The phone is tiny, light, and thin, weighing in at 3 ounces. The design is nothing fancy, and it cuts a few corners (for example, no wifi—connection via Sprint’s cell network only—and an overall slower processor). In fact, for just $55 more you can have the somewhat more featureful and faster Pre.

But at least it shows that smartphone prices are definitely falling. Now if only they could rein in the calling plan prices, too. (Even if, as the article notes, Sprint’s are overall significantly less than AT&T or Verizon’s prices.)

Presumably, the Pixi will run the same e-book applications that the Pre will, so this may look like a reasonable option for people wanting a cheap smartphone. On the other hand, taken as a percentage of overall cost over two years, upgrading to the more-capable Pre is just a drop in the bucket.

Photo Note:

I’ve had more time to play around with the Astak, and the bloom is off the rose. Yes, the e-ink screen is truly amazing, and far clearer than the touch-sensitive Sony reader’s. However, it has certain other problems.

In Praise of Astak

Before I start talking about the Astak’s shortcomings, I should mention that the company itself has some astoundingly good customer service. For one thing, they monitor the Astak forums on MobileRead and pop up to answer questions.

Whenever I have posted a technical question on the forum, I have almost immediately been emailed by an Astak representative with suggestions and offers of advice. Now, granted, I do not know whether this is their default behavior toward all users, or just because they know I’m reviewing their product. I’d like to think the former is true.

Another nice thing about the device itself is that the firmware is remarkably easy to upgrade. Just put the firmware file on an SD card, slide the card in, and reboot into upgrade mode using a combination of keypresses.

My only complaint in this regard is that the instructions I found for upgrading on their website were not entirely clear. One of the buttons to be pressed is mentioned as the “increase volume key”. I assumed that meant the rocker switch on the right—but after that did not work and I searched some more, I learned that those instructions only applied to the 6” Astak reader devices; for the 5”, you press the page-forward button left of the screen instead. Just a little confusing.

Now let’s talk about some of those shortcomings.

Battery Life

One of the things that makes e-ink so great is that it only uses power when you turn the page. The e-ink page uses micro-capsules that are rotated by current, but require no current to stay set as they are. This is why e-ink readers have such a long battery life.

This should mean that, theoretically, an e-ink reader should use almost no power at all when it is “idling”. I should be able to leave it “open,” like a book, for days on end and pick it up with the same battery level that I left off.

(Granted, there may need to be some minor power consumption—but since it is not driving a display, surely it should use less than a digital watch, which is able to run for months on a single tiny battery.)

Unfortunately, this is not the case with the Astak. If I leave it alone for several days and forget to plug it in, the battery drains completely dry—and requires approximately “overnight” to charge back up to full again. This puts a damper on what ought to be one of an e-ink reader’s biggest advantages.

A Peeling Reader

I also noticed that my sample has started to develop a flaw remarked upon by other Astak users: the peeling paint problem. About half of Astak owners have found that, with a little wear, the paint covering their reader starts to peel off. Here you can see it starting on mine, right around the left page-turn arrows. (You may need to click to enlarge it to see more clearly.)

It is only a cosmetic problem, of course, and Astak’s excellent customer service again comes to the fore: they will, on request, provide replacement units that do not suffer from this flaw. Not everyone even cares about a replacement; one Astak user on the Baen Bar has just peeled all the paint off of his and been quite happy to keep using it that way.

Ex-Calibre

For some reason, I have not been able to make Calibre work with the Astak. I am not sure whether this is the Astak’s problem or some flaw with Calibre (which worked just fine with my Sony).

When I posted to MobileRead about it, it was suggested that I should remove the Chinese language manual from internal memory, as it messes with Calibre’s ability to connect.

I wanted to try to do this, but it seems at the moment I cannot get the reader to connect to my computer’s USB at all. It just shows a “charging” indicator and blinking light, and does not give me a “press Enter to connect” dialogue. But others seem to be able to use Calibre with their devices just fine.

It was not a great handicap, however; I ended up just using an SD card reader to copy my books directly onto my card, which I then put in the Astak. It just takes a few extra steps to make the copy.

