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Why Nobody Likes E-Books
Posted by
michael
on Thu Aug 09, 2001 12:29 PM
from the charging-more-money-for-less-product dept.
from the charging-more-money-for-less-product dept.
CybrGuyRSB writes: "In today's Chicago Tribune, there is an interesting article about the total unpopularity of e-books. It seems to partly tie their failure into their copyright protection and briefly discusses the Skylarov case."
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Why I don't want an eBook (Score:4, Redundant)
- I can't flip through it.
- I can't dog-ear it, or use my bookmark collection.
- Books smell good and feel good (okay, this is nostalgia).
- Screens hurt my eyes, paper works fine.
- eBooks run out of power, books don't.
- eBooks might have access control, books don't.
- I own a book, not a license to it.
- Books are cheap - I can forget one at the beach and not lose too much cash on it.
- I'm unlikely to be mugged for a book, even on the NYC subway.
- Reading in bed doesn't get in the way of hot sex.
- And finally, with a book, no one can take away my right to read [gnu.org].
What did I miss?(Hold on honey, let me unplug my eBoo - bzzzzzzzzt aaaaaagh!)
Not everybody ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Last summer, out in the woods with the new popup camper, it was very enjoyable to reread Huckleberry Finn (which I do every few years) whenever I could grab a few minutes. I carry it anyway (work, spreadsheets, phone #s, etc.) so I might as well load up a book or three for those spare moments.
I purchased and read all the installments of Stephen King's The Plant (first time I've ever read anything by him). I'm looking forward to the conclusion of the work (if he ever decides that the 6-figure _profit_ he made from the early portions justifies writing some more).
Specialized readers? NO! Useful and/or entertaining documents? SURE!
I carry around the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, FIFA Soccer Rules, Unleashing the Ideavirus!, and others ...
Having the exact quote at your fingertips is sometimes quite handy ...
No more stereotypes (Score:5, Insightful)
"A Russian graduate student named Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested"
I was happy to see they used the term "graduate student" and not the ever to popular term "hacker" in their article.
Old news (Score:3, Insightful)
I've referenced it a couple times here already.
The Vonnegut comment at the end is great!
My thoughts (Score:3, Insightful)
Publishers shooting selves in foot (Score:4, Interesting)
I've said this before, but publishers are only hurting themselves with this insane obsession with spending millions on consumer-hostile "protection" schemes.
Look at Baen Books [baen.com], which (in addition to dead trees) publishes books in electronic format, which uses good old documented and portable formats such as HTML and RTF with no passwords, encryption, "digital rights management", monitoring, locking the book to a single computer, or other nonsense, and which seems to be the only publusher of e-books that's actually making money at it.
I don't believe this is a coincidence. It may be time for other publishers to remove their heads from their asses, stop paying buckets of money to the concocters of baroque DRM schemes and various Congresscritters, observe Baen's experience, and learn. Imagine! A company that makes money, not by threatening its customers with legal action and hamstringing them with Evil Code, but by providing them a useful product at a reasonable price that yields a profit!
Baen Gets It (Score:3, Interesting)
I went to the Baen books site and checked out the link to the Baen Free Library [baen.com].
Jim Baen and Eric Flint get it when it comes to ebooks and intellectual property.
Check out the site, it's worth the read.
Steve M
O'Reilly (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:O'Reilly (Score:3, Informative)
well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
People who read lots of book, those that would see the greatest benefits of a portable reader, actually love books themselves! They like personal libraries, the weight of a good book in their hand, and honestly have some kind of tactile fixation with page turning. Most everyone but the geeky fifteen year-olds (god bless their hearts) mentioned in an article below are actually trying to get away from the monitor at the end of the day.
Re:well duh (Score:5, Informative)
I consider myself someone who reads lots of books, and I completely disagree with this statement. I think the people who say they like the feel of a book in there hand have never tried any type of e-reader. They weight of enough books to last me for a two week trip is not pleasant. I would much rather put a few books on my Palmpilot, which I have with anyways, than carry around an extra few pounds of paper.
I have been reading books on my Palmpilot for several years now, and I am completely addicted to it. I even have a Palm III with the old low contrast screen, so I would probably like it more if I moved to a V or 500 with a proper display.
