Novelists On the E-Book Experience

An anonymous reader writes "How is reading different on a Kindle, a Nook, or an iPhone? The NY Times asked two writers what they thought. Joseph Finder, the author of thrillers, misses the indices compiled by humans and finds it annoying the way that all of the fonts are the same. Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher novels, actually likes the simplicity because he can concentrate on the words themselves. And then there's the issue of monopoly, which must give the authors the willies."

Comments

No problem

[Dyinobal]

I love the -idea- of Ebook readers, nothing is more awesome than being able -in theory- to carry around all my college text books and all my favorite novels on a thin little device that has a huge battery life. But in general all the systems that I've thought about buying I've turned down for being to locked down, or to expensive. DRM and Price is really a deal breaker, and the idea of rebuying books I already own so I can read them on my ebook reader is a little obnoxious. I love the Idea just hate the execution thus far, but I'm still hopeful for the tech to catch on.

Re:No problem

[FrankSchwab]

I agree; why the hell would I pay $300 for a device just so I have the right to pay $10 for each book I want to read?

A device with an unprotected screen that I don't expect to last a year?
A device that, should Amazon or Sony decide to get out of the market, will become a paperweight that I can't read my purchased content on anymore, and can't transfer my purchased content anywhere (see Yahoo Music Store, MSN Music, Walmart online music, etc ).
A device that can, at any time, decide that some of my content is no longer "acceptable", and delete it (see Amazon and "1984"/"Animal Farm")?

The concept is great; the current implementations just suck. /frank

Re:No problem

[mcgrew]

I wouldn't have much need for one. It would be great for school (if I'd had one when I was still going; computers used Hollerith cards back then), except you'ld have to pay full price for new textbooks instead of buying them used, and you couldn't resell them when the school year was done. It would be great for vacation, except I rarely travel and when I do, reading is the last thing on my mind. When I read, I'm IN the book; when I read Pratchett, I'm not in Illinois, I'm on Diskworld.

Most of the books I read come from the city library anyway. It's not much use there, either.

Re:No problem

[Bigjeff5]

Basically everything but the Kindle is opening up. Everyone is switching to at least supporting ePub, and a number of stores sell only ePub now instead of their formerly proprietary format (like Sony). Eventually even the Kindle will have to compete or die as competition grows via the ePub format.

Your requirement of a lack of DRM is, frankly, silly. This is the modern digital age - you will not be able to avoid DRM completely no matter what you do. Do you refuse to watch DVD's because they have copy protection? Because that's all DRM systems are. Plus, aside from the Kindle, they are not a requirement. You can create your own ePub or PDF documents and read them on most ebook readers (again, excluding Kindle), and people can sell non-DRM files if the market demands it. DRM also allows Libraries to lend e-books, soemthing they could not legally do without it. Several readers support this now, and libraries are starting to pick it up. Once again, that excludes the Kindle (can you tell I don't like Kindle's lock-in?).

The cheapest new e-book reader out is $200, which is quite reasonable given the technology. That single purchase alone, thanks to Google Books and Project Gutenberg, puts millions of public domain books in your lap that would have been painful to read previously.

Lastly, your complaint about re-buying books is unavoidable. One is on paper, the other is digital, and it's not easy to go from one to the other without good OCR technology. This would be expensive for home use, but if you already had a nice camera, were really really dedicated to getting your books on PC, and didn't mind chopping up your paper books, you could do this if you wanted to. Personally, I wouldn't. If you really read the book that often then just fork out the few extra bucks to buy it again. If you do incrimentally you will eventually have your entire library, and it won't hurt the pocket book as much as trying to do it all at once.

Last but not least, if the reason you want an e-book reader is for technical books and dense PDFs, then you are going to need to spend some coin. You will be severly disappointed when you try to read a tech manual on a novel-sized screen, it sucks. Right now you're looking at $500+ to get a decent sized screen, and right now most of the really big e-readers are very over-priced. The target for those is a smaller group of people who can spend more money - lower demand but higher willingness to spend = higher prices.

I'm waiting for the Plastic Logic Que (should be out early 2010) for this specific purpose, myself, and keeping my small e-book reader for reading books.

Re:No problem

[DragonWriter]

But in general all the systems that I've thought about buying I've turned down for being to locked down, or to expensive.

The bookstores linked to each device may be DRM-laden, but most will read ebooks loaded from other sources that are DRM-free, and there are plenty of DRM-free ebooks in formats usable on reader devices available from publishers over the web rather than the through the bookstores linked to the readers.

Re:No problem

[Alinabi]

Then get the Astak EZ Reader. It reads any format under the sun (including .djvu, which means you can put scanned documents on it), it is not tied in to any particular store, and it sells for $265. The battery lasts for 5,000 page turns, it takes a 4Gb SD card, and you can plug it into a USB port on your computer and treat it as a USB hard drive. I had it for 3 months and so far I have no complaints.

Re:No problem

[Anonymous Coward]

It helps to actually have knowledge of what you speak. The Sony devices use the OPEN ePub format. While it's true that many of the commercial ePubs sold have Adobe's ADEPT DRM on them, that was cracked nearly a year ago, and it's trivial to remove the DRM from purchased files. This leaves you with bog-standard ePub books that work on literally dozens of hardware ebook readers and more than a few software readers. So if for whatever reason Sony decides to leave the ebook market, I'll continue to use my Sony reader (which I have a nice cover for to protect the screen) and continue to purchase ePub books from Books on Board, Shortcovers, WH Smith, Waterstones, or I'll continue to check ePub books out from my local library system. But hey, if you want to rant about "problems" that only someone who is uninformed of the subject would have, go right ahead.

Re:No problem

[Bigjeff5]

A device with an unprotected screen that I don't expect to last a year?

Ever heard of a cover? Jeeze, it's not that hard man. I assume you don't buy laptops either because they'll break in less than a year, that screen is so unprotected!

A device that, should Amazon or Sony decide to get out of the market, will become a paperweight that I can't read my purchased content on anymore, and can't transfer my purchased content anywhere (see Yahoo Music Store, MSN Music, Walmart online music, etc ).

While you are absolutely correct about Amazon (which is why I don't recommend the Kindle), you are completely wrong about Sony and everybody else. Sony now only sells e-books in the ePub format, and has offered to update all of their old readers' firmware, which don't support the format, so that they will. EPub is ubiquitous, there are dozens of e-book stores that sell in that format, the two major online public-domain book sources (Google Books and Project Gutenberg) all use ePub, nearly any device but the Kindle can read it, and anybody can create books in this format. If Sony goes away (which, by the way, will never happen, it's fucking Sony for christ's sake), the ePub books remain, and can still be purchased on your device and moved to another device even if Sony were dust. You can easily move them from one device to another - the DRM simply attempts to ensure that you do not copy it to more than one device at a time (note that this also makes lending possible). This is a function of ePub, not Sony, and like I said it is becoming ubiquitous.

A device that can, at any time, decide that some of my content is no longer "acceptable", and delete it (see Amazon and "1984"/"Animal Farm")?

Again, that's pretty much Amazon and the Kindle that can do that - except for library books (which are possible thanks to ePub's DRM, btw), you download a copy to your hard drive (or directly to the reader, if the device supports it) and the book is yours. All the readers except the Kindle allow you to access the reader as a mass storage device and move the files off it.

In other words, your complaints are entirely against Amazon and the Kindle, and have nothing to do with e-book readers in general.

The concept is great; the current implementations just suck.

You know this from experience right? Oh wait, you don't, since everything you said was incorrect. I do speak from experience, and frankly I won't go back to hard copies (except for technical books until till I get my Que) even though I have a crappy, old e-book reader which has none of the nice features the newer devices have. I've had that reader for about two years now, by the way, and I bought it refurbished.

Even the old implimentations (which have had their problems) were overall far supperior to paper books - the fact that I cary about 150 books in my bag now is proof positive of that, as is the fact that I now have access to millions of public domain books on a device that reads as well as having the paper versions.

Re:No problem

[wardred]

No DRM is silly for music...except that the iTunes store does this. I can see that technical publishers, in particular, will probably want to keep this around, but no DRM on novels would be nice and help guarantee interoperability.

I really don't like the specter of having the Betamax of the e-book world, having the authentication servers go down, and have all my books disable themselves because the e-book reader couldn't communicate with the authentication server for X days/months/years, whatever.

If we have to have DRM - and that's debatable - then I want DRM that's interoperable between the Kindle, Sony, and other BIG publishers out there that doesn't require the reader to phone home on any sort of a regular basis and allows one to transfer books from one competitor's device to the other...as you'd be able to do with no DRM, and should be able to do even with DRM if designed properly, though I could see the process being a bit of a pain.

I want this for movies and music too. No DRM, or if we have to have DRM, make it possible to transfer media that I've purchased to other devices. It still galls me that if I do the right thing and purchase media from whoever, I'm getting a broken product, and that the "pirate's" offerings are more interoperable with more devices.

Re:No problem

[Nyeerrmm]

To be clear, and this FUD has been going around since the thing came out, you can use non-DRM formats on the Kindle. TXT and MOBI/PRC files can be read no problem -- the device mounts as a flash drive, you copy them over and they appear readable on the home screen. You can also get DOC and HTML files converted for free. The lack of ePub could be a frustration if a good DRM-free ePub store appears, but given that the spec leaves room for any DRM scheme to I expect that it will be just as fractured as anything else.

The real problem isn't the devices, its the stores. There is no source that I know of for new, legal novels without DRM. I don't think we'll see this until publishers get scared of Amazon or someone else dominating the market and pulls an Amazon Music Store -- offering DRM free MOBI or ePub in order to get into the market with the largest installed base.

Re:No problem

[Bigjeff5]

I love my e-book reader, but I would never recommend it for school books.

Imagine one of your books on a 6" (or smaller) screen - yeah, it sucks. So if you don't read for pleasure don't bother.

The only good ebook reader for technical books and documents is the iRex (I wouldn't touch a Kindle with a 10-foot pole, because of their obscene lock-in), and that would set you back about $800. The Plastic Logic Que should be out early 2010, and it may or may not be cheaper, they have not released pricing yet.

Most of the books I read come from the city library anyway. It's not much use there, either.

The ePub DRM allows libraries to lend books now, and libraries are starting to pick it up. So eventually this will be a big bonus for e-readers, not a down side. Plus, for the devices that have wireless-g, going to the library will mean hitting a button on your reader, no matter where you are (home, travel, whatever), and for everything else it will mean hitting the library website with your laptop. Pretty cool I think. Check out Metro Net Online Library to see what all is available - that's just one online consortium library.

Plus, if you're into free, and especially into the classics, there are over a million public domain books available for free from both Google Books and Project Gutenberg - all designed specifically for use in an e-book reader (obviously they also offer them as text files for your computer, but frankly that sucks). I recently got all of Aesop's fables and several obscure classic Greek mythology books. Plus anything you find in PDF will work (except, as I mentioned, large format dense material like technical books/manuals - they work but suck to read).

I wouldn't use it for your school books yet, but I also wouldn't rule it out for pleasure/library reading either if I were you.

Re:No problem

[NotBornYesterday]

When the only viable solution to a legitimate problem is to become a criminal, there is something wrong with both the law and the original problem.

Re:No problem

[Bigjeff5]

EPub and PDFs are clearly winning the ebook document war, even Sony ditched their proprietary format for it.

I also didn't say DRM was necessary for anything but library books (I don't think it is and I don't like it), but it's also not going to go away. No matter how stupid it is, publishers will always want it.

Basically Amazon is the only holdout for inter-operability. Everybody else is moving to ePub, which seems to be more sanely designed than most DRM out there (it is designed for lending, and removing an ebook from a device for the purposes of moving it to another device).

Re:No problem

[Joe Tie.]

A device with an unprotected screen that I don't expect to last a year?

I think you're really reaching to justify an emotional response. I've had mine for over a year. And I was homeless for three of those months, My kindle still doesn't have a scratch. You don't get much more wear and tear in life than that.

Re:No problem

[Anonymous Coward]

5,000 page turns? Is that an average of the time it takes for a person to read a page, or is the power consumption minimal until it draws the next screen? I can read about 60 - 80 pages a minute...

Re:No problem

[Zerth]

Since when did the kindle not appear as a mass storage device?

I copy all my kindle books to disk to prevent Amazon from "repossessing" them and to crack them to allow speech to text.

I'd miss browsing on the free cell connection if Amazon tossed it, but I've got a browser on my phone, even if the battery life is shorter.

Re:No problem

[Anonymous Coward]

What books are you reading where it takes only 1 second to read a page? coloring books?

Re:No problem

[BetterSense]

There's another format that is ubiquitous.

ASCII

I don't see any reason for e-books to be in any other format, so I refuse to buy an e-reader until it does what I want it to do--digitally store books--in the technically obvious way, instead of the marketing obvious way.

Re:No problem

[Dragoness Eclectic]

If it's an E-Ink display, it only consumes power when it redraws the screen, so you really do measure the battery life in page-turns, not days.

p.s. Slashdot's timeout between posts is f***ing lame.

Re:No problem

[Bigjeff5]

To be clear, and this FUD has been going around since the thing came out, you can use non-DRM formats on the Kindle. TXT and MOBI/PRC files can be read no problem -- the device mounts as a flash drive, you copy them over and they appear readable on the home screen.

Text has been available for everything, and mobi pocket is going the way of the dinosaur. I appologize for not including them, but it's a non-issue as everything else does it too, and text ebooks suck monkey balls. However, anything other than those (like .doc or .pdf, the most common document formats in the world) must be sent to Adobe and, at their grace, sent to your Kindle. Also, books purchased from Amazon for the Kindle are non-transferable, even to another Kindle, and you cannot buy books from another store for use on a kindle (unless they, for some reason, give it to you as a txt file). That's a huge deal-breaker for me.

The lack of ePub could be a frustration if a good DRM-free ePub store appears...

You mean like the Sony Store and Google Books who, combined, are far larger than Amazon's store? Yeah, ePub is already more available, and more transferrable than Kindle books.

