By old I was simply referring to something that was created before people moved to word-processors and where the author's original work was not done in a digital media. Perhaps Frank Herbert's Dune (1965?) is a good example.
I haven't purchased Dune yet, but they did just release a 40th anniversary edition that sells for something like $20 as an ebook (robbery!), so I hope they spent time cleaning up the presentation. I have heard that Tolkien's books suffer horribly from the same issue, with lots of mistakes and even simply missing words. In that respect, the darknet is a better source, especially when it comes to revered classics like LOTR or Dune. People who care actually spend time cleaning up and fixing issues, comparing line-by-line with the actual physical books. Which is what the ebook editors should be doing, especially if they want to charge $20, but they're obviously not.
As to book piracy, last year (I can no longer find the link, sorry) a publisher commissioned a study to see how badly piracy was hurting sales. It takes two or three weeks for a book to hit the Pirate Bay, so the researchers looked at sales figures for a month. They were amazed at the results -- rather than a drop in sales, there was actually a sales spike. That publisher, according to the article, is now rethinking his strategies.
That's normally the way of casual piracy -- exposure breeds sales. But measuring time-to-PirateBay is a poor metric for ebooks. Torrents are good for larger files, like music albums or videos or applications. Ebooks are tiny, often less than 1MB. In other words, they're perfect fodder for filelocker sites (megaupload, rapidshare, etc). A simple google search for "title epub rapidshare" or similar will likely get you everything you could ever want in terms of pirated books. So even though it may take a week or two for books to hit pirate bay, they're usually available elsewhere day 0 (or even earlier, depending on the level of early access people may have).
Minor addendum -- I got the resolution wrong for 6" eink devices. They're 600x800, not 480x800, which puts the PPI at 167ppi. That'll teach me to recite data from memory:)
Books can be replaced for less than 2 cents. I went to the parents house for father's day, and ended up with 24 books, and I already owned six of them in the home collection.
Not all books, unless you're counting on your parents providing them for you, or being able to pick them up at the local yard sale (hope you like trashy romance novels and Tom Clancy...)
I have to confess I dangled the hook you bit on about about the lake. {snicker}. But hey, I drop a five dollar book in the lake when the canoe rolls, but how much is it going to cost when you roll with your reader in the lake??
Well, that depends. Considering when I'm on the go I read on my phone, I'd be more careful than to let it fall in a lake. But if I felt that was a real possibility I'd have paid for an insurance plan (SquareTrade would cover that scenario).
Add to that, i have a book in my collection called Magicians of Gor.
Tell me the resale value of your device file vs my hardcopy.:)
According to the internets, I can get that book for $8.50 from Sony (or for free if you know where to look...). I'm not really worried about resale value, since I don't "invest" in books.
What is wrong with PDF? It is actually my preferred format. It supports annotation, bookmarks, highlighting, and is an open standard. PDF 1.5+ files can be reflowed to fit small screens. What's not to like?
It's not a full standard (like Microsoft's.NET, only a subset of PDF is standardized). Flowable text requires manual intervention (tagging) that most PDF authors don't do, assuming they even put text in the PDF rather than just use images of text (the latter is all too common). Even when you do have proper flowable text, other elements don't flow nearly as well. You can't change font faces on the fly, or margins, or other layout functionality that should be user-controllable.
Epub, on the other hand, is a complete open standard, essentially being a subset of HTML and CSS in a ZIP container. It has its own flaws, such as lack of MathML support (complex equations will generally be represented by images), but for 99.999% of books it's a better solution.
More importantly, PDF vs. EPUB is more about doing layout the "old way" vs. the "new way". The old way is paper-centric, where designers have pixel-perfect control of every piece of the layout, down to kerning of the fonts if they wish. This is great when you know exactly how your content is going to be viewed (for example, it will always be printed on A4 paper). PDF represents magazines, paper flyers, paper books, desktop publishing, etc, or essentially the print world. EPUB, on the other hand, is built from web standards. It's designed on top of markup that was initially created to empower the end user. You get all the standard buzzwords, like separation of content and display, that you would if you were building a web page. For narrative books, it's pretty straightforward to make the swich from PDF (paper) to EPUB (digital). Technical books are where things get difficult, and require a perspective shift. For example, if you were writing a technical book for print on paper, you'd probably have a lot of tables, sidebars, indexes, etc. When you go to convert that to an ebook, you quickly find that EPUB is somewhat limited on first glance. You're dead set on replicating the tables and sidebars and such from your printed book, so you just say, "Screw it, ship the PDF." But that's paper-centric thinking. In the digital world, that sidebar would become a link off to other data. The tables could still be there, of course, but you'll have to rethink where they fit in the flow of the text so that they render well on smaller devices. Indexes are trivial, of course. And there's a ton of other stuff you can do, as newer readers (iBooks, Nook Color) on more capable devices have the ability to embed other media and provide more interactive experiences than what you'd get from a piece of paper or a PDF. It turns out that if you approach the problem from a digital perspective rather than a paper perspective, you end up with something that looks different but still conveys all of the information you intended, and in a better way for digital devices.
To look at it another way, back in the 90s when everybody was just starting to write web pages, a favorite method for graphic designers was to composite a layout in photoshop and then chop that up into multiple images laid out in a table (or worse, use image maps!), just as they would do if they were creating a magazine or flyer layout. Those sites were horrible. They wouldn't scale if you needed to change font sizes to make them readable, they wouldn't flow with the size of your browser ("Best viewed at 1024x768" my ass!), and they eventually broke once the box model was standardized and it turned out that Internet Explorer got it wrong (oops!). You don't see those kinds of sites today, web pages that attempt to replicate the exact look of a paper product, and the reason is obvious -- the web is not paper, and trying to force it into a paper design is painful for everybody. Ebooks are the way, and designers will learn sooner or later that they can't shoehorn their paper designs into an ebook and have it work.
there will always be economies of scale at play when manufacturing physical objects
Nope.
