies of Terry Pratchets Discworld, all of them. I guess this is legitimate since I have all of them in hard/paperback at home.
Some are TXT, they read best. Some are
I think the real problem is, book reader costs. The cost of that little LCD. Lets get the market adoption of those to a critical mass. People who have them now might not appreciate reading a book via it, and see it as a reminder / toy.
Common format - I installed Acrobat reader on my PDA, blam, half the screen lines faded out wierd, froze, adn I had to soft reset. Thanks Adobe. *cough*wankers*cough*
Sorry that was for them handling their PDF encryption the way they did.
So, I would happily pay money for a book. I am writing my own eBook reader for simple txt and html files. I want 'next page' that cleanly replaces the page. I want to move my eyes to the top, like a book, not fix them at one point (scrolling) and jitter as I 'page down'
I think moving your eyes as you read is less stressful.
Also, a simple 'dog ear' function that remembers where you were.
Oh, and when I read a book, and it makes a reference to a clue before, a quick 'find last reference' of a word might be nice.
I think footnotes should be placed inside and then replaced with a *, which you can tap to view. (since they are no longer footnotes, we can call them annotations?)
Of course, when we effectively zero the costs of publishing, what are publishers good for? Of course, they can tie thier writers into thier e-Books if they publish the hardcopies also.
They could get a small fee for supporting thier site and download bandwidth. But as I see it, 95% at least of the price I pay should go to the Author.
Then we can see eBooks at very low prices. And the only ones who will loose out are the publishers. Who cares about them?
Now we need some way of moving music into a computer so we can listen to it on the move... that woudl rule, then we could... no it sounds like a silly idea. You cannot get rid of music publishers.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Usually I don't care about what RMS has to say, but on the subject of e-books he has a few very insightful comments. One of them is, you can put digital rights management in an e-book, but a paper book you can always lend to a friend, no EULAs to break . He does have a short story on how bad it could get, always having to pay for a book to reed it, no libraries or used book stores, so only the rich can learn... Plus you need and e-book reader, I can read my Suse manuals without a computer! Really e-books are a bad idea for the community IMHO.
Just my humble opinion and I have admittedly not read the peice yet, but...
Cost: The reader has to have a reasonable price, it should not cost as much as a PDA, or in fact even a quarter as much as a PDA just to read text for a stright reader. The books themselves should be the cost of a paperback or lower.
Presentation: The testt should be clear, readable, and comfortable to the eye to read. I have seen a few readers, especially when using a PDA where this is not true. Unfortunately its a trade off, in three directions. Size of the reader, size of the font, and over all length of a line of text. Hint: the lines of text and he font should be about he same as in a paperback book. Although for a reasonable cost I'd be more than wiulling to purchase a reader that approximated the page size and font size of a hardcover as thats a much more comfortable reading format for me.
Portability: Two means the 1. ability to easily carry around the reader 2. the ability to move the book between several readers easily...say Laptop to desktop, to dedicated reader, to PDA...
Quotability: The ability to cut and paste passages from the book. This would be great for tech books so you could grab example code and paste it stright into your editor. This would also emcompass printability as well..
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Using "dead-tree" is getting old.
--- Ban humanity.
Your eyes and brain have too much work to do when reading a computer screen trying to smooth everything out.
Until pixel densities approach 300dpi and higher we'll be stuck straining against gaps which aren't perceptibly there but which our eyes are, nonetheless, straining against.
/* TBD */
A world paper shortage.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Indeed a nice, informative article. Just a handful of comments, if I may: .TXT, despite all efforts. From RocketBook to XML-based FictionBook, .PDF attempts to be a book and of course Microsoft, the possible customer is confused, and that doesn't add to the ebooks popularity. Therefore, it is amazing how many books still sirculate around in .DOC format
* the way PDAs are evolving, they are the most likely platform for ebooks evolution. Sure enough, no one wants to carry a full-scale laptop just to read in the underground. But what the author suggests, like an IPOD-like device for books is an overdoze as well. Why would I want to carry my PDA, an IPOD, AND a special device to read text, when there is a device that can allow me to do all of that?
* the biggest mistake made so far by numerous companies trying to promote ebooks is the fact that they are trying to blindly emulate a book. Why have a hard cover, unfoldable double screens and similar nonsense, if not only for nostalgic reasons? Where is *innovation* in that?
* standarts. The ONLY existing standart right now is
* DRM issues. Sure, authors want to be paid. My guess is that the OSS movement applied to old good arts will not work, as artists don't want to create in their spare time =) But none of the existing DRM schemes offers enough flexibility to please both customers and publishers. Time to innovate!
Just my 2 swedish cents
http://www.automatiq.se
1) VERY SMOOTH scrolling with no blurs, no matter how complicated the diagrams.
2) The ability to control the content with just your hands - no keyboard, mouse or touchpad - you should be able to hold it like a book and read it - maybe a tap on the lower right corner to advance to the next page and on the lower left corner to go to the previous page.
3) Eliminate the need to sit facing a vertical screen.
4) Minimize the dialogs. A book doesn't ask you if you want to save the file.
5) Make the text search work through voice recognition.
6) Hardly any boot-up time.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
...include the Ebook in the purchase of the deadtree version. Don't compete co-exist...in time people might start buying the Ebook instead of the dual format if the ebooks price is attractive.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I like RealBooks (you know the kind with PAPER, etc...) because...
*Major Reason: Looking at a monitor screen (any screen, LCD, CRT, whatever) for too long tends to make my eyes red and sore. My eyes dry out easily, and I find that I blink much less when looking at a computer screen, so that is going to always be a problem for me.
* I read VERY fast. (Approx 1,500 WPM). With a book, I can finish a page, switch to the next, turn the page, repeat, while ebooks generally need to be scrolled downwards, (or pageDown) which results in a slight delay while I find my place again.
*Spacial recognition: Partly due to the fast reading, I don't read word-at-a-time, I read paragraphs at a time, and the screens on handheld readers don't show ENOUGH text- I generally finish the entire window in less time than it takes to tell it.
*it's so much easier to just flip to where I was- I tend to remember that the bit I wanted to reread was "about halfway through, on the left hand side..." while ebooks make it hard to do the same... "my slider bar was about 2/3 down" can change depending on the size of the window you're reading it in...
All very personal reasons. I have a few ebooks on my PC, but unless I cannot find the same book in tangible form, I won't sit down and read them.
Ebook column that gets it all wrong
Gizmodo has a new column called "Feature Creep," and they kicked it off with an editorial about the future of ebooks that is striking for its complete disregard for the actual marketplace experiences with ebooks. It's full of hoary chestnuts about ebooks that have been emptily mouthed for 10 years ("Call it digital paper or electronic ink, it's the future of eBooks.") and aside from the occassional iPod comparison, there's hardly a paragraph in there that couldn't have been written in 1997 -- nor one that takes note of any of the events since then (well, to be fair, there's also a lot of puffery stuck in there to promote an ebook company called Vertical that probably didn't exist in 1997, but that's beside the point).
Take DRM. The author asserts on the one hand that DRM can work, and that it won't be so invasive that it turns readers (whom the author insists on calling "consumers," an odious buzzword that invokes Gibson's description in Idoru, "...a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed") off.
This despite the actual marketplace fact that all DRM becomes invasive (ask any copyright policy maker in a country that allows parallel importing how he feels about the "lightweight" region-coding DRM on DVDs that reverses the laws he was elected to enact).
This despite the actual marketplace fact that DRM is generally broken within a few days of engagement with the public, often by teenagers, grad students, or people with ready acccess to sophisticated DRM-cracking tools like Google and the sinister Shift key (for more on DRM, see my DRM talk)
But the author goes further and asserts that without DRM, there will be no market for entertainment product ever again ("If publishers stop wanting DRM, it's the end of popular creative arts. Not as we know them, but period.") despite the fact that the software industry got bigger when it abandoned DRM, and despite the fact that no new medium has ever succeeded by appealing to the virtues of the medium before it (there're very few ideas more goofy than the idea that people will start buying ebooks just as soon as they have fewer features and more restrictions, provided that the ebooks can be played back on special-purpose devices with sharp screens). He cites Sony as proof of this ("Sony may be nuts, but they're not that nuts."), despite the fact that Sony was forced out of the walkman market by its failure to deliver the DRM-free devices that its customers demanded. Yes, Sony is that nuts.
He doesn't even touch on the marketplace experience of every published writer who's tried giving away DRM-free ebooks -- me, Lessig, Jim Munroe, the Baen authors, Orson Scott Card -- universally, the experience is that we sell more books (Lessig's latest just went into its third hardcover printing, for chrissakes). This of course echoes the experiences from elsewhere: the movie studios' box office revenues appear to be increasing as a function of the amount of movies being shared on P2P nets and the only empirical study of music downloading and music sales concluded that the effect was usually negligible, rarely negative, and sometimes positive.
He does, however, take time out to snidely dismiss blanket licensing schemes -- like the ones that enable cable television, radio, photocopying, exam papers, live performance, covers, lending, coursepacks, jukeboxes, rentals, etc etc etc all over the world -- as a kind of pipe dream ("When the visionary of all visionaries develops a model for all-you-can-eat media consumption that provides for the artists to actually eat, perhaps I'll change my mind; until then, we are what we are, and we'll have to play nice within the confines of the present system.") despite the fact that these systems have been employed to universal good effect whenever new technology makes exclusion too costly to work effectively. It's like he's totally missed the fact that billions of dollars go right into the pockets of creators and ri
I think the main issue with eBooks is that you need to read from a screen. Long documents can tire your eyes more easily when reading from an electronic device. I always found myself printing large electronic documents to read them off of actual paper. The white on the paper is much flatter and more dull than a screen. Until a computer can simulate nice paper, I will stick to the normal paperbacks. I also have a habit, which I enjoy, of grabbing the paper of the next page while reading, this isnt really possible with computers, but I could live without that.
It is also rewarding to judge your progress through a normal book by actually looking at where the bookmark is. With eBooks, all you have is a page number. There is just something about eBooks that takes away the comfort of reading a nice little book
I think the best solution is like the diary in Harry Potter 2. The ink that sort of generates itself on a page, that would be nice.
Don't forget how handy it would be to be able to add notes to an e-book, especially if it was being used in the classroom. This would be one great advantage of the e-book... I could highlight text without bleeding through pages, and I could go back and quickly find a note I made about so-and-so's interesting perspective. I always had the problem in classes of having one section I liked and then only remembering a range of about 50 pages to look for it. Report-writing would have been so much faster with e-books!
Live free or die
Let's see, Hardback release costs $17.95. eBook costs $17.95.
Paper back releases costs $7.50 - $8.99, eBook costs $7.50 to $8.99
For my money, i'd like something I can hold thanks. Plus you can't read an eBook until the freaking plane takes off and is in the air or 20 - 30 min before landing.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Let 'em stay on paper. A book printed on dead trees can be re-sold, it can be put on a shelf and read again later, it can be traded in a book club... the possibilities are endless.
Move books to digital and you'll have the "Intellectual Property" police hounding everyone. They'll want you to pay to read a book once, and you'll forfeit all other rights. Who wants DRM infecting literature?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
eBooks won't be practical until they appropriately exploit their use of the new technology. Simply as a cheaper means to publish material isn't enough.
First there is the issue of practicality of the readers. If you don't have impressive battery life, or the reader is more bulky than a real book, or the display isn't as clear, there's no point.
Then there is the value of the new medium to the consumer. The value to the publisher is obvious, but consumers don't care about that, especially since the greedy publishers don't intend to pass their production savings onto the consumer in the form of dramatically cheaper product costs. So if you want to come close to justifying the value of eBooks, they have to include special features that fully-exploit the platform they're using. One good example of this is integrated audio/video, hyperlinks, footnotes, searching and indices. Another example of proper exploitation would be interactive quizzes where readers can answer questions at ends of chapters and be judged on their comprehension of the material and have the eBook point them to relevant sections summarizing topics they may need to refresh.
I think the DRM issue is secondary to practical applications. Right now, there's no inherent value in eBooks so DRM is irrelevent. There are tons of public domain works that are available in eBook form these days that haven't done anything to spur the industry so I don't believe DRM is any sort of setback at this point.
I'd have to say that the reason why I prefer reading normal paper books is that I can see better with them. They don't require recharging, they can be lost in the train/bus/metro without me worried about losing all my personal info or expensive device(Palm).
Now if the screens of portable devices approached the readability that a normal printed book had I'd be reading way more on them. But as it stands now I can't read an ebook for hours but I can read through hundreds of pages on a printed book without a problem.
For the last year and half I have read about 20 ebooks on my Dell Axim X5. I have read one paperback and one hardcover besides the ebooks. I prefer the ebooks.
The myth that you can't curl up with a good ebook is totally false. I turn the lights off and read in the dark with the brightness on the next to lowest setting. One flick of the finger and i'm onto the next page. I don't have an overhead light glaring down on me like an FBI meeting.
The downside is I can't read in sunlight since the screen gets washed out. Hopefully OLED screens will change that. I can't read a regualr book in sunlight either due to the glare.
I find regular books require two hands to keep from closing on me. Hardcovers are totally uncomfortable to hold. The Axim I can just find a comfortable spot to hold it and the only movement is one small flick of my finger.
Jeff
Publishers will resist, but eventually ebooks will take over.
Things like encyclopedias are already doomed. There is simply no way for paper reference material to keep up. The advantages of having digital medium in terms of convience, availablility (never have a book go out of print), and cost make ebooks an inevitability. It is just a question of critical mass for consumer acceptance.
The problem is that ebooks will eventually drive publishers out of business. At first, publishers will have to worry about ebooks promoting piracy, and eliminating premiums. Piracy is pretty easy. Selling music as CD's instead of records eventually made it easier for people to pirate the music. Books are pirated now, but it is difficult to scan in pages. DRM is going to have to be very good before publishers trust this medium.
Also, ebooks eliminate some ways for publishers to make extra profits. They will no longer be able to charge for an expensive hard cover binding (which is really not that expensive for them). Perhaps ebooks get around this by having special editions with extra content, such as the author reading a chapter, notes, commentary, etc, just like DVD's.
Looking into the future, there is a question of whether we need book publishers at all. Perhaps we will still need book promoters, and book editors, but publishing will become obsolete. A huge fear of book publishers has got to be having self publishers on a level playing field with them. Look for publishers to use DRM and other tricks to keep the small guy out.
Ebooks will eventually take over. And it will be a struggle on many fronts.
The global average temperature will have to rise to 451 degrees Fahrenheit.
I have tried many eBook readers and software tools and found all of them lacking something. So I wrote my own for my P800 and P900 phones. My partner never read much to begin with but she now reads regularly on her phone as she always has it with her. I tried to solve some of the complaints that have been made here. Such as proper chapter support and a more tactile interface. Take a look at http://www.symbianbookworm.com/
I agree with you about on demand speed paperback publication - I recently ordered a rather obscure US published book on Amazon.co.uk, and was surprised to discover the front cover claimed it was printed in the US, and yet the inside leaf claimed to be printed in the UK.
