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The eBook, Mark 2
Selanit writes "David Pogue recently published a review of the Sony Reader, under the title Trying Again to Make Books Obsolete. Though he likes the device in general, he concludes that it's not destined to replace the book any time soon. Well worth a read."
pulp books do not need electricity
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
From TFA: "One charge is good for 7,500 page turns. That's enough power to get you through "The Da Vinci Code" 16 times (electrical power, anyway)."
So my question is: Why would you want to?
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
.. to tfa
"Well worth a read."
Was that some pun humour in the summary?
Anyway, I'd not trust Sony to make an eBook reader that wouldn't install a rootkit anyway. Installing Sony software is about as good an idea as installing sofware from MyWebSearch. They messed up Audio CDROMs for cripes sake, now we want them to control a book format too?
Oh You POS
The paper book will be obsolete at around the same time as existing technology succeeds in supplanting other more-or-less longstanding mainstays like the pocket knife, the pencil, the match, the internal combustion engine, corrective lenses, transparent glass windows, tumbler locks, zippers, analog clocks, shoes with laces, the wheel -- well, I think you get the idea.
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
The Web has certainly replaced magazines for the most part, and is even starting to replace academic journals.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that textbook sales are decreasing in real terms since the introduction of easily found information suitable for helping out with a lot of university work.
And there are already exact replacements for some book content.
Just look at what porn is doing - are porn mags still used as much as they were? Nope, it's on the 'net. The web is the main component of a book replacement and once you can get paper like displays which don't need any bulky electronics another feature of books will be replicated in modern technology.
Blogs have replaced journals, and TV guides are now transmitted over the air and published on the net too. All paper based content moved to "book" replacements.
Have you ever seen some of the more complex technical standards? Many of them can reach up to 9000 pages of actual specification, not including tables of contents, indices, appendices, and so forth. 7500 page turns wouldn't be nearly enough for such documentation.
Three things prevent ebooks from taking off: Resolution, ease of use, and DRM. Get displays up to 300 dpi, make it as intuitive (both the UI and form factor) as an iPod, and make the DRM manageable (something along the lines of iTunes) and ebooks might actually become competitive. Then again, audio books as downloads are probably more profitable.
Slightly off-topic, what cell phones are good for reading plain old ascii text files? It seems to be an easy thing to build in, but never seems to be attempted.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
The iRex Illiad is a better choice.
- - -
Online education? http://online.edu.org/
Next!
The Sony ebook reader doesn't support pen input or any kind of annotation. It uses eink and takes one to two seconds per pageturn to refresh the display. It supports plain text, PDF, and Sony's proprietary DRM'd ebook format... so at least Gutenberg.org material can be imported.
Still, without annotation - forget it. My ten year old Newton MP2100 is still a more useful ebook reader!
Bah!
... what I want to know is can you load .pdfs that don't have DRM on here? Personally, I would love something like this for journal papers... especially if it could mimic the parts of the dead-tree versions that I like... like being able to scribble notes in the margins.... without that ability though, I can't say I'd ever care to get one of these things... why carry around a $350 device and worry about charging, DRM and finding the e-books to begin with when I can just carry around a $9 paperback? It's not like I read more than one paperback at a time (okay, maybe two, but big deal...) but carrying a stack of ~100 papers to and from university, that's a pain in the ass...
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Printed books:
- Give me my fair use rights
- Enable me to lend them to a friend
- Enable me to donate them to libraries
- Five me my first sale doctrine rights
- Enable me to sell used if I tire of the book
- Enable me to give away if I tire of the book
- Don't crash
- Don't malfunction
- Don't run out of battery power
- Work in dim lighting, office lighting, and even direct noontime sunlight without washing out
- Are not platform-dependent; no vendor lock.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I guess I'm not the first to figure out that maybe e-books have an uphill battle to market, because a book or two is already portable. Which means that maybe the marketing effort should focus on commercial users of piles of books -- mechanics, doctors, computer technicians, etc. (When I had a service call from Sun recently, the technician was lugging around a laptop to read service manuals.)
you had me at #!
