thankyou

Sony PRS-505
I got a PRS-505 for father’s day. I like it a lot. But the screen is too small for many PDF ebooks. 8.5×11″ PDF is the de facto standard for role-play-gaming industry ebooks, some DRM, some merely “watermarked” with purchaser’s name on the bottom edge, and more and more, no copy protection. It really does handle text-based PDF quite well since the update. The scanned PDF’s, however, are not so happy, and one can’t control the grayscale points. Also one can not zoom in on images well. I’ve emailed Sony and Adobe on that issue.

I’m hoping for the Astak 9.7″ to come out soon. I want one. Why? Reading gaming books at a more reasonable size.

Calibre
I like calibre. It allows me to do almost all sony stuff except system updates from my OS X box. For system updating and purchasing, I use parallels.

Calibre has also allowed me to author content for use on my reader… and to take HTML and make it sony-format (which renders fast).

I’m mostly happy with it.

MobiPocket
So long as content providers require exclusivity on the device, it’s bad for everyone.

My first question is why are the ebooks still so expensive when compared to a regular paperback or hardcover book? Most of the pricing I’ve seen has been similar between electronic/paper versions when you take into account the “New Release” discount or the “membership savings” that most stores offer for the print versions. I would be more likely to pay a higher price for the device if I was able to get an ROI by saving on each book I purchased. Right now I buy a book or two a month, not three or four a week, so this doesn’t seem all that economical. I think the trick in getting people to switch to eBooks is not in lowering the price of the device, but lowering the price of the content or developing a method for current owners of content to put it onto their device. Remember, the digital version of an album (mp3) was around long before the portable mp3 player and that people who bought mp3 players were able to use software to convert all their CDs (and tapes if you really wanted to bother with it) into mp3 format to put onto their players. I imagine that eBook adoption will be slower because people who have extensive libraries won’t be able to convert them into a digital format, they’ll have to buy a whole new copy (more like upgrading from VHS to DVD, but without any real performance upgrades). I also imagine that the eBook will take off a lot slower because reading requires the person to be engaged fully in the book, unlike music. I don’t envision many people reading their eBook while driving, mowing the lawn, riding their bike, or surfing the internet.

My second question is why don’t publishers offer an upgrade to buying the printed copy of the book to include a digital version? I would be more likely to pay full retail price (versus the discounted store prices) directly to a publisher (via their online store or something) if they provided me with a digital copy of the book as well. This way I still have the paperback version and have an electronic version which is more convenient for me to read on my commute. This is similar to buying a CD and being able to obtain a digital copy of it for your mp3 player.

If DRM won’t let me share a file after I’ve downloaded it, how is that a replacement for a real book? The ebook will probably do the same thing for printed media as mp3s did for audio. The only difference is that it’s happening after mp3s, so people have already figured out DRM and all the content management restrictions that weren’t available when mp3s tipped and became mainstream. The ebook has the advantage of learning from other’s mistakes. My friends and I pass (printed) books around and borrow them from one another all the time. It’s actually good because I’ve found a lot of new authors by doing so whom I probably wouldn’t have chosen to read otherwise. With DRM, I imagine that this “networking” aspect would be diminished by people who adopt the ebook technology and it would return once ebook pricing reached a point where people could justify taking a chance on the unknown. If a friend buys a new release from an author I haven’t heard of and raves about how great the book is, I’m not very likely to go buy the $20 hardcover that’s available without first reading an alternate title that’s available in paperback. The same thing will happen with digital content that’s protected, people won’t be likely to chance it for the initial price because once they have it, their stuck with it. There’s no market on eBay or flea markets for “used DRM eBooks”.

I would be interested to know if the print copyright laws are subject to anything similar to the Home Recording Act of 1992 which would let me make a perfect digital copy of a CD for a family member. Can one theoretically make a full photocopy of a book as a backup for personal use or to give to a family member provided it’s a noncommercial use?

Meanwhile, while booksinmyphone is interesting, I don’t need the option. My PDA goes everywhere with me, and I have no need, let alone desire, to read on my cell phone.

You have a lot of options.

I have a U8360, the screen on the diagonal is smaller than my thumb. I don’t really notice the size when I’m reading.

I read books from mobile.booksinmyphone.com It’s a mobile phone internet site where you can install a book as a java application. You search to get to a particular book and then click an ‘install’ link. I find it easier to browse what’s available on their http://www.booksinmyphone.com and you can also download the books there to install to your phone directly – without needing mobile internet.

I read on a Palm OS PDA. Fortunately, I have a relatively large (320×480) screen, and versions of eReader and Mobipocket available for it, as well an open source offline HTML viewer called Plucker, a superb open source PDF viewer called PalmPDF, and an open source viewer called PalmFiction which can handle Palm “doc” and zTXT files, plain ASCII files on a card, and Word and RTF files on a card (which it displays as plain text), so I can handle pretty much anything.

My cell phone is a very low end Nokia, which has no book viewers available for it, and a screen to tiny too attempt to read on if any existed. All it does is place and receive calls, but that’s all I *want* it to do. For anything else, I pull out the PDA.

Thanks for the pointers. Mine is an old LG and so won’t run any of the readers you mention. I think that high end phones like iPhone, Blackberry, and ‘smart phones’ in general are only a small portion of all the phones out there.

