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Adobe Takes On Microsoft Role In E-book Market
ericatcw writes "Barnes & Noble, Sony and other e-book vendors may have the manufacturing muscle, but the brains directing the challenge against Amazon.com's Kindle eBook Reader is Adobe Systems. Like Microsoft, Adobe has built a formidable ecosystem of partners to whom it supplies software such as its encryption/DRM-creating Adobe Content Server. Adobe paints Amazon as being like Apple: secretive and playing badly with others. Amazon argues it just ain't so, and takes a jab, along with other critics, at Adobe's alleged open-ness."
There's an e-book market?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Adobe just provides a platform; it's up to the producers to decide what protection (if any) to place on the documents.
There certainly won't be a market until the prices of the readers come down. $300? You gotta be crazy. Even at $50 they would in any case likely never entice me completely away from the real thing.
Or till there's a cross platform standard format. If I have the option of using an e-book on my cell phone, laptop, desktop, pda etc without having to purchase a half dozen different versions I'm all for it. But buying a file that only works on one device seems like a bad idea.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I used to work there in Kindle tech support, fired without cause as part of a witch hunt on a security breach.
I dont care how well the Kindle is doing, I wouldn't use one again if they gave it for free.
$300 for a device that's easier on the eyes than an LCD screen, and can store 1500 books? I think that's a perfectly reasonable price for what you get.
Adobe generally has the biggest, bloated software of all of them. And they have a phoney upgrade cycle that adds the least value added in the new feature dept compared to everyone. And the stuff they acquire either is aborted or turned to shit. Like dreamweaver and their purchase of that great company that made the kollection toolkits. Only to kill it off.
I feel like Amazon has been pretty cool, but even if they were Hitler incarnate, Adobe would be Stalin. I wouldn't feel any better with the new boss.
DRM for text is silly.
I might believe it if we were talking about text with a lot of extra goodies like hyperlinks.
If Adobe manages to do as well of a job with this latest enterprise as they've done with Flash CS4, then Amazon should be handed the entire market on a platter. Flash CS4 is the single most painful, unresponsive program I've ever had the displeasure of using, and I'm shocked how the same engineers that can produce a program as high-quality as Photoshop can't manage to catch repetitive 10-20 second UI freezes in Flash during testing.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
There certainly won't be a market until the prices of automobiles come down. $20000? You gotta be crazy. Even at $3000 they would in any case likely never entice me completely away from horses.
Fixed that for you.
Umm. Classy, reliable hardware, great user interface and security in exchange for somewhat higher prices. Or cheap devices, crafty software and "interoperability" like Microsoft's PlayForSure? I am sure Amazon would love to be compared to Apple and have Sony/B&N be compared to Dell and Microsoft. I don't think Kindle is up to the sniff yet though. Decent device, still not enough screen contrast and no backlight for occasional night reading, too easy to do unintended things with the buttons.
There certainly won't be a market until the prices of the readers come down. $300? You gotta be crazy. Even at $50 they would in any case likely never entice me completely away from the real thing.
Think of it as the MP3 player of the book world. I am sure the same thing was said when the first MP3 players came out.
"The two most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." -Harlan Ellison
Meh, $300 isn't bad considering you get free wireless web browsing with the unit. If someone made one in color with a GPS and offered that kind of data plan, I might actually consider ditching my mobile phone company's wap browsing service.
$300 for a device that's easier on the eyes than an LCD screen, and can store 1500 books? I think that's a perfectly reasonable price for what you get.
I would agree with you, except you still have to purchase all 1,500 books. And they are not discounted to reflect the savings of no physical production, shipping, storefront, etc.
While I agree with you, I think you're confusing the terms "market" and "desire on your own personal part".
Amazon has, several times, run out of stock on the Kindle in its various incarnations. Barnes and Noble's Nook is currently on backorder until mid-January. Both of these facts point to a good market for e-book readers.
However, like you, I don't see enough benefit from them. Yes, the form factor would be nice, but spending $250-$300 for the right to repurchase my library in a new format and cut me off from my primary book supply (library sales and used book sales)? Uhhhhh... no. Just no.
