Wow. Kind of typical of Slashdot that a simple little question like this turns into OS Advocacy Day.
Frankly, I think a lot of the people are hitting this from the wrong angle. The operating system is not important, or at least not as important. What matters is what he needs to do with it.
Does he just need to check email, read e-books, browse the web a little, write letters? Nothing else at all?
Those are all pretty generic things, really. Almost any OS these days has the applications to support that. Windows could, Linux could without a doubt. If he's not going to be needing to do anything beyond that--no buying the neatest new game or productivity software to come down the pipe--then the grandson can set up any OS he chooses to do the task, and teach the grandfather to do it. And despite the noise all the OS advocates are making, there's not really much difference in ease of use as long as someone else sets the system up and shows him how to use it.
The choice, then, becomes a matter of expediency (leave Windows on there and use it) vs. ease of maintenance (go to the trouble of installing & configuring Linux for him).
The thing is, it depends on how the grandfather is going to use the system. I think there's a tendancy among Slashdotters to unconsciously assume everybody is a "power user" like they are...that they'll want to play computer games or organize their videotape collection or do half a dozen other things on the side. But computers aren't the most important things in people's lives. My father uses his Windows 95 box for reading email, writing letters & things, and the occasional teeny bit of websurfing...and that's it. He's never played a computer game in his life...and what's more, he has absolutely no interest in them. He has never, that I'm aware of, gone out and bought some new piece of computer software and tried to install it. If I knew enough about Linux to be confident in my ability to configure and remote-administrate it properly, I would have set it up on his box in a heartbeat. But I don't, so I left it alone. The point is, it shouldn't matter (to him) what OS he has as long as he can do 100% of the things he wants to do with it.
I read, some time back, a Manifesto of yours dealing with dead (ie doomed or archaic or obsolete) media; it was a very interesting read.
If I'm not mistaken, the thrust of your manifesto was that a research tome on such media should be created, but since you were too swamped with projects, you hoped that people out there on the Internet who read it would come together and help to create the book themselves.
I was wondering if this has been very successful, and if so (or if not) what you have learned from the Manifesto and its consequences.
Hold on there a bit. I really doubt that Pizza Hut would have "defaced" the moon with its lasers.
I mean, you don't have lasers now that can burn through materials very well without being aided by off-camera explosives (see the "Star Wars" defense system development scandal a few years back). Do you think they're going to shoot a beam from here to the moon that burns an image into it?
I believe they would have been talking about laser projection, like the red dot you see when you beam a laser pointer at something. Use lasers to create a reflected image from the moon that people would look up and see.
I mean, think about it. If the public got wind of them trying to permanently deface a celestial object, don't you think there'd be a hell of a lot of an uproar about it from environmentalists everywhere?
I'm pretty sure it was an Arthur C. Clarke story, actually...from one of his books of thematically-related short stories. They were doing lunar experiments, and one of them involved setting off magnesium flares as part of a spectography experiment. Someone who'd configured the flares had been bribed by an unnamed major soft drink corporation and the flares turned out to be in the shape of their logo.
Actually, no. Or, at least, only by the first trilogy. In So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, after the new Earth is created, Ford notices all the pages upon pages of information he ever wrote about the Earth being re-uploaded back into the Guide. So there's a lot more there now, anyway...
The problem is that this gets into all sorts of pesky copyright issues. Considering how heated up some people are getting over just the notion of "deep linking," actually copying someone else's site for public access opens up a whole 'nother can of legal worms.
Programming and book-writing are different. For one thing, no matter how the term Open Source is bandied about, you can't really have an "Open Source" book--someone doesn't know what he's talking about. First of all, a book is already source--it's the written code that our brains "compile" into understanding. This similarity is why we call programming formats "languages."