The Illiad is 649.00EUR at their online store. According to the current rate of exchange, that's about $800 US.
If they're charing an extra $450 for their product, it should be a *lot* better.
[Sony] messed up Audio CD-ROMs for cripes sake, now we want them to control a book format too?
In all fairness, they also helped Philips invent the audio CD format in the first place, which includes the bit about it not having any DRM. It's probably safe to say that they're such a large corporation (making blank CDs, CD-ROM burning drives, CD players, pre-recorded albums, and so on) that they sometimes conflict with themselves.
Fucking ironic. A book will last as long as it's language, so anything published today, if preserved (just leave it somewhere DRY) should last a few hundred years years. Think Shakespeare's English makes good sense to us. The English we use is standardised and well documented, compared to Chaucer's varietie of spellings and meanings in a day without dictionaries. Global communication is leading to a convergence of British English, American English etc.
Now an eBook. Whatever technology they're tauting today as the future will be as obsolete as the telegraph by the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Storing data anywhere for more than twenty years is difficult - think of NASA's trouble rescuing Apollo stuff from magnetic tape. (Propose solutions? CDs, tapes, are NOTHING to scratching inch deep letters in solid rock) Of course, regardless of which side of copyright hell we reach, I somehow doubt one would even possess the text of the book, but download it from the grandchild of our internet. So yes my children will inherit my first hardback edition of Harry Potter and not some joke of a device.
Now tell me your petrol engine will obsolete my bicycle.
Yet again content owners just don't get economics. Look at the first part of the article. How much does a E-book cost compared to a P-book. Why exactly the same offcourse. Nevermind the huge savings in both production, shipping and stocking, just like music and movies on the net we want the same amount of money as for the physical version. Oh and give the buyer fewer rights as well.
E-books sound handy especially for those of us who want to read books no longer in print. But why exactly should I buy an expensive reader only to then have to pay the same price for the e-book as for the paper version.
Why do content owners just not accept that if a product costs less to produce you pass some of the savings on to the customer? Imagine if you said "no thanks I don't need a plastic bag" in a real store and they then told you that will be 25cent extra. If you pick up your pizza at the restaurant instead of having it delivered you got to pay more?
Content owners are either plain stupid or plain greedy. There is a reason e-books failed commercially. This had nothing to do with the tech. It is because customers know when they are being ripped off.
would you want to make the book obsolete? im all for gadgets which make my life easier, goodness knows i have a few. but a book is not a hassle, imho books are great things, there is nothing like getting a new book and smelling the pages, or sitting on the can and having a good read. people are just wasting their time with stuff like this.
Hey Pogue, you don't have to be Pogue anymore. Jesus is here!
For me, the big failing of it is the "who the hell decided this was a good idea?" user interface. And, of course, the price tag - but time will fix that.
I don't see it replacing books in the near future - I see it replacing my computer as a viewer of my collection of reference PDFs - journal articles, datasheets, user manuals, stuff like that. Stuff I need, but don't want to have to keep laying around in printed form to yellow and get water damaged and whatnot.
I understand that it's not much more than a novelty if all you're reading is the latest fiction off the NYT list. I think the marketing is pitching this thing at the wrong people - they should be selling it to academics and technicians.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
If you don't like either Sony's reader or the iLiad (my personal e-Ink favorite) you can make your own!
Awesome.
For what it is worth I'm finding the Nokia 770's 200dpi inch screen to be great for reading, though I haven't yet downloaded the FBReader maemo offers. The Nokia fits in my back pocket is solid, rugged, and has good battery life. At 800x480 it is also great for websurfing or blogging on the go. If I find a good supply of affordable or free reading I definitely plan on using this as my eBook reader. I have already downloaded Moby Dick and 20000 Leagues Beneath the Sea to round out reading some classics -- they are very readable with the Notes application, but it doesn't save your place (you could mark where you were, but that's not very quick or handy). Not only is the resolution 800x480, but the Opera browser appears to be antialiasing the fonts as well. Very readable especailly with the magnify icon, which maintains smoothly formed fonts instead of pixelating them. I assume FBReader would do the same for whatever size font you find most comfortable to read.