I guess you look far enough into the future, a Star Trek replicator-like device that can scavenge raw materials "for free" from thin air is theoretically possible. Of course it's highly unlikely anything like that will exist in the next few centuries or so. Until then, economies of scale will rule, as the cost of buying 10lbs of raw materials for your personal 3D printer will be much higher per pound than it would be if you were buying 100,000 tons of raw materials for a bulk manufacturing process. Changing that would require infinite resources available for little or no work. For now, that's fantasy, while ebooks are reality.
I can read a book wherever and whenever I want to. I won't lose a library and have to buy a new thing to read it again if it breaks, the rechargeable battery dies, the lcd goes, I drop it into the lake I'm fishing in, and the many other ways to destroy the device. Hell, I'll never have to wait for the book to recharge, get infected from the online delivery system, or lose a book because the mothership beams it back up.
In Short, a book is an asset, a drm laden electronic device that is owned by the manufacturer t'isnt.
So buy DRM-free books. They're out there. Or read books out of copyright, like those provided by Gutenberg in multiple formats. I'll concede the battery charging point (though eink devices last for weeks at a time on a charge). For the rest, if you're managing your ebook library properly and avoiding DRM or liberating DRM-laden books, the only other possible issues are physical damage that could just as easily ruin a paper book (like dropping it in a lake).
The funny thing is that you can get anything from bygone eras made new. That will continue to be true for books. As I said, I buy and prefer ebooks myself. But your claiming paper books will be marginalized to the same extent as a buggy whip chimes a tune rather like those claiming a paperless office was near at hand...
Ignoring the possible development of replicator-like technology (with essentially "free" raw materials), there will always be economies of scale at play when manufacturing physical objects. Can you get buggy whips made today? Yes, absolutely. Are they as cheap as they once where (adjusted for inflation)? Not at all. Why? There's much less demand, so fewer are made. When fewer are made, it costs more per individual buggy whip. So if you could've gotten an old buggy whip for $2 in 2011 dollars, you may have to pay $20 to get one now. Today, you can buy a mass market paperbook for $7. In the future if you want that same physical book it'll cost you $20-30. If you're willing to pay that, great. Pay it.
Oh, and that whole "paperless office" thing? Yeah, it's pretty much happened. Not everywhere, and certainly not for every industry, but at least where I work as a software developer the times I've had to physically handle paper have been few and far between (and usually related to dealing with arcane and esoteric reimbursement policies that still require physical receipts). The fanfare was premature, but it's basically happened anyway. And this will be the same -- someone will eventually claim, "Paper books are dead!" to which a large number of people will reply, "Nuh uh!" And then a decade or so later, without any pomp and circumstance and without anybody really noticing, you'll stop finding paper books for sale. All of the brick & mortar book-only stores will have shut down or converted to other merchandise, you'll no longer find romance pulp novels at the supermarket, and you'll be lucky to find a handful of 5 year old overpriced Tom Clancy books at airport terminals. For all intents and purposes, the paper book will be dead, and when you look back on it, it'll seem like it was the most seamless and natural thing ever. Don't believe me? Ask Tower Records, as this process is in the late stages for music on CD. Or Borders, for that matter.
I think the real component of the story you are missing is the future ease of creating custom physical objects.
It may be easy, but that doesn't mean it will be cheap. Why would I spend $8 of raw materials for my 3D printer to make a book when I could just read it in digital form? No doubt people will do it, but it will be a novelty. "Hey, look what I can do!" <prints out entire works of Shakespeare>... "Meh. Won't be doing that again."
Anyone who enjoys reading will still collect physical books for a long time to come. I like to buy digital books, but physical books still accumulate anyway... that's just how it is with books.
Way to generalize, bro. I enjoy reading, yet I've entirely stopped collecting physical books. Same with the girlfriend, though she's still a little reluctant and buys one or two paper books a year. There are very few books that are not available as ebooks one way or another, even the Harry Potter books that J.K. Rowling is so notoriously against making available as ebooks (and honestly, the "darknet" versions are way better than what the hack publishers would put out anyway, if she'd let them).
Plus of course they look good in a house... to a point, but that's back to really avid readers like physical books too.
Personal taste, and/or pretentiousness. If you think that you need books to complete the design of a room, print out some covers and paste them on cardboard boxes. This ranks up there with, "I like the feel and smell of paper," as one of the most ridiculous reasons to avoid ebooks.
But that's okay. Even today people still need buggy whips for novelty horse and carriage taxis, or the Amish, despite the fact that the horseless carriage made them obsolete. You can still buy vinyl records (and CDs), even though there's no reason not to buy music online anymore. Thus you'll still be able to get your paper books in the future, if you really have to have them. Just be prepared to spend a considerable sum buying them.
Older books (as in pre-word processor) on Kindle (not singling out Amazon, I'm sure iBooks and other digital stores share the same problems) are flawed. I've read a bunch of reviews of older books and there are common complaints regarding frequent typos from OCR.
You're doing it wrong. You should download old books from Gutenberg directly. They're available in multiple formats, including Mobi for Kindle, and they're generally high quality and well-edited (even when they start from OCR sources). There's no reason to get old books from Amazon, and especially no reason to ever pay for those old books. That's how people scam -- grab a bunch of Gutenberg books, rip off the Gutenberg text, add a fancy new cover, and charge $2 on Amazon and other stores. Easiest money ever, because there are suckers like you who will pay for it.