I think people who don't like reading e-books have never tried it. (This is making the assumption that the books these people want to read are available in an usable format. I can completely understand people not wanting to read e-books because they have no interest in 100+ year old stuff from the Gutenberg project [gutenberg.net] or whatever annoying thing the publishers have decided to make available.)
Parent
Re:well duh (Score:3, Interesting)
people read books for enjoyment and to get AWAY from tech not deeper into it.
Maybe you only say that because you're an old fogey? I'll concede that the technology has a long way to go. I've read som e-books on my IPaq and the small screen size, the strain of reading from a backlit display (although TrueType fonts are nice!) and worrying about running out of juice are a bother. I see no reason why this won't improve in the near future, though.
Remember everyone hated trains when they first came out and people said they'd rather travel by horse-driven cart than a train. But then a new generation grew up who didn't see it as a problem and actually appreciated the fact that it could get them where they wanted to a lot faster and a lot more comfortably.
Technology is a tool. It's one thing to work with technology to develop it and it's a whole other thing to use it to your advantage. There are times when I want to get away from the work part of technology but I still like it being used to my advantage. Don't forget that the car you drive and the dishwasher you use are all also the fruits of technology.
Re:well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a reason for that. In fact, there's many reasons for that. Me, I've got 2000 books in my house. Sure, I've got a 40 gig hard drive, too -- in fact three 40 gig hard drives -- and could easily fit my books on one (probably less than 1) of those hard drives.
But why? Why would I want to sit and stare at a computer screen or Palm or PocketPC or iPaq or Rocket eBook reader or whatever is the gadget du jour?
I actually enjoy the physical book -- the paper, the way it smells, the way I can use it, abuse it, tote it, and carry it around. I also like the fact that I won't be arrested if, say, I decide to backwards engineer it -- if I take a peep at the binding, wonder if the leaves are glued, and even spot a couple pages that haven't been cut.
I can't do that with an eBook. I can't do that because Adobe and Microsoft will make sure I end up in jail. They'll claim that my "crime" is nearly as bad as murder -- more so, in fact, because I'm infringing on their "intellectual property" which, as we all know, is more important than anything else these days.
Yeah, eBooks rock, all right. Go ebooks. Wonderful.
And all these "screen reading" software that Microsoft is pioneering? Yeah, it's wonderful. Sit me down in front of a bigass monitor with Microsoft's Reader software. Software, by the way, which hasn't been updated in nearly a year. Software which is slow, buggy as hell, and won't even let me "register" more than twice.
Oh yeah, ebooks rock all right. Let's see. Don't get me started. How about the one time I decided to purchase an ebook? I filled out all the forms -- nearly had to give my driver's license number -- and then submitted all my credit card information only to -- get this! -- get a 500 Server Error when it came time to issue me the "digital verification" that I then had to "click" on then RESUBMIT just to prove that I'm who I said I was and that my reader was registered.
Love it! Let's see, now how does that compare with this:
Live in Ann Arbor (or any good college town with lots of bookstores). Go to Dawn Treader Books (or any good used bookstore piled high with thousands of books). Buy book. Buy another book. Bring book up to counter. Chat with clerk who says, "Hey, if you're into Thomas Pynchon, have you tried Gaddis?" "No," say I. "You recommend him?" "Oh yeah," says clerk who, within seconds, drops a copy of _The Recognitions_ and _JR_ on top of the nicely dog eared copies of _V_ and _Gravity's Rainbow_ that I'd already decided to purchase.
So exit I do, ambling down Liberty Street (or whatever street in your college town of choice that is lined with your used bookstores of choice) with my newly purchased used books. I can read these books anywhere. I can underline them. I can lend them to my friends. And -- imagine this! -- no matter what I do to these books -- read them, underline them, xerox a few pages from them for a presentation -- the FBI DOES NOT GET INVOLVED!
Now, compare that with digital books. Compare that with encryption, validation, verification. You tell me which is the better deal for readers?
Now, don't get me wrong. Maybe ebooks have their uses. You're Pre-Med, say, and can get a semester's worth of ebooks on a CDROM. Maybe that's a good deal. Or you're a law student and can get what you need a couple CDROMS and don't have to scout out estate sales of dead lawyers just so you can build a library of outdated law books. All right, fair enough.
But for book lovers -- and actual readers -- readers who like to discover an old Modern Library edition of Thackeray that was used by someone in 1941 who dated the book and even stuck a few interesting notes on the margin -- there's nothing to compare with actual, phsyical text.
