e-books and e-readers: post here

[chuck45]

My wife got me a Kindle for Christmas (the small one) and I love it. I was a bit skeptical the first time I saw one around a campfire but everyone that had one spoke so highly of it that I decided I'd like to have one.

The reading experience is better than I thought it would be. After reading five books on it since Christmas I think I may like it better than reading an actual book. It looks like the only physical books that I'll be buying are the ones I really want to markup, create a personalized topical index for, and highlight. For novels and general reading the kindle is great. I vascilated between the small kindle and the DX but decided to go small because it would be easier to handle when reading in bed etc.

I'm enjoying reading current books for a reasonable price and not having to wait for the paperback to come out. I also like being able to download a book, instantly, if while I hear it discussed on a talk radio program.

I am a big time blog reader and you can subscribe to blogs and have them delivered outmatically to the kindle while you travel.

I love it! FWIW I'm not into all purpose devices. I like discrete devices that do one thing extremely well.

[haven]

Amazon's Kindle was the clear winner in sales this past holiday season. But more e-book competitors are appearing, including the expected announcement by Apple next week. To keep publishers interested in the Kindle platform, Amazon just announced a new scheme for sharing the purchase price of an e-book.

Under the new plan, publishers will receive 70% of the revenue, minus a small amount to help pay for Amazon's costs of downloading the book. That's quite an improvement over the 50% or so that publishers receive from Amazon today. The result: More publishers will choose Kindle, and Kindle customers will have a wider range of publications to purchase. This agreement sets a new standard that other online e-book stores (Barnes & Noble, Borders, iTunes, etc) will have to match.

There are conditions associated with the new plan. First, the price of the e-book must be 20% lower than the lowest price of a physical copy, regardless of where it's sold. Second, the price of the e-book has to be less than $9.99. Third, the e-book can be sold in any country where the publisher has rights to sell the physical book. Fourth, publishers have to agree that the e-book can be presented in all ways the Kindle technology is capable of.

This last point is interesting. It might have something to do with a recent ruling that e-book readers can't be required in classrooms unless blind students have equal access. Universities including Case Western Reserve U. in Cleveland, Pace University in New York City, Reed College in Portland, and Arizona State in Tempe AZ had plans to give Kindles containing course materials to their students. The National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind brought suit on the grounds that blind students would be at a disadvantage. The Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability. The Department of Justice agreed. As a result, the colleges have agreed to halt plans to use the Kindle for the time being.

The colleges' decision is a blow to Amazon, which has big plans to sell the Kindle to the education market. Anybody who has purchased college course books recently knows the exorbitant price of academic textbooks. Every primary and secondary school district spends a fortune each year to buy, catalog, store, and distribute textbooks. Purchasing e-book readers and distributing content electronically would be a lot cheaper for students and taxpayers.

So it's important for Amazon to be able to sell Kindles and e-book content to schools. One way to satisfy the concerns of blind students and their advocates is for e-books to be presented through text to speech translation. This new agreement with publishers will assure that the e-book content can be presented in many ways.

[henrinaiara]

go for kindle mate

[C Red]

Just got my Nook yesterday. So far I love it. Seems easy too read so far. Very easy to navigate. I do feel like it needs a cover to protect it. It is nice that you can read any book that Barnes and Nobel sells while you are physically in one of the stores. I have a couple of long flights in a week, so I will get a lot of chances to use it.

[BKCowGod]

My iPhone has Stanza and a direct connection to Project Gutenberg. All for free... I love the sharp screen, and the fact that I don't have to carry a second electric device with me.

I would highly recommend Stanza for anybody with an iDevice - I've played with Kindles and Nooks and Crannies and even the aforementioned Softbook (I even had an ebook reader on my Newton, remember those?) and at the moment I don't see the benefit of the standalone product.

But even more than that, I love walking into Recycle Bookstore and paying $2 for a trashy Frederick Forsyth novel and knowing that if I drop it in the bathtub I'm only out $2.

[nwoods]

I really enjoy my Kindle, but I wouldn't want to use it as a textbook replacement. To hard to Scan or Skim through.

[haven]

Apple just entered the e-book reader in a big way. The Apple iPad is a 9.7 inch color LCD e-book reader that weighs about 1.5 lbs. The iPad will display e-books in the ePub format. You can choose font style and size of text.

The iPad is linked to an online store run by Apple called iBook Store. The iPad uses a bookshelf view of titles stored on the machine.

At the announcement of the iPad, the NY Times displayed a version of its newspaper formatted for the iPad. The layout included video clips embedded with stories. No word on subscription price yet.

The iPad will be delivered in 60 days. Prices start at $499.

[haven]

One function the iPad is supposed to be very good at is the presentation of e-books. Let's see how the iPad compares with the Kindle DX and the new Sony Reader Daily Edition.

-------------------
Physical size
-------------------
Kindle DX: 10.4" x 7.2" x 0.38" , 18.9 oz w/ Whispernet 3G

iPad: 9.56″ x 7.47″ x 0.5″, 25.6 oz w/ 3G

Sony: 8.125" x 5.0" x 0.6" , 12.75 oz w/ 3G


-------------------
Screen
-------------------
Kindle DX: 9.7 inch E-Ink screen, 1200 x 824 pixels, 150 ppi
16 levels of grey
excellent daylight visibility

iPad: 9.7 inch color IPS LCD screen, 1024 x 768 pixels, 132 ppi
162,144 colors (18 bit color), same as iPhone and iPod Touch (unverified)
poor to impossible daylight visibility, like a laptop

Sony: 7.1 inches E-Ink Vizplex screen, 1024 x 600 pixels
16 levels of grey
daylight visibility

