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.
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.
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
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.
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 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
- *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!
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.
The screen on the kindle only uses power when it refreshes. The other stuff in there obviously uses power (cpu, memory, data link, etc).
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
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.
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.
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.
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!
... 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."
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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!
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
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.
> 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.
They're all still non-starters until they get rid of the proprietary formats and use (eg) eBook.
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.