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Google Working To Make 'iPod/iTunes for Books'
nettamere writes to mention an initiative by Google to take the library online. The end result of the Google Book Search, the company hopes to see a future where they are not merely referring customers to Amazon, but instead offering them the ability to download books directly. According to the Times Online, Google hopes to 'do for books what the iPod did for music.' From the article: "One of Google's partners, Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press, said he foresaw a number of categories becoming popular downloads: 'Do you really want to go on holiday carrying four novels and a guide book?' The book initiative would be part of Google's Book Search service and its partnership with publishers, which will make books searchable online with publishers' approval. At present, only a sample of each book is available online."
'Do you really want to go on holiday carrying four novels and a guide book?'
Yes, I'd much rather have a guide book in my hand that screams "I'm not from here" than a digital version that could run out of batteries leaving me stranded and lost or, worse yet, the look of "I'm not from here" (generally obvious for tourists, anyways) and focusing all of my attention on an expensive looking toy, which is likely to draw in more problems.
I'll take a good old guide book any day, thanks. The novels, however, we can talk about.
From the summary:
I'd rather have a book and not have to worry about internet connectivity, worrying about dropping a laptop or other reader into the bathtub or a pool or a sidewalk, battery life, rain, leaving it behind at a restaurant, getting it stolen, and "sorry, you can't take that in here".
Books "just work" - and if you lose it, you only have the cost of a paperback.
And no, I don't want to read a book on my cellphone, either, even though I watch 3gp ripped episodes of The Simpsons on it when I have to kill some time.
Until there is decent hardware to read books on, projects like this aren't going anywhere beyond niche markets.
I love books, I own a few thousand of them and buy new ones every few months. I don't own a single ebook and I doubt I ever will because I've yet to see an ebook reader that was superior to an actual book. The only benefit to ebook readers over physical books are portability and storage capacity. The problem with this is that neither of these are big problems with physical books - if I'm going on a long trip it's not a big deal to bring even a few full sized hardbacks along to read. I don't need to have a library of books on my person at any time, the most books I've ever needed to bring with me anywhere at one time (since high school) was 4, and that was to read on a flight to the other side of the planet. I don't often fly to the other side of the planet.
Alternatives:
Project Gutenberg - 20,000 books free for downloading - listing in zip format, rss feed of latest releases
... and for other books ...
Interesting - the Kamasutra by Vatsyayana is currently the top book today, yesterday, this week, and for the last month.
I'll buy one of these electronic guide books provided it has the words "do not panic" in large, friendly letters on the cover.
If not I'll stick to my hard-edged paper travel guides which also come in useful for swatting the local wildlife without ruining the guarantee.
There are some quite capable eBook readers on the market, lead by the Sony Reader and the iRex iLiad. Both feature an e-ink screen which uses a matrix of charged dark and light particles at a resolution of around 160 dpi to represent a paper page.
There is no backlight and power is only consumed when the black/white charges are flipped to rebuild the page. The Sony Reader is rated at about 7000 page turns before a battery recharge is necessary. It can be happily left on without worrying about the battery going flat, and owners report in excess of months between charges.
Without a fluorescent backlight, the screen is far easier on the eyes than reading on a LCD screen, provided the ambient light in the room is good. The screen readability is roughly equivalent to a pulp paperback novel. (The texture is smoother but the white is not pure white, rather a very light gray.)
The main limitations are getting the content onto them. The Sony Reader accepts text, RTF, PDF and Sony's own proprietary eBook format, which is what books bought from the Sony Connect store are supplied in (DRM protected).
RTF is generally accepted as the best form to obtain and create books in, as PDF has to be specifically make to the 600x800 screen resolution (larger PDFs scale poorly) and is slower for the device to render.
Buying books from the Sony Connect store is acceptable in theory, but in practice the range is somewhat limited to recent bestsellers and popular classics, and the price is only discounted around 20% from a pulped tree equivalent (for something that is less tangible and less shareable).
Books from the Gutenberg project and other sources can be freely downloaded and transferred as text (plain) or RTF (moderately formatted) although these of course are classic, out of copyright works. More modern books, for which a legitimate or illicit PDF or CHM has been obtained (eg, O'Reilly manuals) can be converted from their original form into RTF, but the process is somewhat tedious and more work than the drag-and-drop method of say transferring a downloaded MP3.
(This is also not helped by poor Sony Connect software (intended to be iTunes for eBooks, and clearly UI inspired by it), which is slow and poorly designed.)
Still, with the Sony Reader and similar devices accepting up to 4GB SD cards, able to store a library of many thousands of books in a quite readable format which is slimmer than a potboiler novel, the hardware certainly shows promise. This is a first generation line of products, so inevitably it will improve for the next rev.
Filling them is the hard part, which is where Google could help.