TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘eReader’ Category

By Chris Meadows

Edit: Although I didn’t realize it until seeing it mentioned in the Ars Technica forum discussion just now, Access also makes the Garnet emulator for Maemo (Nokia 770/8XX) that I previously reviewed here; presumably a version of this emulator is the one that will be integrated into the platform.

Although Android is the platform that generally come to mind when someone mentions “mobile Linux” these days, Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul has had some hands-on interaction with another contender, the Access Linux Platform. According to its creators, “ALP is well-suited for low-end feature phones, business-oriented smartphones, and rich multimedia devices.”

Unlike Android, which is going to be a “highly-insular Java-only platform,” Access can run versions of traditional Linux desktop applications—which, for e-book-lovers, means FBReader. But it can also run Java cellphone applications and even boasts an integrated Garnet emulator for running Palm apps (such as eReader or Mobipocket). A development SDK is under development, though Paul had some trouble getting a preview version to work on his PC.

Although Paul was reasonably impressed by the platform, he does caution that since parts of it are based on proprietary software, it will not be as free as another portable Linux contender, OpenMOKO, and may be more vulnerable than Android to crippling and fragmentation by cellphone carriers.

Still, for those looking for a good portable Internet tablet and e-reading platform, the “access” this one provides to Linux, Palm, and Java apps seems very promising. (And as an avowed scooter rider myself, I really like the logo.)

By Chris Meadows

A few days ago, I mentioned that Jeffrey A. Carver had posted the first novel in his Chaos Chronicles series, Neptune Crossing, on his web site as a free e-book. I also mentioned that his plans included making all three of the novels currently in that series similarly available, to build publicity for the publication of the fourth. The second novel in the series, Strange Attractors, has now been posted to Carver’s download page—but that is not all.

When Carver posted the first novel, someone started a thread in the Mobileread freebies forum about it, and shortly afterward Carver himself joined in. Before long, a number of Mobileread forum regulars had volunteered to convert the book into other formats for him. As a result, both books are currently available in html, MobiPocket, eReader, RTF, PDF, LRF, LIT, and ePub formats. (There is now another Mobileread thread about Strange Attractors as well.)

And as it happens, I was one of those volunteers: I polished the markup of the eReader version. I took the raw output of a Word-to-eReader script, then went in and reformatted it for better readability—adding chapter headers (and thus a table of contents), “smart” quotation marks, the cover illustration, and so on. I did this for both Neptune Crossing and Strange Attractors, and will be doing it for The Infinite Sea as well.

Carver has lately revealed that he has come to an agreement with Tor to publish the fourth book in the series, The Sunborn, as a Tor e-book through their arrangement with Baen (though he retains the option to give it away for free, as well).

Even speaking as one of them, it is great to see so many Mobileread regulars willing to volunteer their time and effort to help authors convert their works to as many formats as possible. Some posters in the threads have suggested that Mobileread could be promoted as a resource for other authors looking to do the same thing.

By David Rothman

How can you install the new eReader upgrade safely on your iPhone or iPod Touch, so you can enjoy a progress bar, page numbers and other goodies? Nothing is certain with any upgrade of any program. But in the wake of some people’s problems, here are helpful tips from Steve Pendergrast, a co-owner of eReader.com and Fictionwise:

"We seem to get a handful of reports about losing books each time we release an upgrade. At least in a few cases this was user error: They upgraded by deleting the old version of eReader (which removes all application data including books, that’s the way iPhone works) then installing the new version from scratch. So far it is unclear whether this is the problem in all cases, we are investigating.

"The correct procedure is to hit the UPDATE button inside the app store. That should retain your e-books.

"Doing a sync to iTunes before upgrading is always a good idea though."

My own eReader upgrade installed without the least problem. The update is well worth the very small risk—especially if you do the iTunes sync.

A cool feature: It turns out that eReader does have a slim progress bar at the bottom of the screen that you can see constantly even when you’re in the full-screen made (unlike the top bar). It shows your progress through the entire book, not just a chapter. Now for a way for the page numbers, too, to be visible all the time? Or am I missing something?

