TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Francis Turner’ Category

By David Rothman

No secret.

The ultimate weapon against e-book piracy is legal downloads—easy to find and reasonably priced.

Now Francis Turner has delved into the issue, following up on Eric Flint’s DRM-related essay for Jim Baen’s Universe.

And Francis finds that legal editions have an inherent advantage because they they come out far, far ahead in search rankings, compared to pirated files. He confirmed this himself with a bunch of searches.

Francis concludes: "Contrary to the claims of DRM proponants, not to mention the paper only folks, and agreeing 100% with Eric Flint’s hypothesis: the best way to avoid having bootleg ebooks available appears to be to offer them for a reasonable price in an easy-to-find location."

"Torrents," he says elsewhere, giving examples, "are available of all best selling books no matter whether they are available electronically or not and no matter whether DRMed or not. That fight has been lost. However if you are honest, then when legal e-books are available…they tend to show up at the top of the search results" so they are "easy to buy."

As Francis sees it, rich older people are the ones most likely to purchase books, and they prefer a convenient, time-saving approach.

By Francis Turner

Moderator: Here’s a close look at the Cybook Gen3 by Francis Turner, an enthusiastic owner who has helped the NAEB buying club survive. See his bio at the end. Welcome to the ranks of TeleBlog contributors, Francis! - D.R.

I’ve had my NAEB-delivered Bookeen Cybook for more than a week now. Enough I think to write a review that is slightly better than “shiny”.

First comment: If you are European, you’ll save a lot if you buy from the NAEB store rather than direct from Bookeen, because with the current weakness of the US$ you save a lot. Choosing the cheaper USPS shipping rate I paid NAEB US$403.80 for my Cybook—which works out at €256.00 at current exchange rates. Adding the €57.15 duty I had to pay the French customs, we have a total of €313.15.

By comparison, if I attempt to buy a base Cybook (and the NAEB package is closer to the deluxe Cybook) for postal shipment in France, then the price is €358.30 which works out at €45 (or about 15%) more. Because the deluxe pack is €450 (plus shipping) and NAEB doesn’t include the spare battery (€44.95), the actual price of the NAEB package if shipped from Bookeen would be over €400. In other words:

• You can buy the deluxe package (including battery) for the price of the standard (€100 saving)
• You are saving between 15% and 33% depending on how you do the sums on what you get

In fact if you buy now, I would even more strongly recommend that you do so via NAEB, because Bookeen are sold out for new orders right now!

Getting started and set up

Now back to the product itself. The first thing you notice when you pull the Cybook out of its box is that it is thin, and, for a piece of electronics, remarkably light. Breadth and length are between a mass market paperback and a trade paperback, but if it were a book, it would be a slim 100 page book as opposed to the more usual 250+ although the weight is closer to that of the standard paperback. For reference, it is just too big to fit in most of my pockets but I do have some coats and jackets that it fits in. I say for reference because I sincerely doubt I personally would want to put it in a pocket anyway, especially because the NAEB package includes a neat leather carrying case (see photo above and click on it to enlarge) which I’m using all the time.

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