Slashdot Mirror
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."
eReader.com is having a free eBook promo this month, with a new one every day for $0.
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?
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
Just wondering, while this article is up, what people's thoughts are on the best reader for e-books?
I've been thinking of getting a PDA for a while, but have never been sure if I can get a simple one that works well for ebooks without a lot of useless flash I don't need to pay for...
Any hints on what people have found works well in terms of price, battery power, readibility/screen?
While I have been getting better acquainted with the joys of EBooks(metworking documentation on PDA is a beautiful thing ;) ), I wonder how much they will take off with the regular (aka non-geek) population. I admit to a strong bias for actual printed media, does anybody else have this bias as well? How much are Ebooks being used among the /. readershgip?
Requiem
I love technology and all, and I love using the computer, but after starting at my screen all day every day, if I ever feel like reading something, I'd prefer it wasn't backlit.
Electrons are free; it is moving them that becomes expensive.
I'm making the next generation version of this right now. eBooks will be big soon. http://www.gale.com/gvrl/
Most proponents of copyright expansion love to talk about how increased copyright powers make it safer to create and profit, which will give incentive to make more, ergo more choice. It seems like a classical dilemma, in another manifestation it is freedom versus security.
Customers don't get any tangible benefits out of a system that allows copyright holders to intrusively restrict their use of intellectual property. That is why systems like the one employed by iTunes work whereas most do not: in the case of iTunes, it only seeks to protect the status quo of the relationship between buyer and seller.
To that end, as part of the intellectual property right agreement, customers should have a legal right to force eBook publishers to let them print the eBook. If someone pays a few dollars for the eBook and then wants to print it, that is their right regardless of what the law says. It's the customer's paper and their expense. In most cases, it would just be cheaper to buy the print book anyway.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Till these damn things support PDF I will not buy one. It is the ONLY thing that is keeping me from buying one and no a PDA doesn't work as the screen is too small.
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.
wag more
bark less
E-books are a good idea, but I'm unimpressed with the hardware that displays them compared to the quality of traditional print.
One would think that in this day and age, someone could make a decent book plaque of some sort with a good display that doesn't give you an epileptic fit or a "lucy in the sky with diamonds" strobing effect after a couple of hours use.
It seems absurd that we have so many advances in CPU speed for instance, but essentially very little in the way of text legibility on monitors. It seems absurd that monitors mimic the dimensions of televisions, and yet the internet and computing in general is primarily a text based medium. I've seen some people rotate their TFT monitors for text, which is a great idea however I'd like to see a greater emphasis placed on making text readable.
Oh, and rendering and embeding decent fonts in html/xhtml wouldn't harm anyone either. It seems ludicrous that people in the 1450s had access to better rendered fonts than what we have to put up with on daily basis on our computers.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
If it's an open format, then presumably you could print it without too much hassle. Just because it's distributed electronically doesn't necessarily mean it has to stay in an electronic form for reading it. Electronic distribution on its own has all kinds of advantages if it's not done in a crippling way.
If there's enough of a demand over time, someone may even develop a bathroom ebook reader to which you could temporarily transfer your book at the page you're up to. One of the best things about open standards is that you're usually not restricted to whatever readers the publishing companies decide to dish out.
Yeah, it's not exactly as easy to do all of this right now. But I hope the concept of future ebooks doesn't get trodden down too much because of how people see them today.
Personally I really do like being able to put books on the shelf before and after I read them, but I read books on the screen occasionally and don't want to rule out ebooks in the future. I'd quite like a reader that looks and feels more like a regular book, perhaps using some form of digital paper that can be recycled for other books in the future. (Technology might still need to catch up with this one.)
why are the books still 20 dollars?
I would think that much of the cost of book would go to the production process. Layout, typesetting, printing binding and shipping.
The eBooks however, seem to cost as much as their paper counterparts.
I'd be more inclined to get an eBook reader if the books were more affordible.
I'm a big fan of books -- the type where you turn the pages, bend the spine, dog-ear a few corners, and occasionally highlight important bits as a reminder. I like the smell of old books that have been shelved and unopened for some time. Then again, I work at a public library so I may be a bit biased. :)
E-books have their place, though. I'm sure they're much easier to carry. Probably easier to search for text, too. As for archiving, they'll certainly stretch further than any physical shelf space. They don't have pages that tear off, no print that fades in time, no worries of physical damage whatsoever...except for water damage, that is.
