The eBook, Mark 2 203
Selanit writes "David Pogue recently published a review of the Sony Reader, under the title Trying Again to Make Books Obsolete. Though he likes the device in general, he concludes that it's not destined to replace the book any time soon. Well worth a read."
Just one question: (Score:5, Funny)
So my question is: Why would you want to?
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Re:Just one question: (Score:5, Informative)
You didn't RTFA.
If you had, you would find out it only consumes power when you have to redraw a page.
You would also have discovered that there is a prototype that has been displaying the same page for 3 years.
Sure, batteries slowly leak power. However, have you noticed that watch batteries can last for years - even with a constant power drain? As long as you don't need to provide huge bursts of energy, like those needed by a digital camera, you can design the battery to be more efficient in the long term.
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Can I blame my density on having had to read the article on a backlit LCD computer screen instead of on a Sony Reader?
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Is The Da Vinci Code really the new standard for literary dwarven bread? [wikipedia.org] (You always have it to read, but strangely you find something else to do in meanwhile.)
I guess I'll have to read it someday...
Hey! (Score:2)
You're spot on.
(and I didn't had to click to know how dwarfish bread is made
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Pun (Score:3, Interesting)
Was that some pun humour in the summary?
Anyway, I'd not trust Sony to make an eBook reader that wouldn't install a rootkit anyway. Installing Sony software is about as good an idea as installing sofware from MyWebSearch. They messed up Audio CDROMs for cripes sake, now we want them to control a book format too?
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Sony (Score:2)
[Sony] messed up Audio CD-ROMs for cripes sake, now we want them to control a book format too?
In all fairness, they also helped Philips invent the audio CD format in the first place, which includes the bit about it not having any DRM. It's probably safe to say that they're such a large corporation (making blank CDs, CD-ROM burning drives, CD players, pre-recorded albums, and so on) that they sometimes conflict with themselves.
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That said, e-books are an interesting idea, but it's hard to beat the usability and durability of a good paperback.
We've heard this before... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:We've heard this before... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:We've heard this before... (Score:4, Informative)
My point, which I apparently failed to convey, is that alternative technology exists to accomplish the most common uses of all of the things I mentioned -- and in some cases, has existed for quite some time -- without "replacing" those things in any meaningful sense of the word. Yes, the new technology infringes on the size of the market for those things, and yes, some people will opt to use the newer technologies exclusively. But the older technologies have their advantages, too -- whether it be cost, safety, ease of use, familiarity, or simple idiosyncratic aesthetic appeal. As a result, I think that the use of the older technologies is far more likely to last than most of us neophile technogeeks seem to think.
(My mention of transparent glass windows was in reference to a trend some years back, now thankfully largely reversed, toward replacing clear glass in schools and office buildings with, yes, opaque brick, or else opaque glass, in the interest of "reducing distractions" in schools and "increasing productivity" in businesses -- till studies began to show that the end result tended to be exactly the opposite. Most people apparently need distraction occasionally to function at their best.)
It's not a but but a feature (Score:2)
If it's $200 every couple of years for glasses, and laser eye surgery only costs $500, doesn't have to be redone, and is risk free, then I think may people will opt for that instead of glasses.
One of the things that people with perfect vision (or vision that is not absolutely abysmal like mine) do not really get is that nearsightedness can also be an advantage. For example, when I am not wearing corrective lenses I can read microprint. This may seem trivial, but it definitely came in handy when I was up
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As for making paper books obsolete. It will happen at most a few decades after e-books hit the mainstream. Sure, some people will insist on p-books, but they will be enthusiasts, just like the people who insist on vinyl today. Or black and white film. Or steam engine trains and boats. Or any number of other obsolote technologies.
Matches are already obsolete, lighters have surpassed them in number of fires started by a huge margin. People use matches mostly for nostalgic purposes. I can easily see tumbler
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Major issue often overlooked (but often brought up as well, so how people overlook it anymore is beyond me): Your key gets compromised, or your combination/password... You can get a new key/password. Hell, just buy a new lock entirely. Problem solved.
Someone (not with much difficulty - watch mythbusters hollywood myths) copies your
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The best thing is keycards. They are incredibly easy to replace and reconfigure and easy to make on the spot. They can also be tracked. RFID keycards can make it possible to just walk though doors.
