Is the ereader dead?

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by FizzyWater

Hmmm, I wonder if having 6 books on the reader means all those books are not able to be borrowed by others. Some ebooks expire based on number of borrows - seems a wasteful way to lend ebooks. It could be they have a special deal with Overdrive or something....I just wonder how that all works.

Perhaps via this licensing method?

http://blogs.overdrive.com/front-pag...e-marketplace/

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by GlenBarrington

As a pretty serious photographer, I know that nothing beats a printed photo using high quality color and lighting control. Calibrated screens are getting better, but I don't know of any tablets that can be calibrated. (which is what we are talking about), and if the 40 inch UHD display is not calibrated, it is no more accurate than a tablet.

Paper has the disadvantage of having a limited range of visible f-stops as compared to the new UHD displays with HDR. You are very hard pressed to fit the 22 f-stops on any kind of paper, whether printed or developed. For content consumption as entertainment having a calibrated display is less important. If a picture was created correctly on a calibrated screen, it will still look great on a screen that is a little bit off.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by macminer

Yes, I guess it is my specific needs that make me not the right customer for a dedicated ebook reader, as it stands today. I do use Calibre, but because I read a lot of academic books, preserving the original page layout is often crucial for me. Calibre might convert an epub into mobi or even a PDF into mobi, but retaining the original layout is often beyond its possibilities.

One thing I noticed with the recent version of Kindle for Android is the new way of displaying footnotes (a simple popup window with an [x] button) - I consider it a huge improvement over the previous mode.

My ideal e-book reader would have the following features:

• E-ink screen, 8" in the typical p-book proportions
• Open source or at least providing the option to sideload applications like Evernote
• Ability to use different formats, including PDF
• Page refresh fast enough to deal with complex formatting in the case of PDFs, so that I can easily zoom in and out

I guess with today's e-ink technology limitations, this is just not possible. I wonder how many other potential customers for ebook readers there would be if they weren't so clearly cut for the "average" fiction reader? Maybe there are still many niches unexplored and this could be a direction for future ereader development?

Anything is possible I would guess. The ereader technology is still fairly young in comparison to paper books which have been around at least since Gutenberg first printed his Bibles. We've just advanced from the clay tablet to the scroll, manuscript, paper book and finally to the electronic tablet. In a sense we are back where we started just with an improved version of an old media.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

E-Ink is not operable by the negative temperature.

I grant you that if it's too cold a person can't get good tactile contact with the screen because they likely have gloves on, but my impression was that the elderly gentleman that was referred to was in a shelter where he would be out of the direct wind and had a small portable heater as well.

[pwalker8]

I do the vast majority of my reading on an iPad. I do use a kindle paperwhite for camping trips. I'm not real fond of the eInk readers with touch screens. I definitely prefer buttons for those.

[GlenBarrington]

Originally Posted by Alpha o

The Treo was a cell phone put out by TMobile.

The Treo was produced by the Palm corp, TMobile may have sold it, but I can assure you Verizon sold a version as well. Very advanced for it's time. It did everything the first iPhone did, but 2 years earlier, though in all honesty, it did not do them as well as the iPhone.

[reznor]

Originally Posted by macminer

Yes, I guess it is my specific needs that make me not the right customer for a dedicated ebook reader, as it stands today. I do use Calibre, but because I read a lot of academic books, preserving the original page layout is often crucial for me. Calibre might convert an epub into mobi or even a PDF into mobi, but retaining the original layout is often beyond its possibilities.

One thing I noticed with the recent version of Kindle for Android is the new way of displaying footnotes (a simple popup window with an [x] button) - I consider it a huge improvement over the previous mode.

My ideal e-book reader would have the following features:

• E-ink screen, 8" in the typical p-book proportions
• Open source or at least providing the option to sideload applications like Evernote
• Ability to use different formats, including PDF
• Page refresh fast enough to deal with complex formatting in the case of PDFs, so that I can easily zoom in and out

I guess with today's e-ink technology limitations, this is just not possible. I wonder how many other potential customers for ebook readers there would be if they weren't so clearly cut for the "average" fiction reader? Maybe there are still many niches unexplored and this could be a direction for future ereader development?

yeah, i second that so much. The fact that ClearInk is (hopefully) developing a tech that will allow to read on-the-go academic paper (chart, figures, scheme etc...) is awesome (as long as not turns out as vaporware)

[macminer]

Originally Posted by GlenBarrington

The Treo was produced by the Palm corp, TMobile may have sold it, but I can assure you Verizon sold a version as well. Very advanced for it's time. It did everything the first iPhone did, but 2 years earlier, though in all honesty, it did not do them as well as the iPhone.

Very advanced. I still have the last product of that company - Palm TX. In good working order. Even the battery (still original) can hold charge for over two weeks.
And before that I also had a Treo (as well as Handspring's Visor)

[Conan46]

Originally Posted by macminer

Very advanced. I still have the last product of that company - Palm TX. In good working order. Even the battery (still original) can hold charge for over two weeks.
And before that I also had a Treo (as well as Handspring's Visor)

I found my Handspring Visor Deluxe in a drawer the other day, popped batteries into it and it still works well. Those things were impressive for their time. I read my first ebook on it.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by GlenBarrington

The Treo was produced by the Palm corp, TMobile may have sold it, but I can assure you Verizon sold a version as well.

