I love reading about reading experiments! In the past, we’ve covered stories on Teleread about reading specific genres (for example, picture-rich non-fiction), certain formats (epub vs mobi vs PDF etcetera) and other special situations. I have even been blogging this year about about my own book experiment—my year of purchasing only DRM-free books. So I was intrigued to find an article this morning about another reader who is launching a book experiment: Book Riot’s Cassandra Neace is commencing a month of being only a digital reader.
This will be old hat for nearly every reader of THIS blog, of course. I do still buy paper cookbooks and children’s titles, but I myself have been doing all my leisure reading in e-form for several years. But everybody has to start somewhere, and it was refreshing to read a perspective on e-reading from a total newbie.
What drove Neace to the e-stacks? Too much clutter, too many books, and too many too-good-to-pass-up Black Friday e-deals. Sure, Neace does raise the whole ‘smell of paper’ chestnut here, and she loses some points in my book for that. But she also writes about tripping over the stacks of paper in her apartment, and about the potential benefits of a font you can adjust and a virtual stack that is not constrained by the limits of physical space. And she is excited about exploring feature such as bookmarking and annotation.
I wish Neace the best of luck with her month of e-reading. I am not sure that switching over to ebook, at least for some of one’s reading, merits the hallowed ceremony she is conveying upon it, but I hope she enjoys her books. As for me, my next experiment, once my year of reading DRM-free wraps up, is going to be ebook production: I have some beloved classics which aren’t available at Project Gutenberg yet, and I want to clean up the scanned copies at Archive.org. I am curious to see if after all my years of reading an ebook, I can learn how to MAKE one!
Authors who’d like to follow this reader down the digital-only path might want to look into a just-out ebook creator called Vellum:
http://180g.co/vellum/
I downloaded a copy and it’s obviously a 1.0 version, having only basic formatting features. As best I could tell, there’s no way to add graphics or pop-up notes. That said, it does seem to have what an author needs to create attractive, text-only ebooks for iDevices, Kindles and Nooks. If you’re a Word hater like me, you can even write your book in it, although it has nothing like Scrivener’s rich feature set for writing.
Making the app free but charging $50 per ebook published may be controversial with some, but the fee does go down the more ebooks you publish. Those who like it most will probably be those who want to go digital-only and “just write,” not fussing with all the geeky issues that digital publishing can raise. One text in one app and you hit all the major ebook retailers.
Also, someone might want to approach the app’s creators and see if they’d be willing to license the free use of their app to create better-looking versions of public domain texts using the raw texts available from Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. I’m reading one now and it ticks me off that the body text is weirdly centered rather that left-justified. It would benefit from a pass through Vellum and a few tweaks.