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livI've been going back and forth about whether I want an e-reader or not. This week I finally caved. What persuaded me was a combination of getting to play with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
darcydodo's Kindle when she was over here, and seeing that both Amazon and Sony were selling last year's model for £110 in anticipation of bringing out a newer, shinier version. It turns out I'm much more willing to pay around a hundred pounds for an electronic gadget (that isn't a computer) than £200 plus.
In the end I decided not to go for the Kindle itself, because I didn't want a reader that is essentially a shopping portal for a single company. (I also didn't care about WiFi or GSM; being able to purchase books while travelling isn't the point for me, being able to read them is.) File format-wise, it seems to be a choice between Amazon only, and anyone other than Amazon, so I went for the second option. I was torn between Sony's PRS-505, and the Cool-ER a new thing by a small British company, whose big selling point is that it handles multiple file formats.
Because I feel guilty about the environmental consequences of giving in to my lust for shiny electronics, I decided I'd get a second-hand model from eBay, assuming correctly that the market would be glutted by people who are replacing all their gadgets with an iPad or iPhone. And I flipped a coin between the two readers by putting in bids, and waiting until I won an auction instead of being gazumped at the last minute by someone with an auto-bid script. (This technique works well if you are buying fungible products and don't mind waiting a few weeks until your number comes up; it's a bad idea if you want something NOW or if the thing you are going for is unique.)
So I ended up with a Cool-ER. It's matt black, its UI is a thumbwheel somewhat like the one that the iPod made famous, and it's very, very light and thin (even compared to e-readers in general.) There are advantages to touchscreens (as in the higher-end Sony models) and keyboards (as in the Kindle), but they are outweighed for my by the disadvantages of a much more expensive toy and the lock-in to a particular vendor. I have no problem at all reading on the screen; it's plenty big enough, both in dimensions and resolution, and I find the E-ink screen highly readable. And yes, it's small and light enough to sling into my handbag and carry around without giving myself shoulder-ache, which is one of the big reasons I wanted an e-reader.
I'm in no way a codex or paper-and-ink purist. In no way; as it is I do more reading in terms of hours on screen than off the page already, and that's with un-ergonomic arrangements like a full-sized laptop, or an almost but not quite fully portable netbook, or an eye-straining smart phone. But until this whole DRM thing is sorted out, I just can't see e-books forming a major part of my reading or my expenditure on books. It's not that I want to steal things, not at all; I'd be quite happy to sign a statement with every ebook that I buy that I won't make any copies, that I won't re-sell it without deleting my version, and I would stick to that. The problem is that I don't want to pay for something that depends on the continuing goodwill of a company that may go bust, or stop supporting that product. And on the particular physical device that I bought to read it with; if the device wears out, or if I just want to replace it, all my content is gone.
And I can't even make backups; it seems completely bizarre to me to have any digital file that only exists in one physical instantiation, with no copy on my main computer or my external hard drive. The other thing that seems weird is that, unlike an mp3 player, I can't even load it up with the particular books I want to read right now, and then move them back to my computer and replace them with other current books. Once the memory is full, my only option is to delete older books to put the newer ones on there. And honestly, if I'm going to be paying a license fee to read a book once, it had better be a lot cheaper than the full, new price of the physical book!
The other problem I have with ebooks would still be there even if DRM weren't an issue: it doesn't really suit the way I acquire books. I read about 50 books a year, which may not be quite enough that it's worthwhile targeting stuff to me, but if the average is 2 or 3, it's still quite a lot! But I borrow a lot of books from friends, and I'm a regular customer at the library, and I pick up books on a whim in charity shops. That's partly cos I'm a cheapskate, but mainly because the books I want to read are available like that. I don't want to read only this year's best-sellers and 19th century classics that are in the public domain and belong to the Dead White Male Canon. I want to read books from a few years ago that I didn't get round to when they were first released (and I didn't feel like paying the premium to grab them the moment they come out.) I want to read random quirky stuff that's out of fashion but appeals to my taste (and perhaps that of the people whose collections end up in charity shops). I want to read classic SF (which isn't quite old enough to be PD). I'd say most of what I read is orphaned works, those that are out of print but not yet in the public domain. Books in that category simply don't have e-editions. There isn't an ebook way to do the equivalent of tracking down that elusive title through a combination of the internet and scouring charity shops.
And writing this has really brought home to me that the copyright term has become way, way too long. I'm very much pro-copyright, but the number of works that are still making money for their creators or their estates decades after the author's death is minuscule. (I suppose one might argue that those few exceptions pay for the whole creative industry, but I tend to doubt it.) It would make much more sense if mid-twentieth century works were in the public domain.