...but given that the spec leaves room for any DRM scheme to I expect that it will be just as fractured as anything else.

So far, the exact opposite has happened, and I'll tell you why: who the hell wants to be the publisher of an ebook that nobody else can buy? What sense does that make? Also, you can now check out library books on any e-reader that suports ePub DRM, and like I said there are more ePub books available than there are Kindle books. If you include public domain books available in ePub (which number in the millions, thanks to Google Books and Project Gutenberg), Amazon's kindle is left in the dust.

There is no source that I know of for new, legal novels without DRM.

By the same token, there is no source that I know of for new, legal DVDs without copy protection, and no source of new, legal Blue Ray movies without DRM. What's your point? It's a stupid argument because it will never happen (except on a select, book by book basis), and if we have a ubiquitous technology for managing legal copies, like ePub is fast becoming, it will only be a problem for people who wish to copy the material illegaly.

Frankly, there are already half a dozen ePub stores, and there are more opening up all the time, like the Barnes & Nobel store, which was formerly all proprietary .pdb books, but now offers ePub books as well. I don't know if you know this, but B&N is one of the largest book sellers in the world.

Your information is out of date, just like mine was. Unfortunately, correcting me doesn't make the Kindle look any better, while correcting you just makes it look worse.

The one thing I'll praise the Kindle for is the Wireless-G access - this was a huge boon and a number of ebook readers - including the latest Sony - are emulating it. However, in the long run the Kindle was the wrong horse to bet on, as they are the ones that are going to have all the troubles you describe.

Lastly, it's not FUD if it's true, damnit!

Re:No problem

[supermank17]

Just to chime in here, you have a few facts wrong about the Kindle (which I do own).
You can mount it as a USB mass storage device, and archive your books or add books that you acquired separately from the Amazon store. Only the encrypted books you purchased from Amazon will be unreadable on any other device you may have (although theoretically you can crack the encryption on the DRM'd books). I believe you can even reload books that Amazon may have "revoked" from your backup and still be able to read them.
You can also load any book onto the Kindle that is in the .mobi format (the kindle format is just a drm'd mobi file with a different file extension). Mobi is about as common as ePub, and most major ebook publishers offer books in this format. In fact, most of the books on my Kindle were purchased / downloaded from baen.com.
I'm not exactly thrilled with the power that Amazon has over books you buy through them, but the device is not as tied to the Amazon service as many people think, and you can use it to read other books (even if Amazon were to die).

Re:No problem

[the_last_rites]

Astak EZReader 5" Pocket Pro Battery Life : 8000 pages or around there DRM Formats : Yea they're there, but there's no lockdown like in the case of Amazon, Sony or any of the other biggies. They're just additions to many formats like RTF,DOC,TXT,HTML,PDF(reflow),EPUB. The support for LIT and CHM is spotty at best and you'd best avoid them on the PocketPro. Then again, other than Pocketbook, chm support sucks across most readers in the market now. Price : $199

Re:No problem

[Anonymous Coward]

> All the readers except the Kindle allow you to access the reader as a mass storage device and move the files off it.
kindle does this too. You can also back up your library onto your computer and put it back on the kindle at any time just dont witch on the wireless or it might get deleted again for the rare chance it happens....

kindle's drm is broken so you can move your crap around all you like. Please stop spreading lies.

Re:No problem

[Anonymous Coward]

and if epub really becomes a motivator for all things ebook and amazon is forced to make the change, then *gasp* new firmware for kindles to support it... its a computer iirc just add support for it not that hard

Re:No problem

[mcgrew]

The ePub DRM allows libraries to lend books now, and libraries are starting to pick it up.

Once it becomes common enough that most books are available from the library in ebook form, I may get one.

there are over a million public domain books available for free from both Google Books and Project Gutenberg

I've not found any free on Google Book; in fact, they seem to discourage your reading books that are in the public domain. Project Gutenberg is a good source, though. There are also writers like Doctorow and Lessig that publish under the GPL and host their books in many formats on their websites. I wish someone would set up a list of these writers with links.

Re:No problem

[ISoldat53]

What a great project for OLPC. They would make a great ebook reader if someone could put together an OLPC activity that is easy to install and use.

Re:No problem

[Nyeerrmm]

Looking at the B&N ebook store, it looks like everything thats not public domain is still DRM'd. To me this isn't any better than the amazon store, since while both are built on a decently open format (ePub and Mobi), you still can't read them without authenticating them. DRM is going to make incompatibilities, there is no way around it. While there are no sources of DRM free movies, there are plenty of sources of DRM free music. This was done because the music labels were scared to death of being bullied around by Apple. Movies are different for now because its still a physical medium controlled by the publishers, and they're not scared of themeselves -- if and when digital/non-streaming distribution becomes more dominant in movies we're bound to see something similar happen.

And this isn't to say I'm a Kindle partisan. If I were in the market now I'd be looking at the other options too. I'm just saying that its disingenuous to say you HAVE to use DRM-locked files on the Kindle -- this misinformation has been spread endlessly around the internet. I just looked and its quite easy to get MOBI files on Gutenberg, and I've read quite a few books from Baen on mine. As soon as I see a general audience DRM-free eBook store with good selection I'll jump ship, until then its just picking what vendor you want to be locked into. I apologize if you thought I was being rude, I was simply trying to correct a misconception I see a lot.

Re:No problem

[biryokumaru]

I understand that DRM removal falls under fair-use when there is a potential of content loss. Is this not correct?

Re:No problem

[ILongForDarkness]

Kindle works as a mass storage device too, in fact that is the default when it is connected to a computer the thing is mounted like a thumb drive. I agree very convenient to have a lot of material with you. I'm usually reading a few things at a time, having to chose which book to bring with me is no longer an issue, I just bring all of them.

Re:No problem

[biryokumaru]

Well, since you don't need 256 unique characters for most English text, ASCII is less efficient than some of the open standards used for eBooks. Additionally, if you wish to be compatible with more than simply English, something like Unicode would be a better choice.

See, there are plenty of reasons that wholly concur with your central argument.

Re:No problem

[bazorg]

Well let's see you put your money where your mouth is. right now at ebuyer.com item: 176445

that's £120, no DRM. There are 270 in stock right now, I expect to see them all gone tomorrow after my post is read by a lot of /.rs.

Re:No problem

[NotBornYesterday]

IANAL, so I can't say how fair use factors into the DMCA. Plus, the concept of fair use is under constant attack here in the US by the same people who are lacing content with DRM. I also don't think that the legitimacy of fair use would stop them from trying to intimidate me into not removing their DRM.

All of that is beside the point for most people, however. Average mom & pop don't know how to remove DRM, or if doing so is legal. The result is that regardless of what is morally right and/or legally permissible, restricted content hurts consumers.

Re:No problem

[boristhespider]

Wow. The idea of being able to have images, a contents page and an index appeals to many people -- probably including those who'll desperately find any objection they can to back up their objections, which are generally founded on the idea that they should be objecting.

ePub is pretty much a zipped XHTML file. So it's ultimately in tagged ASCII, except the file is much smaller, because it's zipped. It also supports images, which ASCII singularly fails to do, and allows one to have both contents and index pages.

ASCII, on the other hand, lacks all of this *and* gives you larger files.

Refuse all you like -- that's your prerogative, even if it is based on an absurd stance.

Re:No problem

[rainmaestro]

You do know that pretty much every ebook reader ever sold supports plain .txt/rtf formats, right?

OTOH, ASCII has limitations. For example, no formatting, no images, no MathML. ASCII is fine if all you care about is the latest Dirk Pitt novel, but it is woefully inadequate for everything else.

Re:No problem

[genghisjahn]

Good points all, but Amazon did send an email apologizing for the Animal Farm hubub AND offered a return of the book OR a $30 Amazon credit. And promised not to do it again.

Here is the email they sent in full -

Hello,

On July 23, 2009, Jeff Bezos, our Founder and CEO, made the following apology to our customers:

“This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com”

As you were one of the customers impacted by the removal of "Works of George Orwell" from your Kindle device in July of this year, we would like to offer you the option to have us re-deliver this book to your Kindle along with any annotations you made. You will not be charged for the book. If you do not wish to have us re-deliver the book to your Kindle, you can instead choose to receive an Amazon.com electronic gift certificate or check for $30. Please email Kindle customer support at kindle-response@amazon.com to indicate your preference. If you prefer to receive a check, please also provide your mailing address. We look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely, The Kindle Team Please note: this e-mail was sent from a notification-only address that cannot accept incoming e-mail. Please do not reply to this message.

Re:No problem

[Bigjeff5]

I know you can get the public domain Google Books for free via the Sony store, I have no idea why they wouldn't offer them through themselves in the same way, unless it is because of a stupid deal with Sony.

In any case, since Sony is doing ePub now, you don't need a Sony reader to buy (or download for free) ebooks from their store.

There are also writers like Doctorow and Lessig that publish under the GPL and host their books in many formats on their websites. I wish someone would set up a list of these writers with links.

Check out Mobile Read, they have regular uploads of free e-books (non-public domain, about 500 in there now, as I recall) as well as a great community of e-book enthusiasts.

Re:No problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Alright, so continue using your DRM-encumbered ePub files on the dozens of ebook readers out there that use Adobe's ADEPT DRM.

Re:No problem

[Bigjeff5]

Most new ebook readers support DRM ePub files, and the ePub DRM itself supports moving files from one device to another. Also, the ebook readers that don't support DRM made by companies worth their salt are being updated for free to support it, Sony I know for a fact is doing this, and I imagine others will follow suit when eventually the only ebooks being sold will be ePub DRM.

In other words, this new, budding little industry is solving the problem on its own.

I don't think there is anything wrong with concept behind the law per-say, but I do have a problem with the law making formerly legitimate activities illegal for no good reason. In that, I agree there is something wrong with the law as it stands today. The original problem is a legitimate problem for publishers of books and other media, and should be adressed somehow.

Re:No problem

[Brandee07]

All the readers except the Kindle allow you to access the reader as a mass storage device and move the files off it.

Um... the Kindle can be used as a mass storage device. You know, with the USB cable that they ship it with.

Re:No problem

[WalkingBear]

"There is no source that I know of for new, legal novels without DRM."

Wrong. Baen publishing has been selling their entire catalog for almost 10 years with NO DRM. RTF, HTML, Mobi, epub, sony, and rocket formats. Direct support from their store for e-mailing to your kindle and relatively simple support for the iphone/ipod touch.

They're also selling several other publisher's books through their store now too. Including a direct competitor, Tor.

Scott

Re:No problem

[Brandee07]

They're ePub with a nice layer of device-keyed DRM on top. Can you buy books from the Sony store and read it on a Nook? Can you buy books from they B&N store and read it on a Sony? They're both ePub (I think), but I doubt they will be compatible.

Re:No problem

[Anonymous Coward]

How can something which doesn't exist be under 'constant attack'? There is not, and has never been, any concept of 'fair use' in US copyright law. All fair use is is a DEFENSE which you may present when you have been sued for copyright infringement. It is up to the jury to decide if it is a valid reason. Copyright holders are under no obligation (and never have been) to allow fair use.

Re:No problem

[CottonThePirate]

Just to correct you on one point, the kindle 2 and DS read PDF natively. Only the Kindle 1 needs you to send it thru Amazon. Books are transferable to up to 5 kindles on one account, not to a stranger. Although most of the ebooks that claim this as a feature have it crippled. (For example the Nook lets you lend a book only one time for 14 days). Your other points are all valid; however, I like my families kindles and they treat us well. YMMV

Re:No problem

[cmiller173]

Go to books.google.com and browse any genre. On the left select "Public domain only". Not all of the books are in ePub only, some can be in pdf.

However I like manybooks.net. Most every book the have (25,439) is available in 20+ formats including the original Sony(.lrf) format, ePub(.epub), Kindle(.azw), mobipocket(.prc and .mobi), palm DOC(.pdb) heck even Newton(.pkg) format is supported.

Re:No problem

[NotBornYesterday]

You are either ignorant or lying. At least learn to Google something before being an ass.

One of the rights accorded to the owner of copyright is the right to reproduce or to authorize others to reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords. This right is subject to certain limitations found in sections 107 through 118 of the copyright law (title 17, U. S. Code). One of the more important limitations is the doctrine of “fair use.” The doctrine of fair use has developed through a substantial number of court decisions over the years and has been codified in section 107 of the copyright law.

Citation

Re:No problem

[flahwho]

ok, but think of the useless electronics gadgets you may have purchased over the years. If you havent thrown them, chances are they're paperweights also, but you still might have gotten a fair amount of use from them. Don't deem a tech product unworthy because of progress of technology. Those companies are counting on you to spend that 300 bucks not so they can impose their Barnyard King DRM tactics, they just put out a useful device hoping that consumers will buy it and they will have budgets to improve it. Were also seeing some crazy things happen with DRM over the last few years : A lot of companies are letting go of DRM and letting you move your files from device to device, while others are slow to change or have added newer methods of DRM. The fact of the matter is that DRM and price shouldn't be the De-facto deal breakers, It should be if that device suits your needs or not. If you own the hardcopy book, and you want it on your device right now you will have to pay. Is that such a bad thing? I really dont think so. Now, if you told me I couldnt move my purchased MP3 collections on my PC to my MP3 player, I'd Have a problem, because the files are unchanged, But if I were to demand that my Disney VHS collection be available to transfer free of charge to another format such as DVD or Xvid, I'd be nuts, because the technology used to play the DVD/Xvid movie is way better than VHS. The E-book devices give a similar scenario - a hardcover book and a e-book file are not of the same format. the content may be similar to the end user, but the technology used to produce and display the content are completely different. Same scenario with Vinyl & Casettes to CD - Most everyone re-bought the albums they had on vinyl and didn't complain because it was a much better format.