My own opinion -- after years of haunting used bookstores and 'Friends of the Library' sales -- is this: that people who claim that ebooks are the best thing to come around since, er, the invention of the book are not readers. They simply don't read. They like to have the books. Or they like to have the electronic versions of books that they've read (I mean, really, how many copies of Joe Haldeman's 'Forever War' or Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation Trilogy' do you really need? If you check out the ebook groups on usenet, these are really the only books traded, posted, and pirated -- Haldeman, Asimov, some Sterling, Gibson (of course), and Heinlein. And the same pirated texts are posted day after day after day after day after day. But that's not the point, is it?)
Parent
Re:well duh (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with most e-books is that the format they are published in is quite literally a value subtracted format. You can't share them, you can't market them up, and the FBI is likely to show up at your door if you develop a tool to read them on your Linux box.
Plain text and its derivatives HTML, XML, etc. don't have any of these drawbacks, and they have considerable upside as well, like being able to use grep and find to search your collection of books. If e-books were in a text-based format then annotations, bookmarks, and a whole list of other physical book benefits would be taken care of automatically (Emacs, for example, would allow you to mark up your texts in ways you never dreamt of with a paper book). You would also maintain all of your fair use rights.
Publishers, on the other hand, would lose a fair amount of control.
Because of this most publishers (besides O'Reilly) are not interested in plain text e-books because they think that people will just steal them. Maybe they are right too. All I know is that e-books are not going to take off as long as these issues are not sorted out. People are not likely to purchase e-books as long as the format is closed, and publishers are unlikely to release more books in open formats for fear that people will just steal their work.
It sort of makes me wonder how well O'Reilly's electronic manuals sell.
Re:well duh (Score:5, Informative)
Storytelling via word of mouth has been around much longer. When i want to leave work and stop staring at a computer screen then i'll be biking up and down liberty/state/main/s. university street, maybe stopping in Ashley's or Leopold's for a quick pint, seeing who's there, finding out what's new, listening to tales of happenings past and present, meeting new folks and learning from their stories.
I agree that most people's negative reactions to ebooks are due to their newness - your own examples particularly bring this to light, as well as other's "if they were as convenient" statements. When books first came out you'd have to wait a while for a monk to make a copy for you, or wait for Gutenberg's invention. Give ebooks some time and the rough edges will hopefully get smoothed out appropriately.
Personally, i wish i had an electronic copy of every book i've ever read (yes, i read too - i'll stop in Old Towne for to sit and read with a pint on occasion) so that i could easily grep out a certain phrase or name or example from the text.
But i'd also like an electronic copy of every bit of data that passes through me, so the next time i'm at the Fleetwood and someone's telling me about their Seattle WTO experience i could quickly reference it against the newspaper articles and tv news i heard and read. Sure my notebooks handle this functionality too and i wouldn't give up making them for anything, but as i open up my notebook i can't help but think 'grep -i seattle' and wish i could have written down full transcripts of what i heard.
Parent
Re:well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see if I've got this right ...
You don't like the current legal environment for intellectual propery, including ebooks. Me neither.
Of course there have been laws about paper books as well. Copyright was originally granted by the king to let you publish. The church had the list of forbidden books. In the US there are people that want Tom Sawyer and Harry Potter banded from school libraries.
Of course this has nothing to do with paper books or ebooks in and of themselves. But I could see story tellers arguing that they didn't need permission to tell their tales, so the hell with these new fanged paper things.
You don't like the current hardware. Me neither. Of course the first 'books' were done in stone (think rosetta stone, an early ASCII to EBCDIC type reference manual). Ok so mabye that is stretching it. But in the same fashion I don't think that computer screens or palm pilots deserve to be called ebooks. As far as I'm concerned the 'e' equivelant of a book hasn't been developed yet.
You don't like the current software. Me neither. But have you looked at old hand printed books? Yes some are gorgeous, clear text wonderful illustrations. But some are unreadable scribble.
You don't like poor service. Who does? But the experience of buying an ebook has little to do with the ebook itself. If I visited a book store with surly clerks, badly stocked shelves, damaged books I wouldn't shop there. But this has nothing to do with the books.
