Call me traditional, but I love books. I have about 5000 of them. If I see a long blog post or a scientific paper or an article that is longer than a page or two, I print it out and read it in hardcopy. I see why an e-Book is a good idea, though, and one day I am sure to have one for particular purposes (e.g., for travel, or for copying and pasting short quotes into my blog-posts as needed, or for sharing books with others), but not until I am the master of exactly what is on it and what I want to do with it - and apparently that time is far off. It may be even going backwards. Just see what people are saying about Kindle, the new Amazon book-reading device. Proprietary, proprietary, proprietary...
This is probably the best way to put it (in the best tradition of Billmon!).
And not just that Amazon is tying you to their own format and forbidding you from doing anything interesting with the book, e.g., owning it, sharing it, printing it, mashing-it-up, but you can now also read blogs using Kindle. Look at the list of blogs they offer, and especially the list of science blogs. Many of my SciBlings are on there. Happily, I am not. Although a couple of times a week when I flag a post to appear in the Select Feed, you will be able to read it on Kindle. And pay for it. In the meantime, you can continue reading my blog for free, right here, or via my RSS feed, or via e-mail subscription. Feel free to print out my posts, link to them, cite/quote them, discuss them, fisk them, use the printouts for kindling a fire or whatever else you want to do. You can print the whole blog if you want and have it leather-bound like a book if you want. Up to you. Free.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Free? Except of course for the price we pay for reading too many blogs when we're supposed to writing qualifying exams! And doing experiments. And taking care of our kids. You get the idea.
Ah, the hidden costs... :-)
try looking at bookeen.com
I agree; if I read on the computer for too long my eyes feel like they're going to melt (although I often write posts that are painfully long). I was a little miffed at first that I wasn't included in the selection of blogs available for kindle, but when I thought about it, it's probably for the better. I don't really want people paying to read what I have to say on Laelaps, especially when they can get it for free in any number of ways. If I wrote a book that'd be one thing, but I am overall not too keen on Kindle and will always prefer a heavy book to settle down with.
It's a shame that nobody has produced a good ebook reader. It's not like we're all that demanding. A good monochrome (or grayscale) screen, decent battery life, and the ability to put whatever we want on it are all it would take.
I've always felt that paying for what is meant, by the author, to be free is somehow robbery. This of course assumes that the author specifically states that such material is to be free. But I gotta say, I feel the same when ever I see some publishing company making money off of Socrates, who charged nothing for his pestering, unlike the sophists of his day. But kudos to you for wanting your writing to remain open to all who can get a library card.
On a side note, how am I supposed to borrow or lend books with this? Must I give so-and-so a $400 kindle so that they can read the book? Somehow I find the whole enterprise lacking in every way but the technology itself. And even that isn't breathtaking, but merely an advance upon the past, which is to be expected.
I wish there was a good e-book reader and service, but none of them that have been offered so far make themselves appealing to the consumer. All of them over-charge for the books. The physical plant is a significant cost item for a book publisher but an e-book publisher doesn't have those costs, yet they don't deduct the full value of that cost from their offerings. It appears that the prices Amazon wants for books is greater than the wholesale cost of trade paperback versions of the books. If someone came out with a good reader and if e-books were offered a significant discount from paper books, it just might catch on.
How on earth did the people who came up with this supposed replacement for a paper medium decide on the name "Kindle"? It's either tone-deaf or arrogant. Or both. Burn, baby, burn...
Yeah, an e-book is an inevitable and in some ways a great development. (Fewer trees turned into paper? Tough to complain about that.) But now that I've seen the drawbacks to this version laid out, eww.
Thank you, for continuing to offer your blog for free. I hope Kindle crashes and burns like so many tiny pieces of kindling in the fires of the free exchange of ideas.
A colleague of mine put a small linux OS on his palm pilot, downloaded the palm version of Adobe Reader (I think, or something along those lines) and compresses the hell out of pdf files or converts them into text files and compresses that. Of course he gets off on reading bike or tech manuals, but can get several full length books on the pilot for plane flights etc. I don't know where he gets the books though. Knowing him, he probably steals them from somewhere.
I have never seen an ebook reader I was truly impressed with, though the Sony Reader comes tantalizingly close (it's rather bottlenecked on input though -- really needs a touchscreen and a USB-A port for a keyboard). The Kindle is just broken by design -- someone on Pharyngula pointed out that it looked like a prop from the old Battlestar Galactica, and tying it to a specific subscription model is just messed up.
For the most part, I don't want eBooks. There are certain situations I do, but the vast majority of those situations are things like HTML and PDF documents -- FAQs, Gutenberg ebooks, that sort of thing. For all those, the technology already exists in the form of PDAs and laptops, which are much more generally useful than an ebook reader. Give me an iPod touch or a Palm unit (or even a full Linux/Windows PC or Mac) in a format the size of a mid-sized trade paperback, for less than the price of a low-end laptop, I'm sold. (It's not like the technology isn't there -- after all, portable DVD players have broken the $100 mark.)
Why does no one sell this? Am I asking too much of the current technology market to put all that into a unit for about $500?