It’s not like you start eating fried grasshoppers or join a bondage club just because someone gives you a half-price coupon

I actually probably would eat fried grasshoppers if there was a really cheap deal at a convenient restaurant. A bondage club probably less so, because I’d suspect that it was like those cheap introductory offers at gyms – they get you to pay up front, and then you never bother going.

Ah, e-book readers…I actually have one, for which my university paid (“Would you like a K*****?” “How much will it cost me?” “It’s free!” “Free?” “That’s right, we’ll buy it for you!!” “Uh, so it’s not really free.” “But you don’t have to pay for it!!!” “What happens if I say no? Can I get something I really want instead?” “No; it’s a K***** or nothing!!!!” “Well, OK.”)

Don’t use it much. The sort of books I read for work (lots of tables and graphs) don’t seem to show up in electronic format and would be difficult anyway (“How do I get to the chart on p. 371?”) and the things I read for pleasure I can buy relatively cheaply in print and then recycle (either by selling them to a used book store or giving them to someone else). So I have areader, but about all I have on it are some things I’ve gotten for free (e.g., a couple of short stories by Charles Stross)…

I suspect that my use isn’t all that much of an ooutlier among academics.

It’s not like you start eating fried grasshoppers or join a bondage club just because someone gives you a half-price coupon

Surely this calls for experimental investigation?

I joined a grasshopper bondage club precisely because someone gave me a half-price coupon.

What? You have a problem with that?

My bondage club will give you 75% off admission if you bring a nonperishable food item for our donation bin.

Does it matter whether most people don’t read Proust in an ebook or a printed book?

I have an ebook reader–I find the “digital ink” screens much more comfortable to read than a computer monitor (higher resolution, reflected rather than emitted light).

A lot of my work-related reading is refereeing research papers, and as these are usually typeset for A4 or US letter paper (rather than the paperback-sized screen of the e-reader), the e-reader can’t really be used to read them. Pity about that.

I mainly use it to read out-of-copyright novels.

I haven’t met a single person ever who likes books as wall decoration, but had not yet enough books for that purpose. Readers tend to have already shelves full when they move out of their parents house, and your shelves grow quicker than your houses.

Damn! My daughter has a K****** and I can’t get her to read a paper book any more. So I keep telling her I will buy an Etch-A-Sketch frame and cut the pages out of the book and paste them top to bottom. And now ejh goes and preempts that joke before the thread is dry from the egg.

For myself, I’m with chris. I lose things. When I lose a book, I just lose the book.

7: The jokes obtainable from combining “informed consent” with “safe, sane and consensual” are too obvious for this refined audience.

…As are double-entendre puns on “experiment.”

But look, I think we’d best not let this rare opportunity to educate Scott McLemee slide. Scott: just as a strip club advertising “women’s clothing 90% off” is not attempting to undersell Kohl’s on clothes, when a bondage club offers you a coupon for half-off, they’re not talking about the cost of admission.

the name of the ***der

***der? eBooks is children!

And yet one too few for ‘kindling’. Where you begin by burning books, you will end by melting plastic, releasing toxic fumes and harming the environment. Just say no!

You know what would be really meta? If you made your coffee table out of Anthony Powell novels instead!

A couple of years ago my mom spent 2 months in the hospital in a pretty weakened state (she had almost bled to death — fine now!). She couldn’t do anything but lie in bed all day but didn’t have the strength to hold her giant books up. I bought her a K****e and it turned out to be perfect — it barely weighed anything and she could get more books whenever she wanted them. So — if you plan to be incapacitated for a spell, I can recommend a K****e purchase.

29- OK but your punishment will be to pay the other half during the session.

This academic uses his e-reader constantly. Most of my reading is papers from journals. I download the pdf and convert it (the e-reader can take pdfs, but the text shrinks, or I can only see half a line at a time). I have cut my printing costs by two thirds, and saved a small copse of trees. It is not perfect – tables and special symbols are often lost, for instance – but I can go and check those things on the pdf.

Great thread. I was just about to go ereader shopping. Lots of new ones on the market or coming. I’ve been ready to jettison paper books for a good fifteen years. The things are such a PITA. I’ve moved a lot recently and never want to lug another huge bin of books around. Most of them are now in storage – I’m not reading them, they are not even decorating my space, but I’m paying rent on their behalf and haven’t had the time to go through them or my other things – splendid.

Your ability to annotate paper books is limited to what you can fit in margins. Extensive bookmarking is cumbersome – I used to use post-its (big ones for more extensive annotations). Scott says valuable books should be on “durable” media, by which he means paper – which ages and is easily destroyed. Digital media are not necessarily durable, but if you can back up it doesn’t matter much – with back-ups, digital is much more durable.

I’m the kind of guy who’s usually reading three or four books in parallel. I don’t necessarily know in advance what book I want to take with me. My whole library in my hands? Great! And taking books can be a problem. I’m all for stuffing them in my pockets, but only mass market books are typically small enough, and they are so cheaply-made nowadays that they can hardly withstand the treatment that was their original purpose as “pocket books”. An ebook reader won’t fit in my pocket either, but at least I only have to take one. Would be nice to be able to carry them on a belt hook or something, though.