In fact, even with books that do come into the category of recent best-sellers, publishers are often incredibly inconsistent about what's available as an ebook. They may sell 1, 3, 4 and 6 of a six book series in this format, which is utterly useless. Or they may sell different works by the same author via different online stores, and DRM means I can't mix and match. When I got the new toy, I started out looking for stuff that is already at the top of my disorganized to-read list, and most of it I just couldn't find.
The big reason I bought an ebook is to change my book buying habits a bit. I have enough income now that I ought to be reading the 50 books I most want to read in a year, not the 50 books I happen to find cheap or free. My plan is to create a proper, organized to-read list, and systematically acquire books from it to put on my new shiny reader. And carry it with me everywhere, and get it out to read for 5 minutes at the bus-stop or when the person I'm with gets up to go to the loo, like I used to do with paperbacks before I got my smart phone. But I'm having problems with carrying out this good resolution, so could use some pointers.
My Cool-ER supports pdf, HTML, plain text and rtf, and epub for DRM books via Adobe's Digital Editions thingy. But I don't quite know how to find ebooks in those formats. Lots of online shops seem to sell ebooks only to the US (would anyone be willing to "lend" me their US posting address so that I can buy the books? They are actually purely digital and don't need a shipping address at all, and I promise not to do anything to besmirch your good name.) Most websites I've looked at don't even say what formats they do supply, which is really unhelpful. Interead (the company who make the Cool-ER) does have a bookstore, but it's one of those stupid things with mostly self-published stuff, as they have some stupid idea that teh ebil publishing industry is all about turning away perfectly good authors and everybody should have the right to publish their works without having to get past any gatekeepers *eyeroll*. This attitude doesn't usually produce things I actually want to read! And a lot of sites seem to have gone down the Amazon route of only selling things specifically for their pet device. Even without that, I have this awful feeling that I'm going to have to put a different program on my computer for every different company I want to give money to, which I'll do, but I won't feel happy about it!
So, for those of you who read ebooks, can you point me to the sites you use to buy them? If you have any advice about *cough* format shifting (note: it's absolutely my intention to pay publishers the full market price for everything I want to read, even if I end up using grey channels to convert the texts to a format that my device can read and I can back up) I'd be glad to hear it. I'm happy to know about legitimate sources of free ebooks (which is to say, not those that offer bundles of thousands of pirated titles, or those that charge exorbitant prices for poorly OCR'd versions of stuff that's in the public domain anyway; I know about Project Gutenberg, of course.) Also, what gadgets do you use for downloading webpages for later offline reading? Do you know any good e-publishers who may sell stuff that never goes through a paper format, but who actually do some selecting, editing and proofreading before taking their cut? Or any authors who are selling their own works directly whom you'd recommend? Another part of my resolution is that I want to read more non-traditional formats, like poetry and comic books / anime, so recs appreciated.
In other news, today I saw a woman with לא נכשלת tattooed across her cleavage in large, blocky Hebrew letters. (I may have looked at her breasts a little longer than is polite, cos while I can read Hebrew, I am not quite fluent enough to read whole words at a glance.) I translated this, with some bemusement, as "she does not fall over"; Googling brings up a lot of technical help documents about what to do when Windows fails [to do whatever], but also several quotes about "love never fails". Perhaps she has "love" somewhere that isn't publicly visible, even on someone who's fairly skimpily dressed. People are strange, but in a good way.
darcydodo's Kindle when she was over here, and seeing that both Amazon and Sony were selling last year's model for £110 in anticipation of bringing out a newer, shinier version. It turns out I'm much more willing to pay around a hundred pounds for an electronic gadget (that isn't a computer) than £200 plus. In the end I decided not to go for the Kindle itself, because I didn't want a reader that is essentially a shopping portal for a single company. (I also didn't care about WiFi or GSM; being able to purchase books while travelling isn't the point for me, being able to read them is.) File format-wise, it seems to be a choice between Amazon only, and anyone other than Amazon, so I went for the second option. I was torn between Sony's PRS-505, and the Cool-ER a new thing by a small British company, whose big selling point is that it handles multiple file formats.
Because I feel guilty about the environmental consequences of giving in to my lust for shiny electronics, I decided I'd get a second-hand model from eBay, assuming correctly that the market would be glutted by people who are replacing all their gadgets with an iPad or iPhone. And I flipped a coin between the two readers by putting in bids, and waiting until I won an auction instead of being gazumped at the last minute by someone with an auto-bid script. (This technique works well if you are buying fungible products and don't mind waiting a few weeks until your number comes up; it's a bad idea if you want something NOW or if the thing you are going for is unique.)
