TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Internet Tablet’ Category

By Paul Biba

My daughter is in from San Francisco for Thanksgiving and she brought “The Road by Cormac McCarthy and insisted I read it before she leaves on Monday. Well, the book was a paper one and so I embarked on the task.

The reason I mention this is that I’ve just spent quite a while reading books solely on the Sony Reader, so reading The Road was an abrupt change and so makes for an easy contrast. I noticed the following things:

I didn’t mind the contrast difference between the pbook and the Sony Reader screen - this surprised me because the pbook has so much better contrast

The Sony Reader was lighter, thinner and easier to hold. The Road comes in at a mere 287 pages and is not a heavyweight at all, but the Sony was more pleasant to use for long periods.

It fatigued my hands to hold the pbook’s pages apart, i.e., bending the spine. This was noticeable since I read the whole book in one session. The Sony Reader would have been much more comfortable.

I had to keep a real bookmark in the book, which was a pain. (more…)

Popularity: 5% [?]

By Roger Sperberg

Access has announced a public beta of virtual machine software that allows Nokia Internet Tablets to run Palm OS applications. Thoughtfix (aka Daniel Gentleman) at Tabletblog was the first* to report on this and has a video showing the software running as well as some photos.

The Garnet VM runs on the about-to-be-released N810, the N800 and the no-longer-being sold 770.

If, as expected, the software runs in landscape mode on the Internet Tablet, readers of this blog may find more e-books now available to them (and more readable on the NIT’s 225-pixels-per-inch screen). With 770’s going for as little as $100 on eBay, an inexpensive high-quality e-reader on a widely used platform is a reality. For those unsatisfied with the stock on non-DRMed books readable in FBReader, this is good news.

As Internet Tablet Talk headlines it, “Run 30,000 Palm OS apps on your Nokia Internet Tablet.”

Brighthand reports that “Garnet VM is expected to be available by the end of the year free of charge as a download from Access.” (Other reports at intomobile and engadget.)
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* Oops. Dan writes that he got the news from intomobile.

Popularity: 7% [?]

By David Rothman

As hot as E Ink gimzos are right now, many e-book-lovers prefer PDAs and other devices, such as iPhones, that they can use for purposes besides reading. Web browsing, for example.

Over at DearAuthor, Jane concludes a three-part series with a discussion of PDAs and the rest—with mentions of favorites like the Palm TX (photo), the Nokia 770 and the IPAQ 211. Part I was the Intro; part II, an overview of E Ink devices and other devices intended just for e-books.

Detail: E-book apps on the iPhone are rather problematic for the nontechnical right now, because of Apple’s closed approach. But this should change in the near future.

Related: Favorable DA review of Manga: The Complete Guide.

Technorati Tags: Palm TX , Nokia 770 , Ipaq 211 , iPhone

Popularity: 7% [?]

By Paul Biba

Writing the post below got me thinking about whether I should be upgrading my e-book reader. Here are my current thoughts on the subject.

I currently own an original Sony Reader and a Nokia 770 and 800. Since I’m using my iPhone I don’t consider my Treo to be a reader any longer, and there is no real reader for the iPhone, so that is out of consideration. The 770 and 800 are nice units, but are rather kludgey when used with FBReader. I guess the Sony has spoiled me. I would really like to upgrade the Sony because of the lack of contrast on the screen, and this leaves me with the following:

Sony Reader, latest version: this is my prime candidate, given the excellent experience I’ve had with the current version.

Bookeen Cybook: really attractive given its ability to read the Mobipocket format. However, I’m a bit shy of buying an expensive product from a company that doesn’t have any service facilities in the US.

iRex Iliad: just too expensive. This one is aimed mainly at the corporate market. Same service problems also.

Ebookman, etc: old technology. Not in consideration.

Amazon Kindle: if it exists. My current thinking is to wait for this to come out before making any decision. Amazon has done such an excellent job with its new MP3 store that it gives me hope that they will do the same thing for ebooks.

What are you going to do?

Popularity: 6% [?]

By David Rothman

The Nokia N800, a powerful little e-book-friendly handheld, is now selling for $240 at Buy.com. See our review from earlier this year. The screen is 4.1 inches (800 x 480 res, 65,000 colors).

Alas, Mobipocket and the other commercial programs with DRM capabilities won’t run on the linux-based N800. But you can use FBReader on public domain classics and other nonencrypted work. What’s more, if you live in a country where it’s legal, not the U.S., unfortunately, you can strip away the "protection" from Microsoft .lit.

Earlier the street prices for the N800 were well north of $350.

One reason for the sale is obvious—the need for Nokia to clear the shelves for the forthcoming N810, which will offer a built-in keyboard, just the ticket for searching. The 810 is off to a great start. You can already read about it in Wikipedia.

