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Sony Reader Now Available
Yaksha42 writes "The Sony Reader, which debuted at CES in January, is now available for purchase on the Sony website. The six inch screen uses E Ink, rather than an LCD, to display the text, reducing strain on the eye while reading. While you can buy books on Sony's Connect site, you can also load eBooks and other text onto the Reader in a variety of formats, including PDF and TXT files. It also comes with the ability to receive newsfeeds, display JPG images, and can play unsecured MP3 and AAC music files. Additional information can also be found on the Learning Center site."
For example they have manga too(albeit a small selection right now). If Sony doesn't fuck it up totally it could be an interesting distribution model. But given their history in this type of thing, I don't have too much confidence.
Monstar L
Imagine a Project Gutenburg DVD loaded on one of these.
See, I love the idea. I even might be willing to pay $350(!!!) for the damn thing. But the eBooks are still too damn expensive! Looking at Sony Connect shows, for example, "Marley and Me," "I Feel Bad About My Neck," and "Ricochet" as a 'bundle' for $42.03 as opposed to the list price of $53.89. *WHAT*?! With music I still think iTunes et al are often overcharging, but at least music has an inherent production cost, even if digital distrobution becomes cheaper. Don't lie to me and say books have the same production cost when distributed digitally and I should save a 'whopping' 11 bucks and change. Books distributed digitally become (almost) pure profit in a way music or movies can't, simply due to the nature of having to produce the damn things.
Even the 'better' deals (Angels and Demons for $5.59) still seem absured.
Jeeze, Sony. It's so like you! Create a really cool product, technologically, then have shit media for sale. And I want so hard to like e-readers...
-Trillian
I'm kind of excited about this thing but at $350 you could buy A LOT of paperbacks before making up for the cost.
http://www.trashingtrailers.com/
for some things, like manuals in the field or for work elements or long bus rides and such, but not for casual home use. If I'm gonna read a book, I like to sit in a recliner and actually turn pages. The only thing I would use it for is for traveling or having reference on the fly.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
A recent Sony product I actually want??
That's unpossible!
I need to see one live, but I like what I see so far - The ability to also display pdf, word and txt are a (finally) smart move by Sony, and the mp3 AND AAC capability is a nice bonus.
The GUI for the Connect app looks awful familiar though...
Yeah... They even have downloadable rootkits.
This looks great for people in academics. I read 100 pages or so per week of articles in PDF that I may never read again. Reading them on an LCD screen is a huge pain, so I usually end up printing them out (and of course using both sides and recycling). This would save me a lot of paper.
I've been following these e-ink readers since I've first read about the technology. I'm an avid reader and re-read all the books I enjoy many times. Having all my books available on a SD card in a reader which lasts like 20 books worth on a single charge, all while looking a lot like real paper is like a dream come true for me.
:(
The main competition to this sony reader seems to be the Iliad from I-Rex. I think it is a much nicer reader for a couple reasons.
It has a nice page turn interface, it has a proper paperback A5 sized screen, and runs linux. There has already been quite a bit of hacking on it. Can code your own readers for various formats etc.
The downsize? It is like $850 instead of $350 of the sony
Guess I'm still stuck waiting till the iliad comes down in price or another reader comes out at a lower price point. These things are way to specialized for the price they are demanding.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
http://www.sony.net/Products/Linux/Download/catego ry3.html#2
The older, Japan only model is there too. As well as various other interesting products.
The disconnect for e-book isn't LCD eye-strain. It's the tactile connection to a book.
The ability to tote a book anywhere and curl up and read it: either under a tree or in front of a fireplace or at a friend's house...the actual weight of the book, the thickness of the pages....thats a book. Thats why people buy books.
Not the lack of eye-strain.
"I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly shadowed seaport of dea
eh... at say $10 a paperback, you could buy 35. project gutenberg alone has 19,000 books, add to that innumberable articles available online, etc. etc. i think it's a good value.
I like being able to share books with friends. I doubt that Sony's going to allow me to lend my book license to someone else, nor am I likely to find electronic books in a used bookstore. Libraries probably won't be allowed to offer them, either. It's easier to just say "no" and rely on the old battery free paper versions. At least no one can deny that I "own" it if it's sitting on my bedside table.
Let's see, mod a troll, or respond... Never the smartest one in class:
Clearly you've never seen e-paper in action. No backlight, stupid, it's just dark print on a white sheet. Just like... paper, just as easy to read.
Glad to see Sony has finally released one of these in the States. Been out for years in Japan, though more expensive.
None of the reasons you list will be the downfall of the device. It'll be two things: Sony's crappy Connect service. Sony has never been able to make any software worth a damn. And two: The same reason ebooks have never gained popularity, namely they're too expensive for what you get, and there are not enough titles to make it worth buying a $300+ device.
I predict that the Sony® PRS-500 Portable Reader System® featuring innovative E-Ink® technology will meet the same fate as the Kamen Segway® Human Transporter featuring the innovative S-Feet® and S-Walking® technologies.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Does not mean "now available".
Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
Ignoring for the moment the actual sentence structure, I'll assume you meant, "Yes, but books aren't free to produce either - how to you want to pay people to create things?"
What I meant is that while movies and music require physical equipment to produce - microphones, instruments, video equipment, etc - books require a single person and - if you really want to go bare-bones - a pen and paper. Even a nice computer is going to be cheaper than a recording studio rental for any significant period of time. So, while movies and music can reasonably say "Sure, distributing digitally means *distrobution* costs go down, production costs are still expensive! We'd love to sell you cheap movies and music online, but we can't afford to!" Now, they may still be lying (about wanting to) but they can make that argument and not be complete liars. Once you lose the cost of distrobution for books, on the other hand, you've cut out the vaaaast majority of your built-in costs. Obviously, you'll still want editors and (presumably) type-setters and layout designers and such, and you should probably pay the author at some point, but the assumption with books was that you were paying a good chunk toward the physical 'stuff' the book is made out of. With that cost gone, it would seem books should be dirt-cheap, but clearly they're not...
All I'm saying is that it looks like, once again, media distroution companies are trying to wring every last cent out, rather than selling at a point that is both profitable and reasonable.
-Trillian
PS - In all fairness, it may be the book publishers, not Sony, who is requiring the consumer to get screwed. They may have deals about minimum book prices or some such BS. I'd tempted to blame Sony, but the main point is that *someone* along the line - Sony, book publisher, etc - is being a greedy bastard and it makes me sad because the tech seems so cool.
The lack of interesting titles may be an issue, but I doubt that the main usage would be reading books on it.
I am considering buying this thing just to be able to read documents (pdf docs, presentations etc) on a very easy to use "tablet" that has excellent contrast and battery life (expressed in page turns instead of minutes/hours). Instead of resorting to printing them on paper.
One thing that's intriguing is how does it support the Microsoft Word format. Any idea?
Serban
I do hope that the supplier of the ebooks for this device take a little more care than do the current crop of ebook producers. Most of the books I read now are ebooks through eReader or Fictionwise, and they often are so poorly converted into electronic form that it hurts to read them.
The one I'm currently reading is obviously an OCR job, because there are occasional soft-turned-hard hyphens peppered through it, and some lines where the wordspacing was evidently tight in the original, leadingtoareallylongwordin the ebook. Another one used hyphens for dashes too-which is extremely jarring in a proportional font-as this sentence demonstrates. Quotation marks and apostrophes are usually just the ASCII ones, which really isn't very professional-looking in print.
Then you see situations where the culture shock just got too much for the converter and they gave up. The sample book in the SonyStyle web page, The Da Vinci Code, has some pictograms in it. Those probably just get included in the ebook as a low-resolution bitmap. They certainly did on my copy from Fictionwise. I've lost count of the books which have hard-coded page references ("see page 321"), which is useless considering that pagination is up to the device itself. Forget about tappable hyperlinks; I've only seen one such ebook in the dozens I've read.
