I like books. Besides the content, which is the core, the reason for having a book, I like the physical nature of them. I like fonts, I like nice paper and a good binding, and I appreciate the thought that goes into laying out the content in a pleasing manner.
I’m also an engineer and a gadget freak, so when Sony offered a special on their Reader if you sign up for their Visa I jumped on it.
I’ve been watching the development of eInk technology and was waiting for a device to come out at a price I would pay. This one hit the spot at $60.
What finally sold me on this device is that there are freely developed tools to convert from html/txt/other into the internal format. So far I love it. It’s not a replacement for my beloved books, but it complements them well. It’s light and portable, the screen is very readable and the device has a multi-week battery life. I can grab books of Project Gutenberg or online articles that interest me and carry them with me. It can hold hundreds of books and fit in the side pocket of my bag. And, an ebook need not go out of print or stock.
It’s not perfect; the screen refreshes slowly, it could have better contrast and it could be bigger. All of which are being worked on and improved with each generation.
The biggest problem is rights management. How do you manage buying ebooks but still have the flexibility of real books? I want to be able to lend my books out to friends and more importantly, read them again into twenty or thirty years (if I’m lucky!). How do you make sure the authors and publishers are compensated fairly when a millions copies can be sent around the world in a heartbeat.
I just watched Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose talking about Amazon’s new Kindle device. It’s very interesting with features above the Sony Reader’s, but everything book you buy is locked to the Kindle and Amazon. What if they go out of business in ten years? Will I lose all the books I’ve bought since then? Apparently you can pay to have them converted to another format, but doesn’t seem very fair.
All in all I’m pleased, it’s an exciting time to be a book lover. However things ultimately turn out we’ll have access to more content and there will be more outlets for authors. Now if George R.R. Martin will just finish his Fire and Ice series I could be content. Until the next book hooks me.
I don’t think rights management is that big of a bugaboo.
Baen books (www.baen.com) has an electronic library, with DRM-free books, if you can believe it. In word, rocket, rtf, and html formats. Totally unprotected. And they still make money.
I bought and read about 50 baen books last year, and never once considered looking around on bittorrent, limewire, or any other p2p service for one of their books.
If a new technology called PTech were invented today, and promised vastly improved flexibility, durability, convenience, and richness of browsing and reading - as well as ridding books from DRM - it would destroy the Digital Book market overnight. We have PTech today, of course - it’s called paper, and it’s simply a superior technology.
But then I thought: you were wrong about the Notebook Writing facility. Remember how you thought it was a joke whenever it came in?
Remember how it swept the world?
Oh wait - that didn’t happen. What did happen was it got used for deliverymen collecting signatures when they left parcels. But it did boost the use of touch-sensitive screens.
And although most people enjoy the feel of a book in the hands, the thing that comes to mind is the reams of paper involved in storing invoices and similar documents - where both access and storage becomes a real problem. My company is involved with Electronic Data Management. We scan invoices and suchlike and record them on CDs. Probably it’s DVDs now - I don’t have much to do with that department. Mostly the documents are called up with tags against records in a database. But I can see how something like this e-book would be a useful way of browsing through archives, especially if you were not sure what you were looking for.
That’s a valid point. As a niche business tool they could be really useful, but then is there a need for a specialist reader over just using PDAs and small notebooks like the little Vaio’s Sony make or the new Asus EeePC, which cost less than a reader and do a lot more?
Carrying multiple books at once…like say, on a trip?
I rarely have time to finish one book on a trip, so the need would be rare.
How about the 2 foot stack of textbooks that college students generally need to acquire?
Would the obscure 10 lb Pharmacology text co-authored by your professor be available in eBook format? And could you see the diagrams? Seems iffy.
I’m glad to see this thread topic, because these things always intrigue me somewhat…I just read the Amazon Kindle introduction yesterday and–like most–was a little taken aback by the price.
(Beowulf’s $60 deal for the Sony though…not bad.)
I wouldn’t care so much about the potential non-permanence factor. I guess I’d buy hard copies of keepers, and things that I was less likely to want forever for the eReader.
But I’m still not anywhere near convinced I’d want one.
all of this technology is just a stepping stone for what i really want. a microchip in my brain so i can hear music in my head, know & savor books and movies, and has some kind of device that reminds me who people are and what their names are.
I hate reading from a screen, though I have to do it all day long. The real benefits, it seems to me, are the ones emmline touched on, where a great deal of academic or research information would be available on-line, cross-referenced, and easily researched.
This might put a bit of a crimp in the concept of “the prof’s self-authored tome on an obscure topic.” What if these books were to become time-sensitive, so that when you were reading them, you were always seeing the most up-to-date state of whatever field you were studying. Books would no longer need to go out-of-date. Original writing would fall back into history, available for those who wanted to see what had gone on in the past in a particular arena.
I don’t agree with Jeff Bezos that dedicated devices will replace books. They’re too good at what they do and there are too many people (like me) who just love the physical nature of books.
But I don’t agree that they’re useless either. The ability to read stuff from the net on the go without wasting paper or carrying dozens of books while traveling is very helpful. Besides Project Gutenberg there are other sites popping up to provide out of copyright books. And more and more authors are putting their stuff online for free; either philosophical reasons (see Cory Doctorow) or as a complement to their published books (see Vernor Vinge) or because their books are out of print (see Daniel Keyes Moran).
The work Baen has been doing facinates me, I’ve considered signing up for the Webscription service but I didn’t read enough of their stuff to justify the monthly expense. However, their deal with Tor may change that.
So far I’ve stuck with free (and legal) sources of books. $10 for an ebook seems a bit too much for me when I can buy a paperback at Half-Price Books for $2-$4. But that may change as the technology evolves.
The new eInk technology is great, it’s not like reading from a computer screen. It’s a reflective surface, not backlit like a laptop. I’ll be happy when the page size approaches that of a trade paperback or hardback and the resolution increases to match real paper.
