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Mainstream Books for Palm Pilots
Joe Rumsey writes "Palm Infocenter reports that Peanut Press is selling books in electronic form. They are encrypted, and the reader currently only exists for Palm devices. The selection is not bad." Looks like a better idea than the SoftBook reader, which costs about as much as a Palm but is big and bulky -- and won't let you do anything but read books and magazines.
A great dedicated reader: Rocket eBook
See also: eBooks at Barnes & Noble
is an eBook that would let me read TeX, Postscript or PDF files.
If I want to read some fiction, I'd much rather curl up with a paperback -- but combined with some sort of annotation/search system, these things would be great for reading text books, tech articles and preprints. (If for no other reason than I could get rid of the film of research papers covering the floor of my study.)
JRaven
My power goes out or I am in a remote area (rural tibet) and have to do some research with the indigenous peoples and get some of the reading done. Electronic readers? Fat chance!!!
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
O'Reilly would be very cool. Better yet, for the O'Reilly stuff, they could have a print reference edition on a yearly basis, and run quarterly, monthly (hourly?) updates as new information/sw becomes available. Or, bug's become documented & fixed.
The only downside, would you really want David Pogue's PalmPilot guide on your PalmPilot?
--
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
What sh*t, da*n, various mumblings? Still electronic media suffers from degredation over time. Printed books have lasted for several hundreds of years in readable condition.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
coming soon, to an irc server near you.
I've been using my Palm for reading Gutenberg textx for almost a year now. I'm actually really pleased with the experience. Sure you need to get the light right, but paging through the book is simplicity itself and I am so used to reading electronic text that I am not finding any real problems with the setup.
Of course it could be improved, the digital ink idea for future e-paper sounds like it could supply the extra resolution a serious read requires. However - for travelling, the Palm reader has been a godsend. I used to carry 3 or 4 books for a week's travel - now I have saved that space and weight by taking the Palm.
I'll stick to books for everyday use though of course.
A little planning goes a long way...
Is this something that we really want to break? I picked up their free book and I think it's pretty cool. I just went back and picked up A Fire Upon the Deep -- for chump change. If we go and break it, we'll only succeed in making them go away. Who wins there? Not me. Chances are that company is made up of people just like us. I'd prefer to support them and by extension, us.
I use my PalmPilot for reading books and information regulary. What strikes me is the screen width is to narrow to be comfortable for any sort of reading. If you could just rotate the text 90degres so that I read the palmpilot screen on its side. For me this seems more appropriatte format for reading on the Palm pilot.
And thats why Firecrackers and kittens don't mix.
tOdd
DOCs are sold unencrypted. you can cut and paste and manipulate and read on a PC. on the palm platform there are no warez (or at least minimal warez) since the ppl who use palms are pretty ethical as compared to the average PC user (the market is small and is going to stay that way). Trusting your customer not to rip you off is nice - i wish most companies and twits like you would learn that not everyone is out to rip someone else off.
Actually...you can. Peanut Reader allows it, and so do AvantGo (IIRC) and some doc readers.
The thing is, though, the Palm's screen is perfectly square , so you don't really see much of an advantage from it.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
they should use an open format like DOC..proprietary formats suck. BTW, im willing to bet they use the same compression as DOC (RLE compression - GPL code available online) rather than zip since RLE is simpler and faster.
I've already read what I wanted to read from that period. There isn't an awful lot that's survived that was any good. And it's a bit short on science fiction. I've already read Verne, Wells, Shelley.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
"Computers don't make mistakes, people do."---Bill Gates, even if you don't like the man, it's true. And people keep blaming their computers when windows crashes.... maybe we should listen more to bill gates and his infinite wisdom. Just like "640k of RAM should be enough for anybody". ;)
It would be very convenient if the technology was commercially available for a page-sized, ultra-thin, high-res display device with bunch of RAM or maybe a flash card. But this would open up a whole new issue about book copyrights, the same thing that's going on with music and software piracy... Yet another headache.
I've owned an Rocket eBook for six months, and can answer some of the questions here.
1. Well, the value of money is relative to how much money you have. But the list price is $350, and the discounters are pricing it below $300.
2. All the electronic texts are saved to the hard drive, just like the Palm texts are, and likewise, you choose which books are currently present on the device. In fact, encrypted texts are also saved for you on Nuvomedia's site, so even if your hard drive turns to dust, you can still retrieve the books you've bought.