That doesn't mean there isn't a market for them, just that you and I are not part of it until:
1. Prices come down.
2. They come up with some way to resell books and/or transfer licenses legally for "loaning" and resale.
3. I can buy books from multiple sources and have them all work on one reader.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
ePub. It works on all of the above, and all ebook readers except the Kindle. (And is the one they are talking about in the article.) It's an open format, with DRM extensions. (Adobe, here, is the main seller of DRM-encoding software for it.)
'Sensible' is a curse word.
So Amazon thinks through a problem and designs an elegant solution, takes care of the software, hardware, and marketing.
Adobe just wants to inject their proprietary technology into a process and sit back and enjoy the royalties.
Screw Adobe. They don't even do any coding here in the US anymore.
When I can stick a reader in my back pocket, toss it on the table, leave it out on the deck overnight and have it get soaked in dew, I'll buy one.
Until then it's an expensive toy.
It stores more than a book, but it's expensive and fragile and big.
yeah... "purchase"... rrriiiiiiiiggghhht
Apple being "secretive and playing badly with others" is the main reason we have a mostly DRM-free music market these days.
We can only hope that Amazon will be so helpfully and successfully obstinate.
Unless you read any public domain or creative commons books. I've read well over 100 public domain books on my iLiad so far. If I'd bought them all as penguin classics then it would have cost me more. I've also read a few textbooks and a huge number of papers on it. The clutter reduction from not having printed copies of them all lying around the place.
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No-one will ever let them play in the same playground. Maybe it has something to do with their j2ee'esq server apps (anyone who has ever configured them knows what I'm talking about) or the fact that their server software is REALLY expensive compared to what Amazon already rolled.
The story title reads: "Adobe Takes On Microsoft Role In E-book Market" yet the only reference I found on Microsoft, on both linked articles, is this:
Though Adobe may balk at the comparison, its role in the e-book market is similar to Microsoft's in the PC market: a builder of a semi-open ecosystem of partners to whom it sells publishing tools.
So, what does Microsoft have to do with both articles really ?
Oh yeah, because Adobe Flash sure plays nice on Mac OS X. /sarcasm
Dude. Shelves.
What's wrong with postscript? It was made to deal with text...
Except I don't think we're going to see people transferring their existing library of paper books to ebook format. If the only way I could get MP3s was to buy them, even if I already own the same music on CD -- especially if I already own it -- I might still be dubbing cassettes to play on my Walkman.
Apple being "secretive and playing badly with others" is the main reason we have a mostly DRM-free music market these days. We can only hope that Amazon will be so helpfully and successfully obstinate.
Amazon's mp3 store really did the trick in moving the whole market (read: Apple) to DRM-free music.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
There is. Epub is open and is supported by everyone except Amazon.
Best Slashdot Co
OT, but how does your iLiad and your Mac get along?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If it were a device that didn't hugely suck for web browsing, the data plan would be a lot more expensive...
Apple being "secretive and playing badly with others" is the main reason we have a mostly DRM-free music market these days.
So, Napster, bittorrent, and that ancient protocol that shall not be named, had nothing to do with it? Quite frankly, you are being ridiculous.
A $300 for a device that's easier on the eyes than an LCD screen, and can store 1500 books?
You could build some pretty nice shelves with $300 worth of lumber...
But the portability might suffer.
And it's more like $250 now, really. The prices are going down, slowly but surely (it used to be $350 for then-new eInk readers ~2 years ago).
Also, there are a lot of books that publishers give away to build readership. Amazon's Kindle store shows about 60-65 non-classic books being offered for free.
There is a LOT of free stuff available, especially older material. Get thee to mobiread.com. Much of what's there is Gutenberg reformatted, but there's still a lot of stuff. When you tire of that, get thee to archive.org, which lists 1.8 MILLION texts online. A lot of them are PDF. The Sony 505 handles the b/w pdf ok. Chokes on color PDF.
For newer stuff, get thee to fictionwise.com. I just bought one book at what I would call a ridiculous price, but the full purchase price was rebated into a micropay account which I can use to pay for other stuff. The $20 I paid for "I Am America" is going to wind up paying for monthly copies of Analog magazine.
