Ebook readers

[Shearwater]

After reading an interesting article about a new ebook reader (http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10151&catalogId=10551&langId=-1&productId=8198552921665921188) from Sony about to hit the shelves in Germany in October, I am seriously considering to buy one myself. It's something I have wanted for years, but to be honest, I don't really know how these things work and don't know anybody who owns one (please excuse my ignorance).
First of all, how does it work with the DRM system on these things? I was really surprised to read that it's apparently no big deal if you simply want to read your own PDF or .doc-files with it. I've always thought that these things were restricted to display only files in some proprietary format so you would have to buy your ebooks from a site that sells them. Since book prices in Germany are the same for both the printed and the electronic version due to legal restrictions, ebooks have never seemed particularly attractive to me.
Also, I can remember that I've read something a couple of months ago about Amazon deleting content that customers had legally downloaded onto their Kindles. (I'm not considering to buy a Kindle, for a whole lot of reasons.)
Finally, display quality. Does it really come close to reading a printed book? I hope that it's different from reading my PDFs on the computer, which I find is somewhat straining to my eyes.
So if anyone could post their experiences here, I'd be really grateful :DL

[XabbaRus]

With a printed book I can make notes in the margin, something I tend to do especially if it is a technical book.

Also pictures are going to look rubbish.

[Skybird]

Book falls on the ground, npothing happens. Electronic device falls on the ground: possibly broken.

Paper is flexible. LCD displays are not.

Sand. Water. Shock. High temperature and sunburn.

Limited diversity of titles available. English language.

Lack of tactile feeling and satisfaction a real book can give you. Books even may smell of age and memories after some years.

When would I consider an eBook? maybe when doing a long holiday and wanting to carry a library with me, of English books. and while I am laying lazy at the beach and my hand is searching blindly for the eReader, I again think: sand. Water. Shock. High temperature and sunburn.

Zero interest over here. Absolutely nil. Rien. Nada. I have a huge library of real books. I like it, I love it, I do not want to miss it.

[August]

A rare occasion where Skybird and I are in complete agreement.

It comes down to this:

A printed book is a completely self contained, permanent copy that, if properly cared for, will remain fully usable for centuries.

An E-book is a fragile pattern of electrical impulses downloaded onto a soon to be obsolete gizmo that will almost certainly have to be replaced within a decade.

[Blacklight]

I personally think that the "handheld ebook reader" is going to be a "fad" that's going to fade out pretty quick. Then again, that might just be the "old man" in me talking, "You young yippersnappers ! Now get off my lawn !!!"

[antikristuseke]

Paper is flexible. LCD displays are not.
http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/47553.html?wlc=1255679084
http://news.digitaltrends.com/news-article/8565/new-e-paper-10-1-flexible-lcd-display
These are just two examples, but granted, the technology is still young and not cost effective yet.

Limited diversity of titles available. English language.
Not exactly true and only a mater of time
Lack of tactile feeling and satisfaction a real book can give you. Books even may smell of age and memories after some years.Agreed, always prefer an actual book to an ebook, but they are becoming viable alternatives.

When would I consider an eBook? maybe when doing a long holiday and wanting to carry a library with me, of English books. and while I am laying lazy at the beach and my hand is searching blindly for the eReader, I again think: sand. Water. Shock. High temperature and sunburn. You know, electronics are not all that fragile, but sure they are easier to f up than a paper book.

Zero interest over here. Absolutely nil. Rien. Nada. I have a huge library of real books. I like it, I love it, I do not want to miss it.
As do I, but I also have a huge library of ebooks and a small library of audiobooks.

[HunterICX]

Just give me the traditional book over these electronic gadgets...

my main issue wiht E-books or pages of text displayed on screen is that I just can't focus and lose track of the text really quik.
also it isn't a pleasure for my eyes.

and nothing is so pleasurable to sit in a comfy chair, radio soft in the background and a good book.

HunterICX

[XabbaRus]

Also you can fix a book with selotape.

Also Dowly would lose the satisfaction of unsticking the pages of his favourite magazines......lol :rotfl2:

[Shearwater]

