Everyone has the right to his own opinion, of course, but it's a shame that you feel that way.
In my experience, I've found that books of whatever form are like...hmm...cartoons or movies. When they play them real slow, you can't help but notice that they're just sheets of celluloid with still images printed on them. But...if you play it fast enough, thanks to persistence of vision, that image starts moving, and you don't see the celluloid anymore, just the motion of the picture.
Books are like that with me, whether paper or electronic. Once the words start flowing and I'm sucked into the fantasy world lurking behind the words, it doesn't matter to me anymore what I'm reading it from...the physical format vanishes (along with the outside world, and whatever sense of time I might have had).
Ebooks let me carry a whole lot more of that fantasy world experience with me: hundreds of books in the amount of space that would be taken up by one Gideon New Testament. For that kind of literary portability, I'll gladly sacrifice some of the reliability of a paper book...I read very fast, and I'd just as soon not run out of reading.
And that doesn't even get into the fact that, thanks to Blackmask, I can electronically read a whole bunch of out-of-copyright stuff that I couldn't even find in paper format. Dozens of Doc Savage pulp novels. Hundreds of The Shadow.
To each his own, I suppose...but I can't help feeling like you're missing out.
Some of your conditions are almost reasonable, but others are less so.
I would buy ebooks if:
1. The ebook readers looked and felt like a book. Meaning they would have the same shape, size, and weight of a book (perhaps with different sizes ranging from small paperback size to 8x11 hardcover size, depending on the preference of the customer), with a cover that looks like a book. When I open the cover, I should see two screens, similar to how I would see two pages when I open a book. That way I'll be able to relax and read it on the sofa just like reading a regular book.
You do realize that the LCD screen for PDAs and ebook readers accounts for something like 90% of their cost, right? How much do you think it would cost for such a device with two? Maybe when digital paper comes out in a few years we might see something like that...
It doesn't seem to make much sense to me to want a two-page reader anyway. You're only going to be reading one page at a time.
2. Ebooks would cost at least 30% less than their paper counterparts. They aren't going to sell much if the savings in printing and distribution aren't passed on to consumers.
Some ebooks do. Baen Webscriptions, for example. And Palm Digital Media typically marks its ebooks down over the cost of the paper version (though in some cases, that paper version is the hardcover...but their prices generally do go down when the paperback comes out).
3. Ebook readers would cost less than $150.
You can get some of the low-end Palms and Clies in that price range, and they make great e-readers.
4. Ebook readers could hold over 100 average books. I really wish I didn't have to have bookcases that took up so much space. When I was in school I would have really preferred to carry one ebook reader instead of lugging around a backpack with 40 pounds of books.
Two words: Memory Card. I've got a 64 meg memory stick in my Clie that will hold at least a couple of hundred average-sized books (depending on their size).
5. You could highlight a segment or page(s) of text and transmit it to your computer or a standard printer.
With Baen's ebooks and a web browser, you can do that from your computer. It'll probably have to wait a few years before that capacity comes to a handheld within your price range, though.
6. An industry standard format existed for ebooks or at least a small number of standards that could be implemented by every ebook reader.
My Palm and my desktop computers do every single format I care to mess around with--Palm Reader, HTML/iSilo, PalmDoc. I could even do MobiPocket or Embiid if I wanted to, but I don't want to. Of course, I couldn't do Microsoft Reader on my Palm...but I have yet to see any MS-Reader-exclusive title I cared enough about for that to feel like a problem.
There are a few readers that do satisfy one or more of the above, but I don't find ebooks worth it unless all the conditions are met.
You should. It was a wonderfully witty satire on the publishing industry in general (where readers are paid not to read, and the publishing industry has to take back used merchandise at full cost, and so on), as well as predicting several things about ebooks that have more or less come to pass. The Amazon link Haxalot provided should be able to find you a decent used copy of it. (I find it sadly ironic, though, that Cyberbooks isn't yet available in paperback.)
One thing that it didn't predict accurately, which I find sadly ironic, is that in the book, the publishing industry saw the ebook as the greatest threat to its welfare, threatening to put almost everyone in the printing industry out of a job. If only the ebook were such an instant success in real life--where, if the publishing industry sees ebooks as a threat, it's largely because people are ripping them off of its paper books.