So I ended up with a Cool-ER. It's matt black, its UI is a thumbwheel somewhat like the one that the iPod made famous, and it's very, very light and thin (even compared to e-readers in general.) There are advantages to touchscreens (as in the higher-end Sony models) and keyboards (as in the Kindle), but they are outweighed for my by the disadvantages of a much more expensive toy and the lock-in to a particular vendor. I have no problem at all reading on the screen; it's plenty big enough, both in dimensions and resolution, and I find the E-ink screen highly readable. And yes, it's small and light enough to sling into my handbag and carry around without giving myself shoulder-ache, which is one of the big reasons I wanted an e-reader.
I'm in no way a codex or paper-and-ink purist. In no way; as it is I do more reading in terms of hours on screen than off the page already, and that's with un-ergonomic arrangements like a full-sized laptop, or an almost but not quite fully portable netbook, or an eye-straining smart phone. But until this whole DRM thing is sorted out, I just can't see e-books forming a major part of my reading or my expenditure on books. It's not that I want to steal things, not at all; I'd be quite happy to sign a statement with every ebook that I buy that I won't make any copies, that I won't re-sell it without deleting my version, and I would stick to that. The problem is that I don't want to pay for something that depends on the continuing goodwill of a company that may go bust, or stop supporting that product. And on the particular physical device that I bought to read it with; if the device wears out, or if I just want to replace it, all my content is gone.
And I can't even make backups; it seems completely bizarre to me to have any digital file that only exists in one physical instantiation, with no copy on my main computer or my external hard drive. The other thing that seems weird is that, unlike an mp3 player, I can't even load it up with the particular books I want to read right now, and then move them back to my computer and replace them with other current books. Once the memory is full, my only option is to delete older books to put the newer ones on there. And honestly, if I'm going to be paying a license fee to read a book once, it had better be a lot cheaper than the full, new price of the physical book!
The other problem I have with ebooks would still be there even if DRM weren't an issue: it doesn't really suit the way I acquire books. I read about 50 books a year, which may not be quite enough that it's worthwhile targeting stuff to me, but if the average is 2 or 3, it's still quite a lot! But I borrow a lot of books from friends, and I'm a regular customer at the library, and I pick up books on a whim in charity shops. That's partly cos I'm a cheapskate, but mainly because the books I want to read are available like that. I don't want to read only this year's best-sellers and 19th century classics that are in the public domain and belong to the Dead White Male Canon. I want to read books from a few years ago that I didn't get round to when they were first released (and I didn't feel like paying the premium to grab them the moment they come out.) I want to read random quirky stuff that's out of fashion but appeals to my taste (and perhaps that of the people whose collections end up in charity shops). I want to read classic SF (which isn't quite old enough to be PD). I'd say most of what I read is orphaned works, those that are out of print but not yet in the public domain. Books in that category simply don't have e-editions. There isn't an ebook way to do the equivalent of tracking down that elusive title through a combination of the internet and scouring charity shops.
And writing this has really brought home to me that the copyright term has become way, way too long. I'm very much pro-copyright, but the number of works that are still making money for their creators or their estates decades after the author's death is minuscule. (I suppose one might argue that those few exceptions pay for the whole creative industry, but I tend to doubt it.) It would make much more sense if mid-twentieth century works were in the public domain.
In fact, even with books that do come into the category of recent best-sellers, publishers are often incredibly inconsistent about what's available as an ebook. They may sell 1, 3, 4 and 6 of a six book series in this format, which is utterly useless. Or they may sell different works by the same author via different online stores, and DRM means I can't mix and match. When I got the new toy, I started out looking for stuff that is already at the top of my disorganized to-read list, and most of it I just couldn't find.
The big reason I bought an ebook is to change my book buying habits a bit. I have enough income now that I ought to be reading the 50 books I most want to read in a year, not the 50 books I happen to find cheap or free. My plan is to create a proper, organized to-read list, and systematically acquire books from it to put on my new shiny reader. And carry it with me everywhere, and get it out to read for 5 minutes at the bus-stop or when the person I'm with gets up to go to the loo, like I used to do with paperbacks before I got my smart phone. But I'm having problems with carrying out this good resolution, so could use some pointers.
