Typical On the Fencer

[NatCh]

Oh, hey, don't make it all that eventually -- you never know when the next device will be announced, and there's no better place to find out than here.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Taylor514ce

Indeed. That was the purpose of this little web foray. I wanted to talk it out, get some other opinions, and make up my mind.

This is a well-run community, highly focused and helpful. I'm sure I'll be back... eventually.

There are many of us that now own eBookwise 1150 devices while we're waiting for the e-INK devices to settle down a bit. It is not a bad way to go. It is a great reading device and much cheaper.

Dale

[Kraken]

Taylor, I say wait your three years. Clearly, eReaders are not for you at this point.

I have no problem finding the books I want, though. 'Nuff said.

Concerning the price... They have to get cheaper, true, but I can't see a "market explosion" as with mp3 players to bring them down. Today's reading habits are what they are.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Kraken

Taylor, I say wait your three years. Clearly, eReaders are not for you at this point.

I have no problem finding the books I want, though. 'Nuff said.

For me, the question is not "are the books I'd like to buy in paper available as eBooks?" but "are there enough eBooks available to interest me?"

The answer, for my part, is an unambiguous "yes". The combination of classics from PG, low-cost SF/fantasy from Baen, and a smattering of commercial eBooks from other sources is enough to keep me going for a heck of a lot longer than I can realistically hope to live .

[Taylor514ce]

Originally Posted by Kraken

Taylor, I say wait your three years. Clearly, eReaders are not for you at this point.

The more I educate myself on the technology, the more excited I am. It seems that several new devices are just on the cusp, which is bound to change the market dynamics. I think within a year we'll see twice as many devices, new content providers, etc.

Don't you think the business market will drive the consumer market? Laptop PCs used to be a business-only special use machine. Mobile/Cell phones are another example. When enough businesses adopt a technology, they fund the development of consumer machines.

I think if a few devices geared for the business market (technical markup, bluetooth, external monitor/projector connectivity) appear it will have a trickle-down effect on the consumer market.

With the current dedicated reader consumer market, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. There isn't wide choice of cost-effective readers, so why produce content, and why develop an affordable reader for a market with limited commercial content? But add business use machines (businesses create their own content) and you'll create a class of users who have high-end devices that they'll take home and on business trips, and they'll want to do more with them than mark-up the latest batch of PDFs from Marketing.

[jazzist]

Reading with interest, may I ask what PG is?
Penguin?

I started investigating bookreaders on Friday and yesterday ordered a Cybook from NAEB. Will probably order a Mighty Bright CCFL as well..

Thanks for the informative posts on this site.

[igorsk]

PG=Project Gutenberg

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Taylor514ce

Ok, FictionWise:

William Gibson: yes, multiple titles
Patrick O'Brian: none
Stephen Baxter: yes, multiple titles
Simon Singh: one title... well, it's non-fiction on a site named FictionWise...
Orson Scott Card: limited titles
Tolkien: none
Neal Stephenson: yes
Ian M. Banks: none

You are at the mercy of the publishers. As far as I know, for instance, there are no authorized ebook editions of Tolkien.

It's possible to find all manner of stuff on the darknet, if you don't mind coping with someone's OCRed scan of a paper book. Personally, I can't be bothered. I have more stuff in electronic form than I have time to read now, without adding stuff that was an unauthorized conversion of a paper edition.

I'll add another perspective. I read a lot of ebooks, but my device isn't a dedicated reader: it's a Palm OS PDA. I need a device that does more than just read ebooks. Right now, I carry a call phone and a PDA. I won't carry a cell phone, a PDA, and a reader. And no "converged" combo cell phone/PDA works for me. The problem is form factor, and specifically screen size. A device small enough to be a useful cell phone has a screen too small for some of the other things I do.

My device happens to be an orphan. I have a Tapwave Zodiac 2. Tapwave went belly up in July 2005, but I'm not concerned -- I have a spare and a "parts" unit if something happens to it. Tapwave was trying to craft a device that was a handheld gaming platform as well as Palm OS PDA. It has a 200mhz ARM processor, 128MB of RAM, and ATI graphics chip with 2D acceleration and 8MB of on-board video memory, Yamaha stereo sound, and two SD card slots. One of the slots is SDIO, so I can use a Wifi SD card to go online. The Zodiac has a 320x480 screen with "virtual" DIA.

The biggest issue I have is that there isn't a standard ebook format that everyone supports. To cover all the bases, I maintain five readers, and must recall which content is in which format read by what reader.

I want to get content once, and read it on whatever I happen to have. My preference is to get content in HTML format, which I can read directly in a browser on desktop or laptop, and convert for Plucker, a free, open source, offline HTML viewer for Palm devices. I also have content in Mobipocket, eReader, PDF, and Word, RTF and ASCII text formats.

PDF is handled by the open source PalmPDF application, which views "native" PDF files on a card. Word, RTF, and ASCII text I read with an open source viewer called PalmFiction, which reads those files from a card. (Word and RTF are rendered as plain text.)

PDFs are problematic on any handheld. They usually don't reflow to fit the screen, and can be painful to read on smaller devices. If I have a choice, I get content in a different format. PalmPDF covers the cases where I don't have the choice.

