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

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.

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: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.