My Cool-ER supports pdf, HTML, plain text and rtf, and epub for DRM books via Adobe's Digital Editions thingy. But I don't quite know how to find ebooks in those formats. Lots of online shops seem to sell ebooks only to the US (would anyone be willing to "lend" me their US posting address so that I can buy the books? They are actually purely digital and don't need a shipping address at all, and I promise not to do anything to besmirch your good name.) Most websites I've looked at don't even say what formats they do supply, which is really unhelpful. Interead (the company who make the Cool-ER) does have a bookstore, but it's one of those stupid things with mostly self-published stuff, as they have some stupid idea that teh ebil publishing industry is all about turning away perfectly good authors and everybody should have the right to publish their works without having to get past any gatekeepers *eyeroll*. This attitude doesn't usually produce things I actually want to read! And a lot of sites seem to have gone down the Amazon route of only selling things specifically for their pet device. Even without that, I have this awful feeling that I'm going to have to put a different program on my computer for every different company I want to give money to, which I'll do, but I won't feel happy about it!
So, for those of you who read ebooks, can you point me to the sites you use to buy them? If you have any advice about *cough* format shifting (note: it's absolutely my intention to pay publishers the full market price for everything I want to read, even if I end up using grey channels to convert the texts to a format that my device can read and I can back up) I'd be glad to hear it. I'm happy to know about legitimate sources of free ebooks (which is to say, not those that offer bundles of thousands of pirated titles, or those that charge exorbitant prices for poorly OCR'd versions of stuff that's in the public domain anyway; I know about Project Gutenberg, of course.) Also, what gadgets do you use for downloading webpages for later offline reading? Do you know any good e-publishers who may sell stuff that never goes through a paper format, but who actually do some selecting, editing and proofreading before taking their cut? Or any authors who are selling their own works directly whom you'd recommend? Another part of my resolution is that I want to read more non-traditional formats, like poetry and comic books / anime, so recs appreciated.
In other news, today I saw a woman with לא נכשלת tattooed across her cleavage in large, blocky Hebrew letters. (I may have looked at her breasts a little longer than is polite, cos while I can read Hebrew, I am not quite fluent enough to read whole words at a glance.) I translated this, with some bemusement, as "she does not fall over"; Googling brings up a lot of technical help documents about what to do when Windows fails [to do whatever], but also several quotes about "love never fails". Perhaps she has "love" somewhere that isn't publicly visible, even on someone who's fairly skimpily dressed. People are strange, but in a good way.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-07 02:35 pm (UTC)The two biggest stores that have non-DRM'd ebooks are Fictionwise.com (the "multiformat" books are available in several formats) and Smashwords.com. I'm a bit blurry on how well either of them deals with non-US buyers. (I know that a lot of FW's books with DRM are US-only.)
Fictionwise is a "normal" bookstore; it sells stuff they get through publishers, and ebooks that used to be in print and the authors have re-released through them. I'm fond of their short stories. However, last year or so Fictionwise was bought by Barnes & Noble, and since then, both the selection & customer service have gone downhill fast. A lot of formerly strong FW advocates have realized they're never going to be as good as they were in 2005.
Smashwords is a self-publishing ebook site; basically lulu-for-ebooks. Quality is *ALL OVER*; ranges from formerly-published bestsellers whose rights have reverted to the author, to "I wrote this yesterday here it is" utter crap. However, most books have samples ranging from 15-35%; you can try them out before buying. They also have a large free selection. (And most of us have developed the rule of thumb that if the description contains spelling or grammatical errors, the book isn't worth giving money for.)
Baen is a sci-fi publisher who *does ebooks right*. Their ebooks are released in several formats, with no DRM; I believe no geographic restrictions (I know they buy world-wide ebook rights). And they understand ebooks as *books*, as in, "it's okay with us if you share them with a friend." They also have an extensive free library.
There are also "real" ebook publishers, with editors and all that, who focus on ebooks and not print. (Some of them also release print editions.) There are *lots* of erotica/romance publishers, a cluster of science fiction publishers, and a few other genre/"literature" publishers. If you let me know what you're interested in, I'll see what I can track down; don't want to flood one comment with too much info. (I did recently do a post on non-DRM ebook stores.)
*THE* format shifting program is Calibre, which is free & open-source & actively being developed to get rid of bugs & be more useful. It works on non-DRM'd ebooks only. To strip the DRM, you'll need other programs, which I'm blurry on the details of. (I'm an anti-DRM fanatic who doesn't ever buy DRM. I can find links for the necessary programs; I just don't keep them on the top of my head. PM me if you'd like more info.)
The best place to ask questions about ebooks--any question, from "where do I find good stuff" to "how do I replace the batteries in my reader" to "does the new law in France affect what books I'll be able to get"--is the Mobileread forums. They also have a collection of public domain/creative commons ebooks; if you're looking for anything PD, start at Mobileread, because those are hand-formatted by people who *care* about ebooks.
