The Social Text hoax was not much of a good hoax, that people cheer for because... they agree with it.
However there are quite a bunch of big shot authors quoted in Fashionable Nonsense talking, well, crap. Where do these folks publish?
A fair critic of physicists attitude to Philosophers was when someone (from Physics) pointed out that Niels Bohr talked almost(?) as much non-sense and crap as, say, Lacan, but when Bohr did that people fell into the same "the author is so bright, it is my fault I can't follow" trap, and considered him "deep".
Philosophical journals have the same rigorous standards for papers as journals for the various sciences. Your view of philosophy is about as valid as a grizzled mountain man who mutters about hard science being all book-learnin' and mumbo-jumbo.
Do you actually believe they have rigorous standards? I do not. Not at all.
I'm even happier that I'm buying a Nook Color, then.
Isn't that LCD based?
If what you want is an e-reader, you _really_ should get something e-ink based. Get a new Kindle or anything with the new "Pearl" e-ink (Sony also has readers using it).
I own a Kindle and I love many of its conveniences (adjustable font size, no need of physical space for storing books etc). But cracking the DRM is cumbersome enough that I still didn't bother. You need a Windows machine, an older version of of the Kindle For PC.
I would like to post my dissenting view of e-books and e-readers.
I've been using Linux for 15+ years, I know exactly what DRM is, and yet I love my Kindle.
My experience with book, e-books, and the DRM in the Kindle:
For starters, the lack of physical space in my house for even more books had -for a number of years- made me buy less books than what I would otherwise. Formulating in a different way: the price of space in my house is a lot higher than any extra cost I might incur due to DRM.
Almost all books I bought and used in university are all in boxes... in a different continent than the one I live at.
people that don't move much perhaps don't appreciate this in its full truth but moving boxes full of books is a PITA. I moved a lot in the last 10 years...
That article is wrong. It says "DRM will be broken". No, DRM has been broken for a number of years. The kindle format is hackable (if you use this old Kindle for windows version), encripted EPUB is supposed to be easy as well. Honestly, while I should crack my kindle files and backup, I still didn't bother.
most people complaining about e-readers seem to be bitching about a product they never used or took the time to properly evaluate the benefits.
Immediate dictionary look-ups improve my reading quality (specially when reading in a non native language).
Taking notes is a pain, but my kindle notes are probably the first ones I won't lose in week.
Adjusting font size is another life saver.
carrying my whole library with me while traveling is a huge comfort.
a small plus point is that when I travel, my touristic guides are not separate books anymore, but stuff I can access from the Kindle app in my phone.
DRM sucks, and as e-books get mainstream it will probably go down, or it will have to get more consumer friendly. Yet, even nowdays the advantage of digital files far outstrip the DRM issue.
Precisely. These kind of projections invariably fail to take into account even the most basic ideas about supply and demand. As we begin to run lower on a given resource it becomes increasingly more viable to recycle it or look for alternatives.
A bunch of hungry economists locked up in a cellar will not create sandwiches out of thin air. When economy meets laws of physics, guess who wins?
I'm not sure about that. If Google denied (some) control the the carriers, where else could they go? Symbian cannot compete. Windows7 was still 1 or 2 years away, and Microsoft is controlling customization a lot more than Google
If it does support video chat, that would make the yet unreleased Desire HD a lot less attractive. Somewhat outdated even before its release. A bit like my G1 released without 3.5mm headset output.
FWIW, I don't think video chat is support (no mention of it anywhere), but I suppose it should be coming soon
I never said that the Kindle supported EPUB. My point is that for epub without DRM this is a non-issue.
As I said, I don't know of a single e-book vendor selling epub without DRM that doesn't sell a mobi version as well.
The fact, that there are converters in the wild, that can convert between formats, doesn't make Kindle "support" mentioned formats.
Read the post I was responding to. The guy already uses Calibre, so that fact that calibre will convert the (open) epub automatically when tell it to put the e-book in the Kindle is pertinent to him.
If you don't want to use Calibre you can use Amazon's free conversion service by emailing the book to "[username]@free.kindle.com".
The problem is that you're not enough of a sucker.
The problem is that you are too much of a Luddite to rationally & honestly consider the advantages that e-books have to paper books. Most probably because you seem to be under impression that e-books == "DRM'ed e-books".
