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Handhelds Hardware

Mainstream Books for Palm Pilots 122

Posted by Roblimo from the it-had-to-come-sooner-or-later dept.
Joe Rumsey writes "Palm Infocenter reports that Peanut Press is selling books in electronic form. They are encrypted, and the reader currently only exists for Palm devices. The selection is not bad." Looks like a better idea than the SoftBook reader, which costs about as much as a Palm but is big and bulky -- and won't let you do anything but read books and magazines.
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Mainstream Books for Palm Pilots More

Mainstream Books for Palm Pilots

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  • is an eBook that would let me read TeX, Postscript or PDF files.

    If I want to read some fiction, I'd much rather curl up with a paperback -- but combined with some sort of annotation/search system, these things would be great for reading text books, tech articles and preprints. (If for no other reason than I could get rid of the film of research papers covering the floor of my study.)

    JRaven
  • My power goes out or I am in a remote area (rural tibet) and have to do some research with the indigenous peoples and get some of the reading done. Electronic readers? Fat chance!!!
  • O'Reilly would be very cool. Better yet, for the O'Reilly stuff, they could have a print reference edition on a yearly basis, and run quarterly, monthly (hourly?) updates as new information/sw becomes available. Or, bug's become documented & fixed.

    The only downside, would you really want David Pogue's PalmPilot guide on your PalmPilot?
    --
  • What sh*t, da*n, various mumblings? Still electronic media suffers from degredation over time. Printed books have lasted for several hundreds of years in readable condition.
  • I've been using my Palm for reading Gutenberg textx for almost a year now. I'm actually really pleased with the experience. Sure you need to get the light right, but paging through the book is simplicity itself and I am so used to reading electronic text that I am not finding any real problems with the setup.

    Of course it could be improved, the digital ink idea for future e-paper sounds like it could supply the extra resolution a serious read requires. However - for travelling, the Palm reader has been a godsend. I used to carry 3 or 4 books for a week's travel - now I have saved that space and weight by taking the Palm.

    I'll stick to books for everyday use though of course.

  • Re:Quick Decompilation (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is this something that we really want to break? I picked up their free book and I think it's pretty cool. I just went back and picked up A Fire Upon the Deep -- for chump change. If we go and break it, we'll only succeed in making them go away. Who wins there? Not me. Chances are that company is made up of people just like us. I'd prefer to support them and by extension, us.
  • I use my PalmPilot for reading books and information regulary. What strikes me is the screen width is to narrow to be comfortable for any sort of reading. If you could just rotate the text 90degres so that I read the palmpilot screen on its side. For me this seems more appropriatte format for reading on the Palm pilot.

  • Actually...you can. Peanut Reader allows it, and so do AvantGo (IIRC) and some doc readers.

    The thing is, though, the Palm's screen is perfectly square , so you don't really see much of an advantage from it.
  • I've already read what I wanted to read from that period. There isn't an awful lot that's survived that was any good. And it's a bit short on science fiction. I've already read Verne, Wells, Shelley.
    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • "Computers don't make mistakes, people do."---Bill Gates, even if you don't like the man, it's true. And people keep blaming their computers when windows crashes.... maybe we should listen more to bill gates and his infinite wisdom. Just like "640k of RAM should be enough for anybody". ;)
  • It would be very convenient if the technology was commercially available for a page-sized, ultra-thin, high-res display device with bunch of RAM or maybe a flash card. But this would open up a whole new issue about book copyrights, the same thing that's going on with music and software piracy... Yet another headache.

  • I've owned an Rocket eBook for six months, and can answer some of the questions here.

    1. Well, the value of money is relative to how much money you have. But the list price is $350, and the discounters are pricing it below $300.

    2. All the electronic texts are saved to the hard drive, just like the Palm texts are, and likewise, you choose which books are currently present on the device. In fact, encrypted texts are also saved for you on Nuvomedia's site, so even if your hard drive turns to dust, you can still retrieve the books you've bought.

    Plus, Nuvomedia gives away tools to scan web pages into eBook texts. Great for those long stories on a single page, or for books that are posted online.

    3. The Nuvomedia FAQ claims that they can deal with you losing the eBook device without any loss of texts. They've got a good rep for being responsive to users.

    4. In my opinion, the biggest problem facing the eBook industry is the lack of current texts. But Rocket is far ahead of Peanut Press or Softbook, with over a thousand texts, and the conversion rate seems to be accelerating.

    The screen is a LOT better than the Palm, i agree, and the backlight and rechargable battery life are sweet. Again, it's a matter of how important that qualitative difference is to you.

    mahlen

    "I hope some animal never bores a hole in my head and lays its eggs in my brain, because later you might think you're having a good idea but it's just eggs hatching."
    --"Deep Thoughts", by "Jack Handy"
  • Now, if we've cut out the manufacuring costs and the middlemen and only have the retailer, why is the price the same?
    I asked them about that. They say that the publisher charges them the same for the etext as they would a printed volume.

    In effect the publisher is making extra profit on these. Which, in the short term, is probably reasonable since these are low-volume and require unusual distribution mechanisms.

    I would expect that things will change as competition increases.

  • Thanks for the link to the pseudo-FAQ, but the sci-fi piece illustrated nothing except maybe the fact that RMS can't write fiction to save his life. It was like a laundry list. And the "Author's Note" was cute, in case you failed to notice the sledgehammer of bad fiction which had just landed on your foot.
  • Printed books have lasted for several hundreds of years in readable condition.