Sorry, I have no interest in reading a book on a LCD.
Why? Are your eyes that special?
I think what you really mean is that you have no interest in reading a book an a PC monitor. That's understandable, PC monitors have shit resolution (in the proper "pixels per square inch" or "ppi" sense). A standard 15.6" laptop screen at 1366x768 has a pixel density of just barely over 100ppi. That's painful for reading. The same 15.6" panel at 1920x1080 just barely goes over 141ppi. People blame the backlight, but they're wrong. The problem is the pixel density. Anything less than 150ppi is painful to read, and really 150ppi is the bare minimum without some extra "smoothing" technology (like eink, where the pixels are not fully uniform).
Some common reading devices and their pixel densities:
Most Android devices are 480x800, with common sizes being 3.8" = 246ppi, 4.0" = 233ppi, 4.3" = 217ppi
6" eink readers like Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony, etc are 480x800 @ 6.0" = 155ppi (note that eink works better at lower ppi than LCDs to create smooth letter forms, so this isn't as bad as it sounds
Nook Color at 600x1024 @ 7.0" = 170ppi
iPad at 768x1024 @ 9.17" = 132ppi, which is too low for reading on an LCD
Try a high-density screen or eink and you might actually like it.
1. There is a standard for ebooks that everyone can agree to. (i.e. not the epub/mobi/PDF/Custom Apps, other stuff format wars we have now).
This is mostly the case now. Every modern physical ebook reader (Nook, Kobo, Sony, etc) supports EPUB with the sole exception of Kindle. Either Amazon will eventually bow to standards, or the Kindle will ultimately become irrelevant. Format changes have happened before. Barnes & Noble successfully switch from PDB to EPUB. Amazon could do it, if they wanted to. Right now they're in a market position where they don't need to. Of course they're also very, very careful about always referring to their offering as "Kindle books" and never "ebooks". These are not intended to be generic ebooks readable on any reader. They're Kindle books, only readable on devices with Kindle software.
PDF is evil and needs to die as an ebook format. That's already happening, especially for narrative literature. The remaining hold-outs are technical books and designers stuck in a paper mindset. The former will change as the epub standard evolves. The latter will change simply with time, as the old guard retires or dies and are replaced with people who understand how to layout books digitally (if you want a corollary for this, look at the web -- it's been a very long time since professional web sites have had "Best viewed at 1024x768 in Internet Explorer" recommendations, because the old paper-based designers who wanted pixel-perfect control have retired or died, or finally evovled).
Custom apps are simply money grabs, and will die as generic readers become more widespread.
2. The DRM is gone and/or and things like resale are easily allowed with ebooks.
There's plenty of movement on this front. All of the major stores allow publishers to sell their books without DRM. The old-guard publishers are the ones requiring DRM now, and they will eventually be forced to follow the example of the music industry. It's just a matter of time at thi point.
3. ALL books are available as standard eBooks conforming to the conditions above.
This is probably the biggest hurdle. The Gutenberg project produces high-quality epubs, but they can only handle copyright-free works. So long as there are luddite authors like J.K. Rowling who refuse to make their works available in ebook format, you will never be able to hit 100% coverage. But of course like all things, time will solve this one. In a generation or less, any author will find it unthinkable not to offer ebooks. Assuming they're even able to do so if they wanted.
4. eBook readers are cheap enough that basically everyone has them.
Compared to what? But there are two ways to look at this one:
Do you have a smartphone? You now have an ebook reader. Every major mobile OS (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, etc) has at least one ebook reader. Kindle's on every platform, for example. But what if you don't have a smartphone (despite it seeming like everybody and their dog has an iPhone or Android device these days)?
Dedicated ebook readers can be had for well under $100. Kindles are available for $114, and Nooks for $140. While that sounds like a lot, it's really rather cheap and a one-time fee. How much would you pay for paper copies of the entire Gutenberg library? Several orders of magnitude more than $100, as a low estimate. Unfortunately ebook prices on current titles are not that good (this will have to change over time), but if you read 20 free books that on average would've been $5 for a paper book your reader's paid for itself.
5. The price of eBooks drops to represent their approximately $0 per unit production cost.
I agree, yet disagree. Ebooks still require editing, cover art, layout, marketing, etc. All you really get to save in the production area i
Electronic only media can be altered retroactively. People in power don't like history? Re-write it.
Paul Revere warned the British that they couldn't take our arms by shootin' guns and ringin' bells. We don't need digital-only media in order to rewrite history.
I've converted entirely to ebooks (more specifically, entirely to epub ebooks). I still have my old paper books I bought years ago, but I haven't purchased another paper book in years. I read on my phone and my Nook Touch.
Short term, the huge amount of copyright-free books available from Gutenberg and others provides a wealth of reading material, and all of the major DRM schemes have been cracked so you can "liberate" your purchases (the only one that hasn't is Apple's FairPlay for ebooks, and that's because nobody gives a crap about Apple's store). Long term, the ebook industry is going to have to follow the music industry's example, getting rid of DRM and charging fair prices that are equal to or less than the cost of physical media (as opposed to ebooks today that are routinely priced above even hardcover prices).
Oh yeah, and ebooks should never be provided as PDFs. PDF is not a valid ebook format, and is an insult to the reader.
With windows mobile you get multitasking, copy paste, thousands of apps you can download for free off the internet. Ability to easily write new apps in winforms on any old visual studio you have laying around. And a ui that's totally familiar. With WP7 you don't. Which is why I just bought a windows mobile device. And now that they've started talking about Windows 8 and coding it in html5 I would guess we can stick a fork in WP7.