That's the way on demand paperbacks should work - I shouldn't even know it's been printed on-demand. Certainly, in this particular book I ordered the quality was what I'd expect from a standard print run paperback.
That said, I do know of a friend who worked as a published for Hodder (UK based book publisher), who recently left to take up a degree in electronic publishing - those in the industry seem to think the eBook form has some future, although where and how I don't know...
There is only one thing that is holding back ebook from being adopted, and that is the fact that they aren't being introduced as an incentive. An ebook is an afterthought for most people, an unacceptable alternative to a real book.
If publishers started to give out a CD that had their book on it (the publishing proofs would be best) along a purchased book (along with a nominal fee of a couple dollars tacked on to the price of the book or even free) people would equate an ebook with a purchase and with a real product equal to a book. That way they'd have both a hard copy and a copy that was transferrable to a harddrive or a portable device.
I haven't seen this happen (excepting technical manuals) in the publishing business. That would really give me (and I think many others) an incentive to try out ebooks and get hooked on them. Then they can start selling them seperately if they see any profit in them.
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
It's been a serious issue that everytime I move I seem to be moving STACKS of magazines for no particular reason! The last time I moved I came across magazines that got moved from the PRIOR MOVE!
It would be nice if all those National Geo's would vaporize after a set period. My back would certainly feel much better!
The author pimps the DRM features of ebooks to the writing crowd, but has neither idea nor interest in what would make ebooks popular with readers. And if the author's opinions are typical of the publishing world, ebooks will remain dead.
Never, does he honestly examine why I, as a reader, would want to pay out a similar amount of money to purchase an ebook as I would a paper book, when the ebook comes with so many restrictions.
If they want ebooks to become popular, they first have to aim these books at the geek crowd, and they have no chance of this while the geek crowd is aware of ebook's limitations.
The little roller blind PDAs from the movie Red Planet would do it for me.
Or maybe a book on tape.
The thing I like most about this job is all the rocket scientists who bang their mice on their desks shouting 'It Broke!
Main reason: cost. Nobody's going to spend $300+ on a reader
Second reason: cost. In most cases, ebooks cost the same as a printed book. And they're all in proprietary formats, so it's not always clear if they'll be compatible with newer ebook readers or readers from a different company.
Third reason: Paper still beats out all current ebook readers' screens. Sony's new e-paper based one is a good start, but it's still relatively low DPI and doesn't respond to page turns very quickly.
I find that like downloading music, it is handy to hit the Palm site and pull the book I want to read. Usually this happens when I read the paper version of a series and want the other two novels without having to run to the bookstore. Instant gratification. One the other hand, my paper books never tell me, "Battery is low! Synch your device."...
-- To airer is humen
Why should I pay the same price for a book that has inferior readability, will self-destruct, and doesn't have distribution/printing costs, which I know full well to be 50% of the cost of regular book?
I have great hope for technical eBooks that I can access from a PDA--I have more than a few 750 page technical manuals that I sure wish I could search for keywords + carry 3 at a time to the crapper. But since there is no cost of printing and no cost of shipping, why in the hell are they as expensive?
--
$tar -xvf
I probably won't switch to Ebooks until a waterproof reader is developed. I like to read in the bathtub and I frequently fall asleep while doing so (which is why I only buy paperbacks, since a $6.99 loss is easier to take than a $24.99 loss).
Plus, I like to read while my toddler son plays in the bathtub or in the sprinklers in the backyard. A few drops of water or a wet hand on a paperback book don't send me into a panic, but a wet hand slapping down on my reader screen would probably flip me out.
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
Reading long text from a compuer screen is difficult for me because of the light. I'm getting it projected directly at me, instead of more softly difused off a page of paper. Really, I think that's all there is too it. I read a fair chunk, and I like ebooks (I normally am using pdf) for certain things (references in gaming books is a good one), but for long text reading (stories, etc), it's just not suitable.
It's ironic too, because I spend all day in front of a computer, but I hate even reading documentation online. If it cracks past a page or two of 12 point, I'll kill a tree for it.
has anyone done a single study on this?
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
DRM is OK; but I *will* have the ability to move the book from reader to reader as technology changes WITHOUT interaction with the vendor or publisher, just as I can move a dead tree book from shelf to shelf.
I want the ability to permanently highlight passages and annotate pages, just as I can with paper -- and these annotations must move with the ebook. I also want to be able to set multiple book marks and go to them easily.
And ebook pagination must match hardcopy -- if I go to page 1, I want page 1 -- not page i. This is currently broken with virtually every reference book I've seen converted to pdf.
And the reader needs to be as legible as dead tree, with a total size and weight rougly equivalent to a paperback book.
and it should not suck!!!
I know that there're definitely flaws inherent in the Palm OS, and the thought of spending $299-399 to read eBooks "decently" may be a bit overboard, but for anyone that's shopping for a PalmOS device anyhow, and wants to consider eBooks, definitely check out a Zodiac. In addition to being a competent gaming machine (at least in hardware, software is desperately needed) it makes a damn good Palm device. The 8M ATI video chip in it does anti-aliasing quite well and makes text quite readable when you use a reader like the commercial app RepliGo. I've been reading some eBooks I've had kicking around for a while on it, and find that it's not nearly as good as a real book, but the eyestrain factor is pretty much nil with the smallest font and landscape mode. The trigger switches on the top of the unit work great for paging, and the analog stick scrolls quite smoothly.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
While it would be really nice to have an e-book reader with a really good display, great battery life, and the rest, I couldn't really see spending money on one unless it had a couple of critical features (one technical, one partly technical and partly social).
The first one is the ability to load any content that I already have in electronic form. Most particularly, I'd use this for reading Gutenberg public domain e-texts, and for storing and reading webpages offline (e.g., the Python Library Reference). And to do this, I'd need either for the reader to handle several common formats (text, html, and perhaps PDF), or a Free utility to convert those formats into the reader's native format.
The second is the ability to pay for all-you-can-read access to the catalogs of various publishers, in an open and non-discriminatory fashion. That is, I don't want to be stuck only being able to buy new (copyrighted) books only through the manufacturers of the e-book, and only from the publishers they happen to have a deal with. And I don't want to pay full hardback price for single books. I want to be able to go directly to the publisher (or to the author for self-published books), and pay a yearly fee for access to everything in their catalog, or possibly a very low price for a single book ($50 a year, say, or $5 for one book; right now one hardback costs on average $25, and that's about all any one publisher will see from me in a given year). This will obviously require an open standard for e-book publishing. There seems to be work towards such a thing already in progress.
As for DRM, I'm not sure what I'd accept; certainly not much. Ideally there would be no reading or copying restrictions, but rather some sort of watermarking that would make it easy to track down redistributors, but I'm not sure how feasible that would be. I think with a subscription-based model, the convenience of having full access to a catalog would be enough to make illegal copying not worth the trouble. Publishers might lose a few sales of popular books to copying, but they'd make up for it with a guaranteed revenue stream.
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow
I think we are all pretty much in agreement here... the principle limitation is the hardware.
My wants:
It must be as good as a "real" book:
Bookmarks. The nice thing about a "real" book is that you can bookmark 3 or 4 pages with various fingers and flick between them. Obviously bookmarking is easy in an electronic format, but the interface must be quick, intuitive and conviente.
It must be readable. High resolution, high contrast, varible brightness. It must be readable in daylight and not cause eyestrain. I'd say a minimum size would be A 10" diagonal, which could be used portrait (displaying one page) or landscape (2 pages).
Weight. It must be light enough to hold over ones head for an extended period of time. Think 300gm, maximum.
Durability. You drop a book from 2 meters, you still have a book. You drop an electronic device from 2 meters, you have an expensive repair bill.
But the "book killer" will be those features that a "real" book doesn't have:
a) See weight. Anybody who has tried to read an advanced University text in bed knows what I'm talking about.
b) Able to notate/highlight passages. The advantage over a real book is that you can turn the notes on or off, thus allowing other people to read your book without the distraction of your notes. In general, once you've highlighted a "real" book passage, its hightlighted for ever. So we a talking about something with a stylus here.
c) Readable in the dark. Often my fiancee or myself feels like reading in bed while the other wants to sleep. Even a low reading light can be distracting to the other person.
d) Readable in the bath. Yep. It must survive splashes, and maybe the odd immersion. At the moment I read Newspapers and trashy novels in the bath because I don't care if I destroy them. However, the ability to read something a bit more valued would be nice.
e) PDF compatible. It must be able to read what is effectively the standard for online books. Most of what I read isn't novels, but news papers and technical books.
I'd love to an nice ebook reader that fills the above requirements, and would be willing to pay for it. Think on the order of $300 - $400.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
Each day I have a fairly tedious journey to work on the Chicago El. The trip is made considerably more pleasant by being able to read eBooks on an old Handspring Visor. I prefer reading on paper (preferably hardback) rather than pokey old LCD, but the utility of the Visor wins over my preference for dead trees. The Visor holds about 10 books in memory, so I never have to worry about finishing a book mid-journey. Furthermore the software opens to the page I was last on when I switch on the PDA - I never lose track of where I am in the book. When the train is crowded I can easy read whilst straphanging, not so easy with a book.
Same deal when on holiday - I can relax on the beach, or half way up a mountain, or trapped in an airport with an eBook because I always have the PDA with me.
However, I have yet to pay for an eBook. I consider the price charged, and the DRM installed to be outrageous. Choosing instead to read authors who publish eBooks for free (Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, etc) or trawling through Project Gutenberg.
What I would want is for each dead tree book that I buy to come with a free eBook. That way I can read the book comfortably at home, but use the eBook when it is more convenient. I don't want DRM - I want text that I can port onto any electronic device I want.
I wouldn't think it would make much sense to just replace some books. If you still have to buy bookcases anyway, what's the point?
I want comparable color and spatial resolution and display size to print, and a display large enough that if I'm reading about the pre-Raphaelites, I don't have to scroll around to see more than the Lady of Shalott's nose or see a postage-stamp size image. (Even if I'm reading about a programming language, I want to be able to see a whole function at once.)
As others have mentioned, I want to be able to annotate my books. I want to be able to lend ebooks just as I can lend dead tree books. And there'd better not be an expiration date on ebooks if they want my money.
I can flip back and forth between pages in a dead tree book. I can find a place to first order approximation by knowing about how far into the book I should open it, and if it's a place I refer to a lot, it will fall open to it.
I guess I can do without being able to press flowers in an ebook, but there need to be replacements for the other book functions.
Getting people to buy e-book readers when there are only a limited number of titles seems to be one of the most frequently memtioned stumbling blocks. From a corporate perspective, I think e-TEXTBOOKS might be the best way to create this market.
Students:
1) are usually more willing to try new technology,
2) have better eyes and are less likely to complain while current graphics capabilities improve (how many times did your Mom insist you needed more light to read by when you were perfectly comfortable),
3) are in a sufficiently controlled environment that the DRM issues could be addressed, and
4) frequently need texts which are in the public domain (at least English and History students.)
Once the paradigm becomes familiar to a significant market segment, it will naturally expand to other areas of the literary economy.
the ability to trade a book with someone else, loan a book to someone else, and so on. These are functions which are available with physical books. I realize publishers are probably salivating at the prospect of making money by losing some (or all) of the features above [and forcing people to repurchase every time], but serious are not going to go for the scheme.
The same could have sunk the music market but once the price was lowered to what the level will bear on all sides, consumers started becoming much more honest instead of learning how to and living on P2P software.
The same roller coaster behavior will likely be observed in the next types of media available to consumers; movies & books. Movies will be seen a cash cow, PROTECT IT AT ALL COSTS!! so the give-and-take will occur with the wildest gyrations htting the sellers the most.
In summary, eBooks will have to address all of the same "issues" dealt with in MP3 (or sound in general) + the other issues such as loaning or swapping as well as some of the other unforeseen issues or eBooks will die [again] until someone eventually gets it right.
I will buy an ebook with a good screen like the Sony product ONLY when I can easily download articles linked from www.aldaily.com for later reading. Rocket eBook had this capability initially but later versions did not. Currently I compulsively "print" newspaper and technical articles to PDF files but they never get read because reading them on a laptop screen is too inconvenient. I guess those thousands of PDF files somehow form a sort of "library" of me for use at some later point in life when the appropriate product comes onto the market.
I know about DRM and can't understand why the vendors are letting it cripple their products time after time.
I don't care about buying downloads to fill my ebook. I want the ability to fill it with my OWN stuff, not some stupid Tom Clancy novel from Amazon.
According to the article:
Nobody is going to get really hot for eBooks until the display technology supports full color, even if they don't need color for what they'll publish and read.
This seems false. High contrast, high resolution, ease of use, affordability -- these are the sorts of attributes of books that are important. I hardly ever read a book that's printed in color. Not that I mind color, but it's just not all that important. A good layout artist can do wonders in black & white. This is just as true with an ebook as a traditional one.
You'd probably want to have more than one eBook, with various screen sizes (small for mobile use, larger for at home) and an easy way to share content between them.
Personally, I prefer paper to electronics when it comes to reading books. Why? Well, for starters, books don't require batteries. That's not to say that eBooks aren't useful. I think that eBooks are ideal for periodical materials, like newspapers and magazine, simply for the sake of conversing paper. I doubt I'll want to keep every newspaper or magazine article just in case I want to read or refer to it later, but books I want to keep just for that very reason; they become reference material and mementos of what I read and who I am. Likewise, I often learn a lot about someone by scanning the books on his/her bookshelf. Not an easy thing to do with eBooks.
It's all fun and games until someone loses the key to the handcuffs.
If they actually costed less then a paperback then i would purchase them more often. But as is id rather spend about $1-2 more for something i can take with me easily then something i need to store in something electronic.
Books just take more of a beating then any electronics ever will
If Microsoft offered an eBook (undoubtedly in a proprietary format) for a really low price (since they could afford to take a short-term hit on revenue in order to create and flood a ready market), could they get eBooks in everybody's hands?
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
For a long time I thought that e-books would never become viable. They seemed more like a curiosity. However in my last move i realized I would love to have all my books in electronic form.
In the past 4 years I moved from San Juan PR to Haverford PA, Rome Italy, Haverford PA, San Diego CA, Philadelphia PA, Berkeley CA, San Juan PR, Ann Arbor MI. Those are just moves not counting random one to two month long trips. My moving around is not going to stop for a while if ever.
My books usually take like 15 boxes to be packed.
If I could have all my books on the palm of my hand on a device that I can read as well as a book I would -now- take the device in a hearbeat -as long as there was some way of having a back up for all the books-.
Pros:
- Replace the need for shelf storage space with the need for hard drive space (Big plus for me! Most of my shelves have books behind books...).