Re:No problem

[Bigjeff5]

You're never going to get non-public domain non-drm books except from a few select authors. I wish it weren't true, because I would prefer non-drm as well, but using that as a requirement for an ebook reader is unrealistic. All ebook readers support non-drm formats, and virtually every ebook reader out there supports more non-drm formats than the Kindle does.

Also, unlike the Kindle's DRM which is Kindle exclusive, the ePub DRM that B&N, Sony, Google Books, and a half dozen other ebook retailers are using is portable from device to device. It is only designed to prevent multiple copies, and even provides functionality for time-limited lending - which makes your ebook unavailable to you after you transfer it to someone else for a set period of time. Once the time limit is up, yours is made available again and theirs is disabled. It is about the only sane way to apply DRM, and they seem to have done a very good job of it.

The lending feature allows libraries to get into the e-book game, opening up the millions of library-donated books out there for lending. They can only lend out copy for copy, just like paper books, so Publishers don't get screwed and neither do consumers.

Like I said, everything is going ePub because it is the most sane format. All of the most popular readers support ePub except for the Kindle, and pretty much all new ebook readers support ePub. In other words, everything is becoming more and more open and available and transferable.

And this isn't to say I'm a Kindle partisan. If I were in the market now I'd be looking at the other options too. I'm just saying that its disingenuous to say you HAVE to use DRM-locked files on the Kindle -- this misinformation has been spread endlessly around the internet.

I don't think anybody ever said you HAVE to use DRM on the Kindle, it's just Amazon doesn't make it easy to use anything else.

The Kindle only supports text and mobi as non-drm formats. While you can get .mobi from a few places (the number is shrinking, btw), most ebook sellers/givers don't offer it in .mobi format. I'll just say right now that plain text is a horrible format for reading a book, especially if it was formatted poorly. For anything that is non-drm and not .txt or .mobi (like .doc, .html, .pdf - though I think the larger kindle can do .pdfs) must be sent to Amazon for conversion and sent back. It's stupid, and slow.

The only one you'll be locked in with any more is the Kindle, which is why I always recommend against it despite some of its really cool features - wireless G in particular. However, a number of e-book readers do Wi-Fi, which is nearly as convenient (though not quite), and a few new readers are doing the wireless G also. Pretty soon Kindle will be the worst choice in almost every way - unless you really, really like buying your books from the Amazon store, and hate checking out library books.

Amazon did the ebook world a great service by shoving ebooks into the limelight, but now they need to shape up and join everybody else to make ebooks more usefull and less divided instead of being the ebook-isolationists that they are now.

Re:No problem

[flahwho]

IMHO I think amazon will ultimately get rid of DRM on movies and books. It happened with amazon MP3's. Maybe, maybe not, but I can only think that companies continually implementing new DRM schemas are flogging a dead horse. It doesn't deter anything.

Re:No problem

[James McP]

Most e-book sites excluding amazon have DRM-free books (see Fictionwise.com, ebooks.com, etc) but the presence of DRM is up to the publishers.

So use a publisher who doesn't have DRM or device lock-in, like Baen, Del Ray, Night Shade, SRM, Subterranean, and Tor (all at webscription.net). Their e-books are available in rtf, html, pub, etc. I'll point out that they also tend to discount vs. hardcopy as well as offering advanced reader (pre-release) copies for addicts.

Plus there are different kinds of DRM. I detest the Adobe and Mobireader approach that requires a remote server. External authentication or device-specific encryption == devil. You can't trust that you'll be able to get to your book when you want it.

The alternative is password protected encrypted files. The eReader format sets a password on your books based on your name and credit card number. As long as you have the info and the device supports the format you can read it on anything you want. The "safety factor" to the publisher is that if you post the book on a warez site they know who did it, since you also have to post the password (name+cc). Plus, you know, your credit information gets out on the net, which is almost punishment enough by itself.

If you're interested in an ebook reader check this wiki page on ebook formats that shows what hardware will read what format.

Based on that little tidbit, the Nook, and therefore Barnes & Nobles' ebook store, has the advantage that all their formats are either unencrypted or devoid of remote authentication. Maybe not ideal but at least you aren't trapped to a particular device or dependant on a remote server.

Re:No problem

[Rary]

why the hell would I pay $300 for a device just so I have the right to pay $10 for each book I want to read?

I don't know, maybe for the same reason you'd pay $50 for a DVD player just so you have the right to pay $20 for each movie you want to watch, or $250 for an iPod just so you have the right to pay $10 for each album you want to listen to, or $500 for a TV just so you have the right to pay $100/month for cable, or (etc).

I agree that the current implementations of eBook readers suck, particularly thanks to things like lock-in and DRM (absolute deal-breakers for me). But the "why pay for a device only to end up paying for the content" argument, which always comes up with this topic, is bunk.

Re:No problem

[Bigjeff5]

I don't disagree that the Kindle is a great piece of hardware, frankly I was jealous when I saw my first Kindle 2 in person. However, in the long run the lock-in is a serious deal breaker for me, and I think it trumps all of the Kindle's great features.

I was actually worried about this with Sony as well until recently, as they were all .lrf format (though all but the oldest e-readers could do ePub, mine just happens to be the oldest). But they have switched completely to ePub, and I will be sending my reader in to have it upgraded to use ePub on Sony's dime. That right there sold me on Sony, and combined with the fact that you don't need to buy all your ebooks from Sony alone means, for the time being, I'm definitely a Sony guy.

Sony is partnered with Adobe, and Adobe's DRM is designed to be moved around - you can move an ebook to up to 6 devices initially, and it's just a call to customer support to move it to more. I don't think Sony allows lending yet, but ePub supports it and I'd expect to see it in the not too distant future - especially since the B&N Nook is already doing it (I say already, but no Nooks have actually been delivered yet).

Re:No problem

[JohnBailey]

"This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

Translation.. Sorry I shot your dog and ran over it five times in front of your kids. Here's the money for a new dog. Next time' I'll wait for the kids to be at school before I shoot it and run over it again.

Re:No problem

[genghisjahn]

My reply is your sig...

Re:No problem

[fafaforza]

> A device with an unprotected screen that I don't expect to last a year?

I've had my Sony PRS-505 for about a year and always carry it in the back pocket of my jeans, and the screen is as pristine as it was when I first bought it. Obviously you should take care not to sit on it, but you couldn't fault anyone but yourself if you did do that.

> A device that, should Amazon or Sony decide to get out of the market, will become a paperweight that I can't read my purchased content on anymore

The entire Sony conglomerate can be dead and buried and I'll still be able to read the books I bought, and upload new files to it. Sony has no way of "disabling" my books or the device itself, unless they shut their store down and I have no backups of my own. But keeping backups of books that are ~1MB in size isn't all that taxing.

Re:No problem

[mdwh2]

Download the books you've already bought? Apparently there are plenty of books out there on p2p.

Of course it's illegal, but then so is ripping a CD you bought to your mp3 player (here in the UK), and that doesn't mean no one buys mp3 players. That's a problem with the laws, not the product.

Re:No problem

[AmiMoJo]

A device with an unprotected screen that I don't expect to last a year?

Of far more concern to me is the high probability of the screen becoming obsolete in a very short space of time.

The current screen is okay for novels but useless for textbooks or any other document that needs the ability to flick/scroll around (e.g. datasheets, almost any A4 PDF file). Improvements in screen refresh rate are being made constantly, and eventually eInk will get there. Maybe I'm being hopelessly optimistic but it would be nice if that was in the next few years, because I really want a device like that.

Re:No problem

[nurb432]

Even the old implimentations (which have had their problems) were overall far supperior to paper books - the fact that I cary about 150 books in my bag now is proof positive of that, as is the fact that I now have access to millions of public domain books on a device that reads as well as having the paper versions.

I agree, but up to a point. Try reading things are are 'image' driven, like art books, many manuals and you will see the epaper format isnt quite there yet. For raw text, its great.

And what is this 'single font' non sence in the story, my kindle displays more then one font..

Re:No problem

[WuphonsReach]

The current crop of ebook readers are excellent for cover-to-cover reading (fiction, novels, etc.).

They're not so good at random-access type reading with lots of page-flipping or fast navigation. Some of that is lack of a good keyboard (although newer readers have such) to do searching, but the rest of it is the pause due to the e-ink technology.

I've had a Sony PRS-505 for 2 years. For leisure reading, it's hands-down excellent. The unit is lightweight and easy to hold. I've done more reading in the past 2 years then in the previous 5-6 years because the reader gives me uniform fonts, uniform text sizes (which I can enlarge if needed) and basically gets the hell out of my way so I can focus on the text.

I jumped in once they dropped below $300. Now you can get basic readers for under $200 (the Sony PRS-300 series). Loaded it up with dozens of free books from Project Gutenberg and a few dozen purchased zero-DRM novels from Baen.

Re:No problem

[JesseMcDonald]

There is no source that I know of for new, legal novels without DRM.

Here's one: WebScription.Net. They specialize in sci-fi and fantasy novels, all available in several DRM-free e-book formats, including MOBI, EPUB, and plain HTML.

Not affiliated, just a happy customer.

Re:No problem

[ThousandStars]

DRM and Price is really a deal breaker, and the idea of rebuying books I already own so I can read them on my ebook reader is a little obnoxious. I love the Idea just hate the execution thus far, but I'm still hopeful for the tech to catch on.

I read a lot -- I'm a grad student in English, and see the /. link to my homepage for my book blog -- so I've paid a lot of attention to eBooks. For me, the DRM is still the big problem, as described in greater detail here. Like you, I find the idea of carrying around every book I've ever read appealing, along with one-click OED lookups. But the DRM is appalling.

That being said, I might try the Nook chiefly for its .pdf ability -- I have to read so many .pdfs that buying one might make sense just for the convenience of not having to print or be tethered to my computer.

Re:No problem

[Bigjeff5]

Baen books are one-offs, generally the first book in a series is free (for the authors who do participate), and the rest you have to buy in print. There are a few exceptions, but I don't think any of the authors who participate in Baen's program offer a large selection of their works for free.

There are, however, some fantastic essays about why authors should be releasing their books for free, especially after the first 6 months after release, which is when books make all their money. It's a great site.

Re:No problem

[Alinabi]

Yes, it has an electrophoretic (e-ink) display, so it only takes power to redraw

Re:No problem

[boristhespider]

This may or may not be true in general, I've no idea, but Baen *have* been re-issuing Poul Anderson's Technic series. Four books, possibly five (depending if they do one or two Flandry books, I can't remember). They've also got the complete Time Patrol, and a couple of other books by him.

Naturally, being dead he's not in a position to explain, but his estate would certainly be able to.

Re:No problem

[Anonymous Coward]

One problem with that is the amazingly shoddy quality of books available on torrents. I've actually concluded that a lot of them are put up by the publishers themselves -- they're incredibly corrupt but there's enough left there to make you want to actually read the proper story. It's not even just bits missing or garbled text -- it's lost formatting, added formatting, strings of paragraphs run together with arbitrary new paragraph breaks thrown in the middle, misspellings, apparent spell-checker mistakes, the whole gamut.

Since I type fairly quickly what I tend to do is actually read through dodgy eBooks like that on my computer and edit them into sanity. I might not read them again for a few years but when I do I've at least got a non-corrupt, readable eBook in case I've not found one for a sane cost in the meantime. I don't mind paying for eBooks -- even for books I currently own. I DO mind paying £10 or £12 for a DRM-filled electronic copy of a book I already own in paperback, same as I'd resent paying for an MP3 copy of an album I own on CD. (And same as I resented buying albums on CD that I'd bought on tape or vinyl, although at least there the sound quality went up.)

Re:No problem

[ajlisows]

While the $300 price tag has kept me from purchasing one myself, I'd like to present the cost in a different way.

I don't know how large your collection of books is, but when my wife and I first moved in together and merged our book collections we had some serious issues with space. Obviously we've added more books since then and they have sprawled out to almost every room in the apartment, our storage locker in the basement, and decent collections left behind at our parent's houses for lack of a place to put them.

Overall between our various bookshelves, more "Decorative" shelves that hang on the wall with fancy bookends to keep them up, plastic tubs to keep older books safe in storage, and a nice bookmark or two we have to have spent (or received as gifts) pretty close to $300 for the right to now have books laying all over the floor. At this point when I buy new books, old books either have to be taken down to storage, sold, or thrown away. Probably due to some psychological problem of mine I have a hard time parting with even the worst books in my collection. I've actually started purchasing some thicker books in Ebook format to read on my computer to save on space.

The big difference at this point for me is the fact that right this moment I can glance over at my copy of 1984 and know that the lady at the flea market booth that sold it to me isn't going to show up tomorrow while I am at work and take it away. With the DRM/Lock in on most of the Ebooks I can't say the same about a digital collection.

DRM for books bothers me more than it does for games and music. I can't see book piracy becoming as rampant, if only because you CAN get almost any book for free just by going to the library. Not to mention it is hard to feel ripped off buying a book. I usually get hard cover books new for $10-$15 (I just ordered Anathem for $9.99 plus $5 shipping) and get plenty of hours out of them. If the book isn't horrible it is way more bang for my entertainment dollar than anything else I can purchase.

Re:No problem

[myrdos2]

It would be nice if there were some way to convert my paper books into e-book format. Say, feed them into an incinerator that scans their titles before they burn. As it is, I have a huge collection of books I'd like to convert to a single, portable device, but there's no way I'm buying the same book twice in order to do it.

Re:No problem

[bws111]

Very good, you managed to find a citation. Now see if you can actually read and understand it. Notice how it says 'factors to be considered'. Who would be doing the considering? Why, it would be a JUDGE and JURY. Notice the 'distinction between fair use and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined'. Hmm, I wonder who would make that distinction? Damn, it's that same JUDGE and JURY. Notice there is not one word in there saying the copyright holder is REQUIRED to allow fair use, only a list of things that 'may' be considered fair use. I wonder at what point such a determination would be made? Perhaps it is when somebody is accused of infringement and is DEFENDING their use. Notice how it says 'there is no specific number or words, lines, or notes that may be copied without permission'. So who sets the limit? Is it the copyright holder? Nope. How about the copier? Again, nope. It is the JUDGE and JURY deciding an individual case.