    I'm wondering how modern books will hold up. Different materials, and all that. It brings to mind concerns of papper acidity, etc, when comic book collectors talk about their trade.

  • From what I understand, they are selling it in a propreitary, encrypted format.

    Palm pilots become obsolete almost as fast as computers. In a decade, those books that were paid for and stored on the pilot will most likely be useless without the pilot itself; they will be stuck on the pc.

    Printed books, on the other hand, have been known to last hundreds of years. It would be a shame to see information made inacessible because the equipment became obsolete.

  • Hmm. Odd, last I checked, you can get the ultrasleek Palm V for ~US$400 or so (egghead.com). Go a little less, and it's possible to pick up PalmIII's cheaply (I'd say $200 new). Or go used, many older palms are $100.

    Must be confusing with M$'s wince (I prefer 'wince' to CE, since wincing is what you do with those machines) machines calling themselves "Palm Sized PCs".
  • Well, I'd carry extra batteries in that case, and toy with several "overclocking" utilities for the pilot (they underclock as well, saving batteries).

    Personally, I don't mind reading fiction electronically. It's online reference books that get me. I don't know, but I find it slower to swap out of my current task, look at some online reference, then swap back in - I'd rather have the book in my lap while I'm toying with something.
  • Well, comic books have traditionally been printed on the lowest grades of paper. In actuality, the paper acidity is actually contagious in a way. Put high quality books adjacent to books printed on crap paper and the bad paper will also take out the good book, to a certain degree.

    It isn't even worth talking about digital media for anything you want to keep around permanently. It doesn't matter if the media is permanent or archival. The retreival formats keep changing every few years. And anything I buy, I expect to keep around permanently. I have many books in excess of 100 years old.
  • I'm never gonna get excited about electronic books wrapped up in encumbering encryption and nasty licenses, especially when draconian copyright laws have dealt such a mortal blow to the open-source alternative [mediaone.net].


    This wonderful pseudo-FAQ [mediaone.net] explains why and how better than I can.

    The downside to systems like this is specifically addressed starting around #48 in the above, but it's worth reading the whole page (and possibly rms [gnu.org]'s illustrative sci-fi piece [mediaone.net]) if you have time.

  • I prefer to read printed books because girls (especially blondes one) who look at me are thinking : "God ! This cute guy is smart too...". Ok it's bad for my geek's score but sometime we need to do sacrifices.

    Reading electronic books has the opposite consequence : "This guy looks stupid ! Why is he reading a book on a so tiny screen."
  • Greetings,

    It falls into the Rio / MP3 category for me. It's not the best solution, but it's worth giving them money so that other people will see a market and try to build a better solution. I bought about $25 worth of books from them, and I will read them. I've converted long Gutenberg books to Doc format and read them on my Pilot, and don't have any problem with it myself.

    On another note... I looked at Rocket Books. WTF?!?! I'm going to pay $350 for a single-purpose item, and they have absolutely JACK for good SF?

    From PeanutPress I just bought Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge (oh god, a digital version...? I'm absolutely in heaven...), and Slant by Greg Bear (which I've been meaning to read), along with a few other books I was interested in. I also downloaded the free samples, for the hell of it.

    Look, if you want to sell an ebook system, whether proprietary or not, get publisher support . That they can offer Fire Upon The Deep (and know to!) gives me faith and confidence in them. That most of Rocket Books SF section looks like it was culled from the Gutenberg project very explicitly does NOT.

    Anyhow, I'm impressed. They have selection. That's key for me, and probably most people who seek ebooks. Their cart system needs a bit of help, but it's not terrible.

    They DON'T have technical stuff, which is a pity, but livable.

    Also, fwiw, I have a Palm3 w/ the TRG 8MB expansion card. I've got plenty of space for these books, even all at once. In the end, though, I'm really dropping $25 as a donation to the cause of 'good things'. As opposed to paying for a RocketBook which doesn't fit in my pocket, burns a hole in my wallet, and doesn't have the selection...

    No contest.

    Cyberfox!
  • The font size of a page to make it fit on the screen would have to be really small 1-2pt or so. The alternative maybe having just a paragraph on the screen at any one time would equally suck.
  • Whaaaaattt!!?!??! You lost me after "So what . . ."
  • If you have any self distance what so ever you will realise that this is just a matter of habit.

    Personally, I agree with you, I love holding books, flipping pages, and I love watching my personal library grow: but it is just habit.

    I've learned to love my mp3 collection like I loved my CDs, I believe I could learn to love my /home/Librarian/ directory as well...
  • To people like me, that live in non-US countries (Italy, in my case) and like reading US books, electronic books are a gift. Yeah, I prefer printed books, but just think that an amazon order takes almost 3 months to get here (unless you pay fedex shipping, but after a few orders it would be cheaper to fly to the US and buy books "live").

  • Barring nanotechnology and smart paper, I think this would be a great use of electric Ink's product [sciencenews.org] along with some embedded surface mount technology for storage/conversion to display. Memory is getting cheap enough that storing a book on chip shouldn't bee a major issue.

  • The sub-notebooks I've looked at are the Libretto and the new Sony picturebook. I unfortunately can't have anything larger than that, because I'm constrained by the space in my tank bag, as I commute on my motorcycle (Honda VFR800). The next two problems are that a) work won't spring for a laptop, so it comes out of my pocket, and b) I don't know that either of those laptops can withstand my agressive riding. :) So, that leaves me with a solid-state device, and I don't really care for anything bigger than a palm pilot.