Imagine, 50 years from now, a kid goes up to the attic and sees a Kindle with a cracked screen, broken navigation keys, and a dead battery. It is junk. Imagine the same kid in the attic uncovering boxes full of books, dozens of them, with pictures, diagrams, stories, plans, photos, etc. Which is the better outcome?
What about the costs and inconvenience of storing and transporting all those boxes full of books for 50 years?
I suppose you also print all your digital photos? As backup strategy for your children & grandchildren? "I will carry and store all these boxes full of printouts for the next 50 years, so that a kid can discover them in a attic"??
I've moved about 4 times in the last 10 years, when my wife moved in with me, she brought several boxes of books that were in a box since the last time she had moved...
Not everyone lives in suburban USA to have an attic to store all the "stuff" (i.e. trash) you don't use, don't need, but won't throw away.
Actually the only reader I know of that isn't (mostly) open is the Kindle. Both the Nook and the Sony Readers take the open.epub formats natively
This is non-sense. When people complain that the kindle doesn't handle EPUB, they mean DRM'ed EPUB. The real problem with the lack of DRM epub on the Kindle are public libraries lending DRM'ed epub, and other shops only selling in DRM'ed epub.
The kindle takes.mobi files, and DRM'ed mobi (.azw I think). The Sony and other readers take several formats but are mostly optimized for unencrypted epub, and DRM'ed epub. The whole deal is about which DRM scheme works on each, and which shop sells on that DRM format.
Back and forth conversion between non-DRM mobi and epub is trivial. All shops I know of selling books without DRM also sell the books in.mobi for the Kindle, and if they didn't epub to mobi is, as I've said, trivial.
Its not because he's rich, its because its his own fucking plane and quite honestly he should be able to do whatever he wants to with his own property, just like there are rules in buses and taxis that don't apply to your own personal cars.
So would you argue that a very rich person should be allowed to carry whatever he wants in a private plane, say, in the US?
I can imagine that a very rich saudi (Osama Bin Laden) would agree to pay for such a plane, while some recruits of his board the plane with guns (or box cutters), to later surrender the pilot, and crash the plane. I mean, according to you, being it a private plane, these fellow friends of mister Osama should have the right to carry anything into the plane since they are paying for it.
If you don't think that these folks should have the right to board private planes carrying prohibited items, why do you think Jobs has that right?
I really do not see what is so special about Ubuntu. As far as having a user friendly desktop is concerned, Mandriva is better and Mepis and others at least as good.
Because Ubuntu's marketing is better than Mandrake/Mandriva ever was, so users actually know about it. Some 5, 8 years ago loads of people wanted a Linux desktop. Mandrake had it, but everyone installed "server oriented" Redhat or Suse, because those were the names they knew.
Besides Cannonical/Ubuntu went out of their way to give anyone a ISO file, back in the day, if you wanted Mandrake (Mandriva, now) they wouldn't just give you an ISO. So Ubuntu came along and really took the crown, despite the years of head-start that Mandrake/Mandriva had.
The times they are a'changing. Why should anyone want to pay $295/yr for something they used to get in printed form at $58/yr, assuming one bought a new edition of the OED once every twenty years?
Much like there are consumer versions of any given product, there are also professional quality versions that have much higher standards and much higher costs. The OED (individual) subscription probably only sells to people that use it as part of their work. What you buy with the digital subscription are the yearly updates and the convenience of checking words from your computer. Again for people that use it for work, this is a major time saver.
People that buy the OED, buy it because the need the very best, assuming that these same people only need a dictionary update every 20 years is nothing but flawed.
Publishers might be looking at enriched or enhanced ebooks as their new big-ticket items to replace hardcovers. But the major ebook retailer, Amazon, isn't set up for video. Kindle isn't even able to do color yet. That leaves Apple, and according to my numbers Apple is a very small part of the ebook market. I sell 200 ebooks a day on Kindle. On iPad, I sell 100 a month.
The trick AFAIK is to run out of battery, and then leave the phone OFF and connected to a charger the whole night.
Android will gauge the battery stats when rebooting. If you reboot with an half empty battery, it may get confused. (XDA had some threads explaining this in detail)
So, I have books on my shelf from the 1960s. Sure, they're old and tattered but still readable. What happens if Amazon goes out of business in 30 years and my Kindle is dead? What if I buy a Nook and Barnes and Noble goes out of business in 15 years?
You should also factor the fact that these books are being kept in shelfs for decades. It costs space. I moved a lot in recent years, the less boxes full of books, the better.