If I were going to keep this reader, I might be more concerned about getting Calibre working with it—but since I will be sending it back, I am not going to let it bother me.

Moving on to formats…

Mobipocket vs. ePub

First of all, the majority of the books I read are unencrypted ePub these days, from Baen. I recently downloaded all of my Webscription purchases and put them on a directory of the 2-gig SD card I normally use for my digital camera, and put that in the Astak. The books load right up with no problem.

Reading ePub books on the EZReader is, well, “EZ”. They load quickly, and I am able to access the table of contents, zoom, search, even use the read-aloud feature (once I had updated the firmware to the latest version).

However, a Mobipocket book I read on it did not fare so well. This was 1634: The Baltic War, from one of the Baen CDs hosted on The Fifth Imperium. It was not available in ePub format, so I loaded the Mobi.

I found that, though I was able to read the file, the Astak reader was unable to parse the Mobi table of contents. There was a table of contents I could jump to, but it was all HTML links and I couldn’t figure out how to click on any of those links (if it was even possible at all). I ended up having to use the “jump to page” function in the menu to navigate through the book.

Furthermore, every so often the reader would lose track of my place. I would turn it back on to find myself a few dozen or hundred pages back from where I had been. If I find myself faced with a Mobi-only title in the future (at least while I still have the Astak), I will probably go to the extra trouble to convert it with Calibre first.

eReader and PalmDoc

In email correspondence, Bob Barry, the Director of Global Business Development for Astak, said that the Astak already supports non-DRMed books in Fictionwise’s eReader format, and they are negotiating to add support for eReader DRM as well.

However, I tried testing with three unencrypted eReader books I created myself and that I had verified opened on other devices, and the Astak did not even see them in a directory listing of the SD card. Very disappointing. It appears the Astak may not be the eReader e-reader of my dreams after all.

I was able to open a book in the PalmDoc format, though since it had no table of contents navigation through it would have the same problem as Mobipocket.

Awkward File List Navigation

I should also note that the navigation through the file list is a bit of a pain if you have a large directory. My Baen e-book files take 27 screens to list, alphabetically by title, and there is not any way to jump to specific titles. (Nor can I sort them in any way except title, date, or type, which is not terribly useful in this situation.)

So if I were to want to read Worlds of Honor or Young Miles, I would have to resign myself to paging through 27 pages of files to get to the ones I wanted.

I suppose if I copied my Calibre directory onto the card rather than my unsorted Baen ePub directory I might at least be able to navigate the directory tree by author, but I would still need to know what author wrote the book I wanted.

However, I cannot now remember whether Sony’s file list interface was any better.

PDF

But the PDF format is where the Astak easily falls the shortest. I had expected that, being a more recent device, it should handle PDF files at least as well as the Sony did. (You may wish to read my review of the Sony’s PDF capabilities for comparison purposes.) However, its performance left a number of factors to be desired.

First of all, I loaded the image-only PDF of “Bronte’s Egg”. Full-page, it looked about the same as it did on the Sony, only smaller by an inch. However, when I used the “rotate” option and turned the reader 90 degrees, when I pressed “page forward” the device simply crashed back out to the file list again. I tried multiple times, and it always behaved in this way.

Moving on to Dragon Warriors, we see that in both the portrait and landscape versions, the text looks pretty good. The problem comes when we use the “zoom” function, to break the PDF out of its formatting and zoom the text in a few times. The result: the first column on the page is nowhere to be found. The text below the header starts at the beginning of the second column.

(The Sony was not perfect in this regard either, but at least it put the “Introduction” header at the middle of the page and kept the first column of text before it. But no amount of paging up would reveal that first column of text in the Astak.)

Spycraft, the 160-megabyte overformatted bloat-monster, took more than a little time to load, but once it did it looked fairly decent, if much too small to read. Rotating 90 degrees did improve the readability some—but attempting to zoom in further simply zoomed out instead—and it remained zoomed out through each of the several zoom levels, until I finally reached the one that zoomed it back in to its original half-page view.