Don't get me wrong. I love my ebooks, and they compare well to Australian dead-tree books in price. But there's more to releasing an ebook than spitting out a plaintext file. If the parent poster is right about manga, hooray, finally. But history doesn't make me optimistic.
Hey, it is made out of E Ink. It is a type of refelctive display. The next big thing in the display industry. It is suppose to mimic paper, hence no back light. That is why you turn on the light to read a book or ebook. It is much more natural and easier on the eyes. Check out http://www.eink.com/index.html
You did not RTFA,or even the intro on top!
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
"Libraries probably won't be allowed to offer them, either. "
The Indianapolis Public Library offers online electronic books.
"It's easier to just say "no" and rely on the old battery free paper versions."
It also represents a good solution against piracy. Certainly better than what the MPAA/RIAA are offering.
"At least no one can deny that I "own" it if it's sitting on my bedside table."
You own the "original book", not the words on the pages.
About how you can get cheap laptops or PDA's, let me remind you of why this device was made: eye strain! Staring at a screen is like staring at a lightbulb, a dim one but a lightbulb nonetheless.
This Sony device has some of the same advantages; potential for large number of books in hand and ability to buy books online at any time.
However, it still misses some of the point of an e-reader vs a dead-tree book!
Portability: it won't fit in my shirt pocket like the Palm does. Why is it the size of a dead-tree book? Because that's what people who haven't used ebooks much think that they want!
The paperback size is a compromise between having enough words to balance the effort and inconvenience of page turning, and having a reasonable thickness for an average-length book. When turning a page requires just a minimal thumb pressure, fewer words per page is less of a consideration.
Backlight: Sure, it shortens the battery life, but being able to read in bed without the light on is great. Or in any other environment where the light levels are low enough to cause your mother to worry about you going blind!
Dictionary: being able to tap on a word on the screen and have a dictionary entry pop up is so useful, especially with obtuse and erudite writers. I always _mean_ to go look up words, but with ereader and a 150,000 word dictionary loaded, I actually _do_!
Availability: my PDA is a general-purpose device and I use it as an alarm clock, an organiser, an MP3 player, a movie viewer, a calculator, a map (with BT GPSr), a note-taker, etc., etc. Because I use it so much, I always have it with me. Because I always have it with me, I always have my current book(s) and magazines available for those unexpected spare moments (or hours!) Since even a long novel is rarely more than 3-400kB, they really don't make much of a dent in a 1GB SD card.
I often hear fellow bibliophiles say that they wouldn't like an e-book reader because they really like the smell and feel of real paper, and the tactile experience of turning pages, and so on.
I imagine that their great-great grandparents thought that automotives were never going to be popular, because people would miss the feel of the reins and the clip-clop of the hooves...
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.....
[/sarcasm]
And, of course, no Ogg/Vorbis audio support. Next!
Seriously, this thing cries out to be hacked. Although one with stylus input would be a lot more useful, hacked.
Even though the website says the reader handles "Unsecured Text: BBeB Book, Adobe® PDF, TXT, RTF, Microsoft® Word; Image: JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMPit", not on one page did I see an image displayed on the reader. This is the most important feature for me as I read many IT books on PFD that include numerous diagrams, pictures, charts, pieces of code as a graphic, etc. I noticed it said it displays 800x600 resolution with 4 shades of gray, but why are there no examples of anything other than plain text? Are images something you do not want to even display on these? If anyone has more info, your insight is appreciated. That would be the difference between me buying one or not.
He who gets the last laugh, laughs last.
The Battery is a Lithium-Ion. Are these the re-use apple and dell batteries? sorry couldn't resist. Although it has a black and while screen. How really useful is it that it displays JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP? Min requirements: Hard Drive: 20MB9 Minimum availible Hard Drive space Spell check please. I am surprised it supports SD as well as Microstick. I figured it would only support MS.
SimonTek
Ultimate digital reading experience? I thought that was braille.
datasheets are always PDFs.
:(
I have a serious hankering for this device. I can fit a giant shitton of PDFs on a 1GB memory stick. As long as I'm not forced to run some shitsack software to get stuff onto it, I may actually get one of these. I guess it's a choice between this and a Wii.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
You left out one very important part. The type of book. An encyclopedia will require both more, and a different set of people than say the latest romance novel. Plus cost is also a function of demand. That's why a book for pediatricians is going to cost more than say a mass-produced dime store novel.
"All I'm saying is that it looks like, once again, media distroution companies are trying to wring every last cent out, rather than selling at a point that is both profitable and reasonable."
"Profitable" and "reasonable" aren't the same thing. For some things, "profitable" and "reasonable" are close enough to satisfy the majority. But don't assume that will always be the case.
Why does this text file reader REQUIRE a Windows PC??? Wouldn't it be better just to have it act like a USB drive that can also image the contained files (text. BBEwhatever, etc...)... GSG
... but will it run Linux?
No, seriously. I know Eric Smith already mentioned a link to the source code.... I wonder what people will be able to do with this thing... What are the refresh rates i.e. could we make it do some kinda TI-83 style video? And so on....
Neat concept, hacking your book.....
[/sarcasm]
I wonder if they will ever stock books in other languages. I want to try to learn Korean(because Korean women are hot :P) and I think that being able to download books written in Korean(childrens books at first, then getting more advanced) would be an interesting way to learn the language. I can always go to hanbooks.com which offers some decent prices, but being able to integrate e-books with dictionaries and whatnot would be really cool. Plus you can be much less limited in your selection.
Monstar L
No backlight? That's a deal breaker for me, I'd like to be able to read in bed in the dark.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
How do you perform the file conversions when loading PDF:s from a Linux host?
I didn't see anything that looked like a conversion program among the published GPL files for the device.
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
Ah yes. Slashdot: Where uninformed opinions, flawed logic and factual inaccuracies are mere fertilizer to the flowerbed that is yet another ignorant rant.
(PS: "distribution".)
The Sony Reader looks really neat and I am excited, and I noticed a few things about storage on the Reader. For instance, I think it is good that Sony made SD card support available, in addition to Memory Stick compatibility. This is nice and all, but PDF files can get large and being able to add even more storage would be good. From what I understand MS cards on the PSP top out at 4GB at least with the older firmware, which leads me to believe the MS "standard" only supports cards 4GB (2^32 bytes) in size. SD 1.1 cards are limited to the same size, 4GB. However there is a new standard for SD cards called, SD 2.0, which is also known as SDHC. I like to know if Sony has plans to or already supports SDHC cards on the Reader. I would also like to know if the Reader supports USB host mode like certain hard drive cases and the Apple iPod do. One model of hard drive case by AMS that supports USB host mode has an internal Li-ion battery. While I do not know the battery life of this case with the drive running, it should be at least one to two hours. This would be long enough to copy a couple of files from an external hard drive to the internal memory of the Reader. If the Reader does not support USB host mode, Apple could add a file browser to the iPod and with the Camera Connector which enables USB host mode on the iPod, files could be loaded on to the Reader. Then again maybe Sony could maye a larger version of the Reader with a hard drive and a larger battery.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
As I posted somewhere else on here, look at the prices of out-of-copyright classics. Not super-special collectors' editions with gilded pages, but just plain paperbacks and hardbacks.
The actual price of manufacturing in distributing ANY book is probably just south of that price. So, under $2 for a mass-market paperback, and that's if they don't go with the very cheapest paper, and maybe $5-$8 or less for a hardback.
Which means that the author, the store you buy it from, and the publisher's staff are taking a total of over 75% of what you pay for most books. 25% or less is the cost of physically manufacturing the book.