Letter To Iran
Pulp books stricly forbid copying & pasting (though there is a hack going around called a scanner + OCR, but it's pretty expensive, hard to use and worst of all: requires you to get off your computer!). They cannot be emailed. You can't even link to them from a blog. And without the aforementioned hack, you can't transfer them among your various devices, even though you legally purchased them.
PS: I'm going back to reading His Dark Materials in this evil format now.
Things to happen before an ebook is of use. It needs to improve on the paper back. Right now it seems the ebook is just that an eversion of the paper, it does nothing more. The tape improved on the LP because of size, the CD improved quality and usability, the mp3 player improved on size, storage, usability over and beyond the CD. The ebook isn't a big improvement. 1) I need to highlight and take notes in the books. Too many famous notes were taken in side margins to eliminate the ability to take margin notes (Fermat's last theorem to name one). To add on to this I also want to be able to save my notes and share them over the internet a wiki of notes so when I go to read "the name of the rose" I can download a few sets of margin notes. 2) I need to be able to resell the book when I am done and buy used ones. Right now I can pick up a used paper back for a dollar or two and I can buy a new for $10 one and sell it to half priced books or on ebay when I'm done. It cuts down my costs, especially for college texts. Don't try to sell me the over all cost will be down. I buy most of my books at half priced books so until there is a half price ebook it won't work for me. I'll be able to buy over 50 books for the price of the reader alone and about 3 books per e book. 3) Make it fast and easy to use. I want to turn it on and read I don't want any load time or lag between pages. I often pick up a page and read (many books I read have small sections) so it is doable but if I have to wait 5-10 seconds for my book to load that will annoy me. 4) I need to import anything, gif, tiff, pdf, jpg, html, rss, doc, google docs, etc. (I understand the Sony can do some) I want variety after all I read magazines, journals, newspapers, hard backs, paper backs, guides, maps, all sorts of stuff the ebook needs to do it all before I get one. I want it to load my rss feeds in the morning so I can read those on it. 5) Be durable, be water resistant, shock resistant, drop resistant, TSA proof. If it gets ruined in the rain it's no better than a book and a whole lot more expensive. I'm going to drop it or keep it someplace it will get dirty make it able to stand daily ware and tare. 6) Read to me. If your electronic you might as well read out loud while your at it. Right now I don't want one. I tested the rocket ebook back when it was new, I carried it to high school one day it was nice, not an easy read, to heavy but it took notes.
(I forgot to mention students, too.)
I don't think ebook readers are aiming at first to replace your entire library. (Although I understand perfectly what you mean about boxes of books; I own many, and my remedy is not to move around much!) An e-book reader is "portable information" like an iPod is "portable music". And that's where the marketing difficulty may lie: Because it's just as convenient for people to carry a paperback (e.g. on a train or plane trip) as it is to carry the reader. And you don't have to worry about theft, batteries, breakage, etc.
But then there are those other categories of user, who need a portable library, which is where they should probably focus.
you had me at #!
Sony never released an Ebook reader for the PSP. However for those capable of running homebrew on their PSPs, bookr is an excellent program for reading ebooks.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bookr/
...and it's a seriously nice piece of kit. (This is the Iliad, which TFA references.) The screen is deceptively unimpressive. It looks like a sheet of plastic with text printed on it, until you see it change. You look at it for about five seconds and suddenly realise how horrible LCDs and monitors are --- this is how screens are supposed to be.
The software, however, is dire. The one we have is Linux based, with some ghastly software running on top of X. It's slow and clunky; the device responds to all keypresses about half a second late. I have a strong suspicion that the screen itself is operated via vector operations from some little microcontroller, and Linux is emulating a framebuffer on top of this, which may go some way to explaining the speed. Whoever designed the user interface also needs slapping around a bit, too; there's a big rocker switch, spanning the height of the device, on the left hand side of the screen. To go forwards through your book, your press it left. Apparently this is supposed to simulate the direction in which you turn pages. Sigh.
