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Why I Won’t Buy an E-Book Reader This Year
December 20, 2008 | 1:50 pm
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By a TeleBlog Contributor
Personally, after looking into the issues of conflicting e-book formats, how people use e-books and costs, here are some things I’ve concluded.
1. With all the conflicting formats, the key thing is that there’s no consistency in formatting and in fact, you lose the nice formatting of a book. Blah! Why do I want that? I like the precision of a nicely formatted book – after all, it’s taken us hundreds of years to get to the point where these books look so good – why throw that away? Instead, there’s a simple solution: pdf formats. Almost every e-book reader allows for pdf formatted books and almost every digital book provider offers a pdf format.
2. Why buy an e-book reader that costs $500 and limits you to only one format. Often that format is incompatible with other formats, it doesn’t transport easily to other formats (yes, you can transport it to other formats but not easily).
3. I’ve listened to comments from my friends with e-book readers and almost all of them say they like the e-book when they travel. At home, they prefer paper books. From their comments there are two key issues: weight and storage. One e-book reader weighs much less than carrying around several paper books, easier to pack. And for that slight weight, they get storage of multiple books.
4. There’s an alternative that is just as attractive to me, if not more so. A wi-fi netbook, the half-size notebooks that are used only for light computing tasks, email and — for me — reading a digital book. At first, these came mostly with Linux, but they are now available with Windows XP, making them even more attractive to me.
Doesn’t make sense to me to buy an expensive piece of equipment dedicated to reading an e-book. Instead, I could get a netbook with more advantages: Weight, storage AND email AND light computing. All in a light-weight, attractive format.
Of course, the other option being touted today is the iPhone. But I can’t read well on any screen that small. The netbook seems to offer more advantages: pdf formatting instead of take-it-as-it-comes on e-book readers; weight (almost) comparable to e-book readers; plenty of storage for multiple books; wi-fi email; light computing; a screen I can actually read; and, color screens!
Darcy Pattison. As an author and writing teacher, Darcy Pattison is watching closely the development of e-books and wondering where it will take the field of storytelling through words. www.darcypattison.com
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Comments:
PDF-formatted books? Heaven forbid.
Many “e-book readers” may support PDFs, but try reading one on a PDA or an iPhone. It can’t be done. Well, at least not well. iSilo and AirSharing will both view PDFs on the iPhone, but there’s a world of difference between “viewing” and having a good reading experience—and even then they only have the horsepower to view relatively small and simple PDFs. Try loading up a multi-megabyte monstrosity full of fancy formatting and illustrations and the like, and it will crash right out.
PDF e-books may be nice for those who can use them, but they’re useless to me—as they will be to the thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of other people using iPhones or iPod Touches as their main reading device.
I’m not really sure what you mean about “losing the nice formatting of a book.” Most of the e-books I’ve read (or made) have been formatted just as nicely as any printed novel. And with ePub looking like it will become the long-awaited “universal” e-book format, there will be consistency across multiple readers if they all use the same digital source file.
PDF is a terrible format: large file sizes, clunky navigation features and the text cannot re-flow or adjust to fit your screen size. And they cannot easily be converted to other formats. I wholeheartedly do NOT support PDF becoming any sort of industry standard. I will take a well-formatted eReader file over PDF any day.
As for the iPod Touch screen size—it actually is pretty good and displays the same amount of text as my eBookwise does. The eBookwise just spaces it out differently to fill the bigger screen. But it is a myth that you can’t fit much text on an iPod Touch screen.
My big issue with reading on laptops is the battery life. It just is not long enough for serious reading on the go. My ideal device would probably be a slightly oversize iPod Touch, but for now the iPod Touch is a good solution for me and I have read many books on it quite comfortably.
1. The pdf format is manageable, but it’s not ideal. In particular it can’t be resized or reflowed.
2. Why? Because you’re buying a specialty product. Something designed to serve one function. And prices are lower than $500. At least a little.
3. I don’t travel and I love my book reader. Paper books are dead to me.
4. There are other e-book options, but you’re missing out on some of the key functions of e-book readers. Such as e-ink displays (much better on the eyes) and long battery life. I wouldn’t mind having internet access, but it’s not worth giving up e-ink technology. If you read much at all the e-ink displays will make a big difference compared to other displays.