In the end, I say let school textbooks go e-book. I'm sure it'll be cheaper that way, and revisions would be more immediate than dead-tree versions. There won't be a book buy-back (so that $5 return on that $80 hardbound won't be there to feed you ramen through the holidays) but at least you'll save on the initial purchase...and you'll need to lug less weight around from class to class.
As far as novels, poems, and other bits of fiction, I'll stick to regular books. There's just something about that page-turning tactile thing that I'd otherwise miss.
I know, I know, you can't make money putting things in ASCII. My real point is to encourage consumption of Free stuff.
Subtle, huh.
sigs, as if you care.
uhm, 2000 books is very few.
Project Gutenberg sports over 13,000 books (these are legal)
if you go to your local alt.binaries.ebooks or just #ebook you can easily double or triple Gutenberg count (my current library has around 30,000 books). Ofcourse would not so legal to download/own as they still would technically be under a copyright. But then, some of the books are easier to download illegaly than to get them at a library (as soon as I found out that my library has Shadow Puppets by Orson Scott Card I signed up and was waiting for over 7 months till I downloaded it).
and if are a maniac (as I am) of reading, but prefer to read legal things, then you could/should go with the lower quality writtings that are provided through various BBS archives various pr0n archives, as well as fan finction. Heck, there is even wikibooks.
What is needed is some project that makes a global internet library out of all of these resources. Where we have things rated per genre (tied with the iblist or, ugh, amazon) But for all the texts, not just published/bookstore works.
If any Apple marketing guys happen to be reading this, the device should be called an iPage.
Of course, in Apple style, they'll probably start calling eBooks by their new name, iBooks, and before long everyone will be updating their websites to reflect the new naming conventions...
Someone posted RMS's short story on Slashdot a week or so ago, but it seems topical now so I repeat it here: http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Hrm. Seems a bit exhorbinantly priced, to me. Otherwise, I agree completely: apple could really get this off the ground,
In my mind, $80-100 is a good ballpark for such a device, with $150 being the possible ceiling. We're talking about a frickin' book reader here, not an MP3 player. Books take up a couple hundred K, a meg or two at best. You could fit an entire personal library's worth of books in a couple hundred megs of space. Not only that, but unlike music or movies, you generally don't need an accessory to play them (DVD player/TV/stereo, CD player/stereo). If people are going to be paying half what a paper book costs (or even 1/3rd - seems the reality is more like 85% or morethough), and you don't actually get a phyiscal copy, you're not going to be wanting to pay several hundred dollars to read it. There's no cost competition there.
The internals would be quite inexpensive in comparision to the iPod, too, in my mind. It need not hold any internal memory beyond that for the OS: a couple hundred kilobytes, at best. It could have internal memory - 32 Mb or so, I guess. The cost for that much memory would be trivial. It would likely be able to run for months worth of reading off of a couple AA batteries (provided it was using an e-ink screen, or similar/equivilant technology). The processor power would also be trivial, because it only takes a couple dozen megahertz at best to parse a document and display it to a screen (provided the software is well-written). Throw in a simple media port (SD, I guess) and interface port (USB), and you've got expandability and interconnectivity.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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. .avi episodes of Stargate, etc, etc. All this fits in my pocket.
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
Of course, in Apple style, they'll probably start calling eBooks by their new name, iBooks...
I don't know how tongue-in-cheek your post was, but I'll bite... Apple already has a product called iBook...
I think you have the copyright argument backward. The ultimate goal of copyright law is to allow people to create their works without having to worry about others republishing or taking claim of the creation.
The end result of strong copyright (and widespread respect for copyrights) is that publishers can present their works in simpler, universal formats.
When there is no respect for copyrights, then publishers must resort to other measures to protect their works.
If we had widespread respect of copyrights, then there would be no need for technologies that prevent people from copying music or printing eBooks.
Likewise, Open Source would be stronger if there was respect for copyrights. In theory, the OSS, GNU, etc., are built on the tradition of copyright. Companies are more willing to produce source for clients when they do not fear that their source will be stolen by a competitor.
This is where you really are missing the point. You are basically trying to turn the argument for more freedom for the consumer into restrictions on the freedom of the publisher. Creators of software should not have any such restrictions on what they create. The groups pushing for restrictive and intrusive technologies do so because they claim that there is no longer any respect for copyright law. If there was respect for copyright law, then I could sell you an MP3 for a nickel and not worry about you "republishing" the MP3 by giving it to all of your friends.