- Plenty of classic literature available for free (e.g., I don't need Disney's version of Snow White for reading to my son when I can have Grimm's version)
- Easy to read in low light situations (e.g., in bed while my wife is asleep)
- Easy to carry around, I don't need to think which book to take for a trip. I just take them all.
Cons:- Expensive, getting a TPC only for books may not be very reasonable. A side effect of it being expensive is that theft is a concern, e.g., I would take a book to read at a public swimming pool and leave it on the chair while swimming, I just can't think about leaving my TPC the same way.
- Contrast is not as good (in bright sunlight it becomes a problem)
I can imagine it being very useful for students. The ability to easily carry a lot of books in easily searchable formats would have been very beneficial for me when I was studying. Also, updating books would be a breeze and the low self-publishing costs for ebooks could be quite helpful for releasing some of the stranglehold from academic publishers.Why the hell isn't this thread about THAT article?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
From what I've seen with e-books, it seems like the publishers and authors (like Stephen King) are trying to lead the way with fiction. IMO, this is probably the toughest segment of the market to crack. People who are avid fiction readers like the smell of a new book, the tactile feel of the rough paper, the sense of accomplishment as they flip page after page after page. There's a whole sensory experience that e-books will never fill for them.
No, the best way for e-books to grow in popularity is to emphasize reference works. O'Reilly is good about offering electronic versions of their books, but I don't see a lot of other publishers following suit. But the ability to do a boolean search on a tech book is a staggeringly great feature. The two problems with doing this for computer books is that 1) you are likely already sitting at your computer while looking up PHP or Python info, so you won't be using a handheld reader, and 2) the internet provides a tremendous source of reference material so you are just as likely to use your favorite website as a tech manual.
However, if e-book manufacturers and publishers could attack niche markets (auto mechanics, aircraft mechanics), they could build their popularity slowly.
There are any number of ways to protect against widespread piracy without screwing the user and crippling the interface and the ruining the reading experience.
One variation on this is Amazon's "Search Inside" function for books which allows full-text searching and the viewing of a limited number of pages for free.
This concept could be expanded to allow the purchaser to read everything and to print a limited number of complete hard copies and to cut and paste a reasonable percentage --say 5% of the entire book -- to be e-mailed, saved to a file etc.
Sure, this can be abused and it WILL be abused, but there are no 100% solutions and a compromise between reasonable DRM and the reader's rights and experience would more than please me and many other authors.
In fact, universal formats with flexible DRM rules have been created. In a previous life as CTO and founder of an Internet micropayments company, Pocketpass (I am no longer associated with that company), I invented just such a system called Tibanna
Tibanna integrated the MediaForgerun-time environment with the Pocketpass payment system.
Tibanna was free software that any individual could download and use. It took the content, the "digital wrapper" and the Pocketpass payment system and combined them into a single file that could be copied, shared and set free on the Internet without all the hassles still associated with premium content.
Tibanna even had a built in affiliate system that allowed fans of the content (book, music, any other digital deliverable) to "sign" the file, distribute it to a million of their closest friends then get a small percentage of the sale price -- set by the content creator -- if anybody bought it.
With Tibanna, the file became the store and I designed it to fit my needs as an author and creator with my needs as a reader and digital content consumer.
My intent was also to put control over the process in the hands of the individual musician, writer, digital creator and free it from the clutches of technological complication and corporate greediness that controls the sale and distribution of digital content. Tibanna would work just fine for corporate and mass wrapping of content, but I believe the independent creator deserves something to level the playing field.
Thanks to a group of untrustworthy investors, Pocketpass underwenta questionable reverse merger with a public shell, changed its name and -- as far as I can determine -- mucked everything up in the process.
I still believe in Tibanna and have just started a tribute site to keep the idea alive because it represents the middle ground that allows a creator to make money from their work without screwing the user in the process.
I have also started the Tibanna Blog to talk about the company, the product and how good ideas can go down the tubes when money guys with no vision take control.
I want a reader that folds open like a traditional book, showing me left and right pages. I read the left page then the right page, like a traditional book. When I get to the end of the right page, I somehow get it to "turn the page" (via a button on the outside or whatever) so that the text disappears and reappears while my eyes "reset" themselves to the top-left of the left page.
The screens (left and right) on this thing should take up pretty much the whole of each side, with as little bezel as possible. They should have a resolution of 300 pixels per inch or greater, be clearly readable from any angle without any reflections or the like. Crucially, I shouldn't have to care about getting fingerprints all over them, so I can hold the whole thing like a normal book (but thinner), nor should I be able to scratch them or worry about inflicting damage in everyday use.
Any "operating system" should be dead simple to use, like selecting tracks on the best MP3 player you can think of. I want an universal external interface that allows me to walk into any bookshop and download any books I want, as well as interfacing to my PC at home.
Give me all that and I might be interested. For now, I'm sticking with paper.
"This is a pipe dream."
No, its not. I can "own" a CD. I can "own" a book. We can argue that I don't really own it. But for all practical purposes, when I buy a CD, I own it.
And short of making copies and selling those copies, I can do what I want without asking "permission".
Lets list the virtues of each medium:
PAPERBACK BOOK
* Is cheap, convenient, and will last a lifetime
* Is not tied to any single technology
* Is usable anywhere without any technology
* Is small
* Easy to read
* I can loan it to a friend. He can keep it and loan it to his friends. He can give it back to me years later. It still works.
* They can be borrowed for free from the library
* a vibrant used market exists
EBOOK
* Is small
* I can take a lot with me
* Is really new technology
That's not a very good reason to get an ebook. I give up all my rights, and in return, I get nothing, except I can read it on my PDA. No, scratch that, because of DRM, I have to use a special reader. God help me if the batteries run out.
So my prediction? ebooks will never catch on unless they create a compelling advantage for ebooks. But publishers seem to believe that people will steal it all, so they're trying to make us pay more for less.
I guess they're just PISSED OFF about libraries.
IMHO, eBooks will only take off when more people who think that eBooks are how books have always been published exist than people who grew up reading hard copy. In case you couldn't guess from my name, I don't prefer to use technology to replace every aspect of my life. I can read a book anytime without waiting for a computer to boot up, while the airplane is sitting for hours on the tarmac, when the batteries are dead in my laptop, or whenever.
There is just no substitute for holding a hardbound book. Why? Because that is how I have been reading for the last 30+ years. It is unlikely that a phone/mp3 player/buffer/toaster/eBook reader will ever be found in my possession. I really think that if people continue to read books (unlikely at this rate) it will not be until eBooks are ubiquitous (like the Internet and 911 that have 'always existed' for the 20's and under crowd) that they are commonly used.
Now, if you will excuse me, I have to get back to my book...
I'd love to be able to rent eBooks.
- The library would be able to stock lots more books, not being limited to what they can cram in the physical space they have. No more need for an interlibrary lending system (with its associated fees, delays etc.). Finally, a library that can cater to everyone's tastes.
- eBook content should be cheaper to buy (since you don't need to print it), and won't need to be replaced every few years due to wear, lowering the cost of running the library.
- The library could become internet-accessible, so you're not limited to opening hours anymore, and you won't have to spend time driving to the library building.
- DRM would be acceptable in this case. I can currently only use the books I get for four weeks anyway, so having a time limit on the eBook would be no worse than it is now.
I think audiobooks are going to go mainstream before ebooks. They already have a better market share, with large sections in bookstores.
Sure they're not the same medium, but it's the story that counts, right?
They're also convenient to have in places/activities where reading a book is not possible...
Next time I take a long flight, I'm loading up on audiobooks, so I can put on my earphones, close my eyes and ignore the rest of the plane cabin.
I was gonna post up Cory's response as soon as I saw this on Slashdot, but glad somebody beat me to it. I love Gizmodo, but when it comes to knowing about how eBooks will or won't work, I'll take the word of the guy who's been very succesful releasing at least 3 of his books in eBook form, rather than the random technology blogger. I've met Cory, and the man knows what he's about, so when he talks about this stuff, I'm much more willing to give his words greater weight in this debate. It should be required reading for anyone who reads the original article.
"Two things are infinite: the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the first one." - Albert Einstein
We are /. We know that for a tech to achieve mass commercial success you need one thing: pornography. Why is this tech any different?
One area of ebook/epub that is doing OK is "Erotic Romantic Fiction" among women. (Think romance novels with lots of sex.) http://loose-id.com/ http://ellorascave.com/
They need dimmer displays....
now hear me out on this one.
LCD screens (and computer displays in general) put out a LOT of light. Looking at a page of white text is like looking directly into a 40 watt light bulb. I personally have a hard time with this, after an hour or so of editing text my eyes actually hurt. Switching to white/light text on a black/dark background helps. But until I can have an eBook without eye strain.... i'll keep my frayed paperbacks thankyouverymuch
No really. You say you prefer it and then sit around and talk about how its use is limited by things like "too much light".
"Oh professor, I would have read the book, but there was too much light and i couldn't see the screen. Aren't ebooks k00l?!"
"I find regular books require two hands to keep from closing on me."
I'll bet you require two hands to find your ass, too. Life must be a bitch for you.
- When the display resolution is as good as paper.
- When the contrast of a display in all lighted conditions is as good as paper (current displays are better in total darkness).
- When battery life is not an issue at all - 24 or more hours on a charge, and less than 30 minutes to recharge.
- When you don't have to worry about breaking an eBook by dropping it or sitting on it.
- When replacement cost isn't an issue for your eBook reader.
- When using an eBook is as easy as grabbing a dead tree book off the bookshelf.
- When an eBook can be folded up or rolled up and stuffed in a pocket - like a paperback or magazine.
- When the pricing of eBook content reflects the significantly lower production and distribution costs involved.
And to sum it up with a simple, one-sentence rule:
eBooks will dominate the market as soon as a typical user doesn't hesitate to swat a fly with the eBook instead of the paper version.
That will indicate that eBook readers have finally met most of (if not all of) the criteria I set above.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
One things I haven't seen mentioned much in the discussions is the different types of book out there and how we use them.
Paperback novels - cheap, small, compact, easy to read in the bath, not too much of a loss if they get creased- stick it in your pocket, lend it to a friend, etc,. Not amny people read more than one or two novels at a time.
Large reference books - pain to cvarry around - never know which volume you'll need, used as a reference not as entertainment, etc. may need a wide raneg fo reference books.
The latter is where I see ebooks being a real useful tool, not for reading, but for lugging arund large amopunts of information in a small space.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
They want all the rights, and essentially want to charge the customers more.
False. Even today, e-books are almost always cheaper than paper ones. Also more convenient and more space-saving. That's the trade-off you make in exchange for first-sale rights.
Then people like you sit around and say "I wonder why ebooks aren't taking off. I know! The DRM isn't good enough!".
Read my other posts. I never said e-books weren't taking off because of DRM, I said they weren't taking off because they're not as convenient to read as paper books. Fair and generous DRM, in the style of iTunes' FairPlay, is merely a tool we need to get publishers involved.
Lets get one thing straight. If the whole "Pay-per-song" thing had never taken off, the portable MP3 player would still be a niche market. The whole reason the iPod became such a huge success was that the distribution model made it easy to (legally) get the content without all that technical CD-Ripping voodoo.
.TXT is as boring as a 64kbps MP3 and noone is going to pay $24.95 for it. Maybe a "Dollar Per Chapter" or "per 50 pages" model with illustrated-PDF style downloads. Don't like the book? Don't download the rest! Want to share a chapter of a book you're still reading with a friend? Transfer your ownership of that chapter to someone else, with a negligable (.15) fee for the CPU cycles.
What we need is a way to purchase, download, and synch up Books as easy as it is songs. While there will be a hundred different opinions on how this could be done, the bottom line is that a flat
The bottom line is, the most amazing ebook reader in the world won't sell ebooks. There has to be an easy, cool -- dare I say, "Sexy" -- way of getting the content to the customer, at a reasonable price.
The technology just isn't there to produce something even remotely similar to text printed on paper. Maybe in another 10 years but until then why bother being an early adopter when you have to deal with their drm bullshit. With overall cost of printing on an inkjet coming down to a fraction of a penny per page I print everything myself that would take me several hours to read. Much easier on the eyes and when I'm done I just throw them in the recycling bin.
I've been read ebooks for a long time. Heck, in the last year, only one or two of the sci-fi books I've read have been on paper. I own a lot of the ones I've read in ebook format in paper as well, but prefer having them electronically by far.
.LIT file that I can't read on Palm OS- or have a PDB or LIT file I can't read on WinCE (no MS Reader support, ha!) or Linux, there are converter tools. I don't feel bad using them, as I paid for the book and just want to read it.
"you can't grep a dead tree."
However, the industry is lagging behind something fierce. I can't get my text books in any electronic format, only fiction books. A damn shame. I take all of my lecture notes on my PDA already, and having the ability to search them makes the notes actually useful to me. It'd be similar with a textbook- the amount it helps me in my studies would double.
Mind you, reading ebooks on a computer screen- even a notebook- is something I don't do. I read them all on my PDA. Most of the ebooks I read are on my the 320x480 screen'd NX70V. For when I have a
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
To ask what it would take for the widespead adoption of ebooks is almost analagous to asking what it would take for the widespread adoption of digital art over the traditional mediums.
Traditional mediums have a feel of "permanence" to them, while digital media has a much more "transient" and temporary feel.
You might find wider acceptance to ebooks with the use of electronic paper, fooling out minds into thinking that we're reading actual permanent type, but that, IMHO is as close as we will get.
One month's cost: $15 for six books.
Individual book prices: $4.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I use my Palm Tungsten T3 as an ebook reader, and I love it. Got some extra fonts to use on its 320x480 screen, and by the use of some very readable, but small, fonts I can get 55 characters per line and 40 lines per screen. Check it out at your local bookstore: That's identical to a typical paperback book. That's right, I get one page per screen...just like a book. Unlike a paper book, I carry around with me dozens of the greatest books in history. I'm reading Shakespeare, Wodehouse, Dickens, Trollope, Tolstoy, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Chekov (insert your favorite Trek joke here), Cervantes, and lots of Sherlock Holmes. Don't like my taste in books? Get yer own. But that's my list and I'm stickin' to it. And there's no way I could carry all those books around with me if they were not in electronic form. But because I have all those books, I can read whatever I'm in the mood for whenever the reading mood hits. Commuting to work, waiting for a movie to start, lounging in bed, whatever. It's there all the time.
I use iSilo to read the books, and I use Many Books to download free (yes, free) books from the Project Gutenberg collection in whatever format you want. I use the iSilo version, but they have plenty of other including plain text or HTML.
What about current books? I get some of those too, but mostly I'm enjoying catching up on the classics of literature. Something that ebooks makes so easy that it impelled me to catch up. As ebook readers improve (and I love the T3 already), this dynamic will only get better. Kids today will grow up thinking of text as something that is supposed to be electronic. Regular books will be around forever, but they will get marginalized as the younger generation embraces the new. As for me, I love ebooks and will try to read in that format as much as I can.
