Upbeat on E-books

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."

I know this is an oft repeated point but

[SpooForBrains]

I don't see ebooks catching on unless there's a sensible way to read them. Reading from a screen just isn't conducive to enjoyment of a book.

Oh, yeah, and my wife says how are you supposed to read an ebook in the bath?

Just an opinion.

[wcitechnologies]

This is just an opinion, but I say you can't beat good-ol-fashion paper.

I love technology and all, and I love using the computer, but after starting at my screen all day every day, if I ever feel like reading something, I'd prefer it wasn't backlit.

Display Tech is the key.

[Bifster]

EBook tech really needs 4 things: 1) contrast ratio approaching paper 2) crisp resolution (anti-aliasing techniques makes fonts look blurry) 3) power to run such a display for at least 5 to 10 hours 4) light weight enough to be comfortable carrying around all day Without these features, I don't think the public will widely accept ebooks. Ebooks loose a certain intuitive spacial sense of location in the work that paper books provide. When you pick up a paper book, it's easy to find your place again and it's relatively easy to find former passages that one might like to refer back to from time to time. People don't like the disconnected homogeneous "loss of place" that one suffers with an ebook reader. Though I think people might be willing to adapt to a new interface if the above display and portability features were achieved though. Display and battery tech are just nowhere near capable enough and they're coming along much too slowly I think for ebooks to become ubiquitously adopted by the general public at least before the next decade I bet.

Give it time

[jesterzog]

Oh, yeah, and my wife says how are you supposed to read an ebook in the bath?

If it's an open format, then presumably you could print it without too much hassle. Just because it's distributed electronically doesn't necessarily mean it has to stay in an electronic form for reading it. Electronic distribution on its own has all kinds of advantages if it's not done in a crippling way.

If there's enough of a demand over time, someone may even develop a bathroom ebook reader to which you could temporarily transfer your book at the page you're up to. One of the best things about open standards is that you're usually not restricted to whatever readers the publishing companies decide to dish out.

Yeah, it's not exactly as easy to do all of this right now. But I hope the concept of future ebooks doesn't get trodden down too much because of how people see them today.

Personally I really do like being able to put books on the shelf before and after I read them, but I read books on the screen occasionally and don't want to rule out ebooks in the future. I'd quite like a reader that looks and feels more like a regular book, perhaps using some form of digital paper that can be recycled for other books in the future. (Technology might still need to catch up with this one.)

Why I have purchased dozens of ebooks

[Andover Net]

1) I find modern pda very readable -- they are easy to carry, and you can read them at night with the lights low. With paper I must have a light on casting glare on my book.
2) I can get an ebook when I want one. When I want to buy an ebook I am usually not at the book store, but I am near the computer.
3) I can fit many ebooks on my pda - along with music and a few .avi episodes of Stargate, etc, etc. All this fits in my pocket.

Respecting Copyrights

[yintercept]

I think you have the copyright argument backward. The ultimate goal of copyright law is to allow people to create their works without having to worry about others republishing or taking claim of the creation.

The end result of strong copyright (and widespread respect for copyrights) is that publishers can present their works in simpler, universal formats.

When there is no respect for copyrights, then publishers must resort to other measures to protect their works.

If we had widespread respect of copyrights, then there would be no need for technologies that prevent people from copying music or printing eBooks.

Likewise, Open Source would be stronger if there was respect for copyrights. In theory, the OSS, GNU, etc., are built on the tradition of copyright. Companies are more willing to produce source for clients when they do not fear that their source will be stolen by a competitor.

customers should have a legal right to force eBook publishers to let them print the eBook.

This is where you really are missing the point. You are basically trying to turn the argument for more freedom for the consumer into restrictions on the freedom of the publisher. Creators of software should not have any such restrictions on what they create. The groups pushing for restrictive and intrusive technologies do so because they claim that there is no longer any respect for copyright law. If there was respect for copyright law, then I could sell you an MP3 for a nickel and not worry about you "republishing" the MP3 by giving it to all of your friends.

Re:Display Tech is the key.

[CAIMLAS]

That technology is available now in E-ink. The problem is, the company that makes it is only licensing it to fucking Sony, maker of the Librie, which isn't available in the US and has restrictive DRM. (The gumstix, which you may or may not have heard of, is what powers the librie, I believe. It's a gumstick-sized system, basically, using an Intel Xscale.)

Now, we need either a competing, similar technology to compete with the E-ink, or the release of the technology for other companies to work with.

Re:Pricing

[eclectro]

The eBooks however, seem to cost as much as their paper counterparts

Because the price of e-books, as with a lot of other things, have little to do with the cost of production....so there's less competition to reduce prices. It's all economics!

Yes, but there is a reason that nobody is buying them, and it's not lack of competition.