Chris and Ficbot:
Obviously you are both iPhone fans! Congratulations!
But you miss my point, which is NOT about reading on a iPhone
Right now, it’s accepted that e-books will have text that “flows” from page to page; that assumption is based on the inability of the industry to adopt a standard.
I’m questioning whether that should be an assumption. Publishers that I talk to moan about the inability of the current e-books to format to the usual specs of print books. A nicely formatted e-book is still a badly formatted print book. I’m asking why do we have to abandon the precision of layout and design possible in print?
Right now, we don’t have to abandon it. PDF files allow for that precision. Traditional pdf files DO look awful on an iPhone, I’m sure; they don’t translate well to every format. However, if you changed the page size to match the iPhone, or whatever device, they might look good, I don’t know.
PDF files are large, if they are not properly run through the Acrobat Distiller. But the size can be drastically reduced by proper handling, as I’ve discovered when our company was required to email large documents to customers.
Also, I’ve seen pdf e-books formatted now in a landscape format, which takes advantage of the wide-screens on computers. With that formatting, you just have to page down, NOT scroll down. It’s a very pleasant reading experience.
And the battery life of laptops is an issue; but for me, I”ll find a place to plug in, or I’ll keep an extra battery. It will be worth it to me to have a better reading experience.
Darcy
Whatever works for you. I have a small “netbook” PC that I love. For pleasure reading, though, I prefer a dedicated device with an e-ink screen (less eyestrain after looking at LCD monitors all day for work) and long battery life. The e-ink screen is also usable outdoors, and I do a lot of reading on my patio here in FL.
What’s wrong with text that flows from page to page? Different devices have different screen sizes, and the ability to change the font size of an e-book is one of an e-book’s primary advantages. Either one of those will result in page size changing, whether you do it on an iPhone or a Kindle. How are you going to change font size on the fly in a PDF without having to go back into the PDF creator and create a new one?
You can’t standardize a page size when books are going to be read on everything from cell phones to widescreen monitors.
Surely you are aware of the fact that the layouts of those nicely formatted books are done on computers and that ebook-readers are computers.
I don’t. I hate p-books. IMHO e-books are so much nicer to handle.
If it works for you fine, but it certainly doesn’t for me. I used to have a FlyBook about half the size of my current 12″ notebook, but still I found it too bulky for reading novels and the screen too small for scientific articles. And the battery didn’t last long enough and it took forever to boot since it was running a normal computer OS. And the screen was unusable outdoors. (It sure was pretty, though, in its ferrari-red glossy finish.)
Huh? What “standard” are you babbling about? A one-size-fits-all screen size???
There will always be different screen sizes and there are lots of people with bad eyesight who wants the text to be bigger than what, e.g., a teenager with perfect eyesight wants it to be. And there are even different viewing conditions. E.g., what’s easily visible indoors might be less visible at the beach, or vice versa. And there are different viewing preferences. E.g., I like it when “pages” overlap by 1-2 lines, i.e. the 1-2 lines at the bottom of one page will be the 1-2 lines at the top of the next page.
So, since so many page sizes are wanted, and even needed, reflowability is among the biggest advantages ebooks have over their dead-tree relatives. Having a fixed page size for ebooks would thus be copiously moronic.
Your arguments are good, but I challenge your conclusion. I agree specialized readers aren’t ready for prime time yet, though they may be one of these years. I still prefer the flexibility of a PDA for ebook reading. A netbook is just too bulky for pleasure reading.
My PDA can accomodate any format, even PDF*. If reading technology or styles change, it’s a simple matter to load a different reader program. I’m not stuck with a device which only does one thing, but have a general purpose device which spreads its expense across a wide variety of functions, from reading to music playing to note-taking.
Regards,
Jack Tingle
*PDF, IMO is the worst acceptable format for an ebook. It’s really intended for publishing on paper, not reading text on an easily portable machine. If it’s tagged for reflow, it can serve the purpose.
@ Darcy Pattison: A nicely formatted e-book is still a badly formatted print book.
And a nicely formatted p-book that has print too small to comfortably read is a failure as a book, period. As is a fat hardcover that weighs as much as a brick and doesn’t fit in a pocket. Given a choice between books as inflexible objets d’art or as objects that adapt to how I want to use them, I’ll choose the latter.
