Slashdot Mirror
Have You Changed Your Opinion On eBook Readers?
An anonymous reader writes "The Kindle made waves when it came out, but they've now had the chance to calm. How many of you have been using your eBook readers since you've received them? How many of you forgot you had one, and how many of you swear by your reader? I like my single-purpose (well, dual — music player) Sony Reader because I actually use it to read, rather than multitasking myself to death. Is this technology as convenient and useful as you expected?"
If not, what refinements or improvements would reKindle your interest?
The Kindle, as I understand it, lacks a monospace font. Monospace fonts are rather useful for code listings and whatnot.
The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
No
I Have not changed my mind. I may use one, but I will always prefer to read a "dead tree" book. I love building my library of books. Some I even read again once in a while.
There is a sense of achievement when sitting in the living room surrounded by bookshelves full of varied book. Besides, they are always a conversation starter when I get visitors.
A file on a computer does not compare.
Ever since I discovered alt.ascii-art.erotica, I've been using my eBook reader at every possible occasion.
I want it to use KPDF, USB and just work. Sell me the book/paper and let me read it with software that works the way I like it to work. If you make it free, people will figure out how to make it usefull.
I have a Palm Tungsten. Very nice PDA, used primarily as an ebook reader. The screen is easy on the eyes, the armored case means I can stick it in my pocket and forget it's there, the small size makes fitting in the pocket possible in the first place. My only complaint is that it has a short battery life.
Any of the modern phones SHOULD be able to do ebooks but the vendors keep the damn things so locked down it's impossible to do much with them. You want some app on a Palm nobody's written yet? You can write it yourself. Want something someone else wrote? You can install it. The Palm is more like a PC, very open, and the damn smart phones these days, even the blackberries, are more like Xbox 360's, technically capable of being open but deliberately locked down due to the parent company's infamous douchebaggery.
I will also say this: none of the books I've read have been paid for and the prices charged for electronic distribution are obscene. Electronic distribution removes most of the costs associated with publication and you're still going to charge me the full price of the hardcover? Fuck you.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I like having a physical library. Books are perfectly convenient for my purposes, and don't typically come with a triple-digit buy-in.
Is there one that doesn't need a backlight or continuous power to display? Can I read it in the sunlight or under a lamp?
In order for me to want a reader, it should have the screen, durability & low power setup of the OLPC so it can be used outside. If you can give it a crank or pull-string charger, that's a bonus, too, especially when you want to get away.
It should support all the basic ebook formats, including PDFs, text, HTML, etc. but NONE of the DRM. I don't want DRM to be an option, I don't want DRM code at all, any more than I want spam.
So it's open formats or bust for me. I don't put up with DRM, however optional.
I'd love to buy one, but two things hurt them right now:
1. Refresh time on turning pages. I know that it doesn't bother some people, but I do notice it. I'm told that it's getting better, though, and that gives me some hope.
2. Price of digital books. The price is still too close to the cost of physical books. The discount from the physical edition is only a couple of dollars, despite not having to come up with materials and shipping. I don't mind paying a little for convenience, but not that much.
Going along with the price is the issue of title selection (not many science or computer books seem to have made the jump yet), but that will improve. Early in the CD days, many things in which I would have been interested were unavailable in that format.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
When it comes to story, I much prefer dead-tree book.
BUT...I'd really like to see subnotebook with e-ink. Yeah, no colours and low refresh rate...but that doesn't really harm www/im/e-mail/writing. With a huge bonus of prolonged battery life.
Sadly, market works against me, in similar way how it established 15,4' "laptop" as perfectly acceptable standard (cheapest) size...
One that hath name thou can not otter
The kindle is still overpriced and ugly as Hillary Clinton's cunt. Tip: get inspiration from Apple, not Microsoft.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I travel a lot and read for entertainment and work related. Give me an ebook when I purchase the paper version. Make ebooks cheaper. Take out the cost of paper, inventory and labor. Make ebook readers less expensive. Sell more ebooks in volume when they are cheaper and the reader is free or subsidized.
()Yes
()No
()Hell No!
()The 70's called they want their 8-tracks AND the Kindle back.
()Dead Tree or Dead Me!
()Didn't I see one of these in Star Wars?
()Cowboy Neal Kindles his Spindle
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
The font has no pixelation at all. Awesome sort of "Dogearing" technology, and an external "bookmark" device I can insert into it. No power requrements.A nice wood finish. Bendable without breaking. Droppable without breaking. Cheap to buy. Anyone have better?
Regardless of how nice the reader is, its worthless to me as long as I can only get something from "their online store of X number of books". Until I can find any random book (yes, including all the zillion tech books we all collect) in eBook form, the device serves no purpose to me.
I'm sick of books and would gladly pay for non drm'd replacement pdfs. I have hundreds of textbooks, novels and paperback books and can think of several serious restrictions. I have to remember who I loan them to. They are a pain to move and an even bigger pain to put back on shelves. Eventually, almost all of them will rot. I'd much rather have them all stored on a hard drive that I can run away with when the next Katrina comes. I've been taking pictures of the books I use more frequently, but a pdf would be better.
Publishers don't really stand to lose much this way. If the price was right, most people will just buy their pdfs. Universities and other schools can put the cost of texts into tuition. Employers will keep buying reference material. Libraries could pay a special fee based on average circulation. The other stuff might be swapped but it's not something people would have bought anyway. Publishers that don't get it soon enough are going to be made irrelevant by things like Google text and free science journals.
Whats wrong with ... wait for it ... a REAL book? One you can read in 20 years, doesn't need batteries, and you can share with anyone else?
Seems like this is a solution looking for a problem.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
With a real book, there's something magical about turning pages.
As you get closer to the end, you keep a mental track of where you are in the book by the thickness of either ends. Having a digit tell you what page out of the total pages you're at just isn't the same.
Especially as you get closer to the end- Having the second half of the book shrink as you go, getting excited about the end (Without knowing -exactly- how close you are). Sometimes it even surprises you; you get close to the end but you know you aren't there yet, and then it -does- end, with a thick index in the back.
But not just the turning and thickness of the book. Also the texture. That rough texture of paper vs. slick plastic. That's just something that an eBook reader isn't going to replace.
However, I do think eventually next generations will get used to this. I don't dislike ebooks because of functionality or looks, I just don't like them because I'm not used to them. Sort of comparable to Windows and Linux, where Linux is actually more functional and capable of more things, but at first it doesn't matter because you're just not used to it.
At any rate, I think there is definitely a market for them, and that it'll grow. It'll just take some time of people getting used to the new feelings.
I never purchased one since the very thought incurs a 451ÂF fever. I prefer the vintage page-turners myself.
A long time ago, I sold or gave away all my Heinlein, Asimov, and Niven - almost 200 books, plus a few Christopher Anvil and James Schmitz stories from Analog. Instead, I downloaded free text versions from some scifi torrent and use TEXTEDIT on my Mac to read them. The advantage is that I can carry all my novels with me, on flash drives and on the hard drive of my laptop. Best of all, I can use the whole screen if I want, and I am not limited to a tiny screen. Who needs an extra device when you've got a Mac?
"Never squat with your spurs on."
- *NO* DRM.
- Uses the same amount of electricity as a solar-powered calculator, so that it can be passively powered rather than rely on batteries. All it needs to do is display text at a decent resolution, enough that it's readable without eyestrain, and scroll about as fast as a 300 baud modem used to be able to put text on a screen back in the day.
- durable enough that I can take it places, drop it, let it get wet, and worry about as much about damage as I would a book, or less.
- Screen is readable under the same lighting conditions as traditional print on paper -- particularly under bright sunlight. I don't want a backlight for reading in the dark as much as I want to be able to read in daylight.
Nice features:You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I don't know about you guys, but I like having stacks of books to convince people that I'm really really smart
"Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig." - Bertrand Russell
Using a sony reader and generally quite happy with it. The size is a compromise between those who want something not bulk to carry with them and those who are more or less home bound and would like a larger, more hardcover screen size. But there remain two issues with ebooks/readers: 1) The pricing model. Ebooks, in general, remain far to expensive. With significant distribution cost savings and no physical material, ebooks shouldn't sell for much over 25% of the print version. The ultimate insult is Amazon selling text books for the same price as the print edition. Clue: Sell the print edition and toss in the emedia for $1 more. 2) Adobe PDFs suck. The ability to regenerate a document on the fly in a variety of sizes is essential (a3,4,5,6 etc). Unfortunately, pdf's are locked in stone after they have been created and only some dramatic hacks make them at all usable on an ereader. Way too much work for inferior results. Adobe, are you listening?
I love mine (kindle). I've churned through 30 or 40 books since I got it in late December. I travel a lot, and the convenience of being able to take along a large and varied selection of books is unsurpassed. The fact that I can refresh the collection mid-trip if I run out (which happened on my last month+ trip), even when in a country that has no english language bookstores, makes it even better. But even at home, I love it. I've always read a lot, but the kindle has probably close to doubled my throughput just because it is always accessible and I can always find something that suits my mood. With a dead tree book, if it isn't what I want to be reading right now, I'll wind up ignoring it. That can't easily happen on a kindle.
Once you get over the silly ego-cnetric aspect of building a collection that you can show off to your friends, I'd much rather have a large electronic collection, just as I do with my music. My whole family has their kindles on one account, so we can share books far more easily than we used to, as well. I no longer have to pop a book in the mail to my folks, or risk having my latest book stolen at the end of a visit. Instead, once I'm done, I just delete it from my kindle and any member of the family can grab it. Try that with a dead tree book! The kindle was be far superior if they just formalized the concept of loaning a book to a friend. I do it with my dead tree books, and I do it with my kindle books now, by sharing account info, but I'd rather just be able to do it by giving up my access while they are reading it after I email it to them.
Also, show one to someone who has failing eyesight and they'll be ever so pleased. The large font size is very readable, even for someone suffering from macular degeneration.
As for the shopping experience - with the built in whispernet, I've been known to wander around a B&N or borders, buying books I see on my kindle, so the experience of walking around, browsing a bookstore isn't really lost. And I don't care much about the 'fairness' o doing that to B&N or borders. However, when it comes to my favoured mom & pop bookstores, I'd far rather that any books I buy while wandering their store would have some kind of rev share deal with amazon. Instead of whispernet, just let me check out at the front and download my books from a machine up front. Or let me use whispernet, but give a cut to the store I'm in.
They're awesome! I would so buy one if I actually read books.
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
...for one simple reason. I can't lend an e-book to a friend. To me, this is actually THE issue that is the wrench in the wheel of digital distribution.
She's an avid reader, always working on a book. With the Kindle, once she is finished with one, she can immediately download a few samples and then go on to purchase the next. She's browsed and purchased several times on our train commute into Manhattan-- extremely convenient. One of her favorite things about her Kindle is that on a crowded subway, she can hold on to a rail with one hand while holding up her Kindle with the other, flipping 'pages' easily with her thumb.
While she may pick up a paperback every so often-- usually if someone lends it to her-- I don't think her life will ever be without an eBook reader again.
As for me.. I don't read as many books. However, I've been considering one, likely the Sony, as a replacement for all of the PDF's I'm always printing out and sticking in my bag for reading during my commutes and while on business travel. There are always a few white papers, marketing material, reports and other documents which I want to have on me for when I have a chance to read them. Unfortunately, when I fall behind in free time, the weight of the documents can add up appreciably and my bag can get pretty heavy. I'm thinking the eBook reader can easily help me cut down on the weight and even allow me to read more as it will be easier to hold onto them until I get to reading them. I suppose I'll also cut down on the paper I'm wasting since when I've finished reading one of these printouts, I trash it.
If the books were printed on rag or something else that lacked acid then those tomes would certainly outlast their electronic counterparts. Over time books will become brittle and fragile because the acid is deteriorating the paper.
I have a Sony PRS-505. It's really great having 300-400 books available at my fingertips, wherever I travel.
The device has PDF support, but it is glacial and nearly inadequate for reading (say) ACM papers. There are conversion possibilities here, or the device may get better support in the future (it wouldn't be hard, frankly).
But for plain text it's wonderful. I'm on vacation now with my unit, and have ploughed through 3-4 books in the last few days.
My balk at getting a Kindle: Having to route your content through Amazon. The privacy aspects of this are terrifying.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
I wont lie, much of the appeal is the VAST library of free books out there, being able to read anything I fancy with a few keyboard strokes.
But the readers themselves are what cinched it. I have always had access to the books but reading on a laptop really is not convenient and does strain the eyes. Not to mention horrible battery life (as compared to a reader type device)
On my Sony (Blech I know) Reader, I can read 2-3 good sized books in between battery charges. I can take it with me traveling to 3rd world countries instead of the seperate suitcase for books I normally bring.
And even just reading in a normal environment I find it better and more comfortable than a dead-tree book. I can lay in any position without worrying about the page folding or losing my page. I can read at night without worrying about losing my page when I fall asleep reading (often). If reading in the cold I can keep my whole body including hands under the covers and read and just hold the book through the covers, one finger on a button.
The screen looks fantastic, the battery life is great, and it has a million and one advantages over a dead tree book. I would never go back. I even download e-book versions so I can read them on my reader.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Since you asked our opinions, here's mine. I love reading books on it. With a PDF, I can turn the doc sideways and switch to full screen mode and easily read it almost anywhere with each PDF page taking up one full screen. I used to have a Palm Tungsten and also loved reading books on it. And for the record, we turned our family room into a library and have a lot of books in it. I enjoy reading books either way. I'm more about the content then the actual physical manipulation of the pages.
I've had three of them -- they mostly get stolen. But having my Palm be my book means i won't lose it or forget it in my drawer. These are all things which i do with my other attempts at keeping a schedule or address book. Or calculator.
I LOVE reading books, and i love my Palm. I think the talk about woodware books having a mystique is understandable affectation.
Plus, mostly i read hard sci-fi, and most of those books have embarrassingly juvenile cover art.
It won't reliably handle many non-English characters. I won't use it for Chinese texts especially. And anything where the illustrations are critical to full understanding of the text is also useless at this stage.
It's very weak when it comes to handling most books with code samples as a critical component, but in most such cases, the kludginess of transporting Kindle text to a machine where I might use the code sample is such that the attraction of stocking up on programming references that contain significant caches of adaptable code is not really there on a Kindle -- and most publishers now offer some simpler means to supply sample code in an accessible manner if you own a hardcopy of the book.