What I most want in eReader for the iPhone: A wide choice of fonts, as well as a boldface option. Steve, what are the ETAs on that stuff? Thanks.

Related: Page numbers, global progress bar, full-page views show up in eReader update.

By David Rothman

One of my gripes against iPod e-reading software is that it typically lacks a progress bar for an entire book and offers one just at the chapter level.

eReader, via an update to version 2.2, has addressed this deficiency. Nice going, guys. It’s in line with a promise from eReader that it would be upgrading regularly

Page numbers, too!

Trying out the update, you’ll also notice that eReader lets you call up page numbers—an issue related to Chris Meadows’ concerns—and that the usual view is a full screen.

What I’m not clear about is whether there’s a toggle to keep the progress bar and numbers on the screen constantly, as Mobipocket can do in a more polite way. Mobi should be appearing soon for the iPhone. Let’s hope the interface will live up to the usual Mobi standards.

Installation bug: Back up your books

Meanwhile a TeleBlog reader, who kindly tipped us off, reports that his first stab at the update failed and that he had to reinstall his books on his machine. Luckily he could reloaded them. But this should serve as a warning to be careful and maybe arrange for multiple backups.

I myself didn’t have problems. I was in the middle of a re-read of Scoop, and when I next opened up eReader I miraculously saw a blue line begin to load (though it soon vanished). At any rate, the update is definite progress and comes with a bunch of bug fixes.

Still missing: A wide choice of fonts in eReader.

A speed issue—nothing to worry about: When you first open up a book, it’ll take time to appear, while the page numbering code does its act. But in the future it will come up fast enough.

Related: Recent New York Times item on Scoop. Former New Yorker publisher Tina Brown has borrowed the name of Evelyn Waugh’s fictitious Daily Beast for a new Web site on the media. Hmm. Is this the placeholder? By the way, the original Times review of Scoop said: "Mr. Waugh writes with such mastery that the use of 321 pages of his prose—prose that in this generation is practically peerless—to bring off too obvious a farce seems rather wasteful, almost as wasteful as was Mussolini’s use of his war machine to capture Abyssinia."

By Chris Meadows

Steve Pendergrast of Fictionwise has reported that iPhones seem to be siphoning off Kindle users. But after looking at all of the major apps, it seems to me that the overall state of iPhone e-book options is still rather primitive.

Most of the readers are lacking useful features, and in some cases do not even render the text accurately. However, the clients are still under revision, so there’s hope for the near future.

For each e-reader, I will be looking at three aspects: readability, ease of use, and ease of loading up with content (both from the Web and self-made). Clicking the header link will open iTunes to the App Store listing for each application, which includes a screenshot. Shown here is eReader, from an earlier TeleRead writeup. I will update the present article with more screenshots as time permits. To avoid awkward phrasing, I will be referring to “iPhone” applications throughout this article, even though I am reviewing them on an iPod Touch.

eReader (v1.1)

eReader is the grande dame of iPhone e-reading applications, tracing its lineage back ten years to the original Peanut Reader for the Palm Pilot—much farther than any other iPhone reader can claim. Even if the iPhone version does not share any code with other eReaders, it has still had a much bigger head start when it comes to user-interface. That should count for something, right?

Readability

Similar to its predecessors, eReader offers three font faces in four sizes. These font faces are Georgia (serif), Helvetica (sans serif), and Marker Felt (a Comic Sans lookalike). The sizes are “small,” “medium,” “large,” and “huge.” Small Georgia can fit 23 lines on the screen in portrait mode, medium 18, large 14, and huge 12. Just as with Safari, the screen can also be rotated for reading in landscape mode—although unlike Safari, eReader will adjust even if you turn the device entirely upside-down.

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By Chris Meadows

Found on the Baen Bar: Jeffrey Carver, author of the Starrigger series, has put his book Neptune Crossing on his website, starrigger.net, as a free download in unencrypted html, MobiPocket, eReader, rich text, and PDF formats.

