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[Vendetagainst]

Background information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle
Amazon Kindle as told by Amazon
Comparison of different E-book readers


Price aside, I think I'd like one. I hate reading long texts from a computer screen, and I have several hundred dollars worth of PDFs that I could never afford in real life and that I have only ever skimmed because of this issue. Additionally, I like the idea of being able to get a book immediately whenever I want one, and in general this just sparks my geeky side.

What do you folks think of e-book readers? Do any of you want one, have one, or have anything against them? I can certainly understand the "it's unnecessary" position, but do you have any other issues?

[BlahBlah]

I like the feel of real books and I just don't think these could ever replace that.

[yelley]

i have seen a few demos of them in stores and i have a friend that has one. they are really cool and i would probably use one a lot when i travel or when i'm not at home, but when i am at home in bed or on the couch or wherever i would prefer a real book.

the kindle looks nicest, i think... but it seems like it is hard to get your pre-existing pdfs onto it? maybe i am wrong about this, but i think i remember reading that it limits you in that respect so you have to buy the specific kindle books through amazon.

[Ozymandias]

I've played with one and I'm completely in love. I can't wait until I'm rich enough to basically buy an iPod for books.

[pen]

I haven't played with one, but I can't really see the point.  I love the feel of a book, especially a new book.  I like turning the pages.  I like going to the library.  Also, I like when I'm carrying a book and someone near me strikes up a conversation about it.  No one would be able to do that with this little gadget. 

Again, though, I haven't touched one, so who knows... I could convert.

[Vendetagainst]

@Yelley
You don't have to get them from Amazon, wikipedia lists over a dozen different sources. But you're right about PDFs, they're "experimental" and can upload with screwed up formatting. Still worth a try though, I would think.

[öde]

I use my Eee 900 as a book, I just flip the display sideways.

[0bsessions]

This is just another of those gadgets for folks with more money than sense. I can understand personal video players and music players and video gaming systems and all that, but this just seems idiotic.

You pay over $350 for the device itself and then another $2 for a digital rendition. That's simply not a price point that lends itself to any form of practicality or survivability of this format, especially as a proprietary one. Your average paperback book costs around $7. Going by that average, you'd have to buy a full 73 books on the thing before you actually started saving money over the cost of buying your books in paperback format. That's not accounting for used book stores and libraries.

That's the thing that really renders this completely fucking useless. Libraries. Why would someone need to get something like this when pretty much every city in America has a place you can go and borrow a book for free? An mp3 player is significantly smaller than this device and you can't exactly carry a day's worth of music around with you in any cheaper and more convenient manner. This device is no smaller than your average paperback and, thus, no more convenient. I'll find myself, in the course of a day, skipping around various albums on my iPod, but I've never found myself needing two different novels in any given day.

You're not saving money doing this, you're not making life much more convenient with this and you're probably going to strain the shit out of your eyes with this. This is an absolutely useless device. I could potentially envision myself using a similar device for comics, as that would balance out quick (Comics run between $3 and $4 each now and are a much quicker read than a novel), but for actual books? Idiotic.

[Vendetagainst]

The first iPods cost four hundred dollars and were not that much bigger than a walkman. And while its surface area isn't any smaller than a regular book (why would you want it to be?) It's a hell of a lot thinner. Rather than carrying a five pound, three inch thick textbook, you can carry something that weighs just over half a pound and is less than half an inch thick. That's a huge difference, and I can only imagine how convenient it would be for students. On top of that, half the appeal is that it is not supposed to be like looking at a computer screen, it's supposed to read like a regular text and not have the same strain on your eyes.

Oh yeah, and it's backlit, texts can be marked and annotated, and you can subscribe to any number of blogs and magazines.

[Katherine]

I would not like to use a Kindle for my main source of reading material simply because I like being able to lend out really good books to people so that they might read them and enjoy them as well.

[0bsessions]

I suppose I can see the allure to a student, but that's about it. Even at that, you'd have to rely on your college adopting it as a popular format. I spent close to seven hundred bucks on books alone my first semester of college. Outside of students, though, this thing is pretty jack shit useless.

[Ladybug]

I could see it being really useful for students or people who generally move around a lot, because a huge plus is that you can carry tons of books basically in a little pocket in your backpack. Though most people read one or two books at the time, I can see it being useful when travelling etc.