Well, save for Anti's post, the response to ebooks is unequivocally negative here :DL
I primarily intend to use it for a purpose true to its name - reading ebooks, i.e. books / documents that haven't been published on paper in the first place. One reason for this is that I don't have a printer, but I have to do a lot of copying or printing since everybody these days is sending their seminar handouts via email and doesn't bother anymore to hand out paper copies. Printing for me always means a twenty-five minute bycicle ride to the nearest copyshop, or even longer if I want to have them at the university's expense :shifty: Also, I have to copy a lot for myself, manily essays or parts of books, but now we have some newfangled contraption here that allows you to make a PDF file of your scan and copy it to a USB stick. I have used it only occasionally, but I can imagine an ebook reader would come in really handy here.
Another thing: Game manuals. Since this, after all, is a subsim gaming site (which may be shocking news for all of those who thought it was a politics forum ;)) you may feel with me that I'm royally pissed off by the fact that most (or virtually all) games these days don't come with a printed manual anymore. As I've said, I don't have a printer, but even if I had one, I simply wouldn't see the point in printing out whole manuals considering the cost. The last printed manual I've actually owned was that of Dangerous Waters, which I ordered on this site and had it shipped all the way to Germany. I mean let's face it: RTFM is a prerequisite to simulation gaming. I even think that reading the manual and learning the sim step by step is actually half the fun of it. And a great number of manuals that include a tutorial assume that you have it at hand while following the sim while it runs, which simply can't be done in a proper way if I only have a PDF. Open the game, open Acrobat reader, start the tutorial, swith to reader, read a few lines, switch back to game, switch back to reader because I've already forgotten what it says, repeat ad nauseam ... Who hasn't made that experience? It would be so much easier if I simply loaded the manual onto my ebook reader. I had two screens and would save the cost and hassle of printing.
And finally: All of those texts freely available in the internet. I'm not talking about book pirating, but about all of those classics that have been made available through project Gutenberg, the Perseus Digital library and the like.
With all the drawbacks in mind (being more of an indoorsy guy that doesn't go to the beach anyway, or likes to scribble - not even marginally - on his electronic equipment), do some of the points make sense to you?


Jeez, I think I'm spent for tonight :DL

[TarJak]

Also Dowly would lose the satisfaction of unsticking the pages of his favourite magazines......lol :rotfl2:He doesn't buy magazines. That's what his internet connection is for and it's far easier to just use spray and wipe on his screen.:D

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Book falls on the ground, npothing happens. Electronic device falls on the ground: possibly broken.

Properly made electronic consumer devices generally have a few falls in them. If I drop the book onto a puddle, it is definitely ruined to some extent because it'll be at least SOMEWHAT absorbent. If I drop the electronic device, I might actually be able to wipe it off.

Paper is flexible. LCD displays are not.

Maybe a cheap paperback. What about the hardcopy version - the paper inside might be flexible but the book as a whole is not. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, sometimes you don't want that flexibility.

Sand. Water. Shock. High temperature and sunburn.

I don't think books are that survivable against the first two. To answer your point below - I won't be taking either close to the beach or anywhere that's not at least paved.

Limited diversity of titles available. English language.

Surely, a temporary problem.

Lack of tactile feeling and satisfaction a real book can give you. Books even may smell of age and memories after some years.

And they might have termites or some kind of ant in them too with age...

Zero interest over here. Absolutely nil. Rien. Nada. I have a huge library of real books. I like it, I love it, I do not want to miss it.

Consider that your huge library might actually fit onto one E-book, thus leaving that space free for new items, and you might be happier to tolerate it all.

[mookiemookie]

I love the smell and feel of a book. I love to show off my shelves and shelves of books, too.

I doubt I will ever own one of these gizmos.

[Platapus]

I could see a use of an E-book for my academic studies. Having all my reference books and journal articles in one "place" where I can quickly search between them would be valuable when I am writing my papers or doing research in a library.

But for my recreational reading it has to be books all the way. I love the library I have in my house. I have books there from the early 1800's and up. The smell and texture of books can't be replicated in bits and pixels. :nope:

Books have been faithful friends of mine for many years. I can't see abandoning them for a computer screen. :nope:

[Skybird]

Properly made electronic consumer devices generally have a few falls in them. If I drop the book onto a puddle, it is definitely ruined to some extent because it'll be at least SOMEWHAT absorbent. If I drop the electronic device, I might actually be able to wipe it off.



Maybe a cheap paperback. What about the hardcopy version - the paper inside might be flexible but the book as a whole is not. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, sometimes you don't want that flexibility.



I don't think books are that survivable against the first two. To answer your point below - I won't be taking either close to the beach or anywhere that's not at least paved.



Surely, a temporary problem.



And they might have termites or some kind of ant in them too with age...



Consider that your huge library might actually fit onto one E-book, thus leaving that space free for new items, and you might be happier to tolerate it all.

Wrong foot first when raising from bed this morning, eh? That's a nice chain of absurd replies made for the sake of just objecting to what I said - no matter how absurd the objection is. If I wouldn't know that you and me use to have no business with each other anyway I could be tempted to think you want to provoke me for some reason.

Tz.

[Skybird]

I could see a use of an E-book for my academic studies. Having all my reference books and journal articles in one "place" where I can quickly search between them would be valuable when I am writing my papers or doing research in a library.

But for my recreational reading it has to be books all the way. I love the library I have in my house. I have books there from the early 1800's and up. The smell and texture of books can't be replicated in bits and pixels. :nope:

Books have been faithful friends of mine for many years. I can't see abandoning them for a computer screen. :nope:
Yes.