Second, as for being "open"--well, the only way a book really could be open is if it were being written with contributions from any yahoo who came down the pike. Which, I suppose, might be an interesting idea...come up with character sketches and an outline, farm out each chapter to a particular person, then have an editor try to put them all together into something that made sense. But for the normal everyday definition of a book...how can you have "open source" for something that has already been completed? If it's public-domain...then yes, anyone who cares to can make "updates," yes...but since Shakespeare, Clemens, Burroughs, and all those other ancient pubdom authors are dead, there's no "project gatekeeper" to apply those updates. (And if someone claimed to be, how many literary authorities do you think would accept that?)
I know this won't do any good, but please, people, try to think before you apply the term "open source"? It's a term with a very specific meaning, and by misapplying it and broadening its use into a general-purpose buzzword, you make it that much less useful.
Second, to the issue of literary quality. The original poster's point about the publishing industry is actually pretty much true, as is the objectivity of programming. Still, I think some people might not quite get it, and maybe this example will help clarify things a little.
What if 99.999% of all Slashdot posters were all high-posting-volume, low-content Anonymous Cowards (instead of only seeming that way sometimes:) and there were no moderation system? Would you even bother reading the discussion threads anymore? I don't just mean would you still read it as it is now, but would you still read it if it were a hundred times worse?
Well, that's the way it is in the literary world. With/., at least people have to have some modicum of technical knowhow to even want to read it, much less post to it. But to write, you only need to know how to write--so out in the greater world, any ten-year-old can crank out bad fiction (and looking at the fanfic newsgroups sometimes, it often looks as though most of them do). The vast majority of things that are written are things that nobody except their authors would want to read.
And so the whole vast system of publishing houses, editors, slushpiles, agents, and so on gradually evolved as a form of self-defense, as a system to provide some level of quality control to the consumer, so in return the consumer will have good books to read, rather than spending his time doing something marginally more useful and enjoyable, like clipping his toenails.
Looking at the current e-publishing sites out there, you won't find very many successful ones (at least, of those that are better-known) that have no submission standards. AlexLit requires it to have been published elsewhere already. Online Originals has a board of editors who go through submissions. And so it goes.
Self-publishing outfits have existed in the "real world" for a long time; they're called vanity presses. They charge you some ridiculous amount of money to publish your book--the name comes from the fact that it's presumably your vanity that makes you pony up the cash for it. With a more legitimate publisher, of course, they'll foot the bill themselves, and pay you royalties...but thence comes the problem of the midlist--shipping and storage expenses have gotten so high that publishers can't afford to publish anything less than a bestseller.
Which is where, hopefully, e-publishing could provide some breaks, letting more "good but not great" writers get published by eliminating storage and shipping costs...but all the same, there has to be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff...and I believe most people will think that anything someone has to pay to get published probably isn't worth reading.
(It also doesn't help matters, in my opinion, that fatbrain wants you to register before you can even see what they have available at the moment.)
Well, the biggest e-book I've yet seen is A Fire Upon the Deep, at 821K. Which is about 2/5 the space of an unmodified Palm III. Most e-books seem to be from 200-500K, which means you could fit maybe 3 or 4 of them onto your Pilot, as well as various other utilities. I tend to have 1 or 2 at any given time, plus all the web journals and newspapers (SalonMag, New York Times, Wired News, Wall Street Journal summaries, etc.) that I pull down through AvantGo. And it's enough, really...how many books can you read at one time?
The nice thing is that when they aren't on your Palm, you can store your e-books on your hard drive, back them up to zipdisks and other media, and so on. You don't have to have them on your Palm except when you want to read them...and when you do, it's just a matter of clearing the space, slapping it in the cradle, and hotsyncing it down--which takes maybe thirty to a couple minutes for even the biggest book.
And there's also the fact that you can get 8-meg memory expansions for the III and IIIx (but not the IIIe, sadly for me who bought one). Which means you could store even more on them...
Actually, I've been reading books on it since I bought it (a IIIe), including some Peanut books, and for me, it works great! Admittedly, sometimes I have to switch to the bigger font, but even for that, it works well. Plus, I can put it in my pocket (which most paperback books are too big for) and read it even in the dark, when I'm waiting for my bus at night or being driven back home from somewhere. Don't knock it 'til you try it...I've finished a couple books on it, and it's been, by and large, a very satisfying experience.