But in that case, the price has to be significantly less.
If a paperback book costs $6, the ebook should probably be $1.50. If a CD costs $12 (a typical price in the US), then an electronic version should be about $2.
But guess what? They cost roughly the same as their physical counterpart, and I give up all my rights. Its simply a way to make me pay more for what I have today.
People like you like it because its new and gadgety. The rest of the world is yawning.
all i need now are the books. right now i'm forced to read sci-fi stuff or books, illegaly scanned and OCR-ed. fortunately, a lot of german stuff get's scanned this way, but the choice of books i like is still very limited.. p_
Charles Stross has recently said the same, but much better and conciser. The basic point: unless DRM goes completely away, eBooks will fail. eBooks without DRM (like Baen offers) increase book sales.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi
The only way eBooks will take off for me is if they come with actual paper media. I would strongly prefer paper media for reading but would love to have the eBook format to search for terms/concepts that I need to reference at a later time. I've been downloading PDFs of scientific papers for years but I find them to be an absolute pain in the ass for reading on the screen. So I end up printing them off, which is also a pain in the ass because I use 20 pages even with duplexing. There's no perfect answer, but I think the marriage of paper and eBook would be closer than what we have now.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
For me, it's not going to take anything; I'm already there. I read pretty much the entire time I'm awake. I'm a computer programmer, so honing my skills and keeping up with the latest trends requires constant technical reading. I subscribe to about a dozen magazines; some work some fun. I also read a lot of fiction. Of course, there's also constant web reading, like /. and TSS. I didn't really realize how much I read until I had Lasik surgery a few years ago and, for the first time in my life, couldn't read for a couple of days.
In preparation for JavaOne, in June of 2003, I loaded Microsoft Reader on my T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition and My Compaq T1000 Tablet PC. I also loaded Dan Brown's "DiVinci Code", Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom", and Isaac Asimov's "Robot City 3" onto both PC's. I found reading on these two devices amazingly convenient. I always have the Pocket PC with me, as it's also my cell phone, so I could easily read while on lines, during the boring parts of keynotes, etc. When I had my T1000 with me, I'd read from it, taking advantage of the larger form factor. The only problem was keeping my place in the book synchronized between the two, which basically came down to paying more attention to chapter numbers than I usually do.
Since then, I've read fiction almost exclusively on these two devices, without really thinking about it. However, last weekend my wife and I took a quickly arranged trip to Tampa (we live in Columbus) and I happened to be caught up on everything loaded on my "phone". I bought the new Sue Grafton book, in hardback, to read on the plane. What a pain in the ass. The book is heavy, awkward, too big to share the seatback tray with even a diet Coke & bag o' peanuts, and generally not there when I wanted it.
Sure, there are problems: DRM, multiple formats, constant nagging re-registration, and insufferable ideas about where to store the files, and poor title selection to name a few; but all-in-all, I still much prefer eBooks to paper.
It's pretty simple why I don't like ebooks. If I pick a 100 year old book off the shelf, it has a great musty smell. If I ready that text in ebook format on my computer, you just don't get the same effect...
... if that's your best, your best won't do... - Twisted Sister
Did you ever lose a book?
(Reply) Yeah, bummer.
Did you ever lose a (insert favorite processor-driven digital storage/read/write/display device)?
'Nuff said?
That Sony device looks real nice. And considering it runs "Sony Linux", I'll bet it could be hacked into a real useful e-book reader.
By "useful", I mean able to display raw text, HTML and PDF at least.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
FREE DOWNLOADS AND COMPETITION: Okay, the InstaWife's book was selling on Amazon for $100 used, which led her to make it available for free download on her website. The used price is now $95.24, after being available for download for over a month, even though there's a comment on the Amazon page telling people where they can get it for free. I'll grant that this isn't scientific , but it certainly suggests that the availability of free downloads doesn't destroy the market for a product, even at a very high price differential
Perhaps Gizmodo is just parroting some party line he was fed by his puppet masters.
Fact is, the evidence show that people will buy $100 paper copies of books that they can get for free.
Such a crude and careless error on a fundamental point makes me suspect the other information.
Possibly the article was written to order to push the sales of e-books and readers. Having a link to it show up on /. smells like a paid advertisement.
I'll leave the other e-book problems, like the inability to resell a used book, and the fact you will lose all your books if the reader breaks, to others to pick apart.
In my workplace, persons older than about 35, who would have gone to high school/college before the widespread use of PCs, generally print out documents of more than a page or so to read them, while those under 35 generally read them on the screen.
Suppose for a moment that I could buy eBooks of any of my favorite authors, on a web site, for a few dollars a book, and that every book came unencumbered by DRM, so I could read it on my big-screened home PC, or on my laptop in bed, or on my plam on the bus, or on my PC at work when I wish to be subversive, or have the book read to me by text-to-speech software on long drives to my girlfriend's parents' place, 6 hours away.
If this were the state of eBooks right now, I would be SOOOOO broke, and I'd have a lot of eBooks.
I've read books on my PC before; in fact, given my web-surfing habbits of late, I spend a great deal more time reading on my PC than I do anything in paper format, so obviously this isn't about high-contrast screens or portable readers.
The eBook industry is shooting itself in the foot, the same way the music industry is starting to; with DRM and copy protection. Only in eBook-land, DRM is pervasive, whereas with music, DRM is only seem in a handfull of albums, and is largely ineffective.
Another big sticking point for DRM; when I buy a hardcopy book, I can read it in all those places I mentioned above (except the text-to-speech bit...), but also I can stick it on a book-shelf, and read it again in 20 years. That's not necissarily the case with anything DRMed. I don't know if the company that sold me the book and/or reader will still be around, or if their software will still work 20 years down the road. I don't want to have to dig out my old pentium 5 from the basement just to read an old favorite.
Semi joking aside, it's compelling content - and lots of it, frequently updated - that's required before widespread, mainstream acceptance. This has already been noted many times here and elsewhere.
In my own experience, I've been reading shorter-form ebook content for years. AvantGo is my primary news source, and Richard Lawrence's excellent AvantSlash is a main way I read summaries and comments on Slashdot.
I have never read a novel with an ereader.
Of a more niche front, I'd love to see e content that's more easily annotated: when reading articles, white papers, etc., I'd like to be able to note, quickly and easily, the ideas that hit me at the time. I'd like those ideas to be linked to the passages that spurred them. These annotations should be syncable to a desktop app for further editing and printing.
Per the parent post, it's good to see Mobireader can see at least some of this. I'll check it out.
I actually use my GBA SP more for reading books than playing games now. There are so many advantages.
- More compact.
- Backlit
- I find I don't get travel sick when reading in a car which I do with books.
- I can carry a whole series of books with me at once.
I'm surprised no-one has tapped into this market and sold ebooks on GBA cartridges. Imagine buying the Harry Potter books with illustrations and mini-games added to them. I'm sure it would encourage even more kids to read.
Currently I find the simplest way to view them is just to use pogoshell and upload the books as text files. I find the font a lot clearer than bookreader.
Charge about £10 - £15 per cartridge.
A new hardback is about that price, a paperback is half that.
Providing a bit more content (like extras on a DVD) would add extra value for little extra production costs.
Most e-book sites charge the same for a purely electronic copy as a paperback. Personally I object to paying the same price for a downloaded book then a paper copy. People would still prefer to get something more tangible for their money (like a physical book or cart) so pricing shouldn't be an issue as long as Nintendo are reasonable.
The hard thing is finding someone in Nintendo to actually consider the idea to begin with. They have already started releasing the old famicon games at the £10 price point in Japan so they must feel that if the content is cheap enough they can get a suitable profit on the cost of the media.
Ok actually it is more than just 2 words.
What we need is something like the iPod-iTunes-Music Store soup to nuts solution.
It'll take the same thing it usually takes to get new technology off the ground.
Adoption by the distributors of pr0n.
Movies, VCR's, even the internet itself, all leapt from their small niches to the bigtime with the help of pr0n.
Think about it. . .
I think travelers will make them popular, like the ipod type gadgets, they are handy in that they can carry loads of data with minimal space. I imagine someone going home from school and taking his text books in his handheld :)
Wish I had that when I went to school ;)
photoplankton
I read a lot (really a lot) on public transport I have an hour long journey through some pretty dodgy parts. If i show i have nice shiney gadgets Im liable to get mugged. However no one is going to steal my tatty paperback + the criminal scum dont read.
ok this might sound daft but just reading some of the related articles i realised the main problem with reading on a screen is the constant need to scroll because we have the dimensions wrong. how many articles are we reading these days with a narrow strip of article and huge borders?
how about our web browsers wouldnt they be better side ways on? why all these menus and tabs on the top why not on the side?
it cant be that difficult to render sideways or move the bars to the side or at least give us the option.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
No fucking DRM and some form of the Free Documentation License from the FSF.
Oh, and no proprietary formats.
Count me out if that is too much to ask for.
...wasn't that a poll a while back? What kind of bookmark we use or something? ;-)
The problem isn't when I want to go back to where I left off, that's easy enough to do. The problem is when I'm most of the way through the book, and I want to flip back and review the details of something that happened earlier, or if I just want to pick up the book and find some of my favorite parts.
Why should I have to specially mark each spot I want to go back to, when with a RealBook(TM) ;-) I can just flip through and find it quickly?
A bit of a ramble :) My thoughts on design/methods that could move the electronic book ahead of the paper book...
Form Factor;
Clam shell (thinking Nintendo DS non its side, kind of), left and right screens. Reasonably large screens (I foresee pocketbook, softback novel, hardback novel, reference and cofee table sized readers being available ultimately) full colour and good definition. Front of reader, when closed, has a small screen allowing display of what book this reader currently "is", some controls on outside.
Rationale; able to display magazine / website content as well as "book" content. Reasonable approximation of book format, but allows enhanced capabilities (could open 1 book in each screen, navigate each screen through a book seperately etc - useful for cross reference; tabbed book reading the extension of tabbed browsing now?)
Ergonomics;
The reader is quite heavy (each version being the same weight as the equivalent real book, possibly lighter in the case of the really big ones). The reader is also rugged; as in kick around the floor and still works, rugged. Ideally it would have good battery life, and a cradle to charge (possibly induction; like my electric toothbrush)
Behaviour;
I see the default behaviours being as close to physical book as possible. I.e. you open the reader to power on, it defaults to presenting the same state that you last had that reader in - i.e. reader "becomes" a book when used. You then have availability of enhanced functionality if and when you want it. (say to load a stored state of a different book, to load annotations for a book (not just your own - think english lit study aids, or collaborative work, revision history etc)
Rationale; basic behaviour is book like for familiarity, but reader also works as a library interface)
File Format;
For my money the format should be working towards XML + XMSLT + required extra files (Fonts / Images, whatever). This is then wrapped in a common format "wrapper" file. This wrapper contains the DRM facilities as required. The end user has software that will read files, DRM allowing as necessary. End user can also have software that will compile (and possibly DRM setup) files of their own, software to convert older / other formats into this format. Nobody _needs_ software to unwrap a book once its wrapped. (not that this means it won't happen, but thats the theory)
Rationale; one format, allows DRM, actual content in non-proprietary format - many makes of reader, all books readable, huzzah!
Library;
I see the need for "Library Servers"; possibly local (wireless networking), possibly internet based, possibly both. The concept is; you book (gained however) sits in the library. The library can track what books you have, what page you were last on, which reader device you were using, any manual bookmarks you've added, annotations, whatever.
The reader can download from the library the book to read, what page etc. It can also upload to the server what book / page etc when you finish with it. (allowing the pick up and continue behaviour above)
Obviously this syncing could be automatic (the bedside reader which keeps page every night, and only changes book when finished), manual (a reader loaded with books because you're going away on a trip), or disabled (the reader that lives in the lounge for anyone to browse at whim, or your reader that you've been reading playboy in, that you don't want to have auto-load the centerfold when the kids pick it up!)
This library could be a machine at home, scaled to handle your family, plus visitors. Or it could be a central server, so that you can sync while on holiday (both so that the book you buy away from home goes home, or so that you can pick up the book you left at home while away from home) Whether this would be your machine having an externally accessible port, or a "trusted" service provider, I leave to your imaginations.
Rationale; books not lost if reader lost/destroyed. A
You can cram a copy of war in peace in your pocket when you head out to take a shit at work. With my palmpilot, Sony TH-55, I can carry a whole library off to the crapper and no one bats and eye.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
I prefer the taste of paper. Although LCDs squish a bit of tangy juice in your mouth but paper is much more wholesome and doesn't back you up.
Who cares about books on ebooks. Even better applications are for stuff that aren't "books" at all: newspapers and magazines:
- Make a light-weight, high-contrast, 8"x10" reader with none of the fancy features none of us want.
- Give away the reader for free with 1 or 2-year subscription to newspaper or magazine.
Newspapers and magazines don't care as much about this DRM crap. And newspapers on electronic readers might be an advantage since you don't get ink on your fingers.
-hadohk
In my case, the only thing they need to take off is that they should start selling the stupid things.
I regularly use my Tungsten T3 as an eBook reader, but the only content I can get is the one available in Project Gutenberg.
With a beautiful reader (TiBR) available, which allows to me to configure it in detail to suit my taste (landscape, full-screen, very-light-grey on very-dark-blue, bookmarks, and so on) I had read many thousand of pages of literary pleasure.
But while I could go on reading classics almost forever, now and then I would like to get a book from the last 50 years, or maybe a technical manual, and I would have no problem in paying for it. Even if the suckers want me to pay as much as the printed version costs.
Sadly, that option is nowhere to be seen.
I check them out on Amazon once. They cost as much as regular books and there aren't any books that I want to read. What's the point?
PDF support, large good screen and the ability to make books in its native format without having to pay a per copy fee.
It's the same with software. You can't (nor can anyone else) dream up all the features that the users want, or anticipate everything they'll want in the future. But if a free market supplies those features, then it will probably do a pretty good job. That's why we're not all still using Mosaic to surf the web. There was competition!!
And the problem with "eBooks" is that there can't be a free market for supplying the reader. Imagine you wanted to write an eBook reader. What would stop you from entering that market? Turns out, there actually is something to stop you. All Slashdotters should know what the barrier is, to there being a free market in eBooks readers, because it's a popular topic around here.
But I'll stop beating around the bush...
DRM is not necessary for people getting paid. So quit bringing it up as though it's somehow related to revenue. The only relationship between DRM and artists getting paid, is this: DRM lowers sales.Remember when DVDs didn't sell much, and there weren't many players you could run on your computer? Then CSS got cracked. Now DVDs are a safe investment for consumers and there's some diversity in player implementations. What happen to DVD sales in the last 4 or 5 years?