PDFs are problematic on handhelds. I *can* read them on my PDA, using a splendid open source application called PalmPDF, but if I have a choice, I get content in another format. Most PDFs are produces with the tagging that permits reflow for smaller screens, and side scrolling is painful.

Now that Apple has an SDK for the platform, I expect to see more solutions become available. eReader’s new iPhone port seems to be quite popular and well regarded.

Content isn’t limited to the freely sharable: Mobipocket has a reader version for Symbian based phones (most of Nokia’s line), Windows Mobile phones, and Blackberries. eReader has reader versions for Symbian and the Blackberry, and recently released a version for the iPhone/iTouch which has apparently been *very* popular. (Fictionwise, who now owns eReader, had their servers straining under the load as all the folks who got the iPhone version promptly went online and downloaded their entire library…)

Both support their respective DRM and allow you to read purchased content.

Lots of folks read on their cellphones/PDAs. (My device is a Palm OS PDA.) The question seems to be form factor, and comfort level reading on the small screen. My device has a 320×480 screen, and while a did a little hacking to use custom smaller fonts, I read comfortably on it and have for years.

(I dodn’t do so on my cellphone. That’s a tine low end Nokia with a screen to small to read on, even if a reader were available.)

I’m currently using a combo of ruBooks and PDFviewer on my iTouch, but ruBooks keeps crashing on me at about page 103 of a book, and neither one of them offer the two simple and necessary functions of letting me flip to landscape, or letting me put a bookmark on a page to easily find it when I pick up where I left off. If there are better programs out there for the iTouch, somebody let me know. It’s not my favorite way to e-read (screen’s just a little too small/pdf’s are just a little too awkwardly-sized, and I’m not really that great at massaging the files from one place and format to another), but it’ll do until I can make up my damn mind.

Thank you, as always, Jane, for your insights on the eReader offerings. These days, it’s not as easy to justify gadget experimentation.

I concur. Where we disagree is the belief that uploading cracked copies to pirate sites will make it go away sooner. It won’t. It will slow that process.

What will make it go away is the example of folks who publish ebooks without DRM, and are doing just fine, thank you, like Baen.

Luuurve my EEE!

In any case, there is a real problem right now in the way patents are awarded, a strong belief among IP scholars and others that patents are given out too liberally. One of the big issues around this is the existence of “prior art” — that is, the existence of the very thing (or close enough) that the patent request describes. So let me flip your example a bit and suggest that a big problem with patents right now is that company A applies for a patent for something that has already been invented, and when company B, which is much less financially flush and slower to file, discovers this, they must then challenge the patent of company A, which got its patent in first but did not invent first. And patents are dependent on the first instance of invention, not filing, at least in the US (which is different from most other countries in this regard). An expensive endeavor, so say the least, and one that can itself crush creativity, especially of the entrepreneurial sort. Patents are intended to protect a very high level of originality in design, but many believe that the granting of patents now actually contravenes the original Constitutional grant to Congress of power over patents.

Anyway, I bring this up merely to say that any intellectual property protection is focused on maintaining a balance between incentivizing the creation of original work and promoting public exchange and use of knowledge. Obviously these two things are symbiotically related. That doesn’t mean that the way to protest certain things, whether that be DRM or patent grants, is to engage in piracy or corporate theft or whatever. But I think that there is a HUGE misunderstanding about the nature of IP rights, how they are distributed, what they mean, what they actually protect and grant, the logic behind their limitations, etc., and whenever you get into a conversation about these rights, it can be frustrating to see responses on both sides of the extreme (aka “an an author I have unlimited rights to my intellectual property” and “as a reader I can do whatever I damn well please with this book, regardless of whether or not it’s legal”). At least I get frustrated, lol. Neither authors (or publishers, for that matter, who are often the ones holding the rights at stake in these discussion) or readers have unlimited rights, and both sides can overestimate their rights, IMO, which just makes it that much harder to elucidate the middle ground.

::ducking outta here::

me, I'm holding out for a cheap ebook reader under $100 that also does color. I refuse to believe that with all the technology out there that we can't produce one that'll duplicate the size of a paperback and also be affordable by the general public.

I’m wondering if the only people out there with the savvy to do that is Nintendo. Maybe I’ll write them a letter…

A second company, through hacking the first company’s computers, gets a hold of the formula and begins to produce the drug. Because the ingredients are cheap and they invested nothing in the research, this second company can sell the drug at 10% what the first company–who must earn back their research costs–can.

Now, this isn’t a cure for cancer–it’s a hair loss remedy. And the second company isn’t preventing the first company from marketing its version of the drug. Many of the thousands who purchased it at a 90% discount would have difficulty paying price the first company offers it for, and arguably therefore would not have purchased it. No one can prove definitively that the first company has lost any money, can they?

But what the second company is doing is illegal. And ethically wrong. And will land someone in a world of trouble if they don’t stop doing it. Even if they’re only doing it to protest the insanely difficult to remove, child-proof caps on the first company’s pill bottles.

Patents are granted to companies that develop new products to ensure that they can afford to continue developing those new products. If not for patent protection (or restriction), there would be no incentive for any company to research anything. And unless they’re paid for their copyrighted work, authors may still write, but they lose a major incentive for making their work available to readers.

Don’t get me wrong. DRM pisses me off, and I agree that it may contribute to piracy rather than prevent it. But idiotic comparisons of books and chairs, and constant attempts to minimize (or deny) the damage done to authors by insisting that piracy actually helps them piss me off even more.