Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

E-reader Prices Dropping

As prices continue to fall, people wonder if e-book readers will eventually come for free. 

It doesn't much concern me; sadly the technology is of no use to me, for practical and philosophical reasons (which may or may not be solved eventually). 

But notice that some e-readers are being crowded off the market.  So long as e-books are nontransferrable and/or trapped in proprietary format, buying an e-reader is basically gambling on the company continuing to support it.  If that brand goes down, you may have to re-buy your whole library that's on it.  (For me, this is another deal-breaker.)  It would be better to have a format that would work on all e-readers.

You know what would be really interesting?  An e-reader constructed cheaply with off-the-shelf parts, using an open-source format to carry not copyrighted material but Creative Commons and public domain material.  Some for money, some for free, all of which you could share or copy or whatever.  Now that would be an interesting competition.
Tags: cyberspace theory, news, reading, shopping
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  • 18 comments
janetmiles

janetmiles

July 13 2010, 17:21:16 UTC 10 years ago

Some e-readers (like the Sony) are accessible to open-source formats like TXT and EPUB as well as to proprietary but common formats like RTF (which turns out to be a Microsoft proprietary format, but damn near every word processor now made will read and save in RTF) and PDF (Adobe).
ysabetwordsmith

Thank you!

ysabetwordsmith

July 13 2010, 17:37:30 UTC 10 years ago

That's useful to know. The details do vary -- some of them let you save books to multiple places, like your hard drive and the reader.
janetmiles

Re: Thank you!

janetmiles

July 13 2010, 18:18:26 UTC 10 years ago

The Sony does that, as well -- you download the book to a designated library on your hard drive and then synch it to the reader. Because it reads multiple formats, you aren't limited to the Sony EBook store; you can obtain books from anywhere that sells or distributes EPUB, TXT, RTF, or PDF.

You can copy the book to an external drive or SIM card, and as far as I know you can load / reload books as many times as you want.
ysabetwordsmith

Re: Thank you!

ysabetwordsmith

July 13 2010, 18:30:22 UTC 10 years ago

That sounds better than the Kindle, all right.
valarltd

Re: Thank you!

valarltd

July 13 2010, 23:49:56 UTC 10 years ago

Everything she said about Sony.
I like the ergonomics of the Sony as well.

I like being able to have a .pdf file, that is saved on my hard drive, backed up on disk and now in my reader so it's portable.

And I have a LOT of Public Domain stuff. Sherlock Holmes and Mark Twain and Charles Dickens from Project Gutenburg.

You can even give away, lend or sell your e-books. But as an author, I am against this because it picks my pocket. (often you can ask an author, we're all online, if they would mind and sometimes they'll send along a freebie for your friend. After all, the first hit is free...)
siliconshaman

siliconshaman

July 13 2010, 18:44:33 UTC 10 years ago

There are already a number of free, open source projects to convert different propriety formats to other forms. People don't like the idea of having to re-buy their books.

I suspect the fall-out is going to be that the restricted formats and DRM fall by the way-side and that e-readers end up being a more reasonable price, but not free... i.e the content is free, the device to read them on isn't. Largely because digital information is infinite, and material objects aren't.
ysabetwordsmith

Thoughts

ysabetwordsmith

July 13 2010, 20:55:16 UTC 10 years ago

>>There are already a number of free, open source projects to convert different propriety formats to other forms. People don't like the idea of having to re-buy their books.<<

Well, that's encouraging.

>>I suspect the fall-out is going to be that the restricted formats and DRM fall by the way-side and that e-readers end up being a more reasonable price, but not free... i.e the content is free, the device to read them on isn't. Largely because digital information is infinite, and material objects aren't.<<

*nod* You may be right. I'm watching to see if anyone in the crowdfunding community will start offering their stuff in e-reader formats.
valarltd

valarltd

July 13 2010, 23:45:34 UTC 10 years ago

Some of the content will be free. I have no quarrel with public domain books.

