I read ebooks on my Symbian 60 smartphone. Works great, and since I'm already carrying the phone around with me, there's no new gadget for me to worry about.

Posted by Risto Saarelma on Thursday April 06, 2006 at 6:21 AM

I've got something like 3,000 titles in electronic format, ranging from big fat books (Le Miz and Don Q.) to poetry and short stories. I've found that eBooks are great reads at night (when I don't want to disturb my wife), or in various lines (like the Post Office).

The formats I use the most are Palm's own reader, a format called Mobipocket that Baen Books uses and a format called TomeRaider(hey, got to love that name!) that is used by many books at the Memoware site (home of thousands of free titles!).

I love eBooks. Heck, I had eBooks going back to my Apple Newton. I probably had a good chunk of what was available from Project Gutenberg back then on a couple of memory cards.

But, eBooks, as pushed by Sony, etc., are going to fail.

Why? I don't think a dedicated reader is the approach to take. I think that a multi-use reader, like Risto and his Symbian phone or me with my Sony Clie is a better approach. You also have, like I do, a better chance of using multiple formats (until all the eBook folks agree to a set of standards, we'll have to live with multiple formats...if you want a wide range of titles!). I'm not going to buy a multi-hundred dollar reader from Sony that "locks" me out of the 3,000-odd titles that I've already spent time downloading! Better to use my Clie (also by Sony) which also, by the way, allows me to read MSWord and Excel files as well as Adobe Acrobat files...gee, that covers pretty much everything I need for work as well!

The other thing that is holding this stuff back is "Digital Rights Management". I've bought books from Palm, but most of them are "locked" by using your credit card number. What happens if I change credit cards? I need to download all the **old** books again if I buy any **new** books and unlock all the old books using the new credit card number. Madness!

Then there's pricing. Anybody want to explain to me why I would want to pay nearly the full price of a hardcover for an eBook that has no "reality" (cover, jacket, pages), costs little to distribute (I'm paying the bulk of the cost in download tme), etc.? It's not like it is going to be a collectible and increase in value or anything!

Baen seems to have gotten it right. They release books in multiple formats so you can read them online, on your PeeCee or on some sort of PDA/reader. They don't use digital rights management. They give multiple titles away each year via CD-ROM or online to hook you. The prices are reasonable.

It's too bad that Tor's parent company got "spooked" by the Baen model and pulled Tor out of a distribution deal with Tor. It would have been great to get eBooks of Charles Stross, Ken MacLeod and others! Ah well. Maybe they'll learn someday.

Posted by FredKiesche on Thursday April 06, 2006 at 6:57 AM

Yeah and there's a damn good reason the market was (and still is, I think) device oriented. I mean design-wise you can hardly beat "real" paper book. Today devices sure are usable, but they offer far less comfortable reading experience than paper. Nobody knows what the future will bring us but personally I think there's only one aspect e-books can ever be better in and that is easier handling. I'd certainly prefer to take a really good reader with, say, ten books stored for a trip to mountains than ten paper books.

Posted by Aiax on Thursday April 06, 2006 at 9:57 AM

Hi,

For various reasons (portability, multiple titles, hating booklights), I moved to ebooks in the past several months. I got an Ebookwise 1150 from fictionwise, did some homework on converting between various formats and I am very happy, I have read 15+ full novels, magazines, short stories, and parts of many novels in the last 4 months, mostly at night. I still have read 2 or 3 paper books since, but I read faster on the Ebk1150 and I just do not have the time anymore to read during the day (I used to commute on the train 35 minutes one way) and at night I have to use a booklight to avoid disturbing my wife, or read downstairs where is far less comfortable, plus the stairs creak sometimes Ebk1150 is as close to print (outside eink devices) that it gets but it has limitations (notable ones are storage and low resolution so nothing that cannot be ocr'ed to text files, e.g. no books with diagrams, equations...). I was looking forward to the new eink devices, but the lack of backlight worried me until someone pointed me to Nokia 770 with Fbreader for text and Evince for pdf's. This one is in some ways the pure "lcd" reading experience, so is far away from a print experience, but with tweaking the colors and fonts it is abosultely gorgeous and I am rereading on it books just for the pleasure to read on it.
So with the right device ebook reading is a pleasure. The problems are with lack of titles, cost, drm, and all of those are trackable to low volume compared to print books. People want them (look at the imense success of Project Guttenberg or Baen/Webscriptions), they just do not want the stuff they get right now from most publishers (drm, high cost) and publishers will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into this like p2p did for music, and broadband does it for tv/movies right now.

Liviu

Posted by Liviu Suciu on Monday April 10, 2006 at 12:33 PM

Sony has delayed their eBook project yet again - this time until the holidays (Dec 24?).

Posted by Scott Shaffer on Tuesday July 25, 2006 at 4:00 PM

Oh, that is great news (about Sony). Maybe they realized what a dog of a product it is going to be. Or maybe they are shrinking from fear of Microsoft's "iPod killer" coming in the fall, so they don't want to compete.

And, all the while, Baen Books keeps making converts one by one by one by one...

Posted by Fred Kiesche on Tuesday July 25, 2006 at 8:13 PM