It is the Worst of Times for Reading EBooks

[underscore]

Originally Posted by Nausicaa

Why only books? I read articles and would love to browse a news site on a ereader. Wouldn't you love a digital newspaper?

that my point, and i think that with last generation of onyx readers, we are quite there



if for the same price, in two years, we can use ereaders also for National Geographic, then i will use my tablet, that's the best tool for it now, just as portable movie/tv device in the kitchen

[radius]

It always amazes me how Mobileread forums are so satisfied with the current state of the art. I often wish for improvement in ereading and I am only a light reader compared to many on the forum (average about 70-80-ish books per year, maybe 75:25 fiction:non-fiction) so surely it must affect others even more than me.

Things I think have gotten worse:

- I don't many of the hardware choices that have become popular. Sony had many metal bodied readers and often had integrated covers and/or cover attachment points, and without the creases for propping up the reader (which I find make the devices annoying to hold). Clicky page turn buttons are something else I miss; I even liked the scroll wheels that some devices had. Variety in colour too (who decreed that ereaders have to be black?)

I like infra-red touch sensors over most of the capacitive touch in modern readers because the capacitive ones have an extra layer of matte plastic and I find that reduces the clarity of the text.

- DRM is getting harder to strip. There was a short period of time when DRM could be removed from the products of most book stores, but now you need to be careful of how you download and/or allowing certain software to update etc.

- Advertising. I've already paid for the hardware, and I'm (theoretically) a captive of your bookstore. Do you really need to advertise to me on device too? I wouldn't mind a recommendation on hitting end of book, but I really dislike seeing ads on the home screens.

- Book formatting. I think we are in a strange middle stage where book formatting isn't good enough to do many typesetting tasks but where it is too complicated for many lay people to take on. Compare to making a Peanut Press format book, or even original Mobipocket. Modern epub can be very complex but still can't do many things that WordPerfect or MS Word could do in the 1980s.

Things that still suck and haven't been fixed:

- Bookstores closing. I've survived a few bookstore closings and it still sucks every time. Now that I have learned to de-DRM every book I buy it sucks less, but it still is annoying and inconvenient at a minimum.

- Devices still slow. I don't mean refreshing the eink display. I mean responsiveness in all other aspects. Like rotating manga pages. Or scrubbing/flipping pages. Or selecting text. Or operating the UI quickly. Or scaling large images. Or opening books made with large files (e.g. I have seen omnibuses where each book was a single html file inside the epub).

- categorization and search. Things took a big leap forward with incremental search, but it's still not all that easy to find what you are looking for in a large library. And what are your alternatives? There's no good on-device tag system. Few readers I know of allow nested or overlapping categories. Paging through a large library is pretty slow, especially since most readers are determined to show you only a few books per screen (and some even omit a text version of the title, forcing you to recognize the cover). No reader I know of allows you to have playlists or to-be-read stacks. Series categorization is missing or inconsistent. Publishers often aren't consistent with author naming and book metadata.

- desktop software still blech (I'm looking at *you* Kobo...)

[4691mls]

Originally Posted by 4691mls

I figure eink readers have internet capability for the purpose of obtaining books from a connected store or library. I wouldn't try to use the browser for anything more than that.

Originally Posted by Nausicaa

Why only books? I read articles and would love to browse a news site on a ereader. Wouldn't you love a digital newspaper?

At this time I am fine with my ereader being a device for reading books. I prefer e-ink when reading for long periods of time in order to avoid eyestrain (tried using my phone as an ereader and didn't like the results!)

I get most of my national news via radio and I check local news websites on my PC or smartphone. I don't feel any pressing need to be able to use an e-ink reader for those purposes since I don't spend that much time reading articles.

Apparently your needs & wishes are different from mine, so I hope you find a device that does what you need.

[MarjaE]

Originally Posted by Deskisamess

I've used various e-ink readers since 2009, and have never noticed "constant delays" when reading.

I've been trying to find ways to pre-process pdfs to reduce the delays when reading pdfs. As well as missing images, crashes, and so on.

[MarjaE]

Originally Posted by teija

Why would anyone buy an eInk device to use for internet browsing??

I often get severe migraines from "standard web design" even on flicker-free computer screens. And I use a number of accessibility settings, accessibility hacks, etc. to try to avoid worse.

I don't have any e-ink device fast enough to browse the internet, but it's possible that e-ink would be safer.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by radius

It always amazes me how Mobileread forums are so satisfied with the current state of the art. I often wish for improvement in ereading and I am only a light reader compared to many on the forum (average about 70-80-ish books per year, maybe 75:25 fiction:non-fiction) so surely it must affect others even more than me.
...

I solved most of the issues you mention by switching to reading mostly on a tablet.