Fair use is a defense, nothing else. Just because it has been codified does not change that.

So maybe you are the one who should actually try to understand something instead of simply Googling it before calling someone else an ass.

Re:No problem

[Fizzol]

"The lack of ePub could be a frustration if a good DRM-free ePub store appears"

So far all the non-DRM ePubs that I've tried have converted over to mobi format flawlessly using Mobipocket reader, Calibre is supposed to do as well.

Re:No problem

[Bigjeff5]

Like I said, there are a few exceptions.

Re:No problem

[Bigjeff5]

Ripping CDs for personal use is legal in the US. In fact, it's legal to do the same for DVDs and Blue Ray too. Unfortunately, some monkeys in congress pushed through a bill dreamt up by the media industries that makes it illegal to attempt to circumvent copy protection schemes, even if it is legal for you to copy the media.

It's like saying breaking into a car is illegal, even if it's your own car. Stupid.

Most CDs have no copy protection, so ripping to mp3s (again for personal use) is legal. That's not the case for DVDs and BDs though, thanks to that idiotic law.

Re:No problem

[cpt kangarooski]

You can easily move them from one device to another - the DRM simply attempts to ensure that you do not copy it to more than one device at a time (note that this also makes lending possible). ...

except for library books (which are possible thanks to ePub's DRM, btw)

Lending books, whether done by individuals or by lending libraries is entirely possible without DRM. Indeed, it is probably easier, since you don't have to waste time and effort implementing a ridiculous DRM system, nor is it necessary for both parties to have devices and books that support it, nor are you saddled with inane requirements imposed by third parties which are apt to cripple the usefulness of the loan (particularly since it is not in the interests of book publishers to permit lending at all).

Re:No problem

[cpt kangarooski]

I don't know where you are, but this is not true in the US at least.

Re:No problem

[cpt kangarooski]

It is impossible for a copyright holder to permit fair use. A use can only be a fair use when it would otherwise be copyright infringement, and actions taken with the permission of the copyright holder are never infringing.

This having been said, the only legitimate concern when crafting copyright law is the public interest, and it is never in the public interest to tolerate authors throwing obstacles into the path of people wishing to engage in fair uses. All DRM schemes fail in this respect for exactly the reasons you note -- DRM schemes fail to allow those otherwise infringing actions which, if fully adjudicated, would be determined to be fair uses. DRM schemes also tend to prohibit actions which are not even infringing at all, which is also against the public interest.

When authors, publishers, and copyright holders engage in such behavior it is completely appropriate to speak out against it, and rewrite the laws to prohibit it, or discourage it, as appropriate.

For example, I would like to see copyright law modified such that if a copyright holder or a person acting under his authority applies DRM to a published work, that work is immediately placed in the public domain. Copyright holders would have a choice to either trust in the legal protection of copyright, or the technical protection of DRM, but not both. This is similar to how we currently handle inventions; an invention can be patented, which requires disclosure, or can be a trade secret, but not both. DRM would be legal, which I think is a consequence of the First Amendment, but people using it would not receive the encouragement of copyright, which they are not entitled to automatically anyway.

Of course, it would be in the public interest to crack the DRM on the public domain works, so the US Copyright Office could work in conjunction with private parties to break the DRM schemes and distribute copies of the works to everyone for free.

Re:No problem

[cpt kangarooski]

DRM also allows Libraries to lend e-books, soemthing they could not legally do without it.

It seems easier and better to me to simply change the law to permit them to do so without DRM, then.

(from your later post:)
It's a stupid argument because [publishing ebooks without DRM] will never happen (except on a select, book by book basis), and if we have a ubiquitous technology for managing legal copies, like ePub is fast becoming, it will only be a problem for people who wish to copy the material illegaly.

The music industry said they would never publish music without DRM, and now they do. Didn't even take very long for them to see the error of their ways.

But you're almost right. Eliminating DRM will never happen so long as quislings like yourself have that sort of self-harming defeatist attitude.

Further, DRM is a problem for people who wish to use DRM-encumbered works in any way that the copyright holder doesn't like, regardless of legality. It is legal to sell used books, but if the copyright holder decides that he doesn't like that, since he doesn't make money from it, he can effectively stop the used book trade in ebooks by making them non-functional.

This is intolerable.

I'm sitting on my couch, across from a massive bookcase occupying an entire wall up to the 12' high ceiling, which is full of books. And it isn't even the only bookcase I've got. I love reading, I love books, I frequently buy books, and check out books from the library, and borrow them from friends.

And I will never get one of these idiotic ebook readers, or buy an ebook until I can do so without having to suffer through yet another inane DRM system. This is not to say that I am against the concept of ebooks. I'm seriously considering getting a slate-format laptop and using it as a reader that I have significantly more control over (and which would have a bigger, better screen; there are too many books that a crude device like a Kindle can't even begin to display properly). I'll supply the books myself, whether via a homebuilt camera-based scanner that doesn't damage books, or other means.

Re:No problem

[Xrikcus]

Not only that, but I just downloaded a Dickens book from google in ePub format. I loaded it into Stanza (made by Lexcycle, owned by Amazon) and exported it as mobipocket format. I then copied it onto my Kindle. It's perfectly readable. Converting between these formats without DRM isn't particularly difficult. Given that the DRM on all of the ebooks seems to be trivial to break, based on comments elsewhere on this thread and what I've seen online about Amazon's DRM, conversion from one ebook to another doesn't seem to be a problem. I was talking to a friend earlier about precisely what you're saying, that the music stores learned the DRM lesson and are changing, the e-book stores will too with time.

Re:No problem

[vuffi_raa]

I am using an ez reader pocket pro by astak- no drm on the machine, can handle drm books though if needed (has adobe rights management) and was $199- also it is cool because it handles chm and rtf files which is great for documentation

Re:No problem

[ToasterMonkey]

it is never in the public interest to tolerate authors throwing obstacles into the path of people wishing to engage in fair uses. All DRM schemes fail in this respect for exactly the reasons you note -- DRM schemes fail to allow those otherwise infringing actions which, if fully adjudicated, would be determined to be fair uses

What sense does it make to bar copyright holders from preventing infringement so that infringements can later be tried in court? How does that help the artists, economy, or anything other than technophiles who feel entitled to everything? You just made the DMCA make complete sense to me. The valid reasons people might have for infringing on copyrights needs to be much more concrete, and need to be weighed against the need to provide incentives to you know.. people that actually produce copyrighted work. I personally think the economy might benefit from digital works that are more flexible by mandate because it would encourage more innovative third party products - I'm not saying it should be this way.

All the arguments against things like the DMCA, that I've heard, are from the consumer's point of view entirely, not being able to do this or do that. Wah, producers won, they are allowed to actively prevent infringement (why on Earth shouldn't they?), and third parties still work out licensing deals with the producers, continuing a long tradition of letting the market work..

When you say 'public' that includes both consumers AND producers AND everything in between. It's in the public's interest to keep generating quality work, and keep spending money on it. If the economy is healthy, what some fraction of consumers cry about doesn't matter. The producers ALWAYS matter; they make shit. That is unless you want to toss the idea of intellectual property out the window. Yay. Free crap. With regulation. It will be like (Linux * the World). Gag me.

Re:No problem

[cpt kangarooski]

it is never in the public interest to tolerate authors throwing obstacles into the path of people wishing to engage in fair uses. All DRM schemes fail in this respect for exactly the reasons you note -- DRM schemes fail to allow those otherwise infringing actions which, if fully adjudicated, would be determined to be fair uses

What sense does it make to bar copyright holders from preventing infringement so that infringements can later be tried in court?

If that were all that they were doing, we could discuss the (lack of) merits of self-help in our society. But the very part of my post that you quoted and emboldened points out that the copyright holders are preventing uses that, if a court ruled on them, would be found to not have been infringements at all. It makes a great deal of sense to promote uses of copyrighted works against the wishes of the author where it is good for society, and to make those uses lawful. And they have done this, in fact; that's what fair use is, just to name one example.

If there were a DRM scheme that perfectly judged every use as if it had run the gauntlet of the courts, and allowed or disallowed them depending on whether they were lawful or not, DRM would not be nearly so objectionable. However, no DRM scheme does that -- instead they are inevitably over-inclusive -- and no DRM scheme ever possibly could, so it is pointless to try to improve them. Better to abandon the entire thing as having been a bad idea in the first place, badly implemented.

All the arguments against things like the DMCA, that I've heard, are from the consumer's point of view entirely, not being able to do this or do that.

Consumers, as you call them, are more important in copyright policy than authors or publishers (who are both also consumers, after all). It sounds to me like you've been hearing a lot of good arguments, and been ignoring them like some sort of moron.

they are allowed to actively prevent infringement (why on Earth shouldn't they?)

Because they're very, very bad at it. First, they prevent things that aren't infringement, and second, in practice, they don't prevent actual infringement, because the pirates are inevitably more clever, more motivated, have more time on their hands, etc.

The movie studios could just murder everyone in their beds, and this would also prevent a lot of infringement. But I'd be opposed to that too. There are more important things than preventing infringement, even when looking at copyright policy.

When you say 'public' that includes both consumers AND producers AND everything in between. It's in the public's interest to keep generating quality work, and keep spending money on it.

That is only half of the public interest, and the slightly less important half actually. Also, quality is not a factor -- the copyright system is only interested in quantity, and in any case, no one wants the government making artistic decisions about what is a quality work and what isn't.

The slightly more important half of the public interest is in providing the minimum amount of copyright, for the least amount of time, necessary in order to incentivize the creation of works. This is simple prudence: getting the most works created for the least cost to the public in terms of rights granted. The works should enter the public domain as rapidly as possible, and be as near to the public domain as possible before then, so that the works are more valuable to the public (for example, a movie I can't resell is not very valuable to me, while a movie I can copy and give away however I please is more valuable to me; a movie I can't make my own sequel to is not very valuable to me, while a movie I can use as the basis for a derivative work is valuable to me; etc.).

Re:No problem

[NotBornYesterday]

The fundamental lie I was refuting was this:

There is not, and has never been, any concept of 'fair use' in US copyright law.

Citation proves otherwise. End of story.

I have already admitted that I am not a legal expert. I am not about to go earn a law degree in order to debate on Slashdot, and I am not trying to argue what entails fair use, or how it is implemented. I am simply attacking the erroneous claim that fair use does not exist in law. Misinformation like that is just what overzealous copyright and IP proponents would like the public to think, and it fits well with their long-established pattern of revising history to suit their own interests.

Re:No problem

[bws111]

Look, you are the one who said fair use is under constant attack. If you don't even know what it is, how can you say it is under attack? Name ONE instance of fair use being under attack. The AC is entirely correct - it is not under attack, because there is nothing to attack. By linking to an article discussing backups, you try to insinuate that at some point it was considered fair use to make backups, and now it is not. The fact is, there has never been anything in copyright law that says 'it is OK to make backups'. There has never been anything in copyright law that says 'it is OK to make a copy on a different medium for your own use'. All there has ever been is a rule that says the copyright owner is the only one allowed to make copies or allow others to do so, and that there are a few exemptions to this rule which as decided on a case by case basis. It is pretty funny that you claim the IP proponents are overzealous. It seems to me that the overzealous ones are the ones making claims such as 'fair use is under attack', and that somehow copyright holders have used laws, etc to swing things in their favor. Except for length of copyright, name ONE change to copyright law that gives anything new to copyright holders, or takes away a right consumers already had. And please, don't say the DMCA. All that did was say it is OK for copyright holders to enforce their existing rights through technological means.

Re:No problem

[Greg_D]

Interesting. I bought a Kindle because my bookshelf is struggling to keep up with the technical books I purchase for work and the books I read for leisure. The vast majority of the books on the Kindle are mobipocket format, from sources like Project Gutenberg. Technical books are a struggle to use on a device like a Kindle, but novels are just fine and dandy. And since I usually read several books at the same time, depending on whether I'm in the mood to read about science or philosophy or fiction or non-fiction, the Kindle makes it easy to jump from one to the other without having to lug 4-5 books around.
I'm also more likely to purchase a book through Amazon's Kindle service than I would if it were in paper format.

Only real complaint I have is the size of the screen. But the DX solves, that problem, I guess.

Re:No problem

[WalkingBear]

Nowhere did I say the books were free in my post. Baen *sells* their complete catalog through their webscriptions site in the formats I listed above.

True, the Baen free library has the first one or two books in a longer series for free, but they also sell the rest of that series DRM free.

Take a look at the link called "books with CDs" on the webscriptions site. Those CDs are bundled with the dead tree versions of the books, but are also available as ISO images if you purchase the electronic version instead.

On those CDs are, in most cases, the complete body of work published by Baen for that author. Again, not a hint of DRM anywhere.

Re:No problem

[WalkingBear]

The webscriptions site also has what appears to be Harlan Ellison's complete back catalog.

I'd love to see every book published this way, and my grandkids may actually see that.

There are people doing it in an open and profitable way.

Re:No problem

[NotBornYesterday]

“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” - attributed to Mark Twain

Short version: You are wrong, and I disagree with you.

Long version:

Look, you are the one who said fair use is under constant attack. If you don't even know what it is, how can you say it is under attack?

My initial post refuted an obvious factual error by the previous poster, namely that fair use did not exist in copyright law.

The AC is entirely correct - it is not under attack, because there is nothing to attack.

It's amazing that you can't admit that both you an he are wrong. See above. Fair use is part of copyright law, both in case law and statutory law. I don't know how much plainer it can be said.

Your reply of "If you don't know what it is, how can you say it's under attack" is poor logic. The lack of clarity is due to how the law is written, and it is written that way because much of fair use is an ephemeral concept. Although there are gray areas, there are also clearly established areas where fair use is allowed. If you want a more nuanced or precise interpretation, go put a lawyer on retainer and have him/her look up the matter. In the immortal words of Justice Potter Stewart, "I know it when I see it."

Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work

The distinction between fair use and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission.

So, to sum up:
a) Fair use is part of copyright law, and
b) it is generally described, but not always precisely defined, making it vulnerable to attack, as well as vulnerable to exploitation.

You go on to say:

Name ONE instance of fair use being under attack

If you are in need of specific instances, I would suggest looking into the large number of DMCA takedown notices the MPAA and RIAA issue without regard to legitimate fair use. For example, I recall reading (sorry, can't remember where) about a Youtube video of a child which was taken down because it contained a TV in the background, on which were shown a few seconds of some show. Or look here for a similarly ridiculous takedown.

However, rather than reinvent the wheel, I'll defer to legal experts. I hope that citing a law professor meets your expectations.

Recently, developments in the business, technology and legal fields have created situations where areas that used to be protected are now included in as part of an artist’s incentivized market. Through the technological advances in internet video and distribution, overstated legal threats and cost driven business decisions winning out over costly legal arguments, the uses that the Fair Use doctrine previously protected are being absorbed into potential markets or eliminated completely.

In other words, the balance between fair use and IP owners' rights has swung decidedly in favor of the IP owners. Groups like the RIAA are trying to restrict what used to be clearly fair use.

By linking to an article discussing backups, you try to insinuate that at some point it was considered fair use to make backups, and now i

Re:No problem

[NotBornYesterday]

If only I could give you points for that. Brilliant.

Re:No problem

[NotBornYesterday]

Name ONE instance of fair use being under attack.

Okay. Here you go. Personally, I think it's stupid to bring a videocamera into a movie theater, but on the other hand, it's obvious that what she did isn't worthy of felony charges.

It is pretty funny that you claim the IP proponents are overzealous. It seems to me that the overzealous ones are the ones making claims such as 'fair use is under attack'

Right. Because filming a birthday party is felony material, and arresting her and jailing her wasn't in the least overzealous. The police themselves say she got no more than 4 minutes of material. Any reasonable observer could see that her intent was not to pirate the movie, but then again, the people and organizations fighting fair use have no track record of being reasonable.

Re:No problem

[cpt kangarooski]

This is Slashdot, so I'll just butt in.

Name ONE instance of fair use being under attack. ... And please, don't say the DMCA. All that did was say it is OK for copyright holders to enforce their existing rights through technological means.

I'd say the DMCA.

After all, it goes far beyond merely permitting copyright holders to enforce their existing rights through technological means. First, it permits copyright holders to enforce rights they do not have through technological means. Since it is an exercise of free speech rights to make non-infringing uses of copyrighted material (e.g. through fair use), they are, in fact, trying to impair the rights of others every time they use a DRM system that is overly restrictive, which is to say, every time they use a DRM system, period.

Second, if copyright holders merely want to enforce their existing rights, they don't need technological means; courts work fine (and don't let the copyright holders go too far, as already pointed out). But even if the copyright holder does want to use technological means, he still doesn't need the DMCA. The DMCA is notable not because it permits the use of DRM -- which could already be used -- but because it grants a new right to prevent people from interfering with the technological means even when it does not infringe a copyright. Why do copyright holders need to protect something other than their copyright, when their copyright isn't even threatened?

The fact is, there has never been anything in copyright law that says 'it is OK to make backups'.

17 USC 117(a)(2). It doesn't apply to everything, but for what it does cover, it says it is OK to make backups.

Plus, of course, any use is potentially a fair use, depending on the circumstances involved, so some backups may be made pursuant to fair use. Libraries can make copies of copyrighted works without permission under some circumstances. And it is non-actionable to make copies of certain sound recordings, using approved media or devices, again, under the right circumstances, which could easily include making backups.

If you don't even know what copyright law is, how can you say what it doesn't include?

There has never been anything in copyright law that says 'it is OK to make a copy on a different medium for your own use'.

See above.

All there has ever been is a rule that says the copyright owner is the only one allowed to make copies or allow others to do so, and that there are a few exemptions to this rule which as decided on a case by case basis.

No.

The rule is that the copyright holder has the right to prohibit other people from making copies. Copyright doesn't grant the copyright holder the right to actually do anything; he inherently has that right, which is protected as free speech and press. In fact, we all have that right, but copyright temporarily and to a limited extent, interferes with it. That copyright is an exclusive right (i.e. a right to exclude others) is why an author who makes child pornography, for example, may have a perfectly valid copyright in it, and can sue if someone else copies it, but cannot make copies of it himself either.

There are then very many exceptions to that right, most of which apply automatically whenever the circumstances are right. For example, if a copy of a work is lawfully made under US copyright law, it can be resold by the owner without the permission of the copyright holder. This always applies; it isn't to be determined on a case by case basis. Fair use is unusual in that it is decided on a case by case basis, but absolutely any otherwise infringing use can potentially be a fair use, so what it lacks in certainty, it makes up in breadth; fair use is the last-resort catch-all exception to copyright.

Except for length of copyright, name ONE change to copyright law that gives anything new to copyright holders, or takes away a right consumers already had.

17 USC 104A. This takes works that are in the public domain in the United States and places them under copyright.

I could name some more changes, if you like, but it's a pretty significant one.

stupid

[Lord Ender]

Fonts the same? The Kindle can do multiple fonts. It can do bold and italic. It can even do illustrations. Why are we asking this guy's opinion if he obviously has never even used the device?

Re:stupid

[somersault]

The /. summary is very poorly worded. He means all the fonts are too similar to each other. If you RTFA, you'll see that he uses his Kindle regularly.

Re:stupid

[Lord Ender]

If you take time to read the stories on slashdot, by the time you post you will be so far down the page nobody will ever read, reply to, or moderate your comment. Reacting to the summary is all we can reasonably expect!

Re:stupid

[MrEkted]

He meant this:
“John Updike, who was so enamored of Janson and insisted that all his books be set in that font, would have been appalled to see all of his books set in Caelicia, the same font used in, say, Nora Roberts.”

He meant font, not weight, slope, and width (which is what you're talking about).

Re:stupid

[dancingmad]

You've been modded funny but I think this is really true; Slashdot's comment moderation system is one of the best on the Net, but the major down side is that comments posted after a while get buried. A lot of good comments just get buried in the mess. I wish there was some way to counter act that but nothing seems readily apparent to me.

Re:stupid

[jank1887]

I'm guessing he'd like to see more Comic Sans

Re:stupid

[Red Flayer]

I wish there was some way to counter act that but nothing seems readily apparent to me.

Well, it only helps if many people do it, but you can change the order in which comments are displayed. Sometimes I view chronologically without threads, sometimes chronologically with threads. Sometimes I'll pick another format for the hell of it.

I read at -1, raw and uncut.

Anyway, it's long been known that threadjacking is great for karma whores... most people who've been on slashdot for a while know that the best discussion is normally buried deep... When I'm really interested in a story I pretty much ignore the highly moderated comments (usually they have nothing to say I haven't read before a thousand times on slashdot) and the posts near the top.

Re:stupid

[Bigjeff5]

I don't know of an e-reader that can't do multiple fonts and illustrations and all that, it makes no difference. I don't see why it's a sticking point for you.

I foresee...

[srussia]

a revival of "Choose Your Own Adventure" books.

Re:I foresee...

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe they are called MMOs these days.

Re:I foresee...

[east coast]

Josh Baskin's dreams have finally manifested into a physical product!

Re:I foresee...

[gEvil (beta)]

a revival of "Choose Your Own Adventure" books.

It's already started to happen.

Re:I foresee...

[selven]

Welcome to the 1970s. It's called a text adventure.

Re:I foresee...

[steelfood]

I believe they're still around in the form of "visual novels" in Japan, and quite popular.

Re:I foresee...

[Brandee07]

Amazon beat you to the punch: Amazon search for "choose your own adventure"

Fonts

[dazedNconfuzed]

finds it annoying the way that all of the fonts are the same.

One thing that made "The Road" striking was indeed the unique font, which shared a touch of the same depressing tone as the terse text. Times New Roman et al would have degraded the reading experience.

When might we see eBook readers which allow inclusion of text-specific fonts?

Re:Fonts

[stagg]

What it NEEDS is screen fonts that are analogous to the original print font.

Re:Fonts

[DragonWriter]

When might we see eBook readers which allow inclusion of text-specific fonts?

We already see them: for instance, readers that support PDFs exist--including the Nook and the Kindle DX. The non-PDF eBook formats that are popular for use on readers, while they may support specifying fonts, generally don't (much like HTML) require it, and default to whatever default font is set on the device.

As the same document in these formats can be viewed on different types of readers (e-paper vs. small LCD vs. larger LCD computer monitor) and readability of different fonts varies on different device types, and to an extent by reader, that's actually a very sensible way to make widely-usable content.

Re:Fonts

[Anonymous Coward]

We already have them. Epub (which is the industry standard ebook format) allows you to include your own fonts and style the whole book or parts of it using those fonts via CSS.

Re:Fonts

[ChicoLance]

To me it wasn't so much the printed font, but the lack of all quotation marks which gave the physical text a stark feeling. I have both a printed copy of "The Road" and a Kindle copy, and that starkness came through in both.

My other two cents: The Kindle sucks for any reference type work. I don't like reading newspapers or reference non-fiction because jumping around is awful. This has potential of being solved soon, but now now. The K2 came with a free cookbook that's just painful to use.

However, if you have a straight-though type text which includes most fiction where formatting isn't an issue, then it's a wonderful device. Non-fiction that's mostly text and no graphs that you read through like a plain book is also not bad.

I like having several texts available to read from, and it's in my bag. I think many people have also gotten into reading classic fiction that's out of copyright and freely available. There are lots of good books out there, and I like having them all easily available to read.

    --Lance (Kindle 1 user for 2 years)

Re:Fonts

[Mprx]

Consistent fonts are a good thing. People argue over hinting and serifs and kerning and the like, but the single most important factor in font legibility is familiarity. Always use the same font and you'll read faster and more accurately. This is a big reason why I prefer to read on screen.

Re:Fonts

[Brandee07]

Some books from the Kindle store are in a format called Topaz (.tpz) which allows for embedded fonts- including foreign languages like Japanese.

There is also a hack out there that lets you install your own fonts and choose which font your books display in.

Re:Fonts

[JohnBailey]

One thing that made "The Road" striking was indeed the unique font, which shared a touch of the same depressing tone as the terse text. Times New Roman et al would have degraded the reading experience. When might we see eBook readers which allow inclusion of text-specific fonts?

Right now. The Cybook gen3. Any true type font you like.

Re:Fonts

[Bigjeff5]

Most ebooks support pdfs (though some better than others). It's one of those ubiquitous formats that a reader seller would be stupid to overlook.

Re:Fonts

[Bigjeff5]

I definitely agree for any sort of referance material - I tried to load some Cisco pdfs on my PRS-500 and it was completely unusable. Love it for books, hate it for manuals.

That's why I'm getting a Que from Plastic Logic when it comes out - as long as the price isn't too absurd.

Wait for interoperability

[Animats]

There are now four or five e-book readers, each with their own incompatible "ecosystem". Until that settles down, don't get one. Most of them are going to fail, and you'll lose your content. Just like the people who signed up for WalMart Music or Microsoft PlaysForSure.

Re:Wait for interoperability

[WillAdams]

Actually a fair number of ebook readers are standardized on .epub files --- Sony in particular was early to support this, and one can use .epub files from any store which supports Adobe Digital Editions DRM (if one wants DRM). Other readers include the Netronix, Hanlin, Bookeen and Jetbook.

One can even use ADE to read .epub files on a Tablet PC or laptop.

William

Re:Wait for interoperability

[Lord Ender]

Any of them will work with non-DRM books. For example, O'Reilly tech books can be purchased in non-DRM digital form. You would only have to worry about losing access to DRM books if you get them from a company that may go bankrupt or stop making ebook readers.

Personally, I never re-read books, and I consider the probability of Amazon going bankrupt to be very small, anyway. So I have no worries with buying digital books from them, and I love my ebook reader.

Re:Wait for interoperability

[$1uck]

I believe the nook is also able to read epub files. I also thought I read the nook was running android. Am I wrong to assume this means the device will be pretty "open"? I buy a lot of books from Amazon, the onlything that could sell me on a Kindle was if they *gave* me an electronic copy of every book I had previously purchased. If the nook is as open as I think it is, well I'll probably be buying books from B&N (and who ever else sells epub books).

Re:Wait for interoperability

[njen]

My thoughts exactly. But then what happens after it all settles down is the possible problem of a monopoly, and the potential abuse it may cause. Honestly I don't know what's worse: the incompatibility of the various systems but with a healthy competition to drive innovation, or the ease of use of a monopolistic system but with the threat of potential abuse technically, creatively and monetarily.

Re:Wait for interoperability

[DragonWriter]

There are now four or five e-book readers, each with their own incompatible "ecosystem". ntil that settles down, don't get one. Most of them are going to fail, and you'll lose your content.

Well, if you mean the linked bookstores, sure, that's a risk. Of course, all of them will read at least oneof the common formats (e.g., Mobi, ePub), and many ebook publishers sell multi-format e-Books on the web which you can download and use with any compatible device (even the ones that aren't dedicated readers.)

Re:Wait for interoperability

[gyrogeerloose]

I consider the probability of Amazon going bankrupt to be very small

Of course, go back a few years and you'd hear people saying the same thing about General Motors. Up until the Eighties, GM was considered a huge industrial powerhouse that couldn't possibly fail. Not so much any more. But if you never re-read your books, you definitely have a point--it really doesn't matter if Amazon or whoever goes under.

The thing that worries me is this: if all publishing goes electronic, with DRM, what happens to public libraries? There are a lot of new books that I'd like to read but don't care to buy; I go to my local library for those. I don't know how they could continue to exist beyond repositories of old books in a world of electronic publishing.

