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#46 | |
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It is the combination of the pixel density and the size of the screen that defines my "perfect form factor", too. All technologies, both eInk and variations on the LCD/LED theme, with the notable exception of new retina displays on iPhones/iTouches (and I haven't seen those in bigger form factor), have a room for improvement. Once the pixel density hits 300dpi, the target is a device big enough to cope with A4/letter sized PDF's. And that's ideal form factor for my reader. I am ready to sacrifice mobility over the (needed) functionality, and I don't see letter-sized PDF's disappearing as a target media for tech specs any time soon. |
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#47 | ||||
New York Editor
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Device: PalmTX, Pocket eDGe, Alcatel Fierce 4, RCA Viking Pro 10, Nexus 7
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![]() My first PDA was a Handspring Visor Deluxe, courtesy of a then employer who decided all IT staffers should have PDAs. It was a mono unit with a 160x160 screen, and a whopping 8MB of RAM. I went looking for things I could do with it that would help me in my work, and one discovery was Plucker, an open source offline HTML viewer for Palm OS. Most of the documentation for the systems I dealt with was in HTML form, so I could convert for the PDA and carry a documentation library in my pocket. I got an expansion card adapter for additional storage and off I went. I didn't think I'd appreciate fiction on the device, but it turned out I did. The Deluxe got replaced by a Visor Pro, that got replaced by a Tungsten E, and that got replaced by a Tapwave Zodiac 2, which I still use. One of the reasons for the Zodiac was the larger screen, as I did things like work with spreadsheets that needed the additional real estate. Palm devices had ports of MobiPocket and eReader, plus an excellent open source PDF viewer, and I had viewers for Word docs and RTF files as well as plain text, so there isn't a lot (save ePub) I can't read on the PDA. (And ePub can be converted to Mobi via Calibre.) The biggest recent win has been FBReader, an open source, cross platform ebook viewer device. FBReader reads Plucker files (as well as ePub, Mobi, and various other things), so my collection of Plucker files is readable on a Linux system (and promptly got transferred to the old notebook I put Linux on.) I need support for color, and the ability to do other things besides view ebooks, so a dedicated reader doesn't work for me. I'm not one of the folks who has problems reading on and LCD screen, and the longer battery life is a non-issue: I've gotten into the habit of topping of my cell phone and PDA nightly. Adding another device to the list isn't a problem, and chargers for them live in a travel case with other electronic gear. Quote:
Current generations of netbooks have the screen, but what I want is Linux and a solid state drive. The stuff in the form factor I like all seems to have WinXP/7 and a 160GB HD. I don't need the drive capacity, as there isn't all that much that would live on the device. Quote:
You might drop a note to the folks who produced the collection mentioning that there's a whole new market of folks using devices that don't run Windows, and an Android port of their software might be a good idea. Quote:
Something like a 10" tablet with a touch screen and a folding BT keyboard might be just the ticket. ______ Dennis |
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#48 | |
New York Editor
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Device: PalmTX, Pocket eDGe, Alcatel Fierce 4, RCA Viking Pro 10, Nexus 7
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Mobility is a variable. While my PDA can be carried in a pocket, it's at the high end of pocket sized, and I usually don't. I normally carry a shoulder bag it lives in, and the bag could just as well accommodate a tablet. The critical factor would be weight, not size. ______ Dennis |
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#49 |
Banned
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I am not unhappy with my current readers form factor and use any number of mine every day. Still I'm disappointed with the failure of the industry to provide an device large enough to read books which absolutely have to have a 11" or larger screen or the device becomes an impediment to the purpose of the book itself so all you think about is trying to manage the device not absorbing the content. I don't care if it is a gray scale display as long is it's giving me the size to shot images inline w/o needing to zoom or any of that other annoying crap the current devices consider acceptable. I know that is a big polarized but it's how I see my individual needs long term or if I am to say invested in the ebook market. I just see no reason to keep buying expensive devices and paying top dollar for ebooks when I can buy used or remaindered versions of the same books for pennies on the dollar. For that I can read them and give them away like I always have, I only keep my reference books. So unless the device makers start making these things worth my investment I, and I suspect more than a few others, will just return to print books, it is that simple.