Some of what fictionwise sells is in "multi-format". Wazzat? You can download your purchase in any or all of a large number of formats, including PDF or LRF or even Palm. Analog, for example. I have copies of one month on my Sony 505 in PDF and LRF format, and the same issue on my Palm. The palm doesn't have the pretty pictures, but it has the text.
That doesn't even begin to cover the large number of sites that have free pdf versions of stuff.
I think I've bought about ten things for my 505, half of which are the latest issues of Analog. Two books. Sony gave away 100 free books with the 505. And I'm up to almost 900 "books" (a few books are broken into upto 20 chapters, each of which counts as a "book" in the main page display, so I'm not at a real 900, but probably 600 is a good estimate). A lot of those are manuals for radios and electronic stuff, but I can never say "I have nothing to read" if my 505 is close by (and it always is).
No "they|we" didn't. We already had to purchase expensive equipment to play music with, since CDs and tapes didn't play themselves. With books all you have to pay for is well, the book.
Have you seen the prices for Sony Reader books? My wife wants a reader for Christmas, so she looked up some of the books she bought over the last year, and the ones she plans to buy in the next months or so. Amazon came in at about 2/3 the cost of Sony, and B&N doesn't have an ereader store (or an ereader that will ship before the biggest consumer day in the western world - nice job, guys). Since the readers are comparable in price and features, the Kindle - for all its flaws - wins out for someone who just wants to buy and read books.
Adobe better figure out a way to make the books on their platform, and the platform itself, cheaper. A lot cheaper. Otherwise they're going to be paired with also-rans to the market/mindshare leader, which is Kindle. Yeah, I'd say Apple is the right comparison. What's worse (for adobe) is that there really are no mainstream competitors for the iPod in the end-to-end usability pile. That's hard for me to say, since I'm not a fan of iPods, but it is still the truth.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
first, it's not easier on the eyes, or lighter than a $5 paperback. second, how many people need 1500 books on hand? the vast majority of people actually read (cover-cover) one single book at a time. if it's reference material you want, it's easier and more current to google for the info, and you can do that from your smartphone that you are carrying anyway and the information will be more up to date.
No "they|we" didn't. We already had to purchase expensive equipment to play music with, since CDs and tapes didn't play themselves. With books all you have to pay for is well, the book.
Where did s/he say "they|we"? S/He was just making a statement that is very true. And with your logic, I guess you still get the newspaper delivered to you rather than reading it on your computer. I mean after all you only have to buy the newspaper and not get that "expensive equipment" to read it.
Actually, one of the Sony reader models is $199, though with a slightly smaller screen than the kindle or nook.
It's only been a few years and people are already quoting incorrect information about this...
You think Amazon just decided unilaterally to sell non-DRM'ed music? You think Apple wanted DRM'ed music?
1. Apple asked the record companies to remove DRM. The companies refused.
2. The record companies were getting more and more afraid of Apple's hold on the market. That's why they gave Amazon the authorization to sell non-DRM'ed MP3 files (not to mention compatibility problems with the huge installed base of portable players if they had insisted on such a thing for MP3). The record companies wanted to break Apple's hold on the music download market by allowing Amazon to sell "better files".
3. After seeing that, Apple demanded to remove DRM from the music files too, but also asked to sell higher bitrates in the process, that's why it's now 256kbits AAC instead of 128kbps AAC.
4. All the iPods suddenly had half the storage space, tune-count wise. The iTunes files went back to being the superior files (MP3@128kbps vs AAC@256kbps). More profits for Apple for still having the best music files to sell and selling bigger iPods to customers.
True, but people do forget that Apple wedged the door open: Theirs was the first non-uber-draconian DRM. (And could be broken, with Apple's own default install, right at launch.) At the time, it was a major step forward, and something only Apple could have pulled off.
Once they showed that the piracy boogyman wasn't as bad as was feared, and started showing exactly how much power even that little bit of DRM got Apple, then the music companies were willing to talk to others like Amazon about going without.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
first, it's not easier on the eyes, or lighter than a $5 paperback. second, how many people need 1500 books on hand? the vast majority of people actually read (cover-cover) one single book at a time. if it's reference material you want, it's easier and more current to google for the info, and you can do that from your smartphone that you are carrying anyway and the information will be more up to date.
Yeah, becaussmartphone service prices are such a GREAT deal.
