Samsung Papyrus E-Book Reader, Coming Soon

kanewm writes with a snippet from Portable-Ebook-Reader.NET: "Samsung's new, highly portable e-book reader, dubbed 'Papyrus,' will be available in Korea in June 2009 and in the UK and North America sometime later (likely within several months)." As the site notes, though, this lacks some features of the Kindle, the obvious choice for comparison in the American market.

Comments

Lack of features

[sanborn's man]

well, if DRM is one of those "features" it lacks, I'll consider it. Kindle 2 is nice, but its draconian DRM it is a big no no for me.

Re:Lack of features

[yamfry]

I'm not really sure where this Kindle-is-full-of-DRM idea comes from. The Kindle has no DRM, but it does support a file format that can be restricted with DRM. I'm a Kindle 2 user (there are a lot of things I don't like about it, but that's another topic), and I have never put a single DRM-laden format on it. There are free utilities from both Amazon and third parties (I use Stanza) that will convert a host of other formats (PDF -- poorly, .mobi, etc) to Kindle format. There is nothing intrinsic to the device itself that makes it a DRM machine.

All-important specs missing

[EdZ]

Lack of data support outside the US isn't a problem. The Kindle only supports EVDO, which nobody outside the US uses anyway. And whilst there is not hardware keyboard, I'd imagine the touchscreen supports a software keyboard (otherwise the 'memo' menu button displayed rather prominently would be pretty useless). The real make-or-break factor is it's resolution. The Kindle, along with all the other e-ink readers I've seen, have had no higher a resolution than 1280x1024 (for the iRex Digital Reader costing an exorbitant £600), with 800x600 being the norm. This is unacceptably low for comfortable reading without huge fonts (and thus low word counts per page), and entirely prevents the use of grayscale images at any readable quality. Until e-ink displays can hit 1280x1024 at a reasonable price point, they're just not worth it.

Re:All-important specs missing

[Anonymous Coward]

I would consider 200 dpi the minimum barely acceptable resolution. 300 dpi is visibly better, and 600 dpi is finally "good enough". There is a reason laser printers improved from 300 to 600 and 1200 dpi as soon as they could develop the technology. It isn't merely a question of smooth fonts - at lower than 200 dpi small print like superscripts and footnotes is simply unreadable.

An A4 sheet at 200 dpi requires 2338 x 1653 pixels, and an A5 page (paperback size) has 1653 x 1169 pixels. In other words, the reader resolutions are still only getting there and real paper is the clear readability champion.

Why in the world

[Jane Q. Public]

... would I want to buy something the size of a netbook, for more money than a netbook, that only does 1/100th the things a netbook will do?

Thanks, but... no thanks.

Re:Why in the world

[agrippa_cash]

Because it claims to do something better than a netbook can. I am slightly eccentric though: I use a watch to tell time, a cellphone to talk and a camera to take pictures. It may seem silly, but there are a lot of people like me.

I'll hold off until they are cheaper though.

Re:Why in the world

[teg]

... would I want to buy something the size of a netbook, for more money than a netbook, that only does 1/100th the things a netbook will do?

Because it's smaller (like a pocket book), has much improved battery life and has a much better display for its particular purpose. I don't like reading books on a laptop, or even worse, on an iphone even though they have a lot of features an e-book reader does nat have.

If I could buy they Kindle here, I would. One major reason for ignoring other offerings is the book store... unlike music, "bring your own book" doesn't work very well so access to a large electronic book store is a huge plus.

Re:Why in the world

[ucblockhead]

To read in full sunlight.

Re:E-Book? I'd rather have a document reader.

[smith6174]

Thanks for the clarification, you must be a genius. Why is .pdf support "experimental" and shitty even on Kindle2? Why do you need wireless to send a file to Amazon to convert a file and send it to your device? Lets get real. If a decent reader device existed, every grad student in the country would want one.

Re:If the DRM is th eonly thing you do not like ..