To summary: deeply impressive. Too expensive. Crap software. Wait until it flops, and then buy one off ebay to hack.
I rate it... 3 out of 4 trees!
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
What's missing is the Audible store for ebooks.
For $22.95 a month I get two books of my choice, which are usually current best-sellers in fiction / non-fiction. Work it out, and that's about $11.50 for the current hardback which sells at $27.95, or the iTMS version selling for $25.95, and definitely beats the $30-50 needed to get the complete audio version on CD.
I travel quite a bit, and currently have about a hundred audiobooks on my iPod that I can listen to in a line, on a plane, or where-ever. The selection means I have quite a bit of flexibility in terms of what I can listen to to fit my mood, as opposed to lugging a single hardback or a couple of paperbacks. And let's me watch recorded TV shows and listen to music to boot.
So "players" can afford that kind of flexiblity. But...
The point is also that if they want to speed up the adoption of ebooks then they need to provide incentives for consumers to adopt them... and paying for a dedicated reader so I can buy the same book at the same price as a hardback is NOT an incentive.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
If it's $200 every couple of years for glasses, and laser eye surgery only costs $500, doesn't have to be redone, and is risk free, then I think may people will opt for that instead of glasses.
One of the things that people with perfect vision (or vision that is not absolutely abysmal like mine) do not really get is that nearsightedness can also be an advantage. For example, when I am not wearing corrective lenses I can read microprint. This may seem trivial, but it definitely came in handy when I was upgrading the hard drive on my (now ex-) girlfriend's 12" powerbook. At some point I came across a ribbon cable that was keyed, and not until I got WAY up close and personal without my contacts could I see where to place a very tiny pin to unlatch the plastic key. The dimensions of the plug/socket were about 1/16" square if I remember correctly.
Now, I know I could have used magnifying lenses which engineers use for precision work, but that would miss the point that nearsightedness is sometimes a benefit. I generally avoid corrective surgery if there are non-invasive means of correcting the problem. For me, impaired vision in the mornings is lovely. I like being able to see my lovers up close and in focus. I would not be able to do this if my vision had been surgically "corrected."
blog
I have many old books that are already out of print. Also, I've bought some books trough used-books dealers, but they are sometimes hard to find. I mean, I love my books, and I want to be able to keep them indefinitely, but will an eBook publisher sell me, say 20 years from now, a book published this year? For me, it is a concern, because you don't always want or need the latest book when an old out-of-print book will do. Storage is cheap, but are they going to keep old books forever? Since a book can be given away, it's possible, although difficult, to find it eventually. An eBook cannot be given away, but if they are digitally kept around for a long time with no compatibility issues in the future, then eBooks might be a good option.
It needs to be cheaper than Amazon's used books are or I'll just buy a real book.
This is exactly what those who control distribution want, to hamstring digital media so they will not prevail.
blog
they publish TFA in paperback yet?
52 52'23" W 47 32'07" N
Not that I'm expecting it to happen in my lifetime, but something like that would probably go a reasonable distance towards replacing conventional books.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You don't seem to have understood this E-Ink technology at all.
It consumes ZERO power to hold the current image on an E-Ink screen. None. You could rip the display out of the rest of the electronics and the image will remain exactly as it was before. ZERO power.
So don't keep comparing it to your Newton. The Newton is a nice and useful gadget, but it doesn't consume zero power to maintain its LCD image.
That doesn't mean that the Sony Reader nor the E-Ink display are better, nor worse, than the Newton. They're just entirely different.
Title pretty much says it all, but with Sony's history of format lock-in and recent DRM root-kit shenanigans, I'm inclined to avoid any Sony electronics, let alone something like an e-book.
-- Alastair
The Good:
-The screen is nice. Very readable even in sunlight, fairly high res for it's 6" size at 600x800.
-The battery life(although I didn't play with one nearly enough to drain it's charge.
The Bad:
-64MB of flash. What is this the 90s? Even plain old text could fill that up pretty damn fast, and it's damn near useless for graphics or audio.
