Pleasures of E-Books

I always love an event that features free stuff and sales, so I took notice of Read an E-Book Week (March 7-13). Their website features a list of authors, publishers, and ebook stores giving away free ebooks or slashing prices. The E-book promotion site says of their event:

Read an E-Book Week educates and informs the public about the pleasures and advantages of reading electronically. Authors, publishers, vendors, the media and readers world-wide are welcome to join in the effort. We encourage you to promote electronic reading with any event....

This week, I'm reading Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her?, which I got from my beloved Project Gutenberg. I'm reading it on my Astak Reader, where I've also downloaded all 69 files they have of his, including 47 novels, some short writings, and his Autobiography.

If I were reading my first Trollope novel in the usual way, either from a library or from a second-hand book dealer, I'd be reading whichever novel I happened to find. This way, I was able to pick the one that seemed the most engaging for me, and I am able to read the Autobiography alongside it. In fact, my local library has none of his books, and my second-hand paperback copy of Barchester Towers is falling apart and features type too small to read except in very good light.

I'm not saying that ebooks have no drawbacks. So far, I haven't been able to find a well-formatted poetry book. (I'm using Tennyson and Whitman as my test cases.) Also, I have no truck with Digital Rights Management (DRM), so that means I won't be buying many ebooks in the near future. Still, access to "The Complete Works of" so many out-of-copyright authors is a real treat for me. When I enjoy a work of fiction, I immediately want to know what else that author has done.

DRM, Price Points, Licenses, and Copyright

This collection of copyright-related articles concerns Digital Rights Management (DRM). Personally, I won't buy DRM-protected books, music, or movies, especially if the DRM interferes with my ability to protect the content I've purchased by periodically backing it up to another device. DRM kept me from using the iTunes store, although I have a Mac mini and I like the iTunes software--I ripped all my traditional instrumental CD's to my Mac, and now I have my musical library in a searchable, cross-referenced format. (I can find all six versions of "The Blackbird" set dance, and play them consecutively to compare styles.)

I'm even less likely to buy DRM-protected books, given the variety of DRM's and incompatible formats in the marketplace. Plus, the eBook price point doesn't make sense to me. Why should I pay as much for a DRM'ed data file as a new print book? If I'm patient, I can find a used hardcover for less than half the price of an eBook I can only read on an approved device.

Making books available electronically has such marvelous potential to connect people to knowledge and ideas--it's sad that the endeavor is thoroughly bogged down in the intellectual property quagmire.

• How to Destroy the Book, by Cory Doctorow. (Dec 14, 2009)

  The anti-copyright activists have no respect for our copyright and our books. They say that when you buy an ebook or an audiobook that's delivered digitally, you are demoted from an owner to a licensor. From a reader to a mere user. These thieves deliver our digital books and our audiobooks wrapped in license agreements and technologies that might as well be designed to destroy the emotional connection that readers have with their books.

• Some Kindle books have secret caps on the number of times you can download them.

  It turns out that there's an undocumented restriction on Kindle books -- if you download them "too many" (where "too many" is a secret number) times to your Kindle or iPhone or whatever, you run out of downloads and can't get copies anymore.

• Kindle's DRM Rears Its Ugly Head...And It IS Ugly. A Kindle user discovers the how many downloads is too many for his book collection.
• Amazon vs. Apple: What Should E-Book Prices Be?:

  The iPad is exciting not as a way to sell or read books as they currently exist but as a tool for reinventing them as multimedia. The book angle also helps generate good press, since journalists are desperate for any evidence that writing will pay in the future. Apple doesn't need to maximize book sales. It simply needs to keep publishers happy enough to maintain an impressive sounding inventory of titles while waiting for entirely new forms of publishing to develop. After all, as Steve Jobs famously put it, "people don't read anymore."

• The Amazon-Macmillan book saga heralds publishing's progress

  It will still be years before e-book technology matures and a sustainable business model emerges for the publishing industry. In the meantime, you'll hear lots of moaning and groaning about how the quality of writing and editing will decline, browsing for books will become a lost art, authors and their agents will be forced into poverty, and consumers will get hosed. Don't believe any of it for a minute.