Out of your entire list, the only one you got right was multitasking. WP7 has copy paste, thousands of apps you can download for free off the internet (the Zune marketplace is technically on the internet, durr), and easily write new apps in Silverlight on any old visual studio you have laying around. In fact, WM6 development actually requires you to buy Visual Studio Professional or above and does not work on the Express SKUs. The WP7 SDK includes a copy of Visual C# Express and will integrate into other VS2010 SKUs. The UI for WM6 is only "totally familiar" because it hasn't significantly changed since 2003. Except where it has, because of 3rd parties like HTC skinning it with their predecessor to Sense, but not fully skinning it so that there will always be places where the old, ugly, 2003-era UI pops up. Surprise!. And the WM interface is very much geared towards stylus-based touch, with tiny touch targets that are next to impossible to activate with your fingers. And it wasn't until the very last one or two phones that you could even get a capacitive screen (resistive screens suck) and even though those screens could support multi-touch, the OS couldn't.
If you really want Windows Mobile, the answer is "get an Android phone". If you bought an HTC HD2, put Android on it. It runs great.
Just out of interest, why? The law sounds a bit strange, probably an old law based on some safety measure of the time?
It's a political job-making law. Everybody needs gas. If you can't pump your own gas, jobs must be created to hire someone to pump it for you. If you want to run a 24/7 gas station, that means you have to hire several gas pumpers to cover all shifts, have multiple pumpers on hand during heavy usage hours. Each gas station could probably generate 5-6 extra jobs, which could mean thousands of jobs across the state.
Of course it's just make-work. No value is added by paying someone to pump your gas. It just costs the consumer more money and time than they would've spent otherwise.
When I called to inquire about their service, I specifically asked if they had a bandwidth cap.
Of course, I found out right away that they DO have a bandwidth cap, 250gb per month. My account page has a meter on it.
Technically they didn't lie to you. You asked about a bandwidth cap (aka, throttling), and their negative answer was correct -- Comcast doesn't do any throttling. They do, however, have a well-publicized download cap. If you pay them for a 50mbps connection, you'll be able to use all of that bandwidth (target sites permitting, of course) to download up to 250GB of data during a month.
Maybe it's splitting hairs, but you didn't do your research properly (you "heard" they had a download cap, but you didn't go to their support site and look at their very detailed FAQ about it?) and you asked the wrong question. Nobody to blame but yourself.
Them: "Hi, you don't know me, but I'm a friend of your milkman's, newspaper boy's, dogsitter . . . they all told me that you are, like real smart with computers. Mine won't start . . . it seems to start, but then the disk screams, and nothing happens
You're doing it wrong. Right there, you should've hung up the phone. You can tell them they got the wrong number if you like, but fuck that. Personally, I'd tell them to go fuck themselves before hanging up the phone, so just hanging up is civil in my book.
These are people who would never dream of asking a mechanic to fix their car for free or a plumber to fix their pipes for free, so why is it okay for them to ask you to fix their computers for free? And if you're like me, you're not actually in the computer repair business, so I wouldn't even accept money for it. But then I learned from a very young age that you have to be able to say "No" and mean it, or you'll just get walked on by people like this. I weaned my family off of using me for tech support over 15 years ago, I'm sure as hell not going to do it for a complete stranger.
As a WP7 app/game dev, I think the platform is stellar. For apps, it's trivial to make things smooth and impressive that integrate well with the look and feel of the rest of the phone. And that look and feel is miles ahead of what I've seen on Android and even a lot of iPhone. It's also trivial to go crazy with it and make something really unique that doesn't integrate at all, though that would probably be harder to get through the app verifiers.
Microsoft has always been great at building developer tools, and the Windows Phone 7 SDK is yet another example. Silverlight is a natural fit for apps, and XNA works well for games (modern games haven't gone straight to the hardware for at least a decade -- the power comes from hardware acceleration, and the phone provides that).
That said, not all is well in Windows Phone 7 land. The SDK has some very arbitrary limitations, like not allowing you access to the camera except through a task that spawns the stock camera app. No AR apps for Windows Phone 7 Series Phone Smartphone phones. Barcode/tag scanning apps are still possible, though inefficient, as they have to spawn the camera task, wait for you to take a picture, wait for the app to resume, and then process the saved picture. I could scan five barcodes on an iPhone or Android phone in the time it takes WP7 to scan one.
No doubt the SDK will get better, but that's too little, too late. WP7 was already so far behind, it couldn't afford to launch without parity with iOS and Android in areas like direct camera access. These are things that are simply expected to be available these days, and not having them is a huge limitation that will prevent developer adoption.
And just a quick note on the games front -- independent developers only get XNA access, but major third-party developers can write native code (and access Xbox Live, just like Indie vs. Arcade games on Xbox). In other words, Unreal or RAGE tech on WP7 is just as possible as it is on iOS or Android. It's just that it's not going to come from the 14 year old programming in his room upstairs.
You may say so, but that doesn't make it true. Care to back it up with facts, or at least anecdotal evidence? Note that being 100% "libre" (or "free", as the rest of us say) means that many wifi adapters simply will not work, you can say goodbye to any decent GPU hardware acceleration, and more.
Or just learn what Fitts' law is so you won't have misguided thoughts such as these.
That only applies if you run your browser maximized. If you run it windowed, the tabs do not extend to the top of the window in Firefox or Chrome. Running a browser maximized at 1920x1080 is not only a waste of screen space but also a subpar browsing experience since most websites are still focused on 1024x768-optimized layouts.