To use an analogy, this article is like saying because the bottom fell out of the dot-com market, the idea of doing business on the Internet is doomed.
Of course ebooks aren't selling in the same scale as paperbacks! We're still in the age of the early adopter. The tech isn't yet mature enough to attract the average reader. That doesn't mean it won't ever be. The article itself admits that the number of buyers of ebooks is increasing, just not as fast as they'd hoped.
Just let the price of reading solutions fall by a factor of ten or so while the resolution and clarity of available screens approach that of paper and the same sources that are bemoaning how few people buy ebooks will be stunned at how many people are.
Can't do that. For security reasons, it doesn't take non-local (i.e., not from the college campus on which it physically resides) SMTP connections. The admin is rather security conscious; I have to tunnel through ssh just to pop my mail down.
Baker didn't even make it as a claim. It's right there in the original article (the one this story links to misquotes him) that he was giving his opinion.
Speaking of Tom Baker, a couple of recent links: an mp3 of Tom fooling around with a commercial voiceover that's been circulating on the blogs lately, and another website with some Dr. Who prank calls, comedy skits, and also that aforementioned outtakes mp3.
And some of us have other reasons for spoofing our from addresses. For instance, the box on which I get all my mail, to which all my mailing list subscriptions go, and which is associated with my online identity everywhere I have one...is located halfway across the continent from me. It's neither my home Linux box, nor my local ISP. I keep it that way because I never know if I might need to change ISPs for some reasons, and that box is always up and always there. I use fetchmail to pull down my email.
But as a matter of course, I have mutt configured on my desktop box to send in the name of my halfway-across-the-country account, even though it sends through my ISP's SMTP server. (It used to send through my home Linux box's own SMTP server, but then a lot of addresses started bouncing it because it was on a list of cablemodem IPs.) How would I be able to continue doing this under such a system?
I've never seen much point in spending a zillion dollars on something as small and easy to lose as a pen. (Unless you could get one with a built-in GPS tracker that would alert you when someone walked off with it.) My pen-du-jour can be found in the stationery section of Wal-mart or K-Mart, and my requirements are simply black ink, rollerball (easier to push than ballpoint), dries fast (I'm a leftie), 0.7mm head (to leave a nice solid black line). Also good is having a window in the side so you can tell how much ink is left.
The pen currently in my pocket is a Pentel EnerGel 0.7mm liquid gel pen. I've also been known to use Pilot V.07 rollerball pens, but they can leak sometimes.
I'm pretty sure that I've seen catalogs for years from gee-whiz electronic gadget stores like Dak selling cassette decks that offered the ability to double-speed-play and downpitch recordings, claiming that this had been proven to make studying easier. Looks like someone's reinvented the wheel.
If I had mod points, I sure would pump this one up.
It's not like there's much else the tv folks can do, what with TiVo coming around. Without ad revenue, there's no way they can put on their shows. And as more and more people take advantage of the technology to skip the ads, the ads become less attractive to advertisers, and less profitable to the network. They've got to find some way to pay for the shows we watch.
Did anybody notice that the description of what the computer program does is awfully similar, allowing for humorous exaggeration in the books, to that decision-justifying computer program mentioned in one of the Dirk Gently books?
When you're looking back from 40,000 years in the future, the few days between man first walking on the moon (December 1969) and the Unix epoch (1/1/1970) fades away into a zillion decimal places. Given that the Julian calendar probably isn't even in use anymore that far away, it seems to me that it's eminently reasonable they tag the zero-time to the nearest historically significant event, and perhaps even that they assume that event, rather than some arbitrary calendar date, was the reason.
Heck, the person who said it went back that far--and I think it was actually in A Deepness in the Sky, not A Fire Upon the Deep--may have just been consciously oversimplifying it for his audience at the time. He wasn't necessarily a reliable narrator.
No, in AFUTD, Ravna believes--and, in a moment of pique, tells Pham she believes, and why it's very likely--that Pham's memories were false...but at a certain point in the book, Pham discovers that they were all true after all.
I considered pointing out the inconsistencies in the review (as between my starting & finishing it I got to read "The Blabber") but decided that would be going too far afield.