I actually find its main use for me is as a laptop substitute, at least in settings were I'm not looking at a lot of quantitative material, and as a pinch-hitting connection to the 'net when I might be someplace without a convenient phone jack or other connection. My book collection is already too large and I won't replace most of it with Kindled copies.
Still its connectivity is useful for following a few current papers, storing public-domain classic texts for text search and reference purposes, when I want to be able to answer some question quickly, but still want to "un-plug" for the most part from phones, e-mail and other pointless distractions.
I can also store reference documents of my own on the device in what is usually a more readable form than I could managed with most PDAs, if the text in question can be readily formatted as HTML without too big a loss of readability.
Sure, you can multipurpose your gadgets into reading books. But the draw of the ebook reader is eInk.
If you havn't experienced eInk yourself, you're missing out. Not only is it as readable as newspaper, but the power consumption at rest is ZERO. You don't worry about that nasty backlighting or the headaches you get from reading off a screen - it is completely different and without trying it, you really can't say 'your' non-eInk device is better.
I was an early adopter, and I've still got dead tree books... but I love my sony reader because I can keep all my paper books in one small unit.
Well maintained, redundant archives should last forever - the ability to copy reliably is equivalent to imortality. I have not lost a single file in the last eight years and I have all of my mail going back 20. Devices may and have failed me but my work, letters, photographs and music has survived and grown. They can be passed on to my kids but books will be too bulky for the same. Every library is overflowing with the result of estate overflow. Some put them on the shelf as a "free library" the majority goes to the paper mill to make TP. Such is the sad fate of your paper media and this is why public libraries are important repositories of culture. In the end, not even libraries last forever. All civilizations have their down time and public libraries are often torched. The entire library of the ancient western world, for example, now fits on a single six by twelve foot shelf because the vast majority of it was lost. The US Library of Congres itself is rotting as we speak. Digital libraries will be much hardier than this.
WTF!?
Thanks to archive.org and the creative commons, I now have a larger collection of free music than non free. This is nice because it gives me something I can share with my friends.
My book collection, alas, is still all dead tree. There are a few interesting titles from project gutenberg and others but there's no equivalent of the easy to rip CD format for books. This is a shame because books are often more important than entertainment. No bread no books, no books no bread or entertainment.
No calls now, I'm
I picked up a Cybook Gen3 several months ago and have read 4 or 5 books on it.
I'm quite happy with it, however it's really only good for reading books from start to finish. It absolutely sucks for reference material, heavily illustrated books, or any book you might just want to flip through.
Another bummer is that it (and most other existing readers) don't display most PDFs very well since they tend to be formatted for a larger screen. It's relatively simple to convert a mostly text pdf to a readable format (mobipocket has a nice, free converter for download) but forget scanned or complex pdfs with illustrations.
That said, it's a joy reading a novel on this thing and there is plenty of content to be had for free as well as for pay. I don't think I'll ever be caught somewhere with nothing to read again.
ebook readers? sure.IRex iLiad rocks, an e-ink greyscale display linux tablet (@ 768x1024), with various linux apps ported as well as the usual ebook-reader style PDF and web page readers.
Amazon Kindle in particular? No. It's just low-spec compared to the iliad (and the iliad isn't particularly new anymore!), and while it may be "linux underneath", its primary purpose is reading DRMed files from amazon so it's pretty much worthless to me.
I buy my books for a substantial discount from a used book dealer and sell them for only slightly less than I paid when I'm done, or pass them around friends and family first. Can you give me an e-book that I can do this with?
... one page is a little see-through now.
I'd love to see how your e-book reader would hold up in my kitchen with a copy of "Joy of Cooking" on it. I'm guessing one good dousing in hot bacon grease would more than ruin the screen, while it only made my JoC smell funny, well
Seems like there are a number of very substantial hurdles for e-books to overcome, I'm guessing the solution involves some sort of wood based material...
The Kindle looks mostly great so far, compared to readers that came before it. Partly because the tech has improved, but also partly because of clever things like the built in EVDO and the free-first-chapter-preview. (I think that would mostly make up for being unable to physically browse books. Or maybe I'd cruise the bookstores, Kindle in hand, and browse physically and buy electronically.) However, the price for the device is too high ($400 is a bit steep; $200 is more like it) and same with the books. I'm not a have-to-read-it-in-hardcover-right-away person. Most of what I read (2-5 novels/month) comes from the library or other people, the few books I do buy are <$10 paperbacks or <$10 discounted hardbacks. After paying a bunch for a device, books should be in the $5 range. The last books I paid over $10 for were the illustrated versions of The DaVinci Code and Angels & Demons. (And I'd happily pay as much for an illustrated The Broker or Playing for Pizza by Grisham.)
:-)
So my main complaint is price, and a couple years should take care of that.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
1. Dead-simple operation. Reads e-books, and does very little else.
2. Minimalist Interface. Possibly the Kindle's greatest shortcoming. Should have no more buttons than an iPod (or, say, the original Game Boy).
3. Books easy to download/retrieve. Should be wireless, though the actual purchase doesn't necessarily need to originate from the device itself (see #1 and #2). Perhaps a hybrid system by which content may be purchased online via web browser, and then "pushed" to the unit wirelessly?
4. Open access. Any seller must be able to supply content via a common format. DRM is somewhat acceptable, as long as it isn't obnoxiously intrusive (eg. Apple's FairPlay). Free content must also not cost money (tsk, tsk, Amazon)
5. Books must be considerably cheaper than their dead-tree equivalents.
6. Large, crisp, legible, glare-free display. Should be able to withstand some degree of abuse. I want to feel like I'm looking at a piece of paper, not a screen.
7. Sleek design. Doesn't need to be revolutionary, but also not ugly. This should naturally follow from #1, #2, and #6.
7. Page-turn lag must be kept to a minimum.
8. Cheap enough for normal folks to afford. Under $300?
Under these conditions, you *might* be able to successfully market one of these.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Sadily, the PSP continues to lose ground as a portable web browser as more website use more dynamic features. It also does not help that the PSP does not have a PDF or eBook reading software. The video game developers would have loved to cut their publishing costs by putting their instruction manuals on the UMD discs, but Sony failed there too.
I'm at the point that I'm thinking of selling my PSP.
Another thing to consider about eBook readers is their availability. Consider the case from the Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last" A shrewd person such as myself would need to consider the drawbacks of relying on electronics to read books, such as battery life, durability, and ofcourse text size. A poorly designed eBook reader will leave you in the dark and unable to read the books that you want. I am still a fan of the physical records. An old book can last a long time if kept in good condition.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
I have a Hanlin V3, and I absolutely love it. I do know my situation is unusual, though. I don't live in an English-speaking country, so *any* English-language book is expensive. I also travel quite a bit. Being able to replace the a couple heavy, bulky dead-tree books with one ebook reader with a gig of memory is really nice.
As far as the complaints go, some seem valid, others not so much. Page lag is a bit weird to start, but I got used to it within an hour or so. It's just a matter of hitting "turn page" before reading every word. Battery life: actually, it's excellent. It only draws power to change a page, and one charge lasts thousands of page turns. I can also just leave it on to my current page, so I can jump back into the book quickly. On the other hand, search functions suck. I would never use the current crop of technology for reference books. Texture/feel...well, I guess. But the ebook form factor is just too much more convenient for me.
I have e-book, newton, and zarurus as readers. The e-book is a piece of junk (bitch to get anything on there that they do not want you to have; it was not worth the 99). The newton is awesome, but only supports ascii text. The Zarus is way too small. I would love to have the e-book, but with the ability of the kindle; Give me CF for mem, and a better battery or possibly e-ink. Finally, make it open arch. so that new formats can be put on it.
But at this time, I do not like any of these except for special cases.
In the end, I KNOW that e-books will come within 5 years. So at this time, I buy few paper backs and/or computer books. OTH, I am buying leather-bound books. Esp the classics. The easton press are OH so nice. They should last all the way to my great grandchildren or beyond. But for simple items, far better to go with e-books.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Ha! The Kindle has solid state memory!
Oh, wait...
They'll post shit about, well, um, shit, for instance.
Deal with it. (e.g. mod it down and move on with life.)
From what I've seen of e-book readers so far, I can predict that in The Future, the "perfect" e-book reader will be almost identical to a paperback book, only slightly smaller than a real book, with electronic pages, and dozens of seldom-used features like dictionaries and trivia games and thesauruses. And I guess the pages might as well light up too. Maybe it will be useful if there is a paper shortage
On the other hand, the newspaper functionality has potential. Unlike novels, reading the newspaper can be very clumsy and annoying unless you have an entire table to read it on. And the online distribution method is so much more convenient than real newspapers. Of course you can already get news on your cell phone or computer for free, but all the same I think e-book newspapers have some serious advantages over the real thing, which I can't say about the e-novels.
Being able to use some more open standards would be great I get a lot of e publications in PDF this includes newsletters books as well as technical diagrams and such. Being able to read those without any conversion would be great.
This also includes some HTML content (Halcyon Days comes to mind... hmm PHP manual...).
I think the more it has features where I don't have to depend on connection/supplies from the company to use it the better, just like real books.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Somes days I just LOVE my spiffy Kindle! It makes puppies smile and rainbows sing!
Other days I just don't see the point. I mean why even bother reading ANYTHING? We're all just going to die eventually anyway.
Books have some really annoying drawbacks, which ebooks promise to solve. Unfortunately for ebooks, the virtues that books do possess are really hard to match in ebook format.
Books, even cheaply printed ones, offer excellent resolution and contrast. All but the most awful will last for ages without any special effort. The ability to use marginal notes, bookmarks, underlining/highlighting, sticky notes, and dog-ears gives one a lot of markup options.
I've yet to find an ebook reader even close to my price range that can touch paper on any of those counts. Until I do find one, I'm sticking with my current setup. A cheap secondhand palm pilot of some sort + plucker + project gutenberg. It isn't even close to reading a real book; but it comes in awfully handy on the subway, in waiting rooms, and so forth. Until the tech catches up, I'm treating ebooks as complements, rather than substitutes, to real books.
Anything that will natively read a PDF is a great win in my book, no pun intended. The iPhone/Touch has a built in PDF reader, but without being able to store them on the device and bookmark the last page read or have a way to jump ahead to a certain page, it falls short. The perfect eBook reader is yet to come and when it does, it will be hotter than the Kindle.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Almost all online multiplayer games (steam, wow, etc.) require payment. They are fairly hard to warez. Pretty much every single one of my gamer friends has paid for those games.
BTW the title of this post is an homage to your lukewarm troll. Enjoy!
Long ago I saw a program on TV that demonstrated that the fastest way to read (and with higher comprehension) is to have the words flashed in front of you in a single spot. Not single words, but two or three - the same length you absorb when your eyes stop. Yes, you read when your eyes stop. So, instead of flitting your eyes across a line, software would move (flash) the words in front of you, so your eyes stay steady.
That's what I want, for my iPhone. It's perfect - just flash the two or three word clusters on the phone while I stare at it. Let me control the speed with simple up and down buttons. Fast with high comprehension. Does something like this exist already for Mac/PC? Somebody make it for the iPhone!!
... it's just that no one has done it right yet. Personally the ability to edit, copy, cut and paste text from books or make 'clip marks' is a BOON. I'm sure many of us do this already manually through either: Bookmarks, or cut-paste to notepad or other word processor/blog/what have you.
Would you go back to regular mail from email? I wouldn't. The ability to search my email and find things from a long time ago is just way too useful to go back to using bulky dead-tree mail. The same goes for books, ever wanted to share something with someone that you read somewhere... there's lots of quote farms online but there are lots of other things you'd love to quote or read online but it is locked behind copyright. Right now I LOVE being able to use google for books but HATE being locked out of the book itself (only getting one page, etc).
I wish we could just subsidize copyright for written works since the internet makes locking up written work a kind of pointless thing if you believe in progress. How many insights and advances are now being stumbled onto because of the net and being able to mine the collective data human beings produce? A lot I would say.
How much electricity does it take to "turn a page" on an e-book? Could a person generate that power easily? In addition to accepting drm-free pdf/txt/whatever files, I'd like, if it's feasible, to be freed from battery dependence as well. If I could generate enough power to turn the page by, say, closing and then opening the device (with, say, a toggle switch for "turn the page" or "I'm just closing the book") you could get that book feel even more, and never worry about your battery running out when you're on a plane.
In my mind, the e-book would look a lot like a paperback, and open in a similar manner.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
I have a massive general-interest book collection (about 6 full bookcases in my house plus more in storage). I read 4-8 library books per month. I buy books frequently, and I also have a big technical library that I only refer to when I need it. I even have two bookcases in my office (which isn't that big) for the fraction of tech books I think I need handy. I also have all sorts of gadgets and computers. I have an old Newton. I've got an iPhone, I've owned Palms and PocketPCs as well over the years. They are all OK for reading, but none have replaced paper for me except in very limited circumstances. So I may not fit the profile they are looking for, but I am an the pretty far end of the reading scale.
To realistically have a shot at dethroning books in my life, a device would have to:
- Weigh a pound or maybe even less.
- Have a battery life of at least 24 hours (of usage - not just standby) on a single charge.
- Be rugged enough to handle the same kind of conditions as books.
- Tactile comfort. Plenty of it.
- Easy loading of content, including stuff I download myself (PDF manuals, for instance).
- Wireless? Sure. That'd be nice too.
- Cheap enough that I won't be bitter if I lose it or have it swiped.
- My library needs to support it.
In other words, not for at least a couple more generations of reader. Maybe never. Paper is cheap - really cheap. If I buy a book for $10-$20 and I take care of it reasonably well, it'll still be there 20-30 years from now. My 6-year-old son reads books now that my wife and I owned when we were kids. Those books are almost 40 years old, and they are still useful today. If I buy a Kindle now, I'm probably looking to get rid of it in 2-3 years.
I think that for the foreseeable future (at least 5-10 years) e-books are at best a niche product.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
EBook may be an iffy use for the consumers, however I see it has a great potential use in the education system. The kids or college students can go to classes for the whole day just bringing a light weigh EBook. The textbook can be stored in PDF format. Students can search and makes on the textbook. I live in Asia, where elementary school kids lug around a 20 pound book bag everyday. I see this device saves a lot of kids' back.