-2-bit greyscale is great for text, but is on the lower edge of acceptable for manga (and the resolution could stand to be a bit higher for manga as well). I realize 4 or even 8 bit grayscale would be a luxury feature on an early-model device like this, and I wouldn't even mention it, except that Sony advertises and sells manga for their Reader.
-Windows-only software, and no word on weather 3rd parties will be able to make their own loaders for linux and macs.
The Ugly:
-The case has a huge lip all around the screen, especially on the bottom. I think this device could be a good deal smaller and more portable without shrinking the screen size.
-The interface is even clunkier than the screen's slow refresh rate requires it to be.
-There are too many ports and slots and buttons and widgets. Sony really ought to take a page from the iPod's book on minimalism.
-Zooming in seems to only work on text, not graphics (manga)
-The $350 price tag. Unless the screen itself costs over $200 (who knows, maybe it does), I just can't justify that price, especially when you need to spend another ~$50 to give it a usable amount of memory.
I'd seriously like to see Apple's take on an eBook reader. My complaints are almost all about cross-paltform support, configuration and case design, and interface design; which are all areas Apple does pretty well in the iPod. So I think they could build a better eBook reader in short order if they chose to (really, it's mostly just grafting an ePaper screen onto a iPod nano's innards and putting it in a slick little case, with a well designed interface).
It's too bad that I suspect they see readers as a nice market next to music listeners and video watchers, and won't bother with that market until they've safely conquered the others.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
That book has been lying in my room for months now.
:P)
You're spot on.
(and I didn't had to click to know how dwarfish bread is made
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Oh great, so you get to lug around this paperback-size thing that does... what? Lets you read? No web browser, no calendar, no features at all that you'd expect from a PDA or "smartphone". And thats what this should be compared to, the only advantage it has compared to those is battery life and, one would hope, display quality. I've used the Nokia internet tablet, and the screen on that is, as someone mentioned, very nice. I fail to see how a single-purpose device like this reader is superior. It seems to me that the people who might buy this are also the people who buy PDAs, and if you have a good PDA, what do you need this for anymore?
He was looking for the plot!
*ba da boom*
I think any ebook without bluetooth has missed the boat.
remember the network is the computer.
http://www.webscription.net/ (BAEN) has 4 ebooks for $15.
I'd like to get the reader, but that's easily 25-50 books right there.
e-books don't fall apart.
wait for the hanlin ebook from jinke. it will support open formats and run linux
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I have to reply to this one, as it just so happens to match my Sig. Other remarks:
1. One piece of bad luck doesn't easily wipe out your entire library. (%^$%$%, I stepped on the screen).
2. Some of us actually hand-annotate our books with notes, and/or insert pages of "potential blog material".
3. This is Sony. Given their last experiment in user trust, I'm now very wary of their approach to media.
4. I think the 21st century struggle over DRM is drastically shortening the life of media. The great text files of 1985-era are still around. Microsoft is going for the record of marooning two proprietary formats in ten years. (Plays-for-Sure and Zune)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
half of the people I know who use their ebook readers daily say they'd give up their home computer(s) before the reader.
E-books should cost less than paper books damnit not more (note that I can sell used books). And companies wonder why no one buys their overpriced DRM filled crap then try to shove more of it down our throats hoping we've somehow become idiots in the meantime. If I remember correctly Baen are the only ones who actually make money on ebooks and they sell non-drm cheaper-than-paper-version ebooks.
If I could get a text file of a book, just pure ascii text, I would buy one or two books a week, every week, or at least $50 a month. Since they don't, I am forced to buy "real" books, which means waiting at the door for the UPS asshole who won't deliver on the weekends, which means no buying online and instead I buy a single book once in two months, if I am lucky and am near the bookstore, which is closer to $5 a month.
I wonder how much money the DRM has saved them by protecting them from "book pirates"?
There are a few glaring details that need to be addressed.
TFA also mentions Amazon is working on a e-reader, too. But I think it's butt-ugly. Reminds me of old chess computers or children's electronic edutainment devices.