It is safe to assume that the person who is buying the ebook is not completely stupid as they know how to turn on a computer.

People know that the DRM is draconian for most commercial ebooks, that there is no standard, and that it costs a fraction of the cost of a regular book to produce.

To price an ebook the same as a regular book is insane, as most people prefer the dead tree version to handle on a day to day basis given the choice. It may change someday with better display technologies, but right now paper rules the world. It is also easier to photocopy a couple of pages if you wanted to where the heavily DRMed version would not give you the chance.

I really don't care if commercial ebook ventures crash and burn (and many have), because producers need to gain a sense of reality which they seem to be lacking.

Sure ebooks have a cost to produce. But to say that they are near anywhere that of a regular book is a bald face lie.

You're right, it is econimics, and economics is saying get a clue or go out of business

Electronic Magazines are the future!

[Anonymous Coward]

For me digitally distributed magazines are the future of ebooks. I don't want to read a novel on my computer because I want it as a book which I can put in my bookcase (and show off what great books I've read ;). But I don't want to keep weekly/monthly journals/magazines physically, so it is much more convenient to read them on a Tablet PC in vertical mode and then store them on my harddisk for later retrieval.

Re:I know this is an oft repeated point but

[fireboy1919]

You know, I feel exactly the opposite way.

Before I got my PDA, I hadn't read more than two books for the fun a year since middle school. Two years ago I got a PDA and have read about 300 novels since then - finishing off the works of most of my favorite authors and starting new ones. I just started and finished the complete works of R.A. Salvatore last month, for example (well...half a book left, and then I'm starting on Tad Williams).

Here are the things I love about it:
You can read while drifting off to sleep. Reading a book requires page turning, which, when you're very, very relaxed, is an effort of coordination. Getting up and turning off the light is enough to make you wake back up again. The PDA will shut itself off, and I can set it to autoscroll, or just press the down button on my pda, both which are very minimal efforts by comparison. Why would I want to read when I'm that relaxed? It's a common phenomenon that the state right before sleep is when you have the greatest connection to your subconsious mind - your imagination is the strongest. Think of it as surround sound for books.

It's less strain on your eyes. With a good PDA, you get better resolution than normal text, and there's a backlight. You can read for longer periods of time without feeling eyestrain. After having seen and tried them, I would never buy an e-book reader because they don't consider this that important, whereas I find it paramount. This may be why there are so many people like you, who think that it's worse. The PDA that I currently use almost exclusively as an e-book reader is a Palm Tungsten E, which is noted for it's especially sharp screen.

You don't have to plan to carry books. A PDA is a convenient thing to have around anyway, so I've got a book with me anywhere. Standing in lines is much more fun now.

I put all my books into my PDA by converting whatever format I have into HTML, and then storing that with plucker, which compresses text into chunks (it uncompresses as the text is needed in an almost unnoticable manner). Usually I have about ten ~300 page novels on my PDA at any one time, which take up about 1.5MB. I have 26MB available for storage. Finish a book, start another without having to go get it.

As far as reading in the bath, I would suggest that a printed copy of a book would be ruined just as PDA would if you got it wet. However, e-books can be printed out, and if the print-out gets wet, you lose little. You don't have to print it all, either, so don't use the argument that printing takes a while. 30 pages at 8 1/2 x11 should be more than enough to turn your wife into a prune before she finishes.

eBooks do Work

[paulkoan]

I have been reading the majority of my fiction through ebooks on Pocket PC (using the Peanut Press / ereader reader) for several years now.

I was much the same as many people, in that I thought that losing paper would also take something else away from the experience, and balked at the idea.

But I gave it a go. Originally on a Palm PC many years back, and I now struggle to get through a book on paper. Quite simply, it is too inconvenient.

My book has its own light source. It is lighter than most books. I find that turning a page on an ebook is actually less intrusive than paper. By the time my eyes have scanned back up to the top of the page, the new page is there ready to read, with seemingly no physical action on my part, as the mechanics of changing to the next page become more subconcious than with paper.

I also almost always have my pda with me, so gone are the days where I would have to carry a pda and a book somehow. Gone are the days where I would have an unexpected boring wait to get through without any stimulus. I can read almost anywhere, at any time. Standing in a queue. Waiting for the bus.

Now I am using ebooks, I find I am reading significantly more than I possibly could with paper books.

And my life is richer for it.

The benefits for me make the cons hard to see. Reading in the bath? Well, I shower, so thats a non-issue for me. But plenty of people manage to use the phone in the bath. Raining? I find pdas are relatively water resistant. Paper books don't fair too well in the rain either.

Of course there is battery to consider. If you used a pda primarily for reading, then thats 2-3 hours of reading in a day if you charge it fully each night.

Which is good going.

I was surprised. Now I don't want to go back.