Would Gary Price—the founding info-maven of ResourceShelf—buy The Case for Books in an electronic or paper edition?

TeleRead promised an answer, and directly from Gary himself, here it is. – D.R.

The winner? The e-book version, which I’ve been reading on Kindle for iPhone. A few of the reasons why:

1. In all of the last-minute stuff I needed to do before a trip, I didn’t have time to go to the bookstore.
2. I purchased the book the night before my trip. I could have even bought the book in the taxi on the way to the airport or while I waited to board at the gate.
3. Like it or not, Price. It was about one-half the cost of the print edition. By the way, some/all of the essays are likely available for free via New York Review of Books.
4. It seems I’m always losing things so this way I had nothing to lose (except my iPhone, which I would be taking with me anyway) and one fewer item to place in my already-overflowing carry-on bag.

Have I read any of the books on my actual Kindle device (1st gen) since I returned home? No, I continue with my iPhone.

I still have issues with low-light reading. An Amazon rep suggested I could buy a book light and attach it to the Kindle cover. Well, I have a book light and have attached it to the cover. It’s a mediocre experience at best.

(1) “Price of devices,” (2) “price of e-books,” (3) “Smartphones,” (4) “Apple’s rumored tablet computer,” (5) popular authors’ ambiguity over e-books, (6) digital rights complexities, (7) standards issues and (8) librarians’ fears about their jobs.

So, gang, what’s your take? I myself don’t think in terms of either one kind of e-gizmo or another—or even P vs. E. For a long time, there’ll be many choices, even in the latter area. Cellphones aren’t going to kill the Kindle, or vice versa.

Related: eWeek piece arguing against e-readers and other single-use devices.

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.

A prep school in Massachusetts created an uproar by saying e-books would replace paper books in its library.

Now a private high school in Toronto says it is tossing out p-textbooks in favor of Sony e-book readers. The school has deployed at least 110 readers already and is ordering hundreds more.

“Our student survey shows that they are twice as likely to read a book available in an e-book format as in hard copy form," says Sam Blyth, chair at Blyth Academy.

Catnip for students raised on tech

There has been a growing emphasis among schools to engage student interest through technology, and this initiative appears to be, in part, a response to that. A comment from Sam Blyth is of special interest:

"When they were told they would be able to download books free, we asked them ‘Would you be more likely to read outside of school?’ they came back with a yes, and that clinched it."

As a teacher, I have long agreed with the growing chorus of e-book fans who say that the problem is not print versus e-book versus whatever, but that fewer people read for pleasure. Might not e-book readers help popularize recreational reading among the growing number of young people raised on technology?

Textbook access is just one benefit. Schools are using the readers to download other documents such as schedules to keep with them at all times

A back-saver

Meanwhile children are spared the burden of carrying traditionally bulky textbooks to and from school with them. In my work, I have seen students struggle with rolling backpacks full of binders, lunch items, school supplies and books on top of that. A slim little e-book reader would certainly remove a dozen pounds or more from the typical student load.

Granted, e-book readers might not be a perfect solution. Pearson Educational Media is providing content, and I wrote in the summer about my not very positive university-level experience with Pearson. I hope the company is offering more junior users a better vetted and more useful experience. And a future user community seems to not be available yet.

Netbooks a possibility, too—for both reading and writing

School board members in the public school system appear to be waiting for integrated virtual assessment tools and other trimmings. But some already are tech-boosters. One trustee quoted by parentcentral.ca visited a school in Littleton, Colorado, using netbooks with great success. “It was amazing to watch how involved every single kid was in what they were doing.” See a related blog item from the Littleton on the success students have achieved in writing with netbooks—which might also be used in reading.

While we don’t yet have the tools for a perfect system, Blyth is still to be praised for trying to innovate—and for taking advantage of the opportunity to try and hook students into pleasure reading while they are at it, too. There is great potential in the e-market, both for pleasure reading and for environments such as a school. I just wish publishers would realize that there are so many great things which can happen, and that the best way for them to survive and thrive in the digital age is to embrace it, rather than fight to keep the status quo forever.

Editor’s note For a different perspective, read about disabled student Robert Kingett’s reservations about the Kindle and also E-textbooks not ready for college students yet? Likewise of interest would be the New York Times series on the future of reading, including the issue of whether the Internet has helped or hurt—in addition to various viewpoints on e-books and the brain. For research findings and other observations on e-books in K-12, check out our past items on the work of Dr. Richard Bellever at Ball State University. In addition, see—from the Huffington Post—the latest version of my proposal for a well-stocked national digital library system for K-12 users and others. – D.R.

Update, 12:55 p.m.: New links: E-books go to college, but books still rule the campus, not Kindle in AOL Daily Finance and Sony Reader follows Kindle to the Great White North in Engadget. Also see Google news roundup.

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.

But if you use a Linux desktop and are sufficiently adventuresome, yes, you can use the Wine Windows simulator to run Kindle for PC.

Details at Lifehacker. Anyone care to tell how the tip there works out?

Go here, and let us know if there’s a problem preordering the PRS-900.

Nov. 18 had been mentioned earlier as the starting preorder date by TechFlash in Eric Engleman’s Q&A with Steve Haber, president of the Sony digital reading division.