DRM is the problem, and eliminating it is the solution. You insist it's not going away? Fine, then settle for making less money. Reject capitalism, if you must. eBooks will remain an obscure niche, like everything else that stagnates due to lack of competition. You could be the internet, and instead, you want to be CompuServe. Keep thinking small, like the companies that sell DRM systems want you to. The Central Committee knows best, comrade.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Some more professional examples. I just bailed on referreeing a paper for J. Chem Ed in which the most recent reference was Einstein, 1905- most of the rest were ~1850. (My small college library doesn't stock the references, and I didn't have time for a loan) But with time I could have gotten all of them. Our library here has been digitizing an illuminated Qu'ran from ~1500, and we'll do a ~1300 Book of Hours soon.
Do you have computer data 20 years old? Can you still read it?
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Good books that people want to read and which will only be ported to this medium.
So, in other words, it will require monopolistic control of copyrighted content?
God, I hope eBooks never get adopted.
You can't take the sky from me...
The reason I read is to get away from the computer.
Thanks to work, I'm sitting in front of a computer screen a good 12 hours a day at least. I don't want to spend any more time in front of an LCD than I have to.
Yes, I've read ebooks on my laptop on the train. I read Anna Karenina on my Sony Clie. The technology is pretty good, I didn't really have problems with the screen, the reader... it's the technology itself!
Sometimes I just need to get away from the whir of hard drives, the glow of pixels... to sit under a tree in the park with a good novel. To feel the texture of the tree on my back, the earth under my butt, to smell the fresh air, to feel the paper in my hands. It's a comfort. To know that as technology continues to infect every aspect of my life, I still can grab a paperback and get away for a few hours downtime. I rue the day we lose that ability...
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
It's been said before, but that never stops anyone:
1) open format, so I can get content from anywhere and read one whatever device I buy
2) No DRM - if I buy it, I own it . I can give it to someone else, sell it, copy it, etc.
3) last and least, good devices to read it - which means a great screen, long battery life, nifty features like a 'flip-through' mode to visually scan for certain text, some form of visually indicating I'm 2/3rds through the book, etc.
is that you're staring at pixels instead of pages.
Subject says it all :-)
Will an eBook ever be this cheap for a newly-released, 550 page #1 seller? Of course, that is all in addition to the extreme convenience of having a physical book with pages you can feel that you can read anywhere.
I don't think the ebook will ever catch on. People truly do love the way a book feels in their hands. I wonder if any studies have ever been done on this?
But I a few important factors haven't been covered, or have only implied.
1) E-books must be cheaper and more convenient than regular books. That means I can pay $18 for a hardcover (after discount from Amazon), or $8 for the E-book that offers similar functionality (i.e. I can loan it to a friend).
2) Major authors/publishing houses are willing to provide books, including non-technical books, in an e-book format. I've seen plenty of people peddling their "free" trash novels on the 'net (Cory Doctrow excluded from the this category), but the fact remains that publishers provide a valuable service to the reading public.
3) Perhaps most importantly, I think the cost of paper/distribution will have to rise considerably for e-books to really take off. That probably means some kind of economic disaster that I cannot totally forsee, such as war with China, sudden ecological change or a sudden, massive spike in oil costs. If the price of printing and distributing books rises high enough, it will drive people toward online distribution systems. And I imagine the trend will solidify for music and movies as well.
I think my third point would be the most likely to suddenly make e-books attractive, but I hope I never see that day come to pass.
It will take nothing less than the complete elimination of DRM.
People will not change formats unless the new format is more convenient than traditional books. DRM makes books inconvenient and eliminates the benefits of having electronic versions of books.
If you cannot cut and paste interesting passages and send them to your friends, why would you give up the smell of paper?
Why would you want 50 books in your pocket if you knew that you would have to pay a fee every time you accessed one of them?
Why would you want a dedicated device that did not allow you to move the book to your computer at home or at work (whenever and however many times you wanted)?
Why would you want a book that would become inaccessible to you the next you upgraded your (MS) OS or when the company that produced your reader went out of business?
Why would you want something that exposed you to Federal litigation if you tried to access it outside the bounds of a long unreadable license?
Why would you want a copy of a public domain work with an ominous copyright notice attached to it? (My copy of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica actually has a copyright notice attached to the Constitution of the United States of America).
There are numerous benefits to electronic formats, but the vast majority of those benefits are eliminated by DRM. I doubt anybody will switch until those benefits are allowed. The publishers need to find another business model... like editorial consulting or something where they would derive their revenue from helping authors and not monopolizing information. But I will definitely die of old age before that happens.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
No, really. Online music was pretty sketchy until the iPod and iTunes. Now, I'm no iPod lover - I don't own one and can't (no, won't) afford to buy it and the online music.
But Apple made it cool. Made it hip. Made it easy. And it works. They weren't the first, but they made it popular, despite all the detractors, and they busted their asses to get a real library available.
It's going to take a lot of cash, a permissive DRM model, and a hard headed exec with lots of industry contacts to make it work. Sony would make it too expensive, Microsoft would make the DRM too draconian, and Apple is too busy with iTunes. Not too many other firms I know of with the cash, tech knowledge, and balls to do it all.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
iSilo is by far the best reader I've found. It has the best functionality I've seen and on my Clie the resolution is perfectly acceptable. The way I get my books is to buy them from Amazon, or Simon Says at MS Reader format and use that ConvertLIT program to render them as HTML. iSiloX then converts them into the appropriate format form the Clie and I'm good to go. Plus I've then got the book in HTML format so I'm assured that I can convert it into a different format if a better one comes along. I know I'm violating the DMCA buy removing the encryption from the original LIT file, but I have to go with what works.
I don't like to read. I want my iPod to read eBooks to me.
Beauty is truly in the eye of the tiger
Vertically oriented screens have to become popular and common before eBooks really catch on.
I can't stand reading a PDF on a horizontally oriented screen. My next raptop may have a swivel screen of some sort.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
Same thing with debugging code, it is always best to make a printout to get a proper overall "feel" of the code in question.
Meh.
1. Changing font size when your eyes get tired. ...
2. Lighted display for reading in the dark.
3. Built in dictionary and encyclopedia for instant reference lookups.
4. Highlighting w/o a highlighting pen.
5. Embedding your own notes.
6. Search.
7.
8. Profit! (sorry)
Bah!
... I find this claim incredible to believe...
After doing some googling to check my thoughts, the best wpm speeds (even on some speed-read contest sites) are in the 3,850 - 5,000 WPM range...
If your WPM speed is what you claim, you ought find some way to capitalize on your fascinating skill. Guiness' Book of World Records, perhaps?
eye dough naught reed
hehe...
don't let those library doors hit your ass on the way out, luddite
YOU'RE FIRED!!!
you forgot a really inexpensive portable reader device with a 16 hour battery life.
my guess would be a hybrid pda running linux with the e-book reader.
it would have to be less than $60 too
They're using their grammar skills there.
My wife has this fantastic collection of cook books. The trouble is, they are fantastically heavy, and we are moving next month. From my POV, ebooks are fantastic. I don't mind reading on a screen and generally, I read a book once, straight through, and am done. However, from my wife's POV, the tangible cook books are better, because she can leave it open to the recipie she needs all day, if need be, without worrying about battery life of her reader.
1. The device itself should be free or nearly free.
2. The device should NOT be proprietary as it should accept books from all publishers.
3. The device should display one page at a type, NO scrolling to finish a page.
4. Backlighting.
5. No proprietary sealed-in batteries. Allow me the option of tossing in a few AAs if I forget to charge it.
6. The books HAVE to cost less than print books. I know most of the money goes to the seller, the publisher, and to the author. But since real books essentially last forever they will be a better bargain unless ebooks are cheaper.
7. No DRM. None. Nada. Zip.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
You can pry the paperback from my cold dead hands!
I am a computer programmer, so I guess that could be interpreted as a professional association to the topic. I am not involved in the publishing industry, electronic of otherwise. However, I do know a lot about how people react to new technology. Quite often they try to see the new technology in terms of the old technology. At best, this portrays the new technology as inefficient. At worst, it appears worthless. Let me offer a related example, then I'll talk about electronic books. Take newspapers for example. News stories are written by journalists, printed overnight, and delivered to your door or newsstand every morning. People have built up routines around reading the newspaper in the morning, because that's when it arrives. Past speculations about the future of newspapers involved newspapers that was faxed to your house, or downloaded into your PC, or downloaded into a portable reading device. But one thing that never changed was that you always got the news in the morning. People could not get away from the idea that the news was delivered in the morning. However, the only reason for receiving the newspaper in the morning was that it took overnight to print the news on paper and deliver it to the public. But once you take the paper away, this all changes. Just look at the news on the Web, and news headlines on pager networks, and you'll see what I mean. Printed news can be available as soon as it happens, once it is delivered electronically (I'm ignoring TV news for the moment). People have built up this habit of reading the newspaper in the morning. But they did this because that's the only way it could be done! You got the newspaper in the morning; that was the best time to read it. You didn't read it in the evening because it was old news. You couldn't read it earlier because you didn't have it yet. But when you can get the news anytime, this habit goes away eventually. You stop looking at the new technology in terms of the old technology. (You may want to research how radio got it's big push when someone thought of broadcasting instead of 'narrow' casting from station to station. This is a good example of a new technology opening a whole new frontier, once people stop thinking in terms of old technology, such as comparing radio to telegraphs.) Ok. Now how does this relate to electronic books? People may seem to have this attachment to paper. But this is only because they can't conceive of reading books in any other way. They have built up habits that involve dealing with the way books are marketed, printed, and bound. People thumb through books because that is the only way to scan the information inside. People browse bookstores because that's the only way you can tell what titles the store carries. People buy bookmarkers because that's the only way to mark your place. We have all these habits involving the act of reading, but all we really want to do is read. I'm sure you have been involved in a really good story, only to look up and realize that hours have passed by. I doubt that you were noticing anything but the story. Certainly you did not care about the feel, smell, or sound of the paper the story was printed on. You were caught up in the story behind the medium. (True bibliophiles are exempted from this argument, because they really do care about the smell/sound/feel of the paper book. But most of us are not bibliophiles) Of course, if the medium inhibits one from getting involved in the story, then the medium is not as good as a paper book. Bad electronic displays, awkward sized reading devices and short battery lives all plague the current crop of electronic books. People who turn up their noses at electronic books always seem to focus on the problems with the current devices. Then they extrapolate and say "Something like this will never replace a real book". They are right, because the first devices are always clumsy and expensive, and rarely as good as they could be. But I believe all these problems can be solved. Future devices will be cheaper, lighter,
"We all float down here"
1) VERY SMOOTH scrolling with no blurs, no matter how complicated the diagrams. -- iSilo has this, very smooth indeed.
2) The ability to control the content with just your hands - no keyboard, mouse or touchpad - you should be able to hold it like a book and read it - maybe a tap on the lower right corner to advance to the next page and on the lower left corner to go to the previous page. -- Your choice of mechanism in iSilo. I use the hardware Down button on the T3, and I programmed the other hardware buttons too. So I can go to the next page with one click of my thumb, and go to the previous or next line (scroll one line's worth) with the other buttons.
3) Eliminate the need to sit facing a vertical screen. -- Yup, carry it with you, read it in bed, and the T3 lets you flip the screen to read horizontally, if you prefer.
4) Minimize the dialogs. A book doesn't ask you if you want to save the file. -- How about flipping it closed to have it automatically turn off while remembering where you were in the book? Simple enough?
5) Make the text search work through voice recognition. -- That's not here, I admit. Not sure I would want that while I'm commuting by train, but I grant you this one.
6) Hardly any boot-up time. -- Zero. Flip it open, and there it is ready to continue with the next chapter.
The fundamental premise of this article is flawed. The situations between iPods and eBooks are simply not analagous, and the reasons are so obvious that any editor who wasn't totally befuddled by their technophile tendencies would have sent this dog back for a serious rewrite, or preferrably sent it to the digital circular file where it belongs.
Everyone buying an iPod has an existing bank of media playable on that device as mediated through their computer: to whit, their CD collection. Nobody would buy a 10,000 song iPod if they had to then buy 10,000 songs at the iTunes music store to fill it up.
Because the computer allowed the conversion of any legacy CD to a portable-playable compressed format, there was generally a huge library of music instantly available when the first MP3 player hit the market. Any music conventionally "in print" since the 80s was available. Every album from any major music publication's top whatever list of whatever was available. Every hit from every chart was available. Every serious popular classic of every genre was available. Many were even available at a significant discount at your local used CD store or on eBay. (And don't talk to me about project Gutenberg. While not an insignificant factor, it is still, in terms of driving a popular market for a new medium, roughly equivalent to starting your product base with access to all music that was released on wax cylinders and 78 discs)
Apple did not invent the portable player. They put iTunes together with an idea (a vast library of music in your pocket) with a handy and slick form factor and a clever one-handed interface. While the total product was innovative, the basic idea (a small music player with headphones) was fully embedded in culture already. People knew why a music portable was a good thing to have. Apple simply sold the idea that this is that, but even better. It scored over the current top product, the portable CD player, in many respects. There was no need to carry media, let alone the impossibility of anyone with a healthy collection of carrying more than a token component of their media. It allowed easy transition between various albums. It allowed the individual to mix and match customized presentations of their music that they could later access through the device. It was small enough to slip into most any pocket.
Most of these functional gains are of drastically reduced if not eliminated in the eBook. Nobody needs to have 10,000 books at their fingertips. A neat trick, but most people read one book at a time, and even freaks like myself rarely are working on more than four or five. Reading is not a "do anywhere" activity. You don't read while you jog or drive or work out or work, so portability in general is simply not of an equal value with reading. Furthermore, the primary issue of form factor in music portables, size, is in many respects a moot point with books because you need the thing to be big enough to give you a good page view. Barring some fantastic unfolding screen technology an e-Book that slips into your pocket is a non-starter. And remember the last time you went down to Kinkos with a stack of books, copied 20 or 30 of your favorite sections, and threw together a fun mix-book to read on the bus?
Finally, with regards to "if publishers stop wanting DRM, it's the end of popular creative arts. Not as we know them, but period." This numbnuts idea has been argued so much I won't even bother, except to say: 1) None of the DRM out there works: it is basically a pacifier for a paranoid industry, and 2) DRM may have made the iTunes Music Store possible from a sheerly pragmatic perspective of what it took for publishers to allow their music to be sold in that format, but the iTunes Music Store did not make the iPod possible. A lack of DRM on the vast majority of available media made the iPod possible.
I don't say the eBook will not come. There are possible benefits (full text searching of any book would be a great thing, an on-board dictionary,
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
What you described is a classic target audience of the ebook. Even the asshat professors of the world should embrace this technology, as it would allow for them to release updates to their books as often as they liked. The implied reduced cost of the ebook would be reflected in the reduced cost of production, and not author royalties.
The point of ebooks will be their ability to be used in new ways. Not simply as a handy DRM distribution mechanism, but in the ways imagined in the form of the Dynabook. Linking information and ideas and personalizing the content in terms of notes and such. You are exactly correct in that the tech interferes, but this is true of computers also. I believe that the two will come together to form this new expression of ideas.
