Monday, May 5 Martha Stewart Show » Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos

[Kingston]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Yes, I have an eval unit. I am working on the review now. I agree there is a bit of a glare... but usally for me holding it at a slightly different angle got rid of it. I haven't tried it outside though. Working on the review and pics, hope to have it up soon.

BOb

Looking forward to it. The glare seems to be a much bigger problem for you than for me. I just can't use the Jetbook with my overhead light as I have to juggle it constantly to get rid of the glare.

About the Cybook: The biggest problem I have with it by far is not so much the dropped bookmarks and lost places in books I'm reading...it's the lack of a numeric readout for the page one is on.

Cybook has a 'go to' utility where you type in the page you want--say 399 of 780. But its fishing in the dark 'cause you don't know what page you are on and you have no display of where you are (except a page bar) when you get there. It's absolutely criminal!! ALL the other devices give you some numeric indication of where you are in a book.

The Sony & Jetbook have the easiest utilities to enter a page number and go there. With Sony just type the number and hit enter. With Jetbook hit 5 then the number then enter.

Why Cybook left this off is beyond me, as they use page numbering for searches (as I descibed). All the user has is a page bar, as with Iiad, but no numeric readout.

The number of pages changes with the font size on any of the devices, but that's not reason for Cybook to make it so dang hard to use the go to utility. None of the other dedicated readers have chosen to shortchange the user in this way. I have to find my numeric place in another device (Sony, Iliad, etc.) and guesstimate where I want to go in Cybook. Most irritating!!

I suspect Harry will shoulder up his lance, pull down his visor and try to skewer my remarks. Lay on MacDuff!

[palex481]

I will give Jeff credit for one thing. He did bring out e-ink into the mainstream. I'm a gadget freak and I'd heard of E-ink before, but not until I heard about the Kindle was I interested in e-ink readers.

Now with that said, I bought the Sony 505 instead. The Kindle I feel is good for someone who is not very technically inclined, and doesn't have a pre-existing ebook library. They did integrate well with Amazon, making it easy to spend money, which is good for Jeff, not the people


Personally, I already had a substantial collection of LIT files, and an iphone. So wireless connectivity was moot.

If Jeff had designed the Kindle better, I would have bought one in a heartbeat. The look of it throws me off of it everytime. Too plastic and odd.

[Alisa]

I'm a fairly technical person. (Software development, network engineering, fair amount of experience in embedded systems, etc.) and I chose the Kindle for features.

It seriously irked me that Sony had made so little of their hardware: no dictionary lookup, no search, no annotation. These three things seemed to me to be the absolute base level features you should have if you're bringing computing power to books. None of them are rocket science. If you can't do that, what are you up to? And then to bring out a 2nd gen product that is still nothing but a page viewer? I was absolutely flummoxed. Add to that the fact that I'd had enough bad experiences with Sony that I figured I was safe in assuming that this was going to be the way it was in the future and the CS would be status quo (unacceptable). It's sad for them. I they'd offered a minimal feature set I would have likely overlooked the numerous times they'd pissed me off royally in the past for the gorgeous display and hardware. Seriously, I'd vowed never ever in life again to buy another Sony product but when I saw that thing on the shelf I wanted it. There wasn't much in the way of competition and I'd been waiting for years for a device like this. I saw that display and was ready to buy it. Then I did the research and looked at the feature set and realized despite my absolute lust for the hardware, Sony would piss me off again like they have for years. It was a no-brainer like turning down the booty call from that guy you know is just going to break your heart. Despite my being a pretty gung-ho ebook customer, they lost me. Even at $100+ under the price I would end up paying, they lost me. They pretty well colossally lost me.

Then Amazon came in and offered me that lovely display with the features I wanted and a huge selection of books wrapped up in a dreadfully ugly package for bunches of money more and I was quite happy to say "yes, please!" because it was really that much better. I'll take function over form any day. I don't care if it's pretty. I don't care if it's cheap. I don't care if I can have it whenever I want. I care if it's better. I'm quite capable of getting books, converting them, loading them. The wireless wasn't a selling feature to me. I didn't need it. Now that I have it, I see that it's freakin brilliant! I would've bought it anyway but the store and the Whispernet is the icing on the cake.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Kingston

Hallelujah brother. Almost every time someone recommends a device Harry jumps in with negative comments. Cybook is an ok reader but a device costing near $400 should be worry free....something Cybook definitely ain't!

Methinks yon Harry doth protest too much...

Like the old ad says 'ask the man who owns one'. I have all the US-sold devices (except the 1150) and Cybook is the only buggy one.

Kingston,

I have owned all the devices (except the Kindle, which I can't buy) which is why I feel able to make meaningful comparisons. I don't "worry" about my Gen3 - I'm sorry to hear that you do. The reason I've kept the Gen3 and sold the other devices is (obviously) that I feel that the Gen3 is currently the best device on the market. I consider the lack of dictionary support on the Sony, and the inability to change the font on the Kindle to be significant shortcomings. You are welcome to disagree - that's fine by me! - but I shall continue to express those views when people ask for comparisons.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Kingston

The number of pages changes with the font size on any of the devices, but that's not reason for Cybook to make it so dang hard to use the go to utility. None of the other dedicated readers have chosen to shortchange the user in this way. I have to find my numeric place in another device (Sony, Iliad, etc.) and guesstimate where I want to go in Cybook. Most irritating!!

I suspect Harry will shoulder up his lance, pull down his visor and try to skewer my remarks. Lay on MacDuff!

Thanks, I will!

The reason they've left off page numbers is almost certainly that they are almost completely meaningless - there's a major bug in the Mobi reader "engine" (all versions of it) which make page numbers almost worthless.

Have you got the Windows Mobi reader installed on your PC? Try this little experiment:

- Load a book.
- Page through it (just press "PgDn") a few dozen times until you get to some easily recognisable point in the book, such as the start of a chapter.
- Make a note of the page number shown on the status bar.
- Go back to the start of the book.
- Select "Goto page" and enter the page number you wrote down.

Are you back at the place you noted?

The answer is "no, you're not". You'll probably be something like a dozen pages away from it, and the further you go through the book, the worse the discrepency becomes. In a 500 page book, by the time you're half-way through it, the error can be over 100 pages.

Now you tell me. Given this bug (which seems to be deep in the Mobi reader "core" - Bookeen can't do anything about it, probably, because it's not in their code), what's the use of page numbers? If you're reading a book and you note something interesting happens on page 250, you can't later say "goto page 250" and get back to that point in the book.

I repeat that ALL versions of the Mobi reader show this bug.

So, what's the only sensible thing to do in this situation? I think personally that to simply show a progress bar rather than a page number is actually the best thing that can be done. It's better than showing page numbers which actually don't mean a thing!

The progress bar is certainly a perfectly adequate way of judging your position in the book, IMHO.

Over to you, Kingston. Given the existance of this Mobi bug, why do you want page numbers? What are you going to use them for?

[daffy4u]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Given the existance of this Mobi bug, why do you want page numbers? What are you going to use them for?

Though I'm not the person you were addressing, I use page numbers in discussions of books. Such as "on page 99 of the hard cover (paperback, kindle)" bla bla bla happens.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by daffy4u

Though I'm not the person you were addressing, I use page numbers in discussions of books. Such as "on page 99 of the hard cover (paperback, kindle)" bla bla bla happens.

That is indeed the obvious use for them. My point is, however, that the bug in the Mobi "engine" makes such references useless. Suppose you're reading a book, going through it a page at a time, and you note that something happens on page 99. You later re-open the book and you think "I'll look at page 99 again". So you select the "Goto page" function and type in "99". You don't end up where you were - you could be dozens of pages away from it!

[daffy4u]

Originally Posted by HarryT

That is indeed the obvious use for them. My point is, however, that the bug in the Mobi "engine" makes such references useless. Suppose you're reading a book, going through it a page at a time, and you note that something happens on page 99. You later re-open the book and you think "I'll look at page 99 again". So you select the "Goto page" function and type in "99". You don't end up where you were - you could be dozens of pages away from it!

I understood your point about the bug, I was just responding to your question about why one would want page numbers.

Is the bug being worked on or is it something so low down on the totem pole that it may be a while (if ever) before it's corrected. BTW, the only eBook devices I've ever used were my old Handspring Visor and now the Kindle. I have no experience with other eBook readers.

[Alisa]

I wonder if Cybook could use something like the location numbers the Kindle uses. I know people find them unwieldy but they are consistent at least. When I finish reading a sample and I notice it finishes at 375, then I buy the book and go to location 375, it's the same spot. I've never had it be inconsistent.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by daffy4u

Is the bug being worked on or is it something so low down on the totem pole that it may be a while (if ever) before it's corrected.

I'm afraid I don't know. It appears to be something deep in the core of the Mobi "engine". EVERY version of the Mobi reader (AFAIK) - desktop and portable device alike - has it, so it would, I suspect, be down to Mobi themselves to fix it, rather than their licencees like Bookeen.

My original point was that, given the existance of this bug, is Bookeen's decision not to display page numbers really so unreasonable? Perhaps they felt that it was better not to display them at all, given their almost complete worthlessness.

[TallMomof2]

Plus page numbers are irrelevant because if you change font size, bold the font or even change the font, the page numbering changes. Until Mobi fixes the page numbering bug, a progress bar is the only thing that is close to accurate.

[daffy4u]

Originally Posted by TallMomof2

Plus page numbers are irrelevant because if you change font size, bold the font or even change the font, the page numbering changes. Until Mobi fixes the page numbering bug, a progress bar is the only thing that is close to accurate.

Maybe that is true in the case of the Cybook but according to the Kindle FAQ the location numbers they use in place of page numbers is not affected by font size.

Kindle shows your numeric location in what you are reading, so you can easily find a particular passage or reference it to your friends. Locations are the digital answer to page numbers. Since you can change the text size on Kindle, the page numbers would change too, but with locations, you can be confident that you return to the same place every time regardless of the text size you prefer.

If there was a way to compare or convert the location number with a hard cover or paperback page number, it would make it easier to converse with people reading another form of the book.

[Alisa]

I've seen people guesstimate the location-to-page-number conversion but I think it falls apart if there are any images. I'd like to see a numbering system more like chapter + paragraph number. That would work across any edition whether it was an ebook or any of the pbook printings. With some works, you can have dozens of printings available let alone older editions. Even with current books, you often at least have a hardcover and paperback edition.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by TallMomof2

Plus page numbers are irrelevant because if you change font size, bold the font or even change the font, the page numbering changes. Until Mobi fixes the page numbering bug, a progress bar is the only thing that is close to accurate.

I think calling it a bug is a bit of a misnomer but it can be viewed as an important feature. You are correct in that it is a difficult problem. This is why Kindle uses a reference number that is actually and arbitrary 128 characters for access. It does not matter what font changes or sizes are made the number of characters is constant.

The real bug in Mobi is trying to show page numbers at all since they are impossible for them to maintain accurately as the engine is now written. The cybook does not display the numbers while some other mobi implementations attempt to display the page numbers but then goes awry when you do jumps.

Microsoft Reader really is the only one that supports user loadable fonts and then does page numbers and it is done as a background task and can take a significant amount of time to get the numbers into the pages. It is not remembered so you spend the time again and again if you resize or otherwise change the document page size.

Sony does it ahead of time and only supports 3 sizes and a fixed font type. If you bypass the computer rendering you will pay the price of waiting until it finishes the rendering the first time you open the book and again if you change the font size.

eBookwise precomputes the sizes when the file is built.

PDF uses a similar strategy of precomputing when the book is built and will be off if you change form portrait to landscape or at least it doesn't math the viewing screen at all.

Dale

[catsittingstill]

Alisa wrote: <i>When I finish reading a sample and I notice it finishes at 375, then I buy the book and go to location 375, it's the same spot. </i>

Oh, that's a good idea. I'll have to try that. Thanks!