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
I have used a Kindle as my main vehicle for reading for 4 months. I now prefer to read material on my Kindle over paper. I love having my library with me at all times, and having the ability to download new material any time. The screen is very easy to read, and the navigation is simple and intuitive, if slightly clumsy. Most people who have negative things to say about the Kindle, just have never used one. Try it for 3 months, and you'll never go back.
At the end of January I bought an Irex Iliad ebook reader (more expensive than the Kindle, but with a larger screen and with the ability to use a stylus). See Irex Iliad
I love it! I use it every day. I can read technical two-column pdfs on it for work, as well as tons of novels. You can plug in CF flash cards or USB drives, and if you attach it to your computer the internal memory appears as if it were another drive. I also use it to take notes in meetings or jot down things while working.
Seriously, it is one of those things that you find more and more uses for, once you have it.
PDF isn't what you really want. I have a Hanlin V3 and I'll take HTML or plain text over PDF any day.
PDFs have fixed size pages - they're designed for printing onto physical paper. E-book readers are paper-back book sized, not A4 (or letter or whatever) as most PDFs use. This means they have to either scale it down to almost illegible sized text, or you have to scroll around each page.
This isn't a shortcoming of the readers, more a short-sightedness on those who generated the PDFs. Maybe someday someone will start using proper page sizes to produce e-books.. one can only hope.
Part of the problem with visual readers is that there's often clutter and the scrolling/paging is often weird. OpenLibrary presents rather well, in this respect. It tends to do badly with used screen area and it's a bugger to set up and use locally for ebooks.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It seems like most comments want there to only be one or the other. Personally, there are some advantages to electronic readers, especially as the technology improves and DRM hopefully decreases. I like the ability to get some books quickly w/o having to go to a bookstore or wait for it to arrive in the mail.
On the other hand, I stare at a screen all day and find it a nice break when I read stuff on paper. I also prefer marking and making notes on many things I read. Even when they make a good interface for that, I'll probably still like paper.
One more thing I like about dead trees. My memory recall is very position/image oriented. I'm not sure why, but I recall details much better from books than online documents. This doesn't matter for reading stories for entertainment, but is very important for technical reading.
http://store.naebllc.com/
This is a great alternative e-Ink reader to the Kindle and Sony Reader. It supports open formats as well as DRM'ed mobipocket, runs linux and comes with the promise of firmware updates to add future format support and bug fixes.
What's your GCNSEQNO?
I use my smartphone in with the free Mobipocket Reader software installed as eBook reader software and am more than happy with it.
My ebook reader being my celphone means I just lug it around everywhere I go, fits in my pocket fine, no hassle.
The resolution's fine too, at 240x320 pixels, it's not much different from the old 80x24-character displays on monochrome monitors in the 80's. Some might say the display's a little small, but it's perfectly fine with me, helps the little critter fit in my pocket better.
With tons of books from Project Gutenberg and whatever else sources you can find on the net, them's a lot of books on one handy little device
The heck with these eBook reader-only gadgets. Maximize your smartphones, guys! Very handy for waiting in lines, etc.
http://www.object404.com
I've had my Kindle since February, and I never leave the house without it.
I use it primarily for textbooks and the newspaper. The Washington Post downloads automatically to my Kindle every morning, for about 1/4 of having the print edition delivered to my door. If I miss a day (never turn the wireless on), I have seven days to grab it from Amazon's website, which is less than perfect but easier than trying to get an older paper copy.
Many of my assigned readings for class are available for free from ProjectGutenburg or similar websites, so those go on the Kindle via USB. Articles from JSTOR are easily converted to Kindle, as long as they don't have too many funny characters (mine generally do). Class syllabi are often distributed online, so those go on the Kindle as well. The Kindle is a student's best friend.
As pointed out by others, the Kindle's main weakness is PDFs. As some of you well know, the PDF format can be tricky. Some can be converted by Amazon's email service or by MobiPocket Creator, but if you've got a document made up of scans of a book, you're out of luck. It'll display, but at a size far too small to read, and since it's an image, there's no way to increase the size.
Foreign character support would also be awesome, but there's only so much room for OS and drivers on the 256MB of internal space. 180MB are available for use on a fresh unit. (More storage can be added with SD cards, but face it- text is small. There's 20 novels and over 100 newspapers on mine and still about half the space is unused)
The real "Killer App" of the Kindle is the EVDO connectivity. It's not fast and active web surfing will kill a battery in minutes that would otherwise last days, but it can be a lifesaver. I tend to browse the Kindle store on my computer and send a few dozen samples to my Kindle, and only turn on the wireless on the Kindle when I have read the sample and decided to buy it- which I can do anywhere I get cell coverage. Wireless book/newspaper delivery is bundled into the cost of the books, and Amazon is making a healthy enough profit off of that to cover our websurfing as well- while having it there is great, it's clumsy enough that no one is going to use up more than their fair share of bandwidth. When my computer failed for a few days, I was using my Kindle to check my email- and even to register for classes, a very time-sensitive operation. It was slow and clumsy, but bad internet is better than no internet at all.
Book prices have impressed me. Most of them are priced well below their print counterparts, normally around 20% lower than the paperback version. Some books come out priced higher than the hardback versions, and then suddenly drop a week later as the author realizes how the pricing model works. Most books off the bestseller list are 50% or more cheaper than what you'd find in a store.
The battery lasts days, books can be read in full, bright sunlight and doesn't cause eyestrain, and the refresh is fast and doesn't bother me at all. The buttons can be a little too easy to press, but if you keep it in the cover that comes with it (or one of a few aftermarket covers that are already out there) then that's not a problem. The back battery cover has a tendency to slide off, but the Kindle itself has never actually come loose of the cover to float freely in my backpack.
The price of the actual unit is really high, and it's got some of the hallmarks of a v1.0 product, but these will be addressed in the future. Having an imperfect product is part of being an early adopter. And yeah, it's not the most aesthetically designed thing ever, but I've been an Apple fan my whole life. I've got a thing for white plastic.
True, but supposing e-ink eBook readers were cheap enough that you could have 5 or 6 of them scattered over your desk? You could even have them open on different pages of the same book. I think that part of the problem with eBook readers is that they are new enough to be a lot more expensive than a book plus all the DRM stuff means they are all mutually incompatible. A ubiquitous standard plus cheaper hardware will make a huge difference.
I have to remember who I loan them to.
You may not want to go to the trouble of entering all of your books into it, but I have just started using tellico to catalog my books and DVDs. So far, it's a pretty nice little program. It fetches most of the book info based on the ISBN, UPC, author, title, etc.
It's a lot like librarything, but unlike librarything you don't have to pay for it ever. It also does stuff that's not a book.
What you're interested in is that you can tell it details about loans, and it'll even tie in with the KDE calendar if you use that.
- -He was unpaid for his enthusiastic comments (featured on Amazon's Kindle page)
- -Much of his enjoyment seems to have come of having multiple books to choose from while traveling
- -He thinks it's a bit overpriced
- -He opines that Books:Kindle as CDs:iPods, citing different needs and overall experience between use while traveling and at home
It's not exactly in-depth coverage, but I think he pegs its usefulness in relationship to books pretty well, at least in a way that made sense to me.If you'd like to refer directly to his journal, including his brief thoughts on Kindle's DRM, here you go:
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2007/11/me-in-manila.html
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2007/11/thanks-from-future.html (brief note at end on questionable PDF support)
For additional biographical notes (putting credentials and context to his thoughts on the Kindle) here's a convenient link to his wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_gaiman
Freeing millions of students around the world of their 20+ pound backpacks. If the music industry is any indication, maybe we'll see it in my lifetime. Sadly, I doubt we'll see it before the end of my education. :(
"not yet"
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I bought a 16gb Ipod touch for AUS$550 before Christmas, because my old Ipod got wet and i heard it had a web browser that could read pdf. I have alot of scientific Pdfs i wish i could read and on the go and in bed. Rather quickly i learned that it was an excellent PDF reader. Shear magic, flickable and zoomable with the fingers, provided that you were near Wifi. It had an annoying habbit of not storing PDF for very long when you were offline. The only hope was to host all my pdfs on a server, but then again i would need wifi to access anything. This always bugged me as such as i knew how much potential apple annoyingly locked away in this little gizmo. I am no longer vexed. Thanks to the hard work of all those i phone hackers out there, i can now do everything i wanted and more. It now only takes a few minutes and a few clicks to unlock an ipod touch or i phone with ZIPHONE Once your ipod touch is hacked just install one small application called "bright eyes" I can be surfing the net on my desk top and download a pdf. Then, simply using WinSCP i can wirelessly SSH the file to ipod (wow it is fast) Bright eyes is a simple file browser for the ipod touch. simply go to the folder you SSHed to. Double tap on a pdf/doc/img (whatever safari supports) and it will open it in the safari browser. Its everything i ever wanted. Perfectly readable, doesn't get fatiguing to read as it is so light and i can hold it up while lying down in bed. Battery last all day, easily handles large graphical PDF and no DRM ! and by double clicking on the home button, It brings up a mini music player so i can switch tracks on the fly without interrupting reading. Headphones ? No thanks i like my mini FM transmitter clipped on the bottom streaming music to my clock radio. Thanks apple for such a perfect piece of hardware, and thank you hackers for unlocking its full potential.
My opinion is the same as it always has been:
- Paper is a fantastic technology, and hard (but not impossible) to beat for books.
- Reading low-resolution text on a glowing screen sucks for long stretches, and always will suck.
- Electronic paper is a fantastic idea that has yet to be perfected. No, the Kindle is not a good reader. A good e-paper reader will handle all reasonable text and document formats, will be DRM-free, will effortlessly connect and sync with my computer, and will include features like margin notes, text highlighting, dictionary/encyclopedia lookup (think Leopard's pop-up dictionary), and other stuff I haven't thought of -- features that actually make it *superior* to paper books instead of merely equivalent.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
*blink
I recently had reader of my book Theory of Nothing ask for a Kindle friendly version of the book. I had flirted with Amazon's ebook program, but the DRM requirements, the proprietry format, and the excessive price tag made this a non-starter. From the beginning a plain, unencumbered PDF was available to purchasers of my book, which I used to email out on request. But eventually I just made it a free download.
Anyway, I mentioned this to him, and he tried out Amazon's PDF->mobipocket conversion service, but the result was dreadful. I had a bit of a read of the Kindle website, and looked at trying to create an HTML version of my book to see if that worked any better. The problem was that HTML conversion failed about halfway through the book, on top of the usual crappy representation of figures, equations etc. So this was a nonstarter too.
Most of my literature I keep on my laptop for a rainy day is PDF (or can be easily converted to such). Without a practical PDF display option, Kindle should be given a wide berth, in my opinion.
So I set it on it's side by my bedside so I can read e-books before falling asleep. What's neat about it is that it shuts the screen down after 5 minutes so when I fall asleep, I don't need to worry about it...
The Amazon DRM lock-in is largely a myth. You hook the Kindle up to your computer with the supplied bog standard USB cable and it appears as external storage. Drop .txt and unprotected .mobi files on there, and they're instantly readable. (.mobi is well-documented, has free software support, and supports rich formatting.)
The e-books on Amazon are reasonably priced: that is, significantly cheaper than the paperback version. Technical books not so much: for example, "Advanced Windows Debugging" will set you back $38 for the Kindle version vs. $52 for the hardcopy.
The whispernet functionality is awesome. Of course, they just HAD to go with one of the proprietary US carriers which means your SOL abroad. What that means is, you can still buy books on Amazon, download them to your computer and copy them over via USB. The on-Kindle store and other wireless functionality only works in North America.
It's not perfect of course: the screen should be larger, the device should be lighter, and it would be really good if it didn't look like a consumer device designed in the Soviet Union. This borders on nitpicking though - the awesomeness of not having to decide what my reading material will be on my next trip based on the freaking size of the book far outweighs the shortcomings. But then again, I travel quite a lot, so maybe others people won't be wowed by this.
My biggest gripe so far is the page turning speed: it's fast enough, but it still feels wrong. You click, and a second or two later the new page appears. It's like if it took two seconds for your stuff to show up after you opened your desk drawer.
PDF support would be nice - I haven't found a tool that does even a passable job at pdf-to-mobi conversion.
The built-in dictionary is great. English is my second language and I love to be able to click a line and instantly (well, it will take the mandatory second or two) get a page with the definitions for all the words in it.
All in all, warmly recommended. It's not perfect, not by a long shot, and I do miss the bookness of books: the paper, the fonts, the feel, even the smell. It does, however, work for me. YMMV.
With all the companies trying to make 100$ netbooks, you'd think that at least one company should be able to come out with an eBook reader for well under 100$ with the following features (in no particular order):
- e-Ink display, paperback size
- at least 1 week of operating battery life (1 month standby)
- USB storage device (no OS requirements)
- PDF/JPEG/PNG viewer (even if it's grayscale)
- at least 4GB of storage
If the reader were small enough to fit in my pocket like a cellphone, but unrolled/unfolded to be about 4x7" like a paperback book, I'd be more interested. The screen would have to be extremely high contrast, and at least 300dpi. And get at least 12-15 hours on a single battery charge, rechargable in under 15 minutes.
Then, let me download my own copy for $1 without DRM of any book I already own on paper, and deliver on paper through the mail any digital book I like at a discount.
You'll have me. And I read a lot of books every year.
--
make install -not war
if you want to read, you get a paperback. indestructible. no battery. cheap. easy. infinitely superior to ebooks for the purpose of casual reading
if you want any sort of text manipulation, you get a laptop. infinitely superior to ebooks for the purpose of anything electronic
but but! i need a small form factor blah blah blah...
then you use your cell phone
end of story
ebooks always were a failure, and always will be a failure. they are a product in search of niche audience that is already fulfilled
to me, ebooks seem to be pushed by a book industry fervently in search of their own iPod or portable dvd player type transformative media rubicon. the ebook ain't it
but don't worry book industry wonks, it is coming: electronic paper. it will replace the book and the laptop and the cell phone. something you fold up in your pocket and unravel like a map or a magazine or a newspaper depending on the function
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
or a palm with a 320x320 screen or better. I love reading books on the clie. I read it in the dark, on the NYC subway, on planes. Loaned my palm pilot to a friend for a long flight to read books. He was able to find a book that he liked among the 20 books on the palm and loved it. I'm not sure what's better Kindle or the Sony Reader. It's trying to be paper. It's better to not try to be everything paper is, but take advantage of the fact that you aren't a book. And what's up with charging you for content that you can get for free on the net (nytimes, blogs, ...).