-------------------
Input
-------------------

Kindle DX: chiclet keyboard at bottom, navigation buttons on right
no touchscreen, no Bluetooth options

iPad: multi-touch screen, navigate by gestures, single on/off button
Keyboard can be attached by dock or Bluetooth

Sony: touch screen, virtual navigation keys, virtual keyboard



-------------------
Other features
-------------------
Kindle DX: Text to Voice, bookmark pages, annotate pages, zoom in on text or graphics (no zoom for PDF files), no bookmarks in audio files?
limited font styles (possible to hack in new fonts)

iPad: Text to Voice, zoom in (including PDF), bookmarks for text and audio books, (not sure about annotations connected to particular e-book page)
Lots of choices for e-book font style and size

Sony: choose from 6 font sizes; highlight and annotate pages using included stylus, make bookmarks, minimize margins setting, export notes to PC or Mac using Sony Reader Library software, built in New Oxford American dictionary


-------------------
Use as Web Browser
-------------------
to access newspapers, periodicals, blogs online

Kindle DX: Whispernet 3G (Sprint), no WiFi
browser speed is limited by the slow refresh of the E-Ink screen
Grey scale screen limits legibility of images
No support for Flash
no charge for Whispernet access

iPad: WiFi or 3G (AT&T)
very fast page refresh, scrolling
color screen better for images, graphics, movies
YouTube app
no support for Flash content
$30 a month charge for unlimited AT&T 3G access

Sony: No web browser, just access to Sony Reader store
no charge for 3G access

-------------------
Purchase Price
-------------------
Kindle DX: $489
includes Sprint 3G modem and 4 GB flash storage

IPad: $629
includes AT&T 3G modem, 16 GB Flash storage

Sony: $400
includes 3G modem, 1.6 GB flash built in, SDHC card slot

------------------
E-Book Price
------------------
Amazon: $9.99 bestsellers, more for other titles
Apple iBook store: $12.99 and up
Sony Reader Store:

------------------
E-Book formats
------------------
Amazon: AZW Amazon proprietary, MOBI, PRC, TXT, TPZ, PDF
Kindle readers for iPod, PC (Mac reader coming)

iPad: EPub, TXT, PDF, others?
E-Pub readers available for iMac, iPod, PC

Sony: ePub, PDF, TXT, Microsoft Word, RTF, Adobe Digital Editions

[haven]

A few recent announcements:

Amazon has acquired a small company with expertise in controlling
touch screens. Amazon is also advertising jobs for people who
know about multi-touch programming. These developments fuel
speculation that the next version of the Kindle will have a color
multi-touch display.

A few months after Apple released the iPhone and the iPod, prices were
cut to increase sales. I have read estimates that Apple will make $200
on the $499 (lowest priced) iPad, and much more on the more expensive
models. That leaves Apple lots of room to cut prices this Summer.

Amazon strong-armed publishers into accepting the $9.99 price for
best selling ebooks. But the publishers are not happy with this low
figure. A publishers' revolt is under way to raise the price to $13 or
$14, which, not coincidentally, is the amount Apple says ebooks will cost
in the new iBookstore.

The Barnes and Noble nook (they prefer the lower case "n") will
receive a firmware update 1.20 this week. The nook sold out during
the holidays, and only recently returned to B&N's web site. Price
for the nook, which has the same 6" e-ink reading area as the small
Kindle, is $259.

FT Press, a technical and business publisher, just announced a series
of short ebooks. These are abbreviated versions of longer works, and
also newly published material. Length ranges from 1000 to 5000 words,
or 4 to 20 pages, using the rule of 250 words per printed page. The
shorter works are sold for $1.99 in the Elements series. Longer works
are called Shorts, and are priced at $2.99.

FT Press offers about 250 titles today in the Elements and Shorts series,
and expects to offer about 500 by the end of the year. They are
available through Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble ebook stores.

Cynics might say these abbreviated books pander to the short attention
span of today's readers. Others hope this might revive the lost art of
the essay. We'll see.

[haven]

The Spring Design Alex e-reader is available for pre-order now. Delivery is schedule for mid April. Price: $399, which is reasonable for an e-reader that offers full Internet access as well.

The Alex has two displays. One is for reading books, the other for general computing. The upper screen is about the size of the original Kindle display. The lower screen is the size of the typical smart phone screen, turned sideways.
The upper screen: trans-reflective greyscale LCD, 6 inches diagonal, 600 x 800 pixels, 167 pixels/inch, 8 levels of grey
The lower screen: backlit color LCD, 3.5 inches diagonal, 320 x 480 pixels, millions of colors, touchscreen

If this sounds familiar, the Barnes and Noble Nook has a similar layout. The Nook's small color touchscreen is used primarily to navigate through ebooks currently loaded onto the reader. The Nook was originally sold without a web browser, but third parties have figured out how to "jailbreak" the Nook and add web browsing. The Nook costs $259.

Spring Design says the Alex is compatible with Adobe's version of the ePub format, which offers digital rights management features to publishers. Several web sites, including the Google Books web pages (http://books.google.com/books) offer lots of books and magazines in ePub format for free.

The Alex includes a "Touch and Extend" feature that lets you view content on both screens simultaneously. I'm unclear about how this works, or when you'd want to use it. Perhaps you can expand a web page to browse it more easily. This might be one way to read publications that are available online in various formats, but not available for download in ePub format.

Overall size of the Alex is 4.7 x 8.9 x 0.4 inches, weight 11 ounces. The Alex has 2GB of flash memory internally, and has an SDHC card slot for removable storage. The built in battery is rated for 7500 page turns or 6 hours of multimedia playback.

The computer controlling everything is based around a Marvell ARM smart phone processor and the Android OS. The Alex device includes a WiFi radio for access to the Internet. 3G cell phone links are optional.

http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/03/16...ing-mid-april/

https://www.springdesign.com/us/index.action