IMHO, while I prefer tabs on top, I also prefer to use F6 to focus the address bar. This does not work with tabs on top in FF4 because Firefox treats F6 as "frame focus" and not specifically "address bar focus". It works in tabs on bottom because the address bar is the first focusable item in that frame.
Take a look at any documentary about food production. You will see a sizable portion of the food go to waste. Ever watched how corn gets stripped from the cob? I'd wager a good 10-20% of waste here alone (and we're not even talking about any other point of the production process, just the part where the corn grain gets stripped from the cob, nothing else. You will notice something similar during flour production.
A quick search would've provided you with links to back up your data, or to refute it. For example:
Some of the major factors that affect the quality of combining operations include: weather, skill of the operator, conditions of the field and crop, adjustment and condition of the combine, speed of forward travel, width of combine header, feed rate of the material through the combine, variety of crop, type of combine and the attachments used.
Mentioned elsewhere in the article, ideal efficiency is 3% loss, with averages "closer to" 10% (implying the range is probably more like 5-15% loss rather than 10-20% loss). And don't think farmers aren't keenly aware of this and will do just about anything to increase their yields. These are machines that cost the equivalent of a nice house in most places ($250,000 on average) and if there's a newer model with higher efficiency then most farmers will trade up to the latest and greatest. Even a small increase in efficiency over several years could cover the cost of the equipment.
I've said it before and I'll say it again -- farming is one of the most advanced areas for technology, biology, chemistry, etc. These are not slack-jawed yokels trotting behind horses. Even the average family farmer works > 1000 acres with only 1 or 2 people and has technology the rest of us have only dreamed of. GPS when it was otherwise only available to military and government applications, satellite maps, sophisticated data collection sensors to track yields, self-driving vehicles, market tracking tools that rival anything wall street brokers can think up, etc. Of course it's also a metric pantload of physical labor, long hours, and a livelihood that is directly affected and threatened by "acts of god" the rest of us would completely ignore (a hail shower might dent your car and cost you $500 in repairs, but it could ruin a farmer's entire crop and cost him $100,000 or more).
With Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) you can deal with the book problem the same way you would use iTunes to catalog music and video. It is available for Windows, Linux and OSX. I have personally used it for both OSX and Windows for a few years and it has never let me down.
I love calibre for ebook management, but I wanted to post a pre-emptive strike. Calibre uses a database for metadata and the filesystem for book storage. However you really need to let calibre "own" the directory tree where it stores its library (or libraries, with recent versions). If you go mucking about trying to rearrange stuff, or if your OCD nature requires books to be organized in a different way than what calibre wants, you're going to break it. For all intents and purposes, the directory structure calibre creates is a database and you need to keep your grubby little hands out of it.
Also, recent versions of calibre have support for "empty" books, so you can put all of your paper books in your calibre library alongside your ebooks and manage your entire book library from one location.
Note that the header and sidebar stay fixed in place if the window is wide enough. There's a body class called "narrow-view-port" which turns off under those circumstances.
That's like the complete opposite of good design -- when screen space is at a premium, waste it with bullshit. Then, when you maximize it on your 1920x1080 screen, go ahead and stop wasting the space where it no longer matters. That's the second most retarded thing I've ever heard.
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I haven't purchased Dune yet, but they did just release a 40th anniversary edition that sells for something like $20 as an ebook (robbery!), so I hope they spent time cleaning up the presentation. I have heard that Tolkien's books suffer horribly from the same issue, with lots of mistakes and even simply missing words. In that respect, the darknet is a better source, especially when it comes to revered classics like LOTR or Dune. People who care actually spend time cleaning up and fixing issues, comparing line-by-line with the actual physical books. Which is what the ebook editors should be doing, especially if they want to charge $20, but they're obviously not.
That's normally the way of casual piracy -- exposure breeds sales. But measuring time-to-PirateBay is a poor metric for ebooks. Torrents are good for larger files, like music albums or videos or applications. Ebooks are tiny, often less than 1MB. In other words, they're perfect fodder for filelocker sites (megaupload, rapidshare, etc). A simple google search for "title epub rapidshare" or similar will likely get you everything you could ever want in terms of pirated books. So even though it may take a week or two for books to hit pirate bay, they're usually available elsewhere day 0 (or even earlier, depending on the level of early access people may have).
Minor addendum -- I got the resolution wrong for 6" eink devices. They're 600x800, not 480x800, which puts the PPI at 167ppi. That'll teach me to recite data from memory :)
Not all books, unless you're counting on your parents providing them for you, or being able to pick them up at the local yard sale (hope you like trashy romance novels and Tom Clancy ...)
Well, that depends. Considering when I'm on the go I read on my phone, I'd be more careful than to let it fall in a lake. But if I felt that was a real possibility I'd have paid for an insurance plan (SquareTrade would cover that scenario).
According to the internets, I can get that book for $8.50 from Sony (or for free if you know where to look ...). I'm not really worried about resale value, since I don't "invest" in books.
It's not a full standard (like Microsoft's .NET, only a subset of PDF is standardized). Flowable text requires manual intervention (tagging) that most PDF authors don't do, assuming they even put text in the PDF rather than just use images of text (the latter is all too common). Even when you do have proper flowable text, other elements don't flow nearly as well. You can't change font faces on the fly, or margins, or other layout functionality that should be user-controllable.
Epub, on the other hand, is a complete open standard, essentially being a subset of HTML and CSS in a ZIP container. It has its own flaws, such as lack of MathML support (complex equations will generally be represented by images), but for 99.999% of books it's a better solution.