I'm reading Ian M. Bank's Algebraist currently. Its a huge 700 page hard cover. It is was available in e-book format I would have finished it long ago on my pocketpc. I could have read it easily in bed with the lights off, while waiting for others to arrive at a meeting, in a queue. It is too big, bulky and heavy to cart around, so currently its lying next to my bed, and has been for last 2 weeks.
I really cant understand why Sci-fi authors dont get behind the idea. Its described enough in their novels for them to understand the concept, isn't it?
Surur
Information is the location of things. Computation is moving things around.
What's wrong with .txt and .html format? All my ebooks have been saved in either of these, and I've converted them to the proprietary format of whatever flavor of doc reader I'v felt like using at any given time. The problem is with sources that provide ONLY the proprietary version and don't even give you and option for .txt or .html. If I can't read the book in whatever reader/browser I have, I'm not going to pay to download and read it.
1.Netcraft confirms:In Soviet Russia all your base welcomes a beowolf cluster of CowboyNeal overlords. 2.? 3.Profit!!1!
I read EBooks on my PDA on the train etc.. it's a lot easier than manageing a real book (smaller, no pages). because the screen is a lot more compact on a PDA (or PDA/Phone) it makes reading a lot nicer than a using 20inch LCD.
I expect there are even some phones that you could take in the bath.
A pda could also read the book to you, which is quite good for the train too.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
You may not remember, but the primary reason we have such robust Network Interface Cards from a variety of manufacturers today is that there was fierce competition between standards in the early days of networking. NICs were pounded through an evolutionary process and we ended up with a more robust product.
The idea there there should only be one operating system and one chip set led to the dual Intel/Microsoft monopolies. Personally, I think the RISC based processors were following a better design path. Unfortunately, the pressure to have only one chipset and one OS that would run ALL programs led to the worst possible solution: the Microsoft and Intel blob.
Imagine how much more fun we would have with 20 or 30 fundamentally different CPU designs on the market, and hundreds of competing Operating Systems? Personally, I think the world is better when there's a ton of different competing technologies on the market.
By jove, your right. Looks like they've painted themselves into corner on this one.
How about iDoc (short for iDocument)? Is that taken yet?
I read Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" on my PDA -- carting around 1,000 page paper books is a pain -- literally! But with my PDA I could read them wherever and whenever I wanted.
Really, I'm surprised at the Luddite "paper forever" attitude that so many people have here on Slashdot -- it's the sort of attitude I'd expect people who still use typewriters and record players to have...
eBooks have turned out to be a great way to fill the gap between articles on a Web site of a few thousand words and the increasingly large exhaustive tomes of 1,000 pages in print. I and a bunch of other authors have written books in the TidBITS' Take Control series for Adam and Tonya Engst, and we've sold collectively in the tens of thousands of "copies."
The books are all about 50 to 150 pages, running $5 to $10 each. They're in PDF form without any DRM enabled. We've turned six of them into print books (four in one volume and two others as single volumes). We use the eBook in part as a way to mature the books: buyers get a subscription to the edition and keep getting updates as we add, correct, and update the books.
For instance, I wrote Take Control of Your AirPort Network focusd on Mac Wi-Fi networks. The first edition was about 70 pages. The 1.1 release ballooned to well over 100 pages because I listened to what readers want and added it in. All the buyers of 1.0 got 1.1 for free.
More recently I spend a couple of hours incorporating all of the changes that Apple introduced with the AirPort 4.1 software update (fairly extensive small fixes and improvements). All the 1.0 to 1.1.2 buyers get 1.1.3 for free, too.
It's rewarding for me as an author to get the kind of quick and precise feedback from readers to write better books and then be able to shoot out those books to the original buyers and all new buyers. It's all a good financial return.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
More than likely this is something they'd add to the iPod. At this time I don't see Apple coming out with any more digital devices.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Why spend the $100 bucks on a reader, if the e-books are not going to be discounted? Most people already have an e-book reader it is called your pda. I read my e-books on my handspring Visor. Even though my unit is old I don't find the reading to be a strain. The only book I bought was the cartridge for the star trek books the Domininon war 1-4 and the Q Continuum 1-3. The pda screens are getting much better and the we (the tin-foil hat crowed) carry pda every place. I find myself reading the books during my down time. Waiting in line at the groccery store, in the Dr's office. I get to chose what I want to read as opposed to a selection of magazines. Digital text for text books are so much better then the paper versions. The ability to search for the information, to make notes of nearly unlimited length, are great. Digarams and pictures do suffer. Why this is not a bigger seller on campuses is beyond me.