Re:Wait for interoperability

[Anonymous Coward]

The Kindle doesn't support any DRM format other than its own. Almost all of the other readers support the epub format with Adobe's DRM, which is also supported by many online ebook stores and public libraries. The Kindle is the odd man out, though unfortunately it's also the popular, well-marketed one.

Re:Wait for interoperability

[Lord Ender]

Libraries will become meeting places and cybercafes, rather than book storage. With a tweak in the law, we could force book publishers to provide digital copies to libraries. But as it stands, DRM will eventually kill libraries in the same way cell phones killed phone booths.

Re:Wait for interoperability

[Qzukk]

Am I wrong to assume this means the device will be pretty "open"?

Mostly, yes. Running on Android doesn't mean much unless they produce a SDK to allow people to write applications that can use both screens and the touch sensor, and possibly (but almost certainly not, though one can hope they'd allow use of wifi) the internet.

Re:Wait for interoperability

[$1uck]

Why couldn't I use the standard Android SDK?

Re:Wait for interoperability

[cmiller173]

I can already check out ePub electronic books from my library.

Re:Wait for interoperability

[radtea]

You would only have to worry about losing access to DRM books if you get them from a company that may go bankrupt or stop making ebook readers.

What?

DRM obsolescence of content sold by perfectly viable companies is a known problem. It has nothing to do with companies going out of business or ceasing to sell a particular device. It's all about the DRM technology and the chance for the company to get a sweeter licensing deal from someone else, and by-the-way force their customers to repurchase any content they still care about in the new DRM-crippled form.

If you buy DRM-crippled content there is a near certainty that you will lose it over a timescale of a few years. As someone who still has a few books he bought thirty years ago or more, that is not even remotely acceptable to me.

Re:Wait for interoperability

[Anonymous Coward]

There USED to be approx five different major ecosystems (Sony, Mobipocket, Kindle, PDF, ePUB) plus a smattering of smaller ones.

Adobe killed their proprietary ebook stuff a while ago and are now the leading manufacturer of the server side of the ePUB ecosystem.

Amazon bought Mobipocket a few years ago and the Kindle DRM is basically Mobipocket. Amazon licenses the Mobi DRM scheme to device manufacturers but refuses to license it for inclusion in any device that will also support ePUB.

Sony is killing their proprietary LRF format and moving to ePub. Sony even went so far as to do a software upgrade to their original PRS 500 reader, a device that hasn't been sold in several years; and they even picked up the tab of next day shipping in both directions.

So you've basically got 2 formats and DRM schemes - Mobi/Kindle and ePUB.

Re:Wait for interoperability

[Lord Ender]

For copyright-expired stuff, sure. But for books less than seventy years old, you can't get your hands on them without the publisher's consent. And they are, for the most part, not consenting on DRM-free books.

Re:Wait for interoperability

[Lord Ender]

A near certainty? Over a few years? When did all the iTunes songs stop working? I must have missed that in the news.

Re:Wait for interoperability

[Anonymous Coward]

For copyright-expired stuff, sure. But for books less than seventy years old, you can't get your hands on them without the publisher's consent. And they are, for the most part, not consenting on DRM-free books.

The ePub books from libraries are typically DRM'd. It's not forced right now, of course. There are new novels too; the latest Twilight and Dan Brown novels are available from my library

Re:Wait for interoperability

[Brandee07]

Libraries are repositories of knowledge. It doesn't matter if that knowledge is in the form of printed books, papyrus scrolls, or electronic text... or, in the case of the library I used to work at: CD, LP, or Cassette.

The need to store large amounts of data for public consumption is not going to go away, although the way that data is stored and accessed may change wildly.

Re:Wait for interoperability

[Brandee07]

iTunes won that battle. What you missed was when all the PlaysForSure songs stopped working.

Re:Wait for interoperability

[Lord Ender]

Hm... no, I'm actually aware of that, and it seems completely contradictory to the fact that it is a "near certainty" that DRM songs stop working in "a few years."

Re:Wait for interoperability

[lennier]

"Libraries are repositories of knowledge. It doesn't matter if that knowledge is in the form of printed books, papyrus scrolls, or electronic text."

Storing knowledge? That's spelled P-I-R-A-C-Y where I come from!

"Hello, public library? I'd like to borrow War and Peace and The Da Vinci Code, thanks."

"Certainly. We have all of Dan Brown's novels in Microsoft, Palm Digital Media and Kindle eBook format... and, oh, sorry, we'd be breaking the law to *lend* it to you - the licence says we can't transfer ownership or sublet or hire. And it would invalidate the DRM if it stopped communicating with the server. Sorry. Well, we can lend you this eBook reader worth $100 preloaded with the book... and of course the Kindle won't play Microsoft or Palm books and vice versa... and you'll need a separate reader for every book you want to borrow of course... or we could just sell you the rights for non time-expiring non-personal use to the book for the price of a hardcover... or we could give you a special cheap deal on a time-expiring DRM format... which of course will only play on your own eBook reader, not a Mac, not a PC, and you'll probably need to buy the latest Kindle... now War and Peace, that's a whole lot simpler, there's the out-of-copyright Gutenberg edition which we can give you in ASCII or HTML for any device you have... or the super eBook retranslated edition with copyright renewed for 80 years which only works on the Elephant Brand DataWedgie eBook Dominator and only if you're located within the Continental USA or Japan on alternate Thursdays..."

"You know, this all used to be so much simpler. Can't you just lend me a physical book?"

"Lend? I dunno... wouldn't that be data piracy? I'm sure the Firemen would have something to say about that. How about a nice fourth wall for your widescreen 3D HDTV? Then you wouldn't miss any commercials, and you know commercials are good for you..."

Re:Wait for interoperability

[shmlco]

"The need to store large amounts of data for public consumption is not going to go away..."

The need, no. The need for a bunch of local, physical buildings... probably. Previously, a quarter-million or so books cost a bundle and took up quite a bit of space. Today, a single 1TB drive can do the same thing. Copy it and you have two. Hook one up to the internet...

The Kindle illustrated the allure of buying a book and of having it delivered in seconds. No need to drive to a central storage location. Heck, with a lot of books in Project Gutenberg, you don't even need to buy them.

Libraries coped, somewhat, by providing CDs and DVDs, but downloadable music and video, and video-on-demand will take care of that too. Providing local internet connections? Go to McDonalds or Starbucks and have a cup of coffee at the same time. Gathering places? Isn't that why we have local community centers?

Personally, I think they need to come up with a new mission.

Re:Wait for interoperability

[dissy]

Personally, I never re-read books, and I consider the probability of Amazon going bankrupt to be very small, anyway. So I have no worries with buying digital books from them, and I love my ebook reader.

Well that is good news at least. Because even with Amazon not going out of business, you won't have very long to re-read that book you bought from them before they delete it off your device for you :P

Re:Wait for interoperability

[Bigjeff5]

I love how people make bold advice based on 2-year old information.

There are now about seven or eight manufacturers of ebook readers, and 20 or so models to choose from. The majority of those support ePub format, including anything that has been released in the last year or two, and ePub is quickly becoming the format of choice among ebook retailers.

Except for the Kindle, interoperability is here. Go out and buy an ebook reader - if there is a particular format you want you can hunt down the device that will do it, but really all you need to do is look for ePub and Digital Editions (so you can buy those nasty DRM titles, which are the majority).

It almost looks like Amazon is positioning themselves to be the Macintosh of ebook readers - except since within the next year or so they won't have any great benefits over the other readers, they'll tank. Having access to Amazon's ebook store would be great, as I think they are the largest individual retailer for ebooks.

Re:Wait for interoperability

[cpt kangarooski]

I dunno.

I recall that NASA did a study many years ago regarding how long their data remained readable. After all, it just wouldn't do to spend lots of money firing monkeys into the moon if the data wasn't kept over the long term.

They tried putting the data onto punch cards, paper tape, and hardcopy printouts, those being the standard storage systems of the era. After a rather short span of time, they found that they had lost the ability to easily read the first two formats, but they could still understand the printouts and make use of them.

I don't think paper books, and the need to have large collections of paper books, are going anywhere anytime soon. The convenience of ebooks is a nice supplement for regular books, but no substitute.

Re:Wait for interoperability

[cmiller173]

I didn't say they were DRM free.... They expire after 3-4 weeks, but I can always check them out again.

Re:Wait for interoperability

[Qzukk]

I can't find anything useful on google about android on dual screens (beyond "oh hey nook is a dual screen ereader running android"), and definitely nothing about it on android's own site. You might be able to get an app to run, but it would probably run on the tiny strip at the bottom.

Re:Wait for interoperability

[Animats]

There are now four or five e-book readers,

And since I wrote that a few days ago, there's another one, with its very own incompatible-by-design ecosystem.

Lee Childs? I don't think so

[smooth wombat]

Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher novels, actually likes the simplicity because he can concentrate on the words themselves.

Someone at work suggested I might like his books. I found one at a used book stand and started reading. The words to describe his writing style are stilted and simplistic. I felt like I was running into a wall at the end of every sentence. (get the hint?)

I think I got through the first paragraph before skipping around the next few pages then finally giving up. There might be an interesting story somewhere in those pages, but I couldn't stay around long enough to find it.

Comfort and Freedom are their Best Aspects

[ideonexus]

The greatest benefit of these e-readers is the fact that I can download tons of free books like Lawrence Lessig’s, Richard Stallman’s, the entire collection of Project Gutenberg, and the works of Creative Commons authors everywhere, and read them in the comfort of reflected light in bed rather than emitted light through a hot laptop or tiny cell phone. So long as Amazon doesn't try to erase the library of texts I got from independent sources, I'll continue to be very happy with my Kindle.

Re:Comfort and Freedom are their Best Aspects

[aminorex]

What I don't understand is why anyone would want a DRM'd straightjacket. I read PDFs on my Droid, which at 480x852 is sufficiently high res to read a full page in one screen. I can do anything I want with my files, and I can get new material online without let or hindrance. The reader fits in my pocket and I carry it anyhow, even if I don't plan to read. It was cheaper than a Kindle, and it also makes phone calls, let's me ssh to a server, plays music, downloads music, does IM, SMS, HD video recording, 5 MPixel photos, voice recording, syncs with Google docs, calendar, contacts and gmail, &c ad infinutum.

Re:Comfort and Freedom are their Best Aspects

[maxume]

Much of his point is that it isn't a straitjacket.

Your Droid is a terrible example for you to bring up, you are almost certainly locked out of the radio side of the hardware.

Re:Comfort and Freedom are their Best Aspects

[2obvious4u]

There is a radio side to the hardware? Don't know when I'd ever have time to use it since I can stream Pandora or other internet radio instead... I guess it might be neat to unlock it for emergencies.

Re:Comfort and Freedom are their Best Aspects

[maxume]

Cellular telephones and other wireless data transmission systems generally rely on a radio.

Re:Comfort and Freedom are their Best Aspects

[rwv]

the works of Creative Commons authors everywhere

Citation needed, and I'm not just trying to be a dick... I am geniunely curious about how you search for CC licensed manuscripts.

I am a CC author and to my knowledge there are no methods to reliably search for CC licensed manuscripts that raise the bar above the "self-published" garbage that's out there.

I'll be putting out a "Version 2.1" of the linked novel sometime next year and the reason for all the revisions is because good writing requires many hours of editing. Editing is what separates "traditional publication" from many (not all) self-publishers and "CC authors" (who aren't already widely known).

Re:Comfort and Freedom are their Best Aspects

[AmiMoJo]

If only they could get the screen refresh rate up so you could read textbooks and PDFs properly... There are huge amounts of free books, magazines and scanned books (Google Books etc) but at the moment you can't access them on an e-reader because they are designed for a page larger than the screen and scrolling/zooming takes 2 seconds per screen update.

Re:Comfort and Freedom are their Best Aspects

[jedidiah]

> I am a CC author [2076book.com] and to my knowledge there are no methods to reliably search for
> CC licensed manuscripts that raise the bar above the "self-published" garbage that's out there.

How exactly do you do that with "officially published" works?

A bogus level of pretense will not prevent Sturgeons law from being in effect.

Re:Comfort and Freedom are their Best Aspects

[rwv]

there are no methods to reliably search for CC licensed manuscripts that raise the bar above the "self-published" garbage that's out there.

How exactly do you do that with "officially published" works?

Word of mouth and author's reputation are a good way of sifting the chaff. "Officially published" works usually mean manuscript editors have been involved in the process which helps ensure that a manuscript has a consistency that the original author may not have been capable of providing (editing my own manuscript over the last two years has been quite eye-opening to this experience). Meanwhile, "officially published" works will get wrung through by a copy editor who is typically somebody who has an English degree so you can get assurance that the spelling and grammar are up to par (whereas not all authors are English majors with a background in composition). Not to say that this alone is enough to make a good story, because a good story requires the pre-existence of a good plot. However, when a good plot has not been wrung through by editors (which is why people can be expected to shy away from self-publishers who don't have strong word-of-mouth recommendations) the end product suffers. That is to say... editors contribute an important part to the development and publication of a manuscript. I believe you need both a good plot and good editing to create something that people would want to curl up and read.

Index?

[rjstanford]

An index? In a thriller? How does that normally work?

killer, identity of - page 274
tension, sexual, relief of - page 102
gun, finding of - page 79

Re:Index?

[somersault]

Actually, the summary makes him sound like an ass, while his statements in TFA are pretty reasonable:

Joseph Finder, the author of high-tech thrillers like “Vanished” and “High Crimes,” praises the ability to pack an entire bookshelf into his carry-on luggage. “I read a lot of nonfiction, particularly for research,” he said, “and since I read a lot when I travel, I like the convenience of being able to lug a huge pile of books in one slim device.”

But e-readers don’t always make research easy. Mr. Finder said that many books he has read on the Kindle lacked a real index compiled by a human, adding that the ability to search for keywords was hardly an adequate replacement.

Re:Index?