    Actually, I don't really have a requirement for the electronic book to be something book sized. I'm perfectly happy with paper books if I want to sit down and read them back to back. I just want to have my complete reference library to be in more than one place at once - namely at work and at home. Whether my digital copy moves with me on the road or sits on my home computer doesn't much matter to me -- since I don't carry a laptop, I can't get any work done unless I'm at home or at work anyway. :)
  • I never liked the idea of electronic books as a replacement for printed ones. And the idea of "selling" electronic books, ugh. I like printed, nicely bound books. I guess it's kinda like the mp3 vs. CD thing though.

    Dictionary, two language dictionary, encyclopedia. Just like mp3, you can carry 100 CDs on a libretto and merely 5-7 real CD on the road, palm can carry much more than the 2 books your back can support. Think about how much easily if college students can carry a palm instead of 4 giants books to school. Actually the bricks my little cousin (jr high) carry is pathetic, I would much prefer she download a book. And those aren't elegant books either, they are not better than a glorified palm.

    CY

  • There's no Peanut Reader for any platform except the Palm...which means you either get a Palm or run a Palm emulator on your desktop--and you can't run a Palm emulator until you have a Palm ROM, which you get either by buying a Palm and using a ROM reader, or signing up for the development program and going through a bunch of rigamarole to get it.

    Or by buying the 2nd Edition PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide [oreilly.com] , which comes with a CD-ROM including not only the emulator, but also licensed copies of the ROMs for various PalmOS versions. (Oh, and lots of Palm software including many e-texts.)

    Much cheaper than even a used Palm if you just want to see what one might be like, and if you do buy one you have a nice book too!

  • There aren't all that many books written more than 75 years ago that I'd care to read.

    Well the golden age of the novel is generally considered to be the 19th century, so there's no shortage of freely available things worth reading.

    Not that I'm in favor of extending copyright, mind you.
  • e-Paper and related stories on eBookNet.com
    http://www.eBookNet.com/news/99 0714/indexxerox2.htm [ebooknet.com]

    There is also a story coming up soon on eBookNet about a new e-reader concept device being developed by a PARC subsidiary, Uppercase. And they have a weekly Newz letter about ebooks. There is a link near the top of their main page:

    http://www.ebooknet.com [ebooknet.com]
  • It isn't as bad as you think. I once read "Anna Karenina" on my palm pilot to see how it would go. It only took a couple of days to get used to it. I also read Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown".

    Still, because of the screen size, it wouldn't be my perferred reading platform. I went back to good old paper books.
  • Anybody have any news on the 'ePaper' that PARC developed and MIT is working on?

    e-ink (Inc.) [eink.com] is working on it

  • And if the electricty went out you couldn't read the paper book, but your Rocket eBook would keep right on ticking for 20 hourse with the backlight ON. I love to read in bed after my wife turns out the light. That's one reason I love my ReB!

    Not to mention that I can download my own email, documents and web pages to read AWAY from my PC and even if the lights go out...
  • RocketLibrarian (for reading and is available for Macs. You can get the pre-release version here: http://www.rocket-ebo ok.com/Readers/Software/librarianPR.html [rocket-ebook.com] And if that page changes, here's the direct link to the file: http://www.ro cket-ebook.com/Readers/Software/rl_install_1.2b5.s ea.hqx [rocket-ebook.com]
  • There's an article about a speed reading software for electronic documents on eBookNet.com:

    http://www.ebooknet.com/news/981207/ vortex.htm [ebooknet.com]

    Pretty cool stuff.
  • No problemo. Both Rocket eBook and SoftBook have these features. With ReB you can also underline words, highlight a word and look it up in the dictionary. EveryBook is supposed to be available in Fall '99 and will be able to display PDF. But get ready for a surprise: $1,500 for first model. Next model is "student" for "only" $900.

    eBookNet has tons of info about ebooks:
    http://www.ebooknet.com [ebooknet.com]
  • I have tried both, and now that I have a Rocket eBook, I'll never go back. With the large font, I fly thru pages of text on my ReB. And, my eyes stopped hurting... ;#
  • The first draft of the Open eBook standards are supposed to be agreed upon by the first of September. You can find a little info here:

    http://www.openebook.org [openebook.org]

    and lots of info here:

    Ebooks now: an overview [ebooknet.com]

    announcement of Open eBook at the Ebook 98 Workshop [ebooknet.com]

    info about the Ebook 99 workshop in September [ebooknet.com]

    Open eBook details 981019 [ebooknet.com]

    Open eBook update 990201 [ebooknet.com]

  • As a Rocket eBook owner, I can say that, while it ain't exactly a PADD, it's the closest thing to it, and for about $275 at HardwareStreet.com [shopper.com]. Do a search on Check Rocket ebook [shopper.com] at Shopper.com for the current cheapest price.

    The screen is great. Clear and easy to read except in really bright sun. Battery lasts 20 hours or more with the backlight on. More than 40 hours without the backlight.

    Feels good when I hold it. The curve for the batteries fits my hand perfectly. Almost sexy.

    Copyright is no problem because the RocketLibrary server encrypts the document and keys it to each individual Rocket e-reader. The document is always encrypted, even on the e-reader. Even if you give someone a copy of the encrypted document, they can't read it because their e-reader has a different key.

