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.

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.

The PC App is free, and people testing it are filling their PC hard drives with dozens of titles from among the 19,890 free book listings in the Kindle Store. Why wouldn’t they?

Of course, they can also use the Kindle for PC app to download thousands of other free books from several other third-party sources, thanks to a new "we play well with others" approach from Amazon. But the Kindle Store is still teeming with traffic from lovers of “free.”

On the Kindle Store’s list of bestselling books—the one that updates hourly and really reflects the comparative velocity of unit sales regardless of price over various recent chunks of time—77 of the top 100 titles were free at one point yesterday or were priced at one cent.

Seventy of the top 81 titles fit one of the free or near-free categories. The number of freebies in the top 100 often hovers around 50 per cent, but 77 per cent of the top 100 and 87 per cent of the top 81 amounted to dramatic new highs. The top 100 bestselling Kindle books included 28 free promotional titles, 47 free public domain titles, one title that was free until yesterday,  one title for a penny, and 23 titles for more than a penny.

Meanwhile, the relative sales rankings of the top-selling paid blogs and periodicals are plummeting, strictly in relative terms (and not, necessarily, in units sold). For instance, the Kindle edition of the Kindle Nation blog, the #1 bestselling paid blog among the 7,453 listed in the Kindle Store, has fallen to an overall multimedia sales ranking of 534 from the 250-to-450 range where it usually hangs out. This is also natural, since blogs and newspapers are not available from within the Kindle for PC App. That may make sense for newspapers, by the way, but why blogs?

None of this is bad for Amazon, the Kindle, the Kindle for PC App, or even for Kindle-available blogs such as Kindle Nation Daily or TeleRead.

There are over a billion PCs in use in the world, and perhaps somewhere between 1.8 million and 2.25 million Kindles. It’s natural to assume that, as word spreads about international (but not universal, right, Canada?) availability of a free Kindle app for the PC, there will be hundreds of thousands of new Kindle readers each day. And this is in addition to many existing Kindle owners who are trying out the additional device.

A natural thing to do, while test-driving the Kindle for PC App before investing much in a library for it, is to scarf up free books. Then, if people like it, they can think about spending actual folding money on a few Kindle books and, perhaps, they might even consider buying a Kindle if the combination of price point and portability work for them.

Anyway you slice it, it seems likely that the number of people reading Kindle content on any kind of device is going to have, at the very least, doubled from Tuesday morning November 10 to, say, December 31, 2009. Sometime between now and Thanksgiving the launch of the Kindle for Mac, Kindle for Blackberry, Kindle for Droid (am I getting ahead of myself) and other Apps will only add fuel to a well-kindled fire. Oops, there’s that word again.

If one out of every 100 PC owners tries the Kindle for PC App, that’s another 10 million people browsing around the Kindle Store. Sooner or later one of them is going to make an actual cash transaction, wouldn’t you think? So the Kindle for PC and all those free Kindle titles are loss leaders, except that since it is all virtual, there is no loss involved.

Let’s pretend your name is Jeff and you want to do a little magical thinking….

If one out of every 50 of those browsers decides to buy a Kindle, that’s 200,000 additional Kindles sold.

And if even half of this comes to pass, authors and publishers will be beating down the door to Kindle publication, and the folks at Barnes & Noble are going to have a new name for Jeffrey P. Bezos.

"Daddy."

Magical thinking?

Maybe not so much.

Editor’s note: Just a reminder that these are Steve’s personal views, adapted with permission from Kindle Nation.  Thanks, Steve! – D.R.

Excerpt: “Nook and Kindle aren’t grossly different cost-wise. So for me, the only reason to switch to the Nook (or if I were a virgin ereader, to buy the Nook rather than the Kindle) is if I thought I’d get a wider selection of the sorts of books I’m likely to buy for my Kindle at a better price from B&N than from Amazon.”

Jim wonders if Amazon will imitate B&N’s friend-lend arrangement. What do you think? He also says Amazon focused too much on the Kindle for its own books and not enough on it as a general-purpose e-reader. Amen to that!

Related: All-in-one post on all-in-one devices, another Fallows post. He himself is sold for now—with the current tech—on the use of dedicated readers.

About the Kindle photo: Yes, that’s a DX instead of the Kindle 2 Jim compares with the Nook. The DX is more expensive than the 2 or the Nook.

Ten publishers are said to be in talks with Creative, whose new baby can display newspapers and magazines, as well as textbooks and, of course, educational multimedia. Significantly Creative is a partner in the Singapore government’s FutureBooks initiative. A bit of a TeleRead going on over there? Tech in Hiding says: “By teaming up with the Singapore government, it allows the company to fund much of the production. It’s similar to how the US defense industry works—the government gives money to Lockheed Martin (or similar) to build new fighter jets. The government will still end up paying for the jet, but the company can also sell to other partners- Canada, UK, Germany, etc.” See a Techmeme roundup for more details on the MediaBook.

In other hardware news:

  –Another gizmo to watch is the Motorola Droid Smartphone, lovingly drooled over in MobileCrunch, with specs already laid out in Wikipedia (carrying the photo to the right). Yep, that’s a real, live keyboard. The touch screen is 3.7 inches, slightly larger than the iPhone’s, and has 854 X 480 resolution. Other features include a five-megapixel camera. Initial price with a contract is supposed to be $199. The intro date is November 6; a Droid site is up and poking fun at the closed “iDon’t.” The OS is Android, of course, and you already know about some app possibilities. Meanwhile here’s a list of Android devices.

–The Nook may go global, if you extrapolate from Barnes and Noble’s search for “head of their international business” (Techcrunch via Kindle Review, which wonders if the Kindle 3 will have WiFi capabilities to help get around steep wireless charges in various countries).