  While markets have their flaws, over the long run they are good at executing these technological transformations. My guess is that in the not-so-distant future, best-selling authors such as John Grisham and Malcolm Gladwell -- along with unknown authors peddling their first books -- will publish their own works, contracting with independent editors and marketers and selling directly to consumers as much as possible. Other authors will turn to smaller, more specialized publishing houses that will offer smaller advances but bigger royalties and will be built, as they once were, around great editors....

  ...But at the end of the process, there will be fewer people who will be paid higher incomes to produce a wider array of products at lower prices. There's a word for that -- progress -- and it's exciting to see it unfold right in front of us.

• Kindle, iPad, MacMillan, and the Death of a Business Model:

  What Apple and MacMillan and the others are doing is trying to preserve their existing business model by forcing the price of e-books to be high enough to not cut too badly into the physical book market. What Bezos and Amazon are doing is trying to cut the price of e-books to encourage adoption.

  Who is going to win? Bet on Bezos. The mainstream publishers can hold on for a while, based on reputation and while e-readers aren't widely available; there's still some prestige to being published by a reputable publisher like MacMillan. But eventually, some publisher will realize that a book that would have sold for $29.95 in a physical edition can be sold for the cost of the royalty, plus a small markup for production and administration. Our $29.95 novel would sell instead for $3.95. When that happens, except for coffee table books and an occasional print-on-demand hard copy, the physical book is dead.

  This weekend kerfuffle is really the death throes of a business model--traditional book publishers trying to preserve their traditional publishing methods for a little longer.

Books, E-Books, and Theft--Very Confusing

My collection of articles on copyright issues, the public domain, open source materials, and digital rights management (DRM) continues to spill over here from my work Website. Here are some discussions of "digital book piracy," as opposed to the offline pirates at the library.

Sherman Alexie has been very vocal about electronic formats for books, but I'm not sure I understand his position. Clearly, he wants to retain ownership of his works, because he derives a decent living from their sale. I can't object to that. We all want to live, and we all would prefer meaningful work. But that's a copyright issue--ebooks are subject to the same copyright laws as print books. He doesn't want his books available in digital format, but several of them are available--his publisher made that decision, just as the publisher chose cover art, fonts, formats, and all the other production details. Is he unhappy with his publisher? Maybe so--many authors are.

On the one hand, he's worried that ereaders and ebooks are "elitist," too expensive for poor kids like the one he used to be. On the other hand, he's worried about book stores being driven out of business, and book stores were too expensive for the kid I used to be (and the old lady I am now--I seldom buy a new book, and the copyrighted ebooks are too expensive for me to consider. I'm a loyal customer of Project Gutenberg.).

I don't even understand his testimonial about print books: " And all of my senses-sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste--come into play when I think and read about books. Books are tactile and eccentric..." I've always been a scrounger of odd books at the back of the library, or at the estate sale, or the used book store, and the books I've enjoyed the most have not always been a delight for the senses of smell and taste. My EZReader's copies of Dickens smell much better than the print copies, and they are easier to read, as I can control the page contrast and the font size and shape. Maybe Mr. Alexie will think differently when he reaches that age where all the typefaces get so small.

Most of the intellectual property I have produced belongs to the universities, the government, or the research institutes who payed me a salary while I produced it. This is probably why I like the Open Source ideas and products so much, and feel that the Internet should be more like a free library than like a cable TV channel. And whether it's in print or in electronic form, it's always possible to Steal This Book. (Google Books will let you read the first 45 pages for free, but if you want to read the rest, you'll have to buy it from one of the vendors they list. Ironic, no?)

Here are some discussions of book piracy, ebooks, and a bit about digital rights management:

• A post from the MobileRead forum: Author Sherman Alexie Wants to Punch You in the Face:

  At a panel of authors speaking mainly to independent booksellers, Sherman Alexie, the National Book Award-winning author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, said he refused to allow his novels to be made available in digital form. He called the expensive reading devices "elitist" and declared that when he saw a woman sitting on the plane with a Kindle on his flight to New York, "I wanted to hit her."