Amazon has sold bunches, so while it may not be YOUR market at these prices, there is one.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Cool. Another Analog reader. I toyed with the e-subscription on my reader, but I just prefer the pulp rag when I read it... Maybe next year...
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
I travel. A lot. I am gone, out of the country, in places where I can't get english language books. I used to hit the used book store before a 3 week trip, and buy 10-12 books to read and discard. Now I use my Sony e-Reader, and my luggage is MUCH lighter and more portable. And if I find that I am not enjoying a book, I don't feel that I wasted space and time lugging it on a trip. I can just move onto something more enjoyable. e-Readers have greatly improved my life, and I can't imaging living without mine...
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
Imagine how much money libraries of the future could save, by sending you your book electronically. They would save a fortune in shipping books around between libraries, storing them, etc. I know, they would always have books for historical reasons, but if I could log onto my libraries web site, and request a book, and then instantly get it online, that would make me use it much more. (my current library does the first 2, and emails me when my book is in, but I still have to drive 7 miles down to the library, during their business hours, which are getting scarcer and scarcer..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
$300 for a device that's easier on the eyes than an LCD screen, and can store 1500 books? I think that's a perfectly reasonable price for what you get.
Personally I wouldn't pay $300 for the current available models, they are (in my opinion) not good enough; but I have no doubt that a few years down the line the quality of the readers will be such that I would have no doubt paying $300 or more; maybe even a lot more. For now I am content waiting for the technology and services to improve to what I would consider an acceptable level. I still remember my first mp3 player, and my first mobile phone; large, chunky, heavy, low battery time, poor UI, and generally stone age tools compared to their current equivalent. But while my player and phone provided functions I felt a genuine need for, an e-reader would have to be fairly good to get me away from books on paper. But as I said, only a matter of time; and I whole heartily support companies creating new readers to compete with what is available to date.
My greatest concern so far is the restrictions and regulations hindering the development of a proper online service for buying, accessing, and sorting through the e-books you have purchased. Personally I would love to see something as user friendly as Steam for buying and downloading your books, or subscribing to regular releases like magazines or comics. But as far as I know the various distribution deals, not to mention various nations regulation, makes the creation of this type of service, particularly for the European market, a pain in the nutsack.
The Long Now Foundation
I hear there's rampant copyright violation there.
How about $90?
Yeh, it doesn't have the fancy screen, it's a bit like a late '90s PDA with a bigger screen, but I read ebooks on a late '90s PDA with a 160x160 display for several years.
Been there, done that, applied the Preparation H, won't go there again.
I've still got (and read) books I bought 30-40 years ago. DRMed content is lucky to survive five years before the company decides keeping the magic servers up isn't profitable and you're unable to migrate the content to the next version of the platform... if there is one.
There certainly won't be a market until the prices of the readers come down. $300? You gotta be crazy.
For a heavy reader, buying a couple new books a month in e-book format instead of hardback can save $300 in a year or two.
When I can stick a reader in my back pocket, toss it on the table, leave it out on the deck overnight and have it get soaked in dew, I'll buy one.
You can do all of that now.
Folks, the Adobe DRM for eBooks is laughably easy to break. Please, guys, keep all this quiet. Adobe DRMed books can be easily turned into non-DRMed ePubs that are reflowable, portable, and in OPEN STANDARDS format.
Please, don't make too much noise that might change my favorite ebook store's (shortcovers) mind about using a DRM format that's easy to break into something nice.
Really? Which reader fits in a back pocket? And, can I sit on the bus or the train with it in my pocket?
How tough are the readers? The ones I've seen all look fairly fragile - like a simple elbow on the screen would render it useless.
If you want a future where e-books are DRM free then you need to hope that the same thing happens with e-books as it did with music.
That is, one company having the majority of the market, not licencing their DRM solution and publishers having to resort to DRM free products if they want to sell outside of the walled garden.
Since Adobe will licence their technology to anyone who wants it, there is no incentive for the publishers to give up on DRM. Which, for e-books at least, means it'll be here to stay for a while...
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Amazon's MP3 files are encoded at 256kbps variable-bitrate (according to wikipedia).
$300 for a device that's easier on the eyes than an LCD screen, and can store 1500 books? I think that's a perfectly reasonable price for what you get.