Plus, Nuvomedia gives away tools to scan web pages into eBook texts. Great for those long stories on a single page, or for books that are posted online.
3. The Nuvomedia FAQ claims that they can deal with you losing the eBook device without any loss of texts. They've got a good rep for being responsive to users.
4. In my opinion, the biggest problem facing the eBook industry is the lack of current texts. But Rocket is far ahead of Peanut Press or Softbook, with over a thousand texts, and the conversion rate seems to be accelerating.
The screen is a LOT better than the Palm, i agree, and the backlight and rechargable battery life are sweet. Again, it's a matter of how important that qualitative difference is to you.
mahlen
"I hope some animal never bores a hole in my head and lays its eggs in my brain, because later you might think you're having a good idea but it's just eggs hatching."
--"Deep Thoughts", by "Jack Handy"
In effect the publisher is making extra profit on these. Which, in the short term, is probably reasonable since these are low-volume and require unusual distribution mechanisms.
I would expect that things will change as competition increases.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
You're right! MemoWare [http://www.memoware.com] has tons of free literature, fiction, technical references and thousands of other documents for Palms, Psions, WinCE's, and TI Avigos. If you want stuff to read or reference, and don't want to pay for it, I'd highly recommend this site.
There were loads of free books to download to a palm pilot. I've read a fair few. One thing is you couldn't fit the whole book on the PDA. What you do is download a few chapters at a time, and is quite readable.
If you had asked me 1-2 month ago I would have totaly agreed with you. But now I own a palm pilot and find it really great for reading long texts like novels. It was a lot easier and convenient than I though it would be.
Thanks for the link to the pseudo-FAQ, but the sci-fi piece illustrated nothing except maybe the fact that RMS can't write fiction to save his life. It was like a laundry list. And the "Author's Note" was cute, in case you failed to notice the sledgehammer of bad fiction which had just landed on your foot.
Does anyone know what the .rb format is for the rocket ebook? I just ordered a rocket, but I would like to be able to read and create texts on a platform other than windows.
Greg Weeks
You know, most Palms only have 2 megs of memory and generally have several other apps residing in that space. How many books would you really be able to fit in a palm?
I'm wondering how modern books will hold up. Different materials, and all that. It brings to mind concerns of papper acidity, etc, when comic book collectors talk about their trade.
From what I understand, they are selling it in a propreitary, encrypted format.
Palm pilots become obsolete almost as fast as computers. In a decade, those books that were paid for and stored on the pilot will most likely be useless without the pilot itself; they will be stuck on the pc.
Printed books, on the other hand, have been known to last hundreds of years. It would be a shame to see information made inacessible because the equipment became obsolete.
Nix absolutably seriousness.
Hmm. Odd, last I checked, you can get the ultrasleek Palm V for ~US$400 or so (egghead.com). Go a little less, and it's possible to pick up PalmIII's cheaply (I'd say $200 new). Or go used, many older palms are $100.
Must be confusing with M$'s wince (I prefer 'wince' to CE, since wincing is what you do with those machines) machines calling themselves "Palm Sized PCs".
While I believe a lot of people would like the convenence of electronic books, this business cannot work. Here's why...
Take any book from PeanutPress and look at the price. Now, go to Amazon.com and lookup the book. Wow, it only cost a penny more to get the book itself. The pricing structure is the same for any of the ebook sellers.
For printed books, the manufacturing costs are generally around 10% of the list price. The bulk of the money is made by the distributors. In the case of a Barnes & Nobel, they are their own distributors. For the little bookshops, it's Baker & Taylor or a handfull of others.
Now, if we've cut out the manufacuring costs and the middlemen and only have the retailer, why is the price the same?
More troubling is the limited rights to the work that the end user is granted. The book probably will not even be readable by their own equipment in a year or two.
Well, comic books have traditionally been printed on the lowest grades of paper. In actuality, the paper acidity is actually contagious in a way. Put high quality books adjacent to books printed on crap paper and the bad paper will also take out the good book, to a certain degree.
It isn't even worth talking about digital media for anything you want to keep around permanently. It doesn't matter if the media is permanent or archival. The retreival formats keep changing every few years. And anything I buy, I expect to keep around permanently. I have many books in excess of 100 years old.
This wonderful pseudo-FAQ explains why and how better than I can.
The downside to systems like this is specifically addressed starting around #48 in the above, but it's worth reading the whole page (and possibly rms's illustrative sci-fi piece) if you have time.