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...
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?
For that matter, there are lots of games for the Pilot, too, including a SAGA ("Final Fantasy Legend" in the states)-esque role-playing game with user-buildable levels, a RTS space game, and dozens of arcade & board game knockoffs in the making. I mean sure, there's nothing really fancy just yet, but hey, having any games at all is really something.
And as Palms get better, with more and more memory added on, and maybe even color sooner or later, we'll start seeing more advanced games for it. No biggie. Maybe someone will even come out with a Playstationesque game controller that plugs into the serial port.
*sigh*, I only wish I'd known before I bought my IIIe that it's not expandable. Oh well, I'll keept it a semester or two and trade it in on the next model. Palms always sell pretty well on Ebay...
I'm fond of "Dare to Be Stupid" for quite another reason--it was featured in the soundtrack of Transformers: The Movie, one of the best works of feature film animation made for primary consumption this side of the Pacific in the 1980s. As the theme for the Junkions, in fact. Those wild and crazy guys...:)
(And if anyone has the Vince DiCola special-edition TFTM soundtrack sold at the BotCon Transformers conventions, you can hear the "Dare to Be Stupid" riff incorporated most ingeniously into one of Vince DiCola's instrumental pieces..."Unusual Allies," I think it is.)
They got progressively weirder... (SPOILERS!)
on
Ender's Shadow
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· Score: 1
I really really enjoyed Ender's Game, thought Speaker for the Dead was kind of weird but okay, found Xenocide interesting, but more weird than good, and haven't read past that. However, I'm looking forward to Shadow, though though I haven't read the preview chapters yet.
Leaving a bit of spoiler space for those who haven't read Xenocide here...
I suppose I couldn't get past the fact that the characters were prone to exhibit a bit of the Star Trekian "character stupidity for the sake of the plot" syndrome. I mean, they were going to turn Jane off, and she didn't even bother to try to contact people and appeal? She was the entire Internet, you know she could have pled her case to everybody in the entire network simultaneously, and perhaps gotten some grass-roots support that would have messed up the people planning to deactivate her. Instead, she just accepted it as an inevitability? They did this to one of the more interesting characters in the books...*sigh*
The article mentions Pilots are between $200 and $300...interestingly, though, the 2 meg Palm III is now down to about $160 new, via buy.com.
I think the most interesting application I've heard of for a Pilot is the adjunct to the TV remote control program that will let you control a Furby. I should try that sometime.
...now that I can finally view it. It required Macromedia Flash, and Netscape 4.6's plugin finder couldn't find a version of it for Linux. Then, on a hunch, I checked on Macromedia's website, and there was a beta Flash plugin right there. Miracles never cease.
Anyway, aside from the marks off for no non-Flash page (and all that it requires Flash for is the opening graphic anyway!), whoever wrote this site must be Stan Lee, as he shows all the signs of having lost touch with reality ten years ago--or else he's pitched the site at preadolescents and early adolescents, and his planet-sized ego is all over the page--even in the radio-button poll.
I will always respect Stan Lee for the great comics and superheroes he's created...but the man is pushing (or past?) eighty. It's nice that he's still trying new things at his age--I guess comics really will keep you young--but we all know people in their forties who don't "get" the Internet...how much more so Stan Lee?
I think Stan Lee is miscalculating. The audience for web comics thus far, as the article says, has been net-savvy people who happened to find them in the course of their other surfing, liked them, and stuck around. I honestly don't think that a lot of regular comic book fans look for comics on-line...or that they can be so easily convinced to change their habits and start.
Of course, this doesn't mean I won't read the comic strips when they premiere...
Slashdot Mirror
...they're counting on the attrition of the large number of open-source programmers who will take one look at the CE source and die laughing.
Wow. Kind of typical of Slashdot that a simple little question like this turns into OS Advocacy Day.
Frankly, I think a lot of the people are hitting this from the wrong angle. The operating system is not important, or at least not as important. What matters is what he needs to do with it.