The download page also announces that the other two volumes in that trilogy, Strange Attractors and The Infinite Sea, will be coming soon, leading up to his release of Sunborn, a new book in the series. He will also be doing an audiobook podcast for Sunborn.

Carver’s commercially-available e-books can be found via ereads.com.

Here’s hoping Carver’s giveaways lead to the same sorts of success experienced by Baen and Cory Doctorow!

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By David Rothman

You know how gung-ho I am on the iPhone/iPod Touch for e-book reading. Just this morning, I finished printing a 327-page, 76,000-word manuscript of The Solomon Scandals for a friend.

Scandals at this point isn’t a finished, bound book, not until October or November. But my friend will be jetting off to the Bahamas for a well-earned vacation. And an e-book version would still have made much more sense than paper—if not on an iPhone, then at least on something with a larger screen.

My friend’s tote-along challenge is nothing compared to those of college students, with all the expensive p-books they must carry around, constantly.

“Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod”

And so I read with interest a New York Times item headlined Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod. Within the Times’ tech section, as I write this, the item is the second-most e-mailed. Some colleges are actually giving iPhones and iPods to students—well, as subsidized by tuition.

How many of the colleges and students will be thinking of the iPhone and iPod Touches for e-book apps among others? Far fewer than should, probably.

Granted, the tinier iPods might end up in some cases as distractions—notice the photo? But the iPhone and Touch offer real positives to balance out the negatives.

While the screens are still too small for typical textbook use, how about supplemental or recreational reading? Or for reading class syllabi or other school-related documents?

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By Chris Meadows

On jeffkirvin.net (formerly writingonyourpalm.net, where I blogged on e-book-related issues before coming here), Jeff Kirvin writes about recent statements by Palm CEO Ed Colligan that the new Nova line of Palm will feature “game changing hardware.”

According to Engadget, echoed in TreoCentral, Palm has hired Matias Duarte, the designer behind the Sidekick and Helio, to create its new user interface. On another note, the New York Times writes that Palm has brought in John Rubenstein, who helped revive Apple with the iPod, to help it recover market share.

Changing the Game?

Writes Jeff about the “game changing” claim:

This is an interesting phrase. New devices that radically change the direction of their market don’t come along all that often. In the PDA/smartphone field, it’s only happened three times in the last 15 years: the original Palm Pilot, the Treo 600 and the iPhone. And of those, Ed Colligan was instrumental in the first two. You could even argue that the Foleo, something he described as revolutionary, was the precursor to the current netbook craze. So he knows “game changing hardware” when he sees it. If he thinks the new Nova devices are going to rock the industry, I’m inclined to believe him.

But what kind of “game-changing” could it be? Jeff speculates, quite reasonably, that it might end up being a net-connected tablet like the iPhone, only larger. He compares it to the PADD, the ubiquitous “Personal Access Display Device” that has replaced books and paper in Star Trek: The Next Generation and subsequent series.

However, apart from the fact that “game-changing” is thrown around entirely too often these days, I have to wonder how “game-changing” it can be if everybody has the same idea at once. Kirvin’s PADD idea sounds an awful lot like the Astek tablets that Jane Litte mentioned and that have received a fair amount of coverage here on TeleRead. (Edit: Jeff Kirvin has since clarified to me that he doubts the Nova will be e-ink, but will instead be a LED or OLED device with the larger tablet form factor—much like the PADD.)

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By Chris Meadows

Note: This letter will be printed out and mailed to Random House as soon as I am satisfied with it (and can find out to whom it should be directed). Any suggestions for improvement will be appreciated.

Customer Service
Random House Inc.
1745 Broadway
New York, NY 10019-4305

Dear Random House Customer Service:

Provoked by Packaging

I am writing to express my extreme displeasure with one of your products: The Last Theorem by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl, which I recently purchased as a Fictionwise e-book. I am not upset with the content of the book, as I have not yet read it. I am upset with its packaging.

Under United States law, as set forth by legal code and court decisions, I should have the right to make full fair use of the book. This includes “space-shifting” it to read on any computer or other device that I own (as per RIAA vs. Diamond Multimedia, which held that “space-shifting” a work is fair use). However, your use of digital rights management (DRM), by releasing the book in Secure Mobipocket format, prevents me from doing this.

