Ebook notes
From LLN
Ebook notes
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Notes and comments on ebooks--book-length texts in digital form--as opposed to dedicated ebook readers.
My personal journey into ebooks
- by Mark Lindner. Adapted and excerpted from this March 3, 2009 post at Off the Mark.
Recently I began reading ebooks. Before I address which books specifically and related issues let me put a few things on the table.
Preliminaries
This post is about my experiences in the recent present and not about the future of what will or might be (even if I comment on that).
I have read quite a fair number of lengthy things from desktop computer CRTs, a flat panel display, and on both my 12″ Mac PowerBook and my 13″ MacBook. I read quite a few PDFs and lengthy web pages...many of them from the PowerBook, back in the day when I was reading heavily in our field and writing about it here...
Last summer...I got a 16GB iPod Touch for free when I bought the MacBook. Until recently...I hadn’t used it much at all. I loaned it to a friend to take to ALA Midwinter and she tested out a few apps and also discovered that our campus IT folks had finally made an “app” available that connects one to the campus network whenever you are in range.
The insta-connection made a huge difference in my willingness to use it. The other thing that made me start using it more is the app Stanza.
Stanza is a very useful app, although not perfect.. I still have a paper-based book in my backpack for reading on the bus and/or at lunch, but I find that it has been remaining in the backpack more and more as I grab the Touch and go to lunch. Part of this is that I have a new winter coat and I do not have a nice big pocket to put a book in anymore. Part of it is something(s) else.
The iPod Touch as an ebook reader
In some ways the Touch is more convenient. It certainly lies flat better than most books. It is lighter than most every book. But it also has drawbacks:
- A large number of things I want to read are not available for the Touch, either due to format issues or [because they're not available as ebooks in any form].
- I have a ton of print things I do want to read and am not about to pay again for an ebook version, assuming one is available. And, yes, I do imagine that over time availability will change. [Note: Amazon's recent Kindle app for the Touch/iPhone will do little to make the books I want to read available any time soon, if ever.]
I am aware that if I used Google Books then I might find even more available than I think are, but until the scanning/OCR process is greatly improved No Thank You! I used to do electronic reserves work and while this work is valuable in assorted ways I hated reading even the quality work we produced... Thus, I’m not about to routinely try reading Google Books books on my Touch. Also, I believe that requires a network connection. Sustained reading on my Touch should not require a network connection except for the occasional acquisition.
I still greatly value production value in my content, be it editorial work, text layout, or the many other qualities that go into a quality reading experience (in any medium)...
On that note, on to issues of
Formatting
So far, I have read one purchased book and a couple free ones from assorted sources. The purchased one had the worst formatting in Stanza.
The purchased book was The Lust Chronicles from Ravenous Romance. Ravenous Romance publishes only ebooks and audiobooks and they are quite affordable [$1.99 for short stories, $4.99 for ebooks, $12.99 for audiobooks]. Their ebooks come in multiple formats and for one price you can download any and every format you need. Your purchase price allows you to download the book up to 50 times over a 50-day period. Not sure why these are the terms but they are certainly liberal.
I initially got the .epub format which they say is for Stanza. Could not make it work on either my laptop or the Touch, nor could we get it to work on S’s laptop or Touch [1st & 2nd gen Touchs, respectively]. After futzing around in the FAQs at both Ravenous Romance and Lexcycle I gave up and grabbed the PDF.
The PDF looks exquisite on the laptop either in Adobe Acrobat or in Stanza. But... it is completely wonky on the Touch. It is readable, but distracting. The table of contents runs together as one long paragraph. The formatting of individual story titles and authors, and white space between chapters, is thrown out; thus the stories are all kind of run together. I guess for $4.99 I cannot complain too much but it was a distraction during reading.
Turns out this is what Stanza does with PDFs, so I have started using PDF Annotater on the Touch for PDFs. It provides annotation capabilities and allows one to read PDFs with graphics. This purchased pdf looks exquisite in PDF Annotater on the Touch.
Other books I have read are:
E. A. Poe, “Bon-Bon” (1832) (short story) from www.feedbooks.com. The formatting on this one isn’t too bad. Default format is fully justified which I do not like when the justifier is not good, or, as in the case of the Touch screen, the “page” size is small. I just turned off full justification and, although the right margin is more ragged than normal, I like it better.
Paragraph breaks exist but new paragraphs are indented a whole space. Not much, but now that I left-aligned text it is enough. With the text fully justified one space was not enough. All-in-all, the formatting of this short story is not bad, especially with the changes I just made.
[Two more examples--sets of poems. Excerpts on the experience:]
Being a neophyte reader of poetry I am still trying to get a grasp of “the art of the poetic line” and the narrow screen width plays havoc with that... I can rotate the Touch and get a wider line length but then am required to move forward (or backward) through more “pages.” And this breaks more stanzas across pages, affecting the next step in poetic semantics, from the line to the stanza.
I’m not saying that this is a non-starter or that it is an issue for more practiced readers of poetry but it is a concern to me.
