The world as frankps sees it!
Posts tagged eBooks
The perfect reading device? We are getting close …
0Amazon released Kindle 2 yesterday. I must say that it is a bit to expensive, US $ 359. The price makes it compete with small laptops, like the popular “netbooks”. But having said that, you have free wireless with Verzion. Yepp, you read correctly, Amazon pays the bill. Reviews seem to conclude with it is close to perfect! CrunchGear has published an unboxing video in high quality worth seeing:
Funnily enough, more or less at the same time as Kindle 2 gets released, one of my professors, Karen O’Brien, publishes a book that it is also available in the Kindle-format. A book about environmental change and globalization, that is actually available in an environmental friendly format! It’s on my list of books I would like to read. The collection of content available for Kindle is impressive: Over 240,000 books plus U.S. and international newspapers, magazines, and blogs available. I would love to have one, but they are sadly not sold in Europe.
Trends of 2009
03 years ago
The year has more or less come to an end. It has been a very exciting year for me, as I have been working with projects like accessability, web standards and Internet trends. So let me dedicate one of this years’ last blog updates to the trends that I think we will see appearing next year.
And yes, you can comment on this blog now in 2008 and come back to it in 2010, and then criticize me for all the wrong predictions that I made.
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It’s getting easier to be Frank …
03 years ago
I have promised myself to try to live in an environmental friendly way. This year I have managed to cut my paper use to a minimum, I have almost not bought a newspaper, magazine or printed out a PDF! The same goes for books, I have bought 6 eBooks so far this year and with O’Reilly going digital without DRM I guess several books are to be read on my Cybook in the time to come! It is not the best selection, but at least it is a start. And if Bookeen soon could update the Cybook with ePub support, computer books would be a pleasant reading on these devices.
Why ePub? Cause Mobipocket doesn’t currently support some of the elements that are pretty critical to many of technical books, for example tables and monospaced fonts. Right now if you see a proper table in a Kindle book or Cybook, it’s actually just an image of the table (which means it’s neither searchable nor resizable, two key features in an ebook).
Great changes to come to Norwegian bookstores soon?
03 years ago
It is funny to see that books are going through their biggest change in nearly 400 years. They are starting to migrated to electronic reading devices. So called “ebooks”, such as Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony eBook, Booken Cybook and the iLiad, enable you to read on a device lighter than a paperback with electronic ink. The ebook can be read comfortably in almost any light conditions, including on beaches. It has no need for a backlit screen that fades away at inopportune moments. In other words an almost perfect device better than traditional books: They save paper and can be reproduced at low cost; users can increase the type size and read while eating, using a finger as a page-turner and already today thousands of books can legally be downloaded from the web.
This has made the Norwegian book industry go offensive. The Norwegian Bokhandlerforeningen has learned from the music industry, who for years have been on the defence in relation to consumers with new MP3 players. Bookstores have already equipped their employees with digital eBook readers, so that they can get to know the technology before the regular readers start buying e-books. The committee working on introducing eBooks in Norway has no authority to determine prices, but suggests fixed price also on e-books. This price will probably 30 – 50 % lower than in today’s paper based books, but still a bit higher then the current paperback books. When the bookstores start selling eBooks, readers will get a six pages reading demo of each. The online shop Amazon has had such an offer in place for years.
Internationally we have seen with so many innovations, that manufacturers try to build their devices with their “own” locked format (for example iTMS), in the hope that they will become the standard for the world or to simply milk the market! Sony’s eBook only offers the books Sony wants to sell (without Internet access) and the same goes with Amazon and their Kindle. The unique about this Norwegian variation of book samples is that it has been able, through cooperation between publishers, to create one solution, in stead of each bookstore chain making their own! This will turn out to be a brilliant tactical move. We have a dusin Norwegian online music shop, all of them running their own solution. I guess that is one of the main reasons for iTunes Music Store great success.
I can’t wait getting my hands on some eBooks in Norwegian. I love my Cybook, and have read 6 books on it already. Sadly the time estimate for the “tipping point” for digital book distribution is still 2 – 5 years away. They are probably not far from the truth, as the consumers need more reading devices on the market. The bookstores will then also have installed so-called print on demand. Using a 1-2 square feet “Espresso Book Machine”, the stores will be able to print out a book in the time it takes to drink an espresso (about 3 minutes). The eBooks will of course be equipped with a DRM-solution, and that is understandable. Authors can not as easily as musicians go on tours and play their music.
O’Reilly is probably the first big computer book house going digital. They this month announced that they will offer a select number of books as a bundle of three ebook formats (EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket) for a single price at or below the book’s cover price, and they are starting early next month. These are the first books out: iPhone: The Missing Manual, Windows Vista: The Missing Manual, Facebook: The Missing Manual, Making Things Happen, Open Sources 2.0, The Art of Agile Development and Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3ed. This is a nice pilot project and all the books will be released without any DRM, but with some custom watermarking options. The great thing is that with these three formats, customers should be able to read the books with most current ebook software and devices. I am a bit sceptical to reading computer books in ebook formats (.epub and mobipocket), cause of all the screenshots. But I will buy the missing manual for Vista, just to have a try.
The Cybook is more then just an eBook
0
It’s been a long time since I have been writing about the Cybook and ebook readers in general.
I am still the same great fan of these devices, if not bigger. I have read more or less the whole Golden Compass triology on the Cybook, and my eyes are so relaxed. The screen is so much better to read on then a LCD screen. It is truely the closest you can get to paper. My New Year’s Eve resolution was to not print paper for personal reading this year, I haven’t managed that completly. I still prefer to read tutorials with screenshots on paper, but more or less everything else I read on screen. And belive me, I have not missed the traditional books a single day! The Cybook is more or less constantly with me, on the subway to and from work, in coffeebars and out on my local pub. Battery is long lasting. I have only had to recharge it once since I bought it in January.