Does he just need to check email, read e-books, browse the web a little, write letters? Nothing else at all?
Those are all pretty generic things, really. Almost any OS these days has the applications to support that. Windows could, Linux could without a doubt. If he's not going to be needing to do anything beyond that--no buying the neatest new game or productivity software to come down the pipe--then the grandson can set up any OS he chooses to do the task, and teach the grandfather to do it. And despite the noise all the OS advocates are making, there's not really much difference in ease of use as long as someone else sets the system up and shows him how to use it.
The choice, then, becomes a matter of expediency (leave Windows on there and use it) vs. ease of maintenance (go to the trouble of installing & configuring Linux for him).
The thing is, it depends on how the grandfather is going to use the system. I think there's a tendancy among Slashdotters to unconsciously assume everybody is a "power user" like they are...that they'll want to play computer games or organize their videotape collection or do half a dozen other things on the side. But computers aren't the most important things in people's lives. My father uses his Windows 95 box for reading email, writing letters & things, and the occasional teeny bit of websurfing...and that's it. He's never played a computer game in his life...and what's more, he has absolutely no interest in them. He has never, that I'm aware of, gone out and bought some new piece of computer software and tried to install it. If I knew enough about Linux to be confident in my ability to configure and remote-administrate it properly, I would have set it up on his box in a heartbeat. But I don't, so I left it alone. The point is, it shouldn't matter (to him) what OS he has as long as he can do 100% of the things he wants to do with it.
I read, some time back, a Manifesto of yours dealing with dead (ie doomed or archaic or obsolete) media; it was a very interesting read.
If I'm not mistaken, the thrust of your manifesto was that a research tome on such media should be created, but since you were too swamped with projects, you hoped that people out there on the Internet who read it would come together and help to create the book themselves.
I was wondering if this has been very successful, and if so (or if not) what you have learned from the Manifesto and its consequences.
Hold on there a bit. I really doubt that Pizza Hut would have "defaced" the moon with its lasers.
I mean, you don't have lasers now that can burn through materials very well without being aided by off-camera explosives (see the "Star Wars" defense system development scandal a few years back). Do you think they're going to shoot a beam from here to the moon that burns an image into it?
I believe they would have been talking about laser projection, like the red dot you see when you beam a laser pointer at something. Use lasers to create a reflected image from the moon that people would look up and see.
I mean, think about it. If the public got wind of them trying to permanently deface a celestial object, don't you think there'd be a hell of a lot of an uproar about it from environmentalists everywhere?
I'm pretty sure it was an Arthur C. Clarke story, actually...from one of his books of thematically-related short stories. They were doing lunar experiments, and one of them involved setting off magnesium flares as part of a spectography experiment. Someone who'd configured the flares had been bribed by an unnamed major soft drink corporation and the flares turned out to be in the shape of their logo.
Didn't I see this in one of the Jackie Chan "Armor of God" movies? Where he uses it to escape from the island savages?
Actually, no. Or, at least, only by the first trilogy. In So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, after the new Earth is created, Ford notices all the pages upon pages of information he ever wrote about the Earth being re-uploaded back into the Guide. So there's a lot more there now, anyway...
I ordered the O'Reilly Palm Pilot book from Amazon and saved $12.
The problem is that this gets into all sorts of pesky copyright issues. Considering how heated up some people are getting over just the notion of "deep linking," actually copying someone else's site for public access opens up a whole 'nother can of legal worms.
He was doing a satirically ironic riff on the original post.
Programming and book-writing are different. For one thing, no matter how the term Open Source is bandied about, you can't really have an "Open Source" book--someone doesn't know what he's talking about. First of all, a book is already source--it's the written code that our brains "compile" into understanding. This similarity is why we call programming formats "languages."
:) and there were no moderation system? Would you even bother reading the discussion threads anymore? I don't just mean would you still read it as it is now, but would you still read it if it were a hundred times worse?