I have an Amazon Kindel, and while it does have some drawbacks, overall it’s great! Ebooks are the wave of the future!
I like the idea of using netbooks for e-book reading.. once they have better battery life and a tablet-pc form factor.
I also like pdf for reading. Technical books mostly. For novels, reflowable/resizeable text is “the only way to go!”
Since 2002 I’ve read over 130 and 300 short stories on eReaders: from Dell Axim PDA to the Kindle. I’m not sure if that makes me an expert at anything, but I have yet to read any PDF file, not even one converted to other format. A lot of people will say the PDF is manageable or acceptable when converted, but I find them intolerable. As a general rule, most ebooks will be nicely formated for an eReader when produced from a savvy publishers or authors. There are, of course, horribly formated ebooks, and while I can’t offer proof, my guess is many of them could be converted PDF file
PDF files have good uses, like short instruction manuals for products, or preparing the text layout for a printer, but it just does a very poor job for handheld eReaders. I think it would be like pounding a nail into a well with the butt end of a screwdriver. Not the right tool for the job. Content providers should understand just how poorly the PDF format performs when off desk or laptop computers.
I like my Kindle and find to a useful tool for reading ebooks. I don’t want a touch screen, color, email, or other light computing. I usually read 8 to 12 books per month and I want my device to show me nicely formated text on a screen; and—at least with a Kindle—an easy to buy and obtain the books I want to read today. Right now I have it and it works for me. The Kindle or other eReader may not be the right fit for everyone, but the idea of the PDF format as a solution needs to be abandoned. Quickly
Darcy writes that e-books’ great failing is that they cannot “adopt a standard” or “format to the usual specs of print books”
What “standard” is that? What “specs” are those?
He then goes on to ask “why do we have to abandon the precision of layout and design possible in print?”
What “precision of layout and design” do you require? The vast majority of e-books that people read are novels, and the vast majority of those hew to no more “precision of layout and design” than starting chapters on a new page and having text neatly separated into paragraphs. E-books do both of those just fine.
If you’re talking about something more than novels—reference books with lots of tables (such as role-playing game manuals), and a need for accurate tables of contents and indices—then you may have a point. But PDF is still not necessarily the answer.
Things that are viewed on big screens, or big surface areas (such as role-playing game books), have to be adapted to smaller screens. You can’t show a book the same way on a small screen, like an e-book reader or PDA, that you can on a larger one. People can’t read tables if they’re teeny tiny.
And PDF is not the answer. You can’t expect the incredible diversity of e-book readers out there to standardize on one screen size, because people use a whole range of devices that way.
Publishers are just going to have to figure out some way of having the mountain come to Mohammed—because bringing Mohammed to the mountain just won’t work.
They are not analogous. They’re never going to be analogous. Trying to make them analogous is futile. It is simply a different animal altogether and if one approaches it that way, IMO, one has less difficulty adapting.
We’ve got teenagers and children who’ve been reading from computer screens since they were tiny, who know qwerty by the time they’re in first grade, and who are sublimely comfortable reading text in any medium they get it.
It occurs to me that the OP may have wrong or skewed information on which she is basing her opinions. But thinking an e-book should be just like a print book is dead-end thinking. At this point, I’m getting very impatient with my print books because it does not have an CTRL-F function, and, like Bryan above, I don’t travel and read my e-book at night in bed (backlit) snuggled under my covers and don’t disturb my husband.
They won’t be dead to me until all books are digitized, but yeah. I hear you and I’m getting there.
Publishers aren’t terribly happy with being forced to get on the bandwagon, so I’m suspicious of any arguments they make against e-books.
I read ebooks for several reasons. One is storage: a thousand ebooks on a PDA takes up much less room than a thousand hard-copy books. Another is price: I can get ebooks from Fictionwise, for example, for much less than I would pay for the same titles even second-hand in shops. A third reason is convenience: I have access to a huge number of titles both new and vintage, and I can get them free or pay for them and download them to read within seconds. But the most important reason, for me and for other disabled people, is the accessibility of reading. I can no longer hold even a small paperback book, but I can hold or prop up my ebook reader, and tap to “turn” pages or set the speed so the text flows past my eyes. I can adjust the settings with a tap or two (no fine-motor movements required: physical page-turning is a complex movement). I can choose a background colour, text size and font which makes it possible for me to read (e.g. white paper reflects too much light). Ebook readers are simply more accessible. I have recently moved from my Palm PDA to an iPhone, and I look forward to further ebook reader development on the iPhone platform.
