Upbeat on E-books

DavidRothman writes "Sunday's NYT Book Review will carry an upbeat article on e-books, complete with mention of the New York Public Library's impressive 3,000-title efforts. The writer, however, misses many of the recent developments of e-bookdom such as the debut of the $100 eBookwise-1150, a reborn Gemstar machine. And the DRM mess and the Tower of eBabel--the horrors that consumers, publishers and libraries face with conflicting proprietary formats of problematic durability and accessibility over the long term--don't get the space they deserve. So far the XML-related OpenReader project, in which I'm involved, is invisible to the big media even though major Internet e-book retailers are quietly coming aboard. Still, it's great to see Times contributor Sarah Glazer being far more receptive to e-books than are many journalists. More at TeleRead."

Comments

I know this is an oft repeated point but

[SpooForBrains]

I don't see ebooks catching on unless there's a sensible way to read them. Reading from a screen just isn't conducive to enjoyment of a book.

Oh, yeah, and my wife says how are you supposed to read an ebook in the bath?

Re:I know this is an oft repeated point but

[fireboy1919]

You know, I feel exactly the opposite way.

Before I got my PDA, I hadn't read more than two books for the fun a year since middle school. Two years ago I got a PDA and have read about 300 novels since then - finishing off the works of most of my favorite authors and starting new ones. I just started and finished the complete works of R.A. Salvatore last month, for example (well...half a book left, and then I'm starting on Tad Williams).

Here are the things I love about it:
You can read while drifting off to sleep. Reading a book requires page turning, which, when you're very, very relaxed, is an effort of coordination. Getting up and turning off the light is enough to make you wake back up again. The PDA will shut itself off, and I can set it to autoscroll, or just press the down button on my pda, both which are very minimal efforts by comparison. Why would I want to read when I'm that relaxed? It's a common phenomenon that the state right before sleep is when you have the greatest connection to your subconsious mind - your imagination is the strongest. Think of it as surround sound for books.

It's less strain on your eyes. With a good PDA, you get better resolution than normal text, and there's a backlight. You can read for longer periods of time without feeling eyestrain. After having seen and tried them, I would never buy an e-book reader because they don't consider this that important, whereas I find it paramount. This may be why there are so many people like you, who think that it's worse. The PDA that I currently use almost exclusively as an e-book reader is a Palm Tungsten E, which is noted for it's especially sharp screen.

You don't have to plan to carry books. A PDA is a convenient thing to have around anyway, so I've got a book with me anywhere. Standing in lines is much more fun now.

I put all my books into my PDA by converting whatever format I have into HTML, and then storing that with plucker, which compresses text into chunks (it uncompresses as the text is needed in an almost unnoticable manner). Usually I have about ten ~300 page novels on my PDA at any one time, which take up about 1.5MB. I have 26MB available for storage. Finish a book, start another without having to go get it.

As far as reading in the bath, I would suggest that a printed copy of a book would be ruined just as PDA would if you got it wet. However, e-books can be printed out, and if the print-out gets wet, you lose little. You don't have to print it all, either, so don't use the argument that printing takes a while. 30 pages at 8 1/2 x11 should be more than enough to turn your wife into a prune before she finishes.

Display Tech is the key.

[Bifster]

EBook tech really needs 4 things: 1) contrast ratio approaching paper 2) crisp resolution (anti-aliasing techniques makes fonts look blurry) 3) power to run such a display for at least 5 to 10 hours 4) light weight enough to be comfortable carrying around all day Without these features, I don't think the public will widely accept ebooks. Ebooks loose a certain intuitive spacial sense of location in the work that paper books provide. When you pick up a paper book, it's easy to find your place again and it's relatively easy to find former passages that one might like to refer back to from time to time. People don't like the disconnected homogeneous "loss of place" that one suffers with an ebook reader. Though I think people might be willing to adapt to a new interface if the above display and portability features were achieved though. Display and battery tech are just nowhere near capable enough and they're coming along much too slowly I think for ebooks to become ubiquitously adopted by the general public at least before the next decade I bet.

Re:Display Tech is the key.

[CAIMLAS]

That technology is available now in E-ink. The problem is, the company that makes it is only licensing it to fucking Sony, maker of the Librie, which isn't available in the US and has restrictive DRM. (The gumstix, which you may or may not have heard of, is what powers the librie, I believe. It's a gumstick-sized system, basically, using an Intel Xscale.)

Now, we need either a competing, similar technology to compete with the E-ink, or the release of the technology for other companies to work with.

Why I have purchased dozens of ebooks

[Andover Net]

1) I find modern pda very readable -- they are easy to carry, and you can read them at night with the lights low. With paper I must have a light on casting glare on my book.
2) I can get an ebook when I want one. When I want to buy an ebook I am usually not at the book store, but I am near the computer.
3) I can fit many ebooks on my pda - along with music and a few .avi episodes of Stargate, etc, etc. All this fits in my pocket.

Re:Pricing

[eclectro]

The eBooks however, seem to cost as much as their paper counterparts

Because the price of e-books, as with a lot of other things, have little to do with the cost of production....so there's less competition to reduce prices. It's all economics!

Yes, but there is a reason that nobody is buying them, and it's not lack of competition.

It is safe to assume that the person who is buying the ebook is not completely stupid as they know how to turn on a computer.

People know that the DRM is draconian for most commercial ebooks, that there is no standard, and that it costs a fraction of the cost of a regular book to produce.

To price an ebook the same as a regular book is insane, as most people prefer the dead tree version to handle on a day to day basis given the choice. It may change someday with better display technologies, but right now paper rules the world. It is also easier to photocopy a couple of pages if you wanted to where the heavily DRMed version would not give you the chance.

I really don't care if commercial ebook ventures crash and burn (and many have), because producers need to gain a sense of reality which they seem to be lacking.

Sure ebooks have a cost to produce. But to say that they are near anywhere that of a regular book is a bald face lie.

You're right, it is econimics, and economics is saying get a clue or go out of business