In project management, there is an old saying - Cheap, Fast, Easy. You get at the most two out of three. With eReaders, customers have gone for Cheap and Easy. I'm sure someone could come out with a fast eReader, but it wouldn't be cheap. Adding all those library features is also doable, but it would require faster hardware and it wouldn't be cheap. Plus, it's really a niche market. The standard customer tends to have less than 20 ebooks on their device at a time, usually no more than 5. You don't really need any library feature for that.

Tablets, which tend to be rather more expensive, are also a lot faster and allow for customized apps. I've got Calibre Companion for library management and Marvin as my eBook reading app. There are other reading apps available.

Can't say that I've noticed any issues with removing DRM. It's easier now than it was 10 years ago, at least with the Kindle store.

When you mention manga, I suspect that some of your issue is that while manga and comics get lumped in with eBooks, such books, along with coffee table books, have very different requirements than a regular eBook. It's a bit like trying to read a PDF on a regular sized eInk reader, not a very satisfying experience for many people.

If I were to totally focus on what I don't have that I want, I would be focused on the eBook store side rather than the reader side. Discoverability and competition are my two big soapbox issues.

[DiapDealer]

I never expected a revolution in the way I read because of ebooks. The only revolution I expected was the immediate availability of just about any book I could ever want to buy and read (plus the ability to change the font size). That revolution has happened. I have no interest in changing the way I read whatsoever (one page at a time; from beginning to end). *shrug*

[Apache]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I never expected a revolution in the way I read because of ebooks. The only revolution I expected was the immediate availability of just about any book I could ever want to buy and read (plus the ability to change the font size). That revolution has happened. I have no interest in changing the way I read whatsoever (one page at a time; from beginning to end). *shrug*

Me too.
The only way the way I read could change for the better would be the ability to download the book directly to my brain. Uhm…..wait a minute, isn't that what I am all ready doing?
Apache

[issybird]

Originally Posted by radius

Things that still suck and haven't been fixed:

- Bookstores closing. I've survived a few bookstore closings and it still sucks every time. Now that I have learned to de-DRM every book I buy it sucks less, but it still is annoying and inconvenient at a minimum.

Meh. Given that agency survives so there's not a lot of price competition anyway, this has made things easier. I figure neither Kobo nor Kindle is on the ropes and I don't buy anywhere else. I buy from Kobo by preference and let the books download and only buy from Amazon when there's a significant price difference (in my laziness I can't be bothered with price-matching) and will either read on an app (I don't have a Kindle) or maybe download, convert and sideload if I'm motivated, but that's not a big percentage of my purchases. In both cases I'm not worried about being able to access unread books in the near to intermediate future and I don't care much about the read ones with rare exceptions. So on a practical level, the shakeout was a good thing - however, I suspect I'd have fallen into this pattern eventually anyway.

[4691mls]

Originally Posted by issybird

Meh. Given that agency survives so there's not a lot of price competition anyway, this has made things easier. I figure neither Kobo nor Kindle is on the ropes and I don't buy anywhere else. I buy from Kobo by preference and let the books download and only buy from Amazon when there's a significant price difference (in my laziness I can't be bothered with price-matching) and will either read on an app (I don't have a Kindle) or maybe download, convert and sideload if I'm motivated, but that's not a big percentage of my purchases. In both cases I'm not worried about being able to access unread books in the near to intermediate future and I don't care much about the read ones with rare exceptions. So on a practical level, the shakeout was a good thing - however, I suspect I'd have fallen into this pattern eventually anyway.

My only store that has closed so far was Sony. Fortunately almost all my books transferred to Kobo (I think I had one that had become unavailable as an ebook anywhere so it didn't transfer.)

Like Issy, I'm usually not all that worried about most of my books. I guess if there were one I especially wanted to make sure I kept for posterity I might buy a paper copy as a backup.

In addition to Kindle and Kobo, I doubt the Google Play store will disappear anytime soon.

[Nausicaa]

I agree pwalker. A lot of the issue is that we call different things "reading". Judiging from how often people here buy from stores and are satisfied it seems that most are pleasure reading text and not comics/manga coffee books, science paper, technical books or whatnot.

If you use it for pleasure reading it's good. The small screen is enough. It works well for that. But if you need to use a textbook it's terrible to type on it or flip through the pages. Used tablets works well and so do smart phones IME.

[binaryhermit]

TBH I can't think of anything that would make me upgrade other than color. In fact, if my kindle manga goes, I might downgrade to the "All-New Kindle" aka KT4 aka lighted kindle basic.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Nausicaa

Judiging from how often people here buy from stores and are satisfied it seems that most are pleasure reading text

I'm guessing (with no actual evidence, of course) that the vast majority of eink device owners the world over are mainly pleasure reading text.

[binaryhermit]

I'd go further and say that the vast majority of book-in-any-format, ebook or dead tree, readers are pleasure-reading

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Can't say that I've noticed any issues with removing DRM. It's easier now than it was 10 years ago, at least with the Kindle store.

Three letters: KFX