--- http://davidnehme.blogspot.com
what you need is an iLiad
...you coulda been there alone because of no girlfriend, and, in soviet bookstoreland, clerk hit on YOU....
While it's true that a lot of the ancient library was lost, much of it was not very good; a lot of the good stuff was saved. And there is much more than will fit on a single shelf, certainly! I have five or six shelves of it just in my office, and that's not nearly everything.
Karen Carr, Dept. of History
Portland State University
I worried a bit that Amazon might discontinue their service someday, in a way that would break books people have already bought, but then I realized that this didn't really matter to me. Different people will weigh things differently.
Looking at my modest physical library (a couple thousand volumes or so), I note that most of them have only been read once.
Kindle books (at least the ones I've bought, and the ones on my current to-buy list) are about 20-30% off the least expensive physical edition.
If Amazon does NOT end up screwing us down the line, then I'll be in the same position as I am with my physical library. I'll have a bunch of books that I am not going to read again, and a handful that I do reread. Except I'll have saved a lot of money. Works for me!
And if Amazon DOES screw us someday? Then I use some of that 20-30% I've saved to re-purchase physical copies of the handful of books that I will want to reread. I'll still end up with a library that contains all the books I actually will want to reread. It will simply be missing the books that I only wanted to read once. But it will probably have cost me less for that library. Seems like a good gamble to me.
It is kind of interesting to compare this to music with DRM. With music, I do listen to most of my albums more than once. If my albums were to go away, I'd want to replace pretty much all of them.
Thus, for music, I am much more DRM-adverse. I have bought a few things from the iTunes store, but it has been obscure things that I could not reasonably find on CD, and there is the old "burn and rip" method to keep them working even if Apple pulls the plug. I also figured that disk space would be cheap and plentiful enough that if I did have to do "burn and rip", I could do the rip losslessly, and so this method of stripping DRM would not lead to a loss of quality. Thus, I had things covered, and could go ahead and buy a few things from iTunes. But I buy from the Amazon DRM-free music store if I can.
I have recently read several classic books on a treo centro with plucker. While not perfect, the application is handy and the screen bright and readable. I prefer a paper book, but recommend the combination for reading "free classics".
For example, I just read a novel by Sir Walter Scott (Waverley). I checked out the print from the library. I also downloaded the e-text from gutenberg.org. I'd switch back and forth between them depending on the situatino.
Overall if I had a prolonged period of reading in a well-lit place, I'd prefer the print book. But I have found plucker very handy due to the fact that I always have my cell phone. Also, plucker resumes exactly where I left off.
Times I found plucker/centro handy:
* in the hospital waiting room
* waiting for my wife in the store.
* on the train ("El" ) into work.
You may see a theme here: anytime I find myself "waiting", the centro/plucker gives me opportunity to read, if only for a few minutes
Pretty much any author from the 1800's is available for free (Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Bronte, Walter Scott, Wodehouse, Gibbon) on Gutenberg.
/
My problem is chiefly with the content distribution rather than the hardware: I'm just not willing to invest substantial amounts of money in a service that might disappear, or that I might not be able to access, or that might force to pay future service fees, or whatever. As the first link states, one reason the iPod took off was that people had a huge amount of unencumbered music ready to go, and they could rip CDs with ease. If the same were true of books, I'd happily buy a Kindle, but it isn't, and I'm not willing to go the proprietary route until I'm sure it's worthwhile.
Currently I use my mobile phone and ubook software. Paper books do feel nicer in the hand, and I am less concerned about dropping a paper back in the bath. However ebooks have a number of advantages too:
I always have my phone, so I always have books.
I can carry as many books as I want. My entire ebook collection is only 2gig so I could fit all that on the phone.
My wife doesn't complain about the shelf space.
I can get ebooks when I want. To get a good selection of paper books, I need to travel to a bigger city which I do infrequently.
I would read about 2-3 ebooks for every paper book. It depends on the type of book you are reading though. Fiction is mostly formated text so it is easy to display on small screen. Non-fiction, tech books and magazines all rely heavily on images and layouts so you need a better/bigger screen. I still read most non-fiction using paper books.
Sean
- 1. Drop the price to $49. Make it a loss leader and sell content with extras and exclusives.
- 2. Get rid of DRM. It doesn't work. It's stupid. It's hostile. It insults your customers. It does not discourage piracy (those who want to steal something will find a way). Implement it in such a way that people feel unnecessary to pirate it.
- 3. Give away a free copy of ebook with most Hardcover purchases.
- 4. Get rid of the keyboard and strip all the unnecessary buttons from the device (Kindle). Rethink the jog dial and compact them into a single superbutton (PRS).
- 5. (Professionally) format all the public domain classics and make them available to users free of charge or for a nominal fee as a token of goodwill.
- 6. Get rid of the web browsing, mp3 capability, or any other extraneous feature that you won't find in an actual book. These things don't provide value, they diminish it. Think iPod. Simplicity sells.
- 7. Make it possible for developers to target and hack the device. Release an SDK and let nerds be nerds.
- 8. Lastly, make it such that it fits in a pocket. I'm sure there is a way. Make it fold like Nintendo DS.
I fully understand that some of these requests are not entirely up to device manufacturers. The publishing industry is just as boneheaded as RIAA when it comes to facts on the ground. However, Amazon and Sony do not help the situation by creating things which are severely flawed.Lets face it, reading is not cool. It is the antithesis of cool. As a company you have to find a way to make it into something which creates a market of "cool" rather than taps into an existing one by "shifting the paradigm" (ugh). You can't realistically expect to provide an alternative to, at the very least, 500 year-old technology which isn't broken by any estimation.
I want to be able to buy the dead tree edition, and get a pdf (or SOME electronic format) book with it. I don't want to have to buy a pdf and pay as much as the dead tree edition.
Personally, I'd love to own one of these. Reading PDF's on a backlit screen is a pain, and battery life of backlit devices is pretty bad. Unfortunately, the Kindle/Sony is into the $300 range.
I've never owned an eBook reader, but I FAR prefer eBooks to paper.
Many other posters have already pointed out the reliability improvements of eBooks (digital media doesn't last forever, but backups are easy, so the digital data remains), so I won't go over those arguments again in any detail.
Others have also pointed out the simplicity of carrying a small library with you when it comes to eBooks, unlike the dead-tree editions, so I won't rehash that either.
Instead, here's a description of my "eBook usage".
For fiction/light-reading/whatever, I used to have a Windows Mobile device (first generation Dell Axim), on which I used Microsoft Reader with free books from Gutenburg that I converted manually to .lit format. The conversion process was a little painful at times, but I managed to get it all sorted out quite quickly after doing a few of them.
I no longer own the Axim, and instead read all those eBooks on my laptop now, which is less comfortable, but still preferred to the dead-tree edition. I will almost certainly get another mobile device (maybe a phone of some kind) that I'll use in the future.
For technical manuals, I always use my laptop, and my preferred format is PDF. I can have multiple open at once (taking MUCH less real estate than having multiple dead-tree editions open) and can use search functions to find stuff quickly and efficiently. I often even convert dead-tree editions in to PDF (scan and OCR) before using them.
This also holds true for manuals that I need to look at at the same time as I'm doing something else (which is most of them really). In these cases though, I never have the manual open on the same computer that I'm using for the task it describes - I always have (at least) two computers, so the manual can be open on one and I work on the other. I find this the most comfortable way to work, as I don't need to constantly switch between the book and the task at hand. My work environment is specifically set up like this with one laptop that is only email and ebook reader, while the other is my "main" laptop for development and testing.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
..and I like what I have: A jailbroken iPod Touch. I can read texts in Japanese or English in either Books.app or TextReader. Books.app does fine with most formats [html, pdb, etc] TextReader is for those BIG unchaptered texts that I'm too lazy to reformat. I have choice of any font or doc encoding that the iPod Touch, a mini MacOSX rig, supports. The 16gig 'Touch is more than enough. Now just get me some non-DRM encumbered data....
--- See you at the Tannhäuser Gate.
1. Cost is too high. Around $100 would probably be the magic number for me. Over that I can't really justify.
2. Text files can be loaded onto it without having to hack it. I'm not interested in reading new books on it. My interest in an eBook reader is pretty much soley to read the classics I can obtain free of charge from places like Project Gutenburg. Reading them on a computer screen is a pain, and so is a Palm, I've tried both. I recently bought Crime & Punishment and the cheapest copy was $8. That kind of pricing for classics makes building a library really expensive, especially with no decent used bookstore anywhere near me (yeah, I can shop online, but half the fun is browsing). This would make it a lot easier for me to read all the classics I should've read in school but never got around to, and make it really REALLY easy to do so before I go to sleep, on the can, at my desk waiting for the phone to ring, or the few times I travel each year.
Well, I don't like the price. Books aren't very expensive, but readers are. How about charging about the same price as a book?
Second, I like real books because the pages are easy to turn and have extremely high resolution. So the first thing I would do is take that silly screen off of it and put in some nice tangible paper pages.
So yeah. Replace the electronic parts with paper, and charge the same as a book. You might want to put some cover art on there too, to attract my attention.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
1-It should have a touchscreen, an iPhone-like gui and double as a Wacom-quality tablet with a nice stylus so people can actually use it like real paper to take notes and draw on.
2-It should have a letter-sized or A4-sized screen.
3-It should run in two modes: reader using little battery and tablet with heavier consumption upon demand. In that mode, it should have photoshop for visual artists and Scrivr for writers and note-taking. This means it'd have to run OSX.
4-It would have 1 mini-USB and one mini-Firewire 800 ports, Optional keyboard which will also act as a 2-Port USB hub. The screen can display a full sized qwerty keyboard. One expresscard slot will be available.
5-It should have advanced, fine-grain force feedback for typing and "feeling" buttons in the UI.
6-It would support multitouch of course.
7-It would have about 64GB solid state HD and 4GB ram.
8-Reading battery should last 24H+, writing can cut that to 12H+, drawing can make it 8H+ and random computer tasks should run for at least 4H.
9-It should have a 12MP camera that doubles as an HD webcam.
10- It should come in rugged and sleek models
11- It should have GPS and google maps integration.
It'll probably cost a lot more than
It's actually amusing that I looked up from sitting at my PC reading The new Peter F Hamilton book on my sony PRS-505 when this article popped up in my RSS feed. I bought my Sony about 6 months ago. I'd been following e-readers for a while but they were either too expensive, too DRMed or too crap for me to bother. When the 505 came out I kept an eye on reviews and finally decided to "treat" myself and buy one. I bought it with some trepidation worried that I wouldn't like the "feel" of it or would miss books (smell touch etc). I am happy to report that I have used it almost ceaselessly since I got it for all kinda of reading. It's a joy to read on and truly does "disappear" when I'm reading as a good book should do. I love it for travelling because instead of stuffing my bag with 2-3 big paperbacks I just slide the PRS (in the hard clamshell I bought for it) into my laptop bag. I discovered 3 months ago the libprs software that took it from a great reader to an awesome one allowing me to DL and format multiple online magazines and blogs for my reader. My _only_ complaint (and this is just me getting used to it) is that I often forget to charge the unit (because it needs charging so infrequently) and I'll sometimes get an an airplane without realising I only have 1 hour of battery left. Nothing is more frustrating than having your batteries go flat at an exciting part of a book on a 12 hour flight. But It's only happened to me once and I always make sure I charge it before I travel now. (You feel quite silly loading up your laptop on a plane so you can plug your book into the USB port to power it. :P )
All in all it's been a highly pleasant experience and simply as a result of me using it at work on my lunch breaks something like 10 of my workmates have bought them and also use them daily (we actually have to label our books now so no-one walks off with anyone elses.)
I would not want to go without my e-book now and while I do still pick up the occasional book not available in e-format that's getting less common as the catalogues get more complete.
I still like classic book.. but I'm _totally_ sold on e-book readers.
So you prefer the killed-a-tree-AND-a-cow book - I am seeing an interesting pattern develop.
Any of you have even-higher-death books they like even more?
..but I use Mobipocket Reader. This is a software for windows,Mac and Linux (the desktop version) as well as a mobile counterpart that works on all major mobile platforms (Palm, Windows mobile/CE,Symbian, Blackberry), and you can synchronize books and bookmarks between your device and the desktop.
I use it with my Nokia N82 to read on the bus on the way to work. Of course, reading on a 2.5" screen isn't the same as a dedicated reading device (or a paper book ^^), but I prefer having one all in one device for communication, music and reading books.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
I actually received a kindle this week.
Reading code/diagnostics on a computer screen to troubleshoot an issue is annoying. As a result I tended to print out large amounts of paper, I'd end up throwing away by the end of the day.
The main reason I got a kindle is because I wanted to stop wasting so much paper.
If I'm reading something, I sure don't want to be staring at a lightbulb. I bet if they come out with a transparent screen that they can print black / white/ whatever color on, and put it in a folder that contrasts with the font well, it would sell great.
Slashdot, the place to go for free market research from nerds.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My wife bought me a kindle for Christmas.
I wasn't sure how much I'd like it, or actually use it. I have a hard time going to bed a night, so I like to read myself to sleep, so I read on it for about 45-1 hour a day. I've gone through about 10 books, and absolutely love it.
Is it for everyone? Obviously not.. But, I find myself using this thing a LOT.
If your teetering on picking one up, I doubt you'll regret it if you really do enjoy reading.
I find my cell phone makes a great super portable, super cheap (prepaid) e-reader. You'd think the small screen would be an issue, but the author's language quickly takes over. My phone seems happy to install apps so with a few clicks on a website like www.booksinmyphone.com I can get a book wirelessly - like a Kindle that is so small you don't realize you are carrying it. A larger range of books would be good, it would be nice if the screen was reflective in sunlight - but all in all I'd hate to do without it.
