Another "I want" thread

[MachinegunDojo]

I feel bad I couldn't find anything... relating to me at least; in searching the forum today. But all I see if features features features, all I want is an eBook reader. I've never read a book in electronic form, I always liked the paper. But this ePaper seems rather nice and frankly the only real reason I want one is becuase I only like reading one side of the book if you know what I mean. There is always that one side that is just difficult to read on becuase of the bend in the book. I prefer to read one handedly and I move around ALOT becuase I am never comfortable in one position for more than a couple minutes.

So as for the reader, I have a budget if possible. $100USD preferable but can manage upwards of $200. I figured you guys could at least steer me in the right direction.

The eBook reader that caught my eye is the Amazon Kindle, but it has features I'd never use. Pretty much all I want is a 6" ePaper screen, an SD Card slot and a battery. I figure a back and forward button might be useful as well

I am not sure about the Palm Pilots, I know they wouldn't have the ePaper screen but perhaps they can serve the function as well? I have a smart phone, the t-Mobile Dash and it's cool, but when it comes to readings the PDF's I can only zoom in and out of the page as a whole so I am having to always use the arrow keys to move left and right to read each line and I read rather quickly and the phone can't keep up. I did some searching to see if I could enlarge only the text, but alas came up with nothing. Otherwise it'd be good enough for me.

So any suggestions? Oh and I love the site, might be my new home I promise better questions as I get used to it all.

[Nate the great]

There are two devices in your price range: the Ebookwise 1150 and the Sony PRS500.The 1150 is just over $100 and can be ordered from www.ebookwise.com. The PRS500 can be found on Ebay for around $200.

I recommend the Sony because the battery life is measured in weeks, and because it is cheaper to add expansion cards.

But if you want a backlit screen, then you should consider the Ebookwise.

[MachinegunDojo]

I might wait a month or two so if I could reach towards $300, seeing that the PRS500 is $250 new(I am not fond of eBay) is there another recommendation?

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

There are two devices in your price range: the Ebookwise 1150 and the Sony PRS500.The 1150 is just over $100 and can be ordered from www.ebookwise.com. The PRS500 can be found on Ebay for around $200.

I recommend the Sony because the battery life is measured in weeks, and because it is cheaper to add expansion cards.

But if you want a backlit screen, then you should consider the Ebookwise.

these are the choices as Nate mentioned. Palm screen is ok but pretty small as an eBook reader. The Sony has the advantage of attempting to read PDF but no eBook reader in your price range (or even close) does a very good job of reading PDF when it is sized for Letter/A4 paper. Palm will attempt to resize the pages and will do better than most dedicated readers but still not particularly well. Was PDF just a passing interest or a real requirement?

Dale

[MachinegunDojo]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

these are the choices as Nate mentioned. Palm screen is ok but pretty small as an eBook reader. The Sony has the advantage of attempting to read PDF but no eBook reader in your price range (or even close) does a very good job of reading PDF when it is sized for Letter/A4 paper. Palm will attempt to resize the pages and will do better than most dedicated readers but still not particularly well. Was PDF just a passing interest or a real requirement?

Dale

I'm not really sure what format books are usually in, the biggest thing I'd have against eBooks is that so far it would seem that some books are in one format while others are in a variety of other formats.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by MachinegunDojo

I'm not really sure what format books are usually in, the biggest thing I'd have against eBooks is that so far it would seem that some books are in one format while others are in a variety of other formats.

That is certainly a argument for PDA's since they can load software and almost all formats are covered by a PDA application (Only Sony and Amazon are not). However, as time goes on multi-format eBooks are becoming a reality. You buy the book and download whatever format you want. The most popular formats are already that way (except for DRM'd files in Sony and Amazon).

Dale

[MachinegunDojo]

As I read more on these forums and the wiki I have more questions, naturally. I guess some new things on my mind are best in a list.

