I’ve just started a project myself.

Time will tell how sucessful these endeavors prove to be.

Although he does bring up a good point. I will need to look into releasing e-Books when the story gets large enough.

Garson: I, too, like to check out relevant sites at times when I’m reading. One problem is that sites come and go. Ideally books themselves can have stable links, as well as deep linking, so you can find specifics in one book while reading another. (Oh no! I’ve offended John Updike.)

Thanks,
David

An excerpt from “The Crystal World” by J. G. Ballard:
The light at Port Matarre is always like this, very heavy and penumbral — do you know Böcklin’s painting, ‘Island of the Dead,’ where the cypresses stand guard above a cliff pierced by a hypogeum, while a storm hovers over the sea?

I was able to rapidly find an electronic representation of the painting “Island of the Dead” online and this helped me to understand Ballard’s mood building citation. I was also able to look up the word “hypogeum” which was not part of my vocabulary.

An excerpt from “Pickman’s Model” by H. P. Lovecraft:
That’s because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear – the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness. I don’t have to tell you why a Fuseli really brings a shiver while a cheap ghost-story frontispiece merely makes us laugh.

Online I was able to determine the images that caused Howard Phillips Lovecraft to shiver by finding two variants of Fuseli’s most famous painting subject entitled “Nightmare”. Wikipedia has a relevant article, and it is fun to know what frightens the frightener.

An excerpt from “Ubik” by P. K. Dick:
He noticed then that subtle background music hung over the lounge. It had been there all this time. The same as on the chopper. “Dies irae, dies illa,” the voices sang darkly. “Solvet saeclum in favilla, teste David cum Sybilla.” The Verdi Requiem, he realized.

I was able to read about The Verdi Requiem and to find a translation of the lyrics that P. K. Dick does not provide. The lyrics were valuable in deciphering Dick’s novel I believe. An mp3 of the requiem also helped me to hear what Dick was probably hearing in his mind during the composition of his novel.

An excerpt containing the initial sentences of “Tau Zero” by Poul Anderson:
“Look – there – rising over the Hand of God. Is it?”
“Yes, I think so. Our ship.”
They were the last to go as Millesgården was closed.

This beginning book passage was confusing. Online I determined that Millesgården is a museum with a collection of statuary by Carl Milles. “Hand of God” is one of the celebrated sculptures that he created and it has several variants. Seeing an image of the sculpture as it appears in Millesgården was wonderful and it helped to clarify that the phrase “our ship” refers to a spaceship.

Perhaps these examples and others from your experience can help to show that ebook hardware with internet connections and web browsers can help intensify the reading experience.

I may be an exception, but I read mainly fiction and poetry only in bed (or perhaps a very comfy chair). I almost never read web fiction on my monitor unless I have converted it to some kind of ebook first. Tthis may have to do with the horizontal orientation of the Opera browser on the Nokia 770 compared to the vertical orientation of the fbreader reading software. Also, because most of the sites I read are not designed for mobile devices, they are often difficult to read in a web browser.

Call me a techno-optimist, but I think the next generation of ebook readers will transform the world! Yes, $350 is still too high for essentially a reading device, but I would gladly pay a pretty penny if it accomplishes half of what it claims to do. I’ve taught literature at universities before; now and especially when the Sony Reader comes out, it will be a no brainer for scholars in history and literature departments to buy these things in addition to laptops.

most of the people I know have no idea of what I mean when I say “ebook.” For them it simply means, “something you read on your laptop” (usually a PDF).

Yes, that’s what I’m driving at. And their notion of an ebook is a valid one. The most successful and widely read ebooks in existence are structured as either Web sites or PDF files.

And in that case, there really is no difference in the reading experience (in terms of design and hardware).

But there is one difference, I think — the successful web-page/PDF ebooks are largely DRM-free.

Perhaps the differences will become apparent as we have more devices and reading systems.

Personally, I doubt it. I think the “download a file and read it offline” model of ebooks has had its day (short as it may have been). My hypothesis is that normal computers (laptops and otherwise) and cellphones are the devices that people will buy and carry, and any e-reading that is going to be done will be done primarily on those. The PDA and the hardware book-reader are gadget ideas that failed in the marketplace, and it’s difficult to see what could ever revive them. And what’s more, the laptop and cellphone that people read on will be continuously connected (no more “offline”).

Sure, there are some possible odd places where you might see e-reading hardware. A college or other educational institution might require them for textbooks; they might succeed in China, as others have posited. But long-term, it’s hard to see how they can compete.

By the way, why do you continue to talk about RSS? RSS is a simple mechanism to transform pull-notification of web-site changes into pseudo-push notification. To compare it to ebooks is to compare apples and oranges.

See my post to the ebook-community list about this (which has generated a remarkably small follow-up trail — perhaps because the “alternative future” meme is so deeply embedded in the readers of that list). See the On-Line Books Page for a listing of additional on-line books.

Pro-Ebook:
Editability. I can underline, highlight, boookmark, add a comment or a drawing, etc. This may not sound interesting for fiction, but very interesting for non-fiction. I work in higher education and I see a real potential there (I just wish others saw it, too!).

Pro-Offline Reading:
Independance. As long as I have an SD card, I have a library in my hand. I can read on planes, at the beach, when waiting in line, and in many more places where I doubt I would find an Internet connection. Even when I am in the States I need to look for a Panera to go online when on the go. Otherwise, I would have to pay (like at Starbucks), so here is one more point: I would pay double if the content I would like to read was not free – once for the content, and, additionally, every single time I would like to access it on the go.

Bob: I think I understand what you’re getting after. Better to follow 5 RSS feeds than 300. Interestingly, I configured a new bloglines account, imported my OPML file of my 300 feeds to the new account and started deleting as many feeds as I could. I found it impossible to limit myself to under 100. Scary realization. I intentionally tried to limit my feeds to those offering a lot of meaty content, but I still couldn’t crack 100.

Mikolaj: Although I’m glad “messy navigation with scrollbars” exist, I wonder why we would actually use it. It’s more helpful for previewing the book than actually going through it.

Liviu: I couldn’t decide whether casual/occasional reading (such as reference works) would work better as ebooks or as web-accessible content.

To go a little deeper (and away from presentation technology and toward content), if the “book” part of ebook implies something that has been published in the traditional sense (i.e. it’s gone through a selection process and then been edited/designed to professional standards) then there’s your fundamental difference from a blog or web feed.

There is no way web surfing/rss feeds/browsers will replace fiction books. E-books are just a manifestation of books and while they have several differences with the p-books (so I agree we should not try to imitate the p-book experience exactly but take advantage of the e possibilities), they are still books. So they still require some concentration, some privacy/isolation, fixed content (not all of us are storytellers) and so on.
For nonfiction and manuals and more generally books that are intrinsically split in chunks (fiction short stories too), there may be a case for browsers/feed readers but we are still far away from the technical capability to make it feasible on the publishing scale of today.

Liviu

Say, I finished reading more or less at 2/3 of a pdf => scroll-bar to ca. 2/3, have I been here already? No – move a a little back, Yes – a little forward.

Normally, you would automatically mix both TOC and “messy navigation” to quickly get where you want. Web content lacks this flexibility.