Comments on: Death of the book ?

By: Gary Farber

Gary Farber — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 20:33:06 +0000

The rain here gives me a focus for banging my head.

By: agm

agm — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 20:13:25 +0000

Although this does transfer the cost of printing to the reader, which is non-negligible for lots of technical/ academic reading (4 pages here, 10 pages there, 35-60 pages for a review paper, at least 30% of which will have a color scale for data, no less than 1/3 of which must be printed in color since the data will be uninterpretable if redered in grayscale…). I mostly go to the library these days for journals whose back issues are not fully online yet. Thank god for online publishing or journal articles, but I still have to pay 25-50 cents a page for my plasmagrams.

By: Joey

Joey — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 04:54:06 +0000

No, I don’t think print is going anywhere anytime soon. Jakob Nielsen (an expert in usability) has an article showing that online reading is about 25% slower than reading print. From the little I’ve read, I do believe that MS ClearType has helped decrease the difference. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9602.html

By: Pedro

Pedro — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 03:52:37 +0000

John, I loved Mieville’s Perdido Street Station and The Scar, but Iron Council has been a disappointment. I wonder how you feel about the novel.

By: Joel Turnipseed

Joel Turnipseed — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 18:15:25 +0000

I’ve tried reading books from PDF and can only agree that it’s great for hard-to-find material (out of print Go books, academic or technical papers,etc). From a cost standpoint, the savings are negligible (cost of printing it, say, plus opportunity cost of trying to keep pages together, etc—not to mention 8.5×11 is much larger than most book formats, versus marginal cost of hardcover vs edoc): when I found out how little it actually costs to print even small print runs (and how much goes into editorial, royalties, and marketing costs—not to mention retail discounts), I gave a huge “Whew, the book is saved!” sigh of relief. Now, if I could just afford a few hundred extra square feet…

By: yabonn

yabonn — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 17:30:31 +0000

Once they find some real electronic paper that won’t waste my eyes, maybe. Even then, i wonder about the influence of piracy on that potential market. For technical references type of books, the string research functions are very nice,though. …Come to think of it, for a novel, it could be hours of fun. Map and compare lexical field on a clic! Repetitions check! Palindromes! Longest sentences! Words used only once in the book! Yay!

By: Ken Houghton

Ken Houghton — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 16:48:58 +0000

If I take a paperback to the beach and it gets wet, or on the subway and I get jostled and drop it, I’m at most out a few pages, or a MSFT. (If I were pressed for an over/under, I’d say seven years, and wouldn’t be surprised if the morning line moved downward.)

By: steve burnap

steve burnap — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 16:18:10 +0000

I’ve been downloading books to my PDA for years, now. I’ve probably read around twenty novels and a few years worth of SF magazines. It’s not perfect as the screen is too small, but on the other hand, it’s easier to read one-handed while standing on the subway and being able to carry thousands of hours of reading material in a package smaller than a paperback is nice. When I started reading on PDAs, on an old Palm III, it was a poor experience with blocky fonts and poor backlighting. Reading on my modern Clie, the only real issue is that the screen is about half the size of what I’d like. The technology is here, it is just a matter of someone packaging it correctly (and not encumbering it with stupid proprietary file formats like previous attempts at eBoook hardware has sufferred with.)

By: JPed

JPed — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 15:59:25 +0000

What is the quality like? I’ve downloaded a few eBooks in .pdf format, and I was a little put off by the enormous font size and the lack of pictures or any other design features (fonts, etc). But it could just be the books I picked, which are sufficiently trashy that their titles will not be mentioned here…

By: ogged

ogged — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 15:56:07 +0000

And with a smaller laptop, or tablet pc, you wouldn’t need to sit in one place to read it. Odd that the book is available for download, but not for searching “inside.”