  ....[W]hen given a chance to correct himself on his own blog, the only thing he apologizes for is the idea of hitting a woman; "I should have edited myself. I should have said, "I saw a man on the airplane reading a Kindle and I wanted to hit him." In this way, my joke becomes about my true object of fear, distrust, and anger---the Kindle---and not about the gender of the person reading the Kindle."

• Later, Sherman Alexie Clarifies "Elitist" Charges:

  People are eager to portray me as being anti-technology, but that's not the case at all. I think the iPod is as vital as the fork and wheel. So I'm not even sure why I have this strange, subterranean fear and loathing of the Kindle and its kind....I rose out of poverty and incredible social dysfunction because of books. And all of my senses-sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste--come into play when I think and read about books. Books are tactile and eccentric. An eBook will always be a gorgeous but anonymous box. It will also be just a tool--perhaps an amazing and useful tool--but I don't want it to replace the book. And I'm worried that many people don't care about the book itself, and see the eBook as a replacement. And I'm worried that Amazon and other eBook distributors will completely replace bookstores....face-to-face interaction will become more and more rare. Sure, the Internet can launch careers, but there is a loss of intimacy that should be acknowledged and mourned.

• And later still: Digital piracy hits the e-book industry:

  "I'd be really worried if I were Stephen King or James Patterson or a really big bestseller that when their books become completely digitized, how easy it's going to be to pirate them," said novelist and poet Sherman Alexie on Stephen Colbert's show last month.

  "With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership -- of artistic ownership -- goes away," Alexie added. "It terrifies me."

  ....However, some evidence suggests that authors' and publishers' claims of damage from illegal piracy may be overstated. Recent statistics have shown that consumers who purchase an e-reader buy more books than those who stick with traditional bound volumes. Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers.

  Ana Maria Allessi, publisher for Harper Media at HarperCollins, told CNN, "we have to be vigilant in our punishment ... but much more attractive is to simply make the technology better, legally." E-book technology offers so many positives for both the author and the consumer that any revenue lost to piracy may just be a necessary evil, she said. "Consumers who invest in one of these dedicated e-book readers tend to load it up and read more," said Allessi. "And what's wrong with that?"

• E-Book Piracy: The Publishing Industry's Next Epic Saga?

  While publishing e-books protected by DRM seems like a no-brainer solution to piracy, the idea has faced criticism from within the publishing industry and from consumers. First, publishers are weary of reports that the DRM technology used in the Kindle and the Sony Reader has been hacked, says Nick Bogaty, an expert in DRM technology for Adobe. Second, consumers are hesitant to buy digital books with inflexible DRM that ties an e-book to a limited number of e-readers.

  Critics say that the two providers of DRM-protected e-books, Amazon and Adobe, are stunting the e-book industry's progress. For instance, Amazon's Kindle uses its own DRM-restricted AZW e-book format. People who purchase an e-book on their Kindle cannot transfer it for reading on another, competing e-book reader from a different company.

  DRM issues get thornier when device makers, such as Amazon, start negotiating exclusive e-publishing rights for their product. Amazon signed a deal with best-selling business writer Stephen R. Covey to publish several of his books, including The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Principle-Centered Leadership, exclusively for the Kindle. The company has also negotiated exclusive rights for Kindle e-books from author Stephen King and for a biography of First Lady Michelle Obama.

  The idea of exclusive e-book rights tied to devices seems as annoying as being allowed to play a particular new CD only on a certain company's CD players. But Ian Fried, the vice president of Amazon Kindle, has stated that Kindle consumers don't mind its DRM. That could change, however, as a predicted flood of new, rival e-readers hit the market in 2010, and Kindle owners think about jumping ship--only to discover that they can't take their e-books with them. Remember the backlash against DRM-protected content in Apple's iTunes store?

  Bogaty points out that Adobe, whose DRM technology is used by Sony and Barnes & Noble, is yielding to critics who say that its antipiracy technology is too restrictive. Adobe is loosening the grip of its DRM, allowing users to share e-books with friends and to read books on up to 12 different devices (6 desktop and 6 handheld).