What is required for this is new display technology mimicking the printed page--epaper--which is at least the quality of a printed magazine. Face it, most printed books are crap (I design books). Scondly, an easy way to share content and links will be required. You can't charge a person to look at another's book. Amazon is doing something like this in a sense. Independent ebook readers are doomed. and the pen interface will be a primary method of highlighting and jotting down ideas within the pages.
Books will never go away, but they will become the hightest expression of the idea again--costly, beautiful, and revered.
I buy new CD's in the US for $7.50 shipped. Go here for more info http://www.bmgmusic.com.
I check Costco today, and it turns out that at this retail level, its 9.99, or $10.
iTMS is a drop in the bucket compared with CD sales. It doesn't even move the meter. It may be the most successful electronic download service, but getting giddy about that is like arguing over the most popular edsel.
See, you're so into tech that you're missing the forest for the trees. There are more illegal downloads in 1 day than iTMS has ever sold. There are more CD's sold in 1 day than iTMS has ever sold.
Do you understand this is a flea/elephant thing?
Nope. Because you're convinced ebooks are kewl, and iTMS is shaking the industry. This stuff is toys. Tech boys don't get why the operate the way they do because they believe technology is an end unto itself. Technology is an end towards more money.
So please, enough with your pet theories... you don't even know the price of a CD.
P.S. Even if you were correct, the price of a CD, should be $4 in electronic form. But they get $10. iTMS is a bad deal for everybody except the record companies. Please don't buy into the hype.
If the technology for ultra-thin, super-flexible displays matures, what about a "book" which is full of "pages" which are actually said displays? Then you plug the "book" in to the iternet and it becomes any book you choose to download onto it. I guess font size and margins could dynamically adapt to the number of "pages" you have. Anyway, this answers the "physical question" but does nothing to ameliorate the concerns of DRM and content lack. Not to mention we may not be alive any longer when such a thing could exist.
Wait, wait. We're not subsidizing the paper industry by allowing the clear cutting of Federal forests: We're proactively preventing forest fires. Sorry. Lost my head there for a minute.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
I have an iPaq 3650 running Familiar 0.7.2. I use Opie as the UI. I've installed a PDF reader, an internet browser/HTML reader and the OPIE ebook reader. I read e-texts from Project Gutenberg with the text reader all the time. The joypad on the iPaq is a godsend for this kind of activity. I read ebooks on it when it ran WinCE, but not as much. Any ebook reader should, in my opinion, have a joypad.
I have gas, but my car uses petrol.
I have NO intention of using ebooks until I have the right to share my ebooks with my friends, like I do with my printed books, and the ability to sell old books I no longer need, like I do with my current books. Oh yeah, I want the right to make the equivalent of "photo copies" of certain pages, like I do with tech books. When I have all that, then I will support ebooks. Until then they can bugger off.
So this issue pisses me off to no end.
First, I own an ebook. I bought an reb1200 from ebay once they opened their software and allowed me to load whatever i wanted to. I've bougth 5-10 books from baen (since their content is cheap, completely open format, and stuff I want to read).
The rest i've downloaded.
The problem with ebook readers isn't the hardware and whatnot. It's the content.
They're not content on fucking you on the price (A n ebook is NOT WORTH FULL BOOK PRICE).
They're not content fucking you with the limited selection.
They have to saddle the content with absolute bullshit DRM.
Give me cheap content (allofmp3.com for books!), solid hardware, and back the fuck off.
I'll buy your content if it's value added. Baen releases their books in ebook format months before they come out in stores. I'll buy your content if it's affordable. I will NOT buy your content if it self destructs or leeches onto some oddball piece of hardware.
At the end of the day, ebooks will become popular when they become usable pieces of electronics and not "content delivery systems".
The one area e-books are currently superior in is how easy it is to sneak them at work. Sometimes if I'm bored I'll open my e-book reader and devour several chapters of a novel. If the boss walks by I'm only a click away from hiding the thing, which would be nearly impossible to do with the paper equivalent.
1) You can't stick them on the shelf or pass them down to the grandkids for hundreds and hundreds of years.
2) DRM: Until someone figures out how to cripple good old paper with DRM, paper will always be superior.
3) Minor, or even significant, damage to a book does not make it unreadable. very minor damage to an "ebook" reader will destroy it completely, damage to a few bytes in the file may make the entre file unreadable.
4) Books don't need batteries.
5) Books dont need to be upgraded when they become obsolete.
6) Domesday project, anyone?
7) Books don't break or malfunction.
9) Books last longer (hundreds and hundreds of years longer) than any company, corporation, or tech-support service that would service an ebook reader.
10) digital obsolescence.
11) It's so much extra work to print out an eBook and bind it (Hell, I'm not going to read 500 pages on a palm pilot and certainly not sitting in front of my desktop computer, are you?!)
When will eBooks get addopted? When people get dumb enough to make it profitable! Which is to say, Real-Soon-Now (hell, it's a terrible idea but people make lots of money off of worse ideas)
Check out my rant about Wired's article on ebooks http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.10/rants.html
Originally publish in October of 1998.
"We all float down here"
I buy eBooks from http://www.baen.com/. These are full novels, with no DRM, priced at $4 and $5 a book.
I read them on my PocketPC-based iPaq 1910, which I find quite usable. With the font antialiasing that the OS does, and the good contrast, I often actually prefer to read books this way. Not to mention that I can read in the dark in bed, while my wife sleeps.
In addition, I can bring a whole library with me, so that if I finish one book, I have a selection to continue with, without the weight additional books would cause.
With the Baen website, I can buy an eBook, and download it in formats suitable for PalmOS and PocketPC (I get both as my wife has a Palm PDA), as well as HTML and RTF formats. And if I lose my eBook somehow, I can go and download it again, as they are always available.
What we need to promote eBook usage is more publishers like Baen who "get it". For an eBook, no DRM is very important for me. I upgrade PDAs periodically (and my wife might want to read the book), so I want a format that will continue to work on each new PDA. I'd also prefer that the price be discounted some, as there are no (significant) production, distribution, and stocking costs. Baen gives me both of these, and I hope like hell that they succeed.
Just as iTunes has caused me to buy more music in the past couple of years than I ever have before, Baen is causing me to buy more books.
John
What I would like in an ebook reader would be an exemption so that I do not have to shut the damn thing down during take-off and landing. with a real book I can kill 30 or 40 pages during this time.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
If people would stop using proprietary formats like MSReader's .lit when importing books.
I want to read a few books I have, but cannot on my Mac.
That CSS file that blocks ads
Why, if I fire up mldonkey, type "ebook" in the search, I'll get a ton of results, everything from heinlein through harry potter to linux manuals.
What, you mean "DRI restricted nonportable expensive ebooks"? Nope, can't think why there's no market for those...
eBooks will languish so long as they are priced higher than paperback or hardcover. Why would you want to pay 2x what I'd pay for paperback for an eBook that requires all kinds of complicated keys / DRM that will royally screw up when you change computers in six months?
BTW - my favorite format for eBooks w/o picutres is ascii or ansi text... my favorite for those with graphical content is non-DRMd PDFs... Funky proprietary ebook formats are useless...
-- $G
Licensing. Now, instead of "buying" a book, which sometimes can be resold, you license it. You can't loan it to a friend, you can't copy any part of it, blah blah blah, and despite the money you've forked out for its use, the license will most likely expire at the end of the term. So essentially, you're doing little more than renting the use of the information contained in the e-book itself.
If ebooks were cheaper, had more texts available, were easier to use, were more portable, or lasted longer than paper books, there would be a market for them.
Pick one, (I recommend portable) and make that better than books.
-- less is better.
Last month I did a lot of travelling for work and thought I'd try the whole eBook thing. I had just started reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, and I knew The Confusion was out. Both are available only in hardcover, so I didn't feel like lugging them around with me. As anyone that's packed a small libary into boxes and moved can tell you, the only thing heavier than books is lead.
But I did have this spiffy new 3.5 lb. subnotebook which I was bringing anyway so decided I'd try an eBook.
Now I don't know a lot about the whole eBook thing, so I settled on Acrobat - it seems people might have issues with it - but it was easy to use and there was a pretty good selection, available through Amazon or Adobe's own store, including both of the books I wanted.
Now first problem here is I'm re-purchasing a book I already own in dead tree format. Blah...
So I go through Adobe's annoying activation and get it loaded up, and it's pretty decent. Whenever I reopen the eBook it remembers where I was. It even has the same page numbers and typeface as the print version. I can go full-screen, zoom in and out, rotate it. I find the best solution is to display half a page at a time otherwise the type is just too small. It's sort of like reading a large print book, but it makes up for the piss-poor resolution of LCDs compared to paper.
Before I left I tried loading Acrobat on my Palm Tungsten T3, eventually figured out how to activate it, and loaded my eBooks. Ugh, I don't know how anyone can read anything on a Palm-sized device. It ended up being something like 52,000 little mini-pages with two sentences each.
So I start travelling (with an extra laptop battery). It's a little annoying to have to "wake" my book every time I want to read, but it's not awful. Printed books however have that whole instant-on thing down.
Then of course the stewardess makes me shut off my laptop during takeoff and until we've been in the air for 10 minutes. Blah...
But while it's not as easy to read on an LCD as it is to read paper, it's not bad. I usually stare out the window at the clouds every chapter or so to let my eyes rest. I get a couple hundred pages read on a cross-country flight.
Then I have to shut it down again during landing...
But over the course of the next week the novelty starts to wear off, and it starts to get more and more annoying to use. Trying to pull out and wake the laptop whenever I feel like reading gets old; trying to read at an outdoor cafe in full sunlight, no chance - but if it were winter and cold and overcast I could keep the laptop on my lap and stay warm; taking the laptop into the bathroom to read while sitting on the toilet, it's just not really that much fun.
After a week, I just went to a bookstore and bought a paperback of something else, and when I got home I finished reading the Quicksilver hardcover.
So I dunno, a dedicated eBook device would be good I guess - but it'd have to be cheap, light, with good battery life, have the resolution of paper and be readable in full sunlight. And cost no more than $500.
Then of course someone needs to work out the whole DRM thing, and find some sort of common format and get all the publishers to buy in on it.
Then Amazon needs to stop charging (on a lot of titles) $5-10 more than the hardcover edition. Because as we all now, the costs of printing, binding, storing and shipping eBooks is just so much more than printed books...
I guess it's one of those things that will hopefully be in my lifetime, but not now, and not anytime soon.
I tried one in the store a month ago in Tokyo. It looked and felt real nice, quite light. The text updated in two passes but even that seemed organic, not like an ordinary raster. The quality was sort of like etch a sketch on rice paper. Anyway you could sometimes see a bit of a previous page in there.
The MASSIVE BARRIER to me though was the DRM. I would want to put MY files on it, not theirs. (And they didn't have enough content either).
I approached the display with trepidation, knowing DRM was not for me. I have read I guess hundreds of books in ascii on my palm.
But unfortunately in addition to reading books a few lines at a time in tiny print on the train or in bed, I would sometimes jot down notes and check some astro software on it. I lost everything on the palm 3 times when the battery ran out. And the final nail in the coffing was pouring coffee on the vaio that had with its integral memory stick port a way to put files into the palm (and copy photos off my phone).
Anyway, there are tons of problems with the article from what I understand (not having read it) but I can tell you if the manufacturer would separate ebooks from the readers everyone would be happy. I'd certainly want to buy their reader if it had open networking and no DRM in it. I *don't* want someone telling me what to read. I spend plenty of money on books and newspapers, and I also get a lot of other stuff I want to read. If the sony reader had a bunch of ports along its side for different kinds of sticks and connectors, and maybe a big hard disk (if light), I would really want it. I figure they couldn't make enough or didn't want to sell to much of this quality display so they are testing the waters with this, then will use the bad response to sell the idea in-house that the hardware has to be opened. There are mutually antagonistic divisions I understand in the company, we just have to wait a little for other companies to jump in. It was nice though, slow but relatively low-stress reading. Hope somebody publishes a hack of one.
eBooks often simply lack the freedom that printed books have. How can you check an eBook out of the library, or sell it to a friend when you are done?
How can you leaf through it in the store?
Simply put, DRM is killing the eBook.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I love to see articles about technology and behavior by people who a) don't use the technology, and b) don't participate in the behavior. Most people don't read e-books, but many do. As far as the technology goes, the sony big screen PDA's rock and with the scrollie wheel and a form factor that fits into one hand, are arguably better than most dedicated readers. I even converted my Mom who was totally against the idea. She had just never tried it. There are also some great sources of material such as Project Gutenberg. What needs to be fixed is the pricing model and DRM. Purchasing an e-book for the same price as a paper book is ridiculous, and a huge hurdle for any thoughtful buyer. Even though the e-book is more convenient, people just feel shafted when they pay full price and download some bits that they can't even loan a friend. An e-book with DRM is currently not an equal value to a paper book. It's that simple. Fix these two things and people will be more inclined to try whatever screen technology is available.
I suspect that the author is correct in using the term e-book "consumer" instead of e-book "reader". Music publishers, movie studios, and book publishers have stopped caring about people listening to, watching, or reading their products. Listeners, watchers and readers do not necessarily purchase the music, movie, or book that they are enjoying; they could be borrowing it or it may have been passed on to them. Publishers prefer that people be consumers, as the term infers that each person purchased the copy that they enjoying. Consumers do not borrow items or accept items from other people, they buy their own items.
I've been reading primarily on the Palm for a few years now. It was tough on the III/V series, but now that I have a Tungsten E, the screen is VERY nice, I can read it day or night and in sunlight, I went on vacation with 50 ebooks (mostly heinlein, some other authors), some collections of web pages including geocaches in the places we would be visiting, a few hundred photos, and 10 hours of NPR .RM's in the memory card.
The device is very durable in the hard shell aluminum RhinoSkin case.
The big problem is getting content. I have bought a few books from Peanut Press, but I dislike DRM'd content. I buy what I can from Baen books; I'd buy a whole lot more books if they were available like Baen sells them; $4 for a DRM-free downloaded copy.
I wind up getting most of my content from usenet, then buying a used paperback copy so I'm legal while I read it.
DRM issues? With /. dot so helpful, who can't find somebody who's worked it out before u?
Hardware? There are already hardware types here with PDA and more with stylus/notebooks. The new display technology in this Sony is fantastic-better battery life. I can't wait. What's the cost again?
Content? Unless you're a publisher and you're scratching your head wondering if Sony is going to put you out of business, who cares? See DRM above.
Break the tether! I want a gadget to collect all the content that I never have time to read. It never gets into book format and no publisher would touch it. It's on the web and somebody is publishing it every day.