Some of the free content will be stolen. Here is my problem. My last book was out for 3 days. THREE DAYS. before it turned up on a pirate site. Some of us like to get paid for our writing. And it is discouraging to write, edit, etc, and then see the stolen copies outnumber the sold copies.
ysabetwordsmith

Thoughts

ysabetwordsmith

July 14 2010, 00:33:14 UTC 10 years ago

I think there should be both free and paid content available.

I don't think piracy undercuts sales as much as people believe it does, though. Most of those copies are going to people who wouldn't have bought a copy; they'd have gone without if they couldn't get it free. If they love it, they might go out and buy a copy later, or buy something else by the same person. This is especially true in areas where people feel like the price is a ripoff. And if you have a way to see how many pirate copies there are, it's a gauge for ghost-interest in the material: people who don't love it enough to pay for it, but are sufficiently intrigued to look at it for free, and might be hooked into coughing up money later.
valarltd

Re: Thoughts

valarltd

July 14 2010, 01:45:26 UTC 10 years ago

I'm totally for the existance of both. I'm just against losing money. And more, I'm against my co-author getting so discouraged she pretty much refuses to write.


There are some people who think paying for anything digital is a rip-off.

Case in point: I wrote a story for a charity event. The story sold for $1.29. I donated my royalties and my publisher matched it. 96c out of each sale was going to charity.

People were STILL pirating it.
A DOLLAR TWENTY NINE.
Price has nothing to do with it.

My stuff can be $1.29. It can be $2.50 or $6.99. And it's still pirated. All of that is cheaper than a mass-market paperback.
ysabetwordsmith

Re: Thoughts

ysabetwordsmith

10 years ago

  • New comment
rowyn

Re: Thoughts

rowyn

10 years ago

  • New comment
ysabetwordsmith

Re: Thoughts

ysabetwordsmith

10 years ago

  • New comment
cortezopossum

cortezopossum

July 13 2010, 23:16:56 UTC 10 years ago

Funny you should mention this. I actually bought a Barnes & Noble 'Nook' eReader. Well, I ordered it last week and it finally arrived yesterday. I didn't have a chance to upload any PDFs or order any books online but I'll be playing around with it tonight.

I chose B&N's Nook because it was significantly cheaper than Sony's (albeit Sony supports more formats) and had more features for that cheaper price. Also -- it didn't have Kindle's tomfoolery when it comes to uploading things that aren't in Kindle's own special format.

The Nook is, from what I've been told, essentially an 'Android' phone internally and should be relatively straightforward to write programs for it so even though it only supports a few formats there's probably going to be support for others later.
ysabetwordsmith

Hmm...

ysabetwordsmith

July 13 2010, 23:38:53 UTC 10 years ago

>>The Nook is, from what I've been told, essentially an 'Android' phone internally and should be relatively straightforward to write programs for it so even though it only supports a few formats there's probably going to be support for others later.<<

There is some charm to a programmable e-reader. Unfortunately anything that can be programmed can be attacked with viruses. At some point it will be a big nuisance to find clean e-book files and keep the e-reader free, the same way it's a nuisance to keep computers virus-free. People will be all wanting to flash ads at you and nose into what you are reading.
lord_caramac

lord_caramac

July 14 2010, 13:44:35 UTC 10 years ago

There are several e-readers with a Linux-based operating system and support for all kinds of open text formats. Like the HanLin eReader series (marketed as BeBook in some parts of the world) or the iRex iLiad series...
ysabetwordsmith

Hmm...

ysabetwordsmith

July 14 2010, 18:30:47 UTC 10 years ago

That sounds promising. I read that the iRex was not being supported much anymore, though.
ravan

ravan

July 14 2010, 20:55:10 UTC 10 years ago

My roomies got an open format reader that handles PDFs and .mobi as well as .txt (and I think RTF.) It supports an SD card and USB, IIRC.

I would like it if I could buy, and loan, books on a permanent SD card. Then I could pop it into my reader, read the books I wanted, or remove it and put it in a case with many others. Small, compact, permanent, and loanable. Who really owns that copy? The possessor of the SD card.