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Magazines and the Web (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that textbook sales are decreasing in real terms since the introduction of easily found information [wikipedia.org] suitable for helping out with a lot of university work.
And there are already exact replacements [gutenberg.org] for some book content.
Just look at what porn is doing - are porn mags still used as much as they were? Nope, it's on the 'net. The web is the main component of a book replacement and once you can get paper like displays which don't need any bulky electronics another feature of books will be replicated in modern technology.
Blogs have replaced journals, and TV guides are now transmitted over the air and published on the net too. All paper based content moved to "book" replacements.
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This is true only if by "replace" you mean "infringe somewhat upon the use of". While web sites have begun to take on some of the uses to which people put magazines, and while many people now forego printed magazines in favor of the Web, magazine sales are still strong enough to keep the industry going. I've worked in public libraries for nearly 20 years now, and the magazine reading room is always full of people browsing the shelves or using th
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Thank you for that marvelous insight. However, to borrow an old saying, "A difference that makes no difference is no difference."
Or to put it another way, by the time you get to the 99th percentile (or even the 80th, IMHO) you've effectively replaced the technology. Do 99% of the people who use candles in the US buy them at the store or make their own? Do the vast majority of today's consumers listen to MP3s or CDs, 8-track, or vinyl?
Given horses and cars, whi
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iRex is better (Score:2, Interesting)
The iRex Illiad [irextechnologies.com] is a better choice.
- - -
Online education? http://online.edu.org/ [edu.org]
No annotation support. Bah! (Score:2)
Still, without annotation - forget it. My ten year old Newton MP2100 is still a more useful ebook reader!
Bah!
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I don't believe that's true at all, double-especially in the size and resolution we're talking about here.
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What basis do you have for this comparison? 7.5k page turns, at 1 turn per minute, reading 12 hours a day, works out to something like 10 days of battery life. Can you find an LCD device at 800x600 that will run for anywhere near that long, backlit or otherwise? I sure can't.
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I'd be very happy to give up my pilot, which is what I currently use, for something with a more readable display, but the sony model doesn't seem to be it. But hey, it's only one of the first three of these devices ever. I have high hopes for future models.
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Hopefully that will be improved in future devices, but even if it isn't, I think the limitation could be worked around fairly easily in software. For example, you could have a two-stage page-turning sequence: divide the screen into "top" and "bottom" halves, and have the machine update one half of the display while you are reading from the other half. Et voila, double-buffering to the rescue :^)
TFA seems a little thin... (Score:2)
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Printed books (Score:2, Redundant)
- Give me my fair use rights
- Enable me to lend them to a friend
- Enable me to donate them to libraries
- Five me my first sale doctrine rights
- Enable me to sell used if I tire of the book
- Enable me to give away if I tire of the book
- Don't crash
- Don't malfunction
- Don't run out of battery power
- Work in dim lighting, office light
The marketing problem: A book is portable (Score:4, Insightful)
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One book or two are the key words of your sentence !
I really feel the pain of moving my books around whenever I have to move, and I know I am not alone. The heaviest boxes are almost always the ones that are packed with books. That is one of the main reasons I have always considered these ebook readers with a special interest, up to the point to be really attracted by th
Yes, but... (Score:2)
(I forgot to mention students, too.)
I don't think ebook readers are aiming at first to replace your entire library. (Although I understand perfectly what you mean about boxes of books; I own many, and my remedy is not to move around much!) An e-book reader is "portable information" like an iPod is "portable music". And that's where the marketing difficulty may lie: Because it's just as convenient for people to carry a paperback (e.g. on a train or plane trip) as it is to carry the reader. And you don't hav
Obsolence. (Score:2)
Now an eBook. Whatever technology they're tauting today
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The reason why really old books from the Renaissance and earlier have survived to this day is because they are printed on rag not pulp! In 500 years even a carefully preserved hardcover book will be extraordinarily fragile.
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It's a step in the right direction (Score:2)
I don't see it replacing books in the near future - I see it replacing my computer as a viewer of my collection of reference PDFs - journal articles, datasheets, user manuals, stuff like that. Stuff I need, but don't want to have to keep laying around in printed form to yellow and get water damaged and whatnot.
I understand that it's not much more than a n
DIY (Score:3, Informative)
Awesome.