/., at least people have to have some modicum of technical knowhow to even want to read it, much less post to it. But to write, you only need to know how to write--so out in the greater world, any ten-year-old can crank out bad fiction (and looking at the fanfic newsgroups sometimes, it often looks as though most of them do). The vast majority of things that are written are things that nobody except their authors would want to read.
Second, as for being "open"--well, the only way a book really could be open is if it were being written with contributions from any yahoo who came down the pike. Which, I suppose, might be an interesting idea...come up with character sketches and an outline, farm out each chapter to a particular person, then have an editor try to put them all together into something that made sense. But for the normal everyday definition of a book...how can you have "open source" for something that has already been completed? If it's public-domain...then yes, anyone who cares to can make "updates," yes...but since Shakespeare, Clemens, Burroughs, and all those other ancient pubdom authors are dead, there's no "project gatekeeper" to apply those updates. (And if someone claimed to be, how many literary authorities do you think would accept that?)
I know this won't do any good, but please, people, try to think before you apply the term "open source"? It's a term with a very specific meaning, and by misapplying it and broadening its use into a general-purpose buzzword, you make it that much less useful.
Second, to the issue of literary quality. The original poster's point about the publishing industry is actually pretty much true, as is the objectivity of programming. Still, I think some people might not quite get it, and maybe this example will help clarify things a little.
What if 99.999% of all Slashdot posters were all high-posting-volume, low-content Anonymous Cowards (instead of only seeming that way sometimes
Well, that's the way it is in the literary world. With
And so the whole vast system of publishing houses, editors, slushpiles, agents, and so on gradually evolved as a form of self-defense, as a system to provide some level of quality control to the consumer, so in return the consumer will have good books to read, rather than spending his time doing something marginally more useful and enjoyable, like clipping his toenails.
Looking at the current e-publishing sites out there, you won't find very many successful ones (at least, of those that are better-known) that have no submission standards. AlexLit requires it to have been published elsewhere already. Online Originals has a board of editors who go through submissions. And so it goes.
Self-publishing outfits have existed in the "real world" for a long time; they're called vanity presses. They charge you some ridiculous amount of money to publish your book--the name comes from the fact that it's presumably your vanity that makes you pony up the cash for it. With a more legitimate publisher, of course, they'll foot the bill themselves, and pay you royalties...but thence comes the problem of the midlist--shipping and storage expenses have gotten so high that publishers can't afford to publish anything less than a bestseller.
Which is where, hopefully, e-publishing could provide some breaks, letting more "good but not great" writers get published by eliminating storage and shipping costs...but all the same, there has to be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff...and I believe most people will think that anything someone has to pay to get published probably isn't worth reading.
(It also doesn't help matters, in my opinion, that fatbrain wants you to register before you can even see what they have available at the moment.)
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.
Well, the biggest e-book I've yet seen is A Fire Upon the Deep, at 821K. Which is about 2/5 the space of an unmodified Palm III. Most e-books seem to be from 200-500K, which means you could fit maybe 3 or 4 of them onto your Pilot, as well as various other utilities. I tend to have 1 or 2 at any given time, plus all the web journals and newspapers (SalonMag, New York Times, Wired News, Wall Street Journal summaries, etc.) that I pull down through AvantGo. And it's enough, really...how many books can you read at one time?
The nice thing is that when they aren't on your Palm, you can store your e-books on your hard drive, back them up to zipdisks and other media, and so on. You don't have to have them on your Palm except when you want to read them...and when you do, it's just a matter of clearing the space, slapping it in the cradle, and hotsyncing it down--which takes maybe thirty to a couple minutes for even the biggest book.
And there's also the fact that you can get 8-meg memory expansions for the III and IIIx (but not the IIIe, sadly for me who bought one). Which means you could store even more on them...
Actually, I've been reading books on it since I bought it (a IIIe), including some Peanut books, and for me, it works great! Admittedly, sometimes I have to switch to the bigger font, but even for that, it works well. Plus, I can put it in my pocket (which most paperback books are too big for) and read it even in the dark, when I'm waiting for my bus at night or being driven back home from somewhere. Don't knock it 'til you try it...I've finished a couple books on it, and it's been, by and large, a very satisfying experience.
