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Finding e-books to read on-line
September 24, 2009 | 3:40 am
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By Chris Meadows
Related: How do you track down specific e-books—and compare prices?
On CNet, Don Reisinger looks at websites that allow book reading on-line. As might be expected, he looks at quite a few sites but barely even scratches the surface.
The sites Reisinger covers are the Alex Catalogue of Electronic Books, AskSam, Bartleby, Google Books, Great Books and Classics, Perseus Digital Library, and of course Project Gutenberg. He does not mention Feedbooks, Manybooks, Scribd, or any of the countless others that are out there. But then, there are so many such sites that no article could list more than a small number.
The sites he does cover are decent enough for reading books on-line. But the fact that the article’s focus is on reading on-line makes it flawed, in my opinion. Almost nobody is going to want to read books on-line, from a computer screen. Downloading them to a hand-held device makes them much easier to read.
For all that, Reisinger does have a decent list of sites, and a good explanation of what makes each one great. If on-line book reading is your thing, there are some good resources here.
Technorati Tags: Don Reisinger,CNet,e-books,web books,Alex Catalogue,Ask Sam,Bartleby,Google Books,Great Books and Classics,Perseus Digital Library,Project Gutenberg
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Comments:
A lot of people keep saying that… just like they say PDF is a failure as an e-book format. But the fact is, more people download e-books in PDF formats, and more people read those PDFs on home computers and laptops, than portable reading consumers want to admit. Don’t sell all those people short, Chris.
Seriously. If significant numbers of people *wanted* to read e-books on their desktop computers or laptops, they would already have been doing so for a couple of decades, by now, and e-books would have been a thriving product by 2000. The Glassbook application was a highly functional e-reader program that saved one’s library, and allowed bookmarking, annotating and highlighting. There was some slight interest early on among consumers — RocketBook and SoftBook were coming out with dedicated e-readers at about the same time; and the Glassbook app was free. Adobe purchased Glassbook, re-named it Adobe Reader (it remained free), and then it died or something. (Darnit! I paid over six bucks for that Glassbook edition of ‘The Right Hand of Evil’, and never got around to reading it!) And by then, online reading had already been possible for years and years and years. Since the mid-70′s, I think. But electronic reading didn’t really catch on until the e-ink readers started to land in the hands of the consumers who wanted them.
I’m starting to think that regardless what technology we’re talking about, there’s going to be a clump of users in the world who will be devoted, heart and soul, to the *penultimate* technology. Many of the same people who were saying in 1999, “Oh. I could never read on a screen” (never mind the fact that that was all they were doing when they were seated at a computer) are now saying, “Why would I spend all that money on a dedicated e-ink reader? I can read just fine on my home computer.” And now they do. Why the heck not? I do it some, myself. (But only if all other options have been exhausted. I’d rather read on my laptop than print the thing out, that’s for sure.) And I am convinced that the existence of e-ink readers gave a *very* serious boost to the concept of reading on iPhones & iPod touches. (I read on my iPod touch *a lot*, myself, even though I have a Kindle 2.)
Well, how do you respond then to Joe Wickert’s comments on the subject?
Fact is, significant numbers of people have been reading on PCs and laptops for the past 2 decades (as well as printing out material, but not always). Adobe’s reader never “died or something”… it became the most ubiquitous reader available, worldwide.
I realize many people either don’t like Adobe Reader, or just don’t like Adobe. But that doesn’t change the reader’s status in the market. It also doesn’t negate the marketing methods Adobe used to get it there. Other reading format supporters could learn a thing or two from how Adobe managed that.
For the record: I rarely read e-books in PDF format these days. But that’s because I can get most of the e-books I’m interested in, in other formats that I prefer personally. When I can only get a PDF, I make sure it is a tagged PDF, which I can read on my PDA with no trouble… just like any other e-book.
