TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

E-books on a Sony PlayStation Portable

By David Rothman

A Game Fries post tells how to read Gutenberg classics and other books on a Sony PlayStation Portable.

Chris Smith, who, via the eBook Community list, pointed to this item, isn’t thrilled by the how-to’s reliance on a virtual printer. All kinds of issues arise such as file size and searchability of text. Here’s Games Fries’ take:

–The virtual printer you installed can be used for any document. This includes websites, text files, word files, essentially anything that can be printed.

–The text is small, but relatively high contrast. I can read it fine, but my vision is also good. Anybody with bad vision may not have much success with this method.

–The files generated are huge without any encryption. DaVinci’s notebook rang in at an astounding 150 mb. Lowering the quality will lower the file size significantly.

Despite the technical challenges, Chris Smith is excited by the idea of e-book devices for the entertainment-minded masses as a whittle down the costs. So am I.

The e-book industry could do worse than to cozy up to the makers of games-gizmos–just so the games people didn’t ruin the party with their mania for proprietary formats, a major risk, especially in Sony’s case.

Interesting point from Chris:

The key advantage of any system used for graphic novels and “ecomic books” is that such a system can handle any other work with an automatic transformation… However, much of what we are seeing now for e-books does not acceptably handle materials which are primarily graphic, with text that is entirely dependent on location as part of the semantics. In a way (a strange way, true) “ecomic books” might be considered the more advanced ebook.

I’ve suggested the idea here before that a “graphic page” system might be more easily built into a low cost reader than any text-based system can ever be. It was prompted by my thinking that the Sigma Ebook might be using this technology to drive costs down. (I’ve still yet to see a detailed examination of this device, incidentally.)

Anyone listening? The e-book industry should stop fixating so much on PDAs. Even cellphones as an alternative are not enough. Of course, the more devices people use to read e-books, the more important it is to standardize formats and DRM–so they feel they aren’t squandering big bucks on device-chained books.

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From Michael Ward of Hidden Knowledge comes different thoughts on e-books on the Sony:

The quick e-book hack that Chris Smith was referring to involves converting all the pages to jpeg and viewing them as image files. It’s interesting as a demo but not really useful.

A better path would use the HTML/web browser that’s built into the PSP. Another investigator has figured out how to view arbitrary HTML pages, so this is a natural for OEB or other HTML formats. The user is limited by the available controls, but there are undoubtedly ways to create soft keys with specific functionality for e-book reading.

The two most important advantages the PSP has are its low price (selling for less than the cost of manufacture) and its relatively good screen. Three: its wide availability. Four: battery life (maybe).