You don't like the current sales infrastructure. No browsing the stacks. No recommendations from clerks or fellow shoppers. I agree with you here. Amazon type user reviews just aren't the same. Is the trade off to be able to find any book ever published, download it, and start reading in minutes versus hours spent driving to the local bookstore and hoping they have it (I know, but I never call first) or days waiting for it to be delivered. I don't know, since we aren't there yet. I do like going to the bookstore. I also like the convenience of shopping on line.
So if you are arguing that the current state of the ebook leaves much to be desired I wholeheartedly agree. But we part company if you are saying that ebooks will never be as useful as paper books. Don't confuse the potential with the current implementation.
Of course, ebooks may not pan out. I think they will, but I've been wrong before.
Steve M
Parent
Re:well duh (Score:3, Insightful)
I have instilled the same love of books in my own children. Both children are highly literate and have very active imaginations.Instead of being afraid to read or disliking it to the point of avoidance, they look forward to reading a good novel and see it as personal private time. I'm sure they can do the same with ebooks, but it's not quite as tangible.
I have nothing against ebooks if the technology will encourage more of our youth to read. That alone is quite a feat considering so many children are coming out of the public school system practically illiterate. My concern is more with the quality of content.Will online books be a steady stream of assembly line novels from authors under contract to pump out the books for profit? Will ebooks instill the value real books do or will they just be a steady stream of read it - delete it - forget it? I know I've revisited books after several years and enjoyed them as much the second time. I've also shared books by reading them to my children. I suppose one could store ebooks on cd's for future reads, but IMHO it's just not the same.
I love reading eBooks... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I love reading eBooks... (Score:3, Insightful)
Haven't you heard? Fair Use is dead.
Economics For Dummies (Score:4, Interesting)
Gee, why didn't some of the other dot.com outfits try doubling their prices? It makes as much sense as their other business models....
Re:Economics For Dummies (Score:3, Funny)
Gee, why didn't some of the other dot.com outfits try doubling their prices? It makes as much sense as their other business models....
Uh, they did. The problem is that twice zero is still zero. So, it didn't help much.
Problems (Score:3, Insightful)
"The biggest problem with [eBooks] is the same one that affects [online comics [slashdot.org]] and other online reading -- Monitors on which reading and viewing are actually comfortable have not yet filtered down to the masses. Joe Sixpack won't read lengthy [eBooks] because it makes his head hurt after a while.
Paper is still a beautiful medium."
Right on.
e-books suck (Score:3, Insightful)
EBooks are extremely handy, but... (Score:4, Informative)
1) I can carry around many books in the space of a PDA (currently a Palm);
2) You can read the book with one hand (get your mind out of the gutter) - I can hold the palm in one hand and turn the pages with my thumb on the scroll button. Sure, it's not much, but that's just that little bit of convenience that paperbacks don't have;
3) Low light conditions - I can just turn on the backlight, and I have an instant built-in reading light;
4) It goes where I do - since I keep the Palm with me, it's always right there if I happen to have a few minutes or more free and I didn't think (or feel like) bringing my book.
However, I have no need of a specialized eBook reader nor Adobe's format. I buy my books and magazines from Palm Digital Media (used to be Peanut Press) at http://www.peanutpress.com/ They have a decent if not overwhelmingly complete selection, they don't overcharge, and everything's quick and easy. I'm not going to give up on paper books any time soon, if ever, but I have easily integrated eBooks into my life.
=Brian
Selling it short (Score:3, Interesting)
And the reader is very nice for travelling, since it holds a number of books, and ends up taking up far less room and weight than the equivalent paper copies.
I can't see paper vanishing any time soon, and I think the download to PC style of ebook is a pain, but the dedicated reader devices are really good, and have their place in the market. And if nobody likes ebooks, why does a Google search turn up more than ten pages of ebook sites?
I love Gutenpalm (Score:3, Informative)
You get the text (from project gutenberg typically) and use a desktop java program to compress it and put it into a palm db file, then just install it on your palm.
Since I spend a lot of time on the road, I can take a dozen or more books with me if I'm going on a trip without the weight. The palm's battery life means I have days of reading at a time without charging up (one reason I turned down a color palm from my employer).
I'v used fancier doc readers, but Gutenpalm is good enough and it compresses the content so I can carry a pretty good sized library around on my Palm. With a 16MB memory module, I could have literally dozens of books handy.