[selven]

What about a computer generated index?

the - page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325

a - page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325

because - page 9, 14, 36, 39, 45, 46, 50, 58, 64, 69, 73, 80, 101, 106, 113, 119, 127, 138, 144, 153, 161, 177, 183, 185, 199, 202, 215, 220, 222, 224, 228, 235, 240, 243, 251, 259, 260, 269, 278, 288, 300, 312, 316, 322, 323, 325

Re:Index?

[hcdejong]

But e-readers don't always make research easy. Mr. Finder said that many books he has read on the Kindle lacked a real index compiled by a human, adding that the ability to search for keywords was hardly an adequate replacement.

Mr. Finder has a real issue, however it's got nothing to do with ebooks. Human-compiled indices are more expensive to create than automatically-generated ones, so not that many books include one. That goes for dead-tree books just as much as for ebooks.

Granted, if you're going to publish a book only in electronic format, it may be tempting to forego the index altogether and rely on the search function, but that's merely the next step.

Re:Index?

[Brandee07]

A good ebook should not just have a human-compiled index, but a hyperlinked one. It's not that hard, but people will cut corners whereever they can.

Re:Lee Childs? I don't think so

[Minwee]

I think I got through the first paragraph before skipping around the next few pages then finally giving up.

You read one whole paragraph before pronouncing it unreadable? I admire your dedication.

Monopoly

[Aladrin]

" And then there's the issue of monopoly, which must give the authors the willies."

WHAT monopoly? They already sign to a single publisher for a book as it is. That publisher has always gotten to make all the publishing decisions. It's business as usual!

And if the answer is 'DRM', then they are doubly fools.

Re:Monopoly

[selven]

If one publisher is publishing a paper book, anyone can buy it for $15 (or whatever). If one publisher is publishing an e-book in a proprietary format for their reader only, the 90% of people that don't already have the reader will have to pay $300 to buy it.

Re:Monopoly

[Aladrin]

So again, DRM is the answer, according to you.

DON'T USE DRM. Then you won't be locked to a specific reader.

Yes, the answer really is that simple.

Re:Monopoly

[selven]

Where did I say DRM is the answer? I'm just stating that if publishers use DRM that kind of market segmentation is what will happen. What exactly do you mean by "Don't use DRM"? Are you making a recommendation to the publishers, the authors (who are, as you said, powerless) or the consumer? I'm not arguing against you, just trying to understand what you're saying.

Re:Monopoly

[fafaforza]

Well, the main reason that publishers are in business is to make money. And they won't make it by publishing to a single place only. That is why you'll see the same books being released on Amazon and the Sony store. Why wouldn't they want that?

Device makers, I'm sure, would like to make their device the one to get, but publishers themselves? Why wouldn't they reach for the broadest audience possible, and release in multiple DRM formats?

Interface

[lymond01]

Having never used one of these Nooks or Kindles, I know that this is a feature I would like:

To be able to press my finger to a page which will then put the book on its binder, pages facing me. Then I could slide my finger back and forth to a random spot and let go...and the book would open to that page. This is how I re-read books I really liked the first time through...they sit on my bedstand and when I want to read a bit, I just pick it up and open it to some random spot.

If I have to type in a page number or some such nonsense from the 1900s, I'll wait until my feature is included. :-)

Re:Interface

[aminorex]

I suggest adding that feature to an open source PDF reader, and using a google phone instead.

Re:Interface

[Brandee07]

To be able to press my finger to a page which will then put the book on its binder, pages facing me. Then I could slide my finger back and forth to a random spot and let go...and the book would open to that page.

Get an iPhone or an iPod Touch and the Kindle for iPhone app and you'll get exactly that. ;)

Re:Interface

[James McP]

I've got Preader on my Palm Pre and it has a slider bar that you can drag. Open an ebook and drag your thumb along the slider just like riffling through the pages. I suppose you could even request haptic feedback to give you some semblance of the page-flipping sensation.

It also had the normal go to page/percentage options.

Re:Interface

[lymond01]

Just installed the Kindle reader on iPhone. It does give me a handy slider bar at the bottom, which is probably close enough. Still like the idea of seeing 3D pages like the album covers on iTunes when you hold the iPhone sideways and flip through music...

But thanks for the tip. :-)

Haven't seen an increase

[greymond]

While the Kindle and Sony eReader have been coming down in price and being heard of more, I haven't seen an increase in PDF sales from the RPG/Fantasy front. Speaking with many of the indie publishers at sites like rpgnow.com and paizo.com has pretty much confirmed this. Maybe once they become mainstream... (mainstream = I walk around San Jose State university and see every other person on the park benches reading an eReader of sorts instead of on their laptop or phones)

Re:Haven't seen an increase

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't seen an increase in PDF sales from the RPG/Fantasy front.

Part of the problem is that so far, eReaders require hoop-jumping to get PDFs onto them. On the fantasy front, that and people sticking to the default store is pretty much the only setback you're going to face.

The RPG front is a much harder issue. Standard PDFs are designed to appear the same "everywhere" (with "everywhere" being defined as "able to represent the same paper size as the PDF was originally created with"). Reflowable PDFs are better on readers, as long as any given element fits on the screen. The problem appears when you have page-sized tables that the reader will have to pan around (if the reader even has that ability), diagrams, and artwork heavy pages that look excellent in color but are completely unreadable in a 4-shade-of-gray e-Ink screen. (Yeah, that background image of a treasure chest behind the chart to roll for treasure? Not going to work in B&W. Ever.)

Re:Haven't seen an increase

[oracleofbargth]

While the Kindle and Sony eReader have been coming down in price and being heard of more, I haven't seen an increase in PDF sales from the RPG/Fantasy front. ...

Speaking of gaming books, one issue here is probably the cost of the devices themselves. I may have over a thousand dollars worth of gaming books on my shelf, but they were all bought for $15 to $35.

While I had significant disposable income in college, now I only occasionally (1 or 2 times per year) have the spare money to shell out $20 to $30 for a new gaming book, and it is truly rare to find myself with a spare $250 to $500 to spend on a single purpose piece of electronics. Most other gamers I know have similar financial situations.

Further, I find it inconvenient that many publishers insist on charging the same amount for a PDF as they charge for a hardcover of the same title. $40 is more than I am willing to pay for a PDF when I can get a nice hardback for the same price. It would make much more sense to me to discount the electronic copy by an amount similar to the printing costs.

A question for someone in the know

[east coast]

If you have any of these devices...

Can you do a fast page mark and go back and forth between them quickly? I like the idea of the reader but since many of my books I'd like to have on it would be reference books it would be important for me to be able to switch between 3-4 different pages at a time with no real thought involved. It's easy enough with dead trees since I can just use my finger as a fast book mark while I thumb to another page but if it's an involved process on an e-book reader it defeats the purpose of why I would want one.

Re:A question for someone in the know

[Lord Ender]

You can set bookmarks. However, navigating the bookmark screen is slower than flipping to the page you have a post-it hanging off of. So if you go digital with your reference books, you will gain the ability for text search, but it will come at the cost of slower access to existing bookmarks.

Re:A question for someone in the know

[Simulant]

      Screen refresh is far too slow on the ones I've used. In their current form, e-paper readers are really only good for reading things straight through... like novels. I also read a newspaper (grabbed from a web site) or two. I find that I don't get through a e-paper as fast a real one, mainly because I'm forced to read the whole thing sequentially. I don't mind this too much. I think I read more of the paper now, but... the point is, they make terrible reference/text books unless you don't mind doing a search for everything you're looking for. Even then, they are still far slower than what most people would find acceptable. You can't quickly or easily flip through books at this point.

Consider the source

[Alerius]

Why ask an author about reading? A successful author may be a good source of information about writing, but that doesn't necessarily make him a good reader. [Obligatory car analogy] A mechanic may be able to drive, but I'd probably get better answers about driving from...well...a driver!

Now an author's complaint about limited control of fonts may have merit if he is saying that as part of the presentation of his art, he would prefer to set the font type and size. Judging from the novels I've read, font selection rarely enters into the equation.

I travel for work so the ability to carry half a dozen novels and a bunch of reference books in my pocket is rather handy. To me the limitations of electronic reading technology are things like battery life, availability and selection, and DRM (which I've had no personal experience with yet because I don't have a Kindle). What's kept me from jumping on the Kindle bandwagon now that they're apparently available in Canada are some of the horror stories I've read of people losing books they've legitimately paid for. I don't want to pay full retail cost of a book to license it and be at the mercy of a nameless faceless entity that can revoke my license at any time.

Re:Consider the source

[Dragoness Eclectic]

Indeed!

Ask editors, agents and other professional readers as well: you'll find they love e-Readers because a stack of manuscripts is heavy! It's way easier to carry around and read a stack of electronic manuscripts on your Kindle or Sony E-Reader than it is to manhandle all that paper around.

Ask a group of extremely avid consumer readers: romance readers. This is a group whose typical readers go through multiple books a week, bought and paid for, not freebies from Project Gutenberg. They were the first group to get on the e-book bandwagon in a big way, and there are a number of e-only small publishing houses in the romance genre. In fact, I find it vaguely depressing that the commenters on a forum for geeks, etc (Slashdot) is less informed and less interested in e-books and e-readers than that of a popular romance blog Smart Bitches, Trashy books.

I also recommend the Teleread blog, for keeping up on things e-book.

Re:Consider the source

[tool462]

There are a couple of places I can think of where font-control can be useful for the writer.

Technical books -- particularly programming books. They will frequently use the font to separate code from text visually.
Various forms of fiction that may make use of flashbacks, multiple plot threads, etc, using various fonts to separate the pieces without having to explicitly state what context they are jumping to.

Re:Consider the source

[Brandee07]

My mother and aunts *love* ebook readers precisely because they tear through trashy romance novels like crazy... and now they can read them on the subway without having to be embarrassed at the cover art.

Re:Consider the source

[Brandee07]

Kindle books can have fine font control. Amazon books are normally in a format called .azw, but are sometimes in .azw1 or .tpz (the two are interchangeable). This format allows for embedded fonts, and I have seen it used for embedding East Asian languages into a book so that the characters can be resized and reflowed. Other books, in .mobi or .azw, resort to embedding images of the charaters, which cannot then be resized.

The problem is, it's apparently very easy to make a .tpz book wrong, so that it all formats wrong and the font is weird and it may crash your Kindle when you turn to page 14. I've seen it done excellently and terribly.

Re:Consider the source

[lennier]

"Now an author's complaint about limited control of fonts may have merit if he is saying that as part of the presentation of his art, he would prefer to set the font type and size."

He may very well want to do that, but that doesn't mean his ideas about presentation should necessarily override mine. If I tell my device I want to read text in 32 point, it should take the author's ideas as a suggestion at best. That's why I love how web browsers have 'increase font size' buttons which let me correct for the bad ideas of web designers who think they know better than I do what is comfortable for me to read.

A publisher should make it possible for a reader to see an author's work as it was intended to appear - but conversely, an author shouldn't have the right to *force* a reader to see their work only one way or not at all. A reader should have the right to be able to restructure, edit, or annotate any text, and share those remixed views, as long as it's made clear that their rendering differs from the original presentation, and it's possible to identify and recover the original source view.

Basically we need to remember that every media 'consumer' is also a 'producer', and stop putting legal and technical roadblocks in the way of the natural human way of disseminating information.

Lower the price

[Anonymous Coward]

I have had a Sony Reader since they came out and I love it. The only problem is the price on the books. They are way too high. They should be able to offer the books at a much lower cost but instead rape you for the hardcover cost or more even after a book has been out in softcover.

The free books are all I read but there are enough of them to keep me satisfied for now. If they drop the price on recent books to below $10 I would start reading them on the reader instead of dead-tree.

Re:Lower the price

[Anonymous Coward]

The same problem crops up for the Kindle. I don't know how Sony handles it, but Amazon lets publishers set their own price points, and publishers are often stupid/greedy.

Amazon reserves the right to discount any book on the Kindle store (with the caveat that any royalties from discount sales are paid as if the book sold full price), which is why most bestsellers are $10. Amazon puts the price there, not the publisher.

Re:Lee Childs? I don't think so

[mcgrew]

A bad writer can ruin the best story. A good writer can keep your interest in a story about mowing the grass.

Some of the criticisms are just wrong

[JerryLove]

I have a Sony E-Book reader.

You *can* imbed fonts.

You are not stuck with Sony's proprietary formats (it reads several, including PDF, and freeware programs like calibre' allow conversions).

Re:Some of the criticisms are just wrong

[selven]

From what I heard, Sony's (embed memory of rootkits here) ebook reader is actually more open than many of the other ones, including the Kindle.

Re:Some of the criticisms are just wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

imbed is not a word. Embed is.

Re:Lee Childs? I don't think so

[Anonymous Coward]

You are obviously not an editor or an agent.

On the plus side

[LeadSongDog]

I can now leave my entire library behind on the subway. Think of it as an economic stimulus package.

"Issue of monopoly"? Bullpucky.

[otis wildflower]

Nook supports unencumbered formats, if you want to avoid the issue of monopoly, simply release your book unencumbered.

Incidentally, isn't every published book subject to the 'monopoly' of its publisher?

Re:Lee Childs? I don't think so

[aminorex]

Or one might contemn his inefficiency.

Re:Lee Childs? I don't think so

[LatencyKills]

The man's a bestseller so clearly he appeals to someone; that someone is just not you. I've read four or five Reacher novels. They read like action movies - low brain power, lots of explosions - and for that I find his style enjoyable. Like Robert Parker, you can literally read the entire novel in about 3 hours. Easy to take, easy to forget. If suddenly I was the supreme arbiter on what constitutes an entertaining book, Stephanie Meyer would be mopping floors as McDonalds.

Others might disagree, obviously

[Mathinker]

Basically everything but the Kindle is opening up. Everyone is switching to at least supporting ePub, and a number of stores sell only ePub now instead of their formerly proprietary format (like Sony). Eventually even the Kindle will have to compete or die as competition grows via the ePub format.

Supporting a common DRM standard is good, but far from "opening up".

