I feel like my “bitching” on this thread is coming off too harsh then. Sorry!
I don’t own an e-reader, but I’d like to try one out before laying money down really. I get the whole “ease” thing. I find myself distracted incredibly easily while reading, so if I find the e-reader off-putting, that could ruin things for me. There’s definitely a parallel with the ease that comes from choosing a record and physically putting a needle on it as it spins vs selecting from an mp3 playlist and choosing a book from the shelf and flicking to the right page vs selecting from a list of e-books and reading them off your reader.
Plus sides:
—no noisy turning of pages in bed
—less heavy to hold and carry (especially if it’s a big book you’d like to read in bed)
Down sides:
—you can’t physically see how far into the book you are
—flicking back and forth for things isn’t quite a simple
—pictures? y/n?
I feel like my “bitching” on this thread is coming off too harsh then. Sorry!
― flexidisc, Wednesday, December 21, 2011 11:56 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink
lol not its not at all, i was just speaking generally
you can’t physically see how far into the book you are
can be argued to be a good thing, adds another dimension to books when you don’t know when they’ll end
- you can’t physically see how far into the book you are
The Nook has a counter that says you are on page X of Y.
- pictures? y/n?
depends entirely on the book; the Nook can support them
kindle tells you how far you are through the book proportionally. graphic representations (maps, photos, etc.) are a weakness of the kindle, they’re going to be black and white and pretty small.
never heard of the nook. is that US only? Anyone who knows about these things have a preference of make/model of e-reader?
it would be great to see one that can handle graphic novels in the future
the problem w/images is it seems like b&w eink is really the best for reading text where a conventional led display is best for images
Nook is the Barnes & Noble e-reader:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/nook/379003208/
I have a Nook Color; the tablet is brand new afaik
it would be great to see one that can handle graphic novels in the future
funny you should say this, they just added Marvel comics/graphic novels to the Nook
Anyone who knows about these things have a preference of make/model of e-reader?
I have a sony, will have a go with my dad’s kindle over the weekend, i figure they’re all much of a muchness though.
E-book readers have one critical advantage for me: easy, free access to classic or public domain literature. There are around 150 titles on my Kindle, only 10 of which under modern copyright. The would have cost a minimum of $1000 if purchased used, with another $150 for shelving, a move to larger quarters to find another free wall to store them all.
Still prefer traditional books for 90% of my reading, as used book shopping has never been easier, or cheaper (in time & fuel).
iPad is grrrrrrrrrrreat for graphic novels. I don’t know if I would necessarily recommend it over a dedicated e-reader, though. Like I may have said, I often waffle about wanting an e-reader and then thinking it’s just a waste.
i love reading, don’t care that much about books.
OTM.
Also: if you have an Amazon Prime membership and a Kindle, you can “check out” unlimited books from Amazon’s own “library.” I don’t know how good the selection is as I do not have a Kindle. If it’s decent, I think that would be worthwhile.
hysterical OMG BOOKS ARE DYING ppl annoy the shit out of me—books will never die bc, unlike vinyl/CDs/DVDs/video-tape, the relationship between the form and the content is often so important, which is also why the fetishization of books as objects is so common. i think airport-type pulp fiction paperbacks will die eventually, but imo e-readers should be motivating small presses (and big publishing houses) to think a little more carefully about production, instead of just slamming out piles of ugly junk.
god, i wish i’d had an e-reader in college, probably would have saved a lot of back/neck/shoulder pain.
E-book readers have one critical advantage for me: easy, free access to classic or public domain literature. There are around 150 titles on my Kindle, only 10 of which under modern copyright. The would have cost a minimum of $1000 if purchased used, with another $150 for shelving, a move to larger quarters to find another free wall to store them all.
yes yes yes yes yes
i slightly prefer the kobo over the kindle, although there is a definite lag when when flipping frwd to the next page. The cheapest kobo comes with 100 classics pre-loaded.
god, i wish i’d had an e-reader in college, probably would have saved a lot of back/neck/shoulder pain.