    Rocket eBooks have 4MB flash RAM now, enough to hold at least 10 books. But I'm sure they'll come out with a memory upgrade to 32MB or so. if so,that would let you store more than 100 books!

  • I read on cnet a long time ago that there would soon be a dedicated book reader, but this is a nice alternative.......now if i just had a one of these babies......
  • But if I am going to read a 700 page novel, I think doing so on a Palm-sized screen would rapidly turn me insane.



    I've been reading stuff from Guttenberg on my palm, and it's not at all bad... Granted, the first 2 works were just plays (Shakespeare), but I'm now reading Plato's republic - dunno how long that is on paper, but it sure is dull ;-/
  • I have to agree with you on this, because I have tried it. One of the first things I tried with my Pilot (palm pro) was reading some of the Gutenberg Project's E-texts [gutenberg.org] and I found the experience to be less than enjoyable. The interface is perfect for storing and recalling small, discrete snippets of information and longer reference documents (which you really only access in discrete snippets). But for "stream-oriented" data such as a lengthy novel, I want a much higher resolution than the Pilot's offering.

    I also found that I went through batteries much faster, probably because I often preferred to use the backlight to read the books.

  • Yes, a Pilot may have an appropriate interface for storing a calender, phone numbers, and some notes. But if I am going to read a 700 page novel, I think doing so on a Palm-sized screen would rapidly turn me insane.


    Visit World Forge [worldforge.org] for GPL'd online gaming
  • Lightweight, flexible, easy to read (without a backlight), and you're not down $200 if you 'em in the pool. Granted, you can't search and copy, but I read books for recreation anyway.

    Anybody have any news on the 'ePaper' that PARC developed and MIT is working on?
  • I just wanted to point out that there is an on going project [promo.net] to convert books on which the patents have run out (ie. "The origin of a species" and other classics) into digital form. These books are freely distributed in ASCII form and you can always use a doc maker to make them readable on your palm pilot. I'm in no way associated with the gutenburg project, I just wanted to point it out to those who didn't know of it. As for getting new releases I suppose the encrypted documents would be your best choice, or you could just go to the library and pick up the real thing. I always perferred real books because you can drop them, get them wet, burn them, tear their pages and other wise mangle them and the most you'll be out it is 20 bucks(unless you're talking about computer manuals, those things are damn expensive).
  • I generally like printed books over digital books, but in the future I think it will be easy to do index look-ups on digital book since you don't have to flip the pages, not to mention the fact that you could do a keyword search which you would never be able to do with a regular book.

    I'm also a speed reader and when I'm speed reading I use a finger pacing and page flipping technique. Maybe when digital books become more advanced I'll be able to just push the next page button and have the next page practically instantly rendered. This beats the half second it currently takes me to flip pages :)

    Maybe they could even add a digital pacer so I wouldn't have to use finger pacing. First I would set the pace in words per minute, and it would highlight the current word in, say, red and the word before it and after it in a slightly less bright shade. And it could have a built in delay at the end of each line to account for my eyes moving to the next line.

    Now, if we could only figure out a way to make digital books minimize my subvocalization (everyone knows what that is right?).
  • I think he was talking about REAL books. Real book(like the phone book) don't have a search button. You can cut, copy, and paste with them, but not in the computer sense.
  • This is actually kind of old news; a SalonMag report from months ago on e-books and the Palm Pilot mentions this site--which is how I found it in the first place.

    The Good: The e-books are the full text of the books in question--including an 821K The Fire Upon the Deep--at $7, one of the better buys out there. The reader is free, has good features, even including genuine italics, and there's a Java-powered converter you can get to make Peanut-readable books of your own.

    They've got some good books there, too. AFUTD, works by Dickson, Silverberg, and so on. I've already bought several books through them.

    They're giving away some books for free, too--including the first book in the Remo Williams Destroyer series, and a short story by some guy I've never heard of.

    As soon as you buy the books, you download them. Zap, they're on your hard drive--along with the reader, in case you lost it. No shipping delays...boom, instant sync to your Palm.

    The Bad: The price on these books is exactly the same as standard retail price--which isn't so bad for if the book is in paperback, as are A Fire Upon the Deep, Dickson's Necromancer and The Tactics of Mistake, and so on. $2-7 for an e-book...well, it's a little more than you'd pay through Amazon (unless you take shipping into consideration), but that's offset by the convenience of being able to slip a full-sized, thick paperback book into your pocket.

    But there are also hardcover editions for sale there...for $15, $20, and so forth. And this makes no sense at all, to me. When you pay $20 for a book, you're paying for the difference between that book and paperback. Better binding, bigger pages, and so forth. But there's no such difference between a "hardcover" e-book and a "paperback" e-book. E-books are e-books.

    (I can guess, of course, that the reason they do this is that the publishers don't want the e-books to steal business from the physical hardcover books, hence they price them the same. But there just aren't that many e-book readers yet--so it wouldn't really affect their sales much one way or another, and it could lead to the wrong conclusion...the publishers seeing that the e-books aren't selling very well, and deciding that people don't want them.)

    There's no Peanut Reader for any platform except the Palm...which means you either get a Palm or run a Palm emulator on your desktop--and you can't run a Palm emulator until you have a Palm ROM, which you get either by buying a Palm and using a ROM reader, or signing up for the development program and going through a bunch of rigamarole to get it.