Linux Woes--Lenny to Kubuntu in 48 Hours

Almost a year ago, I bragged about how smoothly the upgrade from Debian Etch (old stable) to Lenny (new stable) went. Only a few weeks later, the motherboard and hard drive went up in smoke. Because I grew up steeped in the works of the Brothers Grimm, I knew I had somehow caused this by being cocky. (cf. "Rumpelstiltskin;" "The Brave Little Tailor")

A sadder but wiser girl, I replaced the computer and installed Lenny (stable) from a netinstall CD image (via Debian.org) and everything went smoothly, with one exception. When I used the "ctrl-alt-F1" action to switch between tty consoles, all I got was a blank screen with a floating message from my monitor that the settings were not optimal. "ctrl-alt-F7" sent me back to the console running Xorg, and all the pretty stuff. I poked around the Debian forums a bit, but because I didn't really understand the problem, I didn't know what search terms to use. I eventually just learned to live without the tty consoles, although I really missed them.

Lately, though, I began to wish I had a newer version of OpenOffice, because I'm teaching a class in spreadsheets and word processing. I had Calibre, the dandy open source ebook management program, backported from sid (Debian unstable), but it only "sorta" worked, and Iceweasel (Debian version of Firefox) was choking for me pretty often. When the Lenny version of Miro crashed every time I tried to use it, I thought I'd upgrade to testing (Squeeze) or maybe unstable (Sid). (For a recent discussion, see What do you prefer for your desktop: Lenny, Squeeze or Sid?)

First, I backed up my data files. This reminded me how crummy my data backup procedures are. Here's the procedure:

1. Whenever I'm working on a Really Important file, I ftp a copy to the Mac mini (currently in the living room where we're watching it in lieu of a TV), which machine saves it to the 1 terabyte external hard drive. (No, I still haven't set up a better system. Perhaps now is the time....) If it's a work-related file I send it to the work-related Mac Book Pro the same way.
2. Periodically, I copy my data files to the Mac mini's external drive. Sometimes I use ftp (excruciatingly slow and painful), sometimes I copy the files to an external USB drive, carry the drive to another computer, plug in the drive, and copy the files over.
3. Periodically, I copy the Mac mini's external hard drive files to the hard drive in my Linux box by one of these awkward procedures. Thus, I have two or three copies of my data files scattered around the house.
4. If it's important, not huge, and not in some way confidential, I upload it to my web site, my work website, or here. (See Linux and Open Source for examples of things I don't want to misplace.)

I should fix this mess--I say that every time I have a problem, or do an upgrade. I could get an external USB hard drive and back up my Linux installation; I could set up my LAN to work more smoothly, I could set up an automated backup procedure that didn't rely on whim.... That should be my computer project for this spring.

The length of this post must tell you that my upgrade from Lenny (stable) to Squeeze (testing) did not go smoothly. In fact, I'm sitting here typing in Emacs on a spanking new Kubuntu 9.10 installation. I hope that in a few weeks or months, I'll be able to move back over to a working version of Debian, but right now, I seem to be out of luck, and I don't yet know why. Here's a rundown of my problems.

1. I "googled around" for known problems and suggestions for the upgrade. I didn't see any generalized "Lenny-to-Squeeze angst," and I found the suggestion to upgrade the installer software first, and to use a "safe-upgrade" option, followed by a reboot, followed by a "full-upgrade." So, I updated my /etc/apt/sources.list to replace "lenny" with "squeeze," and started the process. Updating the installer programs and the aptitude safe-upgrade procedures showed no apparent problems, so I rebooted, and entered aptitude full-upgrade command.
2. At the end of the upgrade process, I got messages that lots of programs could not be loaded. Many of them were associated with the KDE desktop. This thread from late December 2009 Failed to upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze. [SOLVED] on Debian User Forums points to problems with KDE in Squeeze. I thought that might be the problem. But, Gnome's still in there, so I rebooted, and got as far as the Gnome display manager (gdm). However, the computer wouldn't accept input from the mouse or keyboard.

