Kindled?

The eink displays are from eink.com. This links to their development kits which give the various display dimensions. The Kindle and the Sony use a 6″ diag, 800×600 display. I don’t know if the 9.7″ 1200×825 is yet shipping in a product.

The iLiad 8″ display is smaller than A5, so that A4 PDF are displayed smaller than half size. The Sony reader will show A4 PDFs in landscape, not a full page, which seems to be quite functional.
The iLiad display is about 2mm shorter and about
1cm wider than a paperback – the Sony & Kindle are smaller.

I’d suggest cutting out some templates of the various sizes to get a feel, and read some of the iRex forums and the prior iLiad post.

Reading Stross’s Accelerando PDF on the iLiad was pleasant. Text sized for it is very comfortable, but that doesn’t describe A4 papers in PDF format – unless you have excellent eyesight.

Eye-glass mounted displays? Maybe in the future when we all wear silver, metallic jumpsuits with matching boots.

Don’t have too much time for a full review, but: I like my Kindle. I bought it primarily for reading pdfs, and it serves that purpose well, although I have found to my surprise that I really love the wireless service. Perhaps the best thing I can say for my Kindle is that I carry it with me everywhere, which is probably the ultimate proof point for a piece of consumer electronics.

Note that you can put pdfs on it directly for free, but…you probably won’t. The email feature is just insanely convenient, and I have a very hard time getting worked up about the $0.10 fee. Often people email docs to me, and I just forward them directly to my Kindle. It take about 2 seconds. I’ll pay $0.10 for that convenience.

Also note a major downside of automatically formatted pdfs. Tables and inline footnotes are horribly garbled. This is annoying, and probably all the more so for academics. Maybe there’s a solution to this if you do the pdf conversion yourself.

All in all, I like the device a lot. I could have waited for the next generation, but I read a lot for work and decided I was being penny-wise, pound-foolish to put off the purchase for a year. Don’t regret the decision.

I’ve got a few of those fetish friends myself; all of them are to varying degrees disappointed with Kindle. The .pdf hack isn’t too bad, there are sites, apparently, where you can download it for free. But DJVU is also an important format for academics, and the ‘annotation’ feature, quite frankly, is, well, saying it’s rudimentary would be kind. Finally, the textbooks our school requires aren’t generally available on Amazon, it seems, or at any rate, it’s very difficult to acquire them.

My guess is that there is a lot of money to be made with a business model of the clearinghouse type: a separate entity who acquires the rights to publish books in any of a number of formats. On the one hand, it seems that such an independent would be impossible to establish, simply because of the perceived potential markets. On the other hand, it may be that because there are too many big players that this is the only way to get an ebook franchise off the ground. One could imagine such a franchise kicking back a specific percentage to the publishing entities for each copy sold; the costs would be structured so that there would be an initial license to distribute purchased from each publisher, a rental fee for each book purchased and converted to ebook format(renewable over some specific time frame), and a kickback for each ebook title sold.

The DRM issue will eventually go away, I think; too clunky. Better to have individual encryption keys wired into each ereader. Why not? Numbers are cheap, and so is memory.

PDF has support for accessibility tagging (see the Advanced->Accessibility submenu in Acrobat Pro) that greatly facilitates the conversion of pdf to html (which is how I understand pdfs are converted for Kindle). Unfortunately, most pdfs are not so tagged, and complex documents are hard to guess at. You can manually adjust the tagging, but it’s a clumsy process at best.

The problem of scanned (eg JSTOR) pdfs is of course even worse. OCR is a possibility, but it can be an awfully big job. An easy partial fix would be for a reader like Kindle to offer a 90-degree rotation, a la iPhone, for reading such documents. It’s far from ideal, especially for multicolumn text, but it’s at least readable.

“Apparently there’s a way to do the PDF’s for free now.”

What you do is email the PDF to an address similar to the one for the $.10 conversions. The converted file is emailed back to you, and then you have to get it on the device via USB or whatever.

The PDF situation would be a lot better if people created Kindle-friendly PDFs using a custom paper size that matches the screen dimensions.

jcamfield: “I think in the long run eBook readers will be subsumed by the up-and-coming ultra-portable tablet laptops like the Fujitsu LifeBook”

I’m not sure if my last post is still in the queue, but I’ll repost regardless.

I have two of the smallest of the fujitsu’s (the P1510 and the U810) and while they are good machines, they aren’t quite what I’d really like for extended reading.