As for losing them: yeah, that’s a problem, but from the way people are talking I’m not sure they realize that losing the reader doesn’t necessarily mean losing the books – at least not on Amazon, which allows you to redownload for free. I imagine the others do or will too, if for no other reason because they want to match Amszon’s features.

That gets to one problem I have with ereaders: the Orwellian implications, neatly illustrated by Amazon’s recent post-purchase deletion of, ahem, Orwell. As these things currently work, my ebook provider knows what I read – not just what I purchase or get from the library, but what I actually read, what I reread, what I skip, what I bookmark, what I annotate, and what I say in annotations. All of which could be interesting to future employers or ugly governments. But these sort of privacy problems are everywhere now, and it seems impossible to resist them without cutting yourself off from many of the advantages of living in this particular era.

The other problem and reason I haven’t already gone for a Kindle or something is that I wanted to wait for the technology to mature some. I don’t feel like being frustrated by something poorly thought out. My impression is we’re getting close, though perhaps not there yet. SusanC’s comment that the ereader she has can’t handle materials formatted for larger paper sizes is discouraging, though I don’t know if that’s a universal problem: can’t most of the reader resize pdf materials to their screen, changing the placement of line breaks if necessary?

Here is what I think an ereader should be able to do within current technology:

1) Bookmark and insert annotations of arbitrary length. Tag cloud bookmarks and annotations. Have links in annotations to bookmarks, other annotations, or the Web.

2) Browse the web. Video and color are out for non-backlit readers, but the rest of it.

3) Reformat documents to suit screen or in custom ways. For example: to accommodate prose written for any paper size, changing line breaks if necessary, to enlarge text for easier reading.

Backlit screens are bad for long reading. That’s why I don’t want to do (more) extensive reading on the computer. That leans me towards the Kindle (or equivalent), rather than iPad (or equivalent), though it may not be decisive. The main technological improvement I would like to see is a non-backlit screen that supports color and motion, but I don’t know how far away that is, so I won’t wait for it. I think that watching the equivalent of a magazine picture move, however, will be magical the way movies were when they first came out.

Why isn’t there an e-reader lending library? Big university libraries could become open to all for a modest fee if all the stock was digitalised. For students it would mean the end to the mad rush for the reading list and the inevitable bitter disappointments. Surely a technology for handling that is within reach?

Martin, I don’t really see the privacy issue. If you buy books from Amazon, they know already what you are reading, electric or not. If you put non-amazon files on their reader, they are not uploading that infomation to the mothership.

Perhaps they secretly do it anyway. But let’s face it, at that level of paranoia every vaguely computerish object is suspect, and your ISP or Google or the NSA should probably be higher on the danger list than Amazon.

A kindle at least does most of what your list asks of it, including a web browser. No web-based tagging. The magical magazine with moving pictures in it sounds a lot like the normal web to me.

Big university libraries could become open to all for a modest fee if all the stock was digitalised.

How do you work that out?

Zamfir, how good is the Kindle browser? Amazon themselves call it “expermental” As for moving magazine pictures, I think it changes everything when the image is reflected,l not emitted, light. There are only a few sources of emitted light in nature – the sun, the other stars, fire, lightning, a few glowing plants and animals, some kinds of hot surfaces, certain fairly uncommon chemical reactions – that’s about it. Our eyes have not evolved for staring directly into light sources; that’s why glowing screens are hard on the eyes. And it’s easy to see glowing things as apparitions rather than objects, as illusions, which, in a sense, they are. I think moving images that do not glow will strike the intuition quite differently. We’ll see. But that’s how I bet.

“Well, they are aggregating data on what their users highlight and publishing it, so they are gathering that information. ”

You can turn that off. Annotations are stored in a plain text file which can be copied off the Kindle (and backed up) when you plug it into computer via USB.

” Most ebooks seem only to be available through services from people like Amazon or Borders. ”

There are publishers that sell their books as downloadable ebooks in multiple formats. For example Pragmatic Programmers LLC. Their ebooks are available in DRM-free .mobi, .pdf, or .epub. (You can also get physical books). They let you re-download your books, and if a book is updated or corrected, they notify you and you can download the updated file at no additional cost.

O’Reilly also offers DRM-free ebooks from their website.

DriveThruRPG sells DRM-free PDFs of roleplaying games and accessories, along with fiction, and graphic novels like the Girl Genius series.

Martin, I don’t get how knowing which books you buy is an issue, especially since you can always buy sensitive books through other channels. Search engine queries or unencrypted emails I can understand, but a book list?

Half of Crooked Timber posts are about telling which book someone just read, for the whole world to see. It’s like worring that people know which colour jackets you wear.

Of course, I can imagine that you don’t want all books you read to be known. But that’s a different matter.

For practical matters: Jon H describes the browser exactly right. Also, he makes a good point that Kindle’s have two channels of communication: you can use USB like other readers, or Amazon’s internet service. Of course, Amazon could build the device such that info from the first channel is transmitted to them anyway.

But so could every other device manufacturer. Sony has in the past actually included viruses with their software. Chinese government intelligence (and presumably all the others too) routinely puts call-home viruses on things like camera’s and other gadgets, and they could do that with ereaders too I suppose

In other words, the extra privacy risks you get from an ereader are pretty small.