If You Don’t Have One Yet…

I read books using the Kindle and iBook apps on the iPad. Frankly – if I can’t get it in electronic form – I don’t bother buying it.

ipad, and now there are free apps for kindle and nook to load up the features you want (or there bookstore) on the ipad there is no excuse.

I’m not sold on the idea of ebooks quite yet. I don’t like the fact that I can’t lend one to a friend, or donate it to a library when I’m done with it. There’s something very aesthetically pleasing about an overflowing bookshelf that I quite enjoy as well.

ipad is not as good as a kindle because of the backlit screen. This can tire your eyes out or give you headaches. The kindle is truly like reading a real page which is nice.

iPad is the way to go

No thanks.

When I buy a book, I expect to be the owner of a book. Paying for an e-book from Amazon for Kindle only grants temporary permission to access the text of a book stored on one of their web servers, access to which can be revoked on a whim at any time for any reason, as large numbers of people have discovered for themselves. Since you haven’t bought anything, you have no legal rights in the matter when it happens.

Not to mention that Amazon can, at any time, access a Kindle remotely to tamper with it. Last year, thousands of copies of books written by George Orwell, JK Rowling and others went *poof* when Amazon did exactly that.

When someone makes an e-reader that will display e-books from any source, e-books that I properly and legally OWN and that cannot be tampered with remotely, then I’ll buy that one. Until then, I’ll keep buying dead trees.

As far as the iPad being hard on your eyes is concerned, I’ve read several books on my ipad, and for about a year previous to getting it every book I read was on my iphone. No eye strain or headaches so far.

Eh. I’m not a quick reader, typically it takes me at least a week to read an average length novel.

I’m less than enthralled with the mandatory DRM imposed by Amazon, even for titles which the authors wish to be in the public domain (such as Cory Doctorow’s works).

When I’ve finished a novel I nearly always give it away to someone I know will enjoy it, I can’t do that with a kindle. Now people may say that’s depriving the author of revenue but that’s not understanding how reading works. Reading is a social activity, how we get to know about other authors is from our friends giving or lending us books they’ve enjoyed. The DRM model of the kindle destroys that.

For recreational reading, I use our public library. Can’t beat the prices. For keepers, I’d rather own the real book [usually bought second hand], not an e-version for lots of reasons, many summarized by folks above [look and feel, danger of subsequent editing, by Amazon or whoever owns the e-text, because you don’t, and so on.]

As for the pre-underlining: well, whatever floats your boat, M. But if I had a Kindle, I’d disable that feature immediately. Two reasons: (a) reading a substantive book, I’d much rather read it without anyone else’s ideas about the important bits crowding in as I went along. Engage with the author myself over the whole course of the book without having my reactions shaped by anyone else along the way first time through. (b) since the owner of the text [and that’s not me or you, M] can get constant feedback on what people are underling [and therefor what they are not], seems to me when the data becomes massive enough, there’s a risk of the publisher saying “people seemed to like this kind of passage in this kind of book, and almost nobody underlined that kind of passage. So, authors, we’d like you to produce books with more of these kinds of passages and less of those.” We do not need more data driven content in the world of books than we already have, FSM knows.

Reading is, IMHO, a particularly personal activity: me and the author. The idea of someone reading over my shoulder, noting what I underline, and breaking into my reading of the book with other peoples’ ideas about what should be highlighted is…. well, creepy.

I was wondering what was going on with the underlines. I’m re-reading something now and I didn’t remember the underlines from before. They can be disabled in the iPhone app so I expect they can be disable on the real thing. That should solve Ed’s complaint. Highlights when you want them, none when you don’t. I think that is one of the few real advantages eBooks have over real books.

Shelf space is a major problem for me. There are so many books that I want to read. Many are classics that are available for free online, so not needing more bookshelves for the next few hundred thousand free books sounds nice. If I really like one and have to have a real copy, I’ll go get one for $5 at a used book store.

The only time I could see myself using a Kindle would be to read in bed. Otherwise, I prefer real pages. I bet it must be handy to be able to obtain and read a book anytime you want, but the fact that the books can be “revoked” at any time is really scary to me.

I like eReaders, but would hesitate to buy one that allowed the company producing them to remotely yank books off my device. Also, Amazon tacks an extra $2 on the price of all books they sell to us Canadians (or anyone else outside the states). (Free books are now actually free — they used to be $2 to us too — but all other books appear $2 more expensive when you either view the site from a Canadian IP or log in a Canadian account.)

They claim the $2 fee covers wireless, but I’d rather just have the option to buy them without the wireless transfer for $2 less a book.

There are many other options out there, and many are better; it really depends a lot on preferences (battery life, refresh speed, storage, wireless, dictionaries, etc., etc.), but Sony and Aluratek make good ones for example.

I have a Sony Reader, which I massively prefer to either of the other eReaders. There’s no one getting into my reader to “manage” my stuff, and I certainly don’t want to read a book someone else has annotated – I used to by my college texts new if I couldn’t find one that wasn’t marked up.

My Sony Reader lets me put books on SD cards so I can share them if I care to, or store them however I choose. What I purchase is mine.

Can it help me read faster? Being left-handed and dyslexic to boot, reading is full of starts and stops, jumping back and going forward. It’s slooooooowwww. It goes faster if I just read it aloud like a narrator. Reading a whole book takes many weeks of dedication.

So much I want to read. It’s like being a starving man trying to eat a thick milkshake through a very narrow straw.