I got into PDAs as ebook readers when my then employer decided all IT staffers should have PDAs, and presented me with a Handspring Visor Deluxe. It wasn't clear what I was supposed to do with it, so I went looking for software that would help me do my job as a sysadmin, and discovered I could get technical documentation in a form I could convert and read on my PDA, rather than carrying large heavy manuals. I didn't expect to appreciate reading fiction on the device, but discovered I could do that and like it too.

The Visor Deluxe was a low res device with a 160x160 mono screen supporting 4 shade grey scale. I went from the Deluxe to a Visor Pro (also 180x160 mono), to a Tungsten E (320x320 color) to my current Zodiac.

At this point, I have about 3,500 ebooks on my device, primarily in Plucker, but also in the other formats mentioned. Plucker, eReader, and Mobipocket support color, embedded images, text attributes, fonts, and hyperlinks, as well as search and things like dictionary lookups.

Because it's a Palm OS PDA, I also have PIM functions, and with the appropriate software, the device is an MP3 player, video player, photo viewer and games device, as well as serviceable word processor and spreadsheet viewer. I can go on line, too, and do email, but I seldom do the former as extant browsers leave somewhat to be desired, and don't want to do the latter on the PDA. Email can wait till I have desktop or laptop handy, thank you.

I wouldn't mind a larger device with a bigger screen. I've seen eInk, and it's lovely. But I need color, which is several years off in eInk at best, and I need multi-function. I can't justify the prices being charged for a device that is solely a book viewer.

If someone made a device in the Sony or Bookeen form factor that had color and supported all of the other things I currently do on my PDA, I'd happily jump, but no one does.
______
Dennis

[Taylor514ce]

Dennis,

I work in IT/Software, and everything I need to do professionally I can do with a combination of a laptop and a Blackberry. When I read for pleasure, I definitely don't want to do it on a computer or a blackberry (though I'm trying out MobiPocket on the blackberry).

That's why I'm interested in an eInk reader. My laptop is one of those huge, workstation-class 17" monsters, and the blackberry is just a bit too tiny. When I'm in a plane, hotel room, or airport lounge, I want a book-sized device to read a book, that's it.

I see two clear camps: those who want a dedicated reader, and those who want a multi-function device. I just can't see a multi-function device ever having a form factor that would make it attractive as a reader. I don't want to hold a book-sized thing up to the side of my head to make a phone call.

[Alisa]

Originally Posted by Taylor514ce

I see two clear camps: those who want a dedicated reader, and those who want a multi-function device. I just can't see a multi-function device ever having a form factor that would make it attractive as a reader. I don't want to hold a book-sized thing up to the side of my head to make a phone call.

I'm hoping some day we will have an e-ink (or equivalent) device with a larger, maybe faster, screen and more computer capabilities that would be great for reading technical/academic texts, making annotations, doing your PDA stuff: the "Info Pad" concept. I will definitely want one as will many business users and probably every student. I will also still want something the size of a paperback that I can curl up with in bed or toss in my handbag for recreational reading. In time the screen prices will get cheaper. Since that's the thing that keeps reading devices so expensive, when that happens it won't be a big deal to have more than one.

As it is, I love my Kindle for reading novels and such. I don't really view it as "multi-function" though many people look at the network features and assume that's what Amazon was going for. If you think of the Kindle that way, it's a flop. Web-surfing on e-ink is a pain. If you view it the way I do, as a reader that has some network functionality designed to improve your reading experience, then it's quite successful. It's a single function device IMO.

[Taylor514ce]

I should probably ask this in the Kindle forum, but I suppose it isn't inappropriate here: what is the shape of the Kindle? It's so hard to tell from photos. It seems very asymmetric, and in fact it looks like it may even be wider on the left side than on the right. Is it really wedge shaped? It also looks as if the keyboard section has had a slice taken out of the bottom left corner.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by Taylor514ce

I should probably ask this in the Kindle forum, but I suppose it isn't inappropriate here: what is the shape of the Kindle? It's so hard to tell from photos. It seems very asymmetric, and in fact it looks like it may even be wider on the left side than on the right. Is it really wedge shaped? It also looks as if the keyboard section has had a slice taken out of the bottom left corner.

Your eyes didn't deceive you. Your description is almost perfect. I know it's hard to believe, but made that shape on purpose.

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by Taylor514ce

I don't want to hold a book-sized thing up to the side of my head to make a phone call.

You've got me thinking now ... what about a book-sized thing that used a bluetooth earpiece and had a built in "garage" for storing and charging it? That might solve the problem.

Of course it would have to be an earpiece that was easy to pull out of the device and stick in your ear for quick answering ....

Maybe it could double as a stylus!

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

Your eyes didn't deceive you. Your description is almost perfect. I know it's hard to believe, but made that shape on purpose.

What was the purpose? ie, why was it made that shape rather than the usual rectangle?

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by HarryT

What was the purpose? ie, why was it made that shape rather than the usual rectangle?

I think it's suppose to mimic the shape of the right-hand half of an open book.