ebook readers and price drops

[sad_winslow]

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

[Shawnee123]

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.

[sad_winslow]

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.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by sad_winslow

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.

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.

[wanderer]

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.

[wolf]

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.

[sad_winslow]

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.

[Cicero]

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.

[wolf]

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.

[sad_winslow]

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?

[wanderer]

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

[Lamplighter]

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

[sad_winslow]

Originally Posted by wanderer

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

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.

[sad_winslow]

Originally Posted by Lamplighter

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

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.

[SteveDallas]

Originally Posted by sad_winslow

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.

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.