eReaderJoy: thoughts and news from Eolake Stobblehouse about the wonderful new platform of tablets and e-reading devices. Some say, one of the biggest advances to reading since Gutenberg (Okay, I said that).
In e-form, books have never been wider, cheaper or faster available, easier to understand, use, and carry, or more comfortable to read.
Big color books are coming to Kindle in big waves, hurrah! For example, I searched for books about acrylic painting, and about mixed media art, and there were lots of books which clearly are meant for a biggish color screen rather than the small grey-scale Kindle.
Of course you still have to live with the odd choice of authors and editors. For example in the otherwise nice book about experimental acrylics painting I bought, Rethinking Acrylic, the author tells us that "small brushes are good for small paintings or small details, and big brushes are good for covering large areas". No! Really? Thank gawd you told me. On the other hand he defines "gesso" as "the bridge between the substrate and the paint". I had to use the Kindle apps' dictionary to find out that it consists plaster of paris and glue. Ah well.
But I really like that this is happening. While "serious readers" may be focused on novels and bios, there are big swathes of the book market which depends on complex designs, graphs, illustrations, art, etc. Cook books, comics, children's books, art books, artist's teaching books, text books...
And of course as usual, we have several formats now battling it out. This is Planet Earth after all. There's the new Kindle 8 format. There's the old PDF format. There's Apple's new format for fixed design. And so on. Sigh.
By the way, I recently made small changes to the design of this blog. What do you think of it in general? Is it well readable? How do you like the book background and so on? I made most of it me likkle self.
The new Nexus 7 seems like a quite promising ereader/tablet. Finally a tablet with a rubber back cover. It's lighter than the Kindle Fire. And it has higher screen resolution. And it's as cheap as the Fire. Very promising. (Also it comes in Europe sooner than the Fire.)
Only irritation is only 8 or 16MB storage (not "memory" which is what the processor uses for thinking), and no SD card slot. An HD movie is easily 5MB in itself. This is like Amazon's thinking with the Fire. The Nexus even deletes files after use without asking you! (Admittedly sometimes the iPad does this too.) "Ooh, but you use the online storage, see?" Yeah, great, but what if you're in an area with no or weak Net connection, and you want to watch another movie? Come on, guys, you're being a little bit too forward with this, like five or ten years.
Seriously, I want to have several films and TV shows stored on this kind of device. Expecting video download to work in the train or the summer house is not only ridiculous, but would cost a mint in data fees if you could get it to work.
[Did this remind you of something? Like Apple promotional videos? Apart from looking at people from the left and having more color, this sounds and looks exactly like Apple's promotional videos. The words, the rhythms, the feeling... Have they no embarrassment level?]
Update 1: Janet said: I have to assume you will get one or maybe not?
Well, if it wasn't for that storage issue, I'd be very tempted. But on the other hand, during the rest of the year we're likely to see new models of Kindle Fire, *possibly* a smaller iPad, and so on. It's very volatile right now, so I'm waiting.
Nexus 7 leads now, slightly, with weight and screen resolution for 7-inchers, but others will surely follow. It'll be quite interesting to see how the market develops over the next couple of years.
Another thing though: it seems that on the Google Play store, you can only *rent* movies and TV shows. So you're forced to watch it within 48 hours. I like that on iTunes I can buy them so I can take my own sweet time, flicking back and forth between different films and shows, like I do with books.
... In fact it seems like you can *only* rent movies on GP, no TV shows at all. That's a big downside to me, I'm a big fan of the best TV shows, particularly comedies, nothing better when I want to relax. And laughter is healing.
Update 2:
... As a matter of fact, I can't even get movie rental to work on Google Play. I can buy books and apps, and I can *pay* for a movie rental, I even get the email receipt, but when I try to actually watch the movie, my password suddenly fails. Is this because I'm not in the USA? Does anybody know?
I don't care for Apple's current litigiousness, but when one sees this picture, one can understand their feelings about Samsung and Google/Android. In fact when one sees this picture, one might never realize that one is not in fact looking at an iPhone, but a Samsung Galaxy II. They completely hovered up everything of the Look And Feel. It's patently embarrassing.
It is shameful how textbook publishers are taking advantage of their captive market, students, to inflate book prices. But things are starting to happen, this is one of them. I wonder how it'll look in 20 years.
"If you took a course in philosophy or critical thinking at college or university, you paid an average of $70 for your textbook. I think that's too much, especially for students who have to choose between food and the rent, two or three times a year, like a lot of my students. Yet the cost of these books never goes down, because students are a captive market. So, I've been writing my own textbook, so that my students don't have to buy one. I'd like to expand and improve it and then make it available to the whole world, for free."
I have rarely made notes of any kind, and thus not in Kindle books either. But as an experiment I've turned on public notes for many of my books, so if you "follow" me, you can see them.
I don't know how this will go. On the surface it might be just another Social Network thing, but on the other hand, since the notes are in and about a book, they are bound to have generally more substance than typical FaceBlot or Twigger writings.
iPad Owns 91% of Tablet Web Traffic; Nook Passes Kindle Fire,article.
I'm a bit amazed that the Nook passed the Kindle Fire. Especially given the all-out price-war approach of Amazon since last year. But of course this is only about web traffic, and perhaps more people buy Nooks as a multi-purpose device, and more buy KFs mostly for reading and video.
(Clickable.)
... The closest competitor has two percent of the iPad's traffic. Huh.
I do think that part of the reason the iPad is so astoundingly dominant in web traffic is that most other popular tablets are only seven-inchers, and I feel that with complex web sites like for example Amazon (and in fact most popular sites), even the iPad's 10-inch screen can sometimes feel rather limiting. I sometimes have to zoom in on a list of links to be sure which one I hit. And before the Safari browser got the Reader functionality (which isolates and enlarges the text of an article), an article would often be hard to read, due to the wide-spread use on the web of too small fonts and too-wide columns. (Safari Reader or Instapaper of course is a fantastic help there.)
Annual Cost of Charging an iPad at $1.36,news release. Consumers who fully charge their iPad tablet every other day can expect to pay $1.36 for the electricity needed annually to power the device, according to an assessment by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).
Wow, that's insane. That's the annual cost. Considering the bright, super-high-res screen and the (for a hand-held) very powerful processing, that can only be considered a bargain. Apple has really scored top points with the power-economy here. (Also considered as how much performance you can squeeze out of a given processor, amount of memory, etc.)
I haven't done this test recently, but I once ran a graphic screen-clock application on my iPad 1 non-stop, and the battery lasted over 15 hours. That is of course with the processor not doing much work, but with the screen on constantly.
"Acer Founder: Microsoft Has No Real Intention to Make Tablets", TMO article.
In other words, when faced with the reality that his company will soon be competing with Microsoft in the tablet space, Mr. Shih chose to invent an elaborate world where Microsoft is just doing a head fake to goose the market for Windows 8 tablets so that Acer and other licensees can then take over and reap the benefits. Other prescient theories espoused by Mr. Shih include the prediction that the iPad would merely be a flash in the pan, and that tablets and even MacBook Airs (and Wintel ultrabooks) would go the way of the dodo.
That's too funny. (Although this story origins from Digitimes, not a stalwart of reliable reporting.)
I love the Zinio magazine app, I have several subscriptions. I use on iPhone 4, Android (Samsung Note), and of course mainly on my iPad 3. Awesome.
Just for fun I tried it on my Mac. It was a different experience seeing a high quality produced magazine on a 30-inch Cinema Display!
The Weird World of Fan Fiction, WSJ article. "The publishing industry's current overnight sensation, erotica author E.L. James, began writing her best-selling book "Fifty Shades of Grey" as "Twilight" fan fiction. She began posting her X-rated take on Ms. Meyer's tame paranormal romance online three years ago. Her "Twilight" homage, titled "Master of the Universe," evolved into a series starring a powerful CEO and a young woman in a sadomasochistic sexual relationship."
I have never read fan fiction before, but I started recently when I stumbled over a set of many stories featuring one of my favorite characters, Daria. There are maybe a million words from that one author alone, and I'm enjoying it much.
It's interesting to see the drive to put in that much work without any aim for financial gain. It's also interesting to see how fan fiction is getting more accepted, for example, Ender's Game author Orson Scott Card has shifted from sending threatening letters to actively encouraging fan fiction with a contest.
Of course you still have to live with the odd choice of authors and editors. For example in the otherwise nice book about experimental acrylics painting I bought, Rethinking Acrylic, the author tells us that "small brushes are good for small paintings or small details, and big brushes are good for covering large areas". No! Really? Thank gawd you told me. On the other hand he defines "gesso" as "the bridge between the substrate and the paint". I had to use the Kindle apps' dictionary to find out that it consists plaster of paris and glue. Ah well.
