TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Mike Cane’ Category

By David Rothman

Mike Cane is "trying to see if it’s yet possible to replace a print library with an all-electronic one. This is my search for authors and ebooks and what prices are being charged. This will be a long process as I have well over one hundred searches to do across ten e-book sites."

Best of luck. Mike, with The eBook Test blog and related research. It’s a worthy experiment—maybe even in the class of Chris Steib’s bathtub adventures with P and E versions of The Crying of Lot 49.

By David Rothman

“In the age of the iPhone it is the paperback, not the hardback, that seems most under threat. Between my passion for” books from PS Publishing “and my lovely iPhone, I have barely touched a paperback in months. The part of me that loves books—that wants to own them, or lend them to friends, or give them as gifts—is far more satisfied by a quality hardback than a cheap paperback.” - Don’t abandon hardbacks, by Damien G. Walter, in the Guardian.

The TeleRead take: Is there such a thing as a “hardback visage”? Walter, now working on a novel under a grant from Arts Council England, has it. Is his grim black-and-white photograph part of a rehearsal for a hardback dust jacket? That aside, I’d agree with him and Ficbot that different media would be appropriate for different circumstances. What a pleasing cover from PS for a reissue of Random Walk, a reissue of a Lawrence Block mystery! Click on the image for a more detailed view.

Where I might disagree with Walter: How keepable a p-book is shouldn’t just depend on “hard” or “soft.” What about the quality of the writing, the cover, typography and the rest? 

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By David Rothman

Here’s the question of the day for Apple fans itching to see the company break into e-books. To what extent can the colorful iTunes Store help Apple catch up with Amazon, Sony, eReader and the rest? Steve Jobs is breaking into online movies; can books be far behind despite his statement that people don’t read anymore? TeleBlog readers are well aware of Jobs’ fondness for misleading rivals. Now let’s hypothesize that e-books are on his mind and consider two of the plusses of the iTunes store:

1. The store and related software already dominate online music—-people might simply think of books as one more kind of item to pick up there or include in searches of, say, movies.

2. Apple is associated with ease of use, sometimes correctly, sometimes not.

But there is a third factor—Apple’s flashy, graphical approach in iTunes. Apple could display books to their full advantage and to help users organize their personal libraries in a highly visual manner and even show off their e-books to their friends.

Cover Flow, an existing Apple product shown in the  first screen shot, “displays all the album art in your music collection in one easy-to-navigate interface that mimics a CD collection or jukebox selection. Move between covers using the forward and back arrows or use the slider to browse faster. When you find what you want, click the artwork to start playing the album…Even podcasts and audiobooks from the iTunes Store have accompanying artwork that Cover Flow displays. Think of it as your very own virtual bookshelf.” 

Stark contrast with drab views on E Ink machines

Compare the colorful Cover Flow screen shot with the drab, gray-and-black view on the Sony Reader, shown in the second shot, or the Amazon Kindle. While Sony and Amazon can jazz up their Web presence with color and fancier graphics, the view at the machine level will if nothing else suffer the limitations of E Ink. Mike Cane, who dug up these two starkly contrasting shots, has zeroed in on the potential of Cover Flow, and I think he’s dead on. Most book-buyers may be in it for the text, but as any good publisher of E or P will tell you, a colorful cover can spell the difference between a successful book and a dud.

“The real way to prevent eBook piracy is for publishers to rethink their approach, taking their cue from the way consumers now download music,” David Crow has written in an article Mike cites from The Business. “E-book stores will need to recreate the experience of browsing in a book shop by developing visually stunning websites where customers can appreciate cover art, browse virtual shelves and flick through 3D copies.”

Colorful, shared user libraries

Now let’s go a step further. Mix colorful, enticing graphics with the urge with the urge of people to show off their personal libraries, and some interesting possibilities arise. Imagine Apple letting people blend their visual libraries and comment on well-tagged books within them—either among their friends or among Apple customers at large, something a bit like LibraryThing’s less flashy service. The results could be displayed in several venues: the Web, iTunes software for desktops, and equivalents for handheld computers and phones and other portable devices. Text might even be blended with multimedia someday in a display using technology equivalent to Microsoft’s Photosynth spruced up with Seadragon. The results could go far, far beyond Amazon’s interface, which, although offering annotation capabilities to customers, does not do this with the same aplomb and features that Apple probably could offer. In the end it’s design and usability that count, and those are two areas where Apple generally shines, even compared to Sony.

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By David Rothman

Check out the Techmeme roundup. Are any e-book software developers game to follow up on the latest jailbreak within the iPhone platform? Or is everyone just waiting for the official Software Developers Kit? Until then I’m not expecting that much action on the iPhone app front, but you never know.

Related: iPhone/iPod Touch will have the greatest apps evah, from Mike Cane, who also ran a fascinating little tidbit called The Secret History of the PDA? “Well, it turns out this Klausner guy actually had something akin to an electronic organizer before anyone else!”

And also of interest: Reports that iPhones are piling up at AT&T stores, amid waning demand. Hmm. Kindle parallel here? Aside from user hatred of AT&T gotchas, the world has just so many early adopters. Still, I think both products will do fine in the long run.

By Mike Cane

Moderator’s note: Mike Cane is a New York writer and fellow e-book nut from whom we hope to hear a lot more. Here’s a just-received e-mail reproduced with his permission. Mike’s not the traveler in the PR shot. But, yes, we’d welcome reports on how the Sony Reader works in Real Life in various lighting situations aboard jets, trains, etc.—both the new and old models of the Sony. Need to carry a book light? - DR

I did a light fondle of the new model of the Sony Reader, the PRS-505, at Sony Style NYC. Luckily, they also had one of the old model next to it, so I could do a side-by-side comparison.

The new E Ink is a shade or two lighter than the old one. I really couldn’t see just how gray the original E Ink was until I could compare it to this new one. The new one isn’t exactly white, either, but it is an improvement. The additional shades of gray are really noticeable with the three sample photos. The same samples are used on both models. There’s more detail to see in both the family and the staircase photos. And the baby photo is stark in how the additional grayscale brings out the “blueness” of the baby’s eyes.

Faster paging

As far as speed, I didn’t see any difference between models, not with building the photos (I had the units next to each other and hit the Next button simultaneously to move through the photos) or with page turns/refreshes. I don’t know if this is due the to same CPU being used (is it?) or if it’s a built-in limitation of E Ink itself. That said, the refresh when moving between pages on the new model is far less annoying than the original model.

The new model now has two cards slots (on top) instead of one combined slot (on the left side). The numbered buttons are now on the right edge, which I guess focus groups stated made more intuitive sense. What worried me seeing that came to fruition, though: if you plop the Reader in a tight bag, forgetting to turn it off, those buttons are pressed by the edge of the (p)leather cover! The cover has two wee magnets on their far top corners to make them sticky to the unit. No magnets on the bottom corners, which makes things feel asymmetric.

Go for the silver

One other thing about the buttons being moved to the side: it’s now possible to hold the Reader in the right hand alone to use it. That wasn’t possible before, since the Next/Prior Page buttons were on the left edge.

The Sony Reader comes in two colors: black(ish) and silver. Go for the silver. For some reason, the silver makes the E Ink seem brighter. I know that seems counter-intuitive, but that’s what I saw for myself. (more…)