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Nokia 770 (Score:2)
Great quote (Score:2)
Like Sony is the one to be making that statement. I wouldn't trust Sony to make anything right. My parents owned a Beta, I think thats the last thing that has ever been a Sony in my family. Oh wait, I did buy a Sony DVD+RW because my Fuji one gave up the ghost after much rewriting, and that was all the store had left. It was garbage and I replaced it first opportunity I had with another Fuji.
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What *I* expect from an e-reader (Score:2)
From Sony? No thanks. (Score:2)
My hands-on impressions of the Sony Reader (Score:2)
-The screen is nice. Very readable even in sunlight, fairly high res for it's 6" size at 600x800.
-The battery life(although I didn't play with one nearly enough to drain it's charge.
The Bad:
-64MB of flash. What is this the 90s? Even plain old text could fill that up pretty damn fast, and it's damn near useless for graphics or audio.
-2-bit greyscale is great for text, but is on the lower edge of acceptable for manga (and the resolution could stand to be a bit higher for manga as well). I realize
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Hm, I have a better idea... Aple should take a page from Sony and incorporate a nice eInk display into its next iPod. A device that delivered both audio and printed media, and didn't suck (in all the ways that Sony's products tend to, and Apple's products tend not to), would be a great thing.
jinke (Score:2)
WTF is up with the prices? (Score:2)
DRM killed mark 1, it will kill marks 2 through 10 (Score:2)
I wonder how much money the DRM has saved them by protecting them from "book pirates"?
It could take off... in about ten years. (Score:2)
There are a few glaring details that need to be addressed.
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Why yes, I do live in a basement, you insensitive clod.
KFG
Re:the one advantage (Score:5, Insightful)
pulp books do not need electricity
That's the only advantage you can think of for traditional books? They also have no DRM; they have to be treated pretty badly before they stop working; they contain both the data and everything necessary to read it.
I have a fifty odd year old book I bought second hand recently. It has one or two holes in it where it got torn up pretty badly. However, I can still read it. I probably couldn't say the same thing about a fifty year old computer text file, as it would pre-date ASCII and likely be written on some old format like a punch card, so I'd probably need to buy some specialist hardware like a punch card reader, then write a program to translate the data into a modern format.
Of course, digitised books have advantages too, such as not taking up space, and being easily searchable. It seems like an ideal format for non-fiction reference books such as encyclopedias and guides, but not very good for fiction.
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i.e., a fairly new book (about half of my thousands of books and magazines are between 50 and 100 years old, a few rather older); whereas the standard eternity for computerized gear is three years.
I probably couldn't say the same thing about a fifty year old computer text file, as it would pre-date ASCII
Of course ASCII is moving in on 39 years old and is fairly stable. With a bit of work it's even human translatable, even from certain kinds of computer storage media.
Of
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I know some 50 year olds who could read
They do too have DRM! (Score:3, Interesting)
PS: I'm going back to reading His Dark Materials in this evil format now.
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What's missing.... (Score:2)
For $22.95 a month I get two books of my choice, which are usually current best-sellers in fiction / non-fiction. Work it out, and that's about $11.50 for the current hardback which sells at $27.95, or the iTMS version selling for $25.95, and definitely beats the $30-50 needed to get the complete audio version on CD.
I travel quite a bit, and currently have about a hundred audiobooks on my iPod that I can listen to in a line, on a plane, or where-ever. The selec
Not quite what you mean (Score:2)
I'd like to get the reader, but that's easily 25-50 books right there.
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In many ways I'm an ideal e-book consumer. I read one or two novels a week, I work in a cleanroom where paper
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Dont
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Paper books have a pretty solid copyright protection built in, which is circumventable only through extensive effort and then the copied result is generally of much lower quality than the original.
If you give a paper book to someone, you no longer have it.
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Much easier to carry all the time and read it when using a bus or between college class sessions.
As it's easier to just go scrolling and reading than entering text in my cell phone (except when connected to the computer as I can use a full sized keyboard then), I find easier to read than to use reference books or encyclopedias there.
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Not so important for fiction but I'd love searchable reference material and I'd love to be able to carry one book and have an entire library at my fingertips. Greed on the part of the publishers unfortunately prevents this for anything
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Not all e-books have DRM. Only some do.
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To be fair the comparison between a 50 year old book and a 50 year old text document is hardly accurate.
It's impossible to say whether a popular modern format such as PDFs will seem as obsolete in another 50 years or not. Only time will tell. Still, technology's moving at a faster rate now than it was then...