For me, it comes down to this: Why carry a device that serves only one purpose when, for about the same price, I can grab a netbook computer and go.
With a lightweight netbook, I can read, check email, surf the web, do office work, etc.
I like the e-reader idea until I compare it to what a netbook can deliver for about $299.
Well, I read with my phone, which is always on and has QReader running in the background so that switching to it where I left it takes only a fraction of a second. I can also check email and do light surfing on the phone.
If I think I’ll need to do “office work” (i.e., programming) I take my 12″ notebook with me, but I’ll still read only with the phone. When I’m waiting in line at the grocery store I’m not going to take out and start up my notebook, even if it was a relatively small 7″ model with a relatively short, 4-second “unsuspend from memory”-function and with my ebook-reader software already loaded. However, I will start reading on the phone after spending a second or two unlocking it and switching to QReader.
I’m a fan of the eReader format, every since 2000, used with a lot of different gadgets over the years.
PDF is to be avoided at all costs – text must flow, and automatically adjust to fit the screen of whichever gadget I’m currently using. I’ve had a lot of trouble trying to get the few PDF ebooks I’ve bought onto a PDA. Even when I tried to extract just the text of the story, I found that there were a lot of hidden formatting in the PDF file. It ‘looked’ good when viewing the PDF on a computer, but the extracted text included the header/footer info from each page and sometimes had line breaks where there shouldn’t be that was very distracting when I tried to read the stories. (I only want a PDF file if I plan to print out a hard-copy, like for a tech manual. If it was a book with a lot of pictures, I would probably just buy the bound book.)
As Kindle passes a first year anniversary its Amazon library has grown from 75K to 200K titles. The suggestion is that Kindle, as a provider, can stream a lifetime of reading to the small screen. The pause here is what that means. Can we honestly sustain a full lifetime of reading without a single physical evidence of its passage? From time to time we should glance at a dark Kindle screen and realize the vacancy of it compared with the graceful, arrayed companionship of physical books.
Let’s extrapolate beyond that; how will we enjoy an entire culture as transient as the evening news? All these devices are gadgets; the paper book as well as the hand-held electronic reader. But their uses for culture transmission vary. I am always amused when the death of print books is mentioned; I have a whole collection of truly dead e-book readers.
Ms. Pattison is, in my humble opinion, is trying to apply paper book thinking to ebook technology. PDF, as a format, was designed to ensure consistent layout of documents that are being printed. The problem is that ebooks are not printed books. Ultimately, ebooks provide a flexibility that PDF was just not designed to handle. I will grant that many ebook formats are less than ideal, but I believe in time that a dedicated ebook format like ePub will be far better suited to reading ebooks than PDF ever will be.
Regarding the arguments against text reflowing from page to page? Can we really take this seriously? One of the greatest advantages of the e-book is the ability to resize and reflow the text.
Personally, I am not a big fan of netbooks for reading novels; the form factor is not designed for an immersive experience; in fact the omnipresence of the keyboard ensures that you are always aware of the fact that it is a computer and that there are other things you “could” be doing with it. As others have pointed out, back-lit screens also cause additional eyestrain and also wasteful if you are going to be reading in a lighted room.
Now I am not saying that dedicated readers will always be the best form factor for ebooks. Give them a few years for new screen technology to develop, and in a tablet, a netbook might be a grand way to read books. But it isn’t yet.
Hoo boy, I just can’t imagine what you guys are thinking, those of you who proudly wave the flag for reading on a netbook pc. It’s a safe assumption that most of you haven’t read an entire book on an e-ink screen. If you want to read a glowing LCD on a computer after using a computer all day for work and/or other tasks, be my guest. If you want to whip out a netbook and read your novel that way at the beach, at the park, while eating lunch at a cafe, while on a train or in a cab for only 15 minutes or so, etc., be my guest. But you’re going to look like a huge dork, and you’re going to have trouble seeing the screen in half those situations, and your battery’s gonna quit on you in the other half. And, have fun lying on your side in bed or on the sofa, holding your netbook with one hand while you read it. And I hope having to stop mid-chapter now and again and run your virus software is enjoyable too! lol.