I want to get eBooks that are high quality, if I am paying good money for something I don't want spelling errors or grammatical mistakes. I found a PDF of a book I was reading and tried finishing it in the PDF format on my phone after converting it from PDF to HTML and then to Word format. I noticed that on a couple occasions the text was way off the original. Checking the PDF I knew it wasn't from the conversion process I did but from something else. So with this I am worried that eBooks I pay for are likely to have mistakes like this or worse, someone could alter the eBook themselves and change it up a bit.

I'd like to buy from one store, I am unsure if Amazon or this Sony store I've heard of would have the same eBooks or how it works. Going with the last point I made I would assume that stores like these would have at least a lesser amount of errors by mistake or purposely.

One other thing came to mind just now, and that is censorship. Would stores censor titles?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by MachinegunDojo

I might wait a month or two so if I could reach towards $300, seeing that the PRS500 is $250 new(I am not fond of eBay) is there another recommendation?

Wel, if you can reach $300, then you can get a PRS-505 which has the new Vizplex screen and should be having epub support we think by the end of February.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Wel, if you can reach $300, then you can get a PRS-505 which has the new Vizplex screen and should be having epub support we think by the end of February.

What did you hear about ePub support and who is we? At the CES they showed tagged PDF support but I heard nothing about ePUB.

Dale

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by MachinegunDojo

As I read more on these forums and the wiki I have more questions, naturally. I guess some new things on my mind are best in a list.

I want to get eBooks that are high quality, if I am paying good money for something I don't want spelling errors or grammatical mistakes. I found a PDF of a book I was reading and tried finishing it in the PDF format on my phone after converting it from PDF to HTML and then to Word format. I noticed that on a couple occasions the text was way off the original. Checking the PDF I knew it wasn't from the conversion process I did but from something else. So with this I am worried that eBooks I pay for are likely to have mistakes like this or worse, someone could alter the eBook themselves and change it up a bit.

I'd like to buy from one store, I am unsure if Amazon or this Sony store I've heard of would have the same eBooks or how it works. Going with the last point I made I would assume that stores like these would have at least a lesser amount of errors by mistake or purposely.

One other thing came to mind just now, and that is censorship. Would stores censor titles?

Yes, even eBooks you buy may have errors in them. Particularly if they are scanned from old paper books but publishers don't seem to give them the attention they deserve so new eBooks have some errors also I believe. Note that even paper books have errors. Older books are usually fairly cheap but they don't have the quality checks in them that I think they deserve.

Dale

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

What did you hear about ePub support and who is we? At the CES they showed tagged PDF support but I heard nothing about ePUB.

Dale

Well, I did think that the enhanced PDF support would be part of ePub support.

Think I may be wrong?

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by MachinegunDojo

I am not sure about the Palm Pilots, I know they wouldn't have the ePaper screen but perhaps they can serve the function as well?

I use a Palm OS PDA as an ebook reader.

In my case, it's a Tapwave Zodiac 2, which is a Palm OS 5.26 device with a 320x480 screen and "virtual" data input area. Ebooks are stored on my SD cards.

Most of my electronic library is in Plucker format. Plucker is a free, open source offline HTML viewer for Palm devices. I get HTML content from Project Gutenberg and elsewhere, and convert to Plucker on my desktop. Plucker handles text attributes, fonts (on Palm OS 5 devices), color, embedded images, and hyperlinks. I have the complete Baen Free Library offerings in Plucker format, all of the Linux HOW-TOs, and a large number of other books on a wide variety of topics. All told, about 3,200 volumes, occupying about 1.5GB of a 2GB card.

To cover other bases, I also have the freeware version of eReader, the freeware MobiPocket Reader for PalmOS, PalmPDF, a superb free and open source PDF viewer for Palm devices, and PalmFiction, a free, open source viewer from a Russian programmer that handles Palm doc files, zTXT files, ASCII text files, Zipped text files, and RTF and Word documents (which it renders as plain text.)

I can read pretty much anything on the Zodiac, though I get PDFs only if no other format exists. Most PDFs don't reflow well, and reading them on a PDA screen leaves a bit to be desired.