Poetry & anime/manga: Ebook readers aren't there yet. Oh, they exist for ebook readers, but the devices just aren't friendly to those formats. EPub can do poetry fairly well, *if* the formatter has put it together right; very few bother. And anything image-heavy has problems on the tiny screen. I have no recs. Sorry. The closest I've dealt with manga is a collection of XKCD strips in PDF format.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-07 02:52 pm (UTC)I'm anti-DRM (as you probably noticed from this post) but I'm not quite a fanatic; after years of saying I wouldn't buy an e-reader until the market shifted towards non-DRM, I gave in. But as with music I'm very willing to pay a premium for open files, so I will definitely follow up on your tips. My impression is that books now are where music tracks were a few years ago; there are free-as-in-speech shops, but they are mostly small hobby things that have a minimal selection (or lots of self-published, unedited junk), or are fronts for piracy operations. So you have to get advice from connoisseurs; thank you for letting me benefit from your experience!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-07 03:39 pm (UTC)The Kindle cracks involve something called kindlepid and kindlefix, and possibly a new program called skindle; the Mobi ones involve mobidedrm. (Kindle books are .mobi/.prc format with a different kind of DRM, for no reason we can figure except that Amazon doesn't want its customers to be able to shop elsewhere.)
Microsoft's .lit format has been cracked for years; convertlit is the program works, and there's both a command-line & GUI version.
The good news? Non-DRM'd books are cheaper. Even when they're better formatted and written by terrific authors. JA Konrath's blog talks a lot about changes in the publishing industry, and authors wising up to the fact that 70% of a $3 book, sold a thousand times, is worth a lot more than 20% of a $15 book that sells two hundred copies.
I have to admit, I don't just avoid DRM'd books because of Good Morals... I haven't come close to running out of non-DRM'd stuff to read. (And the AO3 test archive has a beta version of "download this story as an ebook;" I may never need to deal with DRM.) I read a ridiculous amount of fanfic on my reader, and between Smashwords and Feedbooks.com, I may never run out of free content. (I buy stuff at Smashwords occasionally, mostly to remind myself that I should throw money at causes I want to support.)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-07 03:42 pm (UTC)Enjoy your exciting new thing!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-07 05:39 pm (UTC)I am hoping that - if I can find them amidst the masses of self-published books of dubious quality - to find more books of the type I like to read but which are currently not deemed 'big enough' for the market, and I am looking forward to making discoveries.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-07 06:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-07 07:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-07 09:10 pm (UTC)Oh, did she manage to get that published? I reviewed an early draft for her in 1999. (I wonder if my name is on the acknowledgements page. :o))
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-07 09:21 pm (UTC)It's not ever been formally published, I don't believe, only in digital version through the website. Which is sad, because I wanted to go out and buy it from the shops. Possibly several copies, for ease of lending. *g*
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-08 03:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-10 04:29 pm (UTC)Plus, as a UK person I've very rarely run into 'you can't have that' issues at Fictionwise, and when I have, it's been with DRM'd 'mainstream' stuff. (You'll need a US credit card as well as a US email address to get around that.)
Waterstones website is horrible, but they do do epub, because that's what works with the readers they sell. Foyles, sadly, isn't much better, although I always have good customer service from them in person and on the phone. the selection and pricing on both of them is a bit random, but I think that's the industry more than the booksellers.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-10 04:54 pm (UTC)Regarding cheaper non-DRM material, buying direct from authors is one of the big reasons I decided to buy an e-reader. But I don't think I'm ready to fill it up with fanfic; I don't know if you follow tor.com, but in this discussion, I came down firmly on the side of worrying that I'll run out of time for reading rather than being afraid of running out of reading material. I don't want to be reading any old thing that I can get my hands on without paying. I pretty much do that anyway, and it's led to me reading a lot of forgettable trash. I reckon I have enough lifetime left to read a few thousand books, and I want to shift the balance towards books that will really inspire me, and away from anything with words in that will fill up otherwise dull time. I am not at all saying that fanfic is automatically worse than profic, but the point is that I bought the e-reader because I want to be more selective in my reading, not less.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-10 04:58 pm (UTC)Thanks for the recs, too. I have found Waterstones useless for browsing, but if I know what book I want and just search for it, they sometimes have it for a good price and always in the epub format that works on my reader. Foyles is one I hadn't thought of, so thanks for mentioning it.
(no subject)
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Date: 2010-09-10 09:14 pm (UTC)