3. I found this relevant forum thread: keyboard problem with xdm and kdm. Of particular interest is this observation:

   When the keyboard doesn't work in xdm or kdm, even ctrl+alt+F1 doesn't respond....I think it might be related to the radeon driver, which seems quite unstable; when I work after a startx, everything works fine, as long as I don't work too much with the console. But if I switch to the console a lot and do a lot of work on the console, finally, when going back to X, my X ends up not responding to the keyboard nor to the mouse.

   As it happens, I have the same Radeon video chipset. A helpful forum responder pointed me to the appropriate proprietary driver. I don't know yet if I need this--Kubuntu 9.10 seems to be working well. I'll have to find out more about the driver eventually....

4. Because I had no input hardware working, I declared the update project hosed, and downloaded the January 29, 2009 netinstall disk for Squeeze (amd64). The text-based installer wouldn't come up at all, and there was something seriously wrong with the graphical installer, too. It failed during the disk partitioning step, so anything that might have been usable on the hard drive was hosed.

5. The only way to get Sid is through the upgrade path, and, for now, the same is true for Squeeze. So, I downloaded the Lenny netinstall disk image, burned it to a CD, and installed Lenny from scratch. It seemed to work, but the tty consoles were once again, unavailable. I wondered if that might be related to the video chipset driver, or perhaps to the Xorg installation. I hypothesized that my problem might have to do with the Lenny kernel, or the version of Xorg, so I decided to upgrade to Squeeze once more.

6. This time, because all the failing KDE stuff wasn't there, I saw my Xorg-related stuff failed to update. I had no working Xwindow programs, just a console window. I found these relevant forum threads:

   • Blocked packages during upgrade Lenny to Squeeze:

     [i]t appeared that the sticking point for udev and older kernels is linked to the Squeeze libdrm2 package, which is depending on the drm (direct rendering manager) built into kernels >= 2.6.29. Since xorg, udev and hal are also linked to libdrm2, the whole upgrade process gets broken. Once you have a newer kernel, the upgrade process should work.

   • Lenny will not autoconfigure X suggests ways to examine the failure of the Xorg installation.

   • SMXI.org--A set of scripts that may be helpful if (more likely when) I have to troubleshoot this problem again:

     smxi is an interactive script designed to help people maintain their systems. It supports Debian (Stable, Testing, and Sid) and true Debian based distros (sidux, AntiX, Mepis). It does not support Ubuntu based distros because there are too many differences between Debian and Ubuntu.

   • Here are some more things to try if I get Ctrl-Alt-F1 = Black,blank screen? instead of a tty console.

7. At this point, I suspected my graphics card driver was not working properly, I wasn't alone in having problems upgrading the Debian Xorg packages, and I needed a Linux machine before too long. I found this advice from a network administrator in Prague (city of my ancestors, the very ones who instilled in me the certainty that boasting is always punished by ill fortune): Putting new X.org version on Debian stable (lenny).

   Of course, there is a catch--new computers have graphic cards that lenny simply cannot cope with anymore. And if you want new drivers, you need new xorg version. There are no official backports. So you are faced with installing xorg from testing (squeeze), but this is a fairly large-scale operation: your libc6 package and other base libraries will be upgraded, your keyboard/console configuration will change, etc. Especially the library upgrade is troublesome, since in order to stay binary-compatible across the whole department, we would need to install libc6 etc. from squeeze on *all* our machines. It is not very likely significant breakage of these packages would go through to testing, but there are risks and overall it adds significant overhead to the task.

   Thankfully, there is a neat alternative solution--add Ubuntu to the repository cauldron! Ubuntu Jaunty is very similar to Debian Lenny package-wise, and in fact not even libc upgrade is necessary. Only a fairly isolated set of xorg-related packages will be upgraded, which seems ideal for the purpose.

   Perhaps my problem is compatibility with my newer machine. If the Ubuntu repositories have fresher drivers and x-org packages, why not use Ubuntu (or in my case, Kubuntu, because I need several KDE programs for my specialized projects) instead of Debian, at least until an upgrade path becomes available.