I have 10 (TEN) full books on my ipod right NOW. I read on it every day. It uses the note functionality, and, it's absoultely better then paper. (for the record, the 2nd gen ipod nano, and i get HUGE amounts of battery life and it's with me all the time)
That's right, i also have a sharp zaurus (linux pda) , and i prefer the ipod nano. Full books, good backlight, good battery life, and it plays music too. All in my pocket, all the time.
Why do people keep saying that ebook readers are the problem? The problem isn't the readers - it's that there aren't big collections of digitized books (okay - gutenberg, but what i scooped was a russian hosted website with 350+ of the BEST sci-fi/cool books out there)
The point is, i've been reading (for "fun" reading, that is) 100% on the ipod for the past year. Why does sony even matter???
Just sayin'.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
There is nothing like not having to flip back and forth between one side and the other when reading in bed, let me tell you (you in the know, know what i mean)
I have 10 (TEN) full books on my ipod right NOW. I read on it every day. It uses the note functionality, and, it's absoultely better then paper. (for the record, the 2nd gen ipod nano, and i get HUGE amounts of battery life and it's with me all the time)
That's right, i also have a sharp zaurus (linux pda) , and i prefer the ipod nano. Full books, good backlight, good battery life, and it plays music too. All in my pocket, all the time.
Why do people keep saying that ebook readers are the problem? The problem isn't the readers - it's that there aren't big collections of digitized books (okay - gutenberg, but what i scooped was a russian hosted website with 350+ of the BEST sci-fi/cool books out there)
The point is, i've been reading (for "fun" reading, that is) 100% on the ipod for the past year. Why does sony even matter???
Just sayin'.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
Surprised nobody's pointed this out: the contents of a paper book don't change after it's printed, but an e-book can be revised (and who wants to bet that e-book DRM will provide for this?)
A slightly less disturbing variant: having your e-books revoked. After you've already paid for them, possibly while you're in the middle of reading them.
Neither of these scenarios is really an "improvement" for the consumer... but you knew that already.
- reads pdfs
- lets me use a stylus to make notes as if it were a real book
- uses the epaper technology (which is why I'm not just using a PDA for this
- let's me make bookmark (like I was dogearing pages in a real book)
- is not over US$400
- does not add DRM to anything
- doesn't require special software for transferring files to it
- book form factor (Sony's reader works this angle well IMHO)
Anything else (reads other formats, wireless transfer) is gravy, and I don't need it. I can convert all formats to PDF if need be. Sony's model doesn't let me make notes (and does some ridiculous proprietary software and DRM stuff), so it doesn't work. That European company (forget what they're called) with the 800 Euro reader is waaaay too expensive.I'm a law student, and would love to not have to carry around paper copies of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Uniform Commercial Code.
I have got to the point that I prefer to read ebooks. Lets ignore the distribution and availability of legal ebooks for the moment. I have been using ebooks for years primarily on pda's, but I find sub notebooks like the IBM x30 perfectly usuable too. Currently, I use the Dell Axim x50v using a VGA hack for true VGA, and the latest Mobipocket book reader. I find the resolution of this particular screen and software combo extremely pleasant for reading ebooks. Bound paper books aren't so great for reading for two main reasons. One, you have to hold them open, and the manner which you hold the book changes depending on where you are and what page you are physically reading in a book. This can be very uncomfortable depending on lighting, and whether you are reading while eating or some other task, like many of us do. Second, the weight of a book, the quality of the paper, or the binding may diminish the quality of the reading experience. Textbooks often use the highest quality paper with excellent contrast; yet they are often heavy, cumbersome, and pages easily damaged. Novels increasingly use crappy paper with poor tactile feel and low contrast. Occasionally, I purchase books from classic collections which use outstanding paper and binding, but they are expensive. They are nice to own and read from, though; but have limited availibility and selection. Let us assume availibility of the particular book you would like to read. The Axim is easy hold, read, and operate with a single hand. I wish it had a rocker on the side for changing pages more easily. The screen is very high contrast, and the resolution is outstanding. Mobipocket reader is flexible and has