TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘magazines’ Category

By Paul Biba

I was an Economist subscriber for many years but eventually dropped the magazine because I got tired of toting the paper version around. So when I saw the announcement that it was available on the Kindle I jumped at the chance to subscribe. Now I just turn my Kindle wireless on every Monday morning and I have a new issue of the magazine delivered. How incredibly convenient! (By the way, the magazine does not show up on the Kindle app for the iPhone. It seems to only be available on the actual Kindle, itself.)

I haven’t compared the Kindle and paper versions, but it certainly looks as if they are the same. The Kindle version includes graphs, charts and cartoons. I don’t feel that I’m missing anything.

Navigation is very clever. You can use the table of contents, which they call a sections list, or page through page by page. Even nicer, you can use the joystick to move forwards or backwards article by article, which makes it easy to skip an article you don’t want to read.

All in all, an excellent experience from both the content and ergonomic standpoint. I will be keeping my subscription ($10.49/month) and have no intention of going back to the paper edition. Highly recommended. I didn’t realize how much I missed it.

PS: it also underlines how great the wireless feature is. Owning an ereader without wireless is not an option, as far as I’m concerned.

By Joe Wikert

The Kindle is now more than 18 months old and there are still only 24 magazines available for it.  Why so few?  I’ve heard several reasons why and the most likely ones are (a) the magazine publishers don’t like the financial terms offered by Amazon and (b) they also don’t want to give up control of their content (and direct customer access) to Amazon.  I’ve got an idea that solves both these problems and would make Kindle owners everywhere much, much happier.

The company I work for, O’Reilly Media, Inc., sells Kindle editions on Amazon’s website.  We don’t rely on Amazon as our only means of access to Kindle owners though.  We also sell e-book bundles on our site and those bundles feature all the popular formats including .mobi for the Kindle.  Magazine publishers (and newspapers too, for that matter) should take the same approach and sell Kindle content right from their own websites.

Granted, we’re talking about a single block of content with a book vs. an ongoing subscription with a magazine or newspaper…and that’s where things get interesting…

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By Chris Meadows

I have always been skeptical of the idea of PDFs as an “e-book” format.

The PDF format is a queer beastie. It was intended to present a book with strict formatting intact, so that the book could be printed directly without the user needing to format it himself. What the book looks like on the screen is what it looks like when printed.

Hence, PDFs are not really “e-books” so much as they are “dehydrated p-books”. Just add water—or in this case, paper and ink.

Because most PDFs are in the portrait, 8.5” x 11” orientation, they are not the best format for reading on a landscape-oriented computer screen. However, by dint of wide use, PDF has become a sort of de facto “e-book” standard—especially in the role-playing game market, where publishers use it to offload printing costs of marginal titles onto the consumer.

The PRS-700, unlike most computer monitors, has a portrait orientation, so it should theoretically be better-suited to reading PDFs. The question is whether or not it really is.

The answer, it turns out, is a qualified “sort of”. (As always, click on the pictures for a closer view.)

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By David Rothman

Wired Magazine and Wired.com are among Si Newhouse’s properties, but he’s an old media guy at heart. That’s not necessarily bad. I love the in-depth reportage of the kind Newhouse encourages at his holdings  like the New Yorker, and it’s all the more reason for me to care about grubby issues such as screen viewability of e-readers. I keep rooting for the better elements of the old media to make the transition more gracefully than most have.

Now, fittingly, Steve Fishman has written a long profile of Newhouse in New York Magazine, and it’s a real treat, which I’ll hereby recommend to Adam Hodgkin, the magazine-lover over at Exact Editions. Here’s Fishman’s lowdown on Wired.com and Si’s ‘tude toward the Web:

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By David Rothman

I myself like to see books, magazines and newspapers optimized for the Web—as opposed to just reproducing the original layouts. Exceptions exist. But generally I’d rather not zoom in and out.

Not everyone feels this way, however; and Exact Editions has developed a spiffy app to accommodate them.

See those two arrows at the bottom of the left image? They let you move forward and backward. Nothing new there.

But here’s the app’s real wrinkle in the navigation area. “A first for page flow on the iPhone?” asks Exact’s Adam Hodgkin—as shown by the image to the right. More information:

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