That, or all the big chains are selling huge numbers of classics at a loss for some reason, which I doubt.
Hell, in the early and mid 90s Wal-Mart used to sell classics in paperback format, mostly adventure-type books, Robinson Crusoe and crap like that. I think I have a copy of Dracula from them, somewhere. Anyway, they were 50 cents a piece, IIRC, and I guarantee that both the printer and Wal-Mart were making money at that price. They were, however, printed on really awful paper. But it goes to show that the costs for physically producing a book can be extremely low, indeed.
If this thing had audio support, it would be interesting to see electronic books with soundtracks included. Can you imagine reading a horror book, and as your turning the pages the music gets creepier and creepier. You could also hear al sorts of ambient sounds, depending on where in the book the charecters are. If I had money i'd patent this idea ;)
you're not taking into account the IMPOSSIBLY WASTEFUL distribution model for books. The distributor sells the bookstore X copies, and the deal is that after some time the bookstore can rip the covers off the ones it haasn't sold and sell them back for some large fraction of the original sale price. These books are then, I presume, dumped into the recycling vats. So that $4 book also has to cover the manufacturing costs for the other 9 copies that didn't sell.
ps: I'd welcome any corrections on this, I just have this info secondhand.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
I got to wondering what the screen pixel count was, and found "170 DPI". Curious to put that down as "numbers I know"; my 20" dell is 1680 pixels wide and ~17 inches wide; almost exactly 100dpi. This is a fair bit higher (not quite twice!) so they should be able to put down a fair amount of decent-looking print on a "page".
It's slightly disappointing that HTML support isn't standard; they support everything else, but HTML requires "conversion." Yuck.
You know what I like best, though? Battery life is rated in "page turns", not minutes...and it charges off USB. With that kind of battery life, you can cut down on the number of charge cycles and keep the liion battery living longer.
Please help metamoderate.
PDF isn't propreitary, the format is entirely open and documented.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
My biggest complaint is that it incorporates irrelevant extras that add to the weight. It ought to be possible to create an e-Ink based device with a small battery that would be lighter than a paperback book. Do that for US$100-150 and I shall be an immediate customer.
Sony marketing may assume that, because people like extra features in their cellphones, the same will be true with electronic readers. If so, they miss a fundamental difference. Most of us do not hold our cell phones out in front of our eyes for hours at a time.
Of course they did, because multi-purpose devices are what consumers "say" they want. Even when sometimes they don't want that, but just think they do.
I was really starting to get worried that my printed works would never benefit from the powers of DRM. I'm so glad we have Sony to protect us all.
but the assumption with books was that you were paying a good chunk toward the physical 'stuff' the book is made out of. With that cost gone, it would seem books should be dirt-cheap, but clearly they're not...
I never made that assumption for a second. Do you really think that a hardback novel costs something akin to $25 to make and distribute? If the costs were in the binding then they would bring out the hardback and paperback at the same time and let the customer choose. Instead they delay the paperback to push you towards the (relatively) overpriced hardback.
So where are the real costs? A book may take anywhere from a month to ten years to write. Ten years of a skilled labourer costs a million dollars. But more important, the occasional bestseller has to pay for all of the advances paid for unprofitable flops. In addition, there are substantial marketing costs to be heard above the noise.
Downloadability might actually cost the industry because people buy books to read "someday". But if every book is a download away, they won't buy speculatively anymore. They'll buy when they want to read. If my bookshelf is representative, that will represent a drop in sales for the publishers.
OK, here's what I want-a format that combines a readable book with an audiobook. That would be great. I could then listen to the book in the car on the way to and from work, and read the book in bed at night.
I believe it's not unknown to return torn off covers for credit if the book turns out to be a real stinker and the rest of the books ends up in the dumpster.
Is the use of external PDFs and TXT files in the device completely unrestricted? While they mention the availabilty of e-books from Sony's website, would Sony freely allow content from any other place to be freely used in their device? I don't know, but Sony being Sony...I'd expect some very proprietory kind of thing which lets you use nothing but 'Sony stuff' on the device. Maybe this is different, but I have my doubts...otherwise, why would anyone pay for any content from them at all if e-books are available a dime a dozen on the net, cheaper or even free. I also read somewhere of documents being stored have a limited life- they tend to 'self-destruct' after a while?!? Could be just a rumour...
I otherwise think this is quite an exciting technology. Reading e-books on regular PCs is quite a strain on the eyes, and a medium that can somewhat replicate paper is fantastic.
"It sounds to me like they have, once again, given it far more features than it needs, resulting in, as usual, exorbitant prices."
That's just silly.
Mp3 player hardware - even *if* it had to be added in, onlys cost a couple of dollars at most.
What it adds is the ability to also play audiobooks.
The pricing is based on what Sony's marketing department has determined the traffic will bear - just like every other product.
What that means is I read a large amount of ebooks. Baen books, http:/// www.baen.com , was started by the dearly departed Jim Baen who saw the internet as a way to hook readers. They created http://www.webscription.net/ which has most of their library for sale. Books which aren't even in hardback and are 2+ months from publication are $15. Books in hardback are around 6. Older books are even cheaper, some less than $4.
All of them DRM free.
Jim Baen has been a very passionate voice in the publishing industry against the concept of DRM because it assumes the customer is a Crook. He, and some writers (multiple NY times bestselling writers) decided that it was best to not DRM and to not charge an arm and a leg. Ebooks have low costs, and once the hardware is paid off the only costs are maintenance. They went a step further with a free library of Ebooks, mostly slightly older works and the starts of popular series.
http://www.baen.com/library/
Eric Flint has a nice editorial about the system. The idea is if the books are good, and people share them, Bully! Sharing books gets more people to read them. You might not buy the paperback, but 5 people you share your ebook with might. Or they might buy the hardcover of the sequel. The authors who are in the library have all had greatly enhanced sales.
One step further are their cds. Many hardcovers have a cd in the back with ebook collections related to that book. They even post them online for free, with the only stipulation is you don't profit off their ebooks. http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/
I'd say more, but my guild is raiding.
It all boils down to how much the author is paid per sale.
The only other thing that makes any impact is the money the publishing company spends to promote and distribute the book. Now that we have digital distribution it's got to be less than a buck to add a book to a site and the bandwidth is nothing. The main money is in publicity and most of that is advertising flyers (bus adds, billboards, all the static printed poster stuff) not too many commercials and complex adds like they have for movies and concerts.
How often have you gone out and purchased a book because of a really convincing ad?
would you have purchased it if you were just given the synopsis? a clever plot in the genre that you prefer is probably what most people look for in their fiction selection. And for the non fiction the subject is probably 90 percent of the deciding factor.
Best seller lists make themselves.
Top reviews are for good books and are free to the publisher (should be, tsk tsk if they're paid for)
So where's the numbers?
Justify to me that my money isn't just stuffing the pockets of people who really didn't create the thing I want. I want the words. I'll pay for the words and make the person who wrote them happy to hopefully write another book I'll buy and the cycle will go on and on.
But if I'm told I have to pay a large amount and buy less books because of it and there pops up another P2P service that I can get the books I want because people like me don't feel bad enough to pay some fat cat then we'll have another napster revolution and in the end some iTunes will come in and set it up right. I wish we could skip the BS part and just have these people realize that the best thing that they could do to get our money is treat us like intelligent people and give us a fair price.
We'll buy the books if we feel the price is fair. otherwise it'll be P2P.
Justify the price and show how much is going to the author.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
From the presentation, it appears that the Sony Reader supports
So where's the real Sony? Does this show what they are capable of developing when their audio division gets out of the way? If this reader actually supports these standards natively without requiring silly conversion software on the PC, I might even consider un-boycotting Sony to show that they are on the right track.