Just wanting to note that I used to compare texts page by page and side by side, sometimes with several open books on the table, side by side. That is faster and easier to overwatch and quicker to switch between chapters than needing to do it all on just one tiny display.

It reminds me a bit on the "revolution" they promsied when elctronic organisers came out. It still makes me chuckle when I see somebody using a Palm or a similiar device to find an adress or worse: to enter a new adress. A simple old-fashioned paper organiser with calender, adresses, and a register lets you find what you need faster, and lets you enter dates, information and adresses quickier. Plus I have seen more than one person now starting to curse when realsing that his precious electornic gadget - has stopped to work when he switched it on. :DL

Leave such things to where they have a good purpose: attach a barcode scanner to them and use them for managing magazine content and items sorted in the shelves. For this and comparable things such devices are great, relieve you of much paperwork, and are much quicker.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Wrong foot first when raising from bed this morning, eh? That's a nice chain of absurd replies made for the sake of just objecting to what I said - no matter how absurd the objection is. If I wouldn't know that you and me use to have no business with each other anyway I could be tempted to think you want to provoke me for some reason.

Tz.

Actually, rather than having anything against you, I'm a little suprised at all the vehemence against E-books. I can understand that they aren't your cup of tea (to use an old cliche), but there is no need to repeat the "shock" point twice (OK, I'll admit books have an advantage here), add water and sand (where I just don't see the huge advantage of books) and then resort to the smell (really subjective here - I like books but the smell of old books is not always favorable to my senses) and flexibility (I've tried reading larger paperbacks on a train and quickly found myself wishing they were less flexible...)

Regarding the problem of searching and comparing text, if the E-book is properly OCRed or began its life as an E-book, I find the automatic word search capabilities rather useful. I've got The Naval Review from 1910-1997 downloaded as OCRed PDFs, and I can just find desired terms (such as AFO 1/56) from them easily. I can't see myself doing the same if they were still books (even if I can find the place to put so many issues).

I'll admit that the fact I live in Hong Kong may bias my appreciation too by giving me a fine value on the problem of SPACE. You might brag about deploying books side by side on your rather large desk, but the only place I can do that is on my bed, right next to the desk, none too comfortably. It also means if my present library can be crammed onto a few Flash Drives worth of space, I'm much happier to tolerate any small inconvenience...

Finally, should one insist on using paper for reading, the difficulty of just printing out the desired material from the PDF is insignificant compared to the efforts of the inverse process of forcing books onto the scanner, damaging them trying to minimize Gutter Shadow, groaning as the OCR blows it completely ... etc.

[Skybird]

Actually, rather than having anything against you, I'm a little suprised at all the vehemence against E-books. I can understand that they aren't your cup of tea (to use an old cliche), but there is no need to repeat the "shock" point twice (OK, I'll admit books have an advantage here), add water and sand (where I just don't see the huge advantage of books) and then resort to the smell (really subjective here - I like books but the smell of old books is not always favorable to my senses) and flexibility (I've tried reading larger paperbacks on a train and quickly found myself wishing they were less flexible...)

Well, that may be your taste, but to me - and many others - what I listed are real arguments speaking against eBooks. I admit, items like this may be comfortable for special uses, like the list of magazines you mentioned, but in everyday use for ordinary books, both fiction and non-fiction, and private reason as well as work-related research and comaring different texts parallel to each other, what I said are all very valid concerns. PDFs, somebody mentioned, and manuals of study sims. Well, I prefer them to be available in print (book or self-printed) - especially when it is a study sim. Here and with regard to any other kind of study material I think having hardcopies is superior in clarity and working ergonomics.

There is a another problem, with regards to digitising text-culture in general, and libraries who are in the business of needing to collect all publications in their nation's mother language like federal libraries or national libraries (speaking by the German example here) already can sing a song of it, it is a growing and serious problem: data conservation, which not only includes the physical quality of the media, but also includes compatability of hardware that grew old and gets replaced by new hardware standards and new data formats. Digitising analogue data may increase the access time to data, but that time saving is more than eaten up by the generally raised maintenance and regular investments that is needed to preserve such data libraries over longer period of times. We already have the symptom that software of the very early PC era that and is kept in museums and institutions collecting them, in parts can no longer be accessed and used because there are no computer around anymore able to run it, to decypher it, and no people around to repair or maintain the old hardware that still may be there and can run it. Some computer game classics for example are amongst these. There have been several books released in the past years that deal with this problem, and describe that already first symptoms are to be seen that by digitising our culture and let digital copies of the analogue original completely replace the latter, sooner or later sees our culture being "deleted" by content becoming unaccessible and simply "forgotten". That may sound like another paranoia, but as I said, libraries have hired even scientiifc researchers to examine and deal with this problem which has both a socio-cultural and a material component.