OMG so OTM, especially for law school. I would have saved myself the humiliation of dragging around a rolling backpack, too.
but you can buy/borrow classic books for next to nothing. I am thinking of buying my girlfriend a kindle for christmas, but mostly so she can read her uni textbooks on it, and I’m not sure those will be available. It’s just they’re awfully big. I take it she’ll have to buy them again in digital if she’s already got them physically?
also can save thousands of dollars on textbooks
xp
Apple is known to be targeting schools for replacing textbooks with iPads. Besides not having to lug around a heavy backpack, the contents can easily be kept up to date, and unlike textbooks can offer links, sound, video, etc.
>- no noisy turning of pages in bed
- less heavy to hold and carry (especially if it’s a big book you’d like to read in bed)
I’ve already heard some lolworthy “i take my iPad to bed” stories from friends, and given how many times I’ve awakened with my laptop on the floor, I fear that if I’m reading an iPad/e-reader i’ll fall asleep, roll over it, and crush the screen. Still, reading in bed is why I prefer the backlit, color iPad-type screen to the “e-ink” Kindle screens that are great in sunlight, but not in dark rooms.
Which is less bothersome: your bedmate reading a book using one of those little book lights and flipping pages, or taking an iPad to bed and reading on it?
iPad is grrrrrrrrrrreat for graphic novels. I don’t know if I would necessarily recommend it over a dedicated e-reader, though. Like I may have said, I often waffle about wanting an e-reader and then thinking it’s just a waste
if you already have an iPad, I don’t see any compelling argument to get an e-reader aside from wanting something smaller
That’s my only compelling argument.
I prefer Jeff to read quietly using the iPad than rustle pages with a book light. iPad Kindle app has a white-on-black function that makes it easier to read in the dark and less bright to sleep next to.
(note: hate the white on black thing because I can’t see it as well.)
I find reading real books harder. I get distracted by the shadows cast in the page, the edges of the page.
i find e-readers less distracting too because the one-page-at-a-time thing keeps my eyes from drifting over the next page
i love reading, don’t care that much about books.
I have had an increasingly hard time reading books for a few years, so sincerely, no challops intended, I’m finding myself loving books more than reading.
Because you don’t read them?
I like having them around. I’ve had a few books on my night stand for months that I don’t read, but I like having there. They’re nice objects.
I just got a set of lamps for my birthday made out of old books
find ereaders more distracting because my eyes can’t drift, but I’ve made my peace, sort of.
I have had an increasingly hard time reading books for a few years, so sincerely, no challops intended, I’m finding myself loving books more than reading.
feeling this.
That makes me angry.
Show me other pictures and I will tell you how they make me feel.
^^ at last a use for coffee table books
i get the sneaking feeling that i will be getting one of these for christmas (kindle prob) and i dont know how i feel about that yet really. i buy almost all my books (and i buy lots of them) used so idk if there will really be any cost saving aspect. i guess we’ll see.
The thing I love most about my Nook is that I can jump back and forth between reading on it and reading on the Nook application on my phone and the applications will sync to the last page I read if I am in a wi-fi location.
this is awesome
so which e-reader has the least ugly kerning
i don’t know that books are any more linked form-to-content as a uh fetish i guess than eg music to vinyl sleeves or film to reel/vhs case. Maybe a little more so, but not to the extent that books won’t nonetheless become a vintage statement accessory for future hipsters or w/e
they’re significantly more linked form-to-content than are music and films, which themselves are significantly more linked f-to-c than software, say
wait i sort of skipped over ‘as a fetish’ there, though i probably still agree with myself (i always do)
I dunno. Based on the fact that books-as-fetish-objects have been around for 575 years (and even before Gutenberg, as rarer things), they’re probably going to stick around in a way that cassettes/vinyl/film reels won’t. There have been lots of challenges to the physical form of the book before, schisms and failures, and I doubt that a new form of distribution is going to kill them b/c it is currently in nascent vogue.