Your requirement of a lack of DRM is, frankly, silly. This is the modern digital age - you will not be able to avoid DRM completely no matter what you do. Do you refuse to watch DVD's because they have copy protection? Because that's all DRM systems are. Plus, aside from the Kindle, they are not a requirement. You can create your own ePub or PDF documents and read them on most ebook readers (again, excluding Kindle), and people can sell non-DRM files if the market demands it. DRM also allows Libraries to lend e-books, soemthing they could not legally do without it. Several readers support this now, and libraries are starting to pick it up. Once again, that excludes the Kindle (can you tell I don't like Kindle's lock-in?).

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Some people here on Slashdot claim that they don't buy Blu-ray disks at least partially because their DRM hasn't been broken so wide open that it's still inconvenient to do all kinds of things like back them up or work around unskippable content. Since you compare ebook DRM to CSS, are you saying that DRM for text is ridiculously weak anyway (which is true) so no one, including the GP, should worry about it?

Lastly, your complaint about re-buying books is unavoidable. One is on paper, the other is digital, and it's not easy to go from one to the other without good OCR technology. This would be expensive for home use, but if you already had a nice camera, were really really dedicated to getting your books on PC, and didn't mind chopping up your paper books, you could do this if you wanted to. Personally, I wouldn't. If you really read the book that often then just fork out the few extra bucks to buy it again. If you do incrimentally you will eventually have your entire library, and it won't hurt the pocket book as much as trying to do it all at once.

He might also be able to find quite a few of these books already available (illegally) online, and might feel that it is morally OK to just obtain a DRM-free copy from there. I think that a lot of people would agree with him, also.

Re:Others might disagree, obviously

[Bigjeff5]

Supporting a common DRM standard is good, but far from "opening up".

ePub is based on the IBEP open publishing standards, so, yeah it is opening up. It's just not the kind of "opening up" you wanted.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Some people here on Slashdot claim that they don't buy Blu-ray disks at least partially because their DRM hasn't been broken so wide open that it's still inconvenient to do all kinds of things like back them up or work around unskippable content. Since you compare ebook DRM to CSS, are you saying that DRM for text is ridiculously weak anyway (which is true) so no one, including the GP, should worry about it?

That's not what I was saying at all. I was saying publishers won't sell digital copies of their works without some kind of guarantee that it cannot be copied all over the place willy-nilly. They are not unreasonable for wanting this, because selling the books is where all of their income comes from. It is unreasonable to refuse to buy ebooks because all ebooks are not available in a DRM free format. If you don't want to pay for an ebook, that's fine, but why should a publisher make the ebook available to you? If you want to read only free and public domain works, well, you can, ePub is not a DRM only format - the publisher can choose to protect their works in this way or not, it's up to them.

He might also be able to find quite a few of these books already available (illegally) online, and might feel that it is morally OK to just obtain a DRM-free copy from there. I think that a lot of people would agree with him, also.

In all honestly, the only people stuck in this situation are Kindle users - most all other formats can be converted. I also disagree that it is morally ok to obtain new copies of his books illegally. Scanning his own books in and converting them himself I don't see anything wrong with (a-la backup style), but it's an uncommon use for a paper book, and if he wants the convenience with out the effort, he should be willing to pay for it again.

I don't agree that people should not have to pay for books that the author has not offered for free and are still within the original copyright terms, I think it's reprehensible to steal these works. On the other hand, I also think copyright extensions have become a mockery of the original intent of copyright, so as far as that goes, I'm with you.

Re:Others might disagree, obviously

[Mathinker]

ePub is based on the IBEP open publishing standards, so, yeah it is opening up. It's just not the kind of "opening up" you wanted.

I checked in Wikipedia, and it may not even be the kind of opening up which you think it is, since the WP article claims that the current EPUB standard does not specify a particular DRM algorithm. Anyway, DRM for text is ridiculous, the analog hole is really big, and the sizes of the digital files are tiny making it easy to conceal them (and their transfer) in all kinds of ways.

I also disagree that it is morally ok to obtain new copies of his books .... if he wants the convenience with out the effort, he should be willing to pay for it again.

And what if there is no one to pay (i.e., no ebook has been put on sale)?

I think it's reprehensible to steal these works. On the other hand, I also think copyright extensions have become a mockery of the original intent of copyright

I was a bit shocked when I brought up the topic of copyright with a friend at work, and his initial reaction to my desire to severely limit the terms and rights associated with copyright was that he thought that creators have a moral right to their creations in perpetuity, in a similar fashion to physical property. In his case, it just may be that he hasn't thought it out yet (I am going to continue the thread with him in the future). This just goes to show that everyone has their own "reprehensibility" scale.

You misunderstand...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are considering monopoly from a *reader's* perspective, while they speak of monopoly from the *author's* perspective. The issue is whether an author will be able to "shop around" for the best publisher among legion or instead be relegated to one of a very few ebook providers.

As the author is concerned, your choices of bookstores are minimally relevant compared to their choices of publishers.

Mod eBooks +10

[TheJodster]

I love eBooks! I read them on my iPhone constantly. Project Gutenberg is an excellent source of an endless number of books that I should have already read. Right now I'm reading Bullfinch's books on mythology. I have no nostalgic attachment to paper books for whatever reason. I find that I am very likely to eventually finish a large tome (eTome?) if it is in my pocket at all times. A book can lay on my nightstand for a year and I may never finish it, but the eBook will always eventually be completed.

I'n not a fan of any of the readers yet, but....

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize that they represent where the future is going. None of the readers out on the market right now are quite what I would call the real version 1.0 of the e-book reader...but fighting against it and worrying about indices and fonts or monopolies seems like a less than useful thing. One can't fight this trend - the best we can do is try to direct it to a better result.

Actually, there is...

[Dragoness Eclectic]

http://www.webscription.net/ for Baen Books and several other related imprints.

Re:Lee Childs? I don't think so

[Anonymous Coward]

tl;dr

Another passing fad

[Token_Internet_Girl]

I can't reasonably see devices like the Kindle being nothing more than a technological fad unless the costs come down for purchasing a unit and subsequent books. Many users of said devices say they are flimsy and break easily, and several months ago there was the controversial story of the 1984 book deletions by Amazon: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html/. Why not just carry around PDF's of books you legally own on a Netbook?

Re:Another passing fad

[shutdown -p now]

Why not just carry around PDF's of books you legally own on a Netbook?

Because even the smallest netbook is significantly bulkier and heavier than any eInk reader, netbook screen is more eye-straining, and even the best netbooks last for 9 hours on a single battery charge, at most, while any eInk reader can handle a week or more easily.

I own two readers, one for a year (Sony), one for over two years (LBook aka Hanlin). Neither one is broken, and I believe that the convenience of having them is more than worth the money I've payed for both.

That said, I read a lot of literature in Russian, and Russian e-book stores are much more reasonable, both in terms of prices, availability of formats, and lack of DRM and other nonsense (largely because they have to be convenient and cheap to reasonably compete with piracy). For someone who needs English books only, the picture may well be very different.

Re:Another passing fad

[Brandee07]

They're a new market, and the price has already come down considerably. The old iLiads were $800+. The first Kindle was $400. Now, a new Kindle2 is $260. If that's still too rich for your blood, then wait a couple years. Electronics get cheaper.

The primary benefit of an ebook reader over a netbook is the eInk screen, which is also the most expensive part of the device. If reading off a computer screen doesn't bother you at all, then go ahead and get your ebooks that way. Most of these companies, including B&N and Amazon, allow books purchased from them to be read on their PC software, and you can get books from any number of other sources too.

Re:Another passing fad

[greg.collver]

I decided to try the netbook as an ereader about 6 months ago and I like it. The netbook is not as light as an ebook reader, but it is light enough and it is much more versatile. Be sure to get an 8-9 hour battery pack. A touch screen would be nice. A single purpose e-book reader would need to follow an open standard, cost less than $100, have an 8+ hour battery life to interest me.

Libraries

[Dragoness Eclectic]

Some metropolitan libraries are already moving into the 21st century and lending e-books (e.g. New York Public Library). They use DRM to enforce only checking out N copies at once.

then don't read "A Call to Arms"

[Anonymous Coward]

Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher novels, actually likes the simplicity because he can concentrate on the words themselves.

Someone at work suggested I might like his books. I found one at a used book stand and started reading. The words to describe his writing style are stilted and simplistic.

Not that I've ever read anything by Lee Child, but "stilted and simplistic" can also be described as "characterized by economy and understatement" as is sometimes used to describe the writing of another http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway author now considered to be American classics. And, yes, the adjectives "stilted" and "simplistic" have also been applied to Hemingway's writings.

Hence the survival of the phrase "de gustibus non est disputandum"...

Re:Lee Childs? I don't think so

[RoboRay]

"If suddenly I was the supreme arbiter on what constitutes an entertaining book, Stephanie Meyer would be mopping floors at McDonalds."

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Lee Childs? I don't think so

[Hatta]

The man's a bestseller so clearly he appeals to someone

Sure, and McDonalds sells billions of hamburgers so they must be good, right?

On The Media - another comparison

[sl149q]

WNYC's On The Media recently focused on books for their weekly show. One of the segments (you can listen or read transcript here: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/11/27/04) discussed a New York City University deans experiment with reading Dickens Little Dorrit four ways, the original (book), Kindle, iPhone and Audio. The result was a favorable report for all four with a "win" for the iPhone. It had a brighter screen, flipped pages faster and (to quote Woody Allen) 70% of success in life is showing up... The iPhone tended to be with her where other devices required pre-planning.

Personally I don't have a Kindle (they only very recently became available here in the frozen north) but I've been reading Project Gutenburg books on my iPhone since about the day after I got my iPhone. Love it.

FUD around ebook readers

[sunweasel]

From my perspective many of the arguments against these readers don't really hold water. True, Amazon can remove an item from your kindle without your consent but I only recall that happening once and they apologized for their mistake. The mistake was that they made a book available for free download that turned out to have had rights attached to it. Since they had provided the book by mistake they felt it their obligation to correct that mistake. They screwed up, no question but that is a corner case and it is silly to worry about content you've paid for being deleted because of that corner case. I bought a kindle last summer, not because I love gadgets and can't wait to hack my kindle so I can use it to vi all my important documents. I bought the kindle because I love to read and I travel. I like being able to carry a collection of reference books and novels. I love the builtin dictionary so that I can get the definitions as needed instead of writing the word down for lookup later if I get around to it. It's convenient and kinda nice that I don't have paper books cluttering up my apartment that I invariably forget to bring with me on a trip. They are expensive, no question but the solution for that is nothing more than volume and competition. Since other vendors are entering the space I think it is inevitable that prices will come down and at least possible that a common format will be adopted by all of them. Meanwhile, I'll enjoy reading.

epaper is too slow

[peter303]

It drives me crazy to see how long it takes for a page to flip

Re:epaper is too slow

[fafaforza]

Please, it's not that bad. Maybe if you're paging through many pages to find something specific, but for sequential reading, it is quicker and easier than the real thing.

You can anticipate it: as you approach the last 2 or 3 words, hit the button, read the words, then the page changes in a flash. It's near seamless.

Re:Lee Childs? I don't think so

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know what "opinion" means?

Re:Lee Childs? I don't think so

[Hatta]

Yeah, everyone's got one and they all stink.

PRS-505

[^_^x]

I got a Sony PRS-505 a while ago and one thing that surprised me is how many fonts I do see in plain text books - some from HTML, PDF, TXT, BBEB, LIT, they all seem to have a slightly different feel to them. No DRM either - well, I've never bought anything from the Sony bookstore - I have so many forms of text and comics on my PC it will be many a decade before I need to buy a DRM'ed ebook. Largely right now I'm using it to read textfiles of books I own on paper but haven't finished.

What greatly disappoints me is how many books show up as lines of text wrapping a line and a half across, then being punctuated by a one line gap between each line-and-a-half. It's not the most readable thing in the world, but there's no built in fix for it, so I'd have to fix the formatting and print it as a PDF, or mess around with autoconverting different kinds of line breaks and so on to get it to look halfway decent.

For manga though, it's slightly small, but pretty excellent. Just more black and grey rather than black and white.

I just don't get it...

[twoHats]

I have been reading (almost exclusively) on my Dell Axim for about 4 years now, and find it a real treat. Lets look at the pros:

o Back lit screen - read at night with no light.

o Great software - i use an old copy of uBook Reader

o light - I can hold it in one hand for a long time.

o small - i can put it in my pocket.

o cost usd279 4 years ago.

o takes sd cards (hold lots of books)

o no ties to any corporate entity (ie - no one is going to steal 1984 from me in the middle of the night.)

o uses many formats.

Also, I am 67 and my eyesight sucks - but the axim is the easiest media i read. The contrast is great and the software does excellent pagination, so i don't find the small screen even an issue (see "small" above)

So...why all the buzz about single purpose. expensive, DRM filled, soon to be obsolete, eBook readers? btw - Axim is no more, so i am not spamming here...

Ebook readers currently suck

[socratesisamortal]

I looked for an e-book reader a few weeks ago. The current e-book readers that you can buy all suck for some specific reason, for me.

I'd like an e-book reader that you can plug into your USB port and simply copy files over.

It should have WiFi so you can browse the internet. Why? Sometimes I'm reading a book and I see a word I'd like to research on e.g. Wikipedia.

It should support custom dictionaries. I read Latin/Greek books so I'd like to use Lewis and Short.

Lastly, I only found 1 e-book read that supported .djvu. It's my favorite book format, so this is a non-negotiable feature.

So I've put off buying one till something comes out that can do all of that on a decent display size with decent battery life.

Apple should make an e-book reader

[socratesisamortal]

It all probability, ignoring DRM formats and the like, if Apple made an e-book reader it would blow the socks off all the current competition and force the standards to be raised. Again and again, Apple seems to create extremely awesome interfaces for "obvious" tasks like, portable music players and portable telephones. I can just imagine how cool an Apple iBook would be :)