But yeah, I wouldn't be getting one either (if I lived in the US, I mean, I don't think the Kindle is available outside?), just because while it might be good for text books, it would drive me nuts that I wouldn't be able to highlight or comment stuff in it, and that the screen in general is kinda small. I like that my text books are mostly huge, even though that makes them a bitch to carry around.

[Vendetagainst]

I agree that it's superfluous, but it's still basically an improvement in the system. It is first generation and it will only get cheaper and better. You resisted comparing it to an iPod, but you can't deny that there are plenty of parallels. iPods were called unnecessary by a huge number of people, and they were absolutely right. Nobody needs an iPod, iPods are a luxary, but they've made many lives better because they're enjoyable and convenient as fuck--there's no reason to resist improvement on the basis of necessity.
Libraries are great, but would you rather drive to one or have any book you wanted permanently, instantly, and wirelessly delivered to you? And there's an internet connection, so you can find virtually anything to read whereas finding a book in a library is a pain in the ass (for me anyway).
I'm not saying that libraries will become obsolete or that there is anything wrong with the system we have now, but it IS an improvement and thus should be encouraged, because I can think of dozens of things I would enjoy doing with this that I couldn't do the same way without.

it would drive me nuts that I wouldn't be able to highlight or comment stuff in it, and that the screen in general is kinda small.

you can do both. It has a keyboard, you can annotate specific sections, and you can highlight.
Not only that, but it has a search function. Think about that for a second, how often have you gotten pissed by the fact that you cannot find a specific section of a novel or textbook?

[Ladybug]

Well, yes, real life would benefit massively from a search function. That has bugged me so many times. I'm not saying I'm against it entirely - hell, I like PDF e-books on my MacBook - I just don't think that at the moment, it would be worth its price for me.

I must admit I didn't know it had a keyboard, which makes it more relevant for me than I thought, but I think I would still prefer highlighting and adding notes by hand, simply because when I study, I need...lots of room and having multiple things open at once and generally using huge books, while the Kindle looks like it would drive me nuts, because the screen is kind of small. It will probably improve and all that, but unless I start earning loads of money and travelling a lot, I don't see myself getting one.

[Tom]

It'd be awesome if I could read my .cbr/.cbz files on it. Other than that, I'm more in favour of books not being published as ebooks but instead like this.

[celticgeek]

That is pretty cool.

I figure that I do not need a Kindle, although when I was doing a lot of traveling, it would have been nice.  I have talked to several people, and there seems to be two kinds of people:  people like me, who think it is pretty cool, but not necessary to their life styles; and people who absolutely HAVE to have one, use it a lot, and love it to death. 

So, there you are.

[JD]

Obsessions just hates seeing technology advance.

[RedLion]

I just don't see the point. I like holding a firm, thick (hurrrr) book in my hands, being able to turn the pages...I don't know. The tactile part of it is like 25% of the experience for me. Music is different; it's already intangible, it just depends on the form it's it. Words, however, are tangible and I feel like they should be physically there. I already hate reading pdfs and such on computers.

I kind of think it's a dumb, unnecessary invention.

[Tom]

Words are tangible?

[Alex C]

I already prefer pdfs to books, so I could see myself getting one when the costs go down. It comes down to one simple thing: storage space and organization. Is that worth $250+ to me? No, but it's easy for me to say that when I already have a decrepit laptop filled with PDFs which I drag around to tabletop sessions in lieu of lugging around my rule books. If they shave the price down far enough and work the kinks out. I don't buy 70 books a year, but I do buy at least a dozen or so, and I'd be willing to pay a slight premium not to have to put up with having another physical object around.

[RedLion]

Words are tangible?

When they're printed on a page, yes.

[Ozymandias]

So is music.

[TimA]

My agent has a kindle and loves it, with reservations. It functions very, very poorly in cold weather. And by cold, I think the breakoff point is somewhere under 40 F. Screen failures, battery failures, recharge errors. But he reads all his manuscripts on it, and is very pleased with the functionality. When importing stuff not specifically formatted for it, like manuscripts, it doesn't preserve things like page numbers, so that kinda sucks.

