Novelists On the E-Book Experience 215
An anonymous reader writes "How is reading different on a Kindle, a Nook, or an iPhone? The NY Times asked two writers what they thought. Joseph Finder, the author of thrillers, misses the indices compiled by humans and finds it annoying the way that all of the fonts are the same. Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher novels, actually likes the simplicity because he can concentrate on the words themselves. And then there's the issue of monopoly, which must give the authors the willies."
Comfort and Freedom are their Best Aspects (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Basically everything but the Kindle is opening up. Everyone is switching to at least supporting ePub, and a number of stores sell only ePub now instead of their formerly proprietary format (like Sony). Eventually even the Kindle will have to compete or die as competition grows via the ePub format.
Your requirement of a lack of DRM is, frankly, silly. This is the modern digital age - you will not be able to avoid DRM completely no matter what you do. Do you refuse to watch DVD's because they have copy protection? Because that's all DRM systems are. Plus, aside from the Kindle, they are not a requirement. You can create your own ePub or PDF documents and read them on most ebook readers (again, excluding Kindle), and people can sell non-DRM files if the market demands it. DRM also allows Libraries to lend e-books, soemthing they could not legally do without it. Several readers support this now, and libraries are starting to pick it up. Once again, that excludes the Kindle (can you tell I don't like Kindle's lock-in?).
The cheapest new e-book reader out is $200, which is quite reasonable given the technology. That single purchase alone, thanks to Google Books and Project Gutenberg, puts millions of public domain books in your lap that would have been painful to read previously.
Lastly, your complaint about re-buying books is unavoidable. One is on paper, the other is digital, and it's not easy to go from one to the other without good OCR technology. This would be expensive for home use, but if you already had a nice camera, were really really dedicated to getting your books on PC, and didn't mind chopping up your paper books, you could do this if you wanted to. Personally, I wouldn't. If you really read the book that often then just fork out the few extra bucks to buy it again. If you do incrimentally you will eventually have your entire library, and it won't hurt the pocket book as much as trying to do it all at once.
Last but not least, if the reason you want an e-book reader is for technical books and dense PDFs, then you are going to need to spend some coin. You will be severly disappointed when you try to read a tech manual on a novel-sized screen, it sucks. Right now you're looking at $500+ to get a decent sized screen, and right now most of the really big e-readers are very over-priced. The target for those is a smaller group of people who can spend more money - lower demand but higher willingness to spend = higher prices.
I'm waiting for the Plastic Logic Que (should be out early 2010) for this specific purpose, myself, and keeping my small e-book reader for reading books.
Consider the source (Score:3, Interesting)
Why ask an author about reading? A successful author may be a good source of information about writing, but that doesn't necessarily make him a good reader. [Obligatory car analogy] A mechanic may be able to drive, but I'd probably get better answers about driving from...well...a driver!
Now an author's complaint about limited control of fonts may have merit if he is saying that as part of the presentation of his art, he would prefer to set the font type and size. Judging from the novels I've read, font selection rarely enters into the equation.
I travel for work so the ability to carry half a dozen novels and a bunch of reference books in my pocket is rather handy. To me the limitations of electronic reading technology are things like battery life, availability and selection, and DRM (which I've had no personal experience with yet because I don't have a Kindle). What's kept me from jumping on the Kindle bandwagon now that they're apparently available in Canada are some of the horror stories I've read of people losing books they've legitimately paid for. I don't want to pay full retail cost of a book to license it and be at the mercy of a nameless faceless entity that can revoke my license at any time.
Re:No problem (Score:3, Interesting)
The ePub DRM allows libraries to lend books now, and libraries are starting to pick it up.
Once it becomes common enough that most books are available from the library in ebook form, I may get one.
there are over a million public domain books available for free from both Google Books and Project Gutenberg
I've not found any free on Google Book; in fact, they seem to discourage your reading books that are in the public domain. Project Gutenberg is a good source, though. There are also writers like Doctorow and Lessig that publish under the GPL and host their books in many formats on their websites. I wish someone would set up a list of these writers with links.