{"id":4874,"date":"2010-07-22T11:24:27","date_gmt":"2010-07-22T11:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2010\/07\/22\/the-e-book-experience\/"},"modified":"2010-07-22T11:24:27","modified_gmt":"2010-07-22T11:24:27","slug":"the-e-book-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2010\/07\/22\/the-e-book-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"The E-Book Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

A bit more than a month ago, I got a Sony Reader<\/a> as a birthday present, upgrading my electronic book-reading platform from an old Palm Pilot. this is, obviously, not as sexy as a Kindle or a Nook, but then again, it doesn’t involve me paying fees to use wireless services and further stoke my Internet addiction, so that’s more or less a wash. Anyway, since I’ve been using this extensively for a month, now, I thought I’d post a few impressions:<\/p>\n

— First and foremost, the e-ink display is very nice. The one crippling flaw of the Palm Pilot method was that I couldn’t read outdoors or in bright light. The Reader fixes that problem very well. The one catch to this is that it’s slooooow– even after a month of use, the lag between pushing a button and refreshing the page is long enough that I start to wonder if it missed me pressing the buttons. A small price to pay for being able to read outdoors on a nice day, though.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

— The books themselves are generally well done. The page counter may not correspond exactly to the page numbers in the paper edition– I haven’t tried to do an exact check– but it’s close, which is good. Moving back and forth between the table of contents and the main text is reasonably easy, modulo the long refresh time for any page change. Re-sizing the text to make it more readable works smoothly and without any major glitches.<\/p>\n

— There are some problems with elements that aren’t standard text, though. I picked up the electronic version of David Mermin’s It’s About Time: Understanding Einstein’s Relativity<\/cite>, and the equations are all rendered in some microscopic font. Figures are frequently two or three screens away from the text describing the figure, and there’s no good way to flip back and forth between them. I don’t anticipate doing a great deal of technical reading on this, but that’s something to be wary of in the future.<\/p>\n

The couple of fantasy books I’ve read on it that included maps (Ian Esslemont’s Malazan Empire books) render the maps as single-page graphics, that can’t be magnified. This is significantly less useful than it might be.<\/p>\n

— The text of official e-book releases is, I suspect, derived from the text of the bound galley proofs, without any additional copy editing. This is a guess based partly on the fact that, as a reader told me in email, the Kindle edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog<\/cite><\/a> includes some formatting problems that were present in the page proofs but fixed in the print edition. Whatever the reason, though, the text of the two short fiction collections I’ve bought and read included a lot of spell-check typos (“form” instead of “from,” etc.), to a degree that was a little distracting.<\/p>\n

— I’m using the Sony software to manage the library, and have bought a half-dozen books directly from the integrated Sony Reader store, and my impression of it is that it’s like iTunes designed by monkeys. The interface is not-quite-Windows-like, and the controls and locations of things are just non-standard enough to make doing anything for the first time a real chore. And the store combines the “Oh my God, could this page possibly load any slower?” experience of browsing iTunes with a recommendation and search engine that is much, much worse than iTunes.<\/p>\n

The recommendation thing is partly a matter of not having the customer base that iTunes does. The slow loading is something that must come from not being a web browser because, as I said, iTunes does the same thing. I’ve long since stopped buying music from iTunes, because Amazon offers more or less the same selection of MP3 downloads with a vastly better browsing experience. I will most likely be doing something similar with e-books, once I figure out the best way to do this while still getting money to the authors of the books I would like to read. (Obviously, I could download pirated copies for free, but I have a comfortable income, and can afford to buy books.)<\/p>\n

— One non-technical problem with the browsing experience in the Sony store is that it’s choked with vanity press books. Any kind of “I wonder if there’s anything new in this subgenre” search turns up books from AuthorHouse and XLibris and iUniverse, as well as a whole host of stuff from Smashwords (which may or may not be a vanity press– I’ve seen books from them by people whose names I recognize, but it’s mostly stuff that reeks of self-publishing). It’s awfully difficult to sort out the stuff that I might possibly want to read, and when you combine that with the really slow page loading…<\/p>\n

— I forget just how small books are, in terms of file size. I’m used to downloading music, which is about a megabyte per minute, so downloading a bunch of albums on Amazon is something I usually start before bed, and let run overnight.<\/p>\n

The full manuscript of How to Teach Physics to your Dog<\/cite>, on the other hand, is just over 2MB, including all the figures. I can download ebooks in the time it takes to get SteelyKid’s bedtime bottle together.<\/p>\n

— The model I got is the “Pocket Edition,” which really makes me wonder whose pockets they used as a standard. My clothes, unlike Kate’s, tend to have actual pockets, but the Reader only fits comfortably in the pockets of my baggier clothes. Anyone significantly smaller than I am (which is most people), or wearing women’s clothes, is going to have an awfully hard time fitting this in a pocket.<\/p>\n

Anyway, on the whole, I like it. There are still some significant issues to sort out (mostly involving platform-specific DRM type problems), but I like having the ability to carry a huge variety of books around with me, and the reading experience is generally good.<\/p>\n

Anyone else have e-book reader thoughts, comments, suggestions? You know where the comments are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A bit more than a month ago, I got a Sony Reader as a birthday present, upgrading my electronic book-reading platform from an old Palm Pilot. this is, obviously, not as sexy as a Kindle or a Nook, but then again, it doesn’t involve me paying fees to use wireless services and further stoke my… Continue reading The E-Book Experience<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,37,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-pop_culture","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4874\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}