I think it's inevitable that something like this will eventually replace books, just from a standpoint of practicality. I love books, honest I do, but it'll happen eventually. Books will still be around as fetish objects, same as records these days, but they won't be the dominant form.

[Joseph]

Jen's picture summed up why I don't want a kindle.

I love the objects, I love the mess, I love the ability to reach out and grab one at random.  I enjoy the weight of the book in my hand, the feeling of the flipping pages, the ability to lend to friends.  The Kindle just holds no appeal to me.

Throw in Jon's observations about economic sense (which he got a bit wrong, as only classics are $2, so most books one is likely to buy on it would be $10.  Also, where in the world is the average price of a non-used paperback $7) and I'm baffled as to how anyone could want one.

[Tom]

The average price for a new book in Sydney is somewhere between $20 and $25.

[Alex C]

Can we rename this thread "In which DarkFlame admits to having a squalor fetish"?

[Alex C]

Yeah, see, my mild enthusiasm for gadgets cancels out my mild enthusiasm for the aesthetics of books. It comes down to a simple matter of practicality for me in the end. For now, the costs and the limitations sound too intimidating to me, just like with most electronics; I'm not a big early adopter. But the digital distribution angle is potentially a huge selling point for me.

[Joseph]

See, I can find just about any book I want, with a bit of hunting, in used bookstores for between 5 and 10 dollars, never mind all the $1 bargain bin finds.  On average downloading the books to the Kindle would be more expensive.

Upon a bit of reflection, I can see some value though, as far as books which have gone out of print.  I've been hunting for a lot of old Nabokov and E.E. Cummings books for ages now, with no luck outside of my school library, and would love to have some personal copy of the text, and though I would rather the book, at this point I'd settle for something digital.  Having said that, I think the machine which Tom linked to earlier would be a much better solution to the problem.


For The Espresso Machine though, I am a bit confused about how books would be provided in "just about any language" as the Publishers Weekly article claims.  Would they not still need translators?  I know there are a number of books which I have been interested in reading which aren't available in English, and I fail to see how this machine would solve that.

[0bsessions]

Jesus, Norway. Anyway, your typical paperback off the shelf in America can cost $7 or less in a lot of instances. Shit, the larger than average paperback version of the Subtle Knife I'm reading is priced at $8. The most I've ever paid for a paperback was $1d for the Zombie Survival Guide.

Shit, even hardcovers aren't all that expensive here. I paid something like $21 on release night for the last Harry Potter book in hardcover and World War Z was under $20 at Barnes and Noble.

Books, they be cheap.

[TimA]

One of the other advantages of e-readers in general is that it pretty much cancels out any issues with distribution and shelf space in bookstores. This is obviously more of an issue with new books, and is a big concern for new writers. If your debut novel doesn't do that well at the local Borders, they're just not going to order your next novel.

Anyway. Not sure that's relevant to the discussion. It'll be a while before I make the switch to electronic, but god bless the early adopters and the innovators.

[yelley]

Also, where in the world is the average price of a non-used paperback $7

mass market paperbacks in the US are usually 6.99 or 7.99. most new release paperbacks seem to come out in the larger size first, those ones cost 10 to 16 usually, but are usually reprinted to the smaller mass market size a few months later. or after the book gets made into a movie.

jon, i understand your point, but i think it is unfair to assume that since you don't need one, nobody else should either. as a person who has done a lot of traveling, i cannot tell you how much i wish i had an ebook reader when i was trying to move across the world in 2 suitcases. books are bulky... when packing to come home i had to choose between my books and my clothes. let's just say i had to do a lot of clothes shopping when i got back. also, your library argument does not really hold either. it's nice that you have the luxury of living in a place with a nice library, but a few of the places i have lived in recently have not been so nice. the library in salinas had a very large selection of spanish books, but were sorely lacking in new non-fiction in english.

[bicostp]

Meh. For about the same price you can get a netbook and actually be able to do whatever you want with it.

I doubt something like the Kindle will really catch on until the price drops drastically.

[Joseph]

Also, where in the world is the average price of a non-used paperback $7

mass market paperbacks in the US are usually 6.99 or 7.99. most new release paperbacks seem to come out in the larger size first, those ones cost 10 to 16 usually, but are usually reprinted to the smaller mass market size a few months later. or after the book gets made into a movie.

