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?
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 like having a physical library. Books are perfectly convenient for my purposes, and don't typically come with a triple-digit buy-in.
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.
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.
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.
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 had been considering buying one to play with until I saw the price. For crying out loud, I can buy quite a few books for $400!
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
It's a safe bet that those paper books will last far longer than any hard drive that you store files on
I happen to agree with the moving and all the rest of it. But I personally disagree with running everything to PDF. I read PDF's on the laptop - maybe on the way to work or occasionally on my lunch break - but the majority has to be in books. There is nothing quite like having 5 or 6 books open to various pages while I code, flicking my eyes to various books or turning pages to keep track. My screens just do not have that kind of real-estate space.
For me, there is no question in this debate, PDF's might be a lot better to move and transport, but nothing is better than a i-killed-a-tree text book IMHO.
Just my $0.02 AU
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
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.
Hmmm. The Sony Reader is $300. Still too expensive.
7500 "turns" on a charge. At about 20 books, that does seem to use much less power than Kindle's 1 week (maybe!) rating.
The e-books cost the same as normal books? WTF? And I'm tied into only Sony's selection, unless a publisher provides it DRM-free.
If the price were to drastically drop, maybe to $50, for that reader, and the ridiculous prices on the books were lowered, I'd buy it.
So there. I learned something new. But my overall opinion hasn't changed.
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
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.
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.
There's a point. a house full of books encourages the kids. And it is easy to push the kids to read when its available, and can be seen. A file inside your cell phone or ebook reader does not compare, unless it is easy to pass on.
Wilson Ng What matters is what you can, and cannot do.... Captain Jack Sparrow
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... One of the coolest things I just found out about e-book readers is that they don't actually prevent you from having real books around too!! In fact, there are some places where it really makes a lot of sense to have a real book instead. I bet you could come up with such an instance if you tried.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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
Owning that you have not read the lost material, how are you in any position to judge whether it was "good" or not? All you have is the opinions of people whose materials did survive, and we all know from current politics and scholarly literature that there are many works that are improperly labelled as "bad" or "incorrect".
Further, just because a book is badly written or mostly wrong does not mean it does not contain good or useful ideas. Maybe the author was terrible but could inspire a genius to reach a new and ground-breaking mode of thinking.
No one can judge the value of lost materials.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Even if the lost works were boring crap, it is still sad that they were lost. Writers both good and bad reflect their times, and historians can better understand what life was like through not only the lost literature, but even lost reports from the field and letters, even cargo manifests.
Not only that, I suspect many surviving plays and poems may have been remakes of older works, or repackagings. But we may never know, as only the most popular copies survived.
Which returns us to the only true way to ensure a work's survival: make copies, and every so often make fresh copies. No medium is forever. Old works died out because they were either copy-protected or because they were not considered valuable enough for the effort of making a copy.
Cost management.
I'm happy that I can pay $6 for a book that only lasts 20 years.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I hate books for programming. Give me electronic. The main reason is electronic text search. With a book I have to flip through the pages, look through the contents, or manually search through the index to find the topic. Bookmarks get less effective as you add more and more bookmarks to the book. But now full text search and search engines... no more flipping through pages. Find me "BufferedString". Bam. I'm there.
Actually, I find that to be a blessing with paper books (and I generally prefer paper for technical books, even though I own a Sony eReader). Reference works like the old command/function lists, showing parameters, are probably an exception (I prefer those to be integrated into the IDE, or I'll look them up on a 2nd screen).
One thing that I learned 10-15 years ago... don't put blinders on when searching for information. As you search, spend 10-20% of your time looking at results that aren't exactly what you were looking for. Anything that catches your eye, that is the least bit connected, or that may shed light on another issue. You don't have to read the extraneous information in-depth, but you should at least file the concepts away in the back of your mind.
Which pays itself back in spades down the road when you, even vaguely, remember what the possible solution for a new problem is. You'll be able to better form a search query to pull up that information you saw a few months earlier. Which is a lot better then doing another blind search with not a lot of idea about what you're looking for.
I work with a bunch of technical folks. The most frustrating (and self-limiting) folks are those who simply want "the answer" to their current problem. They never grasp the concept that by trying to learn in small spurts, their work will become easier down the road. Instead, they say "I'll learn the details later, just help me fix this", and thus never get anywhere.
(Which isn't really germane to the topic at hand... except that when flipping through a paper technical reference manual, it's a lot easier to glance at content other then what you are specifically looking for. Giving me an opportunity to learn a bit about something else while I'm trying to look up something specific.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?