8. I downloaded the Kubuntu 9.10 disk image and installed it. X-org seems to be working fine and the tty-consoles are there and behaving just as they should. I found it quite easy to change all the little things I didn't like about Ubuntu (the way it handles root, the behavior of the terminal windows), and the latest, greatest KDE versions of my favorite programs are very nice.

Librarians as Offline Pirates

Earlier this week, I had to report to the local government on the historic preservation project that has me in such close association with the Reverent William T. Price and family. Part of that project has sent me reading up on copyright issues and the public domain. I even wrote a little report on it: Pocahontas County Historic Preservation Project: A Draft of Digitization Policies.

Join that with my recent interest in ebook readers and you'll see why everywhere I look, I find more to read about copyright laws, digital rights management (DRM), and intellectual property theft. This week Slashdot pointed me to this amusing analysis: Offline Book "Lending" Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion

Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher's Weekly that "publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy" comes a sudden realization of a much larger threat to the viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were "loaned" last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf the online piracy reported yesterday, and indeed, even the global book publishing business itself.

From what we've been able to piece together, the book "lending" takes place in "libraries". On entering one of these dens, patrons may view a dazzling array of books, periodicals, even CDs and DVDs, all available to anyone willing to disclose valuable personal information in exchange for a "card". But there is an ominous silence pervading these ersatz sanctuaries, enforced by the stern demeanor of staff and the glares of other patrons. Although there's no admission charge and it doesn't cost anything to borrow a book, there's always the threat of an onerous overdue bill for the hapless borrower who forgets to continue the cycle of not paying for copyrighted material.

The slashdot story comments were also amusing:

In related news it has been discovered that the contents of textbooks, which often sell for $200 or more, are largely made up of information and ideas developed by previous authors. The previous textbook authors are starting to complain that they aren't getting any royalties from new textbooks and are now calling new textbook authors "seagoing murdering thieves" (pirates). Others are wondering why books mostly inspired by previous works, have more than a hundred year copyright, when the Constitution only authorizes copyrights for limited times, not a trillion years.

I Join the Electronic Book Revolution--Sort Of

I bought an Astak EZ Reader Pocket Pro a couple of months ago, and I'm really pleased with it, although I haven't yet explored all its features. I had been wishing for an ebook reader for a couple of years, and I opined on them back in May. If only there were a way, I whined, to read electronic copies of Project Gutenberg books comfortably, without a backlit computer screen. Thousands of books that would never get mildewed, or lose their pages, or take up shelf space, in any font size I desire. Because most of the gadget reviewers are young men who don't imagine they'll ever have vision problems, or otherwise get old, cranky or cash-strapped, I'm offering a product review by "A Woman of a Certain Age."

The E-Ink reading experience seems very natural to me, and after the first two or three pages of Wuthering Heights, I had completely forgotten that I wasn't reading a regular book. In fact, if I had been holding my moldy old paperback with the tiny, tiny print, I would have been much more aware of the unfriendly format. My eyeballs are middle-aged, and being able to adjust the font size and contrast is wonderful. I stayed up late to follow Cathy and Heathcliff to the bitter end, without the eye fatigue that comes from reading too long on a computer screen. (I didn't remember how much house-keeping information Emily Bronte included--what they ate, how they cooked it, what it took to keep the kitchen clean....really interesting. Also, everybody seemed to have a simmering case of tuberculosis, with realistic, unromantic symptoms.)

My device came with a 1 GB SD card, loaded with "300 Free eBooks," although I think that was a special, introductory offer. I bought a 4 GB card, and started loading it up with the complete works of every 19th century author I fancy. Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, George Eliot, the Brontes, Henry James--bookcases full, and there's still loads of room on the SD card.

It also turns out this is a great way to read knitting patterns. I often have to rewrite knitting patterns on 3x5 index cards to keep with my knitting. It's just as easy to type them and copy them over to the E-Ink device, where I can make the font as HUGE as I like, whenever I need it.

The most advertised E-Ink readers (Kindle and Sony, for example) are designed to sell digitally locked up, copyrighted books (DRM books) for what I consider high prices. They even charge the customer money to make Project Gutenberg books available in their proprietary formats.

