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.