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Let e-Readers Be e-Readers
Let e-Readers Be e-Readers
Let's not turn them into all-purpose devices until we get the reading details right.
Posted Wednesday, July 1, 2009 - 11:57am
So let's not focus on bells and whistles. I am interested in a highly efficient reading machine. The Internet is great for collapsing time and space. Reading has become a digger's dream of sources and resources. But the computer is a lousy place to consume all of that wonderful content. What I've wanted was an electronic dossier where—at a minimum—I could sweep all those PDFs downloaded from the Web and save them for convenient reading. If that dossier also gave me access to newspapers, magazines, and a boatload of books and reference material, I'd be in wonk heaven.
When the first Kindle was announced, I knew there would be no great leverage to come from being an early adopter. Too many kinks needed to be worked out. Then the Kindle 2 was launched. I got tempted but had already heard about the Plastic Logic device and seen their demo; I knew Amazon wasn't supporting PDFs and that was a nonstarter for me.
Unlike the first Kindles—which draw their power from the allure of books—Plastic Logic is coming at the reader market from the opposite direction. It sees itself as building a device for the bulging-briefcase crowd: anyone who has to wade through long documents. We're talking about lawyers and management consultants, stock analysts, bankers, and marketing directors. These people want something that allows them to riffle through stacks of paper to get to the ones they want; annotate, store, and carry documents; maybe take a break and read something from the press; or, God forbid, relax with a novel.
To appeal to these middle-management types, Plastic Logic built a large (about the size of an 8½-by-11 pad), lightweight device with only one button. That's an on/off switch. You navigate by touching the screen. In all other respects, the reader—which will have a different, yet-to-be-revealed name when it launches in early 2010—is very similar to the Kindle DX, which just started shipping in mid-June.
Both devices use the same E Ink-screen technology, which displays the page in dull gray that looks like soggy newsprint and has a tendency to show through the last image.
That's indoors. In brighter light, the E Ink screen seems closer to white and generates enough contrast to make the print seem crisp and dark. Amazon has cleverly created a bright white case around its Kindles, no doubt to enhance the whiteness of the E Ink screen. As a result, the case is easy to smudge with fingers that are anything less than pristine.
Photo illustration by Jenny Livengood.
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Comments
e-paper devices
... everyone asks when E Ink will support color, but machines have still not mastered basic black and white.
Color support is either a science or engineering problem, but black and white is supported well enough as 16 shades of gray. The problem is what software is available to display data on that kind of display.
... free-content pirates like me who are pumping out PDFs.
As a writer who is a self avowed content pirate, do you write in exchange for no money, or are you in favor of stealing others' creative work as long as it may be easily reproduced?
As a free content pirate, you should know that PDF is not a free format, and although it is well documented, it takes about one thousand, very dense, pages to describe it.
A representative of Amazon told me: "As its core, the Kindle format is based on HTML. We support most features of standard HTML to format and layout text and images on a page."
In the next paragraph, you said that you didn't understand what that means and proceeded to complain about PDF support. Having HTML support, on a gray scale device, implies that text looks just like web pages did in the 1990s: flush left, flush right, or centered text -- not many typefaces -- not more than a few font sizes -- no ability to reliably display a graphic design in the same way on all viewing devices.
All that means that there is no easy way to arbitrarily display gray dots on the device, but PDFs are assembled with the assumption that there is a program on the display device that can do precisely that.
That's why PDFs enable rendering of a graphic design reliably on different kinds of display devices, within the displays' limits, with great variety in the kinds of typefaces, size of fonts, placement of both text, tables, images, and graphs.
It's not simple to do that because you need the same kind of software complexity that you find in display devices such as Postscript laser printers and Apple's Display Postscript software that drives every display that is driven by Mac OS X. Windows displays are not similarly blessed.
... nifty Microsoft Word tools ...
Amazon chose not to be able to display PDFs because they would have had to pay Adobe a hefty license fee for that privilege. For the same reason, you won't see Microsoft formats supported on e-paper devices. Tell your writer friend to provide you with a version of his book that you can read on your Kindle which is essentially unadorned text without line breaks except at the end of a paragraph.
... if the price remains almost $500— ... —I'm going to put my reading fantasies on hold and stick with the computer.
The high initial price of the Kindle is a significant hurdle. Ideally, e-paper devices should be so cheap that damage by dropping, soaking, crushing, etc should not concern us in the least, but they should also be sturdy enough, as a book might be, to survive being flung across a room into a wall.
