MobileReader Paul Biba gets mentioning in NYTimes

[Alexander Turcic]

The New York Times devoted a full article on where we are today with e-books, and lo and behold, MobileRead regular and Palm Addicts Associate Writer Paul Biba had the honor to make the introduction.

When Paul Biba, a lawyer in Bernardsville, N.J., finds himself stuck waiting, he likes to pull out his Nokia E61i cellphone and read one of the 20 or so books he usually stores on it.

The virtual bookshelf in his pocket currently has science fiction like "Falling Free" by Lois McMaster Bujold, all of the novels of Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens, "Eminent Victorians" by Lytton Strachey and the September issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

"Once you get use to having books with you, you get use to reading in places where it never occurred to you. If I'm waiting in line at the supermarket counter, why not read one of my science fiction magazines?" he said. "Believe it or not, I'll sit down in my chair at home, pull out my phone and read a book."

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The article also mentions the Sony Reader, IDPF, e-book sales forecasts, various e-book vendors, and the Plucker viewer.

[via TeleRead]

[TadW]

Congrats, Paul!

[radleyp]

Yes, I read the Times every day and was delighted to see straight away a name I recognize. It also pleased me to see that, like me, Paul reads books on his smartphone. Lest people think we are crazy when they consider the screen size, the MotorolaQ screen is exactly the width of a typical Times column, so it's really not so bad.

[BooksForABuck]

The 'eBooks are dead' articles are finally starting to fade. I agree that phone and PDA screens take a bit of getting used to, but once I got used to them, I found I can actually read faster. My brain can grab the whole screen in a chunk, sort of like the old Evelyn Wood speed reading.

I did wonder about what it said about using the numeric keys on the phone, though. My phone is pretty basic (a Samsung m510) but I do have keys that let me page through jpegs (which is the only way I've figured how to read eBooks on my not-so-smart phone). I'd think a smart phone would have page-turning keys too. Surely Palm phones have the little next button like Palm PDAs.

Rob Preece
Publisher, www.BooksForABuck.com

[radleyp]

You just use the 5-way up (and down) button to navigate (the left-right does the same thing, BTW), and you can scroll in programs that allow it (such as ereader). My wife and daughter think I'm nuts, but in the past few months I have read entire books with ease (Lord Jim, Atonement, Genghis Khan, Dexter, Gettings Things Done,...). But I do have one worry: will this affect my eyes, although at my age (72) I suppose it doesn't make much difference. Incidentally, I wonder how navigation will set up when ereader, for example, comes to the iphone as it has no hardware buttons.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by radleyp

Yes, I read the Times every day and was delighted to see straight away a name I recognize. It also pleased me to see that, like me, Paul reads books on his smartphone. Lest people think we are crazy when they consider the screen size, the MotorolaQ screen is exactly the width of a typical Times column, so it's really not so bad.

As a matter of fact, as a PDA e-book reader I confess to looking at a smartphone reader like yourself and thinking, "How can they possibly--?". Like so many things, you can get used to it if you just decide you want to. And in fact, I think that pointing out the similarity in width to a NYT column goes a long way towards making people (like me!) understand that it's not that different reading on a smartphone... so thanks for the image!