I would agree with you, except you still have to purchase all 1,500 books. And they are not discounted to reflect the savings of no physical production, shipping, storefront, etc.
As many have already pointed out, there are plenty of public domain ebooks available from Project Gutenberg and Google Books.
Some publishers also give away free ebooks to build readership - like the Baen Free Library.
Some libraries also lend ebooks. My local library does, and we're a pretty small town. I'd imagine that if my library is doing it, it must be fairly widespread.
Also, while most ebooks are not discounted, there are some available. I've been watching the Barnes & Noble website for a couple months now and they'll periodically have a decent ebook on sale for just a dollar or two. I've picked up several that way.
Plus, both the Kindle and the nook can read PDFs. I don't know about you, but most of the manuals I get these days are PDFs. It is much easier to read a PDF on something small and portable with a paper-like screen than to print out everything you need, or keep running back to a computer to read it.
And then there's the possibility of subscribing to a newspaper or magazine on the thing.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
There certainly won't be a market until the prices of the readers come down. $300? You gotta be crazy. Even at $50 they would in any case likely never entice me completely away from the real thing.
You clearly don't travel a lot, especially internationally.
EBook readers are frigging great. I have one... while I'm totally unhappy with the quality over all of *EVERY* e-book reader out there, the benefit outweighs the problems, if only marginally. The fact is, I have a very limited amount of space to carry my things. On 8 - 14 hour flights, I can easily go through a 700 page book if not two. There is no way I can carry around 4 700 page books, at a minimum, on each flight along with all my other gear. MY EBook reader has 120 books on it and it fits in my photo gear bag, which is a mandatory carry on for me. My photobag might... MIGHT fight 1 700 page book when it's fully loaded. If I'm halfway through that book and board a 14 hour flight, I'd be screwed. With the ebook reader, I know I have a bucket load of additional reading material to keep me from getting arrested by the air marshals for beating up idiotic passengers.
AAC is better than MP3, but thanks for the correction about the bitrate. And at least iTunes isn't limited to four countries.
PDF is only "not very good at" ebooks in the same way, and for the same reasons, that Flash is "not very good" at webpages.
Both were designed to enforce the content creator's desired formatting, layout and other presentation characteristics regardless of the viewer's preferences. If you want to view the content on a screen of different size or resolution or with eyes that require larger-size content then too bad.
What I find weird is that Adobe had one of the early implementations of a functional way to bridge between rigid adherence to the content creator's presentation wishes and diverse viewers' preferences with the 'hinting' feature of their Type 1 PostScript font format but, to my limited knowledge, they haven't seen fit to provide something similar for the PDF or Flash content formats.
It still doesn't wash:
1) Your iLiad cost $700 or so, not $300
2) $7 per public domain book is rather obtainable, on average
3) A library card costs (nearly) nothing, and would help with your space issues
4) Many of these same materials are accessible online with a device you already own for other purposes
"I wanted one" is an excellent justification for your purchase. "I saved money" is probably not.
I prefer paper, too, but I'm a year and a half behind reading the paper version. I put each new one on the shelf until I get time to read it, and when I get time to read it it's never where I am. Sometimes I pick a few off the shelf when I go on a trip, but then I either run out while on the trip or don't finish and forget to put the ones I didn't read back on the shelf.
The e-version goes where I go. It doesn't bleed ink from the covers or pages onto my fingers. I can read the pdf version on my desktop instead of working.
What did you think about the ending to the "climb a square mountain" story -- can't recall the official title? I was seriously dissappointed. Just when the hero of the story was about to get things straightened out, a reincarnated dead woman with apparently supernatural powers shows up and takes over. All that great setup, designing the planet and working out the side-effects, and then Goddess comes in and makes it all better. And the issue with the colonists killing something intelligent. As I recall, that intelligent thing they killed was carrying a spear and attacking them at the time. Anyway. A big letdown.
It'd be nice if somebody came up with a cheapish, nondestructive paperback digitizer.
If you don't mind slicing off the binding you can just get a drop scanner for ~250, but I'm a bit squeamish about that.
Hardbacks are easy, there's at least one DIY system thats pretty fast.
E-book needs are not all the great for everyone for sure, but their practicality is also unmatched by any other one device.
