Upbeat on E-books 291
DavidRothman writes "Sunday's NYT Book Review will carry an upbeat article on e-books, complete with mention of the New York Public Library's impressive 3,000-title efforts. The writer, however, misses many of the recent developments of e-bookdom such as the debut of the $100 eBookwise-1150, a reborn Gemstar machine. And the DRM mess and the Tower of eBabel--the horrors that consumers, publishers and libraries face with conflicting proprietary formats of problematic durability and accessibility over the long term--don't get the space they deserve. So far the XML-related OpenReader project, in which I'm involved, is invisible to the big media even though major Internet e-book retailers are quietly coming aboard. Still, it's great to see Times contributor Sarah Glazer being far more receptive to e-books than are many journalists. More at TeleRead."
Free eBooks (Score:5, Informative)
Next gen eBooks (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Free eBooks (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I know this is an oft repeated point but (Score:3, Informative)
The #bookz channel on IRC has a very large collection of "warez" e-books, and I honestly feel no moral pains while downloading a book I have sitting on my shelf.
As for reading in the bath with a PDA - I do it all the time. I just keep a towel on the floor next to the tub to dry my hand off as need be.
What's wrong with POT? (Score:3, Informative)
I know, I know, you can't make money putting things in ASCII. My real point is to encourage consumption of Free stuff.
Subtle, huh.
Re:Choice versus freedom (Score:4, Informative)
uhm, 2000 books is very few. (Score:2, Informative)
Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org] sports over 13,000 books (these are legal)
if you go to your local alt.binaries.ebooks or just #ebook you can easily double or triple Gutenberg count (my current library has around 30,000 books). Ofcourse would not so legal to download/own as they still would technically be under a copyright. But then, some of the books are easier to download illegaly than to get them at a library (as soon as I found out that my library has Shadow Puppets by Orson Scott Card I signed up and was waiting for over 7 months till I downloaded it).
and if are a maniac (as I am) of reading, but prefer to read legal things, then you could/should go with the lower quality writtings that are provided through various BBS archives [textfiles.com] various pr0n [asstr.org] archives [mcstories.com], as well as fan finction [fanfiction.net]. Heck, there is even wikibooks [wikibooks.org].
What is needed is some project that makes a global internet library out of all of these resources. Where we have things rated per genre (tied with the iblist [iblist.com] or, ugh, amazon [amazon.com]) But for all the texts, not just published/bookstore works.
Re:No PDF support. (Score:2, Informative)
If it helps, Fictionwise [fictionwise.com] sell all their non-encrypted e-books in PDF, and half a dozen other formats too.
Re:Free eBooks (Score:5, Informative)
You may now begin the Modding Up process...
Reading in the bath (Score:3, Informative)
I use ziplock sandwich bags I bought in a 99pence shop.
As for whether reading from a screen is conducive to enjoyment of a book: you'll either get used to it or you won't. I suspect most people could get used to it and find it enjoyable if they gave it a chance. Have you?
tofu on osX -- changed my view of reading ebooks (Score:2, Informative)
I have nothing to do with this software. I chanced across it, and I'm surprised at how useful it has proved to be.
ASCII (Score:4, Informative)
The major problem I see is how to store, index, and search when you have a lot of ebooks from many different publishers. For example there are no standard filename formats to include author and title information, and limitations on filenames also mean you basically want to have some metadata at the head of the document. So a simple standard for an ascii header at the top of a file would be good. This problem is of course much worse if you have different file/reader/compression formats so I am just thinking of ASCII here.
I've bought the same book several times over from my favorite authors over the years. That is dumb but even now my apartment is full of paperbacks and I keep tying them up with string into bundles which I can't get into anymore. I hate throwing away books but it is nuts. So I would like to get credit when I buy something from an author, so I can get a digital file when I buy the book and a copy any time thereafter for free. If I want a printed copy I pay the printing cost. But I should not have to pay 2 or 3 times for the copyright, and I should be able to store and manipulate electronically the text. I should be able to email or post on the web quotations from it, or put passages from it into my word processor.
When I was studying writing in school, I heard that one well known writer (maybe Kurt Vonnegut?) typed the entire text of his favorite writers on his typewriter, to learn how to write well. That seems like a really excellent way to train.
My opinion is that writers are writing for a couple reasons, one maybe is money (though 99% of the time not for more than making a living at it) and the other is to get what you want to say out. Maybe another reason (Heinlein says) is because you are infected with the writer's bug and cannot stop. (Luckily I stopped before I caught it, as you can see by my long, winding posts).
So I think the brief blurb on the inside cover of printed books about how this work may not be electronically copied etc. is complete anachronism and insulting. The point is, in the 21st century you should be able to do that. You should even be able to trade with friends, like you do with books. The part about not publishing it yourself and stealing profit from writers is a separate consideration which is important maybe but not the most important message writers want to send to their readers. So it may not be a popular opinion, but I think that writers should (and some are beginning to) embrace the Net as a way to get more people to know them, and trust their readers. In general this has already I believe been proven to work.
To me, I am most worried about how to maintain a well-organized, perpetual store for my personal digital library, which will not fall apart or become inaccessible as I move between operating systems and computers , will allow me to have both ascii and dvd together, will have some security maybe via an online backup, will let me trade with friends, will let me discover new works, will let me reimburse authors I like, will save me money so I don't have to repurchase dead tree copies, and will let me carry around a few hundred ascii books on my palm's memory stick.
Also I need a good book reader for linux, that is another perpetual quest but the most important thing I think is to achieve some open least common denominator standards and to create open text archives. Authors who don't want to participate can stay out of it, but there are a lot of books not in the bookstore and a lot of authors probably would like to become better known. Personally I have used an ol
Re:ASCII (Score:2, Informative)
That's where html, plain text, etc, loses it. The answer? XML. Meta-data for Title, Author,Subject, Comments, etc, and a user-selected CSS. Almost zero 'footprint'.The meta data allows you to forget about a separate database, and the CSS is available across all books, all publishers.
Forget html, thats all about bold, italic, which font... etc. Ever seen a web page where someone thought orange prose on a purple background was 'smart'? User-selected CSS to avoid that, and XML to focus on content location/management.Cross-platform, low CPU needs. Simple.