At a or so page a day (a good clip for an author) it can still take a year or more to write a book. How much do you make in a year?
You're right in that you're not paying for the equipment... but you are paying for the author's time (and food, and rent, and...).
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I'm not buying a damned, DRMed book, but there's always Project Gutenburg (http://www.gutenberg.org/). I'd actually like a peripheral display using something like e-ink. It would be something I can dump text from the main monitor for long reading (like Slashdot comments) - or documentation...that'd be a relief.
I'm more interested in storing reference material in it...
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
This is a Sony product. Remember what Sony did? (Think "rootkit").
So it doesn't matter how good the product is. I will not buy
anything from Sony, _ever_. The boycott is eternal.
Not that I have many illusions about the length of the
collective memory...
and I'd like to listen to music with my fingers in my ears!
Then I'd recommend a technology that transmits soundwaves through the head bones.
I can explain why I'd like to be able to read in the dark (or in poorly lighted room), can you please explain why you prefer to keep your fingers in your ears?
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
So... what part of "a movie costs many times more than a book to produce" were you disagreeing with?
If you can show that even an international bestseller book costs several hundred million dollars to write then I'll believe you.
However, I think you'll have a hard time proving:
1. There are more people involved in the production of a book than a movie.
2. Book production requires more equipment.
3. Book production (of necessity) takes noticeably longer than films.
If this isn't the case, then someone, somewhere along the line is ripping people off.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
$350? for a little plastic box to read text?
Wow, that sets MY world on fire.
The more I see attempts to create an E-book, the more I appreciate paper.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
While interesting, I won't be able to go to any new system that doesn't play DRM'd PDB books (also known as eReader files). Is there any way to convert them (even via a means that might not be DMCA approved, hint hint ;)) or play them on this?
"System requirements. Operating System: Windows® XP (Home Edition/Professional, Media Center Edition, Media Center Edition 2004, Media Center Edition 2005)"
How hard would it be to make this an USB Mass Storage device and have it work with all operating systems?
"Using the included CONNECT(TM) Reader PC Software, you can easily transfer Adobe® PDF"
No thanks, I still get shivers when I think of the "included Sony SonicStage(TM) software"...
build in.
The Sony does not have a pen-interface, AFAIK.
That's a lot of additional potential for the Iliad, let's see if their software leaves beta soon and whether they provide us with an appropriate SDK...
For Iliad-Discussion from iRex see forum.irexnet.com
k2rFor more independent info on both products see http://www.mobileread.com/ .
I'm guessing that there's got to be a ton of imbedded resistance to E-books. The cost of a physical book means a living to presses, ink companies, paper companies (and their suppliers), and distributors. It's a big industry.
... of which the actual cost of paper is only a fraction ... as well as holding onto business relationships formed over decades.
... actually it'd have to be much more universal ... E-books are a nice convenience for people with money. They, and the readers, are priced accordingly.
Catch-22. How can a publisher cut their ties to these people without cutting their own throat? If they sell e-books cheaper, and only get 30% penetration, they still have all the costs associated with paper publishing
Until something like a book iPod comes along
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
but the assumption with books was that you were paying a good chunk toward the physical 'stuff' the book is made out of
Perhaps that assumption was incorrect?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Can you take e.g. 10 paperbacks into long journey? After carrying heavy bag for several hours, believe me, $350 wouldn't look all that much.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
It might be a good value if it handled more formats.
But considering the limited number of formats available, it's nearly useless.
although this was quite common in the uk, with the introduction of waste recycling law, it has fallen out of practice and now most books are returned whole for recycling. i suspect it does continue in areas without such law, in several books i have read (i am an avid reader) i have seen warning messages on the fist few cover pagers stating that if the cover is missing from the book, you have baught a copy that should have been disposed of and to call the publisher to report it.
FallenSword, a free MMO you can play at work!
Ogg support would be nice, but I wouldn't say that its abscence makes the product "nearly useless". If it provided a stylus or input method for adding comments and markup to PDF documents I would probably buy one. As it is, the functionality wouldn't be worth the price and clunkyness of carrying a fragile piece of equipment around.
More formats, as in .DOC or .LIT files? Won't happen (I haven't read the current specs of the Reader, though), at least not officially.
But rest assured, as with the previous readers (and with almost all DRM-heavy Sony products, like the PSP and Playstations) it will soon be hacked to run anything you might see fit. The Reader runs on Linux, anyway, AFAIK.
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
What I meant is that while movies and music require physical equipment to produce - microphones, instruments, video equipment, etc - books require a single person and - if you really want to go bare-bones - a pen and paper.
To be equally daft, I could say that music requires one or more musicians coming together for the duration of the song, playing various instruments, and recording on a $10 tape-recorder with built-in microphone, whereas a book requires years expensive research, years of writing, and even more years of editing, by intelligent well-educated people, before it's printed on specialized equipment that costs a fortune (a CD-burner is something everyone's got).
Even a nice computer is going to be cheaper than a recording studio rental for any significant period of time.
Even buying a studio is going to be cheaper than hiring an entire staff for editing and printing books.
Once you lose the cost of distrobution for books, on the other hand, you've cut out the vaaaast majority of your built-in costs.
No. If you by book mean anything printed on paper, such as a new volume of the Hardy boys, or some doctor romance novel, I agree. But then I could counter that with music, I mean a CD-release by some hotel- or street-musicians. But if you by music mean "The Wall", I happen to talk about "Encyclopedia Britannica" when it comes to books.
but the assumption with books was that you were paying a good chunk toward the physical 'stuff' the book is made out of. With that cost gone, it would seem books should be dirt-cheap, but clearly they're not...
Your assumption, not the assumtion.
All I'm saying is that it looks like, once again, media distroution companies are trying to wring every last cent out, rather than selling at a point that is both profitable and reasonable.
And how is that different from any other business? While I agree that the cost of CDs is absurdly high (I buy most of my DVDs at half the price of my CDs), and that this certainly smells like something only a monopoly or a cartel could do, the market for books and e-books is entirely different. There is real price-differentiation there.
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/portable-media/sony -librie-ebook-hacks-115752.php
r ototype-color-ebook-17256.php
Firmwarez are available for the librie, so maybe you can find one with just the features you want.
Personnally, I will be holding my breath for the Secong Generation devices, like this one : http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/tag/sharps-shows-p
1 mm thick, color paper, made by sharp, should be available in 2007... We still must have a look at the drm limitations if any, but the product do look superior !
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
...comes from Umberto Eco and I find it to be insightful. It is here.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The version I'm waiting for has several hundred e-ink pages like a novel, so that I can flip between them at will, hold several open at once with my fingers, etc..
Revive the Constitution.
The main competition to this sony reader seems to be the Iliad from I-Rex. I think it is a much nicer reader for a couple reasons.
It has a nice page turn interface, it has a proper paperback A5 sized screen, and runs linux. There has already been quite a bit of hacking on it. Can code your own readers for various formats etc.
The Sony Reader runs Linux too. The manual says it runs MonteVista® Linux® professional edition and gives a link for download of the GPL bits.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
If you check
:)
http://www.eink.com/products/matrix/High_Res.html
you'll find full specifications for this toy. Like screen resolution (800x600) and refresh rate (500ms for black & white and 1s for grayscale). So any hacks that can make it play videos or anything related to animations are futile. Other thing is that it drains batteries quite fast - but only during refreshing of pages. So if you want to skip let's say 50 pages one after another it can dent you battery quite badly...
Nevertheless - it's enviroment friendly (think about all those dead trees you read from every day) and if marketed properly (slim chance with Sony) it can make a big change.
It's nice to dream sometimes...
jackharrer
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
Sarcasm. Their previous model only supported their own special format, and required things like PDFs or even TXTs to be converted with special software.
PDF isn't propreitary, the format is entirely open and documented.
