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‘No wireless access yet for library users’ with forthcoming Sony Reader Daily Edition
August 26, 2009 | 1:13 pm
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By David Rothman
Just what I thought, alas—and now Library Journal confirms it. Ideally Sony, OverDrive and public libraries can correct that in the near future. Better to make shopping easier, but not library-borrowing?
Related: Alan Wallcraft’s observation that Adobe Digital Editions, a desktop e-reading program that also can send e-books to the Reader, gives publisher control over details such as the size of margins. (Tweaked at 6:10 p.m.)
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Comments:
“Alan Wallcraft’s complaint that Adobe Digital Editions, used in the Reader, gives publishers too much control over details such as the size of margins.”
Oh dear, he is talking about ePub. Digital Editions is only the stand-alone reader app.
BTW: The library-issue could be due to billing problems. After all, Sony hides the wireless fees in the book purchases.
Also, wouldn’t wireless access to libraries require a pretty complicated network between Overdrive, all the libraries it serves, Sony and who knows what else. With the Kindle or Sony stores it’s pretty simple. Not so with hundreds of libraries.
Other ePub apps, for example Calibre’s ebook viewer, do allow readers to override margins and other style details.
It isn’t necessarily a bad thing that Adobe Digital Editions tries to exactly reproduce the formatting specified in the ePub file. This won’t work well on small screens, but ADE does not run today on very small screens. The problem is that readers have no choice in the matter. If I don’t like how ADE displays a DRMed ePub I can’t switch to Calibre.
I would much rather have 2 or 3 DRM schemes for ePub, and therefore 2 or 3 competing Reader apps, than a single DRM scheme and a Adobe Digital Editions monoculture.
FBreader as deployed in OpenInkpot allows the end user to specify arbitrary font face, size, line spacing, margin, and first line indent for ePub as well as other ebook formats. It also provides overrides for justification/alignment, hyphenation, and page number indicator.
Cool reader 3 is almost as flexible and also allows for dual column landscape presentation.
Mobipocket PC also has extensive overides.
All reader apps should be this way.
It is *my* reader, after all.
Why should I *not* have control of how the books I buy are presented? I’m not a serf or supplicant; I’m the paying customer. If I want to read a book in comic book sans I am entitled to it.
Publishers need to get it into their heads that ebooks are *not* pretend paper.
In my book, failure to allow end-user typographical controls is a major demerit for a reader app.
Amazon agrees; Kindle DX has multiple font sizes and margins.
Paul: Great argument for coordinated TeleRead-style approach. Thanks.
David