I prefer to read printed books because girls (especially blondes one) who look at me are thinking : "God ! This cute guy is smart too...". Ok it's bad for my geek's score but sometime we need to do sacrifices.
Reading electronic books has the opposite consequence : "This guy looks stupid ! Why is he reading a book on a so tiny screen."
Greetings,
It falls into the Rio / MP3 category for me. It's not the best solution, but it's worth giving them money so that other people will see a market and try to build a better solution. I bought about $25 worth of books from them, and I will read them. I've converted long Gutenberg books to Doc format and read them on my Pilot, and don't have any problem with it myself.
On another note... I looked at Rocket Books. WTF?!?! I'm going to pay $350 for a single-purpose item, and they have absolutely JACK for good SF?
From PeanutPress I just bought Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge (oh god, a digital version...? I'm absolutely in heaven...), and Slant by Greg Bear (which I've been meaning to read), along with a few other books I was interested in. I also downloaded the free samples, for the hell of it.
Look, if you want to sell an ebook system, whether proprietary or not, get publisher support . That they can offer Fire Upon The Deep (and know to!) gives me faith and confidence in them. That most of Rocket Books SF section looks like it was culled from the Gutenberg project very explicitly does NOT.
Anyhow, I'm impressed. They have selection. That's key for me, and probably most people who seek ebooks. Their cart system needs a bit of help, but it's not terrible.
They DON'T have technical stuff, which is a pity, but livable.
Also, fwiw, I have a Palm3 w/ the TRG 8MB expansion card. I've got plenty of space for these books, even all at once. In the end, though, I'm really dropping $25 as a donation to the cause of 'good things'. As opposed to paying for a RocketBook which doesn't fit in my pocket, burns a hole in my wallet, and doesn't have the selection...
No contest.
Cyberfox!
The font size of a page to make it fit on the screen would have to be really small 1-2pt or so. The alternative maybe having just a paragraph on the screen at any one time would equally suck.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
Whaaaaattt!!?!??! You lost me after "So what . . ."
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
If you have any self distance what so ever you will realise that this is just a matter of habit.
/home/Librarian/ directory as well...
Personally, I agree with you, I love holding books, flipping pages, and I love watching my personal library grow: but it is just habit.
I've learned to love my mp3 collection like I loved my CDs, I believe I could learn to love my
To people like me, that live in non-US countries (Italy, in my case) and like reading US books, electronic books are a gift. Yeah, I prefer printed books, but just think that an amazon order takes almost 3 months to get here (unless you pay fedex shipping, but after a few orders it would be cheaper to fly to the US and buy books "live").
Barring nanotechnology and smart paper, I think this would be a great use of electric Ink's product along with some embedded surface mount technology for storage/conversion to display. Memory is getting cheap enough that storing a book on chip shouldn't bee a major issue.
The sub-notebooks I've looked at are the Libretto and the new Sony picturebook. I unfortunately can't have anything larger than that, because I'm constrained by the space in my tank bag, as I commute on my motorcycle (Honda VFR800). The next two problems are that a) work won't spring for a laptop, so it comes out of my pocket, and b) I don't know that either of those laptops can withstand my agressive riding. :) So, that leaves me with a solid-state device, and I don't really care for anything bigger than a palm pilot.
:)
Actually, I don't really have a requirement for the electronic book to be something book sized. I'm perfectly happy with paper books if I want to sit down and read them back to back. I just want to have my complete reference library to be in more than one place at once - namely at work and at home. Whether my digital copy moves with me on the road or sits on my home computer doesn't much matter to me -- since I don't carry a laptop, I can't get any work done unless I'm at home or at work anyway.
Dictionary, two language dictionary, encyclopedia. Just like mp3, you can carry 100 CDs on a libretto and merely 5-7 real CD on the road, palm can carry much more than the 2 books your back can support. Think about how much easily if college students can carry a palm instead of 4 giants books to school. Actually the bricks my little cousin (jr high) carry is pathetic, I would much prefer she download a book. And those aren't elegant books either, they are not better than a glorified palm.
CY
Or by buying the 2nd Edition PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide , which comes with a CD-ROM including not only the emulator, but also licensed copies of the ROMs for various PalmOS versions. (Oh, and lots of Palm software including many e-texts.)
Much cheaper than even a used Palm if you just want to see what one might be like, and if you do buy one you have a nice book too!
There aren't all that many books written more than 75 years ago that I'd care to read.