    And mostly, it seems, the only books available are out of print ones--ones that print publishers have, pretty much, already abandoned. Which means there's some good books there, but not a very good selection just yet. Which is a shame.

    Other e-book sites:

    There are some other sites selling "real e-books" too.

    Mind's Eye Publishing [tale.com] has some works by well-known authors, including Silverberg, Greg Costikyan, and Spider Robinson, at reasonable prices.

    Alexandria Digital Literature [alexlit.com] has some e-stories by known names for sale, too, and also features a nifty-neato collaborative filtering literature recommender that really deserves more attention than it's gotten.

    Online Originals [onlineoriginals.com] sells e-books that haven't ever been published anywhere else, for $7 US each. They also have a rather interesting deal where you can buy a share in the royalties of a particular e-book for $500. It's nice that they're optimistic, at any rate.

    And we shouldn't forget the Palmtop Library [memoware.com], which has a whole bunch of free, public-domain e-books for immediate download.

    E-book reading on the Palm is nice. It'll be nicer still when there's a better selection. I want Snow Crash on my Palm, dammit! And it would be deliciously ironic to be able to read Ben Bova's Cyberbooks, a delightful satire on the publishing industry and the repercussions that occur when someone invents an e-book, as an e-book, don't you think?
  • I'm talking about real books, not your PalmPilot.
  • You can find some Gutenberg e-texts at

    http://www.memoware.com [memoware.com]

    Happy reading.
  • Yes, but aren't they going to be hit by the new US legslation extending copyright up to 75 years or so after the author's death? There aren't all that many books written more than 75 years ago that I'd care to read.

    Just another example of how the megacorporation-owned US Government is screwing you and you and you. Information wants to be free, but they've got it under lock and key.

    If all the legislation currently under consideration goes through you soon won't be able to fart without violating someone's copyright and it'll be illegal to lock the door when you go to the toilet, in case you might do something secret.

    Boy am I glad I don't live in the US.
    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • So what should I do if I think the bible sucks? Just learn Hebrew and Aramaic and read it? I just kind of dislike when modern people try to take a spin on something that perhaps is not that translatable to modern life. I have some experience with what could be termed Greek culture in reading a book entitled "Zorba the Greek". While it is possible to think that the british may be dull I personally would not want to be so uninhibited as to be a fellow such as zorba. As for the homosexual thing well I am a little skeptical when people say that Abraham Lincoln was gay and such. I don't really care if people want to become homosexual now (like Stephen King says in the Gunslinger series the world moves on) however why are the british stuffy if they didn't have huge orgies in public and do something that was against their religion? This is just what was predicted by David Reisman when he said "The only followers left in the United States today are those unorganized and sometimes disorganized unfortunates who have not yet invented their own group.". What this boils down to is that you can't judge a book or a society by it's cover even in our enlightened day and age we produce some of the worst/boring dribble on the face of the planet just look at the ANSI C++ standards document or maybe a government report. I think each society evolved in its' own way and method. Perhaps this is why we now have a more liberal group in the Europeans today and had more repressive communist oriented/socialistic societies in the Eastern European countries. From chaos into order and order into chaos basic principal of math/chaos theory.
  • Where a simple manual that would have sold for maybe $20+ new now sells for $32+ used etc.
  • Just curious but from what I know it's always possible to get screwed in almost any country where people are out to make a buck.
  • Look...they're in this to make a profit so they can stay in business, right?

    Do you think they're going to discard their user-base just like that? If something new comes along in the way of the Palm, I'm sure they'll port their reader to it, if they want to stay in business--because discarding the media of the past is a sure way to piss off everyone who's ever bought from them, and drive themselves out of business.

    If they go under...well, they go under. That's a chance you take buying products from any business.

    As for all the people who're so upset about the files being encrypted...what the heck is your problem? Are they any less readable for the encryption? What would you do if they weren't encrypted? Are you really so upset at having to scrawl your name and number in on graffiti (or plink it in by the onscreen keyboard)? Or is it just that you want to be able to make copies for your friends, upload them to warez sites, and so forth? You people are so transparent...
  • If not they'd have to be awefully cheap to entice people to use Palm Pilot instead of just buying an actual book.

  • Actually, I've been reading books on it since I bought it (a IIIe), including some Peanut books, and for me, it works great! Admittedly, sometimes I have to switch to the bigger font, but even for that, it works well. Plus, I can put it in my pocket (which most paperback books are too big for) and read it even in the dark, when I'm waiting for my bus at night or being driven back home from somewhere. Don't knock it 'til you try it...I've finished a couple books on it, and it's been, by and large, a very satisfying experience.
  • Following the paradigm we should incorporate greyscale animations with sound and possibly some kind of virtual reality add on. So what if the batteries last 2.5 minutes. Do palm pilots have an AC adapter. Reminds me of a chess program for HP calculators (HP48G/GX) takes the calculator 10 minutes to calculate the next move and might just finish the game when the back up battery fails.
  • I'm not all that excited about novels on an eBook sort of thing. Yeah, if the screen color and size were good, it would be ok.

    What I would absolutely kill for is a way to put my ten-foot bookshelf full of technical books on an electronic device. The palm wouldn't work well for this. The screen is too small for technical documentation. But there is some future device that will be perfect.
  • I agree that there should be some sort of discount for the e-version of a book, but you must remember that hardback books cost more for more than just their bindings.