Do you know of a device that lasts days on a charge gives you access to that web content on the move, and will cost me a total of less than $400 (figure a dozen paid books, a hundred free ones) for a couple years, to acquire and use consistently.
Also these readers do let you put notes into the works also. I know I had a link to a site that gave me the design I wanted for my concrete block wall, rafters, etc... Now gone from the web.
For programming books, sure web is good. But I sure wish I had all of my old college books, and notes with me many times. So many specialized little references to business law, chemistry, and a few other little gems that would be very handy to have without trying to find the right search terms.
Even just Professional-Reference codebooks, anyone fact can be looked up on the web but I don't always have web, and they just aren't bundled together enough to make a convenient local copy.
The file syncing doesn't work; the iLiad refuses to talk to the Samba server on OS X (apparently it works for others, not for me). I just pop out the memory card and copy files across that way. I download most of them from FeedBooks, which has a nice iLiad preset and uses LaTeX to typeset books for the correct size (it generates PDFs).
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My iLiad cost around £200 (I didn't pay full price). £2 per public domain book is what I pay for books (including ones in the public domain) from a local charity shop. The space issues are for papers, not for books: I have lots of book shelves, but my desk was piled high with research papers that I'd printed. Most of the materials I've read on it could have been read on other devices, but I've read vastly more on it than on my Nokia 770 and I can't read things in the park during the summer on any other device I own (which is when I got the most use from my iLiad so far). 'I wanted one' was the reason that I got it, but over its lifetime I've got reasonable value from it. One thing that I didn't mention was travelling. I can take a few dozen books to read on the train or plane or in hotels when I'm travelling. They would take up most of my hand luggage if I took paper copies (not to mention weighing vastly more).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
How much would you pay for book shelves? Can you put the shelves in your pocket? How much do you pay per square foot for the space for your shelves and the space around them?
I wouldn't even mind if I could buy digital forms of older books for the same price I pay for my paperbacks, which is usually between 50 cents and a dollar. I'm not talking about new releases, but stuff that's been out for a few years in mass market paperback.
But, alas, I don't see a market in used e-books starting up anytime soon.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
the vast majority of people actually read (cover-cover) one single book at a time
I call BS on this one! 1. Breakfast/lunchtime book. 2. night-time book. 3. lounge-room book. 4. book (normally 1-3) i started reading but got vaguely bored of but haven't given up on completely. 4. academic papers/books that are on the go (normally around 3-10).
I might read a single book cover-to-cover with an especially good book sometimes, but since I listen to audiobooks too, and since I'd probably be in the middle of several others anyway, this is pretty rare.
"You only get ONE LIFE." Richard Rahl, Faith of the Fallen - Terry Goodkind
... than one retailer, when it comes to choice.
Tweet, tweet.
I hope it means Amazon will adopt a format usable by other ebook stores (or provide the format by opening their own).
But I also hope to keep buying through Amazon, because their cloud-based service platform is awesome. My books reside in the cloud, I can lose my Kindle and not worry about backups etc. Whispernet delivery beats anything currently available (though the Nook will have an equivalent).
Yes, I'm also hoping that the platform wars will lead to other needed improvements in Amazon's offering. Not being able to lend or sell a book is bogus. Not being able to borrow a library e-book is bogus. Not being able to migrate to a future non-Amazon device is bogus.
Competition should be a good thing. Fingers crossed....
Kindle is 259 right now. If you read a lot of books, the thing pays for itself just in shipping (specially if you're international).
For you. For me the reasonable price for this (where I would buy one) lies at $20-25. That’s right. That’s how much a dollar from me is worth to me.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Well I guess it does come down to at some level what money is worth to you. $300 isn't pocket change but it's not going to put me out in the streets.
Can ebook readers display images in PDFs?
It would be nice if when you bought a paperback or hardcover, the store automagically gave you an ebook version. Would be very nice, actually... But then you could just turn around and sell the deadtree copy and keep the ebook.
Might as well just download the book and buy the printed copy if you want it too.
Sorry--it looks like you had an unstated requirement in your original request. You want to stick it in a back pocket, toss it on a table, and soak it with dew and have it still work. With that additional last requirement, I don't think they are there yet.