More to my point, I know the arguments pro and con, but we are talking about what makes an acceptable device here and for me that is a small reader as well as a large screen device which I would prefer be color but can live with gray scale. |
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#50 | ||||
Grand Sorcerer
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Location: Krewerd
Device: Pocketbook Inkpad 4 Color; Samsung Galaxy Tab S6
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#51 | |
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Ebooks and pbooks are totally different, but there's just got to be some digital mechanism that can model the used and overstocked book market. You can buy used and overstocks for low prices right down to literally one cent (plus $3.99 shipping) at Amazon, not to mention the local flea markets. Something must fill in this gap. |
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#52 | |||
New York Editor
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Mobi for Palm OS has a quirk or two, like losing track of what category a book has been placed in, but for the most part it works well enough. Quote:
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Most of the Android devices do assume connectivity, via wifi or 3G, but how usable they'll be without it will be a matter of software. I've no idea if an Android device will fit you. I'm reasonably sure it will fit me because I have some idea of what's available for Linux, and with the flood of Android based devices coming out, if it hasn't been ported yet, it likely will be soon enough. ______ Dennis |
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#53 | |
New York Editor
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Don't hold your breath. First, someone has to see a way to make money on it. Second, there are pesky rights and permissions issues. Who owns the rights to the book? Who has authorization to issue an electronic edition such as you imagine? The publisher may not. When a publisher allows a book to go out of print, the author can ask that the rights revert, and most do. ______ Dennis |
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#54 | ||
Grand Sorcerer
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Location: SF Bay Area, California, USA
Device: Pocketbook Touch HD3 (Past: Kobo Mini, PEZ, PRS-505, Clié)
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They can remove the "resell" option from the legal realm; they can't remove the ability to hand it off. (They're trying really hard with DRM.) What they're managing is to keep word-of-mouth promotions of ebooks down to furtive, backroom conversations while killing real publicity, because "I love this author--you should fork over $10 and find out if you like him too" has never been how books got a foothold into a new audience. For ebook publications to thrive in the future, instead of remaining a weird crossover of "geek hobby" and "luxury entertainment," they need a parallel to the used pbook market. I don't know how it can work; I just know it needs to show up, or ebooks will remain as they are now--great for people who can afford to pay full price for every book they read, great for people able to scrounge the internet for rec lists of obscure titles or links to unauthorized copies, but useless for students, the poor, people in hospitals, and other large categories of people who support the joy of books without buying new copies. |
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#55 | |||||
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There are nascent lending programs for ebooks, such as the one implemented by Barnes and Noble on the nook - you can lend a purchased ebook to another nook owner for two weeks. The significant part is that while it's on loan, you don't have it. This is one major stumbling block to used ebooks. If I sell you, or give you, a printed book I own, I no longer have it. How do you enforce that with ebooks? Quote:
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______ Dennis |
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#56 | ||||||
Grand Sorcerer
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Same way ebooks are sold now. "Here's my server; pay me and you get access to the download options."
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The market segment for used books is nonexistent, from the publishers' perspectives. They can't see it; it makes them no direct money, so they're pretending it doesn't exist and doesn't matter to ebook sales. They believe they've found a way to make money without the "leakage" of used books. They have no idea how many of their customers are also used book buyers, and that removing used books from the equation removes new book buyers as well. Refusing to offer cheap, non-DRM'd music for years worked so well for the music industry; I'm sure the same tactics will be equally successful for book publishers. |
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#57 | |
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Here's one possible model. There are no used book sales since used books are indistinguishable from new books and the supply of new books is limited only by website bandwidth. Therefore ebooks end up with a lower price, almost an average of new and old. Of course sellers won't do this out of the kindness of their hearts, but if they have wiped out an entire market, they have to do something to recapture those sales. Lowering the price would be a logical way to do that. As with all sales in a free market, the price will gravitate to the prices that generates maximum profit, which will probably be below current prices. Another model would be that after a few months or years of sales at a high price with DRM, the books are sold with no DRM at a greatly reduced price. The lack of DRM opens up the market to people that passionately hate it or have technical problems, and the lower price reduces the incentive to steal. |
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#58 | |
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That's an interesting possibility which I hadn't thought of. And, yes, I agree that is a technical problem which could be solved. I hate it, but it might transpire. |
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#59 | ||||||||
New York Editor
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Just waving your hand and saying "It's tech issue" doesn't magically make it solvable. Some tech issues aren't. Quote:
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Printed books are analog. Music CDs and movie DVDs are digital. Once it's digital, the genie is out of the bottle. Until it is, well, they don't call things bottlenecks for no reason. Quote:
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eBooks are perhaps 10% - 12% of the current US book market. What percentage of ebook readers do you think are aware of torrent sites and pirate editions? (Especially people coming to ebooks via things like the Kindle and Amazon, where the Kindle is seen as an appropriate, easy to use device for Grandma who hasn't gotten this whole computer thing down yet.) If you think it's a majority of current ebook readers, I'll be doubtful. Now extend it to the roughly 90% of the market that hasn't yet adopted electronic literature and tell me how many of them you think have that awareness? If you specify any large amount, expect me to laugh at your foolishness. Don't assume you are representative of the market, or that what you know is known by others. By definition, people who hang out in places like MR are early adopters, with more knowledge than the rest of the market. We wanted to learn more, which is how we wound up here to begin with. Quote:
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You can make a good case that used book sales spur new book sales, by introducing people to things they might not otherwise have tried, simply because they can try it cheap, but there is no way to measure what percentage of those trials result in new book sales down the road. I'm certainly going to be reluctant to make business decisions based on stuff I can't measure. Quote:
Until you can, it's wishful thinking. You may be right, but you haven't proved it. ______ Dennis |
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#60 | ||
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Are you a tech? Or a wizard? Techs use science. Wizards use magic.
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You can't solve it. OK. Maybe I can't either. Could you have come up with the current adept scheme? |
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