The Daily Edition will actually begin shipping on or around December 18 if information from a TeleRead community member is correct (thanks, eBook Reader!).

December is also the month when Sony is to reveal the newspapers and magazines that will be available for the device. I just hope the presentation of news content is more efficient than the Kindle’s. I can’t get to the stories lickety-split the way I can reading the New York Times mobile edition on my little iPod Touch.

So who’s carrying Sony Readers right now, or about to? “Wal-mart, Best Buy, Target, Staples, Borders,” Haber has told TechFlash. “Last season was about 3,500 outlets. This year it’s 9,000. Best Buy, this is the first time they have it in stores. It was just online last year. This is a significant push for them. Wal-mart will be more stores than last year. And Staples is all new. Toys R Us.”

Meanwhile, if you own the original Sony PRS-500, you can either update your firmware or trade in the 500 for a new ePub-capable model and get a $50-$75 discount (via MobileRead). You’ll have to send in the 500 for an update—your can’t do it at home.

(Updated at 9:30 a.m.)

Related: Sony, B&N better on DRM than Amazon—but still a long way from perfection.

Related: An unpopular view of Google Books, by Downes.

Disclosure/reminder: I own a speck of Google stock as a long-term retirement investment, though you’d never know it from some of the posts I’ve done on the proposed Google Books settlement.

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.

And the equivalent for e-books? Maybe diagnostic software for your hard drive or solid-state storage?

Also of interest to bibliophiles—or at least typography buffs: Mistakes in typography grate the purists, in the New York Times. Would you believe, the Titanic movie showed Helvetica numbers on pressure gauges even though Helvetica didn’t exist until 1957, more than four decades after the disaster.

Speaking of print: With New Presses, Daily News Is Betting on World of Print, in the Times.

Random House’s Kindle sales in September, 2009, were $22.6 million, up from $2.9 million a year ago.

The Lost Symbol was a huge part of this with 100,000 ebook sales in its first week.

In the first half of 2009, Kindle ebook revenue grew 400% from a year ago.

(Via Amazon Kindle Review.)

* 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, the secret is to use the Manage Your Kindle page. At the very least it can send a day’s worth of postings to the app—I don’t know about blog subscriptions on a permanent basis. You might also try this for newspaper and magazines, although there may be problems.

Within the “Manage” page, scroll down until you see the “Deliver to…” options for individual purchases. Go with “Transfer to computer.” When your browser comes up, you’ll probably be on a “downloads” page. Arrange for the file to be saved or sent to your Kindle for PC app.

I tried this with an old Washington Post edition and got an error message, either because this won’t work with the Post and other newspapers or because something had expired. That’s why I don’t know about magazines and newspapers.

The “Deliver to” tweak worked fine with a day of posts from the TeleRead blog subscription, however (except for some weird formatting).

Of course, you could read blogs directly for free with RSS feeds, but for those who prefer the paid subscription approach, maybe the above tip will help. Anything to modify or add?

Related tip—for people wanting to email book to their Kindles: If you’re having trouble getting your Kindle to pick up books mailed to it—including those to be converted from Word, PDF, TXT, etc.—don’t forget to specify your sending address within Manage Your Kindle. Cost per item is 15 cents.

“I’ve known for ten years what’s been holding agents back from plunging into e-book pool,” he writes in the wake of Amazon spending more than 10K to fly some top New York agents to Seattle for a brain-picking session, “and in fact I can tell it to you in one word: advances. The agents have been waiting for something they can identify with the traditional business model. And advances are as traditional as Thanksgiving turkeys.” Image is of Curtis’s Web site.

Meanwhile publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin tells of trouble that lit agents will suffer in finding a market for their traditional services. More optimistically he writes of expanding opportunities for people advising authors who self-publish. He suggests that agents keep up with new digital and business options for clients, including self-publishing.

Hmm. I see two scenarios. Richard Curtis is writing of the possibility of an important element of traditional publishing continuing with E, while Mike Shatzin is saying in effect: “Hey, get set for lots of restructuring.” I suspect that the future will contain elements of both. My guess—nothing’s conclusive at this point—is that the future isn’t going to be a neat "either or.”

Among other things, will some agents try to sell just p-rights to big publishers, and focus on E, as it grows in importance? And how will publishers respond, especially when some smaller publishers offer more generous terms?

(Curtis item spotted by Dan Bloom.)

Related: Jealous rivals determined to tank Google settlement, from the Curtis blog.

You’re Gary Price, a librarian and e-resources expert well known online for Resource Shelf and other activities such as DocuTicker.

Robert Darnton, a top academic, has just published The Case for Books, mentioned favorably today in the Sunday Guardian.

You quoted the Guardian but want to see the book for yourself.

Should you buy Case as an e-book or p-book? Share and explain your answer, and later this week, you’ll learn what Gary himself actually did.

Don’t just give a generic reply. Think about Gary’s situations. Via the e-editon of Case, you can pick up cites from the book if you’d like. (Yep, I see the Catch-22.) Also—and this might influence your reply, one way or another—two of the essays in the book are already online for free from the New York Review of Books. Update: They apparently are The Library in the New Age and Google and the Future of Books.