With respect to the issue of paper vs. e-book, I see absolutely no reason to prefer a paperback over a Gutenpalm book, except if you find looking at the palm's screen tiring, which I don't. The autoscroll feature is kind of useless, so if you like that sort of thing, I'd recommend the free readre "ReadThemAll", which does not scroll the text but "wipes down" the new page over the old one. However you'll have to use doc format books instead of zipped Gutenpalm format books.
So -- I'm basically a fan of e-books.
That said, I'll never read a non public domain e-book.
The reason is I don't want publishers to start treating books as "software" and to put the kind of onerous "licensing" agreements. That would be the beginning of the end of intellectual freedom.
This is stupid. (Score:3, Insightful)
They just limit ease of use and make the world a crappier place.
Re:This is stupid. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:This is stupid. (Not really) (Score:4, Interesting)
It's already happened. Use your fav file sharing tool (or course, you only use it for legal reasons, ha ha ha ha) and search for e-books or ebook. Not enough? Try some ebook websites/ftps. Try alt.binaries.ebook. Lots of stuff there. I COULD (*cough* could I said) get:
everything Douglas Adams has written
almost every O'Reilly book
All the works of Poe and Shakespeare
Fear and Loathing is Las Vegas
Steal this Book (by Abbie Hoffman) (heh)
Army Manuals
Tons of Lovecraft
Everything by Stephen King and Clive Barker
and about 200 compressed MB of other fun stuff.
Is it legal or right?
Meh.
People have been trading ebooks for a long time. Longer than MP3 trading has been around. Who DID'NT get a copy of The Cucoo's Egg from a BBS?What has the impact been?
Maybe none?
Parent
Re:This is stupid. (Score:3, Informative)
Really? Ever been to Fiction Wise [fictionwise.com]? They have a ton of stuff, mostly SF short stories, but some novels. Mostly oldish (5+ years), some not.
It's in your choice of plain text, PDF, PalmDoc, and some others. You can even download any book you have bought as many times as you like (in case you want to change formats, or deleted your old copy).
I found a number of Kage Baker stories I had never read, and a few Larry Niven stories I decided I should own in electronic form. I payed real money.
I haven't noticed the collapse of the publishing industry. Not even the SF shorts part of it. But maybe I haven't been watching?
Re:This is stupid. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this is silly. You know the same could be said of software and look what M$ turned into.
Companies have been building their software in recent years to make copying more difficult. They understand that copying is inevitable, but by using sophisticated install programs and liberal use of the Windows registry, they have made it tricky to simply copy a program. The software industry has been dealing with digital copying the longest, it makes sense that they would've gravitated toward some level of protection by now.
I'd like to expand on some points I made in the previous post. The first thing to consider about electronic books is how small they are. A single mp3 weighs in around 5 megs, which is quite a bit larger than a compressed version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. This is the root of my concern, books take up so little space that someone could download hundreds of books and store them on their home system. You may point out that someone who does this probably won't actually read the books (and you'd probably be right), but a massive copyright violation did just take place.
I also understand that there are books currently being released in unsecured formats and there isn't a problem with copying. My response is that the distribution channels aren't really there yet for wide spread piracy. When someone thinks of music they think (or used to) Napster; when someone thinks of books, no Internet solution pops in their heads, yet. As more books become available in electronic format, more people will look into copying them because the selection will be there.
As I stated before, it's my opinion that a proprietary format is needed to "keep the honest people honest". I'm not saying Adobe is the best solution for that, I personally would prefer a more open design, but it makes a lot of sense to me to keep heading in this direction. Just my two cents.
Well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Physical dimensions of a closed paperback.
2. >=200 dpi high contrast display.
3. Internet/wireless enabled. Should be able to plug in a phone line or ethernet cable, or use 802.11b at the book store to download new content.
4. E-Books should never 'expire'. I want to be able to re-read a book ten years from now. I can do it with printed books, why not an e-book.
5. Huge storage capacity - at least 1000 books.
6. Battery life in the 16 hours range (most people could read two average books in this amount of time).
7. Should function on it's own. I don't want to HAVE to use a PC to load books onto the damned thing, see #3 above.
8. Not neccessarily fully voice enabled, but it should be able to listen for something like 'bookmark', 'next page', etc...
9. The books should cost LESS than normal books. Why? Because it does cost less to make an e-book - you are just shoving bits, instead of printing, binding and distributing. Additionally people need a REASON to switch to E-books, making them cheaper might be a good incentive.
