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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.
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
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
But that's the same thing that makes it so odd. The publisher negotiates with the author for a certain amount per book text (or whatever they negotiate), regardless of distribution method. The costs for distribution and production of an electronic book are lower (since there's no middle man and a small cost of distribution), yet the book costs the same amount. Your argument is a good answer to "Why do books cost money" but not one for "Why do electronic books cost more than paper ones". There's probably more profit in each electronic book sold, but I doubt the author sees it. Or maybe they do. Anybody know?