Well the golden age of the novel is generally considered to be the 19th century, so there's no shortage of freely available things worth reading.
Not that I'm in favor of extending copyright, mind you.
e-Paper and related stories on eBookNet.com
http://www.eBookNet.com/news/99 0714/indexxerox2.htm
There is also a story coming up soon on eBookNet about a new e-reader concept device being developed by a PARC subsidiary, Uppercase. And they have a weekly Newz letter about ebooks. There is a link near the top of their main page:
http://www.ebooknet.com
It isn't as bad as you think. I once read "Anna Karenina" on my palm pilot to see how it would go. It only took a couple of days to get used to it. I also read Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown".
Still, because of the screen size, it wouldn't be my perferred reading platform. I went back to good old paper books.
The cake is a pie
e-ink (Inc.) is working on it
RocketLibrarian (for reading and is available for Macs. You can get the pre-release version here: http://www.rocket-ebo ok.com/Readers/Software/librarianPR.html And if that page changes, here's the direct link to the file: http://www.ro cket-ebook.com/Readers/Software/rl_install_1.2b5.s ea.hqx
There's an article about a speed reading software for electronic documents on eBookNet.com:
http://www.ebooknet.com/news/981207/ vortex.htm
Pretty cool stuff.
No problemo. Both Rocket eBook and SoftBook have these features. With ReB you can also underline words, highlight a word and look it up in the dictionary. EveryBook is supposed to be available in Fall '99 and will be able to display PDF. But get ready for a surprise: $1,500 for first model. Next model is "student" for "only" $900.
eBookNet has tons of info about ebooks:
http://www.ebooknet.com
I have tried both, and now that I have a Rocket eBook, I'll never go back. With the large font, I fly thru pages of text on my ReB. And, my eyes stopped hurting... ;#
The first draft of the Open eBook standards are supposed to be agreed upon by the first of September. You can find a little info here:
http://www.openebook.org
and lots of info here:
Ebooks now: an overview
announcement of Open eBook at the Ebook 98 Workshop
info about the Ebook 99 workshop in September
Open eBook details 981019
Open eBook update 990201
As a Rocket eBook owner, I can say that, while it ain't exactly a PADD, it's the closest thing to it, and for about $275 at HardwareStreet.com. Do a search on Check Rocket ebook at Shopper.com for the current cheapest price.
The screen is great. Clear and easy to read except in really bright sun. Battery lasts 20 hours or more with the backlight on. More than 40 hours without the backlight.
Feels good when I hold it. The curve for the batteries fits my hand perfectly. Almost sexy.
Copyright is no problem because the RocketLibrary server encrypts the document and keys it to each individual Rocket e-reader. The document is always encrypted, even on the e-reader. Even if you give someone a copy of the encrypted document, they can't read it because their e-reader has a different key.
Rocket eBooks have 4MB flash RAM now, enough to hold at least 10 books. But I'm sure they'll come out with a memory upgrade to 32MB or so. if so,that would let you store more than 100 books!
I read on cnet a long time ago that there would soon be a dedicated book reader, but this is a nice alternative.......now if i just had a one of these babies......
i wonder how long it will take for people to crack it?
I never liked the idea of electronic books as a replacement for printed ones. And the idea of "selling" electronic books, ugh. I like printed, nicely bound books. I guess it's kinda like the mp3 vs. CD thing though.
But if I am going to read a 700 page novel, I think doing so on a Palm-sized screen would rapidly turn me insane.
;-/
I've been reading stuff from Guttenberg on my palm, and it's not at all bad... Granted, the first 2 works were just plays (Shakespeare), but I'm now reading Plato's republic - dunno how long that is on paper, but it sure is dull
I have to agree with you on this, because I have tried it. One of the first things I tried with my Pilot (palm pro) was reading some of the Gutenberg Project's E-texts and I found the experience to be less than enjoyable. The interface is perfect for storing and recalling small, discrete snippets of information and longer reference documents (which you really only access in discrete snippets). But for "stream-oriented" data such as a lengthy novel, I want a much higher resolution than the Pilot's offering.
I also found that I went through batteries much faster, probably because I often preferred to use the backlight to read the books.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
I wonder how long it will take for people to start *buying* it?
has a DOC reader..DOC is industry standard..you can get GPLised code for it, etc etc ..why dont they use encrypted docs rather than a proprietary format ?
