When will eBooks take over from print?

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Still a considerable expense, especially for something you are giving away with the product.

And product manuals won't have the same cost breakdown as books offered by trade publishers. Among other things, the author's advance goes away, as the book is written by employees on salary as part of the development team.

Software houses don't offer printed manuals these days because of costs. They may offer a PDF, and if you want a printed copy, you can roll your own from it.

The goal is software with a clear enough interface and well integrated help functions that the user doesn't need a manual, but it looks like one of those destinations that can be traveled toward but never actually reached.
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Dennis

Anymore now, I prefer a PDF manual over a printed one. I have more room on my computers than I do in my desk.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

Anymore now, I prefer a PDF manual over a printed one. I have more room on my computers than I do in my desk.

I am split on Manuals.

Basic Operation and setup... PDF is fine.
(coding) Reference and "How to..." Hard Copy wins. Post-it "tabs", Multiple books open all over my desk (some to divert the kittens )
I use my Portrait oriented monitor (multi-head rig) for displaying Manuals and editing e-books, with other stuff on the Landscape screen.. (And I still have books on the desk)

[BreezyDay]

Originally posted by DMcCunney
Your cable company? Curious. Which were they offering?

Cablevision. It's an Augen - EBA701 - 7 Inch E-Reader with Text-to-Speech. Here's the link to it -http://www.optimumstore.com/product.jsp?parentCategory=1076&category=2165&prod uct=prod11840075

Originally posted by DMcCunney
The questions to ask are similar to the earlier days of personal computers, where the answer to "What should I buy", began with "What do you plan to do with it?". It all came down to what software was available to do what you wanted to do, and the software you needed would partly determine what you had to buy to run it.

Exactly! Still making up my mind about step 1, the what do you plan to part. Hopefully will do so before we get connected to the world wide mind and ebook readers become obsolete.

Originally posted by DMcCunney
You're in the right place to do the research. Whatever might be used to display an ebook, someone on MR uses it and can give you chapter and verse on its strengths and weaknesses.

It's a great community. Lots of really knowledge and helpful folks here to help steer me away from the shoals and set my rigging up right.

Originally posted by DMcCunney
What sort of training, and what form to the ekits take? What must you use to read them?

We've emailed them about the possibility of taking notes in the Ekits. Haven't heard back yet. But, as far as I can tell from their website's FAQ, the training manuals are PDFs (and the trainers send paper notepads and pens in advance of the class to go along with the Ekit which kinda implies ...). We're taking the course in one of our company's training rooms which have regular desktop PCs with Adobe Acrobat reader software.


Regina
Edge-of-your-seat Dilemmas to Create Your Way Out of
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[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BreezyDay

Cablevision. It's an Augen - EBA701 - 7 Inch E-Reader with Text-to-Speech.

Interesting. A TFT screen capable of displaying video as well as text, plus MP3/wma audio, and a mention of word processing. Looking at the features, is supports a lot of formats. Anmd it uses a Linux 2.6.2 kernel. At a guess, it uses FBReader, an open source Russian ebook viewer package, for the ebook display. FBReader supports ePub, Mobipocket, and several other things. I have versions of it on Windows and Linux.

I'm still not sure why Cablevision is offering it, but they seem to be offering an assortment of other things as well, so they might see this as a convenience for their customers, and get a commision on sales made through them.

Exactly! Still making up my mind about step 1, the what do you plan to part. Hopefully will do so before we get connected to the world wide mind and ebook readers become obsolete.

If nothing else, since you an author creating ebooks, some personal experience with how your readers will actually read your books will be useful.

It's a great community. Lots of really knowledge and helpful folks here to help steer me away from the shoals and set my rigging up right.

There are lots of lee shores and sandbars hiding in the channels, so experienced pilots will be invaluable.

We've emailed them about the possibility of taking notes in the Ekits. Haven't heard back yet. But, as far as I can tell from their website's FAQ, the training manuals are PDFs (and the trainers send paper notepads and pens in advance of the class to go along with the Ekit which kinda implies ...). We're taking the course in one of our company's training rooms which have regular desktop PCs with Adobe Acrobat reader software.

Since the course material is in PDF format, taking notes electronically on the PDF is unlikely. You can create PDFs which are fill in the blank forms, but I haven't seen a solution for taking and attaching arbitrary marginal notes. (It may exist. I haven't had cause to look. But it doesn't sound like your training outfit is going that way.)
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Dennis