I find it amusing how you said that, and were modded insightful. This requires serious lack of sarcasm in both you, and all the people that modded you.
Congratulations.
Wow, it costs the same as a PDA
Wow, with 64mb of storage it will hold almost an entire album.
Wow, it does less than a (cheap) MP3 player AND a PDA yet costs more.
Wow, it comes from Sony... the company which has let the consumer down so many times.
Wow, I'm not going to buy one of these.
TT
I would buy one, not sure for $350, when I'm doing research this would be great. If publishers jump on board this would be great. If I could put the open books from print.google.com, works from CCEL.org, project Guttenberg and project Wittenberg, wikipedia , scholarly journals and the like I would buy. I could load everything I need to do my studies from the web easily onto this the cost would be worth it. I could load up all the websites, ebooks, journals, and such for the topic I was studying then take it on the road, of course I would want to be able to take notes in the margins, but this doesn't seem to be allowed so it isn't as useful.
Hey!!! the parentheses are good for something
I think it is a fair conclusion to draw that the value the book publisher places on the intact book is far less than the value the publisher places on the content. Otherwise the whole book would be returned.
A friend of mine owned a bookshop. I was in the shop once when her daughter expressed interest in a particular book. The owner took the book off the shelf, tore the cover off and handed it to her: "Here you are. Have it."
Sadly I never benefitted from this retail model.
If you like Sci-Fi/Fantasy at all you should check out Baen.
:)
While many publishers are overcharging for e-books, Baen books http://baen.com/ sell electronic versions in multiple formats for very reasonable prices. I can buy six or seven Baen novels in a package for $US 15.00 without any DRM http://www.webscription.net/.
Individual books are between $4 and $6.
Baen also has more than eighty novels available for free (again no DRM) here http://www.baen.com/library/
For several years I've been reading e-books on my palm pilot (currently a Tungsten T5) with plucker . I need the PDA for work anyway and it allows me to carry several novels with me everywhere I go.
Delayed at the doctor's office for 30 minutes? It's an opportunity for me to enjoy a chapter or two from David Weber's latest
Inline annotation and highlighting. Without pen input this thing is useless to me. I'm using a newton mp2100 as an ereader, and it supports excellent annotation functions. But the hardware needs replacement. Unfortunately, this Sony ebook reader ain't it.
HTML? Most of the Gutenberg texts that have formatted versions are HTML.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Palmdoc, PDB, lit, ereader. You know, the most common ones....
eInk is a nicer technology long-term, but the form factor is very important. If I can't fit it in a pocket then it is of no use to me; I only read eBooks when carrying a dead-tree version would be unfeasible.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I can't believe this. Sony releases a device that supports all the common open formats, and people whine that it doesn't support their competitors' closed formats? Ludicrous.
much agreement from me. I've never heard of the document formats listed above. In my world PDF and .txt are the most common. Any decent format should be convertable to one, or both of the two.
Exactly. There's a reason why J.K. Rowling (Author of Harry Potter Series) is a billionaire. She's only released 6 books, and yet managed to get extremely rich.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I completely agree with you on these points, but they have nothing to do with the formats it supports. Both text files and pdf will allow you to do annotation and highlighting (well, okay, it's kinda primitive in a text file to be sure). What you mention is a hardware limitation, and I agree that at the price tag sony's asking, they should provide these features.
I too am boycotting SONY. Never again. I don't care how cool their technology is. The best that could happen is that SONY goes bankrupt!
yeah, good point. HTML is a no brainer. Wonder why they didn't support it? Still, I think "nearly useless" is far too strong a comment. Gutenberg text can be just as easily viewed as a text or pdf file.
Compatibility with the already existing e-book DRM formats, for one thing. I have over 180 books in PeanutPress format (the most widespread format, used by ereader, fictionwise and many others), and would not be able to read any of them on this device. How difficult would it have been for Sony to get a licensing deal? Instead, they did the typical Sony thing, and made it incompatible. Way to go...
The real killer for me, though, is that it doesn't have a backlight. I primarily read e-books in bed while my partner is sleeping. Can't do that with this device.
Regards,
--
*Art
It supports BBeB, PDF, .txt, RTF, Word files, JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP. This covers _all_ document formats I would be interested in reading on the thing. What do you feel is missing and sufficiently important to make it "nearly useless"?
txt.gz, rtf.gz and html.gz just to name a few, you get the idea =) This thing if a far way from useless tho.
Great idea, mod a troll and make a silly comment... it'll make you seem intelligent in front of all the /.ers? What more could you wish for.
Fact of the matter is, if you can't create a product with high end design elements at that price, it isn't going to sell that well. I haven't seen an angle of this that I am been impressed with yet.
So clearly I haven't seen one of these in action. I was basing my impressions on images provided. However, I'd bet that the product is going to fail, and the only point you made that will be relevant is the last one. Which was mine. For $300 you'd better have a great looking, functional product.
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
because the people who want them have probably already bought e-books they would like to continue reading. but they are in closed formats. and the stuff you buy for this in closed formats will suffer the same fate.
drm and closed formats are why i wont touch any commercially available e-books. the people publishing them are so worried about protecting their intellectual property that they make they property worthless to me. (Just ran into this the other day with a Sybex book - it came with a pdf on a disc, but I can't view it because they have drm in there that is busted. their support people told me to uninstall my current version of reader and install the one on the disc that is 2 or 3 versions back- i don't think i'm going to do that)
someday - when you can buy a cheap e-book reader that will support a common format that i can purchase - or get from the library - or share with friends, then i'll think about buying in. basically i want to be able to do all that i can do with regular books now.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Shame, really.
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
>What do you feel is missing and sufficiently important to make it "nearly useless"?
Why does everything in the world have to play MP3s?
This looks like a nifty little device, but it'd be cheaper and probably smaller without noise making capabilities.
Al
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
I'm surprised how many people here want the ebooks to be in PDF format.
I've been reading ebooks for a while, and PDF is the worst format for a book. It works well for magazines, but that's because PDF is a PRINT format. It's designed to lay things out to be printed. With an ebook, you want flowable text, so that when you increase the font size (you know, for grandma) the text flows to the next page. PDF will zoom in, and now you have to move around on the screen to read your book. Completely unacceptable!! (Look at this from an everyday user, not a techie viewpoint.)
CHM is better, HTML can usually be formatted pretty nicely, but PDF, ugh! When I'm reading ebooks, I always look for HTML or mobipocket, or something that's not PDF. And it's because of the flowable text issue.
I think many people who get this device with the intent of reading PDF's will be sorely disappointed.
---- The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. -Thomas Jefferson
I find it amusing how you said that, and were modded insightful. This requires serious lack of sarcasm in both you, and all the people that modded you.
Actualy, there is some truth to the grand-parent's statement about PDF. Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf
If you stick to the subset of PDF that is an ISO standard and don't touch any Patent from Adobe, you can make a PDF generator (http://www.google.com/search?q=pdf+generator).
That is the reason why OpenOffice.org support exporting to PDF. That is also the reason why you can print directly to PDF any unix flavor... or on Windows with GPL tools: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
I live in Soviet Canuckistan you insensitive clod!
Yeah, because wikipedia is never wrong. That very article used to say PDF was an open standard, which it is.
Do tell me any way in which PDF is closed. It is completely documented. The trademark and patents are licensed for free to anyone following and version of the spec. There have been multiple GPL and closed proprietary implementations from numerous companies for years. The only possible argument I can think of is you can't make a new standard based upon PDF and be guaranteed protection from trademark infringement (same as Linux) or patent violations (same as Linux).
It is nice when something comes along with information that you need but this technology won't come anywhere close to replacing a real book, manual, newspaper, or even a stack of printouts. It is mostly hype and is only a granular change from what is already available.