Yes, a Pilot may have an appropriate interface for storing a calender, phone numbers, and some notes. But if I am going to read a 700 page novel, I think doing so on a Palm-sized screen would rapidly turn me insane.
Visit World Forge for GPL'd online gaming
Lightweight, flexible, easy to read (without a backlight), and you're not down $200 if you 'em in the pool. Granted, you can't search and copy, but I read books for recreation anyway.
Anybody have any news on the 'ePaper' that PARC developed and MIT is working on?
I'll admit right off the bat that I work for NuvoMedia. We make the Rocket eBook which I think works better than either a pilot or a SoftBook for reading electronic texts. We offer strong encryption: face it, after mp3 that is the only way that publishers will feel comfortable putting their titles into electronic form. Our form factor is about the size of a large paperback, very comfortable to hold; and our screen is BEAUTIFUL. And for non-encrypted titles we have a 'virtual' e-book for the PC (winbloze only, but that may change). Check it out at the Rocket eoBook site
I just wanted to point out that there is an on going project to convert books on which the patents have run out (ie. "The origin of a species" and other classics) into digital form. These books are freely distributed in ASCII form and you can always use a doc maker to make them readable on your palm pilot. I'm in no way associated with the gutenburg project, I just wanted to point it out to those who didn't know of it. As for getting new releases I suppose the encrypted documents would be your best choice, or you could just go to the library and pick up the real thing. I always perferred real books because you can drop them, get them wet, burn them, tear their pages and other wise mangle them and the most you'll be out it is 20 bucks(unless you're talking about computer manuals, those things are damn expensive).
I have tried... The screen size and resolution is just too small
I generally like printed books over digital books, but in the future I think it will be easy to do index look-ups on digital book since you don't have to flip the pages, not to mention the fact that you could do a keyword search which you would never be able to do with a regular book.
:)
I'm also a speed reader and when I'm speed reading I use a finger pacing and page flipping technique. Maybe when digital books become more advanced I'll be able to just push the next page button and have the next page practically instantly rendered. This beats the half second it currently takes me to flip pages
Maybe they could even add a digital pacer so I wouldn't have to use finger pacing. First I would set the pace in words per minute, and it would highlight the current word in, say, red and the word before it and after it in a slightly less bright shade. And it could have a built in delay at the end of each line to account for my eyes moving to the next line.
Now, if we could only figure out a way to make digital books minimize my subvocalization (everyone knows what that is right?).
Did anyone else notice that a bunch of these books can be had for free (e.g. all of H. G. Well's books). Instead of paying 2 USD for these things, check out: http://www.memoware.com They have tons of content (e.g. fiction, technical) available for free in Doc format.
This is actually kind of old news; a SalonMag report from months ago on e-books and the Palm Pilot mentions this site--which is how I found it in the first place.
The Good: The e-books are the full text of the books in question--including an 821K The Fire Upon the Deep--at $7, one of the better buys out there. The reader is free, has good features, even including genuine italics, and there's a Java-powered converter you can get to make Peanut-readable books of your own.
They've got some good books there, too. AFUTD, works by Dickson, Silverberg, and so on. I've already bought several books through them.
They're giving away some books for free, too--including the first book in the Remo Williams Destroyer series, and a short story by some guy I've never heard of.
As soon as you buy the books, you download them. Zap, they're on your hard drive--along with the reader, in case you lost it. No shipping delays...boom, instant sync to your Palm.
The Bad: The price on these books is exactly the same as standard retail price--which isn't so bad for if the book is in paperback, as are A Fire Upon the Deep, Dickson's Necromancer and The Tactics of Mistake, and so on. $2-7 for an e-book...well, it's a little more than you'd pay through Amazon (unless you take shipping into consideration), but that's offset by the convenience of being able to slip a full-sized, thick paperback book into your pocket.
But there are also hardcover editions for sale there...for $15, $20, and so forth. And this makes no sense at all, to me. When you pay $20 for a book, you're paying for the difference between that book and paperback. Better binding, bigger pages, and so forth. But there's no such difference between a "hardcover" e-book and a "paperback" e-book. E-books are e-books.
(I can guess, of course, that the reason they do this is that the publishers don't want the e-books to steal business from the physical hardcover books, hence they price them the same. But there just aren't that many e-book readers yet--so it wouldn't really affect their sales much one way or another, and it could lead to the wrong conclusion...the publishers seeing that the e-books aren't selling very well, and deciding that people don't want them.)