I have written a novel which I placed on the web as a HyperNovel, if you will. The format gives me the freedom to include complex graphics and tables, links to my sources or allusions, (no to mention soundtrack MP3's, which I'm not mentioning) and the ability to tweak text as I go. In return, the user can control the font face and size, the color and style of a background (or not), and they have full control of the size of the viewing window, and thus, the wrap length.
:">, people don't want to read it on their computers! (Ok, i'm calm now...)
;-)" so that it would slide through the changes of politics, administrations and computer technology, and remain '20 minutes into the future'. But what's the point if I can't get the "upgrades and patches" to the reader in a format that they WILL read?
But even though it has received favorable feedback, including from Neil Peart
On the other hand, I also produced PDF formats of various layouts, including the "submission guideline compliant" versions and one that borrows the typography from Jordan's Crown of Swords paperback. But if they print the pages from the PDF, it totals 654 pages. The submissions guideline version is 957 sheets of paper! The total printing cost at Kinko's would be about $40. You would smoke two Epson black ink cartridges, at like $28 each! Trying to print two sides to save paper costs in patience, time and sanity.
What are we supposed to do? I wanted the book to be 'live' in that it could have "services packs
Does Da 'Net have an answer? Some site where you submit a URL to a PDF and $10 on yer credit card and get a gift-wrapped printout shipped to you? Is there any technological fix for this dilemma? Is there any way to get digital verbal content into a lower cost, readable, comfy format for the reader? If not, anyone have a literary agent I can borrow?
StarGlider29a
"You have the right to remain silent... anything you say will be used in my next book..."
PS: You l33tz are smooth enough to figure out what my URL is. So in an attempt to avoid slash-dotting my server, please instead peek at a low overhead, imageless, slash-dot friendlier mirror for the raw (ugly) content: http://www.traffiscope.com/slashdot/mirror/
Apple could do this better than any other company; but, as a student of usability, I don't think eBooks will catch on for a while. Its an interesting idea but there are major problems:
1. The biggest one is that screen resolution just isn't there yet. Even on my 23" 1920x1200 LCD screen or my 22" 1600x1200 CRT, I still prefer to print out a page. It is easier on the eyes, especially for long times. The problem is 10x worse on a mini screen. I would suffer if I had to read everything on my PDA.
2. Books are lighter, easier to carry, and sustain more damage. I can drop my book, cram it into a pack, and at worst get ruffled pages.
3. If a book gets stolen, I'm out a few dollars for a paperback and at most about $75 for a computer book. Paranoia ensues for carrying around a $400 e-book reader.
4. If it's Apple, there will be some fancy (and good) newfangled navigation but few things beat the speed and ease of use of flipping through pages. A post-it or even a piece of toilet paper makes a great bookmark. Years of printing have actually standardized a nice user interface for books that works well: contents at front, pages on the side of each page, chapter title at the top of each page and an index at the back.
Even in front of a computer with the Internet (the greatest eBook), I still crack open real books when needing programming info. Sure I'll find obscure stuff on the Internet, but for a little in depth reading, a good book is hard to beat.
Sunny
Be my Friend
For me digitally distributed magazines are the future of ebooks. I don't want to read a novel on my computer because I want it as a book which I can put in my bookcase (and show off what great books I've read ;). But I don't want to keep weekly/monthly journals/magazines physically, so it is much more convenient to read them on a Tablet PC in vertical mode and then store them on my harddisk for later retrieval.
To paraphrase William Gibson's remarks to an NYC audience last month, eBooks won't be worth the paper they're printed on until they can be read in the bathtub comfortably risk-free. eBooks might be great, but the readers's searching/bookmarking/storage/networking features don't compensate for the simplicity of disposable paper books, and their high-touch user interface. Just because the NYT wants to get out of the expensive paper business doesn't mean the rest of us should be chained to a buzzy gizmo to read at the beach.
--
make install -not war
Except for physical space, this is a common misconception. Keeping digital data intact for years is much more difficult. You'll need to renew the storage medium continuesely over a long time and recovery is often far more difficult if you fail to do so
As soon as e-books have the same availabilty,accessebilty and ease of use as standard books, they'll take over. However at this point we're way real far from that situation. Having a pda which you have to continuesly babysit for power and which you won't risk going to bath with ain't a serious contender for standard books.
red
In other words, information should be locked down unless Microsoft agrees--after a review of the data, which involves signing the copyright over to them, along with permission to use the information in any way they see fit, including selling your personal information for fun and profit--that it should be allowed to make itself useful, temporarily.