The P1510 is a great little subnotebook, although unlike some I do find the active LCD is a serious strain on my eyes after a while. Also, the machine is still pretty thick when in tablet mode.

Nonethless, I have a huge library of pdf articles on it, and I use it at home as my desktop with a basestation and bigger screen and keyboard. The battery life is an issue: even with wifi off, brightness down, and little software running, I rarely get much more than two hours off the standard battery, and frankly didn’t do a whole lot better than that with the extended battery (which adds a bit of bulk).

The U810 is crazy wacky small, and the screen is remarkable for the size, but it really is small! I am used to small keyboards, but even so, this one is just too small for any significant use beyond a bit of data entry and the odd email (it’s small and a bit flimsy, but the primary problem is the doubling up of various keys, which makes effective touchtyping pretty unlikely for all but the most committed and nimble-fingered users who want to relearn a keyboard).

Also, I’m no guru, but I am a longtime linux hobbyist, and getting linux or bsd on these machines continues to be a challenge for me, especially getting the wifi and touchscreens up and running (granted I haven’t devoted a tonne of energy to it, but still).

So, I like the fujitsus, but I’m not sure they’re yet all that great for reading onscreen, and it isn’t clear the tech could get much better on that front without going the route of the Irex Iliad and the like.

As a laptop the P1510 is great, but I cannot see that functional laptops could get much smaller (although they could get a lot thinner), and again, for folks like me, the active LCD screen is a real issue when reading for any length of time.

Thus I’d still like a very thin reader with heaps of memory, eink-style touchscreen, decent annotation and modest web-browsing capabilities, no proprietary silliness, wifi, oodles of memory and network-related slots, and extraordinary battery life.

I think in the long run eBook readers will be subsumed by the up-and-coming ultra-portable tablet laptops like the Fujitsu LifeBook

I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a criticism of the Kindle, but…who cares? Ultimately the Kindle may die. Apple may come out with an iPod reader application that kills it. Laptops might become so thin and cheap that a dedicated reading device is superfluous.

The question is: are you willing to pay $400 today for the best thing going, knowing full well that in two years it will be a hopelessly antiquated piece of junk. For me, the answer was yes.

(Also, the e-Ink electronic paper really is much easier on my eyes than an LCD screen, so I’m not quite as sanguine as others on the notion of portable computers becoming general purpose reading devices.)

My biggest interest is in some format for adding annotations. Underlining and commenting keeps me engaged in readings (and allows me to come back and revisit important passages later), and I’d hate to give that up by switching to an electronic device.

The particularly successful reader would have some feature where you could switch those annotations to endnote-style comments, then import them through your PC or Mac to Word or another word processor.

One day!

Re 24:

The Kindle does allow highlighting and commenting, and you can use your PC to import that text to another word processor. It’s still a good deal clunkier than making notes on a hard copy, but does allow you to achieve the “keeping engaged” effect. You can also get a quick list of links that lets you jump to any of the places you’ve highlighted or annotated, which is nice. The thing I find most annoying about the highlighting feature is that because of the page-based display of the Kindle (i.e., you can’t scroll line by line, you can only turn the page), I often have passages I want to highlight that span the page break. This leads to two separate highlight entries rather than a single continuous one.

I think the biggest design blunder of the Kindle is the lack of any ability to organize your library into the equivalent of folders or playlists. I can’t understand why they didn’t provide something so obvious, when they tout the device as holding the equivalent of 200 books. Yes, you can list the books in alphabetical order by title or author, and jump to particular letters (or use the search function), so if you know what you’re looking for it’s not difficult to get to it. But bibliophiles like to browse their libraries and want to be able to see a list, say, of all the novels in their collection, or all the law review articles, etc.

The wireless feature is great. Any time you get an email with an attachment you can simply forward it to a dedicated email address and it shows up wirelessly on your Kindle, usually quite quickly. Pdfs that were created from electronic documents tend to work fine, ones that were scanned are more of a problem. The best conversion in my view is from Word files. If you download cases or law review articles from Westlaw in Word and send them to your Kindle, they come through perfectly, with functioning hyperlinks to footnotes and headnotes.

I haven’t used any other eBook reading device, so can’t compare. But I do find the Kindle very useful. There are still respects in which dead tree technology is superior, but the ability to carry around and have accessible this much reading material is huge.

Geeky desires for new gadgets aside, when I’m waiting at my bus stop in the windy cold I’d be loathe to get out my latest piece of kit for a crafty read. And I like the cultural capital I accumulate from my well stocked and wide ranging book shelf, thank you very much :)