Here is the problem: Your eyes and brain are designed to gather and analyze an obscene quantity of information in a real 3D world. You can grab a 100 page manual (or some other quantity of printed material) and flip through it in a couple seconds and find where the info is that you need to examine in more detail. You can also read much faster from a plain paper page. You can't "skim" with any efficiency on any digital display.
Blind love of technology that makes us give up very well proven methods and technology is a real problem. A lot of the people reading this have never seen a card catalog in a library. The total replacement of card catalogs by search computers is one of the greatest losses to research in a library. Search engines are nice but the ability to flip extremely rapidly through the cards would yield serendipitous discoveries that are now lost with search engines. It is a great loss.
Until the technology arrives that allows epaper to be in the form of a multiple sheet book that you can flip through this is no replacement for paper. It is just another display. Ho hum...
Technology like this can definitely be good, but I think a few things are missing:
.doc would be interesting not only for the reader, but for computers and the like.
- Properly formatted Texts
Yeah, they are converting PDFs and such to display on the reader, but the reader should try to offer a portable solution to 8.5x11 sized papers that were made into PDFs. I know this is a little redundant, given how much complaining there is about Sony going nuts with its own formats, but I think that in this case, a new format (open source? well, let's start with making it workable) that is not only plausible on the reader, but on computers as well would be great. A more interactive version of a PDF or a
- Stylus function
It needs a stylus for editing, scribble notes and whatever. Use PDA handwriting recognition or whatever, but it would be useful; so many people like to write in the margins and what not, so I can't see why they wouldn't do this.
- Secure a market for the reader
Yeah, there are sites that sell eBooks and what not, but a.) the prices are ridiculous b.) they are not well known enough to warrant trust in the eBook services or to make people shell out money for a dedicated eBook reader. Personally, I think that Sony is missing a gigantic market called College in regards to the reader. Could you imagine students paying $5-$10 per text instead of $50-$100 per text? I mean, if Sony would have worked with text book distributors a little, they could have hit a friggin' gold mine, and I am positive that within a year or two, every college campus would be flooded with Sony Readers.
- Multi-functionality
It was mentioned before in this discussion that not everything has to play mp3s, but $350 for a dedicated reader is just stupid, plain and simple. Granted, it doesn't need to play mp3's, watch movies, download files and the like, but a few extra functions would be nice. Mentioned before was a dictionary function (click and learn the word); limited software capabilities to incorperate programs that people deem necessary (I'm thinking more towards the college idea again). It doesn't have to have Bit Torrent and WMP and Quicktime and VLC and GIMP and blah blah blah, but a few simple things like an alarm clock, password protection on the system, schedule manager, text editor w/ text recognition...these are relatively simple things that people much smarter than myself could easily incorperate into the Sony Reader.
The sheer fact that there hasn't been much news about this seems to say to me that Sony either doesn't care or doesn't see a market for such a device, hence the impractical price tag. Most likely the Reader will be seen as a gimmick; a techno-fad that will fade out before it has a chance to become old. This is really sad, as I think that a lot of cool ideas could be implemented if they simply held the device back a bit and did a little more planning before release.
and the deal is that after some time the bookstore can rip the covers off the ones it haasn't sold and sell them back for some large fraction of the original sale price.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. sigh... Physically destroying the books serves only one purpose: to express the distribution system's contempt for authors.
So that $4 book also has to cover the manufacturing costs for the other 9 copies that didn't sell.
Sure! That way, the author gets nothing. You see, publishers are happy under only one condition: the author gets zero. Anything else is a failure. They get really happy when some poor misinformed but really talented author signs away their licensing rights. "Oh we get all the money from the $100 million movie I'm afraid." Publishers love that.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I do take a little issue with being accused of ranting, but be that as it may...
What do you disagree with? I'd honestly like to know. Yes, it's an uninformed opinion, but I don't think the logic was flawed or the facts that inaccurate. I specifically didn't use numbers but spoke in generalisations for just that reason. I realize books don't magically come from fairy dust, but they still have fewer inherent costs than movies or music. Where is that thought process flawed?
-Trillian
Why don't you tell us how books and music are produce and please don't leave any of the dollar amounts
If I leave the the 486 (which so far has cost me exactly nothing) which I write on sitting on the shelf unused for a year it costs me nothing to do so.
If I leave the fiddle (which cost me thousands) I record with sitting on the shelf unused for a year it costs me $200 to be able to use it again. Costs go up if I actually deign to use the thing.
KFG
You left out one very important part. The type of book. An encyclopedia will require both more, and a different set of people than say the latest romance novel.
You left out one very important part. The type of sound recording. Sgt. Pepper will require both more, and a different set of people than say the latest solo acouctic guitar teenage angst crap.
KFG
based on the specs of 6" diagonal and 800/600 format, that gives 4.8Hx3.6W. The width is almost, but not quite sufficient - a typical paperback is 4" wide including the margin. However, the 4.8H is poor as the generic paperback is around abouts 6 3/4". As most people won't want text sizes smaller than existing paperback formats this means significantly more page turning - a 500 page paperback would require ~ 780 pages on this device.
I tend to agree with an earlier poster that while music capability is nice, it seems to add too much to cost and size away from screen. Sony would have done better to start with just the reading capability in a screen size identical to mass market paperback w/ 3 buttons (up,down and a toggle for menus). So almost, but not quite.
I've been watching the portable reader for a while and watched it slip its schedule twice, realized the screen is smaller than I thought/hoped earlier, and wished it had a stylus. What I always wanted was an 11" screen with these features and the ability to just draw ink onto bitmaps that I save. No text recognition, none of that crap. Just electronic paper (literally: just let me make marks on a blank page) and the reader funcitons. The closest I've seen is this: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/main/devices/device11 .htm/
and the goReader seems defunct and was way too expensive. So this seems like just another near miss to me.
The problem seems to be that no one can ever bring themselves to offer the product I described: they start pumping up the functionality until it just *has* to cost close to $1000 or they make the sony reader, which shoots a little too low, like the previous paperback-sized reader that didn't take off --anybody remember the Rocket reader? I actually saw one in a store a few years ago.
Is there any hope that someone's eventually going to make what I want?
PDA screens are too small. And I don't want PDA functions.
Most readers are just readers.
What I want is the sony reader with a digitizer and an 11" diagonal screen. I don't even ask to annotate books. Just let me draw on blank pages. Work on the software for later. I'll even pay mark-up to add software to do more things later. Just give me that damn device, so I can avoid carrying paper documents and a notepad and not carry a portable computer. An not path $2500 for a whole tablet computer, since that's not what I want.
In excess of half the business world would by my device, why won't anyone build it?
So many people are against DRM but I want to see a realistic proposal by you guys. How will you get the support from media creaters, authors, and publishers to obtain their work for your device without DRM? Everyone wants some protection for their work. Six devices to be honest isn't that bad at all. Consider a text book. You could technically copy it but who would bother copying a 500 page text (and with the binding on these, who would do it fully). Six painless copies of such large texts are imo pretty decent.
Hmmm... Pie...
Ok, but how many Library of Congresses does it hold??
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Good point on the audio book but I see the audio book's main strength in the car. Does anyone else use it differently?
One of the things which has always bugged me about reading text on an e-reader, PDA, or similar device is the lack of multiple screens. I read pretty quickly, which means that I sometimes gloss over sentences or entire paragraphs, and it's nice to be able to glance back to the previous page immediately to pick up some detail that I might have missed. For technical publications like textbooks, this is pretty much essential.
Features that would get me to buy one of these:
1) Two side-to-side screens, similar to a traditional book
2) Some serious scratch resistance on these things
3) Longer battery life. Instead of wasting power on a CPU that can run an MP3 player, how about designing a product that shuts off entirely except when changing pages?