All I want out of an ebook device is XHTML support, embedded SVG (for graphics), standard CF and SD card support, and a long battery life. The screen should be at least 320x480, but 640x480 or 800x600 would be better. Color is not necessary, and a transflective display would be preferred. Upon insertion of any card, it should display "index.htm" in the root directory of that card and don't do anything else.
Amongst these authors are some of the highest selling sci-fi authors around, as well as hugo and nebula winners.
I use ziplock sandwich bags I bought in a 99pence shop.
As for whether reading from a screen is conducive to enjoyment of a book: you'll either get used to it or you won't. I suspect most people could get used to it and find it enjoyable if they gave it a chance. Have you?
Wouldn't it be nice if a textbook could have animations showing exactly why the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus works? (Demonstrate that the slope of the graph of the integral is the derivative that you're integrating.)
A car servicing manual would be much more illuminating if it had animated cartoons showing exactly how the engine worked.
None of this is possible for dead paper books.
No kidding, I bought an ebookwise a week ago, and have been loving it. I also read it in the bath .
(Actually if you must know, I was reading Lessig's book).
Reading in the bath is probably not a good idea to do all the time, but ebookwise devices are 100$, and I exercised proper caution.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
tofu is an oddly named, but extremely useful text reader for osX. It breaks the text into columns exactly as tall as the window. To navigate, you simply shift columns. Far better than vertical scrolling. I've read several books on my powerbook, and I've found that I prefer it to paper when reading in bed at night (no need to have a light on being the primary benefit)
I have nothing to do with this software. I chanced across it, and I'm surprised at how useful it has proved to be.
Apple will do what they did with the SuperDrive.... just use the old name for the new thing and hope nobody notices....
um, guys?
The iPod IS an ebook. It wouldn't take much to make it work. As a matter of fact, people are already using iPods to read text. Check out this sort-of eBook creator, or this iPod ebook creator.
I'm certain that Apple's IP-conscious designers are making it as difficult as they can to use the iPod as anything nearly like an ebook, but they can only do so much. And someday, non-powered nonvolatile eInk-like screens will be used instead of LCDs, which will make hacking a usable eBook screen a lot easier.
You could store ten of thousands of books on a low-end iPod.
I have been reading the majority of my fiction through ebooks on Pocket PC (using the Peanut Press / ereader reader) for several years now.
I was much the same as many people, in that I thought that losing paper would also take something else away from the experience, and balked at the idea.
But I gave it a go. Originally on a Palm PC many years back, and I now struggle to get through a book on paper. Quite simply, it is too inconvenient.
My book has its own light source. It is lighter than most books. I find that turning a page on an ebook is actually less intrusive than paper. By the time my eyes have scanned back up to the top of the page, the new page is there ready to read, with seemingly no physical action on my part, as the mechanics of changing to the next page become more subconcious than with paper.
I also almost always have my pda with me, so gone are the days where I would have to carry a pda and a book somehow. Gone are the days where I would have an unexpected boring wait to get through without any stimulus. I can read almost anywhere, at any time. Standing in a queue. Waiting for the bus.
Now I am using ebooks, I find I am reading significantly more than I possibly could with paper books.
And my life is richer for it.
The benefits for me make the cons hard to see. Reading in the bath? Well, I shower, so thats a non-issue for me. But plenty of people manage to use the phone in the bath. Raining? I find pdas are relatively water resistant. Paper books don't fair too well in the rain either.
Of course there is battery to consider. If you used a pda primarily for reading, then thats 2-3 hours of reading in a day if you charge it fully each night.
Which is good going.
I was surprised. Now I don't want to go back.
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The cheapest book readers right now are the old palm pilots. They have low power processors running at double digit mhz speeds, long battery lifetimes and small internal memory (2-16Mb).
As old pdas they suffer for their old technology (poor screens, no media ports, serial connectivity) but they follow the correct philosophy for building a cheap bookreader and they're more than powerful enough to do the job.
When you're only manipulating text and a few images you don't need fast, powerful hardware.
Get mine from irc.nullus.net #bookwarez.
Read them on by Tungsten E ($130 cdn) used to read them on my Palm ($30 for a cheap palm.
Rechargeable internal battery is a good idea, you'll go through a lot otherwise.