What is more significant is the continuing price of ownership of those devices. In the not too distant past, Amazon increased the prices of newspaper subscriptions and of books for the Kindle. The prices are outrageously high; some book prices for a downloaded version of a book are nearly identical to the prices of the books printed on paper! There is no justification for that. There is no way that it costs the publisher more to create an electronic version of a book than it does to create a paper copy; thus, I expect to pay a lower price, but that kind of problem will continue until there are competing sources of unpirated digital content for e-paper readers.
Uh...
*** Amazon chose not to be able to display PDFs because they would have had to pay Adobe a hefty license fee for that privilege *** You seem to have missed the point of the article entirely. The latest Kindle (DX) DOES in fact support PDF's. The problem is that the UI and workflow aren't sufficient to do what the author wants to do. Probably it will take Apple to sort out the human factors. There have been rumors of a reader from them for some time.
The Kindle DX
Yes, the lack of folders is a real problem for most. If you still have the device, one thing you can do, while trying to figure out what the files are about on your home page listing, during your commute, is to press the Enter/Return key under the Del key and type a keyword that might find you articles of interest. You can use more than one keyword. If even interested in doing this, then use the 5-way button to go to the right until you see the "my items" option and press down on that. That'll filter out the articles that don't have the word(s). It does't recognize substrings, though. And it's a pretty sorry way of having to try to figure out what is in those files. You have an unusual way of collecting the day's reading material. I use kindlefeeder.com to aggregate feeds, and that is presented in a very organized way, and you can still search it. As for Plastic Logic, I don't think that will be what you're looking for, for more reasons than given. This is some information I gathered recently about the first release planned: http://kindleworld.blogspot.com/2009/06/plastic-logic-interface-demo-at-... - Andrys
Great article
This is a terrific perspective on a question that's been plaguing me—for which consumers are e-readers really a good idea, and why. It also offers a great sense of how one such consumer can get the most out of such devices as they evolve.
False Advertising
Yet again another article by a Kindle critic who just doesn't get it. The Kindle is for reading. Let me repeat that since it seems to be a difficult concept to grasp: the Kindle is for reading. Primarily books, but also magazines, blogs and any other content with a primary content is text. All your complaints amount to a refutation of your article's title. You do not want an ereader to be ereader. You wanted to be a mini PC or "netbook." Then you can have folders, feeds, communication, and all of the other things you complain about in your article that the Kindle doesn't have.
Frankly, your article is so poorly written I do not know what kind of functionality you expect out of an ereader. In any event, Amazon's customers are pleased with the Kindle. I know I am. Of all books that are offered in both conventional print and Kindle format, 35% of sales are for the Kindle.
You do not want an ereader
I was trying to find out basically what an ereader is, or is not. So I found the article useful. The new kindle is proud of its PDF format, so I'm interested in how easy my users manuals etc that are in double column might be easy to read. Basically is it worth paying more for a feature I have a great use for, or just settling for reading about 35% of the books I read on an older Kindle. This is not the first time I've seen someone frustrated by not being able to "shelf" their books, so they would know where in the bookcase to find them. I for one do re-read many of the books I currently own. I also keep my fiction books organized by author, and my non-fiction by subject. I've also wondered about double columns in magazines, which are an nightmare to read on a PC! Personally, I'm glad you know what as ereader will and won't do, but there are those of us out here that are still trying to do our homework on whether the device has a niche in our reading. (Remember, the more of us that decide there is a place the more books you are purported to have available.) I still don't know what that really means and I'm frustrated that I can't actually touch and use a Kindle before purchasing it, and so am interested in all comments about what people tried to do and found exciting as well as what frustrated them! P.S. The PDF feature is an exciting new feature to me. The ability to search the content would be enough to make the deal for extra weight of the DX. The inability to sort books and magazines may be a deal breaker. The unavailability of a table of contents for a book, magazine, or PDF would be more than annoying especially on non-fiction. The device doesn't have to do a hyperlink, just tell me what page to "turn to" would be a help. Again, I'm glad you like your ereader, I just don't have any idea what that really means yet.
**** Yet again another
**** Yet again another article by a Kindle critic who just doesn't get it. The Kindle is for reading. Let me repeat that since it seems to be a difficult concept to grasp: the Kindle is for reading. Primarily books, but also magazines, blogs and any other content with a primary content is text. All your complaints amount to a refutation of your article's title. You do not want an ereader to be ereader. You wanted to be a mini PC or "netbook." Then you can have folders, feeds, communication, and all of the other things you complain about in your article that the Kindle doesn't have. *** I'm sorry, but you are fundamentally clueless. Yes, it's about READING, nitwit. But you need to be able to find and organize the things you want to read.