TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

PDF-formatted books? Heaven forbid.

Many “e-book readers” may support PDFs, but try reading one on a PDA or an iPhone. It can’t be done. Well, at least not well. iSilo and AirSharing will both view PDFs on the iPhone, but there’s a world of difference between “viewing” and having a good reading experience—and even then they only have the horsepower to view relatively small and simple PDFs. Try loading up a multi-megabyte monstrosity full of fancy formatting and illustrations and the like, and it will crash right out.

PDF e-books may be nice for those who can use them, but they’re useless to me—as they will be to the thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of other people using iPhones or iPod Touches as their main reading device.

I’m not really sure what you mean about “losing the nice formatting of a book.” Most of the e-books I’ve read (or made) have been formatted just as nicely as any printed novel. And with ePub looking like it will become the long-awaited “universal” e-book format, there will be consistency across multiple readers if they all use the same digital source file.

1. The pdf format is manageable, but it’s not ideal. In particular it can’t be resized or reflowed.

2. Why? Because you’re buying a specialty product. Something designed to serve one function. And prices are lower than $500. At least a little.

3. I don’t travel and I love my book reader. Paper books are dead to me.

4. There are other e-book options, but you’re missing out on some of the key functions of e-book readers. Such as e-ink displays (much better on the eyes) and long battery life. I wouldn’t mind having internet access, but it’s not worth giving up e-ink technology. If you read much at all the e-ink displays will make a big difference compared to other displays.

Whatever works for you. I have a small “netbook” PC that I love. For pleasure reading, though, I prefer a dedicated device with an e-ink screen (less eyestrain after looking at LCD monitors all day for work) and long battery life. The e-ink screen is also usable outdoors, and I do a lot of reading on my patio here in FL.

I like the precision of a nicely formatted book

Surely you are aware of the fact that the layouts of those nicely formatted books are done on computers and that ebook-readers are computers.

At home, they prefer paper books.

I don’t. I hate p-books. IMHO e-books are so much nicer to handle.

A wi-fi netbook, the half-size notebooks

If it works for you fine, but it certainly doesn’t for me. I used to have a FlyBook about half the size of my current 12″ notebook, but still I found it too bulky for reading novels and the screen too small for scientific articles. And the battery didn’t last long enough and it took forever to boot since it was running a normal computer OS. And the screen was unusable outdoors. (It sure was pretty, though, in its ferrari-red glossy finish.)

Right now, it’s accepted that e-books will have text that “flows” from page to page; that assumption is based on the inability of the industry to adopt a standard.

I’m questioning whether that should be an assumption.

Huh? What “standard” are you babbling about? A one-size-fits-all screen size???

There will always be different screen sizes and there are lots of people with bad eyesight who wants the text to be bigger than what, e.g., a teenager with perfect eyesight wants it to be. And there are even different viewing conditions. E.g., what’s easily visible indoors might be less visible at the beach, or vice versa. And there are different viewing preferences. E.g., I like it when “pages” overlap by 1-2 lines, i.e. the 1-2 lines at the bottom of one page will be the 1-2 lines at the top of the next page.

So, since so many page sizes are wanted, and even needed, reflowability is among the biggest advantages ebooks have over their dead-tree relatives. Having a fixed page size for ebooks would thus be copiously moronic.

@ Darcy Pattison: A nicely formatted e-book is still a badly formatted print book.

And a nicely formatted p-book that has print too small to comfortably read is a failure as a book, period. As is a fat hardcover that weighs as much as a brick and doesn’t fit in a pocket. Given a choice between books as inflexible objets d’art or as objects that adapt to how I want to use them, I’ll choose the latter.

I like the idea of using netbooks for e-book reading.. once they have better battery life and a tablet-pc form factor.

I also like pdf for reading. Technical books mostly. For novels, reflowable/resizeable text is “the only way to go!”

Darcy writes that e-books’ great failing is that they cannot “adopt a standard” or “format to the usual specs of print books”

What “standard” is that? What “specs” are those?

He then goes on to ask “why do we have to abandon the precision of layout and design possible in print?”