    It's a form of what economists call "price discrimination", which is something most people are familiar with. It goes like this: a company in a really "competitive" market will have to charge the same price to everyone. If they could charge more to people who want the good more and less to people who want it less, they would do so. That's why you have different prices for airline tickets, movie tickets, food coupons, etc. Same thing with books. They come out with the hardback maybe a year before the paperback. People who really want the book will buy it in hardback, sometimes convincing themselves that they're paying for the binding ($15?!). Others will wait for the paperback. So it makes sense that they charge about the same for a newer book (hardback) than an older book (paperback), though I agree there should be some discout, since distribution costs are roughly the same and the cost of production is almost entirely shifted to the consumer (who has to buy the electronic thingie in the first place).
  • Distribution and rights are the problem.

    A major issue with publishing online is how you encourage authors to write stuff worth reading. Book sales are tiny compared to, say, TV audiences or magazine sales; a midlist novel sells maybe 20-50,000 copies in the US. To make a living off this -- at the production rate of one or two books a year -- means the author really needs to see about US $0.3 to $1 per copy sold. If the author doesn't see that, they'll probably starve -- being a novelist isn't something you can do as a day job on a salary while creating cool stuff at night, the way much open-source software is effectively produced. The vast majority of full-time authors are already pretty pathetically paid compared to, say, a very junior sysadmin: I'm wondering what percentage cut of these e-books' cover price is going to the people who did the hard work of creating it? (Knowing the way new media companies work it's probably less than the usual 7.5-12.5%, when it should probably be a whole lot more.)

    I'm not convinced anyone has yet come up with a sensible business model for selling novels on non-paper media; this may be a stab in the right direction, but in an age where the cost of copying information tends towards zero, authors are getting worried about how they're going to make a living.

    (In the end it may not be possible for someone to earn a living as a novelist. I think we'll all be the poorer for it if that's where we end up, though.)

  • But that's the same thing that makes it so odd. The publisher negotiates with the author for a certain amount per book text (or whatever they negotiate), regardless of distribution method. The costs for distribution and production of an electronic book are lower (since there's no middle man and a small cost of distribution), yet the book costs the same amount. Your argument is a good answer to "Why do books cost money" but not one for "Why do electronic books cost more than paper ones". There's probably more profit in each electronic book sold, but I doubt the author sees it. Or maybe they do. Anybody know?
  • I wonder if it will run linux.

    Can you make a Beowulf out of them?

    -awc
  • The rocket book is by far the most comfortable way to read electronic text the size,sreen,and backlight are perfect. The rotating display even makes it more comfortable that paperbacks when reading reclined. Do you realy think that $350 is expensive for comfortable way to read all Project Guttenburg Texts, Not to mention All the books that have been published free in HTML.

    I agree the NuvoMedia's Rocket-edition format sucks and will probably never catch on. Even though the rocket book was just a means of promoting this format it is still a great design and realy works.

    I read with it alot and have only purchased one rocket edition.
  • Yep, and you can get content for Rocket eBooks at RocketLibrary.com [rocket-library.com]. And if you don't have a Rocket yet, you can try out a virtual one on the Rocket-ebook.com site [rocket-ebook.com]. They've got loads of "skins" that you can apply to the eRocket, and you can even creat one and upload it to the site. Funn stuf.
  • it's true. Here are a few pages about it:

    info about E-ink, Corporation [ebooknet.com]

    RCFoC story on e-ink [ebooknet.com]

    CNN story on e-ink [cnn.com]

    an expert discusses e-ink [ebooknet.com]

    Xerox e-paper [ebooknet.com]

    Polymer-based LEDs [ebooknet.com]

    Kent State's new cholesteric liquid crystal display [ebooknet.com]


    a very hexy plastic polymer display [ebooknet.com]


    You can find more info about e-ink, e-paper and ebooks at eBookNet.com. use the search button...

  • I have already read several, and I have only had it for 3 weeks. Where do I get the time? In places where I didn't have it before! In places where I can't carry several books around with me.

    Screen - Everyone says is is much much better on the Palm V. I have to agree. I have no problem with it. I can read off it for hours.

    Batteries - They are now rechargeable.

    Software - I am using a program called CSpotRun (freeware) that is fine for the task. It even lets me rotate the text. (It's great rotated 90 ccw, I hold it very comforatably)

  • That's the beauty of NuvoMedia's Rocket eBook. you can rotate the display to 4 different orientations. Perfect for switching hands, reading wide or tall stuff. If you ain't readin' on a Rocket eBook, you ain't readin'.

  • I had trouble reading long texts on my old Palm 5000, but after I got a Palm V -- well, the display is hell-and-gone better. It's really not much different than reading a small-type paperback.

    I find it near perfect for the train -- its small size works well in crowds and easy to find my place again when moving between trains and buses and whatnot. In addition to carrying a book around I suck down the NY Times front page with AvantGo (*way* more convenient than a full-size newspaper on the train!).

    I would be happier if the display were larger but that's mostly a matter of how often I have to page it.

    This was quite a surprise, I thought it would give me headaches. Nope, works great.

    This is what convinced me that digital books will succeed. They just have to get the readers out there for cheap.
  • In steps Rocket eBook [rocket-ebook.com] which encrypts and protects each document by keying it to every individual e-reader. Even if you send a friend your file, their e-reader can display it because their e-reader has a different key...