People thought vinyl was dying in the 90’s, and it still hasn’t.
for some reason ereaders are like the one piece of new-ish technology that seems tailor made for old ppl, like they feel really stodgy and middleaged to me.
re: gutenberg
for some reason ereaders are like the one piece of new-ish technology that seems tailor made for old ppl, like they feel really stodgy and middleaged to me.
― ice cræmde (є(٥_ ٥)э), Wednesday, December 21, 2011 1:20 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Permalink
Because you can make the font bigger.
Automatic thread bump. This poll’s results are now in.
one my e-books I had on hold from the library is now available. i wonder how this will work....
it will only be a matter of time before the number of e-copies of titles will go from finite to infinity
After which, it will go to infinity plus one, then plus two...
interesting thoughts here on how primitive and perhaps wrong-headed the epub format is, don’t necessarily agree with his conclusions but errrrrrr makes you think...
http://crookedtimber.org/2011/12/21/e-books-and-ipads-and-pdfs-some-thoughts/
I pretty much completely disagree with that article
ebooks becoming more like pdfs would be terrible
ha yeah that guy doesnt really get technology
“b b but why would you want to do it any other way?” = apple user.
I don’t get the problems he’s talking about. Websites might show up with problems on certain devices, but ebooks are usu just text, right? And it’s pretty readable? Idgi. What is he getting at?
lol its funny he has a whole long update clearly inspired by people telling him hes an idiot where hes all yeah i know ebooks need to be readable on lots of different devices but what this blog post presupposes is what if they dont
Aye you’re right, there’s nothing wrong with text that flows to fit whatever device it’s on. “Layout” beyond chapters and paragraphs just isn’t an issue for 99% of books.
hes right that ebooks tend to lack the polish of printed matter, but his solution is just silly, and he doesnt even particularly identify the specific qualities of the problem, like there are a lot of people working really hard on this doggie, lol pdf
Well I don’t know that things are that easy. I think there is a place for both a variable, scaleable, context-/device-dependent format and a locked-down, .pdfish model. (Although something a little more sturdy and robust than .pdf would be nice...). In other words, I can see, say, comic book geeks really liking to read things w/ certain well-defined dimensions and presentation standards, while most books/articles will be seved equally well by being read as 160 words on a b&w iphone screen as enlarged on a 27“ monitor.
yeah obvs ‘books’ thatre primarily images have a whole nother set of demands
This issue is v. prominent in adaptive/assistive/instructional info techology, where the divide b/w ‘image’ and ‘text’ is pretty fuzzy.... somebody’s gotta come up with something better than a .pdf to allow input and the preservation of precise, functional formatting that is somehow useable on more than one type of device. HTML5 isn’t a bad option, frankly, but it’ll need wider acceptance/support.
was just thinking abt ui design in adaptive/assistive technologies, not really something i know anything abt, but it seems p interesting
OK, so I guess I was understanding him to the extent that he was making sense.
But is flowing text “plug ugly”? It doesn’t seem that way to me, a non-techy consumer.
its just ‘people talkin abt fonts for no good reason’ m/l
But is flowing text “plug ugly”? It doesn’t seem that way to me, a non-techy consumer.
c/f images upthread
I meant, does it seem “plug ugly” to you, dear reader.
the problem with the crooked timber thing is that ‘just use pdf!’ is a ridiculously awful solution to the problem. but it’s still a solution which would produce better looking results than the current paradigm
here’s some text on the nook:
that’s from an article which has the even better thesis at least if you have a nook you can dump your epubs into pdfs and redo the typesetting yourself and read that which i am guessing probably even more of a non-starter for most people
however i feel like this is right:
“My only real gripe is that, like almost every other e-reader out there, it has such poor typesetting that you have to wonder if it was designed by software engineers who aren’t big readers”
which, you know, ding ding ding
xpost: yes.
I tried for like 5 minutes to be a typeface snob, but I realized that I don’t detect any difference in value between similar typefaces. “Readability” is not an issue for me beyond actual illegibility.