I want a full color, 200dpi or better, a4 or letter sized display that is light reflective rather than light emissive (ie, e-paper), and if one is using external lighting instead of a built-in book-light (for night time reading), it can ideally can be utilized strictly as a reader entirely via solar power. That is, so as long as there's external light to read the display by, you can use the apparatus without draining the internal battery. The entire unit itself should not be more than three-quarters of an inch thick or so, and with batteries should weigh no more than a similarly sized hardcover text. Oh, and it has to be impact resistant enough to be able to handle accidental drops onto the floor and I'd also like it to be completely water-resistant, so that if it drops into water it won't be destroyed either. The device must be capable of reading common file formats such as PDF and CBR/CBZ, and should not require that any files it accesses be laden with DRM in order to be utilized. It should have an SD card slot for additional local storage (that can cover up completely so as to be watertight), and a wireless facility for downloading content from a PC or the internet into the reader. It does not need to be able to play music files or multimedia files, nor does it need to play games or function as a PDA or general purpose portable computer in any way.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
DRMed content is what stops me from buying e-books and in turn e-book readers. I'm willing to re-buy paper books as e-books, but I'm not willing to re-buy e-books just because my device died, was stolen (I don't have to worry about anyone stealing my entire book collection), the license server was taken offline, I want have the file on more then one device at a time (I'll want more then one reader so I can have multiple books open at the same time on different devices or the same books open to different pages on different devices), or I want to get coolest new reader on the market.
Software Inventor
I read e books on my ipod touch all the time. Some of that consists of content I download/scrape of some magazines I read that have on-line articles. Other books come from Project Gutenberg. The iPod Touch screen is incredibly sharp and readable. I find that having text in a continuous scrolling column allows me to read much much faster than normal books. However I still find real books easier on my eyes.
The Kindle's screen is definitely close to what I want, though. I want a 300-600dpi, paper white reflective display that basically emulates printed text on white paper. None of this light-emitting stuff for this application. Perhaps some day we'll just buy blank books with a couple hundred pages of e-paper and read the ebooks like normal books, turning pages and everything. Get to the end, just go back to the beginning and keep reading.
Odds are that real books will be around for a long, long time. No one format will replace them entirely but merely augment them.
No I haven't changed my mind. The prices are way too high, both for the the readers, and the ebooks.
$30.00 to $50.00 is reasonable for a reader. $1.00 to $3.00 each is reasonable for an ebook. Any higher price for either is too much. The readers need to be able to have any true type font installed, and to have a screen that can be read easily in bright sunlight, total darkness, and all lighting situations in between. Possibly they could have a retractable LED light on a gooseneck if a backlight is not possible. The possibility of using a flash drive to transfer ebooks to the reader, and to be used as extra memory would be nice.
Like almost all of my portable electronic devices, the reader must run from AA or AAA NiMH (and Alkaline) batteries. The ability to recharge the NiMH batteries in the reader would be nice.
Software to convert proprietory DRMed ebook formats to plain text (plain text files are smaller)files would be very nice too, though I would not necessarily expect the software to come with the reader.
Maybe some of these criteria have already been met by some readers, but the prices are still too high.
Two orders of magnitude improvement in resolution should just about do it. Less if they can figure out how to do grayscale (for aliasing)
I hate jagged edged letters.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Virtual desktops, multiple split tabs, ala Konqueror, and a nice database like Kbibtex blow paper research away. While a physical desk can hold five or six references, a virtual one can hold dozens. They can easily be moved around and compared side by side, even on a tiny laptop screen. Finally, you can text search and then cut and paste an electronic file. I now absolutely hate paper journals and texts because they are clumsy to store, hard to find and even harder to use.
I used to think like you until my last major paper. I was taught to do research papers with index cards and a typewriter. Databases have replaced the index cards and the things mentioned above make it easier to fill the database up with knowledge. Having the original source at such easy reach makes it possible to check your previous interpretations and make sure you don't get carried away. The sum of all these improvements is speedier, more relevant research and a better quality paper. Electronic publishing combined with good research tools are a vast improvement over dead trees.
Kindle and other ebook readers are expensive toys because they are so relatively limited. I envy the low powered display, that's about all. The device itself might be good for people with very long commutes but the restrictions placed on them are right out of the right to read dystopia. They can not be used for serious research are second rate as a textbook and should not be relied on for news. That leaves you with entertainment/faux news use and even those are not things most people want restricted by third parties.
i'm owning an IRexx Iliad for nearly 12 months now and i'm still very happy with it. I have purchased about 5 "dead tree" books since then and 50+ eBooks (Mobipocket). It's a completely new feeling being able to travel while being unable to run out of new books to read. Usually i have about 1GB of eBooks with me.
Battery life is shorter than advertised but still enough for most uses. When i pull it out, usually i have several people asking me about it.
Regards, Martin
It's a rhetorical question, but I'll answer it anyway.
IF the electronics and bearings survive, and IF the platters don't get bit-rot, in 50 years there still won't be a computer capable of running and reading that hard drive. You might have to build one yourself from 50-year-old open standards and schematics.
Sure, you could copy your data to new media every few years. Make redundant copies in case one is lost or fried. Keep them in separate places. Don't type "rm -rf *" at the wrong time (or anything like that). In a few years? Do it again. And again. And again. Got to keep up with technology, right? It's a lot of work.
Oh-- and while you're doing that...?
I'll be reading the paperback!
Full, unlimited PDF capabilities - my primary use for it would be to read scientific papers
Decent support of Unicode
Larger screen - sorry, folks, 8 inches is not gonna get me excited
Querty keyboard and built in search capabilities
Unfortunately, there's no device that would satisfy all four requirements, which is why they didn't get my money.
Seriously. The verb is "naebat'" which means "to fuck over".
I really enjoy my sony ereader, once you use it you realize that the physical design is vastly superior to the kindle.
Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
Well, it's as good as any other, I suppose, and would vilify the usual demons - RIAA, MPAA, publishers, etc.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
because that is the program you are referring to. I find that the zoom-mode works pretty well to show all the content of my PDF. Last time I even printed from PalmPDF, worked like a charm ! (except the little part where the date was printed on the PDF which resized the page and made the printout useless as it was an e-ticket ;)
Overall, PalmPDF is great.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
I've got more than 20 novels and a ton of "must-read" science and current affairs articles on my Palm Tungsten E2. Although it's far from an ideal reading experience, it fits in a shirt pocket and it's always with me. This allows me to fit reading into my train/subway commute, those inevitable "lost minutes" that add up so fast (line-ups, late appointments, etc.) and more.
I've adjusted to the limited number of words per screen and need to "turn the page" frequently. The convenience more than makes up for having to lug books and reports everywhere I go, and I can even use a freeware program to generate the occasional audio story.
I was always one of those people who never went anywhere without a book, even when it meant I had to carry a jacket or bag or briefcase to hold it. Those days are gone. As I said, the E2 isn't perfect. But I would never again want to be without it as an alternative to the more usual reading method.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I've used an Iliad for a few weeks and found that it sucked: flipping pages is slow, quickly skipping around in a book is nearly impossible, the user interface is mind numbingly broken, and the much talked about contrast of the eInk display is underwhelming. The Sony didn't seem to be any better. With a better user interface, the Iliad could be tolerable despite its display technology, but even then, it wouldn't be a good device.
I think the future of electronic books is with higher resolution cell phones, media players, and tablets, not these kinds of special purpose devices.
Sure, you can multipurpose your gadgets into reading books. But the draw of the ebook reader is eInk.
eInk is what's killing these devices: it makes it impossible to put a decent interface on there, the contrast ratio sucks, it doesn't do color, and flipping pages is orders of magnitude slower than on an LCD.
If you havn't experienced eInk yourself, you're missing out. Not only is it as readable as newspaper, but the power consumption at rest is ZERO.
That's about its only advantage, but it doesn't help much since the processor in the background still needs power to wait for your input.
without trying it, you really can't say 'your' non-eInk device is better.
But with trying it, I can emphatically say that my non-eInk device is better. eInk is a useless gimmick that is giving e-books a bad name.
I'm using Cybook Gen3 and I'm pretty satisfied. I bought it exactly when it became available in Poland, it's quite few months now. I read more than thousand pages, mostly PDFs and some books from Feedbooks. I wouldn't read them using some LCD display, because 8 hours at work is just enough. I wouldn't either carry all those books with me.
I love it's size - it's like a bar of chocolate.
I read more now than I used to, but wish I had more time for it.
For a comparison of the Sony Reader and the Kindle, check out http://www.thisistech.com/2008/03/01/cagematch/
My wife has the Sony and I have the Kindle. We each wrote about what we like and don't like about each other's device.
--Mike
Nobody sells them outside the US
What I wouldn't do for the ability to mod "-1, Plain Wrong"
The word Sony is mentioned a lot here. I'm puzzled. Didn't we all agree that we shouldn't buy Sony anymore? Or was that in an alternate universe where Sony actually uses root kits?
I don't know which is sadder, that this poor loser needs whatever juvenile emotional gratification comes with anonymously posting this kind of thing, or that his life is so empty that he feels the need to do it over and over again.
Just plain sad. Here is someone clearly in need of counseling, but he's not going to get it on Slashdot.
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
I have an iLiad and I just love it. I had always wanted one since I knew about its existence, because it was... well, cool. But I thought it would be just a whim, something that I wouldn't really use much in practice. But I do use it, a lot. For someone who likes reading, like me, it's a better investment than a PDA or any other small gadget.
At work I use it for research papers. It's good both for reading other people's work (printing less stuff that you're going to throw away immediately - I have never liked reading PDF's on a computer screen) and for reviewing one's own (you can mark and add notes with the stylus).
At home I use it mainly to read classic books out of copyright, because I don't find the price of commercial ebooks attractive. Although reading an ebook on the iLiad is very close to the real thing, and in some senses even better, I still feel that paying for an ebook almost the same as for a physical book is wasting money. Possibly the new generations will not have this problem.
I'm very happy with my XO as an ebook reader. Having the ability to rotate the screen, have it stand upright by itself or fold flat, backlit or reflective, makes it very nice. Plus since it has wifi, I can download books without requiring another computer. Also color is nice, for textbooks and the like. All that for the price of a kindle (plus the tax deduction from the donation) make it a no-brainer.
> Check out a Palm T/X. It has a 480x320 screen, will display ...
Meh. Does it run Linux? The Nokia N800 / N810 run Linux, do all the above (well, 800x480 actually),
And the N800 is cheaper than the TX. Of course, the TX is a better PDA ,
but I think the Nokia wins as an eBook reader - e.g. with FBreader program.
And did I mention? it runs Linux.
I have tons of pdfs to read, mostly scientific articles from arxiv and other places and I certainly would go for $300-400 for one of these devices ( http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix ) if I were to know that I can read double column format with ease. Does anybody have some experience there ?
Jake.
I like my Kindle lots. It's easy to read, content is readily available (both free and pay) and the cell connectivity is transformative.
These things you all talk about, the perils of DRM, costs, formats, etc., they're things that ostensibly affect me too. But they haven't mattered.
Don't buy books on it that you intend to keep. Buy books that you want shortly after release, but that you'll almost certainly want to sell later. If you haven't gotten to the point of having such books, you probably will. Most of us on here read way more than we can reasonably afford to store and shelve.
When you do the math, a $10 or less book fitting that description ends up being comparable to buying off the shelf then selling. Only you got yours instantly.
Sure, you can beat it by buying used, but if it's brick and mortar you have to wait for opportunity and if it's online shipping kills the savings.
There are lots of free books out there that offset the cost, too. Sure, you can read them on a PDA or your computer, but I guarantee you it's not as comfortable. Those of you who insist otherwise just haven't compared. Reflective e-ink displays will always be more comfortable than luminous LCD displays because they redirect ambient lighting instead of adding their own, and because they are 100% flicker-free.
It's probably just a new initiation rite for the GNAA.
The truly sad thing is, it's shit like this that make people want to throw away the right to anonymity on the Internet. I guess we're stuck with the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, though.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
iPhone + Project Gutenberg. I can read thousands of classics, wherever I am, on the best looking screen I've found. And with no DRM.
...welcome our digital, tree-hugging overlords!
Defining Statistics and Social Research
I don't have a E-ink reader, though I've been looking at getting one. My incentive is largely so I can read books while I travel (which is a lot). However, I have been unconvinced at getting one so far. So if you're looking for some suggestions on what I'd personally like, they are:
1. Have the ability to edit/annotate files. As I do a lot of doc reviews or just want to make notes to myself, this would be the single largest feature that I could see being added.
2. Remove the music player (and associated speaker if included). I already have something else that does that with a whole lot more memory. I'd never use this feature on the reader.
3. I would prefer to have DRM removed completely. Given that that might not be a choice, I would like to not be locked into getting my content from a single vendor. On that same note, I don't want to have to covert my PDFs into some consumable format and I would like the PDFs to be able to be viewed just as if it were on my computer. This would include graphics and the table of contents.
4. Give it a wifi connection so I can easily add books to it anywhere at anytime.
5. Please don't give it another power supply. I don't want to have to carry around yet another one just for this gadget. Allow it to be charged via USB and if possible sell a airplane charging kit as a accessory.
I have purchased Sony(*) PRS500 about a year ago and I am a very happy owner.
I use it. Every. Single. Day.
It is absolutely awesome for travel. You do not need to make compromises about what books to bring along. You can bring HUNDREDS of books. (well, actually, thousands, but it gets impractical, because this reader has "flat" file structure. No folders, no groups, no skipping pages in the file list (10 books per page))
(*)
I know, I know. "Sony Rootkit" (Tm)! Phew!
Do not be afraid to purchase PRS505.
You can use the reader without touching Sony software. Just use an SD memory card and a card reader.
PRS 505, unlike 500 also works like umass device - it looks like an USB memory stick to FreeBSD, Linux or MacOSX.
The four major advantages of RealBooks are that
a. They don't need a power supply
b. I can read them in the bath
c. When I read in bed, nod off and drop the book on the floor, I can still read it in the morning.
d. Tread on them, sit on them, use them as a doorstop, THEY STILL WORK.
And they can be recycled very easily, there's no worries about cadmium/lithium/lead/whatever getting into the environment.
eBooks are technological answers looking for a question. They are the wet dreams of publishers who don't want to go the same way as record companies, who want to tie the world into DRM infected crap so they control the future.
I love my Sony ebook reader. However, I'm always buying books because technical PDF's look rubbish on it. The Sony reader needs better PDF support!