For this reason already, I see the digital version of analogue data always just as a supplementing option to the analogue original.

There also is the problem of DRM, which has spread in the computer world like a pest. and if the rights-holder of an ebook you bought goes off business, your precious ebook copies could just seize to exist in your ebook's memory, deleted by one central command that is beyond your influence. What many people do not see is that by the combination of networking and digitising, the concept of private property as it has been present in our culture since many centuries, all is about to be drastically altered and changed. You are giving up part of your independence and your freedoms that way.

I am not against technology in principal, by far not, there are plenty of things I use in everyday life that I do not wish to miss. But I am against the unneeded, and uncritical implementation of technology, the ignoring of it's costs and disadvantages in whatever a context (and there always are costs), and I do not subscribe to the idea that just because something is new, it must necessarily be better. Skills that we hand over to technology to let it do the work, are skills that we loose ourselves. In extremes it may lead to pupils able to handle a poicket calculator, but being unable to do simple math calcuation manually on paper, or in their brain. Nothing against the reasonable use of technology. But we behave like little kids who enter the candy store without their parents. I also have a problem with the modern day life of constantly updating items and gadgets and constantly replacing them with a newer version, which to me sounds not like enjoying to consume, but like pure stress (I am no big shopper). Especially cellphones on my mind. That some people, many in fact, enjoy to buy a new cellphone every one or two years although the old is still functionable, and they had spent time to tailor it's functions to their needs, is beyond me. and if a cellphone does not work longer than just two years, to me that is a good argument not to buy it.

I'm a bit consrvative in these regards, which means: stick with the old that has proven it's worth if the new has no obvious advantage(s) outclassing the older thing. and in everyday use for the ordinary consumer, I see little advantage for john smith to turn his porivate books at home into ebook versions. Special purposes like your example with huge collections of magazines where you may need to do term- and context related searches, are something different. But when you need to do close comparisons of several texts, or want to switch back and forth between several texts quickly, you already are better off again with printed copies. an ebopok always shows you just one single page, and pictures and graphics even in inferior quality, and the text volume per side also is limited. For most regular uses, that sounds like bad ergonomy.

[TLAM Strike]

At $200 I think your better off just bying a low end Acer laptop and using that. Plus you get all the functionaly of a laptop computer out of it.

[Sailor Steve]

I agree with both sides to a degree. Like most here I have no interest in them, but I also see that many of the negative arguments aren't really against ebooks themselves, but explaining why you wouldn't own one. Arguing this or that sounds to me like trying to convince somebody they're evil or something.

Me, I don't want one, but that may change in the future. I can see the OP's desire for one, and hope he finds the one that suits him.

[Aramike]

I tend to agree with Skybird and August (heh, has that EVER been written?).

Traditional books are the only way to go for me.

[MothBalls]

After reading this thread, I have to agree with Skybird as well. Some of the best books I have are ones from eons ago, mandatory reading in grade school and college. Occasionally I like to grab an old classic and reread it. For me anyway, rereading classics like Moby Dick or War and Peace, gives one a new perspective on what it's all about when you read it again 35 years later.

I was able to walk over to the bookshelf, grab a classic, and read it. I can't see a Kindle working well after sitting on the shelf for 30 years. The hardback books I have now, will still be useful in another 30 years from now.

[clive bradbury]

Along with almost everyone here , I also fall into the 'real paper' school.

There actually seems to be little benefit, other than storage (and thus transport) capacity, to the e-book. They also appear to be considerably more expensive, although that may change.

A quick check on the W.H. Smith website gives the e-book version of the latest Dan Brown 'masterpiece' at £13.49. Amazon are selling the hardback in the UK at £6.49. That hard copy novel could then be handed to other family members and friends to read, including those who have not invested £250 on a very breakable and loseable device to read it, then sold secondhand afterwards.

An e-book reader would certainly be useful for items such as software manuals, but as someone has already said, wouldn't a cheap laptop or netbook be better value and more useful?

[ajrimmer42]

if you have a PSP, you could try 'Bookr'. I never used to fancy the idea of ebooks but since getting that I've changed my mind. As much as I like a good solid paper book, Bookr is just so convenient, I've got the whole Hornblower series in my pocket!

[Shearwater]

I tend to agree with Skybird and August

A thread to remember :DL
I guess I'll wait until after Xmas, read some more reviews in the meantime and just hope that prices will have dropped by then.
Looking at all the scepticism here, I think I can see a bit clearer why readers haven't really met with a lot of success. I still think it's a neat idea, but maybe the execution at the moment is stilla bit half-baked, and of course I don't want books to be abolished - I just think it's a useful and sensible addition to what we already have.


In any case, thanks for all your replies, guys :ping: