Answering a question from my Dad

[pmb]

Is Kindle the future of reading?

Kinda.

The physical format is, because electronic paper is totally sweet and the extra long battery life is great too. But their system is horribly restricted and locked-down and broken in a few key ways. It's way worse than Apple and iTunes and the iTunes store where you can only play iTunes Store songs in iTunes or your iPod[1]. There's some sort of for-pay conversion service and some other free conversion service where you send them a document and it arrives in Kindle format (something called .AZW that is Amazon's own thing) and you can also load plain text files onto it for reading.[2]

If you want to read a .PDF, which is basically all I would want to do with it, then you are SOL. Amazon, in their mad quest to be not a hardware manufacturer (teeny tiny margins) but a service provider (nice big fat margins) and a publisher (potentially nice big fat margins, but the business accounting practices in publishing are so messed up there is no way to know), has decided that the device isn't really yours. It's kind of yours and it's kind of theirs[3], and if you want to load crap onto it, then it can either be a .TXT file with no formatting whatsoever, or you have to go through them. Basically, it's a good idea that, much like your recent troubles with Windows "Genuine Advantage", contains flaws that amount to Amazon giving you the finger and will probably piss you off too much for you to be able to use it for any length of time (much like Windows Genuine Advantage did).

So you don't want one until someone makes one that won't piss you off constantly. Which could be Amazon if they drop their pretensions of still controlling the device after you bought it, or it could be someone else. If Kindle is the future in all regards, then you and I will probably end up sticking with the past.[4]

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[1] Pedants please note that while it is technically possible for non-iTunes things to usefully play .AAC (or whatever they are) files, basically nothing does.

[2] This was all garnered from web research that ended up finding the useful page: http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2007/11/19/15-things-i-just-lea.html

[3] This "your thing is not really yours" is sometimes called "Digital Rights Management" (DRM) or even "Trusted Computing". In the long run it's a broken idea (Prof. Ed Felten has a lot to say about this kind of thing), but in the short term it's seductively appealing to large media companies that don't want to change any of their practices even when faced with radical technological upheaval. Some dystopic fiction and other stuff has been written about this, most notably attempting to get people to call it "Treacherous Computing". Which it kind of is. Treacherous, I mean.

[4] People who prefer physical books are referred to in librarian circles (where the debate between new tech and old books is apparently this massive constant fight) as "booksniffers". In other circles, people who want physical books are called "pervy for paper". As for me, I think of it as simply wanting to have the new book technology be strictly better than the old book technology instead of this weird "it's digital and sexy, but it's also no longer yours" thing that media companies seem obsessed with.

Comments

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

Damnit, and here I'd almost convinced myself to sell part of my physical library and buy a Kindle.

I don't think I'd really want to read PDFs that much. And I assume that someone will crack the Kindle DRM in not too long, and hence any book I "buy" for 10$ is a book I can not only read, but also share with the world. So I see the 10$ as a liberation fee, as opposed to "paying someone for content they won't let me really own".

Will the Sony Reader also piss me off constantly? Another option would be a palmtop, which wouldn't have e-ink and long battery life, but would have other nice features.

Sigh. I really want this problem solved. I am fucking sick and tired of having so many books.

[clipdude.livejournal.com]

I would not want such a device if it were incapable of displaying PDF files.

PDFs are all I read for school nowadays

[pmb.livejournal.com]

It's like they see all the potential of the device and are so scared of it that they went out of their way to make it something I don't want and can't use.

Re: PDFs are all I read for school nowadays

[agthorr.livejournal.com]

I believe that digital paper and e-books are the future, but Kindle, I don't think, is *it*.

Also, the name "Kindle" creeps me out. Deliberately alluding to book burning? WTF?

[(Anonymous)]

That PDFs can't be be read (well, actually they can be converted to AZW in exactly the same manner as HTML and the like -- it's just something that's not advertised, since conversion is so imperfect) is a technical limitation rather than due to a concern over content. The kindle is paperback-sized, and it's difficult, for example, to re-layout the text in PDFs to display nicely on pages with different page widths. I don't know about the feasibility of a pan-and-zoom approach, but I wouldn't guess it'd be a pleasant experience to read whole papers in such a fashion.

That doesn't make the fact that you can't comfortably read PDFs on a kindle any better -- it's a technical limitation that's keeping me from buying a reader, too. But just so you know, it's a technical issue rather than a Trusted Computing issue.

[bookerz.livejournal.com]

Sorry -- was me.

[maerdi.livejournal.com]

That was my impression, as well.

[kirin]

Pan-and-zoom, I hear, works basically not at all on this type of device because of the slow refresh rate of e-ink.

Really, it seems like re-laying-out PDFs (or at least all but the 10% most-complicated PDFs) ought to be an easier problem to solve.

[mbrubeck.livejournal.com]

That's exactly true. Lack of PDF support is a hardware problem, not a software one. If you can extract the text from a PDF, you can read it your Kindle just fine using Amazon's free converter or your own conversion software. If not, then the hardware is probably just not up to the task. Pressure authors and publishers to use less print-centric formats. Or buy higher-resolution devices, which are either more expensive (iLiad) or more power-hungry (OLPC XO-1).

[erinpie.livejournal.com]

I'm happy with the Sony EReader. Same display, also can display pdfs, which is handy for my pubmed searching. Instead of printing a bunch of articles, I can just transfer them to my ereader and browse them at my leisure.

There are still things I would change about it if it was up to me, but I figure somebody has to buy the early generations of this stuff so they put effort into making more. ;)

booksniffing

[pants-of-doom.livejournal.com]

I would love to have my school books in digital format because they're heavy and I have to carry them around a lot, but I need to be able to make notes all over them. I also have found that I'd rather have cookbooks than deal with online recipes, something about being able to see the whole thing at once. So my point is... I can see both sides of this but will be sticking to dead trees until this DRM thing is kicked, because holy crap is that annoying.

Re: booksniffing

[enth.livejournal.com]

fwiw i understand the kindle encourages adding marginal notes to anything you read on it. that's what the painful looking little keyboard is for.

Do something abou it...send Amazon a note.

[mlissner.livejournal.com]

Amen man.

Here's the link to the contact Amazon page:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/general-questions.html?ie=UTF8&browse%5Fnode%5Fid=508510&jsEnabled=enabled#csTop

I'm not convinced it will do anything, but it couldn't hurt...

Addendum

[dboothe.livejournal.com]

For completeness' sake I will point out that [Wikipedia says] the Kindle also supports the Mobipocket format, which exists in brokenprotected and unprotected forms. I haven't an inkling how much content may be available in such a format, though.

Re: Addendum

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

MobiPocket seems to have a fair amount of content.

Sadly (from my perspective), nobody has cracked the Kindle or Mobi DRM yet (which is surprising, and perhaps indicates how small a market it is).

[zudini.livejournal.com]

I think you're being a little too harsh on the Kindle. I'm much more okay with the "kinda mine, kinda theirs" philosophy when they are footing the bill for my EVDO data access, with no monthly or usage fee to me. I've been trying to decide if having a kindle (wikipedia, Google Maps, etc) would mean I could forgo the $30/month I'm currently spending for GPRS data. If so, the kindle would pay for itself in 14 months.

I'm not sure why you say it's "way worse than" the Apple/iTunes/iPod lockdown. It supports .AZW and mobipocket and plain-text, which is about equivalent to iPod's playing .aac as well as .mp3.

As others pointed out, the pdf fiasco may be at least partially technical, and does not strike me as "amazon giving you the finger". They're offering an "experimental" conversion service, which is free (you only pay if you want it delivered over EVDO), and nothing stops you from converting PDF to mobipocket or plaintext on your own.

I haven't been convinced I want one, and I sure think the next generation will be better, but I don't think it's as bad as you make it out.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

PDFs are basically all I read nowadays, and they are the main format for readable electronic text. I read Kindle's lack of support more like those early digital music players that only played .WMA and not .MP3. Saying that it's okay because they support .TXT as well is pretty weak tea.

You are right that it's not necessarily a bad deal if you don't think of it as a book. But it's being sold as a book, not your tablet pal that's fun to be with. It seems to be a competitor in that second arena, but as a book replacement it's a loser - any replacement system in which I buy books needs to allow me most of the same freedoms I have when I buy a book now. I want a PDF (or other reasonably well-supported open format, but that's basically .DVI (hell no) .PS (which is basically .PDF), .PDF, or .ODF) that I can back up and read on my computer or on my kindle or print out sections from, and I don't want DRM crap that calls home to make sure I am authorized to read a particular book. My books need to be mine, not theirs. Somehow this is way more important to me with books than it is with music or movies, and I'm not sure why.

[mbrubeck.livejournal.com]

I basically agree with you (the ebook market is dead to me because of DRM), but:

I'd much rather have content in HTML or some other device-independent, reflowable, openly specified format. I already read far more words in HTML pages day than in PDF (but I realize that things are different in academia). I've read ebooks on a wide range of devices (XO, Nokia 770, Sony Librie, 14" Dell laptop) and print-formatted PDFs are painful at best on all of them.

The Kindle supports HTML natively (you can even download HTML ebooks straight from the web to your Kindle), and I believe its proprietary format is HTML-based.

[mbrubeck.livejournal.com]

(If authors publish their text in a way that intentionally locks it into A4 or US-letter paper layouts, they really can't complain when pocket-sized viewers don't provide optimal support for their content.)

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Over time I've gradually become convinced that different resolutions need separate designs, so I'm not as sold on reflowable text as others, particularly when it has to be paginated.

But most of the free-novel PDFs I have encountered have been typeset for trade paperback sizes - 5.5 x 8.5. As for academic papers, there's a lot wrong with academic publishing, and the fact that the PDFs target letter sizes only scratches the surface. I, for one, would love it if HTML could become an accepted medium for scholarly communication - you know, like it was designed for.