Personally, though, I do prefer buying real books, anyway, especially if I can browse those books in a store before purchase. That, however, is becoming rare, as most books stores now refuse to sell any programming books unless they are targeted at beginners... Which sucks big time!
So, how does the computer know you fell asleep?
The saddest poem
The thing is, you can't stamp out trolls. What you can do is starve them out. Is that a strong enough hint?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They're all still non-starters until they get rid of the proprietary formats and use (eg) eBook.
Most of what you say applied to then, not now. Buy a new computer today, and the first thing you do is copy your files over to your new machine. My old computer had an SATA hard drive. My new one has a SSD. Entirely different technologies, but the files copied over just fine.
So do you think that, 20 years from now, we still won't be using, or be able to read ASCII text? Be able to import a JPG? Display HTML? A PDF? MPEGs?
And I too have "15 year old cruft" (older, actually), but since most of it is text I can still read it. And keeping space for items created in the days of 20MB hard drives simply isn't an issue. Especially when my current desktop has over 4TB of working space.
Now, on the flip side, how many faded family photos are disappearing due to bad chemistry from prints made at one hour photo labs? How many negatives are NOT stored in optimal conditions, and are succumbing to the same problems, or to the damp and fungi? I have quite a few paperbacks that are now decades old, and attempting to read them now would break hardened spines and crumble brittle and browned acid-based papers. How many audio cassettes and LPs and 45s can you still play? 8 or 16mm home movies?
Next, what happens to your "archival" library in the case of fire? Flood? Water damage from storms, tornados or hurricanes? How many books stuck in boxes and on shelves are in fact protected from mice and beetles and silverfish? Have you looked?
And how many copies do you have of your physical books, CDs, DVDs, and photos? Are they stored offsite?
Sorry, but much of what you think is permanent is far from it, unless you've devoted one room of your house to a sealed, darkened, temperature and humidity controlled storage environment.
Digital is the future my friend. Deal with it.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
PDF is good for printing, but sucks as an ebook format because it's page-based. Isn't one big advantage of reading from screens (as opposed to paper) that it allows us to zoom and reflow the text? I'm aware that there is reflow available in PDF viewers, but it's a poor hack that doesn't work with most PDFs.
Where I live, I haven't yet encountered a phone that doesn't allow installing your apps (as far as technical capabilities of given phone go of course) I live in the United States. Phones that use the CDMA network tend to use BREW, a platform that discourages free software even more than the iPhone does. And the GSM carriers (AT&T, T-Mobile) tend not to have coverage as consistent as that of the CDMA carriers (Verizon, Sprint).
A4 sized screen for proper pdf support. This can simply be turned sideways to be similar to dead-tree books/novels
We have a huge e-book library, and went with mobi for pretty much everything from the beginning. We just picked up a couple of Bookeen Cybook 3s via the NAEBLLC group for the amazing price of $375 a piece.
This thing is a very good appliance, IMHO, as it focuses on being an easy to use reader, with little to distract you from that. Supports html,txt, mobi, and PDF, the only DRMd content it supports is mobipocket!
For the price and the features (for some reason, they shoe horned an MP3 player in there as well), it's hard to beat the bookeen for value. It looks like a card reader/usb drive to any computer, and doesn't require special software to put books on it.
with the same e-ink screen as the sony/kindle, what more do you want? Sure if I didn't care about how much it cost, the iLiad is a much niftier gadget, but I just want to read!
Booklights work the same on e-ink as they do on dead trees, and there is virtually no issue reading in full sunlight, outdoors.
Any openfont or true type font I want to use is also supported.
Free content is easily available as well, both ToR and Baen have been giving away e versions of their paperbacks for sometime, and all the classics are available from project Gutenberg. Not to mention all the courseware from MIT.
Make the leap. If for nothing else, being able to carry around a reference library the size of a large building in your laptop bag has got to be worth the $400....
Always thought they were a huge waste of money, a solution looking for a problem.
Between my PDA phone and my laptop, I have all the eBook reading devices I need. Not that I read eBooks anyway.
For those complaining about the price of ebooks not being low enough I don't think the cost of physically producing the book is more that a few dollars. They might be making an extra dollar off of the ebook but not much more.
"How many of you swear by your reader?"
I dont know if I would swear by my reader, but how soon will it be before we swear ON them? Preloaded with the King James Bible of course...
Just try to take your laptop into the bathroom them.
On second thought, please don't. Or at least don't tell me about it.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
Just my 2 cents... You'd be surprised how much we consume paper everyday. Whether we like collecting paper books or not, the eBooks should really be the way to go. This coming from a guy who is working in the printing industry.
Seems like a nice device, but fairly pricey considering that really it's not that much better than a rocket book reader, later the Gemstar REB-1200 IIRC and costs about 3.5 times what that did, while the the only real advantage it has over that is wireless connectivity.
Electronic versions of books/magazine are also fairly expensive(ripoff), being too close to the cost of an actual physical copy(ooo you can save a $1 or 2) with the added detriment of the purchased work likely becoming unuseable at some point in the future. (Thanks DRM.)
So, the only real advantages are being able to port around a fairly large library in a single device, as well as being able to load up a variety online only type of documentation. The latter feature being the best IMO, as it's apparently possible for the end user to directly load their own content w/o paying Amazon, although they never really bothered to mention that feature when it was first released, instead preferring to push their "small" fee service for conversion by Amazon and wireless delivery.
- it uses electricity, is not very resilient and much more complex (= buggy, prone to failure) than a book
- I don't want to buy DRM-infested books
- the makers of such products seem to consider them glorified PDAs, I don't want stylus input and other such crap (unless I can scribble all over the pages wherever I want). My mobile phone covers all my PDA needs.
Of course I grew up and studied with paper books and reading from monitors, if I went to uni now and had to use an e-book reader from the beginning with all the course material on it, I'd possibly have a different opinion about them..."I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
I have owned a Kindle now for about 2 months. I purchased the Kindle for two reasons. 1) The ability to wirelessly download books instantly and 2) To have a device to read Project Gutenberg texts on. I read many negative and many positive reviews prior to purchasing the Kindle. I believe that the majority of the negative reviews I have read were written by those that don't own a Kindle.
.txt books. This doesn't paginate properly on the Kindle. However, you can download (FOR FREE) . Mobipocket creator that will fix this problem. Once you create your massaged book, you can e-mail it to the Kindle for a dime, or transfer it yourself with a USB cable. Honestly, I usually just e-mail it. If you could afford a $400 reader, $0.10 isn't really a crucial amount of money.
What is the Kindle good for? Well, the form factor is fantastic. I sit. I read. It's that simple. Look, this isn't really a complex task. The first day you own it you bump the page turning buttons. After the first day, you learn to stop doing that. Unless you a total moron, this isn't a problem with the Kindle. The wireless works flawlessly. You can go on the Kindle store, browse for books, download samples, and purchase books quickly and efficiently. I really like the ability to buy a book at 11:30PM and start reading it at 11:31PM. This is an attractive feature for me.
The other thing I was very interested in was access to Project Gutenberg texts. There are several books I have been wanting to read for years, but just haven't picked up. I could have purchased them at any time. But I didn't. Now, I'm reading them. Getting them to the Kindle is easy, although I find I do want to do a VERY small bit of massaging first. Gutenberg uses hard carriage returns in their
The only valid criticism I have seen of the Kindle is the price. Either it is worth it to you or it is not. Since Amazon was sold out of the Kindle for the first 6 months straight, I believe that many people have found it worth it. This reader works. It does what it says it will do. It does it very well. I have also had the opportunity to play with a Sony E-Book reader for a few minutes and compare it to the Kindle. From what I saw, the Sony product works well too.
Some books would not be appropriate for the Kindle. For example, things with pictures or diagrams I would rather have in paper form. The Kindle really is best for things you sit down and READ. Reference books wouldn't work too well for me. Things where you want to thumb through the pages quickly. That just isn't going to be Kindle's strong point. But, for novels or things you just sit down and read through, no issues.
-Happy Kindle Owner
I've been using a Palm Zire 31 PDA as an e-book reader for the last couple of years. While I could live with higher resolution and better visibility in daylight, I'm pretty happy with it. I've got 366 books on it so far, some music, and my flash card is still mostly empty. I avoid dead tree given a choice.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I have a Palm TX which makes for a very good E-reader. I can load Palm ebooks, PDFs, Word documents, text documents, and even, with some effort- html pages. There's no DRM crap, and there's lots of freeware readers out there too.
On the down side, it uses a back-lit screen and the screen is very small.
But, even without the screen issues, it would still never be my preferred way of reading books of any type. Sure, it's nice to have something in my pocket for those times you're stuck in a waiting room or whatever. But, it just will never be the way I read books that I care at all about. For many reasons:
- If I drop it, I'm in trouble.
- I can't jot down notes or circle things in a reference book. I can't stick little sheets of paper in it with relevant articles I printed out from the web. Or my own notes.
- I can't loan the books to people easily.
- I like to keep good books forever. But I doubt I'll have my ereader for that long, or that future versions will support my ebook formats.
- If my Palm crashes, I'll loose my book. I do have backups on my PC, but I don't want to have to maintain an entire drive of backups if I were to make ebooks my main type of book.
- I like the look of my book collection on my shelves. I can easily grab one and flip through it. I can grab a book I haven't touched in years, and start reading it within seconds. No loading it onto a reader.
- I'm not nervous about bringing a paperback to the beach or camping, etc. An expensive ereader- is not something I'd bring to these places.
- I like the tactile feel of a new book. The smell. The feeling of the thickness of what's left to read getting smaller.
- I like the cover art. And the ability to pull books off my shelf, skim the back summary or a few pages to remember what it was about. My ereader wouldn't hold my entire library, so I'd have to boot up my PC to look up my old ebooks. Then re-load it onto my ereader if I want to read some of it again. Ug.
- Traditional novels are only ten bucks. E books should be like a dollar. But they aren't. Too expensive for something that takes away my freedom to do what I want with it. A paper book never 'expires' or locks you in to a certain reader, or prevents you from sharing.
- The city library loans out books to me for free. I wonder if we'll see free digital ebook loans?
- Have you ever 'lovingly' held a book that you really really enjoyed? Or hid a scary novel underneath a magazine because you didn't want to see the cover because you were spooked out by some midnight reading? Or given a good book a prominent spot on a nice shelf or coffee table? Ebooks can't have this type of physical presence in your life.
Sorry, but I'll sometimes use free ebooks to see if I want to buy the 'real thing'. And it's nice to have one in my Palm for convenient reading sometimes. But it will never be my preferred method. No matter how well they design the tech or drop the price or kill the DRM. It's just not a good medium.
He is a griefer from 4chan or some such idiocy.
My question though is the feel of such an experience. Sure, a reader has a page number or a progress bar, but is it as satisfying as feeling the number of pages in one's left hand versus their right? Do you miss the lack of that thump sound when closing the book, or the sound of flipping pages? Or do you miss the familiar curved shape of an open book?
Until eReaders start playing environment sounds or do some other thing to enhance the reader experience, I think treeware still has its advantages from the reader experience point of view.
I have purchased a prs-500 almost a year ago, and despite its many flaws(I think a open-source firmware replacement would do wonders), I think it was one of the best purchases I made in a long time. Although I must confess I have read most of what interests me from the tiny local library, I find it an immense improvement keeping my nose out of aged paper, even when comparing with book I own, and that are kept at pristine conditions.
I certainly had to learn a few lessons, like, you can forget about reading your A4 pdfs on it, I have tried many approaches, and even the best results are wholly unsatisfactory, I wouldn't recommend reading plain text, landscape mode is horrible, always either find a properly formated lrf file on a site like Mobileread.com , or format a lrf yourself using tools like pielrf(extemely easy, no pictures/hyperlinks though), or other more adavanced tools(automated is not a key word here).
My iBook G4 12" is pretty dandy as a eBook reader: PDF... rotate... full screen... use the trackpad button for fwd, an arrow if you really need it.
Of course for two years now Adobe has somehow found it beyond themselves to restore the Digital Editions functionality there was back in Reader 7...somehow a Flash implementation seems to be their new choice and last check it still does not work on a current OSX machine. So here I sit with many dollars worth of eBooks in DRM'd PDFs, all useless. Adobe shrugs.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I have had my Kindle for several weeks now, and it is great. There is a large selection of books available - not only at Amazon but from several others sources, many of them free.
The main advantages are:
1. The search feature
2. The lookup feature (dictionary lookup without losing your place)
3. Web access - even though very limited, it still lets me look up the weather forecast and things on Wikipedia.
4. I can carry a ton of books with me in a small package.
5. You can change the font size. This is a big deal if you are older like me. The e-ink screen really is superior for reading.
I am actually reading more than I used to. This is a device for people who love to read - not a geek show-off device.
If you love to read, I highly recommend the Kindle. If you want to try something cheaper to get your feet wet, look into the eBookwise 1150. (I have both, but the screen on the Kindle is way better, but buttons and software on the 1150 are better.)
I can't believe how many folks here suddenly sound like Luddites when it comes to e-books. You really have to try it to "get it".
I think the comparison to email vs. mail is apt. It is that big of a difference.
I do want one but I consider them waaaay too expensive. Come on. A slowish pc with a supposedly cheap display (eink) and no real need for even a hard drive so expensive? Thanks but no thanks.
I don't know about that. When you consider the research data retrieved from a HD recovered from the Columbia wreckage, I think HD beats paper every time.
I bought a sony prs-505 a few months ago and use it to read novels almost every night. I'd consider THE best $400 (Australian Dollars) I ever spent.
I bought a kindle and use it daily to read regular ebooks, though I must say I don't use the wireless option I can see where it comes in handy if you travel a lot.
I love my Kindle, and still read quite a bit on it. Still, it's not perfect. I would like the 2.0 to have:
--an onboard hyphenation and justification engine, so that the text would lay out better, even as you shift the font size.
--water proofing. I like to read in all sorts of places. Plus I have a child-- stuff gets spilled on EVERYTHING.
--the ability to buy a service plan so that I could use it as an email device, along with the limited type of web access that I currently have.
--better browsing for books. I often find that it's not trivial to find something to buy.
Marion Gropen
consultant to small book publishers
the only thing that could make me want an ebook reader would be if it was made from paper, and the story was printed in ink.
unless of course it made a difference in the environment..
dreemkill.
You can pry my paperbacks out of my cold, dead hands.