5) ability to read in direct sunlight. If I can't rely on being able to use my reading device when I'm stuck in the sun (agh, it BURNS!) then I can't trust it and it becomes only an occasional convenience.
If I'm going to carry a reading device around everywhere, I need to be able to trust that it is usable to me at all times.
I heard a couple years ago about display technology that IBM was devloping which could maintain superb contrast ratio even in direct sunlight. They initially planned on using it on camcorders and digital cameras (where sunlight often interferes in the usability of these gadgets). But they also intended to eventually move this technology into large scale full-sized computer displays. Part of the demo of this tech involved shining bright halogen lamps directly on the display so that users could see that they remained quite readable in intense light. Since that preview though I have heard nothing more... I wonder if they hit some kind of manufacturing costs snag or something?
Does anyone know any specifics about what I am referring to?
wag more
bark less
I know its discontinued, but you can find them on ebay, and they rock. I love my 1100.
Yay me!
Zip-loc bag isn't a bad idea, but reading a baggie eBook sucks compared to reading a paper magazine, even without grep.
As for Gibson, remember that he's paid to *write* for a living. He's actually paid well, because he's been so prescient, so convincingly self-fulfilling in his prophecies, that people keep buying his books as blueprints for our future. Because he understands people better than he understands technology. FWIW, he missed the "cellphone" in his cyberpunk future. So maybe we're headed for eBooks faster than we think, and the future sucks even more than he depicted in the Sprawl.
--
make install -not war
I think we're living the same life...
Yay me!
I have the feeling that they're just blaming the lack of sales on internet piracy instead of just admitting that a lot of this stuff just sucks ass.
Apple should invent an e-book reader.
:)
They already had one, years ago. It was called the Newton.
Back when I was working for ANS - err, UUNet - umm, WorldCom - I would download text files, convert them to Newton Book files, upload them to my trusty Newton 2100, and read away. I read The Hacker Crackdown while taking lunchtime walks, as well as a few RFCs.
The Newton's form factor would still be great for an ebook reader. There's still a small but rabid base of people still writing software for the Newton, including mp3 players, 802.11 support, and even a web server! Surely someone can be persuaded to come up with a modern book reader / creator package for the Newton.
The only problem with this is the pride of Steve Jobs. One of his first actions upon returning to the Apple helm was the killing of the entire Newton program, ostensibly as it was the baby of John Sculley, the man who had Jobs removed from Apple. Apple still has the rights to the name and the hardware, and the Inkwell software that's included with OS X supposedly came from the Newton handwriting recognition software, so I can't see a reason why this wouldn't be possible.
Then again, I'm a hopeless dreamer about seeing the best PDA platform in existance making a return to the market
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
The failure of E-Books is another example of what happens when you spend all your time and energy trying to build restrictions into a product, instead of concentrating on making a good product at a fair price.
I think the parent's point is that the "free" ebooks are in the public domain and free anyway, when it's implied that the "free" ebooks being "given away" are actually commercial titles still under copyright.
I've always found it odd that many online stores are selling ebooks which are actually in the public domain...
You are aware that LotR contains maps, timelines, commentaries and so forth?
"Um... excuse me, but the constitution says no such thing. It doesn't even imply it."
Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power
Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Having read a lot of ebook text I so far have not found anything much better than ascii and jpegs, in the end. HTML is also good if you have good software for it. (By good I mean you can view embedded images and zoom/pan them on a small screen, slow cpu; you can transparently copy, save and search plain text without worrying about html tags; you can easily view and convert formatting with free tools, etc. Anyway ascii is best so far.
The major problem I see is how to store, index, and search when you have a lot of ebooks from many different publishers. For example there are no standard filename formats to include author and title information, and limitations on filenames also mean you basically want to have some metadata at the head of the document. So a simple standard for an ascii header at the top of a file would be good. This problem is of course much worse if you have different file/reader/compression formats so I am just thinking of ASCII here.
I've bought the same book several times over from my favorite authors over the years. That is dumb but even now my apartment is full of paperbacks and I keep tying them up with string into bundles which I can't get into anymore. I hate throwing away books but it is nuts. So I would like to get credit when I buy something from an author, so I can get a digital file when I buy the book and a copy any time thereafter for free. If I want a printed copy I pay the printing cost. But I should not have to pay 2 or 3 times for the copyright, and I should be able to store and manipulate electronically the text. I should be able to email or post on the web quotations from it, or put passages from it into my word processor.
