(no subject)

[catsittingstill]

Yesterday I had a thought.  Maybe I should try reading e-books before I actually spend lots of money on a reader.

 

I decided try out  e-books  on my PDA.  There's a free download of Mobipocket reader for it, and I can download free unsecured Mobipocke e-books from the Baen Free Library, so it doesn't cost anything. I could see if that "carrying many books around in a small package" thing is really as useful as I think.

Yesterday I fired up the web browser on my palm pilot (something I almost never do, as it takes forever) and downloaded and installed Mobipocket Reader. 

At that point I was much cheered to see that the e-books I had (which had originally shown up in Word To Go, and dispayed with html markup imbedded, which was distracting) were in the Reader's library, and appeared to display normally.

Then I tried to download some books from the Baen Free Library, discovering in the process that my PDA web browser is willing to download them, but cannot figure out where to put them, and I can't figure out how to get into its file structure to move things around.  So I downloaded the books on my computer and went through the inevitable struggle to get the computer to talk to the PDA.

Speaking of which, I think I have figured out why the PDA is always complaining that the Bluetooth is occupied by some other program—I think I need to select the Bluetooth connection in the Prefs, and wait until the little animation at the bottom of the screen has actually quit before I try to hotsync.  But anyway, once I actually got it to sync, I got the .prc files to transfer over reasonably easily, though it took several minutes.  Now I am the happy possessor of 1632, 1633, Forward the Mage, Crawling Between Heaven And Earth, Med Ship, and Planets of Adventure.

I will say that, while I don't have much experience synching the PDA with my Mac, precisely because it is such a hassle, I don't consider myself generally technically challenged.  But I found the whole process of getting the e-books into my PDA a bit frustrating.

The display is adequate.  It's obviously a backlit screen and not e-Ink (but I've never seen e-Ink; is it really as nice as they say?).  It displays about 90 words in its smallest type, which is at a guess about like 9 or 10 point in most fonts.  The font displayed is not fancy but perfectly adequate.  It's nice that it's small enough to fit in a pocket, though sitting on it might be ill-advised.

I will try reading some of the books and see what I think.  The format (unsecured Mobipocket) of the books I have is also one of the formats the Kindle will read, so presumably my download time has not been wasted whatever happens.

Also I have been pointed toward the Bookeen Cybook Gen 3 as a possible e-book reader.  I have checked that out somewhat, and will consider it further.  I like that it supports more formats natively than the Kindle, but dislike the thought of being shut out of Amazon's content (though that's Amazon's bad, not the Cybook's, and the Kindle would shut me out of secured Mobipocket content (or the subset of it that is not using Amazon's DRM--apparently Amazon books are Mobipocket, just with a different DRM.  Just to be difficult, I guess.)

Comments

[mdlbear]

eInk is very nice, though the screens are a little small at the moment. It's roughly the quality of a cheap mass-market paperback, and displays about the same amount of text. Resolution is 150dpi. The flash when you go to the next page is annoying; there are things that can be done about that, but they're still experimental and top secret.

The Bookeen looks very cool.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

And the Cybook Gen 3 and Kindle displays 4 greys (black, "white" and two greys), whereas the Sony displays 8 greys and the iLiad 16. The Sony and the Kindle reportedly handle PDF "sortof", so the Sony says "yes we handle pdf" and the Kindle says "no, we don't handle pdf" The iLiad has a larger screen, handles pdfs (supposedly pretty well) and even lets you make notes by drawing on the screen with a stylus, but saves the notes as JPEG (or maybe that was GIF) files. Of course, the iLiad costs 700$

Sigh. Nothing is really *there* yet.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Thinking. They may run you off the net for that.

Me, I've been doing a lot of reading on LCD monitors, because a lot of the documents I've been working on are most easily (or only) available as PDF files. Works great if you flip the monitor to a vertical format (or if you have a huge expensive monitor) but is rather tiring.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I read a lot of pdfs on screen when I was helping write grants and journal articles. Eventually my eyes got so tired I printed everything out. That also let me write little summary notes on the papers. But I needed a file box to hold all the papers, and I had to store them alphabetically by first author's last name to be able to find anything.

Which didn't work all that well because the guy I was working with could never remember the first author of the paper he wanted me to give him.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Chuckle. I commend to your attention the Jabref free citation database manager; it has space for abstracts, comments, and reviews, which is usually enough to locate a paper. It's funny; for one of last week's seminars we read the famous Mark Prensky "Digital Natives" paper and I showed up with an annotated paper copy. Acrobat Standard (regular price $toomuch, educational price $onlyalittletoomuch) does allow one to annotate a document but, really, unless I needed it for something else, I think I'd save the money; it's just not worth what they're charging.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Hmm. So far I haven't seen any method of annotating pdfs that I like better than writing on the paper--except for the iLiad, and that's just out of my price range.

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

If you want to be driven nuts by news on this front, try http://www.teleread.org/blog -- there are plenty of options, and there are rumors of more in the near future (i.e., the iRex iLiad partnering with someone, or A4-sized eInk readers).

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

It would be really cool to have new options (though the iLiad is very expensive...

I didn't see anything there about A4 (is that 8 1/2 by 11?) eInk readers, though I think it would make it much more feasable for the readers to handle pdfs.

I did see that iRiver apparently showed a prototype e-book reader that was a folio, (two screens side by side like the facing pages of a book) which is an idea I really like, since I think it gives a lot more display flexibility (display a page each of two different books to compare two accounts of something, look at an illustration on one page while reading an explanation of it on another, things like that, plus you could close the reader to protect the screens when you put it in a pocket, and maybe you could even open it all the way out flat and view pdfs in landscape (though the hinge in the middle would tend to break up the page), though I may be in the minority, based on the comments about the prototype.

Maybe I should hold off a few years and see what upcoming events will bring :-)

[mdlbear]

A4 is the metric version of letter-sized paper; it's slightly narrower and slightly longer. (The geometry of metric paper sizes is fascinating, but not really relevant except to note that A[n+1] is exactly half the size of A[n].)

I like the folio idea.

I'm definitely going to hold back a couple of years; I think my current needs will be met by the XO (One Laptop Per Child) machine and various Linux-based PDAs.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Well, knowing that A4 is about US standard letter and A5 is one half that (and presumably A3 is twice that and so on) is actually pretty helpful.

I did look at the XO, but while everyone says how great it would be for an e-book reader, I couldn't find any admission that there actually is any program to read e-books on it yet...

I do like that it folds up into a tablet, though. That's a neat form factor.

I find that reading from a PDA in the light is okay, but reading from it in the dark seems to make my eyes ache after a while. Also the battery on my PDA has to be recharged *much* more often when I spend hours reading from it :-). On the bright side, I finally (as long as I was doing all the other messing about with it) removed that #$%^ screen protector that came with it, and that I foolishly put on first thing, and it's noticeably easier to write on it now.

[mdlbear]

Not sure about specialized ebook formats; it depends on whether the software has been ported to Linux. But there is certainly software on Linux to read PDF, Postscript, HTML, and plain text as well as all common image formats, and OpenOffice does a pretty good job on Microsoft Office formats. I don't anticipate any trouble.