I buy a LOT of books, and go through on average two a week. I read them in the bathtub, before bed, while eating breakfast, on the balcony when it's warm out, while waiting for friends, on the subway, during takeoff and landing on planes every Monday and Thursday. I can throw a couple in my messenger bag and not have to worry about breaking them. If they get wet, they dry out without any issues. If I drop one, the worst that happens in a dog-eared page. I can lend them to friends, borrow from their collections, or read many books for free via the library.
I don't see any kind of ebook reader being capable of that anytime soon.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
By lowering cost significantly.
The Sony Reader starts at $299 and uses E Ink technology that offers all of the features you seem to suggest don't exist. So, YES, there is a eBook reader that:
- doesn't cost near $400
- doesn't need a backlight
- doesn't require continuous power to display
- can be read in the sunlight or under a lamp
Though, I'm sure you will find something else to complain about--either real or imagined.
For the record, this was moderated 'Redundant' and it was the first of it's type to be posted... I think all the others are the redundant ones.
Just my $0.02,
"Perhaps most amazingly, votaries of 'diversity' insist on absolute conformity." -- Tony Snow
I doubt I'd be paying for dedicated hardware such as the Kindle to read E-Books. $399 is a bit steep. If they had an ebook credit equal to or greater than the price of the Kindle I'd reconsider it. That said, it is very cool technology and I do like the look of it.
.. they're not bad, but not great... I've gotten several eBooks from Tor for free (legally).
I've tried palm ebooks
My preferred electronic book format it the unabridged Audiobook. I can get 'em from Audible.com (and no, I don't work for Audible) for about $11.50 each, same as a paperback at the store. I put 'em into my iPod Mini or my Garmin GPS and I'm good to go.
~~Douglas
DouglasK Do Justly. Love Mercy. Walk humbly with your God.
I haven't purchased an ebook yet... waiting for that next generation with font support and color :-). But seriously I have thousands of $$$$ worth of technical books that out date every few years. For the convenience of having them all at my fingertips and having the ability to update them conveniently and less expensively... WOW!
:-)
Never get the 1.0 version though
I ordered my Kindle the first day they became available during the first 5 1/2 hours.
I use my Kindle every day and would go into withdrawal without it.
I do have about five books on it, but that is not why I own a Kindle. I use my Kindle to read these newspapers: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Irish Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Seattle Times (always arrives late-- plan to cancel), an Austin, Texas newspaper, an Atlanta, Georgia newspaper.
All those newspapers beam into my Kindle early each morning through the free EVDO broadband wireless connection built into every Kindle.
I save a fortune on newspapers because the Kindle editions are dirt cheap.
The Kindle is magnificent. It has totally changed my life. I am so well informed it's unbelievable. Most people have no idea what the newspapers in other parts of the country are reporting. It's an eye opener.
I do almost all my Kindle reading during commutes to work on trains and subways. It's a joy to read the Kindle in a busy subway. Try doing that with a newspaper. Ha!
printed on paper made from pulp created from endangered plant species and written with spotted owl quills.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Most of you are forgetting the resale option. The main reason I stick to physical books. Not only can I find a used copy of the book for less (and buy it legally), I can sell it when I'm done. (and a few will actually sell for more than I paid for them) While some of you like to maintain libraries of your collected readings, I for one am happy to read most things only once and have them be gone.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
I still consider them yuppies with too much pocket money.
Oh, I get it.
Except that doesn't work. That, plus moderation, means we don't have to think about them, but by now, they'll be fuckwads with or without an audience.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I bought an XO laptop during the Give One Get One promotion and I have been using it as an ebook reader. As shipped it has a Read activity which can be used with PDFs and one other format. I wrote two more activities myself, one for Gutenberg Etexts and another for Zip files containing sequentially named images (comic books, etc.) I've been pretty pleased with it, and the price for two of them is less than one Kindle. Project Gutenberg has an amazing selection of books, many of them quite rare. I can read Sir Richard Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights, a complete translation of the Indian epic the Mahabharata, classic science fiction from Edgar Rice Burroughs and E.E. Smith, and tons more.
The ebook function by itself justifies the cost of G1G1, and you get a bunch of other neat activities too.
Currently I'm working on making my Etexts activity do Text To Speech with Karaoke highlighting.
My Activities have been published on the OLPC Activities page if you want to check them out.
I, too, prefer dead tree books, but the XO gives me a convenient way to read books that I would otherwise never be able to own.
Lately, I have been buying all my books as e-books, and I use my Nokia E62 to read it.
Since I already carry my celphone everywhere, it is very natural for me. I enjoy it. I don't think I would buy a dedicated e-book reader.
morcego
I bought one DRM'd book from an Australian bookstore. I downloaded the pdf and the Reader into a windows partition. I didn't really feel that reading a pdf on a laptop wasn't so great so I printed off the first 20 pages. When the printer jammed, I tried reprinting it, but it said I had already printed these pages off, and couldn't do it again,
Annoyed beyond belief, I screenshot'd the whole book, 2 pages at a time and pasted them into OOo and then exported the odt file to pdf. The result was 99% as good as the original and only 11Mb in size. I now have a useable version of the book, and can print off pages when I want them. The whole business took about one hour. The electronic version was about half the price of the hard copy.
Would I purchase another? I doubt it. It's not worth the effort.
So, we need to build a series of massive deep-space rings that, when activated, will kill every troll-feeder in the galaxy?
(Forgive me the gratuitous Halo joke, but the image of trolls as Flood was too funny - and too scarily accurate - to pass up.)
First rule of trauma: Bleeding always stops.
I use Mobi Reader on my blackberry. I have a free program to build mobi texts. I tend to keep short stories and stuff on it. With the nice backlighting, it is great for reading in bed without having a reading lamp on. I used to do this with a Palm. It is nice on a trip to have several books along without the extra weight. Since it is also a good cellphone, webreader, emailer and gps, it doesn't suffer from the problem of being "one more gadget to drag along".
I think something the size of the little Acer Eeo or whatever, with a touchscreen, real keyboard and instant on would be a nice etext reader, assuming it had decent battery life. If it was running windows I could do exactly everything I need a computer for, work-wise. Play-wise it would come pretty close as well.
The idea of a dedicated gadget for reading etexts is hard for me to warm up to. A real book is hard to beat.
I have a Kindle, like it and use it regularly. Far better than reading PDFs on my laptop. Ideal for airplane reading, etc. But not the same thing as a book.
I love paper books & don't think they will ever be replaced by Kindle-like devices.
I like to be able to put my docs onto my Kindle. The current Kindle uses a subset of HTML as mark-up, which limits what can be done. It's possible to convert PDFs to Kindle format, but the conversion has problems dealing with the fact the Kindle form factor is not 8-1/2x11 or A4 and so many things don't fit right.
Bottom line -- Kindle meets a need I have. It's not perfect but it's adequate. The Amazon kindle book catalog has gone a long way towards building the critical mass needed for an elecronic reader, any electronic reader, to be successful.
Personally, I LOVE ebooks. I don't have an ebook reader, but I do have an OLPC XO. It has a screen option that is very close to the eInk display of the Sony eReader. The screen also rotates into a tablet mode, and the display will rotate at 90 degree intervals so you can hold it any which way you want. I have read probably 20 books on it so far. I installed a PDF reader and I read everything in that format. It works really great. And it's got wi-fi so it's my personal computer as well.
Sara
(more like lazy bastard than anonymous coward)
I use an alphasmart dana as an ereader, works well with Plucker. I read in portrait orientation. The fullsize keyboard is nice for taking notes and it's not too pokey except for big PDFs.
--- Do you believe in the day?
I read quite a lot, and would love to try out an eBook reader, but the cost is far too prohibitive. With the number of books I read in a year, I've read 45 so far this year, I find the library a much better resource for me. I can get just about any book I want for free from many different libraries in Ohio. Until the prices come down to below $100, I'm not interested in purchasing one.
"Trust that little voice in your head that says 'Wouldn't it be interesting if...' and then do it." - Duane Michals
I have had my Kindle for about 5 months now, and I remain happy with my purchase.
Now, keep in mind that I did not buy my kindle as a PDA, or a multi-function device. I bought my Kindle to read books, without having to carry several books. This means that I spend very little time surfing the Internet, or reading email on my Kindle. It is possible to do so, but I have devices that are better suited to those tasks.
I used to use my PDA for reading e-Books, but the backlit screen wore on the eyes, and the screen was not sized for the task. The Kindle's screen has been great for reading, in any conditions I have been in (yes you do need a light to read in the dark, that's what my bedside lamp is for.)
The fact that I am able to download books directly from Amazon whenever I want has been very useful, as has the ability to download books directly from the gutenberg library.
One of the biggest knocks that I have heard from others is the concerns about the copyright protection that is built into the device. I know this won't be a popular comment here, but that is something I really don't care about. When I buy the book I know that it will only ever work on my Kindle, but that's what I want the book to do. Once I have read the book I have little to no use for it.
My biggest complaint about the Kindle is all of you. If I am in public reading my Kindle, here is a hint, I AM READING LEAVE ME ALONE. Seriously, if you want to know about the Kindle go to Amazon, because I would rather read than explain/show the device to you.
Those who can do... Those who can't get a certification from Cisco or Microsoft.
Let me start off with first saying that my first set of expectations were (and I believe still are) pretty low when it comes to portable e-readers. I only want to do one thing on them - read books. Yes, I don't need mp3, email, internet, news mags, etc. I just want to read books. As long as the font is "readable", just like most textbooks and paperbacks, I don't need adjustable fonts. Of course, now that I've been introduced to adjustable fonts on the Sony PRS-505, I like the feature. As long as there is good contrast and the display is easy to read, I don't want extras. It has to be well constructed, of course. Having said that, the only others things I care about are title availability, price, and file format, and the price of the reader. While I'm impressed with all of the things that I've *read* about the Kindle and the iLiad, they're too expensive for me because I *only want a reader*. I can't say if they're worth the money since I don't personally believe there are enough e-readers on the market right now to make a meaningful price comparison. Okay, there are some other things - I would like to see consistent support for PDF's and junk the proprietary formats. Textbooks I need to write in, so I'll always buy paper. Scientific journal articles I would *like* to read on an e-reader, hence my concern over PDF's. We have a Sony PRS-505 at home. It's amazingly comfortable to use and (I did not think this would happen) I don't even "process" that I'm using an e-reader. If I'm enjoying what I'm reading, my mind isn't focused on the e-reader itself, it's focused on the story/information. Isn't that what books are for? Someone offer me a $149 e-reader, let me see what it can do (I hope not too much), and I'll think about it. I thought e-ink was inexpensive? Is the demand for them helping to keep a inflated price? Maybe I'm missing something...
Audiobooks. At the end of the day, what matters is the information, not the method of sensory input. Listening to a book allows one the opportunity to be entertained/informed during periods of time which would otherwise be wasted (commuting to work, walking the dog, doing chores, exercising etc.). Visual or even tactile methods of "reading" a book are not nearly as efficient, or as fun for that matter.
In most cases, eBooks are incredibly pointless. You can't write in them, you can't resell them, DRM could prevent you from reading them except on special (usually inconvenient) devices, you can't rebind them (heck, you can't even bind them!). The list can go on considerably from here. But that's just the average reader's problems with eBooks. I am a bibliophile, so let's get in to my problems; eBooks have no binding, their value has been removed because there's no physical worth to them, there's no reason to get the first editions anymore, there's no fine binding, the pages don't smell nearly as good as real books, etc., etc.... But possibly the worst thing about eBooks is that you can't bludgeon those extreme christian liberals with an eBible.
....
On top of this, eBook formats are limited to three general categories: a proprietary format, where your books lifespan is directly linked to the software that reads it, or the device that you need to read it on; ASCII text (or perhaps UTF-8 and the others), which will guarantee that you won't have any kind of typesetting or images; and PDF, which wouldn't be to bad, if PDF rendering wasn't so slow.
Obviously, PDF is the best format to distribute an eBook in, but the rendering is way too slow. On my laptop, reading the eBook edition of my french textbook, trying to move the pages around causes the computer to freeze for two seconds while Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional tries to render it. Not to mention that it's DRM prevents me from editing it into a more screen-readable format or converting it to another format that renders faster.
I'll admit, there are some advantages to eBooks. Let's see... It's convenient. I use my PDF french book every day. It would be great if I could get my 800 page C++ book in PDF so I could learn on the go. And there's more advantages....
I'll call back when I think of them.
Of course "he" did, it's one of your sockpuppet accounts.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
All these ebook readers have either no support, or limited support or paid support for PDF documents. Why would I want to pay someone any amount to read my own PDFs ? (Or PDFs that I have legally downloaded, from say, a Journal, or a PDF that I have already paid for) ?
These are just gimmicks. What these people are trying to do is to build an iPod for book readers. Its a badly misguided effort. Starters - books/written documents are massively more ubiquitous than music and in most cases, legally free to read (think the internet, scientific journals that your employer subscribes to, free ebooks, your own documents, etc.). You simply cannot transplant the successful model in one market to another when the markets are so very different.
Until some of these people figure out that an ebook reader is just that - an ebook reader, and not a hamster wheel for further purchases of closed format texts, they will keep falling short.
Here is the recipe for the fellow who wishes to succeed in this market : Support PDF and ODF's out of the box, without any penny pinching schemes to ask people to pay to some format that the dumb machine can understand. Sell a quality product that behaves like a hard disk and uses some free software like aigaion for library management, and do not even dream of selling ebooks. You will lose.
Amazon, for all its smarts, has still not figured it out. I would pay $500 for a quality product like the above. I will not however pay one red cent for a product that is nothing more than a portable storefront for a book shop. The model they ought to be following for an ebook reader is that of a PDA, not that of an iPod.
Of course, it might already be too late. The day ASUS comes out with a tablet EEEPC running linux, this market will officially be dead.
When I can take an ebook to an author for them to sign, I might consider one.
But as it is, I have quite a collection of signed books. Ex-Presidents, political prisoners, chefs, writers. The signature means more than their name scrawled in ink; it stands for the proximity we shared. And in some cases, it makes the art you already have more personal, and has more sentimental value.
Ebooks can never have sentimental, emotional value. Which is the entire reason for reading, no? Emotional connection. Sentimental rememberance. Textbooks? Fine. PDF your education. But Mark Twain on a kindle? Might as well watch the movie.