Re:Well duh (Score:4, Interesting)
11. I should be able to back up ebooks. When I loose one of those cheap readers I don't want to be out a thousand books.
12. I should have remote access to my complete library. This is a result of numbers 3 and 11. If I need a book not currently installed in the reader that is on my back up server I should be able to get it.
13. A mechanism to share books. Today I can lend a book to a friend. I would want ebooks to have a lend function that gives the lendee access to a book for a predetemined length of time and that is copy protected.
Steve M
Parent
Re:Well duh (Score:3, Interesting)
It has more to do with it than you think. You should check out paper prices sometime, they've increased immensely over the last 10 or 15 years. I don't know about computer books in particular, but generally speaking, say fiction, or your big non fiction areas like biography or business books, the markup on books is only like 40-50 percent, which may sound like a lot, but in comparison to other types of products like clothing, for instance, is nothing.
It's been about 10 years since I worked in the industry so my percentages may be a bit out of date, but I doubt it's changed that much.
They need to make changes to e-books (Score:4, Funny)
With paper books, I can look smart by filling a whole bookshelf with stuff I haven't read. With one trip to the used bookstore, I can cheaply purchase a whole 6 feet of classics from the past, and look like a well rounded person. Ebooks need to include some sort of packaging that fills bookshelf space, like the computer game boxes.
Technical references are too easy to use in a well-implemented electronic format. Why would I want to search text electronically when I could visually scan for it, page by page? There should be three ways to find something - Table of Contents, Index, and post-it-notes. Oh - and you shouldn't be able to click on the index entry to jump to the page, you lazy bastard. Navigate there yourself.
It's also too easy to correct errors in electronic books. I have fond memories of spending the first day in class fixing the errors introduced in the 11th edition. Errata should be sent on paper, by mail, so you can make the changes by hand. Think what the children are missing!
One thing that should be implemented is textbooks that change every year, in such a way that they can't be upgraded. This encourages students to keep their textbooks, since they can't sell them to next year's students. My shelf has many inches taken up with important sounding books like "Elements of Style", "Thermodynamics, 3rd Edition", "Calculus Made Easy", and "Learning Programming (with C)", that protects my shelf from getting dusty.
The best thing about reading the newspaper is the feeling of getting up, throwing on a bathrobe, getting your slippers wet with dew, and retrieving the daily paper from your neighbor's yard. All ebook media should be delivered by throwing it on your lawn, preferably at 5 AM, so that the dogs can tell you the moment it arrives. Or shipped in two weeks, the way Amazon does it. Again, don't forget the packaging - I want evidence that I've been getting the daily paper in my trash.
Size is also important - how will the folks across from me on the bus know whether I'm reading Dostoyevsky, Hacking Exposed, Playboy, or Harry Potter? The e-book should be huge, so that it requires a backpack, and should include, in a bright red LCD display on the back, what you are reading. The back-pocket is an unreasonale design goal. Weight is also a good thing - you need a counterweight when you are taking a dump.
Also, current ebooks are a bit too waterproof, and a bit to easy to backup. If I spill a little liquid on the display, I should see the waterspot five years from now. If I lend it to a friend, I want the electronic equivalent of a marked cover and bent spine. Books are a precious thing, and should be fragile, easily transferable, and should age with an old-book smell. Or, just put mold in a aeresol can, I don't care which way you go.
Are any design engineers listening?
Only the legal E-book business is dying (Score:5, Insightful)
Contrast this with "official" ebooks, where you have to buy an expensive and proprietary reader for your expensive books from exceptionally obscure authors. Worse, these readers have all sorts of annoying "copy protection" built in that makes you a thief for even trying to give your book to a friend (like you can do with regular old paperbacks), and the publisers treat you like the enemy when you buy one of these.
I think the truth is in the article. Ebooks are the future, unfortunatly that's a future without publishers, so the publishers of today have every incentive to make ebooks look as bad as possible and makes sure that everybody knows that "everyone else prefers the tactile sensation of books over any of those crappy ebook things that you want to stay away from."
Of course the publishing industry is slow to change, so we probably won't see the publishing industry die anytime soon.
Re:Only the legal E-book business is dying (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course not. In a world without publishers, you would decide which books to read based on the recommendations of people whose opinions you trust/respect. I'm imagining Slashdot-style "book club" sites where the editors of the sites recommend an e-text a day or so.