My point with my initial comment wasn’t that pdf’s are marginal, or that people ‘don’t read on their computers’. For heaven’s sake. Reading is what people are *mostly* doing on their computers. That’s what blogs and email *are*. (Although they can also be *writing* online, and may be construed as interactive, as well.) My real point, is that if the reading public really and truly *did* “read online” — and I don’t mean little articles here & there; I mean “Lonesome Dove” by Larry McMurtry. “Anathem” by Neal Stephenson. “Der Zauberberg” by Thomas Mann. “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace. If the reading public really and truly did/does ‘read online’, why hadn’t e-book sales percentages already passed the double digits *ten years ago*? Why are publishers only getting interested in e-formats *now* (meaning since about 2 years ago)? Today the mere fact that e-book sales have popped into the *whole-number single digits* is a phenomenon. Why isn’t it bigger, if pdf’s are so ideal for the purpose?
And – yes, pdf’s and Adobe Reader clearly ‘dominate’. Or should I say, the software plug-in by that name — which is *nothing* like the Glassbook Reader — dominates in the marketplace. (Adobe Digital Editions is just a glorified Acrobat Reader which also lacks most of Glassbook’s functionality.)
But pdf just isn’t very good; at least not for professional and scholarly reading. Because there remains the dissatisfying fact that except under very special circumstances, one still cannot annotate or highlight. Pdf is a format designed to be printed onto 8-1/2 x 11″ paper, and is therefore an even more rigid print analog than any e-ink reader in the world. Pdf’s are frozen into their stored aspect ratio, and on a tiny device, their fonts are also tiny. Adobe Acrobat-created pdf’s didn’t even ‘flow’ correctly into my instance of Adobe Reader for Pocket PC (Adobe’s own product!) back when I was trying to do course readings on my Dell Axim. Until some of this changes, those having to read pdf’s will continue to carry a ‘better than nothing’ sense about this thing that they (we) have simply been handed by the software company and document producers.
Could it be that Adobe is more interested in pleasing people who write, than people who read? Since they started out by creating PostScript fonts and a desktop publishing package, it seems clear that their interest has its roots in the ‘creation’ end of things — and that their interest in reception has always lain primarily in visual impact, and to a far lesser extent in function for the reading human.
Moving to a functional model where output is online rather than printed is only *almost* as simple as just ‘not printing’. The biggest sign that there’s something wrong with this idea, is the fact that device — i.e. HARDWARE — designer/manufacturers are fitting their dimensions to Adobe’s electronic document format and aspect ratio. I like Adobe’s stuff, but they are the tail. For the time being they get to ‘wag the dog’; but it seems wasteful and ignorant for them not to redesign the software to correctly flow text and graphics onto any device with the capability of reading the file. It’s not like the concept is anything new.
In the meantime: I wonder how much stock Adobe owns in HP. People still print *a lot* of the pdf’s they access online.
Some of the things you mention regarding PDFs are really more personal preference (or complaints) than absolutes. For instance, that a professional “needs” to annotate or highlight material… that is a preference, not a requirement for a useful reading experience. I know as many professionals who only need to read, or can take notes independently of the document.
I will point out, however, that newer Adobe readers, available on PCs and laptops, do allow annotation and highlighting of PDFs, features used regularly for editing purposes. If devices are not using these full readers, that is not the fault of the format, or of Adobe.
Your mention of flow and paper size is also not absolute. I have read tagged PDFs on PDAs for the past 5 years with little problem… the fonts don’t “come out small,” and the pages aren’t “forced” to fit different sized screens. The presence of graphics often cause such problems, but that is also often the fault of the person who created the file in such a way as to prevent fonts from being able to flow around such problems. A lot of hardware, and a lot of non-Adobe software, essentially “polluted” PDFs for a lot of people. That’s the result of improper adherence to the standards, not of bad design on Adobe’s part. Put the blame where it belongs.
Yes, PDF was designed to favor the creator… that was the whole point. Before PDF, there was no reliable way to electronically transmit a document to a different computer and assure a proper viewing or printing experience. PDF was designed to provide that, and it does.
It may not be the “perfect” e-book reading app, but for all the things it can do, I say Adobe PDF is damned good. ADE may not be perfect, either, but it is just a single reader… it is not the OEB (ePub) document itself. If you find a reader that renders ePubs better (Zulu, for instance), I say use it.