4) Some way to skip a lot of pages at once.
5) Some really slick OCR/PDF reflow software. I agree that PDF is impractical as an ebook format, so what we need is a really good OCR program that will convert PDFs into flowable text.
6) Low price. I would pay $300 or so, I think, if it worked well and did everything I wanted it to do. Sony could lower costs, unnecessary size, and battery usage substantially by removing every scrap of electronics aside from the e-reader part.
Take all of these
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
There were a few movies in there too. I wonder if she made more off the books themselves or the movie rights?
If it had more then one page... I buy books for the ability to turn the pages, to have the feel of the book.
And thats just for the crummy books.
For the good books I read, it is the experience I enjoy. The smell of the paper, a well-crafted binding, the yellowing of the paper, the feel of the paper. Its a relegiouse experience.
Or when I read a science book I enjoy, how would I take notes in the margins? Or use a massive resourse text as a filing system?
If the technology advances to the point I can enjoy reading my books with most of the sensations intact (hell, a movable touchscreen so I can still write in the margins, and I'll shell out a grand), then I might consider it. Until then, great idea, but its still way too green.
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
I know 4 authors. One is an illustrator, another a photographer, another a journalist, another an economist. None of them are full time professional authors. It breaks down like this - a book takes 1-2 years to produce, and earns maybe US$10,000 if you're lucky. Advances are rare, and pretty small change. A book might get you some spin-off consultancy work or media appearances, but otherwise, it's mainly a labour of love. And it's madly competitive to get anything published at all, every other journalist/academic has their eye on the same market and a manuscript in the drawer. Anyway, to discuss the economics of this as though authors didn't exist is pretty much exactly how the status quo in publishing views it. The big winners are currently publishers, and the rare superstar author. Add in some more tech middlemen, and the authors still get screwed. Hey, that's progress.
10 paperbacks? How long of a journey are you planning on. I'm sure I don't spend as much time reading as some people, but personally I rarely finish more than 2 or 3 books a month. 10 books would last me 5 months. Even if you read twice that much and 10 books would only last a couple months, how often do most people travel on a two month journey and even if they do how often would it be in a location that didn't have a store selling books in their native language.
Find coupons in Greeley
No-one's being ripped off. If you don't like the price of a book you don't have to buy it. There are many other books you can buy which are much cheaper. The number of books being sold suggests that the prices are actually correct.
Books are a luxury entertainment product anyway, you can't cry about the prices like you can electricity or water.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
What is the "inherent cost" of music? Sure you have to rent a sund studio and pay a sound engineer and a band. But how much would that cost for a week long recording session? Probably a few tens of thousands maybe. If you want to get the best studio and the best sound engineers and producers lets say about $100,000.
Well the music and publishing industries are the same in that it sin't just a matter of someone writting down some stuff or someone strumming a guitar and singing a song. You have to be able to find people with talent. You have to promote them. And if they suck you have to be able eat the loss and not go out of business. Add to that you have to hanger ons and executives and marketing idiots and the costs start to rise.
Yeah maybe books could be cheaper. What surprising is that you question the price of books but not the price of music. Both industries are similar in many ways.
I know for .lit there is a program that will break it down into either html or txt. Oh yea, I just remembered having a good laugh about that program because it was named "clit". Not sure if the other closed formats are popular enough to encourage development on a DRM -> USEABLE app.
Fear is the mind killer.
The problem with adding compression could be the CPU overhead. If something as simple as changing pages slowed down even a little I think people would get annoyed. If the device had enough ram to always keep the entire document in an uncompressed form it would be a good way to save on storage space and the compression ratio on text is likely pretty high. But with how cheap storage is now, I'd be more concerned with speed on an embedded device.
Fear is the mind killer.
I would like to buy a V2 does anybody tested it yet?
"Use cases are fairy tales..." I. S. 2005
Heck if this thing had college textbooks that you could download to it, I'd purchase it in a second.... hmmm now I wonder if the books might be out on torrents or something that I could use with it if nothing else. But I'd prefer to buy the textbooks in an electronic form because that's legal and my work would re-imburse me for it :)
Actually, proper production of a fiction book requires at least three people: the author, the editor who spots the author's mistakes, and the typesetter who formats it for the target medium. It's a rare author who can format a book for printing, and any author needs an outside reader to point out mistakes the author made but can't see because he's too familiar with the story.
An ebook doesn't have the printing and distribution costs of a paper book, but the publisher still needs to advertise it -- even more so than for paper books, since paper gets some free advertising just from being on a shelf in a bookstore. I wouldn't expect the price of ebooks to be lower than 60% of paper for top-sellers, or 40% for older stuff.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
If you are an avid reader and go backpacking, you can easily finish 10 books in three-four weeks at the very most. Finishing a 300-page book on a 7-8 hour bus-ride isn't that great of a feat, and if you spend any time on beaches you can speed through most literature that isn't Finnegans Wake.
For people who love to read, and do it relatively fast, this is a major issue. If you're in China, it's not always easy to find good books in english. And if you don't, you can look forward to many, many, many boring hours of point A to point B.
Except that then the author will go to another publisher for their next book[1], which is likely to be a big seller no matter how good or bad it is, because the author is already famous. An already successful author is a valuable asset to any publisher, because they already have a fanbase and you don't need to spend so much money on marketing them. So it would be very short-sighted to fool an author into giving away all their rights.
[1] Unless you tied them in to a multi-book contract, which is a risk in itself because if the author turns out not to do very well you've just tied yourself in to publishing several more dud books that you'll make a loss on.
Production costs do exist, but many of them (such as copy-editing) will exist whether the book is on paper or in electronic form.
You found a bigger list than I found.
At the very least, I'd prefer it to handle any electronic book format already around and have the capability of upgrading to new formats later.
Many scientific papers are readily available only as postscript files so that would be very useful. I see more and more djvu files as well.
That's why we have e-book warez sites.
I think someone will make an attachable lamp. This is better in that it seperates the batteries, and makes the extra bulk removable. Tt might not distribute light evenly however.
I'm not sure if e-Ink can even do backlight, by nature of the design.
If you are backpacking, I would be surprised if the batteries on this (or any) reader will last 3-4 weeks. I don't know anybody that has taken a 7-8 hour bus ride recently or regularly. If you spend time on beaches you probably still aren't going to blaze through 10 books in a day - I don't, we don't have beaches where I live. When I do get to the beach I go for the scenery.
For people who love to read, and do it relatively fast, this is a major issue. If you're in China, it's not always easy to find good books in english.
Again, how many people are spending significant amounts of China. Most of us aren't. This is only a major issue if you read a significant number of hours, read quickly and spend time in places where new reading material isn't easily acquired. I'm not saying a good ereader isn't a fantastic idea, or even that $350 isn't a reasonable price. I'm saying that if Sony is banking on people using it to replace carrying 10 (or more) paperbacks that market segment is going to be pretty small.
Now where you do have a point is textbooks. As soon as somebody figures out how to provide college students with their textbooks on one of these it will be all over. I'm surprised no one has managed to do that yet.
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Why not just use OpenOffice.org Writer software to translate Microsoft Word .doc into Adobe .pdf?
Of the several thousand Ebooks I own, roughly 5% are DRM protected but all are in PDB format and none are in any of the formats Sonys reader supports - that gives me sufficient permission to whine. They simply arent catering to the mass market.