More importantly, PDF vs. EPUB is more about doing layout the "old way" vs. the "new way". The old way is paper-centric, where designers have pixel-perfect control of every piece of the layout, down to kerning of the fonts if they wish. This is great when you know exactly how your content is going to be viewed (for example, it will always be printed on A4 paper). PDF represents magazines, paper flyers, paper books, desktop publishing, etc, or essentially the print world. EPUB, on the other hand, is built from web standards. It's designed on top of markup that was initially created to empower the end user. You get all the standard buzzwords, like separation of content and display, that you would if you were building a web page. For narrative books, it's pretty straightforward to make the swich from PDF (paper) to EPUB (digital). Technical books are where things get difficult, and require a perspective shift. For example, if you were writing a technical book for print on paper, you'd probably have a lot of tables, sidebars, indexes, etc. When you go to convert that to an ebook, you quickly find that EPUB is somewhat limited on first glance. You're dead set on replicating the tables and sidebars and such from your printed book, so you just say, "Screw it, ship the PDF." But that's paper-centric thinking. In the digital world, that sidebar would become a link off to other data. The tables could still be there, of course, but you'll have to rethink where they fit in the flow of the text so that they render well on smaller devices. Indexes are trivial, of course. And there's a ton of other stuff you can do, as newer readers (iBooks, Nook Color) on more capable devices have the ability to embed other media and provide more interactive experiences than what you'd get from a piece of paper or a PDF. It turns out that if you approach the problem from a digital perspective rather than a paper perspective, you end up with something that looks different but still conveys all of the information you intended, and in a better way for digital devices.
To look at it another way, back in the 90s when everybody was just starting to write web pages, a favorite method for graphic designers was to composite a layout in photoshop and then chop that up into multiple images laid out in a table (or worse, use image maps!), just as they would do if they were creating a magazine or flyer layout. Those sites were horrible. They wouldn't scale if you needed to change font sizes to make them readable, they wouldn't flow with the size of your browser ("Best viewed at 1024x768" my ass!), and they eventually broke once the box model was standardized and it turned out that Internet Explorer got it wrong (oops!). You don't see those kinds of sites today, web pages that attempt to replicate the exact look of a paper product, and the reason is obvious -- the web is not paper, and trying to force it into a paper design is painful for everybody. Ebooks are the way, and designers will learn sooner or later that they can't shoehorn their paper designs into an ebook and have it work.
I guess you look far enough into the future, a Star Trek replicator-like device that can scavenge raw materials "for free" from thin air is theoretically possible. Of course it's highly unlikely anything like that will exist in the next few centuries or so. Until then, economies of scale will rule, as the cost of buying 10lbs of raw materials for your personal 3D printer will be much higher per pound than it would be if you were buying 100,000 tons of raw materials for a bulk manufacturing process. Changing that would require infinite resources available for little or no work. For now, that's fantasy, while ebooks are reality.
So buy DRM-free books. They're out there. Or read books out of copyright, like those provided by Gutenberg in multiple formats. I'll concede the battery charging point (though eink devices last for weeks at a time on a charge). For the rest, if you're managing your ebook library properly and avoiding DRM or liberating DRM-laden books, the only other possible issues are physical damage that could just as easily ruin a paper book (like dropping it in a lake).
Ignoring the possible development of replicator-like technology (with essentially "free" raw materials), there will always be economies of scale at play when manufacturing physical objects. Can you get buggy whips made today? Yes, absolutely. Are they as cheap as they once where (adjusted for inflation)? Not at all. Why? There's much less demand, so fewer are made. When fewer are made, it costs more per individual buggy whip. So if you could've gotten an old buggy whip for $2 in 2011 dollars, you may have to pay $20 to get one now. Today, you can buy a mass market paperbook for $7. In the future if you want that same physical book it'll cost you $20-30. If you're willing to pay that, great. Pay it.
Oh, and that whole "paperless office" thing? Yeah, it's pretty much happened. Not everywhere, and certainly not for every industry, but at least where I work as a software developer the times I've had to physically handle paper have been few and far between (and usually related to dealing with arcane and esoteric reimbursement policies that still require physical receipts). The fanfare was premature, but it's basically happened anyway. And this will be the same -- someone will eventually claim, "Paper books are dead!" to which a large number of people will reply, "Nuh uh!" And then a decade or so later, without any pomp and circumstance and without anybody really noticing, you'll stop finding paper books for sale. All of the brick & mortar book-only stores will have shut down or converted to other merchandise, you'll no longer find romance pulp novels at the supermarket, and you'll be lucky to find a handful of 5 year old overpriced Tom Clancy books at airport terminals. For all intents and purposes, the paper book will be dead, and when you look back on it, it'll seem like it was the most seamless and natural thing ever. Don't believe me? Ask Tower Records, as this process is in the late stages for music on CD. Or Borders, for that matter.
It may be easy, but that doesn't mean it will be cheap. Why would I spend $8 of raw materials for my 3D printer to make a book when I could just read it in digital form? No doubt people will do it, but it will be a novelty. "Hey, look what I can do!" <prints out entire works of Shakespeare> ... "Meh. Won't be doing that again."
Way to generalize, bro. I enjoy reading, yet I've entirely stopped collecting physical books. Same with the girlfriend, though she's still a little reluctant and buys one or two paper books a year. There are very few books that are not available as ebooks one way or another, even the Harry Potter books that J.K. Rowling is so notoriously against making available as ebooks (and honestly, the "darknet" versions are way better than what the hack publishers would put out anyway, if she'd let them).
Personal taste, and/or pretentiousness. If you think that you need books to complete the design of a room, print out some covers and paste them on cardboard boxes. This ranks up there with, "I like the feel and smell of paper," as one of the most ridiculous reasons to avoid ebooks.