DRM is a problem, but please don't overlook the advantages of going digital. You can't adjust the font size of any of your "tattered but still readable" books.
-- I moved 3 times in the last 8 years. I will probably move again in 3 years time. The less boxes full of books, the better. -- I love being able to adjust the font sizes of any book I read; -- I don't take 10 books with me during my vacations anymore, just 1 reader. While on vacation, I can easily buy from a _huge_ selection of books. -- I am learning French. After buying a French-English dictionary, all I need to do is to select a word in order to do a dictionary look-up.
If it takes buying a new reader every 3-5 years (with an yet better screen) in order to have the above convenience, I am all for it.
The ability to buy books on the fly (or get free public domain books) is also very handy.
I second this as well. The convenience and comfort of shopping/downloading books from the reader itself (without even bothering with wifi!) is something I underestimated until I actually experienced it.
Does the DX handle PDFs better than the regular Kindle (or Nook, or any other reader I've tried)? I noticed that most of them mangle PDFs pretty badly, and the original Kindle had a very hard time with scaling them to be readable.
I never used a Nook or Kindle (6") so I can't compare.
The PDFs I loaded into my DX (DX Graphite) so far are CS scientific papers. These are generally well behaved PDFs, and without fancy vector graphics effects. Any PDF reader normally renders them easily.
What did amaze me was how the whole A4 sized page fitted well into the DX without problems.
What all Kindles lack is reflowing PDFs if necessary. PDF reflow was a deal breaker when I only had my 6" Hanlin v3, now with the DX it's less of a problem, but it would still be nice to have.
When I go into a person's home, there is nothing I like seeing more than a large bookcase full of books. Even just a few shelves is cool. Perhaps it's nosy, but I can't help but peruse their shelves (and form an opinion on them based on what I find). I'm always excited to see one or more of my favorite books, or books on a favorite subject of mine.
Same here. I think that for as long as the book is displayed in a shelf in the living room, there is nothing nosy about it.
I don't think we will get to peruse through Kindle's of folks we are just visiting (as opposed to close friends). At the same time, an e-reader could make it easier for you to post "reading Foo" at Facebook/Twitter/Buzz.
Slashdot Mirror
The Social Text hoax was not much of a good hoax, that people cheer for because... they agree with it.
However there are quite a bunch of big shot authors quoted in Fashionable Nonsense talking, well, crap. Where do these folks publish?
A fair critic of physicists attitude to Philosophers was when someone (from Physics) pointed out that Niels Bohr talked almost(?) as much non-sense and crap as, say, Lacan, but when Bohr did that people fell into the same "the author is so bright, it is my fault I can't follow" trap, and considered him "deep".
Philosophical journals have the same rigorous standards for papers as journals for the various sciences. Your view of philosophy is about as valid as a grizzled mountain man who mutters about hard science being all book-learnin' and mumbo-jumbo.
Do you actually believe they have rigorous standards? I do not. Not at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
I'm even happier that I'm buying a Nook Color, then.
Isn't that LCD based?
If what you want is an e-reader, you _really_ should get something e-ink based. Get a new Kindle or anything with the new "Pearl" e-ink (Sony also has readers using it).
Mod Parent up.
I own a Kindle and I love many of its conveniences (adjustable font size, no need of physical space for storing books etc). But cracking the DRM is cumbersome enough that I still didn't bother. You need a Windows machine, an older version of of the Kindle For PC.
I would like to post my dissenting view of e-books and e-readers.
I've been using Linux for 15+ years, I know exactly what DRM is, and yet I love my Kindle.
My experience with book, e-books, and the DRM in the Kindle:
DRM sucks, and as e-books get mainstream it will probably go down, or it will have to get more consumer friendly. Yet, even nowdays the advantage of digital files far outstrip the DRM issue.
YMMV.
Precisely. These kind of projections invariably fail to take into account even the most basic ideas about supply and demand. As we begin to run lower on a given resource it becomes increasingly more viable to recycle it or look for alternatives.
A bunch of hungry economists locked up in a cellar will not create sandwiches out of thin air. When economy meets laws of physics, guess who wins?
I'm not sure about that. If Google denied (some) control the the carriers, where else could they go? Symbian cannot compete. Windows7 was still 1 or 2 years away, and Microsoft is controlling customization a lot more than Google
If it does support video chat, that would make the yet unreleased Desire HD a lot less attractive. Somewhat outdated even before its release. A bit like my G1 released without 3.5mm headset output.
