When Will E-Books Become Mainstream? 350
An anonymous reader writes "IBM developerWorks is running an interesting article dicussing the difficulties faced by e-books and what it might take to help them to 'break out'. What are some other ways to give books a 21st-century facelift?"
ebooks are erehwon (Score:5, Informative)
Ebook technology is backwards. The article pretty much is dead on (in summary:).
In addition, ebook readers don't feel like or smell like books. I saw Bill Gates give a presentation probably five years ago and he was hot for ebook technology. He described how ebooks would simulate the look and feel of a book to the extent that would be possible electronically. Virtually none of his listed features have appeared (e.g., the ability to "flip" a page with your finger as if it were a paper book).
As for the above listed reasons:
A year later I got the new and improved version, same size, higher resolution and in color! Virtually no improvement in the font rendering, I returned that unit the same day also.
PSP Browser + Gutenburg Project (Score:2, Informative)
You weren't worng (Score:2, Informative)
You can't say that on slashdot!
You have a lot of free (as in beer, as in speech) eBooks: Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org], Wiki Books [wikibooks.org], or you can search it on Creative Commons [creativecommons.org]. And there are a lot of books in HTML, PDF (without encription), txt format...
E-books addressed at OpenReader.org (Score:2, Informative)