Also, zooming, rotating, and page-turning were all extremely sluggish—not that I am surprised, given the 160-megabyte size of this monster.

Spirit of the Century, a much smaller book and less-bloated PDF, came off considerably better. The smaller page size meant it is more readable in general on the Astak, and the non-cruft formatting meant it came off considerably better zoomed in as well.

Tables of Discontent

One other annoyance had to do with the table of contents. The Astak would read the PDF’s table of contents, and this included multi-level TOCs such as the one from Spycraft.

In a multi-level table of contents, if I clicked on “4. Chapter 4: Skills” I would get another table of contents, starting off with “1. Chapter 4: Skills” and then listing subheads for 2, 3, and 4.

So assuming I want to start off at the beginning of Chapter 4, I would click 1 for “1. Chapter 4: Skills”, right? Wrong. Clicking 1 would put me back at the main TOC. To go into the chapter, I would need to click 2 or up for one of the subheads. This is not a very intuitive interface design.

Conclusion

Although ePub files are a joy to read on the Astak, other formats are considerably less so—and the interface makes getting to those files somewhat awkward when I have a lot of them. With that in mind, though I am enjoying using it while I have it, I find I will not regret sending it back when the time comes.

E-mail has replaced paper mail for a lot of purposes. Now people who used to write long letters every week or month instead send short e-mails every day. The jury is still out as to whether this is actually an improvement.

But sometimes one does still have to send paper letters, and that can be a matter of some inconvenience—printing it out, addressing the envelope, going down to the post office. But Salon Magazine reports on a service called Snailmailr, which will print and mail paper mail anywhere. The price starts at 99 cents for 2 pages, including paper, envelope, and postage.

The only snailmail I have to send tends to be checks, so this service would not be for me—but for people who do have to send paper letters and wish it could be done with the convenience of e-mail, this could be a pretty good deal.

99 cents is twice the cost of a postage stamp—but as Salon points out, that might be a small price to pay for dodging the inconvenience of dealing with paper yourself.

It seems that Condé Nast has decided that the Apple Tablet will, in fact, exist—and is creating a version of Wired Magazine for use on such a tablet.

Condé Nast  is telling Apple exactly what it’s doing. But Apple is still not telling anybody whether the company is eplanning a tablet, let alone what software it will support.

What’s more, the planned version of Wired will run on Adobe AIR—which is not even available for the iPhone or iPod Touch. So if the Apple Tablet runs the iPhone OS as some are expecting, it won’t even work to begin with!

(Not that a special version is actually even needed—Wired offers its content via RSS, which means it can be read by a number of solutions that already work on the iPhone—Stanza or NetNewsWire, to name just two.)

Of course, some of the tablets under consideration by various companies probably will run AIR, so the effort may not entirely be wasted. But it still seems a trifle premature to make plans for a hardware platform that may end up vaporware.

Adding to the fun, there’s talk of an OLED model of the Apple Tablet with 9.7-inch screen (see video of rival OLED tech from Sony).

“The big shift over from analog to digital is happening in the reading space,” Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading unit, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television.

While this may be true, we reported yesterday that more people still use smartphones, PDAs, and other multi-purpose devices to read e-books at the moment.

We’ve known for a long time that a lot more people read e-books on multi-purpose than dedicated devices—they’re cheaper, they do more, they’re easier to pocket.

And more people have them. It is estimated 1.7 million people own a dedicated e-reader, and that number may rise to 4 million by the end of the holidays. But Apple has sold over 50 million iPhones and iPod Touches.

“The iPod Touch is always at hand,” Shannon Stacey, who has written several romance e-novels, said. “It’s my calendar, it’s my everything, so my books are always with me.” Ms. Stacey, who also owns an early Sony Reader model, said she had now bought twice as many e-books for her iPod Touch as for her Sony.

But others are still dubious:

“The Kindle is for people who love to read,” [Ian Freed, vice president for the Kindle division at Amazon] said. “People use phones for lots of things. Most often they use them to make phone calls. Second most often, they use them to send text messages or e-mail. Way down on the list, there’s reading.”