I use a PDA for ebooks because I need to do other things as well, and the PDA is Personal Information Manager, MP3 player, photo viewer, video player, games device, and pocket reference to everything as well as ebook viewer.

I wouldn't mind a larger screen, but a device that can do everything I do with the PDA and had a larger screen would also carry a much larger price tag.

If you don't mind poking around on places like eBay, a Palm OS unit might be a good choice in your price range.
______
Dennis

[MachinegunDojo]

How long of a life does that PDA get while reading books, I have been thinking of getting the Nokia N800 or whatever it was, which is said to have like 4hrs of life so if the PDA does about that much I might go for that Nokia due to it being a small computer and seems rather interesting. Amazon has one for $228 which seems great to me.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by MachinegunDojo

How long of a life does that PDA get while reading books, I have been thinking of getting the Nokia N800 or whatever it was, which is said to have like 4hrs of life so if the PDA does about that much I might go for that Nokia due to it being a small computer and seems rather interesting. Amazon has one for $228 which seems great to me.

Hard to say. I top my PDA off nightly. In an average day, I may see battery power drop to perhaps 70%. The big variable on battery life is screen brightness, and I keep mine set as low as I can comfortably read it. (About 10%, with backlight turned off entirely outdoors.)

Wifi eats power like crazy. If I plug in my Wifi card, I'll see power levels drop rapidly in the Zodiac. I suspect the same is true in the Nokia, and if you don't use Wifi much you'll see better than 4 hours of useful life before needing to recharge.

I've been lusting in the background after the Nokia 800. I don't need the keyboard of the 810. I do want two SD slots. The Zodiac has two SD slots, and that makes my setup possible.

The main reason I haven't gone for the Nokai yet is that PIM functionality isn't quite there. I need a device that can replace my Zodiac if I'm going to do it. One thing of great interest is Palm OS compatibility.

Access in Japan bought the former Palmsource operation that produced Palm OS. They were going to make a Linux based smartphone OS that would include PalmOS functionality. What they wound up doing was was encapsulating Palm OS "Garnet" as a virtual machine running on Linux. They recently released a beta of GVM as a free download for the Nokia tablets, and it runs on the 770, 800, and 810 devices. There are quirks: GVM apparently can't see SD cards on the Nokia, and can't run Palm OS apps that use external libraries. But the fact that it exists at all is a hopeful sign.

The big questions I'd have about the 800 as an ebook reader would be the formats it could read. FBREader is available for it, and that covers a lot of bases... (See http://www.fbreader.org/about.php)
______
Dennis

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by MachinegunDojo

I want to get eBooks that are high quality, if I am paying good money for something I don't want spelling errors or grammatical mistakes. I found a PDF of a book I was reading and tried finishing it in the PDF format on my phone after converting it from PDF to HTML and then to Word format. I noticed that on a couple occasions the text was way off the original. Checking the PDF I knew it wasn't from the conversion process I did but from something else. So with this I am worried that eBooks I pay for are likely to have mistakes like this or worse, someone could alter the eBook themselves and change it up a bit.

I'd like to buy from one store, I am unsure if Amazon or this Sony store I've heard of would have the same eBooks or how it works. Going with the last point I made I would assume that stores like these would have at least a lesser amount of errors by mistake or purposely.

One other thing came to mind just now, and that is censorship. Would stores censor titles?

Legally-bought eBooks are generally of reasonably high-quality - certainly on a par with paper books. Scanned eBooks which criminals illegally upload to the internet can (and often are) of extremely poor quality.

If you want the widest range of options, I'd suggest going for a device which can read MobiPocket format books, such as the CyBook Gen3. Although slightly more expensive (about $50 more) than the Sony, it has numerous advantages such as dictionary support, the ability to load any font you wish on the machine, and view any book in any font at any size (the Sony restricts you to only three font sizes and doesn't let you change the font). Plus there's the fact that there are dozens of different bookstores selling Mobi-format books, and real price competition between them. With the Sony, you're stuck with one store.

Censorship? Why on Earth would anyone "censor" an eBook? For what purpose?