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."
Best PDA/Reader for E-books? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been thinking of getting a PDA for a while, but have never been sure if I can get a simple one that works well for ebooks without a lot of useless flash I don't need to pay for...
Any hints on what people have found works well in terms of price, battery power, readibility/screen?
Choice versus freedom (Score:5, Interesting)
Customers don't get any tangible benefits out of a system that allows copyright holders to intrusively restrict their use of intellectual property. That is why systems like the one employed by iTunes work whereas most do not: in the case of iTunes, it only seeks to protect the status quo of the relationship between buyer and seller.
To that end, as part of the intellectual property right agreement, customers should have a legal right to force eBook publishers to let them print the eBook. If someone pays a few dollars for the eBook and then wants to print it, that is their right regardless of what the law says. It's the customer's paper and their expense. In most cases, it would just be cheaper to buy the print book anyway.
Need better readers (Score:3, Interesting)
One would think that in this day and age, someone could make a decent book plaque of some sort with a good display that doesn't give you an epileptic fit or a "lucy in the sky with diamonds" strobing effect after a couple of hours use.
It seems absurd that we have so many advances in CPU speed for instance, but essentially very little in the way of text legibility on monitors. It seems absurd that monitors mimic the dimensions of televisions, and yet the internet and computing in general is primarily a text based medium. I've seen some people rotate their TFT monitors for text, which is a great idea however I'd like to see a greater emphasis placed on making text readable.
Oh, and rendering and embeding decent fonts in html/xhtml wouldn't harm anyone either. It seems ludicrous that people in the 1450s had access to better rendered fonts than what we have to put up with on daily basis on our computers.
Pricing (Score:5, Interesting)
I would think that much of the cost of book would go to the production process. Layout, typesetting, printing binding and shipping.
The eBooks however, seem to cost as much as their paper counterparts.
I'd be more inclined to get an eBook reader if the books were more affordible.
Traditional Dead Trees (Score:3, Interesting)
E-books have their place, though. I'm sure they're much easier to carry. Probably easier to search for text, too. As for archiving, they'll certainly stretch further than any physical shelf space. They don't have pages that tear off, no print that fades in time, no worries of physical damage whatsoever...except for water damage, that is.
In the end, I say let school textbooks go e-book. I'm sure it'll be cheaper that way, and revisions would be more immediate than dead-tree versions. There won't be a book buy-back (so that $5 return on that $80 hardbound won't be there to feed you ramen through the holidays) but at least you'll save on the initial purchase...and you'll need to lug less weight around from class to class.
As far as novels, poems, and other bits of fiction, I'll stick to regular books. There's just something about that page-turning tactile thing that I'd otherwise miss.
Re:I know this is an oft repeated point but (Score:2, Interesting)
Then there's the joy of having pretty much an entire library of books with you at any one time. I always have my Pocket PC with me on the go, so I always have my ebooks. Can't beat the convenience, especially if you have tools to easily search and highlight in the book. PDFs, although kinda unrelated, are amazingly great for students already overloaded with encyclopedia sized volumes of tech books.
That said, I also own multiple bookshelves worth of technical, educational, and entertainment books and buy more regularly. If it comes down to a book I actually have to buy, I buy it on paper. Maybe it's availablity of older books, maybe it's not paying attention to battery life, maybe it's being able to psychically flip the page... but despite practically living on digital information, I have to admit... if I have to buy it, I typically still want a tangible copy.
Re:First and Goal for Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
In my mind, $80-100 is a good ballpark for such a device, with $150 being the possible ceiling. We're talking about a frickin' book reader here, not an MP3 player. Books take up a couple hundred K, a meg or two at best. You could fit an entire personal library's worth of books in a couple hundred megs of space. Not only that, but unlike music or movies, you generally don't need an accessory to play them (DVD player/TV/stereo, CD player/stereo). If people are going to be paying half what a paper book costs (or even 1/3rd - seems the reality is more like 85% or morethough), and you don't actually get a phyiscal copy, you're not going to be wanting to pay several hundred dollars to read it. There's no cost competition there.
The internals would be quite inexpensive in comparision to the iPod, too, in my mind. It need not hold any internal memory beyond that for the OS: a couple hundred kilobytes, at best. It could have internal memory - 32 Mb or so, I guess. The cost for that much memory would be trivial. It would likely be able to run for months worth of reading off of a couple AA batteries (provided it was using an e-ink screen, or similar/equivilant technology). The processor power would also be trivial, because it only takes a couple dozen megahertz at best to parse a document and display it to a screen (provided the software is well-written). Throw in a simple media port (SD, I guess) and interface port (USB), and you've got expandability and interconnectivity.
Re:Pricing (Score:2, Interesting)
I would think that much of the cost of book would go to the production process. Layout, typesetting, printing binding and shipping.
