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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?
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.
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!
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.
Till these damn things support PDF...
If it helps, Fictionwise sell all their non-encrypted e-books in PDF, and half a dozen other formats too.
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
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.
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
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 $10 on yer credit card and get a gift-wrapped printout shipped to you? Is there any technological fix for this dilemma? Is there any way to get digital verbal content into a lower cost, readable, comfy format for the reader? If not, anyone have a literary agent I can borrow?
StarGlider29a
"You have the right to remain silent... anything you say will be used in my next book..."
PS: You l33tz are smooth enough to figure out what my URL is. So in an attempt to avoid slash-dotting my server, please instead peek at a low overhead, imageless, slash-dot friendlier mirror for the raw (ugly) content: http://www.traffiscope.com/slashdot/mirror/
I use ziplock sandwich bags I bought in a 99pence shop.
As for whether reading from a screen is conducive to enjoyment of a book: you'll either get used to it or you won't. I suspect most people could get used to it and find it enjoyable if they gave it a chance. Have you?
No kidding, I bought an ebookwise a week ago, and have been loving it. I also read it in the bath .
(Actually if you must know, I was reading Lessig's book).
Reading in the bath is probably not a good idea to do all the time, but ebookwise devices are 100$, 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.
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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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