There's no Peanut Reader for any platform except the Palm...which means you either get a Palm or run a Palm emulator on your desktop--and you can't run a Palm emulator until you have a Palm ROM, which you get either by buying a Palm and using a ROM reader, or signing up for the development program and going through a bunch of rigamarole to get it.
And mostly, it seems, the only books available are out of print ones--ones that print publishers have, pretty much, already abandoned. Which means there's some good books there, but not a very good selection just yet. Which is a shame.
Other e-book sites:
There are some other sites selling "real e-books" too.
Mind's Eye Publishing has some works by well-known authors, including Silverberg, Greg Costikyan, and Spider Robinson, at reasonable prices.
Alexandria Digital Literature has some e-stories by known names for sale, too, and also features a nifty-neato collaborative filtering literature recommender that really deserves more attention than it's gotten.
Online Originals sells e-books that haven't ever been published anywhere else, for $7 US each. They also have a rather interesting deal where you can buy a share in the royalties of a particular e-book for $500. It's nice that they're optimistic, at any rate.
And we shouldn't forget the Palmtop Library, which has a whole bunch of free, public-domain e-books for immediate download.
E-book reading on the Palm is nice. It'll be nicer still when there's a better selection. I want Snow Crash on my Palm, dammit! And it would be deliciously ironic to be able to read Ben Bova's Cyberbooks, a delightful satire on the publishing industry and the repercussions that occur when someone invents an e-book, as an e-book, don't you think?
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
You can find some Gutenberg e-texts at
http://www.memoware.com
Happy reading.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
So what should I do if I think the bible sucks? Just learn Hebrew and Aramaic and read it? I just kind of dislike when modern people try to take a spin on something that perhaps is not that translatable to modern life. I have some experience with what could be termed Greek culture in reading a book entitled "Zorba the Greek". While it is possible to think that the british may be dull I personally would not want to be so uninhibited as to be a fellow such as zorba. As for the homosexual thing well I am a little skeptical when people say that Abraham Lincoln was gay and such. I don't really care if people want to become homosexual now (like Stephen King says in the Gunslinger series the world moves on) however why are the british stuffy if they didn't have huge orgies in public and do something that was against their religion? This is just what was predicted by David Reisman when he said "The only followers left in the United States today are those unorganized and sometimes disorganized unfortunates who have not yet invented their own group.". What this boils down to is that you can't judge a book or a society by it's cover even in our enlightened day and age we produce some of the worst/boring dribble on the face of the planet just look at the ANSI C++ standards document or maybe a government report. I think each society evolved in its' own way and method. Perhaps this is why we now have a more liberal group in the Europeans today and had more repressive communist oriented/socialistic societies in the Eastern European countries. From chaos into order and order into chaos basic principal of math/chaos theory.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
Where a simple manual that would have sold for maybe $20+ new now sells for $32+ used etc.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
Just curious but from what I know it's always possible to get screwed in almost any country where people are out to make a buck.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
Look...they're in this to make a profit so they can stay in business, right?
Do you think they're going to discard their user-base just like that? If something new comes along in the way of the Palm, I'm sure they'll port their reader to it, if they want to stay in business--because discarding the media of the past is a sure way to piss off everyone who's ever bought from them, and drive themselves out of business.
If they go under...well, they go under. That's a chance you take buying products from any business.
As for all the people who're so upset about the files being encrypted...what the heck is your problem? Are they any less readable for the encryption? What would you do if they weren't encrypted? Are you really so upset at having to scrawl your name and number in on graffiti (or plink it in by the onscreen keyboard)? Or is it just that you want to be able to make copies for your friends, upload them to warez sites, and so forth? You people are so transparent...
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
If not they'd have to be awefully cheap to entice people to use Palm Pilot instead of just buying an actual book.
crazy dynamite monkey
Following the paradigm we should incorporate greyscale animations with sound and possibly some kind of virtual reality add on. So what if the batteries last 2.5 minutes. Do palm pilots have an AC adapter. Reminds me of a chess program for HP calculators (HP48G/GX) takes the calculator 10 minutes to calculate the next move and might just finish the game when the back up battery fails.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
I'm not all that excited about novels on an eBook sort of thing. Yeah, if the screen color and size were good, it would be ok.
What I would absolutely kill for is a way to put my ten-foot bookshelf full of technical books on an electronic device. The palm wouldn't work well for this. The screen is too small for technical documentation. But there is some future device that will be perfect.