But that's okay. Even today people still need buggy whips for novelty horse and carriage taxis, or the Amish, despite the fact that the horseless carriage made them obsolete. You can still buy vinyl records (and CDs), even though there's no reason not to buy music online anymore. Thus you'll still be able to get your paper books in the future, if you really have to have them. Just be prepared to spend a considerable sum buying them.
You're doing it wrong. You should download old books from Gutenberg directly. They're available in multiple formats, including Mobi for Kindle, and they're generally high quality and well-edited (even when they start from OCR sources). There's no reason to get old books from Amazon, and especially no reason to ever pay for those old books. That's how people scam -- grab a bunch of Gutenberg books, rip off the Gutenberg text, add a fancy new cover, and charge $2 on Amazon and other stores. Easiest money ever, because there are suckers like you who will pay for it.
Why? Are your eyes that special?
I think what you really mean is that you have no interest in reading a book an a PC monitor. That's understandable, PC monitors have shit resolution (in the proper "pixels per square inch" or "ppi" sense). A standard 15.6" laptop screen at 1366x768 has a pixel density of just barely over 100ppi. That's painful for reading. The same 15.6" panel at 1920x1080 just barely goes over 141ppi. People blame the backlight, but they're wrong. The problem is the pixel density. Anything less than 150ppi is painful to read, and really 150ppi is the bare minimum without some extra "smoothing" technology (like eink, where the pixels are not fully uniform).
Some common reading devices and their pixel densities:
Try a high-density screen or eink and you might actually like it.
This is mostly the case now. Every modern physical ebook reader (Nook, Kobo, Sony, etc) supports EPUB with the sole exception of Kindle. Either Amazon will eventually bow to standards, or the Kindle will ultimately become irrelevant. Format changes have happened before. Barnes & Noble successfully switch from PDB to EPUB. Amazon could do it, if they wanted to. Right now they're in a market position where they don't need to. Of course they're also very, very careful about always referring to their offering as "Kindle books" and never "ebooks". These are not intended to be generic ebooks readable on any reader. They're Kindle books, only readable on devices with Kindle software.
PDF is evil and needs to die as an ebook format. That's already happening, especially for narrative literature. The remaining hold-outs are technical books and designers stuck in a paper mindset. The former will change as the epub standard evolves. The latter will change simply with time, as the old guard retires or dies and are replaced with people who understand how to layout books digitally (if you want a corollary for this, look at the web -- it's been a very long time since professional web sites have had "Best viewed at 1024x768 in Internet Explorer" recommendations, because the old paper-based designers who wanted pixel-perfect control have retired or died, or finally evovled).
Custom apps are simply money grabs, and will die as generic readers become more widespread.
There's plenty of movement on this front. All of the major stores allow publishers to sell their books without DRM. The old-guard publishers are the ones requiring DRM now, and they will eventually be forced to follow the example of the music industry. It's just a matter of time at thi point.
This is probably the biggest hurdle. The Gutenberg project produces high-quality epubs, but they can only handle copyright-free works. So long as there are luddite authors like J.K. Rowling who refuse to make their works available in ebook format, you will never be able to hit 100% coverage. But of course like all things, time will solve this one. In a generation or less, any author will find it unthinkable not to offer ebooks. Assuming they're even able to do so if they wanted.
Compared to what? But there are two ways to look at this one:
I agree, yet disagree. Ebooks still require editing, cover art, layout, marketing, etc. All you really get to save in the production area i
Paul Revere warned the British that they couldn't take our arms by shootin' guns and ringin' bells. We don't need digital-only media in order to rewrite history.
I've converted entirely to ebooks (more specifically, entirely to epub ebooks). I still have my old paper books I bought years ago, but I haven't purchased another paper book in years. I read on my phone and my Nook Touch.
Short term, the huge amount of copyright-free books available from Gutenberg and others provides a wealth of reading material, and all of the major DRM schemes have been cracked so you can "liberate" your purchases (the only one that hasn't is Apple's FairPlay for ebooks, and that's because nobody gives a crap about Apple's store). Long term, the ebook industry is going to have to follow the music industry's example, getting rid of DRM and charging fair prices that are equal to or less than the cost of physical media (as opposed to ebooks today that are routinely priced above even hardcover prices).
Oh yeah, and ebooks should never be provided as PDFs. PDF is not a valid ebook format, and is an insult to the reader.
Out of your entire list, the only one you got right was multitasking. WP7 has copy paste, thousands of apps you can download for free off the internet (the Zune marketplace is technically on the internet, durr), and easily write new apps in Silverlight on any old visual studio you have laying around. In fact, WM6 development actually requires you to buy Visual Studio Professional or above and does not work on the Express SKUs. The WP7 SDK includes a copy of Visual C# Express and will integrate into other VS2010 SKUs. The UI for WM6 is only "totally familiar" because it hasn't significantly changed since 2003. Except where it has, because of 3rd parties like HTC skinning it with their predecessor to Sense, but not fully skinning it so that there will always be places where the old, ugly, 2003-era UI pops up. Surprise!. And the WM interface is very much geared towards stylus-based touch, with tiny touch targets that are next to impossible to activate with your fingers. And it wasn't until the very last one or two phones that you could even get a capacitive screen (resistive screens suck) and even though those screens could support multi-touch, the OS couldn't.
If you really want Windows Mobile, the answer is "get an Android phone". If you bought an HTC HD2, put Android on it. It runs great.
It's a political job-making law. Everybody needs gas. If you can't pump your own gas, jobs must be created to hire someone to pump it for you. If you want to run a 24/7 gas station, that means you have to hire several gas pumpers to cover all shifts, have multiple pumpers on hand during heavy usage hours. Each gas station could probably generate 5-6 extra jobs, which could mean thousands of jobs across the state.