At least in Canada, it seems the vast majority of literary non-New York Times #1 bestseller type fiction just stays in trade paperback, which I usually much prefer to mass market ones.  I was judging what the US price would be off of the stated price on the back of these books.  Do that many books which aren't incredibly popular best-sellers really make it to mass-market paperback in the States?

[Alex C]

We're awash in paperbacks, honestly.

[TimA]

Most books, especially genre books, are released in MM initially. You actually have to have some kind of sales record or sales expectations going in to make the bump to trade paper or hardcover.

[Alex C]

I can think of a billion uses for MM, but not a one of them has to do with book publishing. Clarification please?

[TimA]

Sorry, Mass Market.

[ackblom12]

Yeah, I can honestly say that after having to move multiple times with 8+ heavy fucking boxes of books the Kindle is something I'm seriously coveting. I am going to be waiting until the 2nd gen at least, but I'm really excited about it.

[Joseph]

Most books, especially genre books, are released in MM initially. You actually have to have some kind of sales record or sales expectations going in to make the bump to trade paper or hardcover.

Where are you getting this from?  Maybe this was true thirty years ago, but this certainly isn't the case now, in my experience (some genre books, especially romance, being an exception).  My mother and grandmother have had books published, and every one of them, as long as I've been old enough to notice, has appeared first in hardcover, followed by a TP.  I go in lots of bookstores, and the recent fiction is almost always hardcover, or, if slightly older, TP.  It is a rare book that I see published in a MM sze, unless it is something like a mystery or romance, or has a movie adaptation.

[TimA]

I'm getting it from being a writer, and having lots of friends who are writers, editors, agents and publishers. I will emphasize that my knowledge is mostly genre based. Publishers focus their hardcover spots on established writers, or writers they feel are about to break out. And the hardcover > trade > mass market time gap is usually a year for each step. There are some publishers who do nothing but trade paper, and there are others who do nothing but mass market. Large houses run the whole gamut... it just depends on their publishing strategy.

My local Borders, for example, has a shelf of New in Hardcover. A little further on it's New in Trade, and then another shelf that's New in Mass Market. And yes, some books are moving from HC > TP > MM, but not all. Not even most. Beyond that, though, if you walk back to the stacks there are dozens of books back there that are newly published but aren't getting pulled out and put on their own shelf as being new. It's just the nature of the business. Too many titles, too little space. I could go pull the latest Locus magazine and count out how many titles are coming out this month, and what their formats are, but that's a lot of work and I'm supposed to be writing rather than reading the internets. I'm happy to expand on this if you'd like, but I think we may be suffering a little subject creep.

[lprkn]

For The Espresso Machine though, I am a bit confused about how books would be provided in "just about any language" as the Publishers Weekly article claims.  Would they not still need translators?  I know there are a number of books which I have been interested in reading which aren't available in English, and I fail to see how this machine would solve that.

I think it addressed a little in the article. I believe it relates to warehousing costs, i.e. Why would you take up valuable space with foreign language copies of books when they do much less business than the english language copies?

[Joseph]

But what about when books aren't even available in translation?

[Tom]

Nothing probably, unless they gain a massive surge in popularity.

[KvP]

Sorta unrelated, but Slate's Timothy Noah has a piece on how Amazon's success (and by extension, the Kindle's success) is not really backed up by any numbers at all. Which is nothing new, really.

[Wyr]

Anyone who has or wants one, I hate you.

You are single handidly destroying literature in this world.
Who wants to cuddle in a beanbag for a few hours and read a nice warm gameboy?
Tech goes too far when it starts to take away books. Newspaper comics I have no need for. But books?
My dark prince, people! Will you not be satisfied until you can download books directly into your brain? (Ok, that would be cool, ignore that) Why do you hate paper so much?
For the nerds out there, remember all the good times. I beg of you.

[Joseph]

You are single handidly destroying literature in this world.

This confuses me a bit.  Care to explain?

[öde]

Well literature has to be on paper. It certainly can't be published like this.

[Alex C]

I bet the cuneiform scribes said the same thing when some young punk started yammering on about his fancy shmancy papyrus.

[Drambels]

I can't speak for the Kindle, but I love my sony e-book reader.