Haven't you ever gone backpacking? You know, take a friend, pick a continent, pack a bag, book some tickets and travel for two-three months? Go by bus whenever you can, stay at cheap and lousy B&Bs, see all the wonders of the world? It's the greatest experience you'll ever have as young man/woman (well, losing your cherry...), and for that books are pretty much a must have. In those travels, a bus travel that takes 7-8 hours is a short one, and you take a lot of them. Foreign languages are the only languages, and the beaches are not used for scenery, the beaches are a break from the scenery. They look the same all over the world and there are millions of them, but there's only one Machu Pichu, only one Angkor Vat, only one Papal Palace of Avignon and only one Checkpoint Charlie. If you're the kind of person who travels to foriegn cultures and great cities only to lie on the beach all day, you should save your money and go to a tanning salon, because frankly: what's the difference.
Believe me, when you travel that way, books arn't just for diversion, books are food. You eat them up, because at those times, culture is water, you have to have it.
http://www.jinke.com.cn/compagesql/English/embedpr o/prodetail.asp?id=15
It looks like this ebook has a keypad for entering notes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You know, take a friend, pick a continent, pack a bag, book some tickets and travel for two-three months?
Unfortunately no. Thanks for adding to my feelings of wasting my life though.
I absolutely believe you that books would be vital in those situations. I have spent spent some times in other countries (not at resorts) and it doesn't take long for the foreign culture to start wearing on me.
Back to the topic, I can only think of one person I know that has ever done what you describe. Plenty who have talked about it, but very few have actually done it and most of them wouldn't spend $350 on an electronic book. Not a great target market for Sony.
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This is true, but HTML (at least basic HTML, the kind you might use when formatting an eBook) is pretty trivial to parse and turn into RTF. There are any number of tools out there that do it.
Changing an HTML document to PDF is similarly trivial, although usually you end up with a simulated printed page, which might or might not be what you want.
I'm not sure what the hardware and software on this thing are like, but if it's even slightly open so that people can write third-party applications for it, I'd expect to see, if not a full-fledged HTML rendering engine, than at least a file converter that would dump it to some other format.
Personally, although I find the concept of e-ink and an ebook reader to be an intriguing one (I would read a lot more ebooks if it didn't mean either reading them on a backlit LCD or printing them out; neither of which are very attractive options), I'm going to hold out until I find one that's going to really be a swiss-army knife. But then again, I've never been an early adopter; I only got my first digital camera in 2004.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Talk about bang-for-your-MB: while 6GB of video might only get me a season of TV episodes, 6GB of ebooks, suitably compressed, are probably more text than most people read in a great portion of their lives.
... even if they never un-rar it.
How much trading would you do of that? I mean, once you've acquired the entire Library of Congress, what would a ebook-warez kiddie do? Start in on the foreign-language ebooks? ("Dood...I just, like, totally got this hot copy of The Da Vinci Code...in Urdu. How sick is that?") Would people brag about how many Human Lifetimes Worth (HLW?) of written material they have?
I guess anything that gets kids involved in literature is a good thing
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I think the pertinent point is that someone who is likely to spend $350 on a piece of kit for reading books on probably a big reader. I like the sound of this, I probably average 3 books a week, often I have 5 separate books I am reading, not including manuals. I like to read, I want lots of books available to me. I use a Palm for this reason, especially when I am spending more than a few days away from home.
I have a 40gig mp3 player, it has a large chunk of my music collection on it, do I want this much available to me because i can listen to that much music in a day (or week)? No, but I want it because if I am on my way home and suddenly fancy listening to some Bulgarian folk music I know I just have to remember what that damn bulgarian choir is called.. Pretty much the same with books, if I am on my way home I may decide I want to reread a Will Self short story, if I can have that available then I am a happy puppy (apart from Will Self doesn't make anyone a happy puppy, but that is another discussion entirely)
The best is the enemy of the good
Jesus, if I could get my textbooks on this thing, at say, $10/piece sans software, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
SRSLY.
What is the "inherent cost" of music? Sure you have to rent a sund studio and pay a sound engineer and a band. But how much would that cost for a week long recording session? Probably a few tens of thousands maybe. If you want to get the best studio and the best sound engineers and producers lets say about $100,000.
.. getting something for a song just got a lot more expensive.
Golly
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
PDF isn't propreitary, the format is entirely open and documented.
That's as maybe, so how was Adobe able to stop Microsoft from having a "Save to PDF" feature in MS Office 2007?
I'm sick and tired of these hip, "ironic" sigs. This is an actual, honest-to-goodness no-nonsense sig!
I would like something like this too. However I looked at the requirements and it said the software is MS Windows XP _only_. I would only consider this device if I could use Linux and possibly Mac to transfer my NON-DRM PDF files to it. I hope this device just mounts as a USB mass-storage device. However, knowing Sony, they probably with mess this up with way too much proprietary crap.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
PS - In all fairness, it may be the book publishers, not Sony, who is requiring the consumer to get screwed. They may have deals about minimum book prices or some such BS. I'd tempted to blame Sony, but the main point is that *someone* along the line - Sony, book publisher, etc - is being a greedy bastard and it makes me sad because the tech seems so cool.
Yeah, apparently this is the case - Sony says the publishers have complete control over the content pricing in the store. My guess is that the publishers saw what happened to music labels and iTunes, and demanded control. Hopefully content creators will eventually realize that DRMed digital works are worth less to consumers than the physical hardcopies.
I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
If this thing had some sort of note-taking capability it would be killer.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
I was an avid fan of ebooks on my iPAQ 7 years ago, but stopped using them becuase I got pissed off at the pricing. I was paying the exact same price for a DRM restricted ebook that I was paying for the physical hard cover. This is a rip off. I understand why the publisher wants to maximize the bucks, but since they are saving printing, shipping, shelf space, and returns, ebooks are way cheaper and I should share some of the savings.
Alas, the publishers were much like the record labels and that means too greedy! If they provide price incentives than I'd use this, but given the expected restrictions if the prices are the same, I'll skip it and use the old fashion hard copies.
Or you could buy a good number of comic books which you would then destroy by treating them the same as you could treat an electronic device. Bringing that mint copy of Detective Comics #27 out on the bus with you and stuffing it in your pocket when you get to your stop would cost you enough to buy a thousand ebook readers.
HTML can be read after converting the file to BBeB.
Karma: Dyn-o-mite!(mostly affected by Jimmy Walker reading your comments)
I thought backpacking was partly about practicality and travelling light.
:-P
But what do I know, I only stay in 5 star hotels
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
1.- Learn the local language (whit so much empty time, that should be a doodle).
2.- Buy books in the local language.
3.- Here I meant to say profit.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Do you believe that an item's price should be based on the production/distribution cost, consumer demand and the pre-agreed "fair price" of similar items, or is it solely dependant on consumer demand?
If you take the hardline ultra-capitalist approach and think it's ok for the price to be based purely on demand, presumably you also have no problems with "cornering the market", price-fixing cartels and gouging people (eg, selling inflatable rubber dinghies for $1000 each during Hurricane Katrina) - after all, whatever people will pay, eh?
If you think price should contain some element of "fairness", then these prices are way over the odds - the price is broadly equivalent to a brand-new hardback book, but consumer demand for e-books isn't exactly battering the door down, production is less than for paper books, distribution is essentially free and you have to shell out something like $300 minimum on hardware before you can even use the thing you just bought.
If you agree that it's perfectly acceptable for companies to charge you a premium merely because people will pay it, then fine. However, given most people believe that ticket touting, price-fixing and the like are wrong, I think most people would agree that "fairness" should also be an important consideration.
And incidentally, in the UK books are considered an essential/educational item, not a luxury - this is why you don't have to pay VAT on them.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
You can get, hopefully soon, a similar ebook reader with similar specs, but without all the potential baggage from Sony's DRM rootkit debacle from a Chinese company called Jinke, and from Phillips.
Translation: It doesn't support .DOC, but if you _buy_ another application, you can use it to convert the files to a supported format.
So you would like _them_ to take responsibility for _you_ getting documents in Word format while you don't have Word available?