I don't think ebooks for leisure reading will take off until they: ... and I mean like a densely packed Ayn Rand page
- are bendy like a paperback
- can resist water at least as well as a paperback, so you can read in the tub or on the porch in the rain
- have the same brightness and information density (or better) in the display as printed text
- of course, have a wide selection of reading material would be good too, you need both Rand and Vonnegut to be well rounded (and confused)
When the adult industry starts investing in ebooks, the market will take-off. Just like VHS and the internet
It seems to me what's crippling the eBook industry is the uncontested assertion that normal, everyday people are never going to pay for something they can steal for free. Think about restaurants that have a buffet. Imagine if they had employees patrolling to keep an eye on everyone and make sure nobody eats anything off someone else's plate. Who would go to that restaurant? Do people go to buffets and eat off their friend's plates without paying? Yes, they do. Somehow, the industry survives. Why? Because those people are in the minority. For the average individual, believe it or not, "because it's wrong" is reason enough not to do something. Social mores is a system that works (for the most part), and moreover it's free. In this digital age, businesses of all kinds are looking for the holy grail of DRM, the system that cannot be broken and that the people will accept. Unfortunately, it's impossible to create a system where it's possible to sell and possible to give away, but not possible to steal. It simply cannot be done. What you have to do is give the people what they want. Then they'll buy it. And sure, some people will steal it. You just have to accept that as the cost of doing business. But don't adopt a business model that makes the only option that gives people what they want the option of not paying for it.
...make it illegal to read a book to your children?
Sure, maybe my tinfoil hat's on a bit tight at the moment, but consider it...
You'd be allowing unauthorized access by bypassing the encryption of the e-book media - simply by reading Rabbit Hill to your kid before he goes to bed! Adobe could, and if their previous actions(Skylarov) are any indication, WOULD have you arrested.
And that doesn't even consider the arguement of losing a $100 reader if you fall asleep while reading in a bathtub. No thanks, I'll take dead trees.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
That's an easy answer. It's the same answer for any medium's success: a low cost/value ratio.
At the time being, there's little value, and high cost. $250+ for a reader, which uses batteries, for a reader which can only read proprietary book formats is not a reasonable proposition for most people - particularly when you consider that the ebooks themselves cost as much as paperbacks, and sometimes hardcover versions of the novel.
Another thing that hinders the adoption is the lack of a quantifiable physical item when ebooks are purchased. You just get a data file which is easily deleted, lost, or damaged. This isn't appealing to many geeks, let alone the general populace.
No, I don't view ebooks and their readers gaining much acceptance at all, as most people do not read nowadays. They would gain popularity if the media were significantly cheaper (dimes on the dollar), and the media was not provided with a restricted license, I'm sure. Ditto for being able to use the ebook reader to read, say, saved web pages, text files, PDFs, and various other 'standard' file formats - or at least a provision for importing them to the ebook reader format in a non-restrictive manner.
Really, I think the best chance ebook readers have of becoming common, or even popular, is for the ebook reader companies to start talking to course book publishers. These publishers make many, many books which are in publication for a year or two, and then discontinued, only to release a new version with one or two spelling changes, a couple pretty graphs, and a new cover. The old books? They largely get disposed of, I'd imagine. Students are left with a shitty text book and no means by which to get rid of it for reasonable reimbursement.
If I could have an ebook reader which cost me $200ish, and then spend $150-250 a quarter on books (as opposed to the 300-400 I spend now), and possibly get a discount at the end of the quarter for not copying the data off the device (20%, say) on the next quarter's books, I'd do it in a heartbeat, provided the ebook reader was technically mine (not some lease from the school), and I could use it to store any variety of my own books as well (technical documents, novels, etc.).
Granted, I'd only have the ebooks for the quarter, but I'd wager that 90% of the course books out there have little reuse value for the student, let alone for the next person that come along, as there'll likely be another version available. I imagine publishers would like this scenario - a lot - as I can imagine they would save a LOT of money by not having publishing, transport, storage, etc. costs for the millions of text books they make.
Schools (public schools, at least) would also likely benefit, as they could get a license for a book, and use it indefinately, provided they had the readers. If the readers were made of similar sturdyness to an AlphaSmart, i don't see this as being too unlikely a scenario. Battery cost would be negligible, as most students probably don't use their books enough to drain a single AAA battery half way, so there'd not be much recurrent costs. Students could get their work done more quickly (due to search features), and everyone would benefit. (Well, at least in theory - it depends on what the actual purpose of our school system is, I guess.)
At any rate, I'd like an ebook to replace the multiple text books I've got to lug about, personally. I'd be willing to pay roughly the same amount for the ebook reader and the ebooks as I pay for my text books, provided I could add my own data (PDF, txt, whatever) without restrictions. Is anyone out there listening? Market research, hello?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
One word... Plucker.
I have both the REB1100 and REB1200, both of them descendents of the Rocket Ebook, but made by RCA. Both solve the irritating problems of trying to read ebooks on PDAs (too small) or laptops/desktops (too big) by being book sized. The only problem with the REBs is that they were made to take only an encrypted proprietary format. You were expected to buy all your content from Gemstar (who bought Rocket) and download it via modem (both models) or internet (REB1200) or USB (REB1100). The functionality of these devices is GREAT. The only real drawback is that it currently takes about four steps to get plaintext into one of the REBs using aftermarket software. Really, these devices would be PERFECT if they had a couple more features: bluetooth and/or 802.11 wireless transfering of text and the ability to render PDFs.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
It would take revolution because:
I downloaded the 911 report and my text-to-speech reader stumbles over the fact that incompetent Government bureacrats can't leave spaces in between sentences; result --> my reader links 2 and sometimes 3 sentences together - very ugly to listen to...
This kind of incompetent corporate & Israel sucking, afraid to deal with terrorism by confiscating oil land from Saudi Arabia and flipping the Islamic world the finger, let's do something stupid like invade Iraq and stick Americans with the bill, UBL who? we aren't going after him, let's make friends with Pakistan because they have the bomb aside from the fact that they ARE a major terrorist sponsor, thinking is why this country is going down!
Yahh that's right fool you vote Republican or Democrat - it don't matter. You WILL be short shrifted by a corporation when you're in your 50s and you will get F&%^#%^#. This is because YOU have FAILED to rise up and beat your local politicians and CEOs into the ground and take back the country. So quit bi&(^thn about E-Readers because your world is over! BTW - YES your job is going to be outsourced and YES the tax bills for the idiot move in Iraq will keep coming in even though your broke!
Uhhm... Sorry about that... 6 cups of high test and counting... I dunno what I just blabbered but it felt good so I'm posting it...
--Richard
Make it more like a real book. I want two full pages of text visible at once, and at similar resolution. I want it to work at any level of illumination above a single candle. It can be no heavier than a book. It must have no more controls than a book, or I must be able to operate it normally while ignoring (without effort) any extra controls it presents.
The content itself must not stop functioning if I don't keep paying; I don't buy content that isn't good enough to enjoy for a lifetime. Avoid the temptation to cram in sidebars and flashing whozits -- I want no distractions while I'm reading. Keep It Simple.
Speaking of content, it needs stuff beyond whatever inhabits the front windows of the big chain bookstores this week. Older titles and specialty subjects are important.
The price of a reader must not be more than, say, three times the price of a paper book. And the content modules should be much cheaper than p-books since I have to furnish the reader.
All this is required to make an e-book *nearly as good as* a p-book. Still wanna be in the e-book business?
And them we may be reading Fahrenheit 625
The temperature at which eBooks burn......
Future textbooks will be like Slashdot posts in that a topic will be introduced, followed by a link to a technical discussion. Following will be comments and critiques with links to further in-depth discussion and off-topic threads. Students will be graded by the value of the content that they contribute to the discussion which in turn will depend on the extent that they explore the threads.
Future textbooks in hypertext ebook format will differ from Slashdot posts by having many more tutorials at various levels on the topic being presented.
The idea that education will be purchased by buying college credits through physically attending a lecture in a classroom and correctly guessing from an assortment of discreet facts with a multiple choice test after a number of lectures will fall away.
The promise of e-books is simple: they have the promise of using Moore's law to lower costs. Try going to Project Gutenberg. You can download a DVD image that contains 9400 books. It fits in 4GB, which is the capacity of one of those mini iPods. If you could go through one book a day, it would take you twenty five years to go through the contents. And Project Gutenberg is able to process more books every year. It's clear you could never catch up.
What's nifty about this is that any place which has even a modest computer and/or internet link can now be a library. Many classics are available for discussion, distribution, adaptation and just general enjoyment.
The one problem: sometimes you really want a book. Something with a small convenient form factor. That you can slip into your pocket. Read on the bus. Read in your bed. In sunlight. In dim light. Something you can scribble in. Fold the corners over. And something cheap enough that if you lost it, you might feel bad, but it wouldn't be a catastrophe.
Luckily Moore's law will eventually provide a solution to this too. If we set the ultimate price of an e-book to be the cost of a hardcover book, then low-end PDAs are already within a factor of two. Eventually, e-books will be cost effective.
I've taken a circuitous route, but here's the rub: while there is plenty to read, not everything you want to read will be available. The reason? DRM. Sanford writes:
The problem is that there is no such thing as convenient DRM. DRM is always inconvenient. It exists only to prevent the consumer from doing something he might want to do, and gives absolutely no benefit to the consumer. You can look at one person's experience, and imagine it multiplied a million times over.
I'm not paying for that headache, thank you very much.
Now all I have to do is figure out how to store all these dead trees.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
I have huge library of cached online articles & personally typed texts that I would love to be
able to search through and store in one place.
It would be awesome if I could carry this device
around with me and refrence articles during discussion.
Sadly though, I doubt a device like this would
ever get pushed by publishers.
My dream reader:
*I should have the ability to upload my own texts.
*The text needs to be searchable.
*It should support multiple formats;
or a converter from multiple formats:
html,txt,doc,pdf,xml, etc..
*It should have massive storage space;
with support for hundreds of thousands of texts.
*It should be fairly small so I can carry it everywhere.
it is apparently available now
it uses something called e-ink, which is an interesting technology.
it uses hardly any battery power
It's readable in the sun
it takes no battery power to actually run, just change state
Etc.
Pay attention! The only thing that I don't know that it has is the ability to be backed up properly, lack of DRM, etc. as I've not yet seen one myself.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
- read it now
- read it later
- lend it to my friends
- give it to my children to read
- run textual analysis on it
- write in the margins
- read it on any device that I own.
I don't trust a DRM program to allow me to do those things, especially if my DRM e-book hardware becomes obsolete or breaks. And I don't want to risk going to jail for cracking my own damned copy of the book. (DMCA).One might argue that DVDs don't have those things, and were adopted anyway. But DVDs have several things going for them that ebooks do not:
Until e-books are available with either no DRM at all or minimal DRM, I probably won't be buying into them. It's just too annoying to not have control of my own data.
Hypertext.
Embedded small movies. Some works of art (sculpture, architecture) can only be appreciated by viewing them from multiple angles. A calculus text would benefit enormously from animated illustrations, because differentials, etc. are dynamic things. Imagine a cookbook with a video clip for every recipe.
Interactive tutorials. Again, great for textbooks.
Of course, I wouldn't invest in an e-book reader unless there were literally millions of books I could download into it. I would also need some reasonable assurance that any e-books I bought would last at least as long as their dead tree versions (some of my father's books are over 60 years old). Unfortunately, neither of my requirements is likely to be met if DRM is imposed.
Thing is, I don't WANT to have to sit at my computer to read something. I don't WANT to have to buy specialised readers with DRM and funky connection protocols (and which probabaly won't work with my Mac anyway). I don't WANT to read a PDF file on a tiny palmtop computer. I don't WANT to pay full price for a digital file.
What do I want? Dead fscking trees, m'man, and lots of 'em. I've never had the batteries in my books die. I've never had to find a wall socket for my books. I've never had to carry around special equipment to hook my books up to a computer. I've never had to tell a friend, "No, sorry, the DRM on this dead tree prohibits me from letting you borrow it." And I have yet to find a used eBook store.
eBooks are the solution to a problem that doesn't exist. They may be useful to some people (geeks who travel a lot, for instance, or techs who have to do a lot of on-site work) but for most people there's no obvious appeal.
It's an example of translating a meatspace idea into the digital realm and finding that the result is far too complex and unsatisfying to justify the effort. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn't. The trick is recognising when it's failed and letting it die or settle into its niche and leave it be. Just stop trying to force it on consumers who obviously don't care.
Mod parent up. It contains trivial facts that many people writing here seems to not know...
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
"Of all writings I love only that which is written with blood.
Write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit."
Thus spoke Zarathustra
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I regard eBooks the same way I regard the Segway and Hummer H2s. Crap that has no real purpose in life but to justify the spending of one's disposable income on brutily obvious frivolity.
eBooks can not do anything any better than paper books.
Until one can, they serve no functional purpose.
period.
Get rid of the annoying ebook format :)
I don't want Yet Another Standard that I have to constantly keep updating software to use.
I'm all for "electronic books", and would happily pay $5 to download a new "paperback" to read in my favorite text browser (less). If you want snazzy indexing, how about good old HTML with anchor tags at each chapter? Use XHTML and then it can even be picked apart as data, if you like.
In short, what does the "ebook" format do for ME, that HTML doesn't? If your answer has the word DRM in it, I will slap you.
(long rant about DRM and losing access to unpopular works in XX years, not included)
However, there is a new chemical that has just been released by a company called P2i in England, which is a joint venture between a VC firm (Cirrus, I think) and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. From their website, the coating (as yet un-named, it seems) is described as "an invisible ultra-thin polymer coating where water beads up on a surface like mercury, protecting the material or device it has been applied to."
It sounds like snake oil, I admit. However, I saw it demonstrated on Japanese TV late last week. The announcer had a normal, non-water proof, not special in any way laptop, TV and cell phone coated with the stuff. He then dunked the above electronics into a big tank while they were on. Everything worked perfectly in the water and when he took them back out. They also coated a newspaper with it, and it didn't get wet at all when put into the water. He took a glass of water and spilled on the laptop and it kept on working just fine.
I'm not sure where it is in terms of approvals, etc. in the West although the P2i is planning to market the material soon, their site says. The Japanese National Fire Department is in the process of approving the material for sale now.
This will, I think, make e-books much more useful and practical. For me, a book, while not exactly disposable, is something that I don't mind if it gets wet, etc. It will dry out and be fine. I just never feel comfortable having expensive electronics anywhere near the bathroom or moisture. Existing waterproofed products in the thick yellow coating or in the special bags are clumsy to use and kind of annoying to deal with.
In fact, I doubt I could have finished Cryptonomicon without my eBook. I read eBooks on my Sony Clie. I like that I can carry these books around in my shirt pocket. While I would like a larger device at times (especially one that could read .cbr and .cbz comic book files, as I'm an vid graphic novel reader), I can make do with the smaller device. Since I'm a cubicle jockey, I can take the Clie into the mensroom for a quick 5-minute reading break without being obvious. That's a plus!
If an eBook is more than $5-7 dollars, I won't consider a purchase. A $20 eBook is madness. I won't buy many paper books for $20; why would I buy an electronic book for that amount? Price them like paperbacks, and I'll be happy to buy them.