    That's why many publishers are starting to back the Rocket eBook and why they have over 1200 titles [barnesandnoble.com] available already.

    And, you can check out a virtual Rocket eBook by downloading eRocket [rocket-ebook.com] and visiting RocketLibrary.com [rocket-library.com] which has nearly 1000 free titles.

    And while you're playing with your eRocket, try applying the built-in "skins" and get some new skins here [rocket-ebook.com].

    You can even create a skin and upload it to the NuvoMedia site!

  • I have a couple of problems with the RocketBook (and all of the other dedicated eBooks).

    1) It's way way too expensive for what little it does. For me to consider buying a dedicated digital reader it needs to be under $100 -- and preferably WAY under. That pretty much means that they'll have to be subsidized by the publishers.

    2) I can't build up a personal library very easily. With the Pilot I can save 'em on my PC and pick and choose what I want on demand.

    3) What happens when I lose the #$@^ thing? Are all my books lost too? This was a primary concern with the Pilot texts too, but they're not locked to the hardware in any way as are some of the other readers (not sure about the RocketBook).

    4) Not much text available. It's getting better, I know, but damn -- $500 is a lot to spend for a pretty limited book selection.

    What I like is the big screen. It's a much better form-factor than the Pilot.

    eBooks will be a big thing, but the economics and text availability has to be worked on. If they're going to succeed with dedicated readers the publishers ought to sell them way below cost and make it up in the document sales (ie the cellphone model). That's the only way to ramp up the volume of the devices fast.

    I don't expect this to happen any time soon; I think it much more likely that we'll see palmtop computers develop the market to the point where publishers are willing to subsidize dedicated readers.

    Unfortunately most or all of the current eBook companies will be dead by then.

    Keep in mind: I have tried eBooks on my Palm and am a huge fan of the idea. Even so I'm not willing to spend $500 on a single-function device when I can get the feature on a $200 device (albeit with a smaller screen) that does a lot of other things too.
  • One word: headache.

    That's what you get from reading huge books on computer screens. Especially green ones with black print.

    Horrible idea, at least until they start making lightweight (less than half a pound), book-sized Star Trek PADDs with refresh rates of at least 1Mhz. :)
  • Actually I have found curling up in bed while reading on a palm to be more enjoyable than with a book. With a book it was always uncomfortable because I like to read lying down on my side and holding open a book with one hand isn't fun. With the palm I just set tealdoc on to autoscroll or just click down thru the pages. Even for my eyes the screen is easy to read for extended periods of time. But maybe it's just because I've looked at computer monitors my entire life. :-)
  • I'm now reading Plato's republic - dunno how long that is on paper, but it sure is dull ;-/

    For what it's worth, only the English translations of Plato are dull. The original Greek is very easy-going and colloquial, with a real sense of conversational flow, not all the stuffy rhetorical grandstanding you get in translation. The Symposium is hilarious! It's basically this huge bull session where a bunch of urbane dudes sit around talking about (homosexual) love and romance over dinner. Alcibiades shows up piss drunk and starts hitting on the host,etc. ;)

    I have to hand it to the older British scholars for really fucking up such a fun corpus of work. Just the fact that they didn't know how to kick back and have fun doesn't meant the Greeks couldn't.

    *Sigh* One of these days, when I vest the stocks from my awesome Linux start-up and become independently wealthy (yeah, right) I'll brush up on my Greek and do a real translation. ;)

    Beer recipe: free! #Source
    Cold pints: $2 #Product

  • Sorry for being nitpicky, but this is something that really bugs me.

    - books are copyrighted, not patented.
    - inventions are patented.
    - software is copyrighted, although the algorithms used may be patented.
    - names are trademarked, not copyrighted or patented.

    The laws for each of these are VERY different.

    /peter
  • sounds like a stupid idea..
    gimme a printed book any day.
  • I have over $2000 invested in my technical reference library, which consists of about 4 boxes of o'reilly and other books which are a pain to move around. When I'm logged in to work from home trying to fix some problem on the weekend, desperately attempting to avoid having to actually go to work to fix it, the last thing I want is to find out that the book I need is sitting on my shelf in the flourescent hell I'm told is called an office.

    It would be nice to have all of my books on digital media. I don't care if it's my Palm IIIx, or on CD (as long as I can use it on linux or freeBSD).

    But how many megs are each of my books? Would the entirely of the 2nd edition of the bat book even fit in the 4 megs in my palm pilot? Even if it would, I have dozens of books, many of which are very useful as references. I don't think I can put enough of them on one tiny Palm Pilot, at least until they come out with the 512Meg Palm LXIX.

    I don't want to give up my paper books. I'd be willing to spend a few dollars extra to have the digital media in addition to the hard copy, but I wouldn't pay more than half-price for a digital-only book. Even then, it would have to be a concise reference book for me to be interested in it.



  • I just read a Robert Silverberg book (from Peanut Press) on the Palm, and it was fine - as long as the light's good, it's fine. The print is about the same size as a magazine, which is what matters.

    Most importantly, the book weighed nothing - in future I think I'll just download a few novels before I go on a trip, and cut the weight of my bag immensely!

    Reading websites (via Avantgo.com) is also great for short Tube (metro) journeys in London, where in the rush hour you can be crammed in so tight there's no room to read a newspaper - here, the small size is an advantage.