I was surprised to find that I prefer to read on the Kindle because you can set the font size bigger which makes it easier to read quickly. Also, I usually read several books simultaneously, switching between major types (business, narrative fiction, philosophical, etc) in one sitting. The kindle is much lighter than carrying several books.
Another nice feature is that Amazon can send you a sample of a book - usually the first chapter. This is much better than the few page scans they provide on their site for deciding on buying a book. Seeing the book in person would be better, but I prefer not to use the time to go shopping with driving and distractions in the book store.
I live in New York City, and I have a 45 minute subway commute each way.
The kindle is a godsend. You can hold it with one hand, get it out of the way when people brush past, and you don't lose your place when you put it away.
It's perfectly balanced in either hand, easy to hold onto, and it has a very well-thought-out interface (button placement, menu gizmo). The software is excellent too, and apparently hackable (yes, it runs linux).
The Whispernet rocks. Every kindle has a Sprint EVDO modem built in. You never need to connect it to a computer, you can just email pdfs and whatnot and they appear on the device within minutes. Very slick.
The downsides:
- can't "flip" through a book (but you can search!)
- battery runs out, no more reading
- DRM is pointless asscrap, books should be shareable
Switching back to a real book a few weeks ago was painful. They're really heavy and awkward you know? At least, the books I like are. I love the look and feel of paper, but the "book" form factor is not the best for reading on the go.
A method, for the rich and powerful to keep the poor in their place by charging for materials that normally poor have access to for self education.
This allows the poor to become more educated, which of course must be stopped.
Why not institute a method to reprint everything in a electronic format that only can be bought and sold.
Can't buy it or license it, you can not legally learn anything.
Sounds like a perfect plan for 21st century feudalism.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
No backlighting. That kills it.
I've been using my handheld (originally a Visor Deluxe, now a Clie SJ22) for reading eBooks since 2000, and I like it fine. :)
Don't see the point in a dedicated piece of hardware that's six or eight times the size and doesn't do anything else I use my handheld for, nor for the more expensive DRM-encumbered book formats they favor.
Again, as has been said here before, it's not enough to fix a single aspect of the publishing problem, your solution has to be hugely better to have any hope of replacing the current paradigm. You want a revolution in publishing, you gotta change^H^H^H^H^Himprove everything.
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
But that was the beginning and the end of my love for them.
As a tech-geek, 99.9% of my reading is reference materials. If there's a book I use even somewhat often, I generally know what I want to find, what it is, and (vaugley) what it looks like. Thus, searching through the book is generally a matter of flipping through the pages, very quickly - scanning for what I want.
This is something that even Acrobat/PDF's annoy me with.
With the update/redraw time the eBooks take - this is completely out of the question. Furthermore, the UIs don't have any way of making this good. If the update/refresh issue wasn't [an issue], and they had some really cool scroll/jog/zoom capability, that might be another deal. Sort of like an iPhone.
But now we're talking a bit of horsepower to do this.
Getting up on my salt box...
So It's really about usability - does anyone even remeber what that even is anymore?! When you could flip though the pages of a book without waiting for some sort of lag - or turn the channel knob on your TV and switch to another channel without waiting for some keypress that was buffered somewhere to get received and re-sync to a new stream - Or pick up your phone to answer it and be able to say "hello" to the person on the other end without some VoIP connection-lag blocking out that first 1/4 second of your call. Or you could by a book or a song, without worrying that you might not be able to read it or listen to it in the future if you loose your machine, or aren't careful to backup your licenses or whatever. Or when I didn't have to spend 5 minutes a day getting rid of the spam in my inbox which actually has a spam filter. Or instead of pressing a single button sitting on my kitchen counter and walking away to hear my phone messages I have to go through the crappy AT&T voicemail menus or whaterver. Or you press the "radio button" on your radio, and the needle jumped to the station, without delay or ambiguitiy over wondering if the radio "got the keypress".
No - I'm not a crotchety old man - I'm really a bonified techy - but It's literally getting to the point where the tiny bit of complexity, and time to deal with some of the "simple" things in life just adds up and adds up and guess what? Every little thing can do more maybe - but it's a pain in the ass to deal with it all.
Repeat after me:
USABILITY
USER EXPERIENCE
Devices should be "responsive" - not "interactive". Like a book - you open it to a page, and it's there - as opposed to "telling" it to go to a page then watching it, waiting for it to do so - so you can continue with the next action. I think there are only 3 companies that get this: Garmin, Apple, and TiVo (with the notable exception of Tivo's new "Home Media" garbage and their Comcast Set-Top boxes).
End soap-box
Okay...you may now mark me as flaimbait/argumentative and/or offtopic.
I also love the eInk screen. V8 is technically an older-generation book now, so the contrast is not as high as I'd like (the background is rather grayish; newer eBooks, such as V2, Sony 505, and Kindle, are noticeably brighter). Even so, it is readable everywhere a normal paper book is readable, even in direct sunlight (yes, I do read on a beach while sunbathing, too) - which is more than can be said of any device with a TFT screen. It's also thinner and lighter than most books of the same size, and you don't have to force keeping it open, so it's much easier to hold with one hand while reading - can do it for hours and not get tired.
As for DRM, well - what do I care? The solution for me is #bookz@irc.undernet.org. I do buy an occasional legit copy when there is an online shop selling stuff DRM-free, but otherwise, if they don't offer me what I want, I'll go and find it on my own - and by that time I don't care who does (or doesn't) get my buck in the end.
The http://www.booksinmyphone.com/ eReader for cell phones has everything you mention - except the texture. It pages rather than scrolls. It does not give page numbers but does have chapter and page scroll bar style 'thumbs' at the edge of the screen, so you get a rough guide where you are (reassuring in some of the longer novels)while still having the tantalizing uncertainty about exactly where you are. They give away books so there is nothing to stop you reading a few to get used to them.
My wife got me a Kindle for Xmas. I love reading with it.
There are still many books that aren't available for it yet. Last month, I had to go back to dead-tree format to read a book. I couldn't wait to get back to using my Kindle. I know it's stupid, but using a real book was annoying.
I think it's fair to pick on the Kindle for various aspects of its design. The scroll wheel is kind of odd. The paging buttons took a little time to get used to. But, all that really matters to me is the E Ink display, it's great. I suspect I would like the Sony reader just as well as the Kindle because they have the same display.
I've mostly been reading free/classic books downloaded from sites like feedbooks and manybooks.
I'm eager to buy an eBook reader but my minimum requirements for eBooks and eBook readers have not been met...
1) An eBook puchased from any eBook merchant should be readable by any eBook reader.
There, it wasn't a long list of requirements. If I buy a load of eBooks from (say) Amazon for my Kindle and then decide to change my reader to a Sony, then my Amazon books will be unreadable. That is simply unnacceptable. Even if I'm happy with my Kindle hardware and decide to stick with Kindle forever, I am forced to buy my eBooks from Amazon, I can't purchase from anyone else. That is also unnacceptable.
Whilst I'm waiting for eBook merchants and eBook reader manufacturers to sort this out... Does anyone know of a piece of hardware combined with some DRM stripping software that would suffice for now?
I have no need for a change of opinion. I've thought eBook readers were the best thing ever since they were invented. There's a magic balance of "good enough" and "cheap enough" that hasn't really been reached yet, though, at least not for me. Until then I'm using my Samsung P2 (MP3/media player) which restricts me to .txt files but otherwise works great. (This isn't even really a bad thing -- I have a few years worth of classics to get through anyway, and many other formats can be converted easily.) The tiny form factor makes it very convenient to carry around. Plus 8GB of storage blows the Kindle away. And it plays videos. And it has (dull) games, and a calculator. The LCD is roughly 150 DPI so it's easy to read; with the brightness turned up it's even OK outdoors.
I'd love an iLiad though. If I had a grand to waste I'd buy it for sure. The pen input and Linux is the main thing.
I used to use a Handspring Visor but there were shadows on the monochrome LCD that were pretty annoying. I still read a few novels on it.
I have books I've read 20 years ago. I can read the notes I've jotted in the margins long ago â" a glimpse of a younger me.
When eBooks can do that, without format/device rot, let me know.
...my copy of Stroud's Engineering Mathematics has "DOVER" and "M1 SOUTH" written in marker pen on the inside covers. Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach says "CALGARY" on one flyleaf, "ABERDEEN" on another. I've sat on my books to keep my arse warm on a freezing crash barrier, rested my head on them to sleep on borrowed dorm floors, stuffed them up my shirt to avoid hypothermia while waiting to hitch a ride in a car that never comes in that kind of weather. Some of them have tickets and receipts from strange destinations between the pages, leaves left to dry and little notes by those girlfriends you recall less painfully every time you open the pages. Whereabouts in your favourite memories will a Kindle transport you to, when you use it 20 years after you bought it? My books are battered, creased and stained, but function as perfectly as the day I bought them. Maybe one or two have loose pages now, but I can fix that with sticky tape.
Maybe when e-books can refresh more than just my technical memories, maybe I'll make the change. Maybe. But I won't be junking those old books, they grow more precious to me every day. I can't recall one single item of information technology I feel anything like the same attachment to.
I don't mean this as a troll. Ever since I started reading sci-fi as a kid, I've wanted a computing device that replaces books, radio, TV, phones. I buy plenty of gadgets, but they all end up being thrown away without a trace of regret. I'd really like to see some reports of people being moved by their gadgets (at mHz, or less).
A couple of years ago I had an insider position as a beta tester for Adobe's Video Collection. I went a bit off topic as the the test came to conclusion and requested that Adobe Acrobat come out with a Full Screen reader that would "scroll across panoramic landscape spreads" using either a mouse or the left right arrows. I finally got this reply from an arrogant project manager for Acrobat named Alan Pageant [name slightly changed] that my requested feature would be done "when I say it will be done". PowerFull guy! Well to this day the feature has not, to the best of my knowledge been coded. This is sad . . . because some really good panoramic picture books that are too expensive for print to paper, could easily be distributed via any platform if the feature were deployed. For those who need an illustration of the desired format, see: http://cruiserbob.com/TourdaMaui_spread_compressed.pdf and try to get it to fit top to bottom on the screen and scroll using either your mouse or the arrow key. Last I checked it could not be done except inside a window. Those of us that want an e-Book want full screen with no windows.
The only problem I have with my Sony Reader is the proprietary format and the resulting dearth of available content. I use it plenty for books that have been out a few years and the odd recent publishing that shows up available, but if I could get any book I wanted as soon as I had the desire I'd use it a lot more.
drink beer, and let the water run the mill
I would LOVE an e-ink based reader with a decent size. But they still cost quite a bit more than I'm willing to spend.
The cost of a Kindle gets me a loooooot of books from the bargain racks and half.com.
Of course, with the Kindle, I'd probably be locked into paying high prices for books, shopping the closeouts and used books wouldn't be a possibility. Yet one more thing I'd have to start cracking.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I am still waiting for them to come down in price- or have a decent touchscreen interface- as neat as they are when I have seen them, I just can't justify myself spending $300+ on a decent book reader- I just don't see myself using it enough especially if it is b/w since I would mostly be reading manuals and comics on it.
BEEN READING eBOOKS TOO LONG? --Dan Poynter Not only are most of my books available as eBooks, I read a lot of eBooks. I am a publisher and a reader. That places me on both sides of publishing: as producer and consumer. My speaking travels average some 6,000 miles each week. Yes, 6,000; I made five around-the-world speaking itineraries this year. (I have a home in Santa Barbara but live on United Airlines.) Traveling as light as possible, I do not carry printed books. Think about it, even for a short trip, you would have to carry two booksâ"in case you finished one. For the past several years, I have read eBooks on my Pocket PC. A Pocket PC is a multifunction device. Now I do not have to carry an address book, calendar, reference materials, paper books, etc. Then something happened. In December I was home for a couple of weeks. I had a couple of mass-market paperback that I wanted to read. They were not available as eBook editions so I decided to read myself to sleep with one of them. How awkward! With the printed book, you have to turn on the (bright) light. If you wake up in the middle of the night and decide to tire you eyes with reading, that light is dazzling! The eBook reader is back-lighted and very gentle. As a world traveler, I have become used to reading my eBooks in a taxi at five in the morning. Light? No thanks, my (back-lighted) book comes with a light. Holding a printed book (pBook) is awkward. It take two hands. Even a smaller mass market paperback is difficult. Have I been reading my Pocket PC with one hand too long? Bookmark? How Twentieth century! I donâ(TM)t need a book mark. Nor do I have to deface the book by dog-earing it. The eBook remembers where I stopped reading and opens to that page when I turn it back on. Cost. The only reason I paid more for these pBooks is that they were not available as eBooks. I love these authors and have purchased everything they have written. How I wish all of their books were available electronically. Type.. Why canâ(TM)t I adjust the size to the glasses I am wearing? It is easy with an eBook reader. Spelling. When not sure of a word in a pBook, I have to go find a dictionary. With my eBook, the dictionary is built-in. Convenience. I can download eBooks from anywhere in the world. I do not have to visit a bookstore or have Amazon deliver it. Disposal. I read a lot of books. What should I do with pBooks when I finish reading? My shelves are full. Electronic books are a far superior platform to dead-tree books for numerous reasons. But letâ(TM)s be practical. After trying bothâ"extensively, I prefer to annoy electrons than cut down trees. This is not just an environmental concern, it is a practical reading decision. I love eBooks. --Dan Poynter, http://parapublishing.com/
Personally, I love to read. I, however don't have a lot of space to store books and call me a bleeding heart liberal tree hugger if you will, I have decided I don't want to use dead trees. I don't have a Kindle or Sony book reader or any other of the $400 and up book readers that have come out on the market. I have a 5 year old Toshiba e800 Pocket PC running both Mobipocket and Ereader software (forget about Microsoft's software) and have about 1500 novels and short stories, biographies etc on my HD and carry around about 20 or 30 books on a 2Gb CF card at any one time. What did it cost? $165 used and $0 for software. Books are available for free at various sites and at a vastly reduced price (as compared to regular books ) at other sites like http://fictionwise.com/
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
I have both versions of the Sony reader. I use them all the time. Have dropped both from shoulder height with no ill effect. I don't get the battery life they claim (7500 page turns); I find that the battery discharges quite rapidly when the unit is not being used.