When I was studying writing in school, I heard that one well known writer (maybe Kurt Vonnegut?) typed the entire text of his favorite writers on his typewriter, to learn how to write well. That seems like a really excellent way to train.
My opinion is that writers are writing for a couple reasons, one maybe is money (though 99% of the time not for more than making a living at it) and the other is to get what you want to say out. Maybe another reason (Heinlein says) is because you are infected with the writer's bug and cannot stop. (Luckily I stopped before I caught it, as you can see by my long, winding posts).
So I think the brief blurb on the inside cover of printed books about how this work may not be electronically copied etc. is complete anachronism and insulting. The point is, in the 21st century you should be able to do that. You should even be able to trade with friends, like you do with books. The part about not publishing it yourself and stealing profit from writers is a separate consideration which is important maybe but not the most important message writers want to send to their readers. So it may not be a popular opinion, but I think that writers should (and some are beginning to) embrace the Net as a way to get more people to know them, and trust their readers. In general this has already I believe been proven to work.
To me, I am most worried about how to maintain a well-organized, perpetual store for my personal digital library, which will not fall apart or become inaccessible as I move between operating systems and computers , will allow me to have both ascii and dvd together, will have some security maybe via an online backup, will let me trade with friends, will let me discover new works, will let me reimburse authors I like, will save me money so I don't have to repurchase dead tree copies, and will let me carry around a few hundred ascii books on my palm's memory stick.
Also I need a good book reader for linux, that is another perpetual quest but the most important thing I think is to achieve some open least common denominator standards and to create open text archives. Authors who don't want to participate can stay out of it, but there are a lot of books not in the bookstore and a lot of authors probably would like to become better known. Personally I have used an ol
that you can't pose a few on the coffee table to make yourself look intellectual/arty or whatever when someone's coming round that you want to impress... also you can't exactly have a nice impressive display of ebooks on your bookshelf either... having Mobipocket open with the library display just doesn't compare.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
where's the code to download then??? where's the stuff for us to break??? It appears that all you've been doing is playing politics and generating a very pretty roadmap. And now you want us coders to come in and do the real work for you.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
My read of choice is a Rocket e-book. Baen supports the formats, there's enough out of copywrite stuff out there to keep me satisfied.
The Internet Public Library has a catalog of over 20 000 online, publicly available books and has cataloged a comparable number of online, publicly available magazines and newspapers. Unfortunately, that part of the database is down for a time while the back-end is moved to a new provider. (The old provider stopped on too short notice.)
If you feel you must spend money on e-books, then at least make that a good investment in the form of a donation to Gutenberg, Runeberg, etc. or to EFF or another group to make copyright laws more reasonable once again.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
It's pretty damned easy to photocopy a book, and it's not realy that expensive or difficult to OCR it, so realy paper is piss poor DRM.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
I'd quite like a reader that looks and feels more like a regular book
Well, it don't quite look like a book but it seems to work fine on T.V.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
"The exclusive rights supported are"
Note: supported by copyright law, not by the constitution.
""However, during that time the writer is still borrowing the work from the public."
Neither clause supports this statement."
Truth be told, I did make an assumption; namely, that the constitution makes sense, and that it does not describe token rights that nobody has use of.
It only makes sense for the constitution to allow congress to grant an author exclusive rights to his work if the author did not already have those rights. From that, and the assumption that the US constitution is not a non-sensical document, I conclude that authors do not automatically have these rights.
What's more, if the constitution had not mentioned copyrights at all, congress would have been free to invent them and make them as bad as they could. This, to me, clearly means that the Founding Fathers meant copyrights and patents to be a very limited thing, something that should be applied with caution.
There's nothing odd about public domain works to be sold. To the contrary, it is the nature of the public domain that anything can be used in any way you like.
That, however, has little to do with format conversion. AC, what development work does it take to dump the ASCII file from Gutenberg onto the Palm sevice? That is something I do on a regular basis, and all it takes is the minute I need to start and run Pyrite Publisher.
Perhaps you are talking about adding value to the text (prettifying, adding commentary, adding in links, et cetera), but a trained person can do that in a few hours.
Case in point: Distributed Proofreaders, main supplier of Project Gutenberg, now submits over 70% of its etexts both in ASCII and HTML format. Having the HTML file available cuts tremendously on making nice-looking PDFs or other formats, and allows us to retain much of the original lay-out of a work. This is all done by volunteers, many of whom had no experience with HTML whatsoever before they started working with us. The learning curve seems to steep, but after a few books most people seem to be comfortable producing great HTML editions. (And for every one of the few volunteers who just do not get the hang of it, there are several volunteers who are glad to do nothing but HTML editions.)