a myriad of useful options. I can read in nearly all lighting conditions for dark to sunlight. I have 12GB of available storage, so I have hundreds of documents at my fingertips at any on time. The reading experience is consistent for every book. I have a Stowaway bluetooth keyboard which is fantastic when I want to read when I prefer not to hold or when eating. It has a stand which fits the Axim well in either portrait or landscape mode. Sometimes, I prefer to read on a larger laptop screen. Mobipocket has a very good synch function with the pda client, and the reader is outstanding on a laptop. Obviously, there is some downsides, such as price and power. However, i purchased the laptop and pda irrelevant of their ebook functions; consequently the marginal cost to obtain ebook reader hardware was marginal. The ebook reader software is free. Finally, the availability of ebooks. This is the real problem and failure of ebooks from a consumer standpoint. Many books are available as scans in various places. Suprisingly, many are of excellent quality and have been proofed and revised. This is clearly a failure of the marketplace to provide a product where there is some level of demand. I have seen many arguments about how expensive from the publisher's standpoint to provide all books as ebooks. I just don't buy it. Every book is available in a relatively readable electronic format by the time it has reached the publisher. Personally, I feel that everybook should include access to a basic digital version of everybook we buy. It doesn't have to be fancy, just usuable. The problem is that publishers want to sell the ebook version for the same price as the paper price, and this is the crux of the problem since most people do not see the same value of a $25.00 hardback and a $25.00 ebook, especially since most new and popular hardbacks are sold for significantly less than full retail price. Publishers are scared to lill the golden goose, and ebooks languish.
...of the top useless inventions, the eBook needs to be on it...up there with such wonderful ideas as the computer controlled toilet and the Internet-enabled fridge.
;-)
Personally, I'm still waiting for the robotic vacuum cleaner that use internal pathfinding to flawlessly circumnavigate a house, unattended. For a totally pointless invention which I still think would be rather cool, I'd also like to see an IRC client written entirely in shellscript using only netcat, grep, and sed.
Come to think of it, on the same topic I've actually wished for a while that I had the money to travel to the US temporarily...because I really wanted to track down that guy who was shown in Trekkies who'd built himself a working version of a ride-on that was used by one of the characters in TOS...if I could give it the ability to carry shopping, I'd really want one of those things myself. Of course, I'd only use it after dark, and then only while wearing a balaclava...if I was positively identified while riding it, I would feel forced to commit suicide due to embarassment and/or shame.
From the article:
"These books are copy-protected, of course. You can read them on a total of six machines, counting Readers that you own and Windows computers. You can't give away or sell a book when you're done with it, much less return it to the store."
Paper books I can sell and buy second hand. I can give them to my friends.
I can read paper books no matter what operating system I am using.
Priced $8 to $16 apiece, from Sony's online store. If Sony is serious about replacing paper with e-books, then the price will have to come down. I'm never going to pay that much for any DRM'd media.
assignment != equality != identity
I have several hundred+ year old books and a couple multi-hundred y/o books. They've stood the test of time, I don't need to worry about not having the equiptment to read them, and have this sense of age that goes along with the wonderful tactile feel of books. I'm a computer peson, I spend a huge amount of time in front of a screen; while I can think of places where ebooks can/have been useful (places where storage of a lot of books is problematic, like on ships), normal reading is so much nicer with a real, paper book.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
My Palm PDA (Zire 31) and the 87 books I've got loaded into it is a fraction of the volume of that of a single paperback.
Why only 87? I've only got 128M of memory on the external card. When my 1G card finishes the warranty replacement process, I can change that to 870. Or some combination of books and MP3s... video is probably not worth the trouble on a 160x160 display. Instead of a whole bunch of boxes, I'll be able to move my fiction collection in one box, I've still got some paper books left, but the bulk will go with me in the PDA. What happens if the card fails? It's backed up on my HD... and if that fails, there's the mirror drive and the monthly DVD-R backup. PDBs I can read from OpenOffice if need be.