    My only concern is that there needs to be standards that are adopted by everyone - sounds like the eBook standard may help, but I don't know much about this.
  • I like the idea of e-books... carrying around 20 of my O'Reilly books in one small, lightweight device is appealing. Trying to read them on a small Palm screen... is not. I wouldn't have any problem with Softbook/Rocketbook/whatever only having one function -- book display -- as long as it does it well and becomes much cheaper. Four hundred dollars for an e-book is ridiculous. I'll consider buying one as soon as they break the $200 price barrier with no strings attached. The stuff the Palm pilot does is great, but I have no use for it, and do not wish to see an e-book attempt to reproduce that functionality. Palm's need to be small as possible without losing their functionality. E-books need to stay as big as a standard book, or they become a chore to read. -WW
    --
    Why are there so many Unix-using Star Trek fans?
    When was the last time Picard said, "Computer, bring
  • Well, the biggest e-book I've yet seen is A Fire Upon the Deep, at 821K. Which is about 2/5 the space of an unmodified Palm III. Most e-books seem to be from 200-500K, which means you could fit maybe 3 or 4 of them onto your Pilot, as well as various other utilities. I tend to have 1 or 2 at any given time, plus all the web journals and newspapers (SalonMag, New York Times, Wired News, Wall Street Journal summaries, etc.) that I pull down through AvantGo [avantgo.com]. And it's enough, really...how many books can you read at one time?

    The nice thing is that when they aren't on your Palm, you can store your e-books on your hard drive, back them up to zipdisks and other media, and so on. You don't have to have them on your Palm except when you want to read them...and when you do, it's just a matter of clearing the space, slapping it in the cradle, and hotsyncing it down--which takes maybe thirty to a couple minutes for even the biggest book.

    And there's also the fact that you can get 8-meg memory expansions for the III and IIIx (but not the IIIe, sadly for me who bought one). Which means you could store even more on them...
  • Right now, you might want to look at a sub-notebook with a built-in hard disk, or one of those tiny palmtops with hard disk. Although if your books fit on a Compact Flash card (say 32 or 64MB, not sure how big these are now) you might want to look at a Psion Series 5 or a WinCE machine. Palms don't support add-in Flash memory.

    O'Reilly already do some CDs with 6 or so books on them, have a look at their website. Not sure of the format but I'd guess it's work on *nix since they are very supportive of open source etc.
  • I don't care how they think they're making it secure, if a PalmPilot can read it, so can a PalmPilot emulator. From there, you can either hack the emulator to get the text or do screen grabs and text recognition on perfectly accurate, identical characters. Assuming, of course, that you don't just crack the encryption and decode directly to plain text.

    I don't think non-profit illegal book copying has been a big problem in the past, but it will be now. IMHO, the reason people aren't passing out many illegally copied books over the internet is that it takes so much time and effort to scan in the pages, do text recognition, and correct the errors, and also how convenient it is to just lend books you've bought (I mean, if you can share it with your friends already, who would bother scanning it?).

    It's a recipe for disaster (or at least minor to moderate profit reductions) for the publishing companies, and not exactly great for the authors either.
  • I never liked the idea of electronic books as a replacement for printed ones.

    I don't either. There's something about the tangability of books that is appealing. I like the feel of them. I like flipping the pages. I like putting them on my shelves and occasionally scanning over my favorites thinking "what do I feel like reading tonight?" And I like having them on display - and, consequently, its interesting to see what other people have on their shelves. You can't do this with electronic files.

    Having said that... I'm all for electronic books. I wouldn't mind spending a nominal fee for the service of having select tittles converted to electronic form. Maybe I want the ability to electronically search a reference. Or maybe its great to have my favorite novel tucked away in my PDA for those unexpected times I need to kill a bit of time.

    But the electronic version would not be a replacement for the paper. I would still want that copy on my bookshelf.

  • But if I am going to read a 700 page novel, I think doing so on a Palm-sized screen would rapidly turn me insane.

    This hasn't been my experience. I've read numerous amature stories, as well as some full scale books on my trusty well-abused Palm Pro. At first, I thought it was a great novelty to be reading books in this fashion. Then, with some shock once I realised it, I no longer conciously thought about reading on a PalmPilot. I was absorbed into the text as if I were holding a conventional paperback. The text size and quality didn't bother me at all. The backlight was a major plus since I tend to read in bed while my wife has gone to sleep and it negated the need for a nightstand light.

    Of course, your tastes may differ.

    Having said all that... I still like books. I definately would not seek out electronic copies of texts over their paper counterparts. However, I would pay a nominal fee for the service of converting my favorite texts into a handy electronic form.

  • thats why mr. taco makes available the code, no? see the page about it perhaps. [slashdot.org]
    while the site in question doesnt use slash, copying the format is more of an acknowledgment of its merits than a rip off.
  • I''ve read complete novels (freely available classics) on both my PC and Pilot. I really don't see what the problem is. Most of us spend hours each day reading text on computers with zero ill effects. Why do you think reading novels is anything different?
  • thanks, I always wonderd the difference between them, and "man trademark" gave me the error "No manual entry for trademark":)
  • What a /. rip-off! If they were worth anything, andover.net would have to set their lawyers loose. hehe

  • What is strikingly similar to this is the PADD device on star trek (Personal Access Display Device). Those things are basically cheap and readily avaible as well in their world. I would never justify spending $500+ on anything just to avoid buying even the most expensive of hard cover books (maybe $300 at the most) until the cost of palm pilots comes down or the readers are cheaper I will not really care.

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