"History has shown that present copyright has been more an asset than a hinderance."
Is it something in the weather? This is at least the third broad, unsubstantiated claim about copyright I have seen in this thread. Please, show us some evidence. (And yes, I am aware that you are not capable of showing that evidence for lack of parallel worlds.)
History suggests that in the years between the invention of the Gutenberg press and the invention of the digital copy, some reasonable copyright has been benificial to the production of works.
BTW, granting monopolies are not the only government instrument for counteracting market failure. In chapter six of his book Promises to Keep (parts of it available online), William Fisher outlines three of these alternatives: government can supply works themselves (think public television), governments can pay private parties to supply works, and governments can issue prizes/awards for works.
Of course, authors have other incentives besides what the government can offer. From what I hear, magazines that publish short stories offer the same per-word price to authors as they did thirty years ago, even though inflation has made all other goods twice as expensive. It is pretty safe to conclude from that, that authors aren't merely writing for money.
"Don't forget that trademarks, and patents are also part of what made your computer possible. Patronage most likely wouldn't have."
Speak for yourself. The two most important recent events in the development of my computers were that IBM and Xerox decided _not_ to enforce their cpt. That gave us the GUI and the PC architecture.
Today's free ebook is The Wizard of Oz, by Frank L. Baum. That's two public domain books that the buyer could have gotten for free anyway.
Perhaps I should start a fitness center that offers free one-hour work-outs. Then when somebody takes me up my offer, I tell them to leave the building and go and run for an hour.
Also one of my favorites: bars that have a sign that says: "Tomorrow free beer".
Any business that treats their customers like that deserves exactly the kind of customers that will treat them similarly in return.
Anonymous washed-up Coward, just because they hose your rabid ass down in the lockup, doesn't mean you should waste our time with your Internet privileges. Go back to breaking rocks, or "scrubbing poles", or whatever you convicts do.
--
make install -not war
Those of us with kids know that books for kids should stay traditional. I don't have to worry about batteries and boot time. No worries about dropping the unit, or spilling milk on it. Large colorful pages don't take up megabytes of disk space. Sure there's no sound effects or a robot reading to them; but seriously, what machine can replace a parent sitting down with his/her child and reading for the child, making noises, and funny faces?
Linux at home
for one I like having the actual real book in my hands (among many reasons: i enjoy the smell). I adore being able to annotate to my hearts content (a lot of books, like some of J. Joyce's offerings, are impossible without taking notes in the margins).
But mostly I doubt ebooks taking off because once you move to a digital format you have a lot of problems selling your product because the cost to the customer of replication is nil. This is why going to cds in the 80s eventually led to p2p once the personal computers got powerful enough. It is a byproduct of the digital asthetic (or paradigm) in general. You can see this in action at Project Gutenburg. Information wants to be free (speech and beer).
00010111 always try everything twice
Not much of a promo, since the books they're "giving away" are public domain. They probably just copied the text from Project Gutenberg.
As someone who uses a NZD40 secondhand Palm V as a book reader -- they're fine. The screen is only 160x160, but the text is nice and sharp, and a good size. Some models have worse screens, of course. I don't see the problem with having a serial port -- converters to USB are cheap and plentiful, and it's not as if you're going to be transferring more than a few hundred kilobytes at a time.
:-)
The other nice thing about the Palm V in particular is you can drop it from a height of a metre or two onto carpet and it won't break
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
actually, the iBook is a fine eBook reader. I have to take a computer when I travel anyway and the 12 in. iBook does not take up much space, has good resolution, and when you are tired of reading you can watch a DVD or listen to music. If you need a computer anyway,the eBook feature is free. Both PalmReader and Adobe Reader are avaiable. In fact, since I lost my treo 600 and got Skype and bluetooth headphones, it is my reader, my mp3 player, my phone and it is still a fine computer, in case I decide to do some work.
ivan
If the authors would be able to take there books straight to an editor for a fee ($500-1000 dollars for a couple days work), and and then published the books, and sold them through Amazon, and could get listed on Bestsellers lists by virtue of the sales of the electric copies, books could be sold for a couple dollars less than the cost of a paperback. With no printing or transport costs, and a few good literary reviewers to filter the material, which could be run as a blog or a popular reading site.