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The author of this article mentions some nice philosophical elements of the question of electronic books, but he skirts outside the entire DRM issue, which is t
by marvin 19y ago
The author of this article mentions some nice philosophical elements of the question of electronic books, but he skirts outside the entire DRM issue, which is the thing that is keeping me back. What, the only difference between the Sony "Reader" and this "Kindle" is that the Kindle can connect to Wi-Fi access points? Give me a break.
A _decent_ e-book reader should be able to read any document format, be easily extensible, _maybe_ support one DRM schemes as an afterthought (to appease the publisher ass-hats) and of course have every other benefit a book has: durability, portability, a touchpad or keyboard for taking notes, waterproofness for the heck of it _and_ excellent connectivity.
Every e-book device I have seen have avoided all of these requirements. I won't buy anything that isn't easier to use and better than my laptop. Not a snowball's chance in hell.
How hard can it be to make a bloody gadget that works right? Every manufacturer should be working to dislodge their heads, but it seems like it is very comfortable in there. In the publishers' orifices, that is.
Bite me.
- qaexl 19y agoI admit. If I ever get a Sony Reader, the first thing I'd do is to hack it so I can access all the text files I already have. I want to be able to read, say, the electronic copies of David Weber's scifi books that I bought, the PDFs from my software reference library, the Art of War in the original Chinese, and whatever I want off of Gutenburg. I've seen the Sony Reader first-hand. There was a demo unit in one of the Border's in Atlanta. It looks a lot cooler than the Amazon device. It is almost as slim as an Apple iPhone. It also has a lot of random ports surrounding the device ... pretty useless if I can't get it to access the things I want it to access. Compared with the OLPC XO, it looks like it'd break if I drop it. On the other hand, the eInk display is everything the press says it is -- the fonts are crisp and the display is a pleasure to read in standard lighting. It has no backlights -- but neither does a hardback novel. The refresh rate is too slow for animations. It takes almost as long for the page to refresh as turning a page (that's probably perceptual ... I didn't time it with a stopwatch). It might just be easier to buy the eInk developer kit -- http://www.eink.com/kits/index.html http://www.eink.com/kits/index.html and roll your own. For about a $3k a pop.