In September, the Astak EZ Reader Pocket Pro came on the market for $200. (And it was available in RED!) It's a little Linux computer that can display 21 non-DRM'ed file formats. I may never buy DRM'ed ebooks, but if I decide to, the EZReader can display ADE-encrypted PDF and ePub books, and there are lots of books available in those formats. In addition to the company website, there's a careful and detailed look at the Astak Pocket PRO, provided by a company spokesman.

Here are some features that convinced me that I would really like this device, instead of the many others on the market. (Also, it comes in RED.)

• E-Ink technology, with eight levels of grey scale (better display of pictures or illustrations than earlier devices)
• Displays these DRM-free formats: PDF, TXT, PDB, DOC, HTML, FB2, LIT, MP3, EPUB, PRC, WOL, CHM, PPT, TIF, PNG, GIF, RAR, ZIP, DJVU, JPG, BMP
• Adobe Digital Editions firmware update lets you buy copy-protected eBooks in PDF and ePub formats.
• a user-replaceable rechargeable battery (Sony and Kindle devices are done for when their battery won't charge anymore--have to send them back to the factory for servicing)
• an SD card that supports up to 16GB
• three levels of font size and different font choices; also you can read in portrait or landscape mode, which is useful if you go with a very large font
• mp3 player mode which can be used simultaneously with reading mode
• Text-To-Speech... meaning it can read to you and automatically advances pages
• bookmarking capability
• Accessories in the box include crush-resistant case with magnetic clasp, ear buds, AC charger, USB cable, and wrist leash. (The pricier devices require you to buy these separately.)

Reading--Off the Page and Off the Screen

Here's my copy of Little Dorrit, part of The Complete Works of Charles Dickens, which I bought for a dollar at an auction in Connecticut, about 1980. One volume contained a German Christmas card, used as a bookmark, dated 1892. This has certainly been a good value, but little pieces of Little Dorrit fall off every time I turn a page, and my other Victorian novels (bought as secondhand paperbacks in the sixties and seventies) are in worse condition. Do I move these old wrecks into the new house? Do I replace them? Most are only available in paperback, or as hardbound sets of similar vintage to my Dickens volumes.

I'd like to rely on Project Gutenberg for my continued reading pleasure, but the computer screen is not comfortable reading. I have an eleven-year-old Linux laptop that I sometimes use to read Project Gutenberg books in html format, but it's heavy, gets hot, and the battery doesn't last long. It did represent my ideal price point, as I salvaged it from a junk heap. I probably won't find a bargain like that again.

That's why I've been eyeing eInk book readers for the last few years. A cute, lightweight, paperback-sized device that isn't backlit and can hold hundreds of text documents--it sounds wonderful. Unfortunately, there are plenty of drawbacks with what's been on the market so far. The various ebook readers have competing DRM's (Digital Rights Management systems), so you can't use books from one device on different hardware, or make backup copies of the (fairly expensive) books you buy. Some of the devices have features I can't use here in Pocahontas County (like the Kindle's wireless capability), and both books and devices are on the pricey side.

Nevertheless, I keep looking at what's available, and daydreaming. I should be daydreaming about drywall, and oriented strand board (OSB), and paint, as these are the items I will be purchasing soon....

• Kindle: Amazon's 6" Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation) Too pricey for me, and the elaborate wireless connectivity is useless in this part of the country. It'd sure be cool though, if money were no object....
• Introducing Kindling, the Wireless Wooden Reading Device! Made me laugh out loud.
• BeBook Review on Mobileread.com's forums. This is one of several implementations of the Hanlin hardware. As far as I can see, BeBook handles the largest range of ebook formats, including pdf's and rss feeds.
• BeBook homepage.
• BeBook Mini, smaller, cheaper, and yet to come.
• Coolreader uses the same hardware as BeBook, but reads fewer formats. They have their own (very expensive) e-bookstore, but they come in lots of pretty colors.
• EZ Reader is another incarnation of the same hardware (any color as long as it's black)--a little more expensive than BeBook, and the software is not as well-explained on its product web page.