It could use more resolution, but what I've got is perfectly adequate for reading formatted text. It works well enough that I read paper books now when I can't avoid it.
I can read text, Mobipocket formatted books, and PDFs. If I had a Palm with higher resolution, it would be just great for a pile of manuals.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I read TFA and I'm not getting the Sony reader as presented, but I for one would be all over a useful e-book reader for $100 right fucking now.
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
what i think the greatest use for ebooks will be in the nature of school textbooks. load a semester's worth of books into the device. at the end of the semester archive them somewhere for reference and load the next set. e will not totally replace paper but has its place. i recently loaded plucker and zlib into an old palm pilot and downloaded several books from project gutenberg. i find i read as much on this as i do paper. its handy, it keeps track of my page for me, it's searchable. its not perfect (my wish list could get quite large) but its limitations are reasonable.
Battery Charge
Up to 7,500 continuous page turns with a single full charge on internal rechargeable battery. Actual battery life may vary upon usage.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
That's the only advantage you can think of for traditional books? They also have no DRM; they have to be treated pretty badly before they stop working; they contain both the data and everything necessary to read it.
Try dropping a book underwater for an hour or two, let it dry, and then try separating the pages. I once shipped a book from Panama to Canada; it arrived practically unusable. A decent ruggedized PDA can be thrown into a tub of ice water and continue to function just fine. Back in the early 1990s, a decent ruggedized model used to cost about 4 times what a "normal" model cost; and that was back when they had to design in special shock-resistant hard drives. In the days of 2GB flash memory cards, ruggedization must be even easier.
A well engineered e-book reader can be tougher than a book; we're just not making them, probably because they're too expensive.
DRM is a translation issue; not a technical one. You can copy a DRMed work without much difficulty; just like I can copy a book written in ancient Aramaic without too much trouble. It's reading the result when you're done that's a problem; and that's just an excercise in translation, not with technology per se. If I encode anything, and don't tell you the encoding, you have a problem.
I have a fifty odd year old book I bought second hand recently. It has one or two holes in it where it got torn up pretty badly. However, I can still read it. I probably couldn't say the same thing about a fifty year old computer text file, as it would pre-date ASCII and likely be written on some old format like a punch card, so I'd probably need to buy some specialist hardware like a punch card reader, then write a program to translate the data into a modern format.
That's hardly a fair comparison. Fifty years ago, computers weren't used to store books.
Of course, digitised books have advantages too, such as not taking up space, and being easily searchable.
They have other advantages, too. You can read an e-book and turn the pages with one hand; that's a major advantage. You can read faster, because the text is always right under your eyes, and turning pages is just a tiny finger flick. You can get e-books remotely from half-way across the world away in seconds. It's cheaper to download data than it is to ship paper. And the storage benefits are enormous.
It seems like an ideal format for non-fiction reference books such as encyclopedias and guides, but not very good for fiction.
When they can get the economics and marketing right, they'll be ideal for both. Right now, the screens are still a bit too hard to read, and no one outside of niche markets are selling ruggedized PDAs anymore. The E-Ink concept is a decent attempt, but if the refresh rate takes a full second delay, I won't buy one. I read much faster than that; one of the things I like about reading books on my PDA is the fact I can read quickly and comfortably. I also like never worrying about losing my page when distracted, being able to read multiple books simultaneously, and being able to quickly search for my favourite passages to quote to friends.
And while there's a certain nostalgia in the feel of a paper book, memories are what you make of them. One of my favourite memories is now of sitting perched high in a tree above a rushing stream, feeling the sun on my face as I lay back comfortably nestled in a cradle of branches, reading The Three Musketeers on my PDA. I couldn't have managed that climb with a paperback in my hand; and I couldn't have turned the pages with one arm wrapped around the branch I was holding. With my PDA, I could, and it felt natural and comfortable to do so.
I like e-books. I want them to succeed. They're not ready for the mainstream yet, but they will be. When they are, I'll be waiting, eagerly, to adopt them.
this whole discussion, in avoiding that fact, makes my head hurt.
i read on it everyday.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!