Although Fictionwise allows readers to register up to four different Mobipocket clients on which an ebook can be read, there is no official Mobipocket client for either my Nokia 770 Internet tablet or my Ubuntu Linux laptop. There is FBReader, but it will only read unencrypted Mobipocket files. Therefore, if I wanted to read your book on those devices—which is, again, a perfectly legal fair use of your work—I would have to break another law: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

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By David Rothman

Steve Pendergrast, co-owner of Fictionwise, has made a good case for the iPhone and iPod Touch as Kindle rivals in the e-book area.

And, yes, I’m allowing for FW’s ownership of eReader, which runs on the iPh and Touch among other devices.

In the end both the Kindle and the Apple machines will do fine, as I see it. Many Kindle owners couldn’t stand too small a screen. That said, I still think mobile phones are where the real action will be, long term. Some people just want one all-purpose device. Others may fear the fragility of the present E Ink screens.

Later today or tomorrow I’ll run a post full of Kindle love, from Sam Hendrix—but for now, here’s what Steve wrote in our comments area.

30,000 iPhone users going for eReader in just one month

By David Rothman

Unable to access your bookshelf with eReader version 1.1 on your iPhone or iTouch?

Here’s a handy workaround from Man Ching Cheung, who, mysteriously, can’t use his virtual shelves.

Keep in mind that eReader can "download books from eReader.com and fictionwise.com.

But he can "access the…web sites using the minibrowser from within eReader v1.1, and I’ve downloaded my books that way.

"I hope this helps other eReader users having trouble!"

Thanks, Man! Of course, I hope you get to the root of the problem. Maybe Fictionwise will have some ideas.

By Chris Meadows

Thanks to Chris for such a useful post. Let’s see more articles like this—I can’t do both news and in-depth tips constantly. Meanwhile Alan Wallcraft says Mobipocket will also run under Garnet, but not with DRM capabilities. - D.R.

Today I looked at a Palm emulator for my Nokia 770, with the intent of using it to run an eReader client. My overall verdict: mixed, but promising.

The screenshots were captured using VNC from my Windows box. Click on them to see larger views.

Going (Pea)nuts about ebooks

It started with a problem.

My first PDA, way back in the late ’90s, was a Palm IIIe. I remember it well, though I did not have it long before I upgraded to a Handspring Visor. When I broke that, I moved to a monochrome Clié—and then, later on, my employer gave me a full color Clié. I was a PalmOS man, dammit! Nothing was going to change that.

And I invested heavily in e-books for my device. The first e-book I ever bought was one of my favorite p-books: the original edition of A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. And I bought it from what was the pre-eminent e-book vendor in those days: Peanut Press. And other books soon followed, until I now have a total of 128 books in my library. (Although not all of them were paid for; some were freebies and an awful lot of them  were given to me by a kindly employee shortly before he left the company.) I also got a lot of e-books from other places, of course—especially Baen—but I had a special place in my heart for Peanut books. I even tried my hand at making a couple of them myself.

The Tower of eBabel

Fast-forward to the present day: Peanut Press is now eReader and owned by Fictionwise, my last Clié finally gave up the ghost, and I moved up to a Nokia 770. It read the Baen and other unencrypted e-books just fine—but there was no Linux eReader client. I still had the Windows desktop client, of course, which would run on desktop Linux under WINE; but WINE does not run on a Nokia 770’s flavor of Linux. I could not even crack the DRM on my eReader books, the way I could if they were protected MS Reader or Mobibooks—apparently, nobody had ever been interested enough in doing so to bother. In short, the Tower of eBabel conundrum had bitten me on the butt.

Desperate, I e-mailed eReader support, asking whether the company would have a native Linux client out soon and explaining my need for a way to read on my Nokia 770. The response was that eReader did not currently have a timeframe on a Linux client—but there was something I could emulate on my 770 that would let me read those books once more, something I had not even known was possible. I could emulate a Palm.

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