What discourages me is the lack of eBooks from smaller authors. It's little work to take a Microsoft Word doc and turn it into an e-book; why not take advantage of that and push books from authors like Caitlin Kiernan (a fantastic goth-oriented writer who is as skilled with language as Umberto Eco)? eBooks have done wonders for Cory Doctorow's career; why not try them with smaller names that can't penetrate the best seller market?
I read somewhere that the file-sharing of scanned-in book pages is taking off. People got frustrated waiting years for content, render-quality and value of ebooks to pan out. At the same time file-sharing software grew up and networks have the capacity to transmit a books' worth of page-images efficiently. The initial market is expensive texbooks and best-sellers.
Every time I read something on paper these days I always end up thinking "damn, I wish I could grep this". I suppose the more modern term would be google.
Anyway, the ideal ebook would be ipod sized with a flip screen and keyboard inside, serve as a pda with wireless internet, web browser, mp3 (and audiobook) player and maybe a phone. That way you always have a reason to have it with you and can use it for reading whenever you have a spare moment.
Good point, but I'll go one step further and argue that textbooks really aren't one of the most promising applications of ebooks, at least in the short- to mid-term. This is because to read an ebook you need an ebook reader, and it will be a significant expense that most likely costs even more than your textbooks do now. Ebooks will get adopted gradually in classrooms, just like laptops were, until eventually they get widespread enough that it makes sense for textbook companies to release titles in compatible eformats.
My best guess as to the most successful initial applications of ebooks? Technical books ("Learn C++ in Only 5 Minutes a Day!"), business titles ("The 927 Habits of Successful Anal-Retentive Micromanagers") and mass market paperbacks ("Chicken Soup for the Metrosexual").
These would all take advantage of the people who are likely to be on the front end of the adoption curve -- techies, rich business junkies, and then everyone else. The cash-poor students, I'm afraid, can't buy a decent ebook reader for a few more years....
Honestly, what college student is going to legitimately own 10,000 songs anyway?
Same with eBooks. Until you can download them easily and put the publishing industry out of business, they won't be popular. Publishers know this, which is why they won't ever release non-DRM'd eBooks.
I.e. it will happen when flying pigs slip on the ice covering Hell's floor and crash into the monkeys flying out of Satan's butt.
Two things:
First, this article blindly repeats the lie that for artists to get paid, they (or their publishers) need control over distribution. This isn't true; they just need to get paid. Control is one way to do so but there are others. For example, compulsory licenses pay the artists without giving them control over distribution.
(Cory Doctorow does this better than me, here. ObAttribution: This link was stolen from other Slashdot posts.)
Secondly, the article way overstates the importance of big publishers.
I'm convinced that the future lies with the small publishers, the ones that can't afford to pay a decent advance but will do a good job editing and make sure that their books are good. Those publishers will embrace DRM-less ebooks because they have nothing to lose. And someday, one of those DRM-less ebooks will be a huge best-seller, and that'll open the door for reasonable ebooks.
Until then, I'll just use Plucker to read free html ebooks like My Tokyo Death Cult on my Visor.
The bottom line is that people will not switch to ebooks until their benefits outweigh that of their paper cousins. Paper books are: INEXPENSIVE, can be read in a variety of lighting, can be re-sold, they do not require batteries, they are compatible with speed readers, reading them doesn't cause eye strain.
There isn't much going for ebooks. You pay hundreds of dollars for the reader, you have to worry about battery power, the text isn't as readable as paper, DRM means you cannot sell your copy of a book to someone else and that there may even be a time limit on reading the book. There is a much smaller selection of content available.
Really the only thing going for ebooks is the ability to do searches through the book or a dictionary lookup. This is very cool but not generally necessary when reading a novel, and it certainly doesn't outweigh all the negatives associated with ebooks. I love gadgets but even I wouldn't buy a pos ebook.
It's unfortunate that ebook manufacturers simply don't get it: THEY OFFER NOTHING BUT HIGH COST BOOK READING. They and the publishers can go fuck themselves.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
It wont. Paper has way too many features:
Low Power requirements
long storage life
Much easier for the novice
Can be shared easily
Great portability. I can mail a piece of paper for a very small amount.
Plus studies show higher retention for information presented on paper, than that presented on a screen.
Get a free ipod.
A while back, there was a book that I wanted to purchase, but it had mixed reviews. The author had used a publisher that also had PDFs available (if I remember correctly). Anyway, I was able to legitimately buy the PDF on-line for a fraction of the price of the paper-version. I was totally happy with the book, and the purchase.
My only experience with "e-books" has been brief, and negative. The e-book reader on my PDA wants to register itself (I believe with Microsoft) prior to use. I am not bothering with this "solution." Besides, there is a -free- PDF reader available for PDAs from Adobe.
PDFs work for me.
Sam Nitzberg
Just a matter of people discovering they can read books on their mobile phones AND other publishes following Baen Books lead by making ALL books available in a WIDE range of format WITH NO DRM!
(8-DCS)
Wello, for starters. how about having it in the john, just as handy as the readers digest, laying open to the page where you left off reading it the last time you were sitting there?
Nice idea, but as long as these things need power, or the contents cannot be downloaded for long term storage and retrieval on demand (and do the retrieval in 10 seconds or less from anyplace in your home) its never going to happen. I don't want to mess with the device, I just want to read, and for that, dead trees are the exact ticket.
Throw in the DRM and its a dead product that will never, ever "find its niche market" and make billions for the retailers peddling it. Anyones vision that includes that is suffering from dillusions of grandieur and a way outsized "I'm important so do as I say" ego.
I'd suggest a good shrink, but I don't know any that aren't also at least 51% quacks.
Cheers, Gene
The day you can read an ebook sitting on the crapper is the day become adopted.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
...coming in a dead tree package and requiring no power supply...
(Stolen sig) Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus", a "Microsoft worm", not a "computer worm
The goggles, they do nussing!
Slashdot needs a "Green and bland only thankyou" checkbox in the preferences.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
...they're called "web pages."
The entire notion of an eBook betrays outdated thinking. Web pages were invented to encode and transmit scientific papers. The difference between a collection of papers and a book is negligible.
HTTP readers even include bookmarking, which people claim to want in an "eBook reader." A web browser, like a real book, can place bookmarks ("favorites" in IE) on a specific page.
The eBook baby is born blue and silent, and nothing will wake him up. The web is a superset of the eBook.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
I've read the comments (at 4 and 5 only, is that irony for an AC ? ), and I agree with the wish lists. I would add "leather bound". Imagine in a few years sittings down with a couple THOUSAND books CROSSREFERENCED with PHOTOS and VIDEOS and each other of course and with notes you jot as you read and think - all in a paperback sized leather bound battery and photo-cell powered $100. stylus i/o digital library in a personal display unit.
l ogs/by subject-top.html
:
By the way, check out:
http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/cata
I just downloaded a FREE gigabyte of HTML books (WELL organized and indexed) - using the FREE Site Copier from:
WinHTTrack Website Copier 3.32-2
(C)1998-2003 Xavier Roche and other contributors
Web page
http://www.httrack.com
"Dear Gods!, I hope not. I think the loss of the scroll would be a giant leap backwards for civilization. Call me nostalgic, call me romantic, call me old-fashioned, but I think there's something soul-satisfyingly and fundamentally *right* about scrolls."
Scrolls, smolls, THOSE newfangled things will never replace the sturdy enduring cuniform on clay tablets!! Ahhh, the SMELL of it!!
More people with color PDAs with removable memory slots
Cheaper flash media (getting there)
Elimination of copy protection (Project Gutenberg and Baen.com are my primary ebook sources)
--"You can lead a man to knowledge, but you can't make him think."
I just don't get it.
Actually making the book is the cheapest part of the process. It costs about $1 to make the object itself - the rest of the price is marketing, royalties, distribution and markup. And paper? It's a renewable resource, and recyclable. On the other hand, electronic equipment is made in factories that produce any number of hideous toxins; plus, they often use batteries that pollute landfill. Nasty stuff, really.
So what is the advantage of doing this electronically? It isn't really cost; in any case, a reader will probably cost you a good chunk of $1 per book, unless you read a *lot* of books. A reader will also be less robust than a book, which will still "work" with the cover torn, the binding split, and all the pages creased and grubby.
And in exchange for all that, you'll have to read books by peering at screens that don't work in direct sunlight, that make you page up and down with buttons, are fragile, and use batteries.
I really, really don't see the point of eBooks. It sounds like tech for tech's sake.
1. Make the books with no DRM whatsoever.
2. Create a society were people respect other peoples work, and won't pirate copies.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Well there a few things you can do with a book that you either can't or shouldn't do with an ebook, or presumably they wont let you do with ebooks:
The last two points are just another impingement on our personal freedoms and property rights by non-human person-entities (companies), which will mean it will happen eventually, once the technology is sufficiently capable and cheap.
It'll mean the death of libraries, and everything will become 'user pays', 'pay per view'.
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
Yog wrote: Even easier: if you buy the hard copy of a book, you get a free download of the e-book. Sort of like providing the source code with a software application.
Baen basically did that when they published the most recent David Weber novel in the Honor Harrington series in paperback. In the back of the book was a CD-ROM with the full text of the book and (if memory serves) all the other books in the series. Apparently it didn't cause a problem because the next thing they did was to include John Ringo's entire backlist on a CD-ROM with his recent book Hell's Faire.
Baen has been distributing quite a few of its backlist titles for free in electronic form for reading on PDA's, onscreen, etc. and it has been increasing their sales. Check out the Baen Free Library if you enjoy science fiction or fantasy novels.
They also have a web subscription service where for $15/month you can get access to titles that are about to be published. The first month you get the first half of the book, the second month you get the next quarter, and the last month you get the final quarter, and they promise that a minimum of four books will be available in a given month. It looks like they have six available right now.
After the books are published, you can just buy an electronic version if you want for $4-6. That's a decent deal, considering that the even paperbacks often cost more than that these days.
hacksoncode wrote: Honestly, what college student is going to legitimately own 10,000 songs anyway?
Same with eBooks. Until you can download them easily and put the publishing industry out of business, they won't be popular.
There's a big difference between the songs that people were trading like crazy on Napster and e-books: there are a lot of books that are legitimately in the public domain. There are over 10,000 public domain books available through Project Gutenberg (as of October 2003), still more "free" books available from other sources either because they are public domain or because the rightholders decided to publish them on the internet, and many websites such as the New York Times allow downloading of daily content for offline reading.
What's more is that the file sizes are relatively small because they are, after all, merely text.
Frankly I'm tired of hearing people moan about publishers. I have been in the book business for most of my life and have done my fair share of grizzling, but one thing is for sure, as long as there are authors trying to earn a crust with their art, publishers will always be with us. And so they should be, because publishers fill a valuable, indispensible role in the business of books. They:
(Notice that I didn't say anything about printing or distribution.)
It is certainly true -- and they'll be the first to admit this -- that publishers do all three in a very haphazard way. But, for the lack of anyone else, they're the experts.
Think what it means to an author when they get a letter from Random House saying Random would like to publish their book. When that happens for the first time, it's often the greatest moment in an author's life. This is because Random has endorsed the book. The author feels great because a firm that should know what it's doing has decided to put some cash behind their created work. That same endorsement works the other way in influencing a reader's decision to read.
In the print world, there are significant costs in getting a book printed and distributed. That's why vanity publishing is such a small part of the overall industry. But, with the advent of the Internet and the promise of disintermediation, hundreds of thousands of appallingly bad ebooks got out there. Several companies raised mountains of cash, set up websites devoted to self-publishers. When they opened the floodgates and posted the awful slush that in a sane publishing environment would never see the light of day, nobody came. The cash burned away and the sites shut down.
Why didn't anyone come? Because there was no filter. No way of knowing if any of this stuff was any good.
A Simon and Schuster logo on an ebook doesn't guarantee that you'll enjoy it, but it does ensure a certain minimum quality control. Like, someone ran it through a spellchecker; it has an ending; there are more than 50 pages; and so on. Publishers foster talent by providing editorial guidance. And heaven knows, guidance is necessary even for the most accomplished author.
As for marketing, publishers do indeed advertise books across the media spectrum. But the returns from publishing a single book are not as grand as those from releasing a single movie, so it's unreasonable to expect to see a media blitz except for the most hotly anticipated titles. There's a huge amount of effort required from publishers to get their author's books reviewed. And they carry a massive payrol for reps to be out there visiting every bookstore and outlet on the country.
Complaining about publishers is like complaining about hospitals.You could argue that hospitals just get in the way between the patient and the doctor. But that would trivialize the massive infrastructure required to enable the important interface between patient and doctor to take place. Likewise with publishers, who are the people that bring the reader and author together.
Long after the last print book has crumbled to dust, someone will have to be there identifying and fostering talent and making us aware of good new books.
Stephen Cole www.ebooks.com
Most of us object to more new gadgets.
It's faster and efficient and flexible to peruse, buy, print and read. Witness the success of www.printandread.com.
It started as PeanutPress, but is now known as http://www.ereader.com/ has a free e-reader that works on Palm and Pocket PC PDA's as well as Mac and Windows desktops/notebooks.
They have a pretty good selection of current titles as well as a lot of classics.
As far as the reading experience goes, I think the current standard of Palm PDA's (320x320 or 320x480) works just fine. In fact I find that I much prefer to read on the PDA than the dead-tree version. It's lighter, smaller, it's always with me (fits in my pocket) (bit of geek factor - sigh). I can change the font size as might sight degrades with age :-). It has a built in back light - no more disturbing the spoulsal overunit.
I read "The Count of Monte Cristo" not long ago which is 1,000 pages or so (on par with "War and Peace"). I never would have finished it if not for the the PDA version. The book is huge. I was able to get a lot of reading done in the kids room while they were drifting off to sleep, or while waiting to pick them up, or while commuting.
There has been this misguided notion that the device needs to have the same look and feel as a book to succeed. Nonsense. In this case, the PDA form factor is much better regarding size and heft. The text width is much like reading a newspaper column - very natural. In fact, when I was sick for a spell, I found I could read much longer with a PDA than a "real" book. It's an easy one handed job (I suppose that may bring up other advantages) and I could roll over an many positions.
I even found their DRM to be pretty much a non-issue. You have a library on their web sight that includes every book that you purchaced. If you ever need to re-download it to a new device, it is all right there. The book is encrypted using your name and credit card number as keys. Thus you can open the book on any device that you have the free e-reader on.
The downsides?
1) Yes, I can't lend it to a friend, or sell it used.
2) I can't impress my friends with my impressive bookshelf when they come over. But how many among us actually have friends that come over :-)
3) They are often a bit less expensive than dead tree versions, but I think that they ought to be even less expensive given the lack of material, manufacturing and storage costs. Then again, shipping is always free - and really d*mn fast.
Cheers,
Steve