There’s also wireless news—the possibility of free Kindle-style wireless for Nintendo owners.

Related: italica e-Reader joins the family, in MobileRead.

Reminder: DRMed ePub still won’t be an open, nonproprietary standard. Alas, big publishers are still insisting on DRM.

While we are supplying screens for tablets (and ebooks, and netbooks too!) and are starting production shortly, including supplying limited volumes earlier than our official mass production start – we can’t say when these products will be announced and sold retail.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

But what if the MTS phone company in Russia can negotiate a Kindle exclusive and import the machines directly from the Far East? In fact, negotiations are underway now.

Kindle books in Russian are said to cost a mere $12 on the whole, with 100,000 under $6. Total number is 290,000. Could a new deal drive the price down even more?

Note: I don’t know where the above picture, from Amazon, was taken.

–Netflix boss says DVD has two years left, from Christopher Null (pseudonym?) at Yahoo Tech. A preview of the fate of hard-copy books? The struggles of Conde Naste (thanks for the link, Felix) also isn’t the best of news for old media and related business models.

–The international digital rights mess, in Dear Author, quoting David Grigg’s guest post in the TeleRead blog (photo).

–B&N’s possible plans for a share-an-e-book-option to offered with its readers, in a New York Times blog item.

More from the NYT account: “B.&N. has been talking to publishers about a new model, whereby users are granted a license to ‘lend’ an e-book to a friend. This could help the bookseller market the device to members of its book clubs program." One issue between B&N and publishers is how many loans a year the program would permit. Good for B&N for recognizing that books are social things! Some books can die for want of sharing.

The type on Kindles just is not large enough. Jeff’s machines won’t even let you bold all the words in a book—a failing shared by most other e-reading devices. The low contract of E Ink, between text and background, just worsens matters.

For now, however, at least if you’re sufficiently technical and own a 2 rather than an original Kindle, a partial solution exists for the size issue—a large-print font hack for the Kindle 2. Big thanks to TeleRead community member Felix Torres for pointing people to the related instructions.

You might also be in luck if you own a Kindle DX.

The experimental hacks for both machines provide a little help, too, in the bold area.

But why does Amazon make its customers go to all this trouble; especially, how about the nontechnical? Next time Amazon gives us some PR spiel about being a Good Guy company, just ask about its callous treatment of visually impaired. Funny. I thought Amazon and other dedicated device makers wanted to grow the market for e-reading. Can’t visually impaired people, too, be customers? (An aside: The Amazon-related rants are mine, not Felix’s.)

Machines best suited for large print

So what devices might be better than Kindles for people with vision problems? Felix observes:

“Cybooks do a good job of displaying a fairly large font size and the Hanlin V3’s (BeBook, Astak EZReader, etc) when running OpenInkpot do a fabulous job at large print rendering; any font, any spacing, any margins, any point size up to well past 40-points, plus there is a full-screen bold option,” Felix says. Of course, use of Open Inkpot probably means you can’t read DRMed books—please correct me if I’m wrong.

The built-in Adobe Digital Editions firmware “has no shortage of bugs and design misteps,” Felix goes on, “but lack of large font display isn’t one of them; it offers at least two very large font sizes in both portrait and landscape orientation.

“Options exist as long as you’re not dealing with PDFs and locked-down epubs.”

Oh, how I hate the locked-down philosophy. Readers should be able to control print sizes, and I almost wonder if Washington shouldn’t pass legislation banning such lock-downs in books in situations where they can be avoided. The designer as the Devil? Absolutely. Readers first!

The new Apple tablets will “expand the iPhone and iPod touch media concept to its next potential level: as a slate-like replacement for books and magazines, plus all of the media, gaming, app, and web functionality of the iPhone and iPod touch.”

So says iLounge in Ten New Details on the Apple Tablet, inspiring a spate of follow-up reports.  Apple “is currently planning to announce” the tablet “on or before January 19, 2010, and to use an iPhone-like hype buildup period to start selling it in May or June.”

iLounge also tells us:: ”Screen resolutions will obviously jump considerably from the iPhone and iPod touch 480×320-pixel displays, enabling easy reading of full-sized book and magazine pages, plus cropped newspaper pages. Expect something like 5-6 times the resolution of an iPod touch or iPhone screen (720p or thereabouts) and 7 times the touchable surface area.”

In addition, iLounge says: “It will come in two different variations: one with 3G networking capabilities, and one without 3G networking capabilities. Think of the 3G version as a bigscreen iPhone 3GS, and the non-3G version as a bigscreen iPod touch.”

A few of the other tidbits:

• “Apple has created at least three separate prototypes of its tablet computer. Let’s call it ‘iPad.’”
• “Version 1 was designed with a 7” screen, which was judged to be too small. The latest version has a 10.7” screen.”
• “It runs iPhone OS.
• “There have been reports that it looks like an iPhone. They’re sort of true. It looks like an iPhone 3G, complete with a curved back.

So what do you think, gang?

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, announced today that downloads for both the B&N Bookstore app and the B&N eReader app for the iPhone and iPod touch have hit the one million mark. The company also said that its free B&N eReader app is one of the most popular apps in the iTunes Books category, having held the number one position throughout the summer. …

“Achieving these milestones so quickly after launch is a great affirmation of our strategy to provide our customers with more choices in how, when and where they can interact with America’s #1 bookstore,” said William J. Lynch, president of Barnes & Noble.com. “The access and convenience we’re providing through these apps, combined with our complimentary Wi-Fi, have enhanced our rich in-store experience, extended that experience for on-the-go mobile consumers, and helped us deliver on our promise to give readers access to the books they love — on any platform, in any place and at any time."

Thanks to Nathaniel Hoffelder for the link.

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