(and who would pay these editors? Well, in many cases the editors would maintain the site just because they are fans and like to do so)
E-book problems. (Score:3, Interesting)
So I can buy a E-book, and it can sit on the shelf with my ever useful sony data-discman... the Ebook of 1987.
No thanks. Until the solve all the above problems, an Ebook is just a joke.
Should be able to buy for whichever format we want (Score:4, Insightful)
I would like to go into a book store, and ask for any book, which would be printed on demand.
Or, I would like to go into a book store, transfer my ebook token, for which I paid $4 for to the book store. Then for an additional $3, I would receive a cheap pulp/paperback print copy of the same book. Or I could add $11 for a original printed copy from the publisher/printer, which normally would have cost $15 withot the token.
30 years after, the print copy would still be functional, while all the other gadgets and content delivery schemes would long since have been obsolete and thrown away.
Looking Forward to ebooks (Score:3, Insightful)
For some things perhaps. Not all. An ebook library would take up much less space. Which is a problem I currently face in my one bedroom condo.
It allows someone to move through the book faster (mainly reference books, like Java in a Nutshell), ...
I suspect that someone using the find or search command would more quickly locate info then someone using the index or table of contents on a paper book, with the discrepency increasing with the size of the book. Exceptions might be searching for illustrations.
That said I much prefer paper books to todays ebooks. The are numerous problems with the technology (poor screens, clunkly units), the software (limited catalog, lack of standards), the legal environment (DMCA), and the lack of respect the companies have for the consumers (copy protection, greed, thinking everyone is a pirate).
But the problems all seem correctable. And I look forward to the day when book readers are as cheap as gameboys, my entire library is available to me where ever I go, and I can back up my books (ever drop one in a pool, leave one on a plane?).
Steve M
Re:No good titles yet (Score:3, Informative)
quote: Most publiers are releasing only older titles on e-books. I have yet to see a new hardcover edition be simultaneous released on e-books.
I beg to differ! (Score:5, Interesting)
Online publishing is only dead if you're a publisher.
-grendel drago
Parent
Re:No good titles yet (Score:3, Informative)
Most publiers are releasing only older titles on e-books. I have yet to see a new hardcover edition be simultaneous released on e-books.
You're looking in the wrong places, apparently. www.peanutpress.com [peanutpress.com] has released at least several simultaneous with the hardback.
According to some inside info :-) King's Black House will be released as ebook the day it's available in hardback.
Re:Why I like books (Score:3, Interesting)
The Rocket ebook I have is slightly larger then a paperback. Not much so. You can also use a Palm, which is much smaller then a paperback.
Memory is cheap. I have a (nowadays) scant 16 meg in my Rocketbook. That can accomodate 20+ books. So, if I run to the bathroom, I can actually choose what book I want to read out of many. This is great on trips. You can go on vacation, and in the space of one book, bring 30.
As for my Visor, I have 72 meg of memory in that. I can store more books then I could read in there. Keep in mind that readers (at least the ones that I have seen) store books compressed. Text is very easy to compress, so, you can fit quite alot in there. If the reader comes with a memory card slot, forget it. You could practically store a whole library with the larger cards nowadays (ok, not quite, but you know what I mean.)
As for uploading stuff to your book, with space like that, chances are you dont have to do it often. Its been a couple of months since Ive uploaded stuff to my Rocket. I have The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings series, the whole Wheel of Time series, and some other stuff I havent gotten to on there. Thats about a good 10,000 pages of text, easily.
There are plenty of converters for different formats, so, whether you have a book in pdf, lit, rb, html, doc, pdb, or text, its not a problem to swtich from one to another.
Its not as much of a problem as you would think.
I was wary of all this when I first decided to spend 250 bucks on an electronic book, but Im quite happy I did now.
Re:We want digital paper (Score:3, Insightful)
It describes a world in which everything has been mechanized and computerized. Because of this, there are few required jobs left, and most of the population has to work for government programs, or join the army. Eventually, the former director of the largest automated mass production facility becomes the de facto leader of the rebellion against the machines. Published in 1952, this puts it comfortably in the "way ahead of its time" league.
Interspersed in the novel are examples (a mechanized tavern goes flat broke when a "germ trap of a Victorian bar" opens up next door, and the soon-to-be-rebellious director falls in love with an old farmhouse with well-water and no electricity) that the most advanced way of doing things is not always the best, or the most appealing. It's a good read... on paper, of course.