As did Sprint and AT&T and probably just about every phone company in the world. (Sprint started with the Treo 300 in 2003.) They were huge. But it wasn't the iPhone that knocked them off their perch, it was Blackberry (which were also very nice phone/PDAs, aka smartphones). (Ironically, I don't see any entry for a T-Mobile specific Palm Treo?)

The Palm Treo Wiki ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Treo

I still play a golf game on my Sprint Treo 700p ("p" stood for Palm OS as Palm was also selling a Sprint Treo 700w, "w" for Windows by then). I used to read on the Treo. I also owned/own(?) a Sprint Treo 300 and a Palm Centro, and, at one time, a couple other Palm PDA/phones (one was the Samsung SPH-i1500, a small flip phone with Palm OS and Graffiti input (instead of a keyboard) complete with a telescoping stylus – I may still have one of those around also). Also a Kyocera QCP-6035, which felt like holding a brick (which I think I sold shortly after getting it). Except for the Palms, these were all bought cheaply on eBay, after the Palms began their descent – I think I did use the Samsung SPH-i1500 on Sprint for a while though.

Sorry to ramble.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Conan46

I found my Handspring Visor Deluxe in a drawer the other day, popped batteries into it and it still works well. Those things were impressive for their time. I read my first ebook on it.

My first ereader was a Franklin ebookman that I bought at ebay. Not sure where it is at the moment. They stopped supporting the os I think though. The newer mobi files wouldn't open on it. Probably would still work but it only ran for maybe 4 hrs before the batteries were drained.

[robilarocn]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

I don't see a future to e-readers, as the sales of e-books will continue to fall, because the book released in a digital format will be stolen by pirates in days.

By your logic the music industry should be long gone by now.

You might want to note that many authors now release books DRM Free. Why do you think they do this?

I'll give you a hint It's because book piracy is a great way to get an author's work distributed (especially a self published one). Do you think Andy Weir had an issue with people pirating The Martian?

Not to mention the digitial distribution model for books is vastly better than paper books. Plus its easy to convert paper books to digital for piracy. Hell, the Harry Potter books were pirated into digital almost immediately after publication. The irony is that Rowling refused to create digital books because she didn't want to lose revenue to pirates when days after each book was released there were V5 EPUB's everywhere on the net.

And yet her new releases have been released digitally in conjunction with paper copies.

Not to mention, there are literally millions of people that read digitally that would never have a clue how to strip DRM out of an ebook and convert it to a usable format; or go find pirate sites, download, convert etc.

Both my parents have moved to reading digitally on Samsung tablets I gave them. Neither would ever consider pirating books.

The irony is, the generation that is most comfortable with pirating content and converting is also the generation that reads the least books...

[Richwood]

So far as I know the two largest distributors of SF Ebooks, TOR and Baen, do not use DRM on their ebooks and Tor reported after a year that they saw no difference in pirating before and after dropping DRM.

https://www.tor.com/2013/04/29/tor-b...ne-year-later/

IMO DRM is a PITA for readers who want control of their book files and, as posted here, discourages purchases from some potential buyers. Besides it is apparently readily bypassed by free software by any one who really wants to.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by Richwood

So far as I know the two largest distributors of SF Ebooks, TOR and Baen, do not use DRM on their ebooks and Tor reported after a year that they saw no difference in pirating before and after dropping DRM.

https://www.tor.com/2013/04/29/tor-b...ne-year-later/

IMO DRM is a PITA for readers who want control of their book files and, as posted here, discourages purchases from some potential buyers. Besides it is apparently readily bypassed by free software by any one who really wants to.

DRM is really more about mollifying worried authors and publishers than it is about actually stopping piracy. These days it cost a fairly trivial amount to scan a book.

[macminer]

Originally Posted by Richwood

IMO DRM is a PITA for readers who want control of their book files and, as posted here, discourages purchases from some potential buyers. Besides it is apparently readily bypassed by free software by any one who really wants to.

And there are different DRM schemes, competing against each other, which is a real PITA. I could live with DRM, as long as there was one universal standard. Closed ebook ecosystems is something that really hinders the adoption of ebooks and ereaders. Contrary to some off-the-cuff remarks about Calibre, software which helps you integrate ebooks from various sources into one library is actually promoting, not killing ebooks.
If there is one single factor which stops people from buying ebooks, it is greediness and shortsightedness on the publishing business side (agency pricing and so many other issues debated on this forum), not purported piracy.

It is likewise for any digital content. Imagine that you can only play a DVD bought from Sony on a Sony DVD player. Wouldn't that prevent you from buying such DVD? Proprietary, closed (and usually costly) formats are something doomed from day one. It was so with Betacam/Betamax vs VHS or WMA vs mp3.

And as long as ebook publishers and distributors cannot agree on a common standard (by which I mean both the file structure and a DRM system), there will be only a limited group within the large consumer market willing to switch to such closed ecosystems.