Of course, we know that people who read e-books have been in love with their small screens for more than ten years. E-books were one of the first big “killer app” uses for the Palm, and e-book vendors eReader and Fictionwise have been in business ever since.

Some have even gone so far as to predict “the end of single-purpose devices,” but that is probably still premature.

It’s a funny comic that I suspect sums up the views of a lot of TeleReaders—especially those who, like Lucy and me, read e-books on their iPod Touch.

(Found via BoingBoing.)

Or, all right, your wish list on whatever shopping site you like to use. (But let’s face it, Amazon’s marketing machine is good enough that “Amazon” and “wish list” have pretty much become synonymous over the last few years.)

But this year, Amazon has something new cooking, that may entice you away from other sites’ wish lists: the “universal” wish list button. This is a great idea for everybody who has “wishes” from multiple e-tailer websites—especially those who buy e-books elsewhere (such as Webscriptions) but use Amazon’s wish list for their Amazon purchases.

I can’t remember exactly when Amazon announced this new innovation, though I get the feeling it was recently. It works through the use of a “bookmarklet” tool that you drag to your browser’s bookmark bar.

When you find an item that you would like to add to your Amazon wish list, just click the bookmarklet, then enter the price of the item and a description. When you are done, the item appears on your Amazon Wish List, with a button to redirect the wish list viewer to the origin site for shopping purposes.

This is a very clever innovation indeed. Given that Amazon is already the “go-to” site for wish lists, this provides a way that wishers can combine their wishes from all their favorite sites in one convenient place. Even if I strongly dislike some of Amazon’s business practices (with regard to the Kindle versus Mobipocket formats, for instance), I have to tip my hat to—and make use of—such a darned useful feature.

I have already added a couple of Baen Webscription months to my Amazon wish list, as well as a BluRay DVD drive from NewEgg. I can’t wait to see what I might wish for next!

But before Kindles, there were calculators, and students with time on their hands have long eyed the big LCD display panels of graphing calculators and seen yet another venue for video games. One hacker even created a primitive e-book reading application, though he could only read a couple of lines at a time.

The Wall Street Journal has a story on some recent TI-83 hackers and their run-ins with cease-and-desist orders from Texas instruments. TI feels the hackers are violating the DMCA, whereas the hackers (and the EFF, who is backing them) are demanding the right to innovate.

"That’s what it’s all about — taking such a limited device and doing the impossible with it," says [calculator hobbyist Brandon] Wilson, who also likes to take apart game consoles and put them back together. "There’s no greater feeling than being told something can’t be done and then showing them it can."

This seems reminiscent of the dichotomy between Apple protecting its iPhone platform and jailbreakers cracking the protection to extend the functionality of those devices. Perhaps it might set a precedent.

Wired has screenshots of one of the games that calculator hackers have created.

Fledgling

The novel Fledgling, and its sequel Saltation, are two of the biggest success stories of the “Storyteller’s Bowl” e-publishing format. As we reported before, the idea behind this format is that the writer agrees to post one chapter per week as long as reader donations hit a certain threshold. (Here is a PBS Mediashift article on the practice, including an interview with Lee & Miller.)

Necessity

The idea for Fledgling was born out of financial necessity: when Lee & Miller’s publisher Meisha Merlin went under without paying the royalties it owed them, they needed a quick source of income to get them through the winter.

At the same time, they needed to explore the backstory to a mysterious character introduced on the last page of the last “main plotline” Liaden novel published back in 2002. Since the character would feature prominently in the next “main” novel (were a publisher to be interested), they needed to “meet” her and learn more about her and her world.

The problem was that such side-story books are generally “expected to be of little interest, except to stalwart fans of a series,” and do not tend to sell well to publishers. Thus, Lee and Miller decided simply to publish it themselves. In lieu of an advance, they would write and post the draft using the “Storyteller’s Bowl” format.