The cake is a pie
The current version of the Peanut Reader provides this feature. Use the Menu icon and select 'Screen Orientation'.
I'd hardly call these current but it is a step in the right direction. I should be able to get the electronic book even sooner...no time to press and stuff....Has anyone used this, how does it feel on the eyes ??? Can the font be adjusted for those of use who see the world through COKE BOTTLES ??
it's true. Here are a few pages about it:
info about E-ink, Corporation
RCFoC story on e-ink
CNN story on e-ink
an expert discusses e-ink
Xerox e-paper
Polymer-based LEDs
Kent State's new cholesteric liquid crystal display
a very hexy plastic polymer display
You can find more info about e-ink, e-paper and ebooks at eBookNet.com. use the search button...
Screen - Everyone says is is much much better on the Palm V. I have to agree. I have no problem with it. I can read off it for hours.
Batteries - They are now rechargeable.
Software - I am using a program called CSpotRun (freeware) that is fine for the task. It even lets me rotate the text. (It's great rotated 90 ccw, I hold it very comforatably)
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
That's the beauty of NuvoMedia's Rocket eBook. you can rotate the display to 4 different orientations. Perfect for switching hands, reading wide or tall stuff. If you ain't readin' on a Rocket eBook, you ain't readin'.
In steps Rocket eBook which encrypts and protects each document by keying it to every individual e-reader. Even if you send a friend your file, their e-reader can display it because their e-reader has a different key...
That's why many publishers are starting to back the Rocket eBook and why they have over 1200 titles available already.
And, you can check out a virtual Rocket eBook by downloading eRocket and visiting RocketLibrary.com which has nearly 1000 free titles.
And while you're playing with your eRocket, try applying the built-in "skins" and get some new skins here.
You can even create a skin and upload it to the NuvoMedia site!
Finally, something has come out for the Palm's that would justify the purchase of one, for those who already have. Not a lot of people like to think that they bought a rather pricey piece of equipment with little or no practical value. Now Palm owners across the world can sleep easy at night. Hooray!
One word: headache.
:)
That's what you get from reading huge books on computer screens. Especially green ones with black print.
Horrible idea, at least until they start making lightweight (less than half a pound), book-sized Star Trek PADDs with refresh rates of at least 1Mhz.
anyone see that site ? they copied slashdot.
Sorry for being nitpicky, but this is something that really bugs me.
- books are copyrighted, not patented.
- inventions are patented.
- software is copyrighted, although the algorithms used may be patented.
- names are trademarked, not copyrighted or patented.
The laws for each of these are VERY different.
/peter
sounds like a stupid idea..
gimme a printed book any day.
I have over $2000 invested in my technical reference library, which consists of about 4 boxes of o'reilly and other books which are a pain to move around. When I'm logged in to work from home trying to fix some problem on the weekend, desperately attempting to avoid having to actually go to work to fix it, the last thing I want is to find out that the book I need is sitting on my shelf in the flourescent hell I'm told is called an office.
It would be nice to have all of my books on digital media. I don't care if it's my Palm IIIx, or on CD (as long as I can use it on linux or freeBSD).
But how many megs are each of my books? Would the entirely of the 2nd edition of the bat book even fit in the 4 megs in my palm pilot? Even if it would, I have dozens of books, many of which are very useful as references. I don't think I can put enough of them on one tiny Palm Pilot, at least until they come out with the 512Meg Palm LXIX.
I don't want to give up my paper books. I'd be willing to spend a few dollars extra to have the digital media in addition to the hard copy, but I wouldn't pay more than half-price for a digital-only book. Even then, it would have to be a concise reference book for me to be interested in it.
Slightly off topic, but I remember seeing a news report of some researchers who made "electronic paper". It looked like coated paper, and it was the size/thickness of paper, but the text could be electronically changed hundreds of times. Anybody else hear about this, or am I hallucinating?
I took a quick look at the strings in the binary and the binary format. strings PeanutReader.prc |less yielded some fruit. The phrase "deskey" and "deskfunc" appear. There's also references to CRC functions.
So, it looks like it takes your name and credit card#, combines them to form a DES key, and encrypts the book. The reader then decrypts the book with the info you supply it.
The idea is good. You won't give away your key because that's giving away your CC#. But, it still decrypts the data and leaves it in the clear. I imagine it's an incredibally tough thing to get the data out of the reader and into another pilot, so you can't distribute it.