What “precision of layout and design” do you require? The vast majority of e-books that people read are novels, and the vast majority of those hew to no more “precision of layout and design” than starting chapters on a new page and having text neatly separated into paragraphs. E-books do both of those just fine.

If you’re talking about something more than novels—reference books with lots of tables (such as role-playing game manuals), and a need for accurate tables of contents and indices—then you may have a point. But PDF is still not necessarily the answer.

Things that are viewed on big screens, or big surface areas (such as role-playing game books), have to be adapted to smaller screens. You can’t show a book the same way on a small screen, like an e-book reader or PDA, that you can on a larger one. People can’t read tables if they’re teeny tiny.

And PDF is not the answer. You can’t expect the incredible diversity of e-book readers out there to standardize on one screen size, because people use a whole range of devices that way.

Publishers are just going to have to figure out some way of having the mountain come to Mohammed—because bringing Mohammed to the mountain just won’t work.

I read ebooks for several reasons. One is storage: a thousand ebooks on a PDA takes up much less room than a thousand hard-copy books. Another is price: I can get ebooks from Fictionwise, for example, for much less than I would pay for the same titles even second-hand in shops. A third reason is convenience: I have access to a huge number of titles both new and vintage, and I can get them free or pay for them and download them to read within seconds. But the most important reason, for me and for other disabled people, is the accessibility of reading. I can no longer hold even a small paperback book, but I can hold or prop up my ebook reader, and tap to “turn” pages or set the speed so the text flows past my eyes. I can adjust the settings with a tap or two (no fine-motor movements required: physical page-turning is a complex movement). I can choose a background colour, text size and font which makes it possible for me to read (e.g. white paper reflects too much light). Ebook readers are simply more accessible. I have recently moved from my Palm PDA to an iPhone, and I look forward to further ebook reader development on the iPhone platform.

Why carry a device that serves only one purpose when, for about the same price, I can grab a netbook computer and go.
With a lightweight netbook, I can read, check email, surf the web, do office work, etc.
I like the e-reader idea until I compare it to what a netbook can deliver for about $299.

Well, I read with my phone, which is always on and has QReader running in the background so that switching to it where I left it takes only a fraction of a second. I can also check email and do light surfing on the phone.

If I think I’ll need to do “office work” (i.e., programming) I take my 12″ notebook with me, but I’ll still read only with the phone. When I’m waiting in line at the grocery store I’m not going to take out and start up my notebook, even if it was a relatively small 7″ model with a relatively short, 4-second “unsuspend from memory”-function and with my ebook-reader software already loaded. However, I will start reading on the phone after spending a second or two unlocking it and switching to QReader.

As Kindle passes a first year anniversary its Amazon library has grown from 75K to 200K titles. The suggestion is that Kindle, as a provider, can stream a lifetime of reading to the small screen. The pause here is what that means. Can we honestly sustain a full lifetime of reading without a single physical evidence of its passage? From time to time we should glance at a dark Kindle screen and realize the vacancy of it compared with the graceful, arrayed companionship of physical books.

Let’s extrapolate beyond that; how will we enjoy an entire culture as transient as the evening news? All these devices are gadgets; the paper book as well as the hand-held electronic reader. But their uses for culture transmission vary. I am always amused when the death of print books is mentioned; I have a whole collection of truly dead e-book readers.

Hoo boy, I just can’t imagine what you guys are thinking, those of you who proudly wave the flag for reading on a netbook pc. It’s a safe assumption that most of you haven’t read an entire book on an e-ink screen. If you want to read a glowing LCD on a computer after using a computer all day for work and/or other tasks, be my guest. If you want to whip out a netbook and read your novel that way at the beach, at the park, while eating lunch at a cafe, while on a train or in a cab for only 15 minutes or so, etc., be my guest. But you’re going to look like a huge dork, and you’re going to have trouble seeing the screen in half those situations, and your battery’s gonna quit on you in the other half. And, have fun lying on your side in bed or on the sofa, holding your netbook with one hand while you read it. And I hope having to stop mid-chapter now and again and run your virus software is enjoyable too! lol.