Of course it's just make-work. No value is added by paying someone to pump your gas. It just costs the consumer more money and time than they would've spent otherwise.
Technically they didn't lie to you. You asked about a bandwidth cap (aka, throttling), and their negative answer was correct -- Comcast doesn't do any throttling. They do, however, have a well-publicized download cap. If you pay them for a 50mbps connection, you'll be able to use all of that bandwidth (target sites permitting, of course) to download up to 250GB of data during a month.
Maybe it's splitting hairs, but you didn't do your research properly (you "heard" they had a download cap, but you didn't go to their support site and look at their very detailed FAQ about it?) and you asked the wrong question. Nobody to blame but yourself.
You're doing it wrong. Right there, you should've hung up the phone. You can tell them they got the wrong number if you like, but fuck that. Personally, I'd tell them to go fuck themselves before hanging up the phone, so just hanging up is civil in my book.
These are people who would never dream of asking a mechanic to fix their car for free or a plumber to fix their pipes for free, so why is it okay for them to ask you to fix their computers for free? And if you're like me, you're not actually in the computer repair business, so I wouldn't even accept money for it. But then I learned from a very young age that you have to be able to say "No" and mean it, or you'll just get walked on by people like this. I weaned my family off of using me for tech support over 15 years ago, I'm sure as hell not going to do it for a complete stranger.
Grow a pair and stop being a doormat.
Microsoft has always been great at building developer tools, and the Windows Phone 7 SDK is yet another example. Silverlight is a natural fit for apps, and XNA works well for games (modern games haven't gone straight to the hardware for at least a decade -- the power comes from hardware acceleration, and the phone provides that).
That said, not all is well in Windows Phone 7 land. The SDK has some very arbitrary limitations, like not allowing you access to the camera except through a task that spawns the stock camera app. No AR apps for Windows Phone 7 Series Phone Smartphone phones. Barcode/tag scanning apps are still possible, though inefficient, as they have to spawn the camera task, wait for you to take a picture, wait for the app to resume, and then process the saved picture. I could scan five barcodes on an iPhone or Android phone in the time it takes WP7 to scan one.
No doubt the SDK will get better, but that's too little, too late. WP7 was already so far behind, it couldn't afford to launch without parity with iOS and Android in areas like direct camera access. These are things that are simply expected to be available these days, and not having them is a huge limitation that will prevent developer adoption.
And just a quick note on the games front -- independent developers only get XNA access, but major third-party developers can write native code (and access Xbox Live, just like Indie vs. Arcade games on Xbox). In other words, Unreal or RAGE tech on WP7 is just as possible as it is on iOS or Android. It's just that it's not going to come from the 14 year old programming in his room upstairs.
You may say so, but that doesn't make it true. Care to back it up with facts, or at least anecdotal evidence? Note that being 100% "libre" (or "free", as the rest of us say) means that many wifi adapters simply will not work, you can say goodbye to any decent GPU hardware acceleration, and more.
That only applies if you run your browser maximized. If you run it windowed, the tabs do not extend to the top of the window in Firefox or Chrome. Running a browser maximized at 1920x1080 is not only a waste of screen space but also a subpar browsing experience since most websites are still focused on 1024x768-optimized layouts.
IMHO, while I prefer tabs on top, I also prefer to use F6 to focus the address bar. This does not work with tabs on top in FF4 because Firefox treats F6 as "frame focus" and not specifically "address bar focus". It works in tabs on bottom because the address bar is the first focusable item in that frame.
A quick search would've provided you with links to back up your data, or to refute it. For example:
Mentioned elsewhere in the article, ideal efficiency is 3% loss, with averages "closer to" 10% (implying the range is probably more like 5-15% loss rather than 10-20% loss). And don't think farmers aren't keenly aware of this and will do just about anything to increase their yields. These are machines that cost the equivalent of a nice house in most places ($250,000 on average) and if there's a newer model with higher efficiency then most farmers will trade up to the latest and greatest. Even a small increase in efficiency over several years could cover the cost of the equipment.
I've said it before and I'll say it again -- farming is one of the most advanced areas for technology, biology, chemistry, etc. These are not slack-jawed yokels trotting behind horses. Even the average family farmer works > 1000 acres with only 1 or 2 people and has technology the rest of us have only dreamed of. GPS when it was otherwise only available to military and government applications, satellite maps, sophisticated data collection sensors to track yields, self-driving vehicles, market tracking tools that rival anything wall street brokers can think up, etc. Of course it's also a metric pantload of physical labor, long hours, and a livelihood that is directly affected and threatened by "acts of god" the rest of us would completely ignore (a hail shower might dent your car and cost you $500 in repairs, but it could ruin a farmer's entire crop and cost him $100,000 or more).
I love calibre for ebook management, but I wanted to post a pre-emptive strike. Calibre uses a database for metadata and the filesystem for book storage. However you really need to let calibre "own" the directory tree where it stores its library (or libraries, with recent versions). If you go mucking about trying to rearrange stuff, or if your OCD nature requires books to be organized in a different way than what calibre wants, you're going to break it. For all intents and purposes, the directory structure calibre creates is a database and you need to keep your grubby little hands out of it.
Also, recent versions of calibre have support for "empty" books, so you can put all of your paper books in your calibre library alongside your ebooks and manage your entire book library from one location.
Trolling is a art
That's like the complete opposite of good design -- when screen space is at a premium, waste it with bullshit. Then, when you maximize it on your 1920x1080 screen, go ahead and stop wasting the space where it no longer matters. That's the second most retarded thing I've ever heard.