Concur
it’s not the typefaces so much as the spacing
lookit the paragraph starting “‘Fangtasia,’ Pam said” — there’s places where the gaps between words are larger than the words themselves — now admittedly i. a small subset of people will care and ii. this appears to be from one of those true blood novels so w/e
i don’t know, i assume the normal response is “why in the hell would that bother you” and then i say “you don’t know it but it’s crippling your reading experience” and then i turn into that guy who starts the dynamic range compression threads and refuse to go outside because i might hear some music that’s not on my perfectly magnetically balanced insulated and feng shui-ed hi fi system
I honestly don’t notice stuff like that, and I read a lot. That paragraph looks fine to me.
xxxp
I get distracted by weird spacing. I can push through it, but it will take me out of the reading headspace, if that makes any sense. Like, it will remind me that I’m reading, and it takes a minute to get back to where I am no longer aware of the process of translating words into brain images.
the main offense of that formatting is the that text is justified rather than aligned, aka itd be more readable were it jagged along the right margin
its p unconscionable tbqh, is there a setting for that or something
i mean its like a super easy fix
I don’t know why all these things use whatever random just-above-MS-Word-quality line-breaking algorithms when they could be using something closer to the TeX line-breaking algorithms, which are pretty much the gold standard of doing this sort of thing automatically.
xps the Sookie Stackhouse novels are in first person? ick
having just said that, though, reading it in my head, that “‘Fangtasia,’ Pam said” did come out slower than it should have. So maybe I guess I do notice this stuff.
xp to myself
I like the ability to change the font for each book I read. The more “formal” the book, the more likely I am to want a serif font, for some reason.
Kids book = sans serif
Classic lit = serif
Pop science/history = sans serif
I appreciate a typesetter advising me with which font to use*, but now the tech exists to change it, I would be mighty annoyed if it was taken away.
And justifying the paragraph so it fills up the entire line is some bullshit, dnw. I’m one of those who notice this and would really prefer it didn’t happen.
*that first sentence’s grammar got me confused, so apologies for the clumsiness.
years and years and years of publishing precedent argue against left justification, is the problem
I totally get why that spacing issue would bother some people, and sometimes when it’s very obvious, it bothers me too. What did bother me about that text was that it was fully justified (which accounts for the spacing problem). I like ragged right edge.
I’m the same with audiophilia—I am usually OK with getting the “gist” of the music I’m hearing. Though I appreciate why it would be different for other people.
You know what irks me though? Is the way some “audiophiles” and “font snobs” seem to care about those things (and care very vocally) b/c it makes them seem refined and sensitive. Again, SOME of them.
many xps
years and years and years of publishing precedent argue against left justification, is the problem
― OH NOES, Thursday, December 22, 2011 1:23 PM (17 seconds ago) Bookmark Permalink
yeah idgi is that really the default setting on the nook
I mean justified text blocks pretty much empirically look better and read better when they are carefully tweaked by hand and hyphenated and whatnot. One of the big reasons that a lot of these justified blocks look bad is that they are averse to automatic hyphenation of words, whereas TeX is all about automatic hyphenation. You can’t fill up lines in a pleasing fashion without being able to auto-hyphenate, since really all you’re doing in that case is taking the ragged-right paragraph layout and stretching all the interword spaces until each line is justified.
as an example, in the Fangtasia excerpt, this paragraph:
“Fangtasia,” Pam said, as if she were bored more
completely than anyone had ever been bored.
would look better if it were set like this:
“Fangtasia,” Pam said, as if she were bored more complete-
ly than anyone had ever been bored.
because a lot of that extra interword space in the first line would go away.
yeah but then you have the hypen
yes but that’s why hyphens were invented, so justified text blocks could have aesthetically pleasing amounts of interword space!
I find hyphens dis
-tracting
maybe because you are using them incorrectly?
fine
I find hyphens dis-
tracting
I find hyphenating less
annoying then
badly justified text.