Page navigation
I'm not sure whether this is a Touch issue or a Stanza issue. Page navigation is accomplished by touching the right side of the screen to move forward and the left side to move backward. Sometimes the pages go the opposite way from what you expect. Generally it isn’t too big of a deal but it is a pain when reading poetry. It is a massive deal when one is trying to read poetry aloud in an attempt to cheer up someone special. My Touch got tossed across the room the other evening when it did this several times in a row to me. Not that my getting upset helped the situation at all. Thankfully it didn’t hurt it, either (the situation or the Touch).
Metadata and citation issues
- See the post for this extended discussion. and for comments on the ebooks as literature.
Conclusion
I will keep reading some ebooks and PDFs on my Touch. In fact, I downloaded several more titles the other night...
Hopefully some of the issues I complain about above will work themselves out. My concern is whether they will be solved or whether I (and others) will simply adjust to this brave new world. Either way works, I guess. But I fear the second leads to the loss of something meaningful.
Library use of ebooks
- by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest May 2008
The Primary Research Group has published the 2008/2009 edition of Library Use of E-books. Data in the report is based on a survey of 75 academic, public and special libraries. Key findings are available free on their website. Here are a few:
- The libraries in the sample had MARC records for about 74% of their e-books. E-book providers furnished MARC records for about two-thirds of those e-books.
- 45% of libraries surveyed make special efforts to help patrons reach free e-book sites.
- Over half of patrons reported either extensive or significant use of e-reference books. College libraries reported more extensive use than publics.
- Business books were among the most popular e-books.
- Fiction e-books were little used.
- Just over 10% of libraries surveyed owned an e-book reading device.
The full study costs $75 and is available in print or PDF. (Sarah Houghton-Jan, LibrarianInBlack, May 14, 2008.)
How the book publishing industry should reinvent itself
- by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest June 2008
Paul Krugman’s op-ed piece in The New York Times predicts that digital book readers will soon become the common, perhaps even preferred, method of reading books. The problem is finding the right business model.
According to David Balter, writing on the Harvard Business blog, Conversation Starter, “traditional book publishing is still primarily an old media business in a new media world.”
2007 book sales were just 0.9% above those for 2006. “Publishers … are finding it increasingly difficult to figure out just what’s going to work and what isn’t.” Foot traffic is down in book stores and authors can now have their books published and distributed via the Web.
Publishers need to get in touch with today’s economy, in which consumers are “the ultimate distribution channel.”
Balter suggests that publishers look at authors the way “savvy early-stage investors view emerging businesses,” investing in the ones that look like they’ll be successful. Here’s a scenario:
- Authors package their books and distribute free copies on their own.
- Publishers decide what books to pick up, pay for licensing and distribution rights, and “distribute a product that has developed an initial marketplace of buyers.”
- Publishers tweak the completed product as agreed-upon with the author, “print more and distribute them through the strength of their partners.”
“Here, everyone wins. Authors have to prove their ability to deliver a good book and build an audience before a publisher fully invested. Publishers greatly reduce the up front production costs and the risk of betting on authors that can’t produce, and increase the odds that what they spend on will provide results.”
Balter has done just that with his new book, The Word of Mouth Manual: Volume II. We’ll see if it works!
(David Balter, "How the book publishing industry should reinvent itself," Conversation Starter from Harvard Business Blogs, Jun 13, 2008; Paul Krugman, "Bits, bands, and books," The New York Times, June 6, 2008.)
Freed from the page, but a book nonetheless
- by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest January 2008
Randall Stross, writing in the New York Times, predicts that widespread “digitization of personal book collections” is coming soon because “display technology” can now compete “page-to-page” with paper.
The article refutes Steve Jobs’ claim that ebook readers aren’t necessary because nobody reads books anymore, using statistics from the Book Industry Study Group, which estimates sales of 408 million books and revenues of $15 billion this year in the United States.
The article concludes that the “object we are accustomed to calling a book is undergoing a profound modification as it is stripped of its physical shell” and reminds us that “Amazon should be credited with … replacing the book business with the reading business.”
(Randall Stross, “Freed From the Page, but a Book Nonetheless," The New York Times, Jan. 27, 2008.)
Related articles
- Kindle and ebook reader notes - Facts and commentary on dedicated ebook readers.
- Kindle experiences - First-person commentaries on experiences with the Kindle.
- Sony Reader experiences - First-person commentaries on experiences with the Sony Reader.
- Backnotes:Ebooks and readers - Earlier notes about ebooks and dedicated readers.
- Reading and viewing notes - Shorter commentaries on changes in reading and viewing in general.
- Digital audiobook services through libraries - There's more than one way to provide books in digital form. This item summarizes a Library Technology Report on digital audiobook services.
- Light my fire: thoughts on the Kindle - Joe Lucia's commentary on actual experience with Kindle and the nature of text and books.
- Kindles and libraries: LaRue's Views - Two commentaries by Jamie LaRue.
- Google Book Search, Open Content Alliance and Live Search Books notes - The widest range of ebooks may come from the book digitization projects; public domain books are already becoming available for download or reading online. Various notes appear here.
