dreamshovel

After a couple of years of using this latest generation of ebook reader I find there is one core use case that remains under-served.

Never mind the fancy business models.

Never mind the rent-seeking.

Much of the time what I want is to simply dump articles, clippings and pages to the Reader for later, offline reading. I don’t want to fumble around with loading SD cards, custom applications, server uploads or postscript tweaking. Basically I just want to treat the reader like a printer.

Sure, there are various workarounds for this but none have the simplicity of just printing. And the support infrastructure already exists as the “print page” paradigm for web pages is well-established.

Naturally any implementation should handle necessary format conversions to assure the best possible rendering for the given device. Hardly exotic behavior for a printer driver.

Look, I like the “iPod of books” tag and the sync paradigm has its advantages but most of the time what I want is a paper replacement. An official printer driver should be included with every Sony Reader and Kindle.

I’ve never read Stephen King’s “The Stand”, nor seen the movie. But I know it involves an end-of-the-world flu pandemic. With the Swine Flu hype escalating and references to “Captain Trips” percolating out of every social media stream, I figured I’d get the book before someone hits me with spoilers and anyway what better choice for bedtime reading in the midst of an actual influenza outbreak, right?
Proper pandemic protocol dictates that I order-in, thus avoiding tedious and harrowing interactions with possibly (oh noes!) INFECTED hosts. Obviously, this is a job for my trusty Sony eReader…

Popping over to the Sony ebook store I immediately find they have “The Complete & Uncut Edition”. Excellent! I hate how King’s novels always get cut down to a whispy scant 800 pages or so.
And the price is…US $35. Wow! That’s a lot for an ebook version of a novel published in 1978 by a super-popular author. Isn’t it? Since I find the Sony store prone to overpricing their books I’ll just look elsewhere.

OK, top of the search results: same edition ebook available from Random House. Hmm, US $50! No thanks.
A few dodgy torrent sources pop up, but I like books and authors and have this silly idea that artists should be compensated for their works. So no leeching. (hold that thought.)

Just for kicks, I check the Amazon store, as if I had a Kindle, but find only “Title is not available”. So much for that. It is however, fairly encouraging that other King ebooks recommended on that page are about $8 bucks each. And amusingly, a new DVD copy of the 1994 movie for sells for just $26. But to be fair it’s not the new “uncut” edition. Anyway King’s work is usually better in book form.

Other vendors offer the novel in a range of formats and prices, from $15 - $43, but none of the formats will work on my PRS-500 eReader. Hoorah for standards.
I could just grab the mobipocket version and do some conversion voodoo, but I’d like to avoid possible conversion artifacts and legal PITAs.

So for my $350 ebook reader I can either buy an unsupported version for about $15 bucks and perfom a possibly low-quality / quasi-legal format conversion or shell out $35 for a bona-fide Sony-compatible version of “The Stand’. And to think they say these things will never take off!

EPILOGUE:
OK, nevermind the ebook and H1N1 virus, how about regular, olde-school paper?

Amazon lists a range of hardbacks, used-new-first editions, $15-$500 + shipping, but since I have to go out anyway I decided to just swing by the local big-box bookseller. Unsurprisingly, they have it. The nice stack of fat paperbacks is prominently displayed right next to a speciality section of disease-disaster thrillers. Well that’s some responsive marketing, you sick puppies!

But the real disaster is the $8.99 paperback itself. Very poor quality, uneven printing, flimsy pages (all 1000+ of them). Worse even than the regular paperback edition of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (which literally fell apart in my hands as I was reading it).

A Prime Argument in any iteration of the somewhat silly “ebook vs paper book” debate involves the tactile and other sensory aspects of holding a physical book in the hands, riffling the pages, the the look, the feel, smell, etc. And also the keepsake element of a tangible object. This argument is largely neutered by shoddy printing and cheap bindings. Yeah, I know, it’s a mass-market paperback so what do I want? Well, how about something that allows me to experience the author’s art without eyestrain? How about something that doesn’t look like it will fall apart well before the 1000+ pages can be turned? I have a copy of the similarly massive “Swan Song” by Robert R. McCammon that I must have bought 15+ years ago. Its clearly printed pages are still intact and readable thus demonstrating that at least a nominal level of paperback quality IS possible.
After a few minutes of trying to convince myself to just buy the damn cheap paperback I walk out of the store empty-handed.

So in the end I’m left with the public library, that dependable bastion of the written word. And indeed I should have gone there first, since they had a nice hardcover copy of “The Stand” just sitting quietly on a shelf, waiting for me. I was mildly surprised that some other twisted soul hadn’t beaten me to it ;^)

POSTSCRIPT:
While I’m of the firm opinion that ebooks should be priced less than their paper-based versions, I might have paid about $15 or so had a compatible ebook version been available. It’s also clear that I’ve been spoiled by the crisp e-ink display of the Sony Reader (also on Kindle) as evidenced by my somewhat snobbish dismissal of the cheaply-done paperback. And whomever may benefit from hefty ebook pricing and cheap paperback printing the only certain thing is that, just as in the case of ‘piracy’, Stephen King lost a sale.

Libraries Rule!

Wafery thinness

In October 2006 Sony began shipping its ebook reader (henceforth referred to as the ‘Reader’) and I couldn’t wait to get one. For me a usable electronic book is almost a mythical entity living in a world of the future that we’ve somehow missed, along  with the flying car.
Over the years I’ve used a variety of phones, PDAs, micro-laptops and one or two short-lived “electronic book” devices but none have provided a particularly satisfying ebook experience. Enter, the Reader.

The Screen
Once unwrapped and powered on you immediately see “The Screen”, the lauded E-Ink display technology making its large-scale consumer debut in the Reader.

This new display technology renders text that is crisp and flat and really beautiful. The background is slightly more dull light-gray than white, but the contrast is quite acceptable. And right away you encounter the difference between the e-ink screen and a backlit LCD. The E-ink screen, like a regular paper book, gets easier to read in brighter light. So unlike for instance, a regular backlit PDA, the Reader allows one to lounge around the patio reading, in the sun. More importantly, the display is very easy on the eyes, and I have personally experienced none of the eyestrain I had come to expect from reading text on a backlit phone or PDA display. Whatever happens to the Reader, the E-Ink display has set a new standard for portable display quality.

There is one display quirk in the form of a very noticeable flicker during page turns. It appears to invert black to white as the new page is rendered on the screen. It takes about a second for this repaint operation to complete, and the impression is of a “flicker”. Fortunately you habituate to this after about 15 minutes or so.

Continue reading ‘A Year with the Reader’ »