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...
You can find some Gutenberg e-texts at
http://www.memoware.com
Happy reading.
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?
Well, you can turn off macrovision and region-protection on a DVD-ROM drive if you have the right kind of drive and use the Remote Selector program...
For that matter, there are lots of games for the Pilot, too, including a SAGA ("Final Fantasy Legend" in the states)-esque role-playing game with user-buildable levels, a RTS space game, and dozens of arcade & board game knockoffs in the making. I mean sure, there's nothing really fancy just yet, but hey, having any games at all is really something.
And as Palms get better, with more and more memory added on, and maybe even color sooner or later, we'll start seeing more advanced games for it. No biggie. Maybe someone will even come out with a Playstationesque game controller that plugs into the serial port.
*sigh*, I only wish I'd known before I bought my IIIe that it's not expandable. Oh well, I'll keept it a semester or two and trade it in on the next model. Palms always sell pretty well on Ebay...
I'm fond of "Dare to Be Stupid" for quite another reason--it was featured in the soundtrack of Transformers: The Movie, one of the best works of feature film animation made for primary consumption this side of the Pacific in the 1980s. As the theme for the Junkions, in fact. Those wild and crazy guys... :)
(And if anyone has the Vince DiCola special-edition TFTM soundtrack sold at the BotCon Transformers conventions, you can hear the "Dare to Be Stupid" riff incorporated most ingeniously into one of Vince DiCola's instrumental pieces..."Unusual Allies," I think it is.)
I really really enjoyed Ender's Game, thought Speaker for the Dead was kind of weird but okay, found Xenocide interesting, but more weird than good, and haven't read past that. However, I'm looking forward to Shadow, though though I haven't read the preview chapters yet.
Leaving a bit of spoiler space for those who haven't read Xenocide here...
I suppose I couldn't get past the fact that the characters were prone to exhibit a bit of the Star Trekian "character stupidity for the sake of the plot" syndrome. I mean, they were going to turn Jane off, and she didn't even bother to try to contact people and appeal? She was the entire Internet, you know she could have pled her case to everybody in the entire network simultaneously, and perhaps gotten some grass-roots support that would have messed up the people planning to deactivate her. Instead, she just accepted it as an inevitability? They did this to one of the more interesting characters in the books...*sigh*
FYI, I believe that there is a card you can drop into the Palm Pilot's memory card slot that gives it pager capability...
The article mentions Pilots are between $200 and $300...interestingly, though, the 2 meg Palm III is now down to about $160 new, via buy.com.
I think the most interesting application I've heard of for a Pilot is the adjunct to the TV remote control program that will let you control a Furby. I should try that sometime.
...now that I can finally view it. It required Macromedia Flash, and Netscape 4.6's plugin finder couldn't find a version of it for Linux. Then, on a hunch, I checked on Macromedia's website, and there was a beta Flash plugin right there. Miracles never cease.
Anyway, aside from the marks off for no non-Flash page (and all that it requires Flash for is the opening graphic anyway!), whoever wrote this site must be Stan Lee, as he shows all the signs of having lost touch with reality ten years ago--or else he's pitched the site at preadolescents and early adolescents, and his planet-sized ego is all over the page--even in the radio-button poll.
I will always respect Stan Lee for the great comics and superheroes he's created...but the man is pushing (or past?) eighty. It's nice that he's still trying new things at his age--I guess comics really will keep you young--but we all know people in their forties who don't "get" the Internet...how much more so Stan Lee?
I think Stan Lee is miscalculating. The audience for web comics thus far, as the article says, has been net-savvy people who happened to find them in the course of their other surfing, liked them, and stuck around. I honestly don't think that a lot of regular comic book fans look for comics on-line...or that they can be so easily convinced to change their habits and start.
Of course, this doesn't mean I won't read the comic strips when they premiere...
I got the same thing. Fortunately, Google has the page cached.
:)
(Now watch their cached link go down, too.