The idea was that once the draft had been fully written, they would pay to have it professionally edited and then printed, and send copies to those people who had donated at least $25 each. Happily, the book and its sequel were eventually picked up for publication by Baen making that no longer necessary.

As Lee and Miller write in the book’s Afterword:

We figured, you see, that we would start off strong, then donations would slope away, and we’d be posting a chapter every, oh, two or three weeks.

Before December was over, readers had funded ten chapters. By the time the first chapter was posted, we were committed to writing twenty weekly episodes in the life and times of Theo Waitley.

In the end, they wrote 31 chapters, which became 42 in the final book.

The Liaden Universe

Fledgling is set in the Liaden Universe, a setting that Sharon Lee and Steve Miller have been living in for decades. The Liaden stories combine an amazing number of genres—science-fiction, space-opera, fantasy, romance, espionage, military, wild-west, and more. It is one of my favorite settings, and I like to reread it from start to finish every so often.

Centuries after fleeing a collapsing universe, humanity is split into at least three sub-races: Terrans, Liadens, and Yxtrangi. The galaxy is still very much a frontier, like the wild west, and Pilots are a highly-respected cross between long-haul truck driver and samurai.

The main five-book arc tells an epic story, and the other books and short stories weave many threads through and around that story to create a universe that feels like a rich tapestry. Baen is reprinting these books in omnibus form, and already offers “e-omnibus” bundles of all the novels prior to Fledgling and most of the related short stories.

Fledgling

Much as I do highly recommend reading them all, no knowledge of these earlier works is necessary to enjoy Fledgling. Having read them does enrich the experience, but apart from one or two minor references to past continuity (such as the way Professor Jen Sar Kiladi converses with a woman named Aellianna inside his head), the book is quite self-contained. It is a coming-of-age story for a character who is herself being introduced to the larger galaxy, so readers can be introduced to it at the same time.

The protagonist is a girl named Theo Waitley, who was introduced in the Back to the Future style “here we go again” ending of I Dare—a young woman who runs up to the main characters, out of breath, with a problem that she can only describe as “kind of complicated” before the book ends.

Fledgling is set several years earlier, when Theo is on the cusp of adulthood, just a few months away from her coming-of-age ceremony. She lives and studies in a university on the planet Delgado, a “safe world” renowned for its scholarship. And she has problems fitting in.

Theo has just had to move out of her father, Jen Sar Kiladi’s, house back to the cramped, sterile confines of the university itself. And as a half-Liaden (and more importantly, half-Korval Liaden, though she does not know it), her reflexes are a problem. Though she actually has extremely good reflexes, they do not mesh well with the average reflexes most other students have—so she is the one who is labeled “clumsy”.

At the same time, her mother Kamele has problems of her own: cases of academic dishonesty and document alteration have been found that threaten the reputation of the entire university. She and Kiladi must intrigue to uncover the conspiracy behind it before it is too late.

The Perils of Academe

Perilous academic settings are a staple of the Liaden books, perhaps because the authors come from academic backgrounds themselves. One book featured a university where “defending one’s thesis” was done with swords and daggers.

The world of Delgado is not quite that dangerous, but it is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time in the way that good settings often are. Since it is a “safe world,” emphasis is placed on the safety and conformity of its inhabitants. There are strict curfews, and security police who record all incidents.

The world is “safe” for most of its inhabitants—but it poses a challenge to Theo, since she does not conform to the society’s norms. This provides an interesting chance to examine the practice of “tranquilizing into normality” that some people practice even today.

Another interesting twist to the setting is that Delgado is decidedly matriarchal: women are the ones whose rights take precedence. Cultural norms vary from world to world, of course (the idea of “local custom” taking precedence is one of the major themes of the setting), and Pilot culture is something else altogether. All these different cultures give the setting a very interesting flavor.

First Draft vs. Final

I first read this book in its serialized draft form as it was posted chapter by chapter, in 2007. Since I donated $25, I recently received my autographed hardcover copy of the finished book, which I read over the last day or so.

It was a good book, but the inconvenience of carrying it around with me made me long for the electronic version. The e-version does also exist, of course. Thanks to Baen Webscriptions, it can be bought and then downloaded in a variety of formats. I will probably purchase it eventually, but could not justify it given that I had the print book already.