Here's where "security through obscurity" comes in. If you can decrypt the data without the program they give you, something that'll spit it out in ASCII and maybe even run on Linux, then there is no protection. Someone is going to figure out how they combine your name and CC#, figure out the compression method, and figure out a little more about the header data and be able to decode them. Then, you pay for one, decrypt it, and send the text to whoever you want.
The fact that they only use 8 digits from the CC#, which happens to be the size of a DES key hints they don't even use your name. There seems to be no pattern in the text starting at 0x120, so CBC mode is probably what they used. There are a number of 8-byte blobs that would hint at being an initialization vector. With the key, assuming DES is the cipher, andthe IV, you would have everything you need to decrypt it.
But, you'd still need to decompress the data. The obvious things to try are pkzip and gzip. I bet the data is straight ASCII (or, if they're hip, unicode).
So, if it's really important to someone to crack this, I don't think it would last a week. I bet everyone who's still reading would agree with me that reading long text on the computer sucks :) I'll sign off now.
-Truly an Anonymous Coward
scared that something I said will get me in trouble.
I like the idea of e-books... carrying around 20 of my O'Reilly books in one small, lightweight device is appealing. Trying to read them on a small Palm screen... is not. I wouldn't have any problem with Softbook/Rocketbook/whatever only having one function -- book display -- as long as it does it well and becomes much cheaper. Four hundred dollars for an e-book is ridiculous. I'll consider buying one as soon as they break the $200 price barrier with no strings attached. The stuff the Palm pilot does is great, but I have no use for it, and do not wish to see an e-book attempt to reproduce that functionality. Palm's need to be small as possible without losing their functionality. E-books need to stay as big as a standard book, or they become a chore to read. -WW
--
Why are there so many Unix-using Star Trek fans?
When was the last time Picard said, "Computer, bring
There are two free books - The Destroyer #1 (Murphy/Sapir), and Nikko's Dream (Hutsko). the latter appears to be a short storie published especially for this company. The interface is not bad (2 font sizes, annotations and bookmarks, saves place in the book when you switch back and forth, etc). So far, it's worth what I paid for it :-)
I don't care how they think they're making it secure, if a PalmPilot can read it, so can a PalmPilot emulator. From there, you can either hack the emulator to get the text or do screen grabs and text recognition on perfectly accurate, identical characters. Assuming, of course, that you don't just crack the encryption and decode directly to plain text.
I don't think non-profit illegal book copying has been a big problem in the past, but it will be now. IMHO, the reason people aren't passing out many illegally copied books over the internet is that it takes so much time and effort to scan in the pages, do text recognition, and correct the errors, and also how convenient it is to just lend books you've bought (I mean, if you can share it with your friends already, who would bother scanning it?).
It's a recipe for disaster (or at least minor to moderate profit reductions) for the publishing companies, and not exactly great for the authors either.
I don't either. There's something about the tangability of books that is appealing. I like the feel of them. I like flipping the pages. I like putting them on my shelves and occasionally scanning over my favorites thinking "what do I feel like reading tonight?" And I like having them on display - and, consequently, its interesting to see what other people have on their shelves. You can't do this with electronic files.
Having said that... I'm all for electronic books. I wouldn't mind spending a nominal fee for the service of having select tittles converted to electronic form. Maybe I want the ability to electronically search a reference. Or maybe its great to have my favorite novel tucked away in my PDA for those unexpected times I need to kill a bit of time.
But the electronic version would not be a replacement for the paper. I would still want that copy on my bookshelf.
thats why mr. taco makes available the code, no? see the page about it perhaps.
while the site in question doesnt use slash, copying the format is more of an acknowledgment of its merits than a rip off.
Juln
A few years off, hard-bound books will no longer be commonplace. With better and better display technology it won't make sense to distribute books in physical form. Way down the road, I sense that actual books will become horrendously expensive, thus becoming items coveted by the wealthy, etc... At least the trees will be happy about that.
What a /. rip-off! If they were worth anything, andover.net would have to set their lawyers loose. hehe
Peanut Press has an interesting idea -- more power to them. Any know of Pilot-friendly versions of the Project Gutenberg texts?
What is strikingly similar to this is the PADD device on star trek (Personal Access Display Device). Those things are basically cheap and readily avaible as well in their world. I would never justify spending $500+ on anything just to avoid buying even the most expensive of hard cover books (maybe $300 at the most) until the cost of palm pilots comes down or the readers are cheaper I will not really care.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin