ebook readers and price drops
 

Has anyone had any experience with the Nook, Kindle, or Sony Touch e-readers? the recent price wars have got me re-evaluating the merits of each of them and if I should consider picking one up. I am a voracious reader - I have bookshelves overflowing through my entire apartment. Any thoughts on the good/bad/ugly of these devices, and if they're worth it at all, particularly now that price points are going sub-$200?

I am an early adopter of the Kindle. I have a Kindle1 and love it. Since the price drop I have started considering purchasing a Kindle2. I have several friends with Nooks, and after playing with them, I really don't like the device. The "color" display is only there to show titles, and reduces the reading-area. I don't think the "lending" feature of the nook is enough to recommend it ... if you can afford a $250 device, you can afford to pay $10 for a book. Consumer Reports liked the Kindle better, too. There is a lot of free content available for the Kindle, and you can port over pdf files, so even if you are trying to read on a budget, it's more than do-able.

Good points. The color thing on the nook I always thought was a little stupid. It does, however, take SD cards, and I like the chess and sudoku built in. but the keyboard on the kindle does have some interest for me, too. I can't decide if I should just save up for an iPad instead(or equivalent, cheaper tablet later), or skip the whole thing entirely. Also one thing I don't like about the e-books often for sale as a whole is that they're either free "classics" that i've already ready from project gutenberg a billion times, or they're like.. the stuff you buy in airports. super lame. i'm still torn. :( a big draw, though, is as a portable PDF reader. I like white papers/research papers a lot.

How heavy are these devices?

Unfortunately my wrists are in such poor condition that it can be slightly uncomfortable to hold up a book for extended periods, in certain positions.

10.2 ounces for the Kindle, may be slimming down sometime after August ... there are rumors that a lighter device will be released then.

Nook is 12.2 ounces, according to B&N's site.

Maybe when OLED monitors hit mainstream...

I dunno about OLED. not really at all the same as e-ink. eyestrain, for one.

well, woot.com got bought by amazon yesterday, and now woot has a pretty good deal on a latest-generation kindle starting tonight for 24 hours, so I ended up ordering one. We'll see how it is, and I hope I don't regret not having the chess app that Nook offers. For some super-nerdy reason, the chess thing really, really appealed to me. But the Kindle should be an interesting experience; I'll post my thoughts when it arrives if anybody cares.

Yes, please do.

I like paper books, I like flipping through the pages, noticing the bookmark lovingly
holding my last page(cheesy I know) and everything else tactile about holding a book.

I hope the kindle type things don't do to the book like the c/d did to LPs although that was a good thing.

I'm with Sky on this one. I like the actual books. I stare at a computer screen for work, I don't want to have to read a book on one, too. Then again, my dream house would include a two floor library. :)

Kindle upgrade v3.0 :
Has a transparent "page" that the reader can turn as they read.
Allows handwritten notes in the margins.
Retains notes for future reference.
Allows pages to be folded, torn, or crumpled by 3-yr olds of the family

Kindle upgrade v4.0 :
Charges the reader's bank account late fees if it is borrowed by a friend.

To all those who say that they love paper books:

Let me tell you guys something - I live in less than 900 square feet of apartment and I have, I think, eleven sets of bookshelves. Some have the shelves double-stacked, and all of them have piles on top of them. There are piles of books (and magazines, I don't discriminate) next to the bed, around and on top of my desk, the couch, around the television(delicious irony), and, ahem, in the bathroom.

I LOVE books.

And I'm drowning in them.

I'm also not particularly willing to pay $10 for a digital copy of something that's locked to a single manufacturer, though. Ebook prices are still too high to justify their regular purchase, if you ask me, without guarantee of rights in perpetuity across multiple platforms.

Mostly, I expect to be using it for news and blogs, free publications, a portable PDF reader, and Wikipedia. I'm really (nerdily) excited by the idea of being able to carry piles of research papers with me.

One thing that the Nook has over the Kindle is that I saw the Nook has a chess app built in, and sudoku. Man that's appealing. But the sale on the Kindle was too much to pass up since I've been chomping at the bit to play with one. Plus, my birthday is soon, so here's my present :D

I think it's a wonderful medium, I'm not part of it...yet.

However, there is something about the feel of a book, the sight of books on shelves, the subsequent browsing of hardcovers, or even softcovers.

They're comforting, books. I bet if a tornado takes your home you will salvage at least one book. I can't imagine a nicer possession.

Mind you, I've misplaced books in my years, but I've never consciously thrown one away, or even given one away or sold it. I still have my books from childhood. Mom gave me much leeway in ordering from the scholastic book club or whatever it was called, but often had to limit me to 4 or 5 at a time, because I was voracious.

Excuse me, I must go read The Mystery of the Witches Bridge and The Phantom Tollbooth one more time. :)

My paperback copy of Glory Road from the late sixties is falling apart. So I don't like that part of it. But, like Sad, I'm not ready to pay for digital books yet.

Well, yes, I think my point was, my paper books aren't going away any time soon, despite a foray into this newfangled digital thing. :)

It's an alternate media, not a replacement. I love my books. And it's a lot cheaper to replace when you accidentally dunk a $7 paperback in the bathtub versus a Kindle ;) I have so many positive books that have emotional baggage attached to them. Favorites received as gifts, interesting things stuff between the pages, memories of when and where I was reading, cover art, the person who introduced me to the book, all sorts of things like that.

No, my bookshelves are staying in place. I do though like to be able to carry reference information with me. I have a lot of reference books and tomes that would be nice to be able to carry around in something that's 1/3" thick and weighs less than a pound.

On the other hand - for "less special" books, dare I say "pop" writing - is the book really that important to have in a paper form? Why buy a $15 crap paperback at an airport just to pass the time and have it take up space when I could just have eighty interesting things to read on one device that takes up a tiny sliver of luggage room?

I think there's room in the world for both digital and analog content at this point. And besides, for a noted gadget head (me): new toy new toy new toy :D

The new toy thing and access are what make me want one. I agree, there is room for all. As my mom told my brother, who is actually a great if not confident or published except the interwebz sports writer, as long as you're reading! He did not read a lot, at least not like I did, but he read enough, and has a way with words. The power of words, it is magnificent.

I've been browsing the Kindle store today. I have to say that some of it makes me want to throw up in my mouth a little - $2 a month for a "subscription" to various individual blogs - like slashdot, boingboing, techcrunch, etc? All stuff that I read for free with an RSS reader on my ipod or on a computer. Screw you, Amazon - definitely not going that route. I don't care if it is via your 3g push service. Not happening.

On the other hand: they have some print magazines available in digital format that are potentially appealing. Asimov's Science Fiction Monthly and Analog, two of my favorite sci-fi short story rags, are available at a good discount over the newsstand price. Looks like shopping for content with this thing is going to be an up and down kind of experience.

On the other other hand, some of the print magazines don't offer digital discounts at all, which is lame given no distribution or print costs. The Economist is still ~$126 a year, though Kindle does break it into a monthly $10 subscription instead which I suppose is a bit easier to digest. Still, I expect a price break. That's kind of crap.

Hmmm... Interest in Kindle rising... I have a crate full of old Asimov's. It might be fun to get back into that, without the bulkiness. Of course, I have shelf or two full of stuff I haven't read yet, so an extra book (though a small one) a month may be too much.

How about readability on Kindle in brighter light? I have heard that early versions really suck on this. Since I am travelling most of the times, I was hoping the newer (and slicker) versions might have improved on this.

I've had no problems reading in bright light with the Kindle. Screen is made to reduce glare, and it seems to work just fine.

I'm giving serious consideration to the new Graphite DX.

Very Serious.

May be my reward for surviving camping.

Well gang, it arrived today, it's unboxed and i've been fooling about for about an hour. First impressions:

It's small! I've never held a kindle before. It's, er, about the size of a nook, which I have. Maybe a little thinner. Very light, I am *so* going to get a case for this thing ASAP, because it's just begging to be broken, though it does still feel surprisingly solid. Also a screen protector seems essential, though it's not a touch screen so there shouldn't be any need to sausage-finger it, better safe than sorry.

I loaded some PDFs via drag/drop on a PC. Amazon, it turns out, charges 15 cents per megabyte if you email it to your kindle and then use the 3g whispernet, so i think i'll be avoiding that. Part of the general sales model is "nickel and dime you everywhere if you're not careful", I think. Not to mention the "dollars and more dollars" model of buying rather expensive ebooks and subscribing to things.

So the PC connection in win7 worked just fine. It rendered all of the PDFs generally very well, including cover art. I'm applying the latest software update to get the most recent additions including PDF zoom, which is stupidly missing in the default, but at least they fixed it with a free update. Also that'll get the twitter and facebook things going, so I can play with those later.

The screen is in fact pretty easy to read. It took a few moments to get used to after staring at a computer screen, but I very quickly adapted. The interface is very tolerable, though still a bit less optimal than it could be. they need to steal someone from apple's human interface design group to streamline things a little more, though it's quite useable.

Page refreshing is faster than i thought, and seems faster than the nook i played with. the black flash of refresh is a little annoying but you get used to it fairly quick. hopefully with future e-readers that will get quicker til it goes away entirely.

Overall, I am fairly impressed right out the door. I downloaded Frankenstein for free from the store via the 3g link and it was done within a minute, quite nice.

I'll continue after I've played with it a bit more. :)

I'm very happy with all book mediums. I still prefer the real thing to digital because I'm a sick person. I like rare books, paper-backs, e-books, hard covers, scrolls, plastic bound manuscripts, saddle stapled manifestos whatever etc...I love it all.

I was the only person I know that actually thought pocket digital dictionaries were cool.l (warmth back) The point is, you guys may have talked me into a Kindle.

I got to play with a Kobo today.

Buttons suck. Menuing is clumsy. Too easy to doubletap the page forward button. The big selling point is that it's cheaper than a Kindle. What they don't talk up is there's no wireless ... well, you can mate it to a bluetooth to download stuff. If you have a Blackberry. Great marketing idea, chums. You can have a device that is less functional than a Kindle, for $40 less (it was $100 until amazon dropped the cost on the Kindle), but you can only download books without your computer if you buy a $500 smartphone. The page refresh rate is visibly slower than a kindle, and they give it to you preloaded with 100 (classic/out of copyright) books you probably won't read anyway ... and you can GET FOR FREE.

A follow-up after playing some more and the software update, with some positives and some criticisms. I focused on the cool factors a lot on the first post, so be prepared for some down sides here.

First, I did the twitter thing with it. The functionality is, essentially, awkward and limited. You can use the beta-status mobile web browser, which pretty much sucks in its current state, to view other people's feeds. Otherwise, you have to be in some document and annotate something or otherwise be able to highlight text, then select a "twitter" option. You're limited to 100 characters instead of the full 140, because amazon automatically adds a shortened URL to an amazon.com page (where you can put a slightly longer message) and a #kindle tag. I absolutely detest this behaviour. I only detest it slightly less because I've mostly dedicated my twitter account to being quotes from books.

Facebook I haven't tried, and I'm probably not going to, but it's going to be the same kind of deal, I think: if you want to actually read facebook, use the bad browser. Otherwise, you can just update your status message.

The "built-in Wikipedia" is also just access through the mobile browser. To be clear: it's not really a full browser, but like the kind on a non-smart cellphone. Weaksauce. In short, I wouldn't rely on a kindle for actual internet access except in the direst emergency where I absolutely must twitter about my latest toilet visit and can't use a cellphone but for some reason can use a kindle. That being said, Wikipedia's mobile site is.. semi-tolerable. At least it is there, though I'd expected a better interface for it than just a crappy WAP browser.

On the plus side, their list of default bookmarks was a short but good selection of major news sites. CNN, BBC, Wikipedia, ESPN, AllRecipes, Google, Weather Channel, Fandango, CNET, Yelp, and Lonely Planet. All more or less useable. Hopefully more software revisions make the browser less queasy-making. Also, accessing the browser is annoying - press menu, scroll to "Experimental", select "Browser". Poor UI decisions. While I'm on that, in the experimental menu there's an option to play MP3s that you can dump to the device via your PC. I think it's a terrible feature on this sort of device and hope to never, ever use it.

I tried dumping some .txt files with mixed success. The formatting is hosed on the ones I tried, but that may be be due to them being fifteen years old and bounced between windows and linux systems so many times that the LR/CFs are all kinds of bonkers, so I'll have to either find a way to clean them up or find some better text files. I tried converting one to PDF successfully and copying it over - but the text came out with very, very poor contrast on the grey screen such that it's like reading a newspaper that's been soaking in the rain for a few days. I don't know why that is - I'll be playing with it to see if I can sort it out. Maybe I'll try running it through their free converter service.

Other PDF documents, like some academic papers I dumped, came out looking generally fine. Many are far easier to read if you change the page orientation to landscape and turn the unit 90 degrees, but the device lacks a setting to remember orientation for individual documents, which is a bit frustrating. I mostly want to hold the thing upright for reading regular texts.

I broke down and paid for a book and a magazine. "Shit My Dad Says" and "Science News". The purchase process is very easy with one-click, and there is a "Buyer's Remorse" button on the page after you click "buy" that lets you change your mind before you navigate away, which is good. (The book was still too expensive for digital only content at $10, but still cheaper than the print copy - though I don't get the cool title to sit on my shelf when I'm done.) The Science News magazine (which was $1.25, not too bad) has some embedded images that rendered really quite nicely, and for that matter when you put it in sleep mode it puts up some really nice looking random images of famous authors and literary-themed things that look really quite good, like good quality black and white newsprint. Actually, newsprint is really what reading on the thing is like in general.

Something I read in the customer reviews of Asimov's and Analog disappointed me - apparently the publisher may be a month or two behind the print schedule. Just a reminder that it's still a relatively new medium that's entirely at the behest of the publishers to either stay on top of or slack off and ignore. Also, an oddity - apparently, though the digital issues are individually priced lower than newsstand prices, the total yearly price is still more than the cost of a print subscription, which makes absolutely no sense. For what's already a newsprint fiction rag (which I enjoy), cutting out printing costs should again be lowering the overall price, not increasing it.

Reading through the sample of Shit My Dad Says before I bought it, reading was easy and pretty natural. Changing font sizes to suit my speed and visual capacity is a nice ability. I haven't read enough yet to gauge any "slowdown" in reading as has been reported in the media lately versus print books, but I also tend to read at, er, near-relativistic speeds, so it might not impact me as much as somebody who maybe reads a bit slower than warp speed to begin with.

As an aside, I think I'm of the opinion that every publisher should consider a code or credit for a digital copy of the book when you buy a print one. A scratch-off code on the inside cover or something. Digital content should be stupid cheap and near pure cream for publishers without printing and distribution costs. I can understand not doing it the other way round, of course.

Anyways, there's hidden Minesweeper game built in, as well as Gomoku (which is a game of "connect five in a row" on a large gridded board), which I'm a big fan of. But I compare that to the sudoku and chess of the Nook - it's like Amazon is saying with minesweeper "now you idiots can play minesweeper everywhere, not just at your desk when you should be working!". Compare to B&N's more "the cool kids sit in cafes with fashionable eyeglasses and play chess on our fancy device. So hip, so educated, so vente mocha latte half soy half skim extra foam". I don't know if I'm amused, faintly insulted, or a perhaps mixture of both.

Creating "Collections" folders to organize your books is a nice feature to de-clutter your home screen list. It's lacking a way to quickly tag multiple books and dump them all into a collection, though, so one at a time.

Once I get a case for this, I think I'll be carrying it around fairly often, though.

The battery meter is barely nudged down and I've been toying with it
on and off all day, poking and prodding and downloading and syncing and all that. Battery life does seem to be excellent and charging is very fast.

Will I continue to use it for a long period of time? Honestly, I don't know. I think once I'm back at college full-time in the fall it'll be nice to have around in my bag to break out between classes (when I'm not studying my butt off - I'm going to be buried in classes again. Organic chemistry, biology, critical thinking and composition, and one yet to be decided. Eeesh. The first two are gonna be the worst.)

I'll have this next to the stack of books by my bedside tonight and see how it compares reading in bed to a paper novel. I'm not sure, but I get the feeling I may still enjoy the paper while I'm in bed. Call me old-fashioned in that respect, but I do spend all frickin day in front of computers and TVs and around technology, and when it's time to rest, I want the devices shut off. Cellphone can sit quietly as my alarm clock while it charges, but give me the rustle of paper and a nice blanket any day - I say this now, but we'll see how it pans out as I experiment.

I don't regret buying it yet, still, so that's a plus overall :) It's a neat thing with some current uses and much more potential. I'll look forward to the next-gen devices for sure. For the woot.com sale price, I think it was probably still worth it, but as they say, your mileage may vary.

Whew, that was an.. ear-full? Eye-full? Keyboard-full? I don't know, crazy long post. Thoughts or comments?

Seems that we can just plug it into PC and download all the (pirated;)) pdfs as well? Or is there any catch here?

Thanks for spending so much time/effort on your review...
I'll share it with my wife who has been "hinting"

Nope, no catch, the thing goes into a "USB mass storage device mode" and you just drag and drop PDFs to it. I have some legitimate PDFs of some technical books (that helpfully came with the print editions) that do just fine. Rotating them to landscape mode often helps. If the fonts aren't decent in the PDF, read very small and thin, though, they'll wash out to an icky, difficult to read light grey. Landscape helps with that a bit. Plain .txt files do quite well, though. You can also highlight and annotate in a .txt, but not in the PDFs I tried. I haven't tried running them through amazon's free converter process, which involves emailing your stuff to them, which I don't really like - a desktop utility would be nice, or just... better support in the firmware maybe. Also you have to be sure to email to the "free" service which will send you back the file rather than the "convert and send via whispernet" service which is, I think I mentioned, 15 cents a megabyte for the transfer, super lame.

Hah, glad to be of service, one way or the other. I'd been dying of curiosity about e-readers for quite a while, truthfully. Brain-dumping about it lets me work out all that and get to how I *really* feel about the thing and dissect it as a technological device, as a concept, as a product, its place in life and culture, etc, etc. I think about that kind of crap often. ;)

I have a nook. I like it a lot. (I bought it before the recent price drops... yay me!!) I expect there will be more applications than chess and sudoku floating around, as it's built on the Android platform. (If you're willing to violate the innocence of your OS to gain root access, this is already possible. There is a simple, but workable, Twitter client, and the Android version of Pandora will run with some hoop-jumping.)

The touch-screen keyboard takes some getting used to. It is IMO not as easy to use as the one on the ipod touch. However, I like it a ton better than I like the buttons on the Kindle, which I have had a chance to try out.

By all accounts the current version of the Nook handles PDFs better than the current version of the Kindle.

I've also tried the ipad at the Apple Store. The ipad vs. the electronic ink-based things (Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo, etc.)... you're really talking about different animals.

ETA: No, of course I didn't read the whole thread before I posted.

I coulda sworn I'd replied earlier but maybe I forgot to hit submit.

Steve: too late, I got a Kindle, see the rest of the thread. :) Thanks for the input, though. I do like the android nature of the nook, and wish the kindle had an SD slot. plus I have a B&N membership so the tie-in would get me some more discounts. But the kindle price was too good to pass up that one day. I don't think I'm sorry that I got it, overall, though. i could've gotten a wifi-only nook for the same price, but the 3g is what sold me.

I didn't like the nook touchscreen one bit from when I played with it in the store a couple times. The kindle keyboard isn't too bad, though a bit slow to update. it's definitely not for speed typing. and i think i would have absolutely detested the keyboards on the older models, they look horrid. the new DX looks downright sexy, I have to admit, but is waaay too pricey.

Agreed that the ipad is a totally different beast. it's a nice beast, though. i have an previous-gen ipod touch already and i have to admit that i really, really like it. reading on it or an ipad, though, isn't the easiest thing. i've played with several book apps and they're.. ok, but the kindle is a thousand times easier on the eyes. ibook is painfully slow on my older itouch. stanza is nice but again the backlight thing just makes it hard to read for long periods of time, whereas i sat down and read an entire book (admittedly a shortish one) on the kindle with no eyestrain like a regular backlit display at all.

i also discovered that target is selling kindles now. i was checking out the cases that they sell, but the ones at the local store were all crap and overpriced to boot, plus none of them even had a hard front to protect the screen. cases for the damn thing are awfully expensive in general. i think i'm going to save up my pennies and get the moleskine one off amazon as soon as i can. it's only a little bit more than the cost of a really crappy one from target. probably shell out for a silicon skin and screen protector, too. i'm nervous about carrying the thing around without a case and don't think i will til i have one.

i am also admittedly a bit jealous of the apps on nook comparatively. amazon just isn't thinking in that direction so far, to their own loss. i am shocked at the so-called 'functionality" of their twitter integration.

and friggin' minesweeper, man. It's just plain insulting. Gomoku is slightly less so, but sudoku and chess are just plain more stimulating to me.

i also wish that amazon had an alternate payment system besides one-click, like a store credit system where i can charge it up with some dollars. it'd help with budgeting so that i don't, eheh, overspend on books, because good grief i do read a *lot*. i am almost never without at least one book or at least a magazine. and it'd be waaay too easy to drain my bank account by going "oo i wanna read that *click*" and bam, money from bank account straight out gone. i wonder if i can buy an amazon gift code and tie the one-click to it, that might be a workaround.

and nobody seems to have any of Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently books in ebook format yet :( i lost my print copies ages ago and would dearly love to have them to read again. I've read the Hitchhiker's series literally about 20 times over in my life.

I'm still addicted to ink and paper, so I think I will keep buying books.

Read the rest of the thread and you'll find that nobody else is going to quit buying paper books either, at least from those who have chipped in their 2 cents, and that includes me :)

That being said, I bit the bullet and bought an issue of Analog last night, and actually? Reading it on the kindle was really kinda nice. If I subscribe, paying my $3 a month and having the next issue automagically appear will be pretty neat. The formatting was decent and it read just fine.

More importantly (to me, anyways) is that I don't think I even noticed I was reading on a digital device, which I definitely can't say about a backlit screen. I was able to actually engage myself with the text like a book without the hardware being in the way, which is kind of amazing. I think there's a niche in my reading life for this device, and that pleases me.

I'd love to have the room to have a gorgeous shelf of the paper copies of my favorite fiction rags, but I just don't. Plus, versus newsstand the digital edition is a) a bit cheaper and b) i don't have to go to an out of town bookstore to get it. Double win for me.

If my bookshelves weren't in such horrific disarray, I'd take a picture. Maybe when I clean them up I'll start a "share a photo of your bookshelves" thread :)

Damn lazy whippersnappers, why in our day we had to go out and chop papyrus reeds, with a toothbrush, or we'd never have anything to read... or wipe with. :haha:

Ahh but with the silicon slipcover and screen protector it's fully washable, so not only can you use it like traditional bathroom paper products but it's reusable and eco-friendly! Right? Right? This is the future! And if you want the real retro "frontier experience", try the first-gen model with the large-button keyboard for that authentic corn-cob feel!

Now about those three seashells...

The "Alternate Payment System" you seek is to use amazon.com gift cards as your primary method of payment.

Actually, if you have a gift card linked on your account, kindle purchases will spend that before they charge a credit card.

I like my clunky old keyboard, and do not feel the need to wiki from the Kindle at all. I haven't even loaded any music on the thing yet.

I've read a damn lot, though.

and the DX Graphite has been ordered. I will report back.

I was wondering if a gift card could be linked. that may be the convenient way to keep on a scheduled budget. Thanks for that tip!

well, i thought the wikipedia access would be a handy thing to have, but i thought it would be through some sort of customized interface rather than a crappy WAP browser and wikipedia's mobile site. gross.
Also I will never, ever put music on the thing. Ever. I have an mp3 player already, I don't need a kindle to take over the job - poorly - from a device that already does it quite well, not to mention wasting the fixed, limited amount of storage space on the kindle.

Ooh I eagerly look forward to any thoughts about the DXG. That is a nice looking piece of hardware, I have to admit. too expensive for my taste and budget, though. Nice that it's got twice the storage of the regular, too.

I'm still tickled with this thing though and now just desperately want the dang moleskine case for it so i can carry it around outside the house, but it's like $40 that i definitely don't have right now. :/

Spend $75 and get the Oberon Designs cover.

You will not regret it.

MIL used her kindle as an anchor at the river. That is not good for it. Pete bought her a new one. Good thing prices are dropping.

oh my. while those are very nice covers (and i have a paper journal with a similar kind of cover, gifted to me ages ago), that's far out of my price range. i'd as soon spend $40 for the moleskine one that will protect it at least as well, and spend the remaining $35 on content. i'd not be able to afford books if i bought that!

I will consider a KindleKover for the Graphite once I determine whether or not the standard DX covers will fit it. I don't know that I'd go the $130 for one I really like.

I ended up ordering the Moleskine case. I like their regular notebooks and carry one at all times, and this case has a slot inside that comes with one top-opening notebooks and a spare to boot.

And for what it's worth I still like my Kindle, a week later. :)

One thing I've been thinking though is that these things may never fully catch on and become truly ubiquitous without some sort of public library functionality or similar. Even if you had to physically go to a library with your ereader - or maybe even be able to rent/check one out there - to "pick up" and "return" digital books. Which would be a little silly but at the same time might be a deterrent against piracy, which the publishers would pitch a fit over. If only they'd learn from the MPAA/RIAA what *not* to do.

Or imagine if there was a Netflix for books - a few dollars a month and you can download X number of books at a same time (or maybe per month). That would be brilliant.

I kind of think that Amazon should give you some sort of major discount(like next to free, a buck or two at most) or just outright freely give you a digital copy of any paper book that you buy from them. It'd be the best of both worlds.

The Overdrive system is the one most commonly used by public libraries that lend ebooks (and audio books, etc.). It uses Adobe Digital Editions DRM to enforce the lending period.

I understand it's possible to remove the DRM, after which the ebook can be converted for reading on a Kindle. This would, however, violate license agreements and most probably the DMCA.

Huh, I had no idea such a thing existed already. We don't have it in the local system, that's for sure - and it looks like Kindle isn't directly supported. Bummer, big time. One of the Sonys and the Nook seem to be supported by Overdrive. Yes, removing DRM would violate the DMCA as circumventing an access control device. Although I want access for myself, what I really want is overall simple, ubiquitous access for anybody, and that's not going to be found through an arcane technical process (or even one that people think is, even if it's really 'simple' to someone like you or me). The less steps involved, the better.

However I just discovered we do have something called NetLibrary which has about 7k modern, free titles in PDF, which isn't too too bad. Looks like it's mostly academic, professional, or general public information stuff(childcare and resume-building, skeezy 'how to succeed!' books, etc). Still, at least that's something. Though it's not the direct-to-device lending I had in mind - that's what I want to see. And libraries renting e-readers, too.

Become a regular surfer of the amazon.com Kindle Bestseller lists.

There is a LOT of free content, some of it good, much of it entertaining.

Pretty much anything on project gutenberg has been converted over to kindle format already, and you can download it free.

I have a LOT of free content on my kindle. occasionally I will buy versions of the out of copyright stuff if I want niceties like an active table of contents.

Most of the publishing houses offer free books (via amazon), often to entice you into reading the rest of a series. And you can easily convert PDF files (either with the mobi converter, or something called Calibre, which a lot of kindle folks recommend.

Thanks for the tip, I'm definitely keeping my eye on the bestseller list. The amount of religious fiction, romance, and out-of-copyright stuff has so far been hard to wade through to find anything that I'm really interested in, though - I keep hoping I'll stumble across some gems hidden in there, though.

I've been up to my arse in pre-1932 classic literature since the inception of project gutenberg - i'm specifically trying to avoid loading up my kindle with that stuff. i mean, it's good stuff and i'm glad it's there, don't get me wrong - i've just read most of it that i care to read already. like a million times. and whenever you look for free or cheap resources, out-of-copyright stuff is always waved around, particularly by manufacturers, as "TONS OF FREE CONTENT AVAILABLE!" while technically true, yes, it's also the same "free content" that's been around since my grandparents - or older.

modern content, meanwhile, is stuck in this horrific and complicated licensing/copyright/distribution morass that is strictly controlled by people in suits who haven't read anything beyond the wall street journal for their entire lives, it seems.

in general, it seems like it's getting harder and harder to break established revenue streams and replace them with new ones. of course nobody wants to lose revenue streams but nobody seems willing to even upgrade or shift them i a new direction. these industries are *extremely* risk-averse and overall resistant to even the hint of change. you know, i don't even think Analog/Asimov's took anything but a postal submission until recently, as an example - can you imagine, publications purporting the latest-and-greatest imaginations in science fiction that can't even take an email? it's symptomatic of what it's like that all over the publishing industry.

Hopefully something will break and modern, relevant content will become cheap and ubiquitous, everybody will get paid, nobody will go broke, and happy smiles and fuzzy bunnies for everybody, right? right? yeaaaaahh. :)

The Kindle and the iPad both support their own DRM. Almost everybody else out there supports Adobe's. (It would be easier, in the short term, if everybody supported it, and there are certainly market-based reasons to do so. But that would still leave the "standard" in the control of one company, which isn't fabulous in the long term.)


If you like science fiction or fantasy, and you've never been to the baen.com site, check it out. They offer many of their books for free, especially early volumes of long-established series, and the ones that aren't free usually have the first few chapters available as a teaser.

Adobe is generally awful and I applaud anybody's efforts to get away from them. I don't really like DRM at all, to be honest. Digital music folks are just beginning to understand that nobody really does and allowing access on other devices is probably the best way to sell music - you just have to make it as easy as possible for people to buy things and chances are that they will buy rather than steal. There may always be pirates, but their impact can really be minimized if you make things easy on folks. Also, pricing close to what people see is an appropriate value - that's some free market action there. Publishers jack up prices and act all surprised when suddenly people are just stealing their stuff! I hope book publishers and e-reader manufacturers can come in line with the same ideas without having to go through a repeat of the past 10+ years of stupidity that's been going on in music.

I will definitely check out baen.com, thanks! I'm a big science fiction fan. Slightly less so on the fantasy stuff these days, I'm a bit pickier there, but even so. It looks like a good site, and I like their free library introduction. Good for them, that's really forward-thinking and brilliant, and I hope they make oodles of cash. Or at least enough to keep doing what they're doing and live happily ever after, which is after all the point.

It came two days earlier than estimated. There are benefits to living less than 50 miles from the shipping point.

The DX Graphite is nice, but I'm having some minor challenges adapting to the new navigation strategy. The five way switch is nice, but I thought the Kindle 1 was a lot more intuitive to use out of the box. The shipping container was a lot more utilitarian, but it was sturdy.

It was very easy to transfer files from my computer to the new DX (rather than downloading one at a time from amazon). took about 5 minutes all told. I've been going back and forth through the afternoon between reading and starting to sort things out into categories.

I like the size of the screen, but the keyboard is a little challenging to use, as I can't balance the DX on my hands and type with my thumbs, like I did on the Kindle1 and the Blackberry.

The display is much clearer, with better contrast, and the native PDF reader is fantastic.

I like the graphite gray case color. It makes the Kindle itself fade more into the background than the white.

I think the DX and I are going to get along just fine.

Brilliant, glad to hear it. if i had that kind of dough, i'd love to play with one myself. the bigger screen i can tell already must be superior just by virtue of size, not to mention the improved clarity and contrast.

i do wish they had better sorting options. i like my data neat and orderly, and it's tough to do that on a kindle, which sort of bugs me. call it my inner librarian, but i like my books organized on my own terms, whatever those may be.

is the keyboard thing because the device is that much larger and the keys are spaced apart further? do you have to put it down, or hold it with one hand and hunt-and-peck with the other?

If you have the version 2.5 upgrade you can make "collections" ... sort you books into categories you define. It's pretty easy to do. A lot of users are hoping for the ability to create folders within these collections. So far amazon has been fairly responsive to ideas from customers like that.

Typing is easier if I hold the KDXG with my left hand and type with my right. It is a size of the keypad issue. It's not as easy to type on as the Crackberry.

i definitely did the upgrade pretty much right out of the box, and collections are definitely a step in the right direction. i'd like to see still a bit more advanced sorting, group tagging and moving into collections, stuff like that to make it easier to manage overall.

i'm probably going to pile together a list of my likes and dislikes and email amazon's kindle feedback to let them know what i think. i don't know if any of it would ever happen, but hey, can't hurt, right? i try to follow a general policy of letting companies know when they do something right or when i think something could be changed after an experience with their products. sometimes they even pretend to care, which is awesome.

also, man baen.com, i grabbed a handful of books and have not been disappointed with having some good light scifi reading. very happy with that, so thanks to stevedallas for that :)

For what it's worth, I got my moleskine case today it's very nice, but also very bulky particularly with the notebook insert. it's very book-like now, though it loses that neat charm that the unit has when you're just holding it - the light, thin quality of the unit is completely negated. on the other hand it looks like it'll be quite protected for transport, so i'll be able to take it out of the house with slightly less fear. seriously, it quadruples the thickness of the unit and is two or three times heavier now.

Amazon is reporting more sales of eBooks than of hardcovers.

Yeah, sure. What are the bookstores and libraries reporting?

This "eBook" thing strikes me as a culture-change much like the past few years in the music industry, and before that the photo-copy industry, with much ado about keeping control of money-streams through copyright, etc.

For good or evil, things are probably out of the control of the industry-gurus and in the hands of the market place. A digital reader that satisfies the majority seems to me to be inevitable. I'll even bet that we see the addition of (timely / personalized ?) advertising and product-placement within future ebook texts.

My wife is wishing for an eBook, but unfortunately for me I probably will always go after the hardcover and will have to pay thru the nose for my affection.

It very much is a culture change. It's a change in consumer culture and it's a change in corporate and industry culture. The latter two are the slowest and most difficult and resistant to change and typically the least responsive. But with any technologica product, it's where the cultures meet that things happen. The closer together they can be brought, the more awesome things happen.

Really, I only got an e-reader because of the woot.com sale, though. They were still too expensive otherwise - $40 off was just enough to put it in my price range. They're still new to consumers and new technology. I hope they continue to get better and better. And as I've said before, I hope that it doesn't spiral out of control like digital music did for so long, until distributors finally realised that holy crap, you CAN make money by giving people what they want! Go figure, right?

Another followup, this time about reading lights for e-readers.

I picked up two book lights to try out. One was the eBook*Lite from Target, for $20. It has a special padded clip mechanism that slots onto the top of a kindle (or other device) and a fold-up 3-LED lamp with a low and high setting. It runs on 2 AAA batteries.

The other, also from Target, was an Energizer LED Book Light reading light with clip for $6 and change. One LED, runs on two button-cell lithium batteries. It has a padded clip designed to fit the spine of most books and fits quite well in a hardback.

The verdict? Well, the eBook Lite is good looking and color matches the Kindle, and runs on standard, cheap AAA batteries. The lighting quality is decent for reading, but not stellar - the angle of the unit means there is a definite light gradient from the top of the reading screen where it's the brightest, down to the bottom, where the light grows a bit thin.

The Energizer unit, though only having one LED, is on a very adjustable bendy neck and is surprisingly very, very bright. Center it properly and your screen will be lit up very, very well all over, as it's got a wide-angle beam to it.

It's tough to recommend one or the other - the two biggest factors vary depending on your individual preference and circumstances.

If you're spending too much money on books and can't afford the eBook*Lite, get the Energizer - it's cheap, nicely bright and works great overall, but battery replacement will be a little annoying. However it also has potential uses besides for an e-reader, as it can easily clip to anything. It may not transport in a bag as easily as the Ebook*Lite, though - I can see the clip or flex neck getting damaged easily.

On the other hand, it *is* quite bright and could potentially bother a spouse trying to sleep, which the eBook*Lite wouldn't do nearly as much. Plus AAAs are cheaper to buy than the coin cells, which may help offset the initial investment of $20 versus $6.50 or so. It also folds up into a compact, self-protective package with a small slip case to ward off scratches.

Hope this helps anyone with accessory choices.

Also, I really do like my moleskine case. It's still easy enough to use the kindle, and the energizer lamp clips nicely into the spine whereas the eBook*Lite fits a little awkwardly. It does work, but it's not as nice with the moleskine cover as it is attached to the unadorned Kindle unit itself, where it actually looks quite natural.

I have an LLBean headlamp for a reading light. It is awesome and the light falls wherever I'm looking so I don't have to adjust it.

However I look like a complete geek wearing it.

Since I am a complete geek this is not a significant issue.

I am sad_winslow, and I approve this message.