I found some of the differences and inconsistencies quite telling, especially after reading the annotated FUtD with its behind-the-scenes look at how everything worked. (For instance, how "The Blabber" conflates Jefri, Pham, and Amdi into a single person.) The Zones as depicted in "The Blabber" are the "first draft" of the idea, pretty much...and in the subsequent novels, the ideas expanded and changed. I'm glad that Vinge didn't let "The Blabber" constrain him when he wrote Fire, as the expansion and alteration of the ideas has been almost entirely for the better.
(For instance, even as far as beginning writing on Fire, Vinge had originally intended Jefri to have the mathematical prowess that was later bestowed on Amdi instead. And there's some deleted/altered text from the end of Fire which gave one of the characters a slightly different fate...)
When I originally wrote the review, there was a link to the image of Jefri and Flenser that was originally on the Hugo/Neb CDROM...but I screwed up the link when I searched and replaced all the underscores to italicize the title. Oops.
I know that Palm Digital Media is only too happy to release the books unencrypted if the author/publisher requests it that way. (Seth Godin's Spreading the Ideavirus is unencrypted, for instance.) If Vinge (or his publisher) didn't want it encrypted, they had only to say so.
...is the telemarketing industry's reaction to this list. From the way they're behaving, they seem to believe that if the do-not-call list is blocked, then all fifty million people on that list will magically want to receive telemarketing phone calls again, and be happy to buy from telemarketers.
If I were running a telemarketing business, I'd think I would be glad for that list, as it means fewer negative prospects and thus a higher percentage of sales.
So...could that be a defense to being sued by the RIAA, I wonder? "But...I use an Apple. I couldn't run Kazaa!" (Nudges Virtual PC and Windows 2000 boxes under the sofa with foot.)
(This is my 1000th Slashdot comment! Happy anniversary to me!)
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Given that the LCD screen is something like 90% of the cost of PDAs & ebook readers these days, I think you're probably right.
Everyone has the right to his own opinion, of course, but it's a shame that you feel that way.
In my experience, I've found that books of whatever form are like...hmm...cartoons or movies. When they play them real slow, you can't help but notice that they're just sheets of celluloid with still images printed on them. But...if you play it fast enough, thanks to persistence of vision, that image starts moving, and you don't see the celluloid anymore, just the motion of the picture.
Books are like that with me, whether paper or electronic. Once the words start flowing and I'm sucked into the fantasy world lurking behind the words, it doesn't matter to me anymore what I'm reading it from...the physical format vanishes (along with the outside world, and whatever sense of time I might have had).
Ebooks let me carry a whole lot more of that fantasy world experience with me: hundreds of books in the amount of space that would be taken up by one Gideon New Testament. For that kind of literary portability, I'll gladly sacrifice some of the reliability of a paper book...I read very fast, and I'd just as soon not run out of reading.
And that doesn't even get into the fact that, thanks to Blackmask, I can electronically read a whole bunch of out-of-copyright stuff that I couldn't even find in paper format. Dozens of Doc Savage pulp novels. Hundreds of The Shadow.
To each his own, I suppose...but I can't help feeling like you're missing out.
Some of your conditions are almost reasonable, but others are less so.
I would buy ebooks if:
1. The ebook readers looked and felt like a book. Meaning they would have the same shape, size, and weight of a book (perhaps with different sizes ranging from small paperback size to 8x11 hardcover size, depending on the preference of the customer), with a cover that looks like a book. When I open the cover, I should see two screens, similar to how I would see two pages when I open a book. That way I'll be able to relax and read it on the sofa just like reading a regular book.
You do realize that the LCD screen for PDAs and ebook readers accounts for something like 90% of their cost, right? How much do you think it would cost for such a device with two? Maybe when digital paper comes out in a few years we might see something like that...
It doesn't seem to make much sense to me to want a two-page reader anyway. You're only going to be reading one page at a time.
2. Ebooks would cost at least 30% less than their paper counterparts. They aren't going to sell much if the savings in printing and distribution aren't passed on to consumers.
Some ebooks do. Baen Webscriptions, for example. And Palm Digital Media typically marks its ebooks down over the cost of the paper version (though in some cases, that paper version is the hardcover...but their prices generally do go down when the paperback comes out).
3. Ebook readers would cost less than $150.
You can get some of the low-end Palms and Clies in that price range, and they make great e-readers.
