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Originally Posted by BreezyDay
Thanks for your thoughts on it. As an author, I was curious. Haven't ventured into the ebook realm as a reader yet, just as an author. Although probably heading there before too too long. Haven't had a chance to research the different options very well yet. Lots of players getting in on the action. Got an email from my cable company about buying a reader from them!
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Your
cable company? Curious. Which were they offering? I'm not offhand certain what would be in it for them, beyond a cut of the sale, unless they have plans down the road to make content for them available, too.
Meanwhile, there are lots of options, and we're all waiting for the dust to settle a bit. The questions to ask are similar to the earlier days of personal computers, where the answer to "What should I buy", began with "What do you plan to do with it?". It all came down to what software was available to do what you wanted to do, and the software you needed would partly determine what you had to buy to run it.
Something similar applies to ebooks, as there are three dominant ebook formats are an assortment of lesser ones, and different readers display different formats. The question becomes what do you want to read, what form is it available in, where do you get it, and what do you need to display it.
Amazon's Kindle, for example, uses the format designed by French ebook publisher Mobipocket, who Amazon bought. Mobipocket works for most books, and Amazon has an enormous selection. But Amazon uses a proprietary form of Digital Rights Management. The intent is vendor lock-in: if you have a Kindle, or Kindle app for other platforms like the iPad, you have to purchase ebooks from Amazon. If the book is not protected by DRM, the Kindle can display any Mobi format title, but anything you might be likely to
buy will have DRM.
The Sony Reader and Barnes and Noble nook use ePub as the format. There will probably be DRM there, too, but you'll be less restricted in where to buy it, as both license Adobe's software for display. The questions become the availability of what you want to read and the price charged.
There is a fair bit of stuff in PDF format, such as textbooks. These can be problematic for handhelds because the PDFs are not usually created so the viewer can reflow the text to fit the screen size on a handheld device. In many cases, the material is such that if it
did reflow, it would make hash of the content. Amazon wants to get into the education market, and created the Kindle DX with a larger screen size and PDF display capability precisely for that case.
And the most popular dedicated readers, like the Kindle, Sony, and nook models, all use an eInk screen. eInk is considered easier on the eyes by may users, and has much longer battery life than backlit displays, since once a page is displayed on an eInk screen, no power is required to maintain it. But eInk is gray-scale only. It does not support color. So if color is a requirement in your content, eInk is not for you.
You're in the right place to do the research. Whatever might be used to display an ebook, someone on MR uses it and can give you chapter and verse on its strengths and weaknesses.
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Print is really getting scarcer and scarcer. In scheduling my team for some training recently, the trainer mentioned that they now provide ekits instead of printed training manuals. We're curious to see how that'll work since folks are used taking notes on the pages of the manuals during a course to keep them together with the page the note refers to. Hmmm. I guess we'll see how it goes. I wonder if the ekits allow you to add electronic sticky notes to the pages. That would be nice. Gotta ask the next time I speak with them.
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What sort of training, and what form to the ekits take? What must you use to read them?
One feature appearing in ebook readers is a note taking ability. This is critical for things like text books, and one of the things that can make a used textbook valuable is someone else's marginal notes and emphases on what the particular teacher of that class thinks important and is likely to test on.
I don't expect to see a resale market for used ebooks, for a variety of reasons, but one of the things Amazon was trumpeting about the Kindle DX was a collaborative facility where students could share notes via Amazon's network.
Depending upon what your team will wind up using, similar approaches might be possible.
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Dennis