The change from draft to final form is definitely noticeable. The final book is a lot more polished, and takes into account ideas that formed during the writing of the sequel, Saltation. It also fleshes out a subplot that I seem to remember appearing only vaguely in the draft and not actually coming to any sort of fruition.

Conclusion

If Fledgling has a problem, it is that it really only tells half the story. As is often the case with books, the original tale grew in the telling until it was necessary to create a sequel project, Saltation, to tell the second half—and Saltation will not be published by Baen until April, 2010. It does not end as abruptly as Peter David’s Darkness of the Light, but it still stops at a point where the reader wants to know what happens next.

For those who are really impatient after finishing Fledgling, the draft form of Saltation is still available to read on-line at Lee & Miller’s website. (I might just go read it again myself.)

And some other good news: it was recently announced that Baen has contracted for the book that will continue Saltation and follow I Dare, tentatively titled Ghost Ship. We Liad fans can hardly wait.

As a well-written coming-of-age story about a fun character in an interesting setting, Fledgling is well worth checking out.

The stated reason was that the Open Content Alliance changed their representative at the last minute from a professor to a lawyer. Google did not want to put an engineer up against a lawyer, and it was too late to find a Google lawyer to take the engineer’s place.

Naturally, each side is claiming the other’s behavior is ridiculous.

If the rumors are true, the tablet will be able to do basically everything a gadget could possibly do. It’s an e-reader, a gaming device, and a music player. You can watch TV and movies on it and surf the Internet (or so we’ve heard). And it will have thousands of third-party apps available for it … or maybe it will run Mac OS X. That’s all still unknown.

Of course, nobody yet knows how much it is going to cost, or exactly how big it will be, or exactly what features it will include, or even when (if) it will come out. There sure is a lot of guessing, though!

Although I have found e-ink to be gratifyingly clear and easy to read in good light, I have to admit that a clipboard-sized version of my iPod Touch with appropriate resolution is something I would find very appealing for a variety of uses—especially e-reading uses.

* Crain’s New York Business has a short piece on September 2009 e-book sales at Random House seeing a dramatic 700 perent increase over the same period in 2008—largely due to Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. Just imagine how much sales might go up if they actually sold their e-books at reasonable prices!

* PC World Magazine has a review of the bebook Mini e-book reader. They like it, on the whole, but note it has some interface issues.

* Buzzmachine writes about Rupert Murdoch’s nose-cutting face-spiting decision to start blocking Google. A German research group has analyzed how much damage Google would take from such publisher search-blocking, and come to about the same conclusion as the bulldozer operator from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: almost none at all.

* While this is not related directly to e-books, Wired has a piece looking at a “copyright time bomb” that will soon be giving the music industry more headaches. A 1976 copyright law had provisions that will allow recording artists to reclaim the copyright to their works from the record labels that currently hold them.

The article claims that this applies to all forms of copyrighted material, not just music, but does not go into any details as to how this could apply to non-musical works.

Well, interactive books have finally come to the Kindle—except that these books are actually thirty years old. Amazon has begun selling Kindle editions of the venerable “Choose Your Own Adventure” series.

These are the books that those of us who are old enough remember where each page or multi-page section ended with a reader choice: if you take the left fork in the road, turn to page 8. If you take the right fork, turn to page 9. And so on.

Although they were not the first interactive stories, they were the best-known, and spawned many imitators (including a line from Dungeons & Dragons publisher TSR).

With interactivity touted as “the future of e-books,” I find it amusing that the first major line of interactive e-books is actually just reprints of paper books that are three decades old.

Sure, he’ll lose market share, but he’ll make it up by catering to a clientele made up entirely of money-spending, hard-partying young people, plus a single undercover detective who infiltrates the shocking world of underground websites to track down a killer by having conversations in front of pole dancers. I assume.

I would say something about how silly Murdoch’s decision is, but after reading Sjoberg’s piece, I have literally nothing to add.