4. Ebook readers could hold over 100 average books. I really wish I didn't have to have bookcases that took up so much space. When I was in school I would have really preferred to carry one ebook reader instead of lugging around a backpack with 40 pounds of books.
Two words: Memory Card. I've got a 64 meg memory stick in my Clie that will hold at least a couple of hundred average-sized books (depending on their size).
5. You could highlight a segment or page(s) of text and transmit it to your computer or a standard printer.
With Baen's ebooks and a web browser, you can do that from your computer. It'll probably have to wait a few years before that capacity comes to a handheld within your price range, though.
6. An industry standard format existed for ebooks or at least a small number of standards that could be implemented by every ebook reader.
My Palm and my desktop computers do every single format I care to mess around with--Palm Reader, HTML/iSilo, PalmDoc. I could even do MobiPocket or Embiid if I wanted to, but I don't want to. Of course, I couldn't do Microsoft Reader on my Palm...but I have yet to see any MS-Reader-exclusive title I cared enough about for that to feel like a problem.
There are a few readers that do satisfy one or more of the above, but I don't find ebooks worth it unless all the conditions are met.
A few more years, and maybe we'll see...
(I find it sadly ironic, though, that Cyberbooks isn't yet available in paperback.)
Isn't available in ebook. I meant in ebook. I don't know where my brain was. Off reading some ebook somewhere, I guess.
You should. It was a wonderfully witty satire on the publishing industry in general (where readers are paid not to read, and the publishing industry has to take back used merchandise at full cost, and so on), as well as predicting several things about ebooks that have more or less come to pass. The Amazon link Haxalot provided should be able to find you a decent used copy of it. (I find it sadly ironic, though, that Cyberbooks isn't yet available in paperback.)
One thing that it didn't predict accurately, which I find sadly ironic, is that in the book, the publishing industry saw the ebook as the greatest threat to its welfare, threatening to put almost everyone in the printing industry out of a job. If only the ebook were such an instant success in real life--where, if the publishing industry sees ebooks as a threat, it's largely because people are ripping them off of its paper books.
To use an analogy, this article is like saying because the bottom fell out of the dot-com market, the idea of doing business on the Internet is doomed.
Of course ebooks aren't selling in the same scale as paperbacks! We're still in the age of the early adopter. The tech isn't yet mature enough to attract the average reader. That doesn't mean it won't ever be. The article itself admits that the number of buyers of ebooks is increasing, just not as fast as they'd hoped.
Just let the price of reading solutions fall by a factor of ten or so while the resolution and clarity of available screens approach that of paper and the same sources that are bemoaning how few people buy ebooks will be stunned at how many people are.
They've lost my business with that whole copy-protection thing.
:)
I'm never going to pirate Turbotax again.
Can't do that. For security reasons, it doesn't take non-local (i.e., not from the college campus on which it physically resides) SMTP connections. The admin is rather security conscious; I have to tunnel through ssh just to pop my mail down.
Can't do that. It doesn't take non-local SMTP connections, for security reasons. I have to tunnel through SSH just to pop my mail down.
Baker didn't even make it as a claim. It's right there in the original article (the one this story links to misquotes him) that he was giving his opinion.
Speaking of Tom Baker, a couple of recent links: an mp3 of Tom fooling around with a commercial voiceover that's been circulating on the blogs lately, and another website with some Dr. Who prank calls, comedy skits, and also that aforementioned outtakes mp3.
And some of us have other reasons for spoofing our from addresses. For instance, the box on which I get all my mail, to which all my mailing list subscriptions go, and which is associated with my online identity everywhere I have one...is located halfway across the continent from me. It's neither my home Linux box, nor my local ISP. I keep it that way because I never know if I might need to change ISPs for some reasons, and that box is always up and always there. I use fetchmail to pull down my email.
But as a matter of course, I have mutt configured on my desktop box to send in the name of my halfway-across-the-country account, even though it sends through my ISP's SMTP server. (It used to send through my home Linux box's own SMTP server, but then a lot of addresses started bouncing it because it was on a list of cablemodem IPs.) How would I be able to continue doing this under such a system?
I've never seen much point in spending a zillion dollars on something as small and easy to lose as a pen. (Unless you could get one with a built-in GPS tracker that would alert you when someone walked off with it.) My pen-du-jour can be found in the stationery section of Wal-mart or K-Mart, and my requirements are simply black ink, rollerball (easier to push than ballpoint), dries fast (I'm a leftie), 0.7mm head (to leave a nice solid black line). Also good is having a window in the side so you can tell how much ink is left.