[Whillowhim]

Many of those have DRM that is just as bad. I know the Sony readers have it from personal experience, and the Sony store sucks a heck of a lot more than Amazon. Of course, they all read a variety of free formats without DRM as well, as do all the readers I know about. The problem is not that the readers handle DRM, its that online stores are selling books in a variety of incompatible and restrictive formats. The Sony store sells books that are DRMed with a format only readable on the Sony e-book readers. The Amazon store only sells books readable on the Kindle. As an owner of the Sony e-book reader, I cannot buy e-books from Amazon. With a Kindle, I could not buy books from Sony. This fractures the market and turns e-books from "any book ever written (within reason)" to "any book your manufacturer bothered signing a contract with". This fractures the market and destroys much of the usefulness of an e-book reader. The sole reason I recommend the Kindle to people is because the Amazon store seems to have the best selection, I dislike some of the features of the actual reader itself (i.e. I don't see downloading books over a cell phone as a feature, since you have to pay for it with higher priced books and a short battery life if you forget to turn wireless off).

Of course, there are stores out there that sell books in a non-DRM format. Baen was one of the first publisher to do this and I have bought a lot of books from them. However, they are a small fraction of the books published today (3ish new books a month, all sci-fi or fantasy) and the same seems to hold true for the other stores I've found. Fictionwise seems to come up in conversation a lot, but only some of its books are DRM-free, and the 6 times so far I've gone looking for a specific book from them, they've had it only in DRM encumbered format. And since Sony doesn't want to release its DRM scheme, none of their DRM formats will work with my reader. I just added up my order history for Baen, and I've spent $936 on their e-books over the past 3 years. I'm more than willing to pay for books, but there are a lot of e-books out there where people simply refuse to take my money.

The alternative to all of this, of course, is to pirate books. This is generally a pain in the ass and can result in some poor quality books, but there is a lot more available this way than there is from legitimate non-DRMed books. I haven't found a specific site that works well for downloading books. Many of the major torrent sites have large collections of books available for download, but they can be pretty spotty and the quality is... variable. There will often be issues with the lines being too long for the reader, and wrapping in weird ways or with extra spaces between lines. There are some that are perfectly fine, but it is often a crap shoot. On the other hand, the first time I got frustrated with Fictonwise's DRM only books, I found a collection of sci-fi and fantasy that was 9 gigs. A good portion of that was scans of graphic novels, but you can fit a mind-blowing amount of text into even a small part of a 9 gig compressed file. Once I downloaded that, my first stop for new books is Baen, and the second stop is my hard drive. Its rare that I bother looking for anything else now. I still check for some new releases on various websites, but more often than not I'm disappointed in the results. I'm not going to pay $18 for a book that has been out in paperback for 6 months. And that was just the one book lately that _was_ available.

Though I may have got off track a bit, I think the real problem here is not that readers can handle DRM, its that online stores are fucked up. I could easily have spent an extra $1k on books if they were available in a format that works in my e-book reader. The fact that publishers won't allow those formats is the problem, not the fact that a specific reader has DRM for file format Y, but not Z. They're just asking everyone who doesn't have their specific e-book reader to pirate the books, instead of selling good quality versions for sale with reasonable fees and an easy to use system to download what you want when you want it.

Re:Only one feature needed

[Whillowhim]

Exactly, but you did miss one other feature. Size matters. Try putting your netbook in your pocket, or holding it in your hand without resting it on something. Readers are small enough and light enough that they are in a completely different class of portable compared to a small notebook computer. Its a similar comparison between an ipod and a netbook, since both of them play audio just fine.

So... if you want something with crazy battery life (1 week or more), small enough to fit in a pocket and light enough to hold in your hands indefinitely you want an e-book reader. If you don't mind recharging 1-2 times a day, carting a small bag around to hold your notebook and setting your notebook down on a convenient surface to read books, then don't bother with an e-book reader.

Re:Great, but what about the SOFTWARE?

[ErkDemon]

Yep, format conversion is a joy-killer.

A serious reader =has= to be able to read PDFs and basic webpages by default. Hell, reading ODF and MSWord6 wouldn't hurt, either.

But if a reader can't read a simple saved HTML page without an attached PC to run the conversion software, or without going online to access a proprietary conversion service, then it's not a very good document reader. If I'm going to spend a lot of money on a document reader, I want it to be able to show me PDF-archived correspondence and stored webpages.