It can't compare with the feel of a real book, there's no comfortable way of holding it for an extended period of time, and the buttons can drive you mad.
But when you're done reading a book on it, you're not carrying a lump of paper around until you get home, to a used bookstore, or to the nearest thrash can. Just enter the meny and half a minute later you've started reading a new book. I'm used to carrying at least two books with me whenever I travel, so that's a big plus for me.
Let's not forget that there are thousand of free books available, even without resorting to pirating.

I would rather be without my computer than my reader.

[Mallli_kite]

I'm sure to offend SOMEONE with this -- this is the Internet and it is inevitable.  So, if you feel like being offended, you can start now.

<rant>I'm also a big fan of my Sony E-reader.  I had an E-Bookman some years ago.  I read books on my cell phone when I'm stuck in line. I spend hours on the computer reading and writing.  I avoided the Kindle in part because I did NOT want the Blue Tooth/web enabled function -- the Internet distracts me enough as is.

I should add that I own currently somewhere close to 2500 bound volumes, hardback and paperback.  I collect signed books.  I buy new and used books. I trade books via the internet.  I have a damned storage room I pay rent on each month because I have more books than I can keep in my house.  Despite unloading books I no longer want, I just bought  more bookshelves, for a total of 12 in the house, 4 in the storage unit.  I love books.  I love reading.

This argument has been everywhere over the last 8 years (possibly longer -- when did they first start talking about electronic books, 1992?  1990?)  and I hear twomajor  lines of thought -- one group of people who are all about the sensual experience of the book, and another who are more about portability and space saving.  For me, it comes down to one issue -- I don't give a good damn about paper and covers of a "real book".  What matters to me is the CONTENT -- you know, the words that make a book a book.  Some people love books.  Other people love reading.  This doesn't mean there isn't something to be said for the sensual side of it -- the smell of an old book, or a new book; the sound of pages turning; being able to write notes and underline impressive bits of text; the heft and feel of the book in your hands.  But if what you want is something to read, an e-book works pretty well, especially if you read while you travel. Hell, when desperate, those who just want to read will settle for cereal boxes, stereo instructions, or even the in flight magazine.

It's not even an 'either/or'.  There are a LOT of books in the world.  There are so many books that thousands of them are remaindered and destroyed every week (not even recycled -- most end up in landfills or incinerators).  It's great to loan a book to a friend (never to be seen again, in most cases) and there is a huge thrill in opening the cover of a new book.  In my e-book currently I have 96 books (all classics, as it happens) that I take where ever I want so that I can pick something to read whenever I'm stuck somewhere, or when I'm on vacation. (I used to pack between 6 and 10 books with me on vacation -- not that I expected to read them all, but just so I had some choice). I can read MORE because i can carry them easily.

So I get a little confused about people who denounce the e-book as 'the end of literature' and so forth, as if books ARE literature (no, not really, just the latest method of transporting literature --  as someone else pointed out on the thread, skin scrolls and papyrus, stone tablets, temple walls, and caves all precede the printed word). 

Speaking of which, how many of you still write letters -- I mean really, with a pen on paper, an envelope and a postage stamp -- instead of sending an email or a text?  Do you bemoan the loss of the handwritten letter since the rise of electronic communications?  Do you miss the feel of unfolding heavy paper and scanning the carefully inked lines that took days or weeks to reach you?  Chances are good that a fair portion of you have little experience with written letters since they were in large part replaced with electronic means of communication.  But letters still exist.

I'm hoping that, eventually, publishing will move to an electronic format with print-on-demand for area hard copy distribution.  Printing technology is more than up for it.  Bookstores would be POD locations with a selection of finer hardbound books for collectors or sensualists.  Publishers will concentrate on acquisition and author development, editing and layout, rather than units printed, units stored, and units returned or remaindered.

As for the Sony itself -- light, easy to read/low glare, after about 10 minutes it feels like reading a printed book.  Requires a book light for reading in low light conditions (not back lit like a computer screen).  Menus are simple to navigate and it's easy to carry.  One draw back is that it doesn't support Mobipocket, a format which has a lot of free ebooks.  Can support audio books or MP3 music, too.  I have the second generation, having heard about some problems with the 3rd gen as they try to expand the technology.  Battery life has been fantastic and recharging has not been a problem. </rant>