I love the feel and all the sensual things that sarah said about a real book, but if technology could help get the info in, I’ll try anything.

@Richard: The screen isn’t significantly different from a normal book (it’s designed to be a paper-like reflective screen so that it doesn’t cause the strain that backlit monitors or TVs can cause over time), so it probably wouldn’t be any better than a book in that respect, but it is possible on the vast majority of eReaders to zoom to your preferred viewing size. If large text helps you, then an eReader may be a good alternative to trying to hunt down large print editions of books.

Here’s a photo of my Libre at full 400% zoom compared to an average hardcover (not large print): Link

Ignore the shadows on the Libre; they showed up due to the flash, and you don’t see anything like that when normally using it.

Thank you very much, Nakor!

That’s very interesting. I don’t need the large type for vision problems (yet) but maybe a larger size font could help get the vision-to-perception-to-comprehension process going a bit faster. I’ll experiment with that.

Did you take that picture just to show me?

Y’know, the Kindle is just one of those things you have to see first hand. My dad bought my mom one (she turned out to be a geek and never knew it until she was 50) and she only now buys books she cares to “own” in paper.

While people want to get in on the iPad vs Kindle war, because both can read books, play music and surf the internet, (kinda on the Kindle), I’d say its Apples to oranges. The Kindle is tailored to one task, and the iPad is tailored to many. The prices say it all. While I might want an iPad personally it doesn’t make it better than the Kindle as if I was only concerned about reading Ebooks, I’d get the Kindle, for the screen and battery life alone.

@Richard: Yeah, I had my camera handy and had just been to the library to get the hard cover in question, so it was just a minute’s effort. 😉

Thanks, Mark. all that is encouraging. I’m a little hesitant about the book integrity and reader’s privacy issues that Rooker, Bob, flatlander100 and others have mentioned, but CJ🙂 says Sony has more owner’s autonomy and sovereignty. Clearly I have to do some research.

Thanks again, Nakor. Very cool.

Richard, I’ll also weigh in on the Sony. I love it. You can change orientation from portrait to landscape, change the touch screen to favor either hand, select font size from small to extra-large. It also handles pdf format.

SickoftheUS, to continue my book buying at the rate it has been for the last few years and we’ll have to buy a new house just to store them…in spite of the fact that I donate, yard sale and participate in Book Crossing. My ereader helps eliminate -some- clutter. (I still buy ‘real’ books, just not 50 to 75 at a time 3 times a year at our library sales.)

I have a Kindle app on my iMac – you can also get OSX and Windows Kindle apps.

It worked nice for me, though the main deficiency was lack of a search facility. Is that a problem with other Kindle apps and with Kindle hardware?

I tried out both the kindle and nook before deciding on the nook. I agree with the person that said you just have to see it first hand. I love that I can borrow eBooks from the library. And really it’s just more convenient to read from for me.

I am always amazed at how much conversation the kindle generates! My husband bought me one right after they came out and I love it! I only read the free books that amazon offers on it and I usually use it for treadmill reading at the gym. Much easier to read on a kindle there than a real book or magazine. Strangers have literally stopped me on the bus or in coffee shops to look at it. People seem unsure about it most of the time but strangely attracted to it. I still buy tons of used and new books and attempt the public library (though ours is small and doesn’t have the best selection). Love it or hate it, I don’t really care. I do think that making books available in electronic form is going to make them much more accessible in the future to people who might not normally pick up a book, especially if the price comes down on ereaders in general.

I bought my Kindle (finally been wanting a long time) a couple of weeks ago. When I got it, Hemant, I also thought it fitting that I try it out by downloading something else I’ve been wanting and procrastinating on — “I Sold My Soul on E-Bay” so you have the honors of being the first book on my electronic shelf.

I love love love my Kindle. If you have disabilities this is the way to go, at for arthiritis and poor eyesight. It doesn’t hurt my hands and wrists as books often do now. And the choice of 6 fonts sizes is great.

I tried the voice. You can pick male and female and found it a bit faulty as it’s totally phonetic which means it pronounce some things weirdly but if I ever go blind, it’ll be more than doable.

Can’t get the smell but the look is that of a page and there’s page turner buttons on either side and you can set it portrait or landscape. And I bought the leather case for it and that utterly makes it feel like carrying a book. But light and easy, not heavy and painful on my wrists and hands like real books.

Some things here I’m finding disturbing though. I’ve got to make sure annotations are turned off because I hate that too, finding someone else’s underlines. And I didn’t know that when you buy a book, they can yank it on you later! That’s wrong.

I only glanced at it and bought Hemant’s book and one other. I only have a few books stacked up and am making myself finish those first so no review of yours yet but I compared it to the nook. I chose the kindle because I could care less about chess, the four colors isn’t that big a deal to me and my eyes aren’t what they used to be. The nook doesn’t have the ability to read to you. And Amazon keeps you books stored on backup at their site.

The nook from B&N has a selection of 3 fonts and, with the newest update, 6 font sizes. As for handedness, I’m a lefty, and the nook works for me because it has both forward and back buttons on either side of the screen. You can also turn pages by swiping the touch screen at the bottom of the nook.

Also I did a search for “0.00” via the “Shop” button on my nook last night, and got about 95,000 hits for free books. Hehe.

Here’s a link to a youtube video featuring the recent 1.4 software update, showcasing the different font sizes among other things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrXb3pdmOM4