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Unless it's dark. And where I live, it's dark about half the time. Farther north, planetary motion is even less compliant with readers' needs. Fix that, and you've got something!
I happen to split my time between web development and book design and typesetting, and I can't imagine that the old, er, analog format can't live in harmony with the new digital formats. I prefer to read print on paper, but I do keep several reference and classic books on my PDA. I don't fi
Re:the one advantage (Score:4, Informative)
True, but how much is "enough"? I have a electric quartz watch that I have had for about 10 years and have changed the batteries twice. I would regard that as maintenance to the point of it being negligible.
The Sony Reader has an eInk display. Charged plates underneath capsules arranged in a fine grid push either dark or light ink into view. The resulting display is basically the same as ink on paper and needs no back light in the same way as conventional paper doesn't need them either. And crucially, there is no power required other than to change the display. I fully expect that in a few years, eInk will require about as much power as a quartz watch and will have as long a life without a change of batteries.
The Sony Reader isn't going to "replace" books or magazines any more than dishwashers "replaced" washing the dishes, or the car "replaced" the train. It's going to simply find a niche to co-exist with paper. All this huff-puffing about how you need batteries and can't swat flies with an eBook is hokum. DRM is going to be the biggest problem - by far - with this technology. Luckily, Sony haven't carried that particular innovation through with the Reader it seems.
PS: Here's a review of the Reader published on our company blog [lbigroup.com], which concludes that's it not too bad. Has a video of it in operation too (the Reader's screen refresh is rather slow, apparently), which is more than the NYT can manage.
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This is one of the things that annoys me with new technology. Why can't they just make it so that the books are distributed on something like a widget that you plug into the reader? This way, no copying problems, no limiting the number of authorized PCs, no electronic files to deal with.
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also pulp books are not tied to technology that can be quickly replaced. think of the 20 or so ebook formats of the past that nobody supports anymore.
environmentally, you probably better off chopping trees down to make books than you are making plastic and combining it with arsenic and cadmium and lead.
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Then there's all the energy and chemical goo expended in the papermaking process (nasty, expecially if it's a chlorine-based pulp plant), all the energy expended in the printing and binding process, and all the energy devoted to moving those heavy books around.
You're still probably right. I'd rather increase the demand for trees than for plast
the one advantage (Score:2)
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pulp books do not need electricity
They do when it's dark.
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Size & weight would be a big deal for me; I'll need to see this in person (or at least in cyborg) to assess its chances. Oh, and I agree that DRM BS can kill theses.
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there are at least three more things that are big issues, IMO:
The way that e-books have really taken off is in the world of free books -- see my sig.
Re:Things need for ebook success (Score:4, Interesting)
What was bad was the low resolution.
I personally want something with a similar interface to the RCA e-book reader, better screen and better importers. I really like the backlight myself - and having a battery that can last "only" ~20 hours seems fine to me - hell, we live with cellphones and mp3 players that get significantly less always on battery life. I mean, is it that hard to plug it in at night?
That's not to say longer battery life is bad, but I really think backlights are a great benefit to e-books, and should not be discarded for an "authentic" experiance. If I wanted a paperback experiance, I'd buy a paperback!
Finally, am I the only one who thinks content industries in general just don't get it? I mean, why would I pay the price of a hardcover book for a DRMed computer file? For that matter, why would I even pay the price of a paperback for that? I would pay $2-$3 for that though, if it's something I'm going to read once or twice...
It needs to be cheaper than Amazon's used books are or I'll just buy a real book.
Now you're seeing it our way (Score:2)
It needs to be cheaper than Amazon's used books are or I'll just buy a real book.
This is exactly what those who control distribution want, to hamstring digital media so they will not prevail.
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I've tried the clip on lights with real books - they are shit. They are uneven light - often an orangish color near the bottom of the book. They need to be brighter than a backlight - and they can inadverently blind you or others if you happen to glanc
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I'm not even sure you could make a backlight work with this kind of screen... I suspect the screen is not translucent. You'd probably need some sort of front-light instead. Presumably any solution that you would use for an old-fashioned paperback book could be applied to this also.
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Re:Direct link (Score:4, Funny)
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Well, those at project Gutenberg would argue that it is not impossible to find electronic versions of books that are over 20 years old. My guess is that will not be anymore of a problem in the future.