FWIW, I don't think video chat is support (no mention of it anywhere), but I suppose it should be coming soon
The Skype official blog says 2.1 is required...
Perhaps you have the wildfire whose screen definition is too low for the Skype app? Or you don't have Android 2.1?
I have a G1 running Cyanogen 6.? (i.e. Android 2.2) in France and could just install it.
I never said that the Kindle supported EPUB. My point is that for epub without DRM this is a non-issue.
As I said, I don't know of a single e-book vendor selling epub without DRM that doesn't sell a mobi version as well.
The fact, that there are converters in the wild, that can convert between formats, doesn't make Kindle "support" mentioned formats.
Read the post I was responding to. The guy already uses Calibre, so that fact that calibre will convert the (open) epub automatically when tell it to put the e-book in the Kindle is pertinent to him.
If you don't want to use Calibre you can use Amazon's free conversion service by emailing the book to "[username]@free.kindle.com".
The problem is that you're not enough of a sucker.
The problem is that you are too much of a Luddite to rationally & honestly consider the advantages that e-books have to paper books. Most probably because you seem to be under impression that e-books == "DRM'ed e-books".
Imagine, 50 years from now, a kid goes up to the attic and sees a Kindle with a cracked screen, broken navigation keys, and a dead battery. It is junk. Imagine the same kid in the attic uncovering boxes full of books, dozens of them, with pictures, diagrams, stories, plans, photos, etc. Which is the better outcome?
What about the costs and inconvenience of storing and transporting all those boxes full of books for 50 years?
I suppose you also print all your digital photos? As backup strategy for your children & grandchildren? "I will carry and store all these boxes full of printouts for the next 50 years, so that a kid can discover them in a attic"??
I've moved about 4 times in the last 10 years, when my wife moved in with me, she brought several boxes of books that were in a box since the last time she had moved...
Not everyone lives in suburban USA to have an attic to store all the "stuff" (i.e. trash) you don't use, don't need, but won't throw away.
Actually the only reader I know of that isn't (mostly) open is the Kindle. Both the Nook and the Sony Readers take the open .epub formats natively
This is non-sense. When people complain that the kindle doesn't handle EPUB, they mean DRM'ed EPUB. The real problem with the lack of DRM epub on the Kindle are public libraries lending DRM'ed epub, and other shops only selling in DRM'ed epub.
The kindle takes .mobi files, and DRM'ed mobi (.azw I think). The Sony and other readers take several formats but are mostly optimized for unencrypted epub, and DRM'ed epub. The whole deal is about which DRM scheme works on each, and which shop sells on that DRM format.
Back and forth conversion between non-DRM mobi and epub is trivial. All shops I know of selling books without DRM also sell the books in .mobi for the Kindle, and if they didn't epub to mobi is, as I've said, trivial.
But notice that a ratings squabble gets prime coverage and Anand's championship win was ignored?
Probably because people here have more interest in algorithms than in chess itself?
Its not because he's rich, its because its his own fucking plane and quite honestly he should be able to do whatever he wants to with his own property, just like there are rules in buses and taxis that don't apply to your own personal cars.
So would you argue that a very rich person should be allowed to carry whatever he wants in a private plane, say, in the US?
I can imagine that a very rich saudi (Osama Bin Laden) would agree to pay for such a plane, while some recruits of his board the plane with guns (or box cutters), to later surrender the pilot, and crash the plane. I mean, according to you, being it a private plane, these fellow friends of mister Osama should have the right to carry anything into the plane since they are paying for it.
If you don't think that these folks should have the right to board private planes carrying prohibited items, why do you think Jobs has that right?
I really do not see what is so special about Ubuntu. As far as having a user friendly desktop is concerned, Mandriva is better and Mepis and others at least as good.
Because Ubuntu's marketing is better than Mandrake/Mandriva ever was, so users actually know about it. Some 5, 8 years ago loads of people wanted a Linux desktop. Mandrake had it, but everyone installed "server oriented" Redhat or Suse, because those were the names they knew.
Besides Cannonical/Ubuntu went out of their way to give anyone a ISO file, back in the day, if you wanted Mandrake (Mandriva, now) they wouldn't just give you an ISO. So Ubuntu came along and really took the crown, despite the years of head-start that Mandrake/Mandriva had.
And if nothing else, I like knowing that in 100 years, my descendants would still be able to use it, even if it will be a little dated by then.
If nothing else, I pity whoever has to carry such an amount of dead trees every time they move to a new place.
(oh, the beauty of e-readers).
The times they are a'changing. Why should anyone want to pay $295/yr for something they used to get in printed form at $58/yr, assuming one bought a new edition of the OED once every twenty years?
Much like there are consumer versions of any given product, there are also professional quality versions that have much higher standards and much higher costs. The OED (individual) subscription probably only sells to people that use it as part of their work. What you buy with the digital subscription are the yearly updates and the convenience of checking words from your computer. Again for people that use it for work, this is a major time saver.
People that buy the OED, buy it because the need the very best, assuming that these same people only need a dictionary update every 20 years is nothing but flawed.
Anecdotal evidence from at least one author doing self publishing puts the Kindle selling 60x more than Apple's ibook:
Publishers might be looking at enriched or enhanced ebooks as their new big-ticket items to replace hardcovers. But the major ebook retailer, Amazon, isn't set up for video. Kindle isn't even able to do color yet. That leaves Apple, and according to my numbers Apple is a very small part of the ebook market. I sell 200 ebooks a day on Kindle. On iPad, I sell 100 a month.
Howzat? Apple is offering more competitive terms to publishers
Define competitive. So they don't have to compete by price? Having all books at $10-$15?
Amazon also has a deal where publishers get 70% of the pie. But in that case the price range of the books is set lower.
In any case, this is not a Free market, not as far as the readers are concerned:
http://www.techradar.com/news/portable-devices/other-devices/apple-and-amazon-slammed-for-e-book-pricing-707275?src=rss&attr=all
The trick AFAIK is to run out of battery, and then leave the phone OFF and connected to a charger the whole night.
Android will gauge the battery stats when rebooting. If you reboot with an half empty battery, it may get confused. (XDA had some threads explaining this in detail)
So, I have books on my shelf from the 1960s. Sure, they're old and tattered but still readable. What happens if Amazon goes out of business in 30 years and my Kindle is dead? What if I buy a Nook and Barnes and Noble goes out of business in 15 years?
You should also factor the fact that these books are being kept in shelfs for decades. It costs space. I moved a lot in recent years, the less boxes full of books, the better.
DRM is a problem, but please don't overlook the advantages of going digital. You can't adjust the font size of any of your "tattered but still readable" books.
-- I moved 3 times in the last 8 years. I will probably move again in 3 years time. The less boxes full of books, the better.
-- I love being able to adjust the font sizes of any book I read;
-- I don't take 10 books with me during my vacations anymore, just 1 reader. While on vacation, I can easily buy from a _huge_ selection of books.
-- I am learning French. After buying a French-English dictionary, all I need to do is to select a word in order to do a dictionary look-up.
If it takes buying a new reader every 3-5 years (with an yet better screen) in order to have the above convenience, I am all for it.
The ability to buy books on the fly (or get free public domain books) is also very handy.
I second this as well. The convenience and comfort of shopping/downloading books from the reader itself (without even bothering with wifi!) is something I underestimated until I actually experienced it.
Does the DX handle PDFs better than the regular Kindle (or Nook, or any other reader I've tried)? I noticed that most of them mangle PDFs pretty badly, and the original Kindle had a very hard time with scaling them to be readable.
I never used a Nook or Kindle (6") so I can't compare.
The PDFs I loaded into my DX (DX Graphite) so far are CS scientific papers. These are generally well behaved PDFs, and without fancy vector graphics effects. Any PDF reader normally renders them easily.
What did amaze me was how the whole A4 sized page fitted well into the DX without problems.
What all Kindles lack is reflowing PDFs if necessary. PDF reflow was a deal breaker when I only had my 6" Hanlin v3, now with the DX it's less of a problem, but it would still be nice to have.
When I go into a person's home, there is nothing I like seeing more than a large bookcase full of books. Even just a few shelves is cool. Perhaps it's nosy, but I can't help but peruse their shelves (and form an opinion on them based on what I find). I'm always excited to see one or more of my favorite books, or books on a favorite subject of mine.
Same here. I think that for as long as the book is displayed in a shelf in the living room, there is nothing nosy about it.
I don't think we will get to peruse through Kindle's of folks we are just visiting (as opposed to close friends). At the same time, an e-reader could make it easier for you to post "reading Foo" at Facebook/Twitter/Buzz.