Popularity: 5% [?]

By Paul Biba

I thought I’d take you on a tour of some of my e-book readers. It’s amazing to me that some of them worked as well as they did. Take, for example, the Cingular 3125 phone on the left. Even though the screen was tiny, it was crisp and clear and I could easily read a book “one-handed.” It was, and is, an excellent phone. By the way, on all of these devices, except the Sony, Mobipocket is my ebook reader of choice.

Moving on, by screen size, comes the HP 4155 Pocket PC. This little guy had the advantage of being easily pocketable and small enough to be held easily in one hand. It was fast and had built-in WiFi. It was easily one of the most useful Pocket PCs ever designed.

The Toshiba e750 was the first “big screen” Pocket PC that I used. Aside from the large screen, it had a jog wheel on the left hand side. This little control made it one of the most useful ebook readers I’ve ever had. I really wish that the jog wheel would be re-introduced into more modern devices.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

By Branko Collin

- Geek.com lists the 10 lessons to be learned from the OLPC project, and why it will revolutionize the laptop world, although it’s more like six actual lessons, and four for padding the list to ten. Ils sont fous ces Americains… #1: the laptop is the type of computer that is most prone to physical abuse and theft; OLPC shows price matters for a laptop. #5: energy consumption need not be as high as that of a traditional laptop if you are willing to let go of preconceptions of what a laptop should be. And so on. Via Slashdot.

- FON is a company that sells Wi-Fi routers with a twist; any member can use the Wi-Fi of any other member. It has now struck a deal with BT that will create hundreds of thousands of FON hotspots in the UK, according to BoingBoing. The advantage for members with OLPC XOs and Irex Iliads could be considerable. Cory Doctorow seems to be a fan of this scheme, although a scheme he suggests in his novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town differs a bit. (Yes, go read the novel. It’s not bad.)

- In September Slashdot celebrated its tenth birthday. Slashdot is a website for technical news that has sported numerous blog like features from even before blogs were invented. It has had a journal like structure from its beginning, as well as the opportunity for anyone to comment. The Slashdot software is Free Software, and is used among others by the library news site Lisnews.org. Slashdot became very popular very quickly; so popular, in fact, that a link posted at the site would often cause the linked website to crash or stall, so heavy would the traffic from Slashdot be — a phenomenon called “the Slashdot Effect”. Now Network Performance Daily has an interview with founder Rob Malda. Via BoingBoing.

Popularity: 7% [?]

By Paul Biba

I’ve used practically every gizmo around to read e-books, starting in the 1990s with one of the first Pocket PCs, the HP Jornada.

You name it, there’s a good chance I’ve read off it: Palm units, such as my favorite, the TX; Smartphones, from the tiny Cingular 3125 to the large screen Nokia E61i and iPhone; Internet tablets such as the Nokia 770 and 800.

Somehow I’ve always managed to get through my books, some of them pretty lengthy, but the experience has never been as good as a paper book.

Well, the Sony Reader is something new for the industry, and for me, and I find that I’m pretty satisfied with it. This isn’t a review, but simply one reader’s thoughts about his Reader.

The Screen

I’ve found that the e-ink display is much easier on my eyes than any of the backlit displays I am accustomed to. In all the other units I would use the Settings function of Mobipocket or eReader to set the background as a pale yellow or pale blue, in order to avoid the glare from the screen, and often had to dim the display as well.

Of course, this is unnecessary with the Reader, given the E Ink display. The text is crisp and clear and very easy to read if you have good light. I find that I can, lighting permitting, use the smallest text size without difficulty. (more…)

Popularity: 10% [?]

By Roger Sperberg

Planet Maemo has pointed us to Buy.com’s offer of new Nokia 770’s for $139.99. Free shipping too.

The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet runs FBReader, which is a world-class open-source e-reader that accepts books in a large variety of formats, even inside a zip archive: OEB, HTML, FB2, Plucker PDB, CHM and non-DRMed Mobipocket, among others. FBReader runs not only on the Nokia 770 and N800 but also the Linux desktop, Windows, PepperPad, Sharp Zaurus and IRex iLiad. The program is still under development (the most recent version is 0.8.4a) and has not yet implemented bookmarks or annotation.

Probably no other device at this cost matches the 770 in features, capability or fabulous screen resolution (I include PDA’s and computers, not just e-book readers when I say this). The display contains five times as many pixels per square inch as the typical LCD monitor, making it the first on which 6-point type can reasonably be read. (And being 800 pixels wide means web-pages can be viewed without scrolling horizontally.)
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Popularity: 5% [?]