The pen currently in my pocket is a Pentel EnerGel 0.7mm liquid gel pen. I've also been known to use Pilot V.07 rollerball pens, but they can leak sometimes.
Scenes we'd like to see...
Jack Bauer stalking through CTU, glaring at each computer monitor, then arresting anyone using Windows for treason...
If only he'd done that in the first place, he could have saved himself a lot of grief in the first season!
I'm pretty sure that I've seen catalogs for years from gee-whiz electronic gadget stores like Dak selling cassette decks that offered the ability to double-speed-play and downpitch recordings, claiming that this had been proven to make studying easier. Looks like someone's reinvented the wheel.
If I had mod points, I sure would pump this one up.
It's not like there's much else the tv folks can do, what with TiVo coming around. Without ad revenue, there's no way they can put on their shows. And as more and more people take advantage of the technology to skip the ads, the ads become less attractive to advertisers, and less profitable to the network. They've got to find some way to pay for the shows we watch.
Did anybody notice that the description of what the computer program does is awfully similar, allowing for humorous exaggeration in the books, to that decision-justifying computer program mentioned in one of the Dirk Gently books?
I said "many", not "all" or even "most". Read for comprehension next time, why don't you?
When you're looking back from 40,000 years in the future, the few days between man first walking on the moon (December 1969) and the Unix epoch (1/1/1970) fades away into a zillion decimal places. Given that the Julian calendar probably isn't even in use anymore that far away, it seems to me that it's eminently reasonable they tag the zero-time to the nearest historically significant event, and perhaps even that they assume that event, rather than some arbitrary calendar date, was the reason.
Heck, the person who said it went back that far--and I think it was actually in A Deepness in the Sky, not A Fire Upon the Deep--may have just been consciously oversimplifying it for his audience at the time. He wasn't necessarily a reliable narrator.
No, in AFUTD, Ravna believes--and, in a moment of pique, tells Pham she believes, and why it's very likely--that Pham's memories were false...but at a certain point in the book, Pham discovers that they were all true after all.
I considered pointing out the inconsistencies in the review (as between my starting & finishing it I got to read "The Blabber") but decided that would be going too far afield.
I found some of the differences and inconsistencies quite telling, especially after reading the annotated FUtD with its behind-the-scenes look at how everything worked. (For instance, how "The Blabber" conflates Jefri, Pham, and Amdi into a single person.) The Zones as depicted in "The Blabber" are the "first draft" of the idea, pretty much...and in the subsequent novels, the ideas expanded and changed. I'm glad that Vinge didn't let "The Blabber" constrain him when he wrote Fire, as the expansion and alteration of the ideas has been almost entirely for the better.
(For instance, even as far as beginning writing on Fire, Vinge had originally intended Jefri to have the mathematical prowess that was later bestowed on Amdi instead. And there's some deleted/altered text from the end of Fire which gave one of the characters a slightly different fate...)
When I originally wrote the review, there was a link to the image of Jefri and Flenser that was originally on the Hugo/Neb CDROM...but I screwed up the link when I searched and replaced all the underscores to italicize the title. Oops.
I know that Palm Digital Media is only too happy to release the books unencrypted if the author/publisher requests it that way. (Seth Godin's Spreading the Ideavirus is unencrypted, for instance.) If Vinge (or his publisher) didn't want it encrypted, they had only to say so.
...is the telemarketing industry's reaction to this list. From the way they're behaving, they seem to believe that if the do-not-call list is blocked, then all fifty million people on that list will magically want to receive telemarketing phone calls again, and be happy to buy from telemarketers.
If I were running a telemarketing business, I'd think I would be glad for that list, as it means fewer negative prospects and thus a higher percentage of sales.
But then, what do I know?
Sounds like the editor/submitter was trying to make a lame joke, an exaggeration of "doesn't even know what Kazaa is."
So...could that be a defense to being sued by the RIAA, I wonder? "But...I use an Apple. I couldn't run Kazaa!" (Nudges Virtual PC and Windows 2000 boxes under the sofa with foot.)
(This is my 1000th Slashdot comment! Happy anniversary to me!)