Easy.
Because the price of e-books, as with a lot of other things, have little to do with the cost of production. Book publishers will charge the maximum amount that the market will let them get away with. In addition, there are a whole lot less big-name electronic publishers than paper ones, so there's less competition to reduce prices.
It's all economics!
Not enough selection (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm reading Ian M. Bank's Algebraist currently. Its a huge 700 page hard cover. It is was available in e-book format I would have finished it long ago on my pocketpc. I could have read it easily in bed with the lights off, while waiting for others to arrive at a meeting, in a queue. It is too big, bulky and heavy to cart around, so currently its lying next to my bed, and has been for last 2 weeks.
I really cant understand why Sci-fi authors dont get behind the idea. Its described enough in their novels for them to understand the concept, isn't it?
Surur
Re:Pricing (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I know this is an oft repeated point but (Score:4, Interesting)
Baroque Cycle ebooks (Score:3, Interesting)
Really, I'm surprised at the Luddite "paper forever" attitude that so many people have here on Slashdot -- it's the sort of attitude I'd expect people who still use typewriters and record players to have...
Niche publishing (Score:4, Interesting)
The books are all about 50 to 150 pages, running $5 to $10 each. They're in PDF form without any DRM enabled. We've turned six of them into print books (four in one volume and two others as single volumes). We use the eBook in part as a way to mature the books: buyers get a subscription to the edition and keep getting updates as we add, correct, and update the books.
For instance, I wrote Take Control of Your AirPort Network focusd on Mac Wi-Fi networks. The first edition was about 70 pages. The 1.1 release ballooned to well over 100 pages because I listened to what readers want and added it in. All the buyers of 1.0 got 1.1 for free.
More recently I spend a couple of hours incorporating all of the changes that Apple introduced with the AirPort 4.1 software update (fairly extensive small fixes and improvements). All the 1.0 to 1.1.2 buyers get 1.1.3 for free, too.
It's rewarding for me as an author to get the kind of quick and precise feedback from readers to write better books and then be able to shoot out those books to the original buyers and all new buyers. It's all a good financial return.
Digital to Comfy Conversion? (Score:3, Interesting)
But even though it has received favorable feedback, including from Neil Peart
On the other hand, I also produced PDF formats of various layouts, including the "submission guideline compliant" versions and one that borrows the typography from Jordan's Crown of Swords paperback. But if they print the pages from the PDF, it totals 654 pages. The submissions guideline version is 957 sheets of paper! The total printing cost at Kinko's would be about $40. You would smoke two Epson black ink cartridges, at like $28 each! Trying to print two sides to save paper costs in patience, time and sanity.
What are we supposed to do? I wanted the book to be 'live' in that it could have "services packs
Does Da 'Net have an answer? Some site where you submit a URL to a PDF and $10 on yer credit card and get a gift-wrapped printout shipped to you? Is there any technological fix for this dilemma? Is there any way to get digital verbal content into a lower cost, readable, comfy format for the reader? If not, anyone have a literary agent I can borrow?
StarGlider29a
"You have the right to remain silent... anything you say will be used in my next book..."
PS: You l33tz are smooth enough to figure out what my URL is. So in an attempt to avoid slash-dotting my server, please instead peek at a low overhead, imageless, slash-dot friendlier mirror for the raw (ugly) content: http://www.traffiscope.com/slashdot/mirror/
Re:I know this is an oft repeated point but (Score:3, Interesting)
When you have a person read to you, you get their inflections, their impersonations, and their fake voices for the characters.
A computer adds none of these things. You have to imagine what the words would sound like to you just as you would with a written page. The only thing I don't like about it is the speed. You can't adjust it easily, and I tend to read through character actions quickly and dialog slowly.
I read ebooks in the bath ! (Score:3, Interesting)
(Actually if you must know, I was reading Lessig's book).
Reading in the bath is probably not a good idea to do all the time, but ebookwise devices are 100$, and I exercised proper caution.
Re:I know this is an oft repeated point but (Score:4, Interesting)
I too am a huge fan of reading on the PDA but... even a super high res PDA screen isn't sharper than real print. Sharp ENOUGH, sure.
I'm DONE with paper, for the most part. uBook [gowerpoint.com] on my 640x480 Axim X50V is just sick, and even on my last iPaq (only 320x240) it was very usable.
What the world really needs is a cheap ebook.
- Screen at least 640x480, greyscale
- Good backlight
- CF or SD slot
- A few fonts w/ bold, ital, underline
- Software that digests open formats: Palm DOC, RTF, HTML, TXT
Basically, it would be uBook on a dedicated monochrome device for about $150. Kind of like the Cybook [bookeen.com] but slashed down to essentials.
ebooks won't really hit it big until they are cheap enough that you don't cry when you leave one on the bus.