We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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No interest Kindled in digital book readers for me Much has been written about Kindle in the last few days, but I for one am in no hurry to rush out and buy one.
I do like the idea of a searchable digital book reader, but being locked into a proprietary format, not to mention paying a 40% premium for content for not being in the USA, means I am not even considering this product.
If someone comes up with a well designed open-standards digital reader which does not force me to buy from Amazon, that will get me to look again, but until that happens…
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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The Kindle will happily display plain text files and mobipocket files, both of which you can easily create yourself and stick on the device over a USB cable. There’s no standard more open than plain text.
You’re not ‘locked in’, or ‘forced’ to do anything. The number of reviews that get this wrong is shocking. Most of the content on my Kindle consists of free files from Project Gutenberg and other sources of e-books.
The official Kindle shopping experience is pretty gratifying, though, in some ways more so even than shopping in a regular bookstore. And the position-syncing between the Kindle and my phone makes up for (some of) the sting of paying very nearly the same price (and in some cases more) for a DRM’d e-book as for the physical, lendable, resellable version. And in practice the DRM is fairly simple to remove if I have some need of doing that.
“Amazon agreed to pay 150,000 dollars to lawyers representing a US high school student whose copy of Orwell’s “1984” was zapped from his Kindle and promised not to unilaterally yank ebooks from Kindles in the future.”
But there’s no libertarian problem with this. It’s in the licence agreement. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.
I’m considering buying a Sony Reader, which you can get new on eBay for less than £150. It reads several formats.
There are so many brilliant old books available for free, it’s hardly a problem if paid-for books come with DRM.
All above is true, and if you have an iPod Touch or IPhone, the Kindle app is gratis. I am reading Hayek on my IPod these days, in fact. Love it.
I understand your concerns, especially being forced to pay a non-US premium (which doesn’t affect me). Still, I have owned a Kindle DX (the large-format version) since the summer, and really like it. While I do buy some books and other content from Amazon, you should be aware that there is a huge amount of free content available in Kindle format (things that are in the public domain, which the Gutenberg Project has been transcribing into electronic form for several years now). On it I’ve read Ivanhoe, Utopia, Robinson Crusoe, No Treason (Lysander Spooner), even some HP Lovecraft, all free. I have also downloaded (but not yet read) works by Nietzsche, Voltaire, Wilde, Paine, Joyce, Marx, Plutarch, even Wodehouse. You want the complete works of Shakespeare? It’s there. Or some Schopenhauer (in German), Twain, Austen, Verne, Dostoyevsky? All that and lots more, all free. I also like the built-in dictionary (I used that a lot when reading Ivanhoe, and a surprising number of archaic words were in it), and even the voice synthesizer (although it’s far from perfect). And of course it’s all with you in once nice, compact package, so if you’re like me and have several books going at once it’s easy to switch between them.
Like you, I hope that someday there will be a universal, open format for all e-books. Until then, I do like my Kindle.
I’m not sure what your non-US premium is, but I know that when I got my Kindle there were 180,000 titles available and now there are over 300k. Best sellers that would cost me $25-30 at the store are generally $10 and on my Kindle in less than two minutes. I’ve read classics and out-of-copyright stuff such as the complete works of Dickens or Kipling for 99 cents. A new release due out in about ten days offers international coverage in more than 100 countries, so maybe your issue will go away. With a Kindle I read more for a lot less money and with much greater convenience.
Very interesting, because the reviews I have seen do indeed imply that.
Does it read .PDF and .Chm?
“Like you, I hope that someday there will be a universal, open format for all e-books.”
HTML?
Or a new XML standard? What extra features would you like?
“Does it read .PDF and .Chm?”
http://packratstudios.com/index.php/2008/05/04/how-to-hack-your-amazon-kindle-to-read-all-your-ebooks-and-documents-including-pdf-doc-xls-chm-lit-etc/
http://download.cnet.com/Auto-Kindle-Converter/3000-10743_4-11009637.html
Can it display non-Latin scripts?
The DX does read .pdf files. The earlier versions don’t read them directly, although I understand that there is some sort of conversion utility which does permit reading them, but the formatting is lost. That’s one of the reasons I decided to go with the DX (the size of the display being another), despite the higher cost.
Incidentally, not previously mentioned is the ability to change the font size. That’s a nice feature for my aging eyes.
Can it display non-Latin scripts?
Show off.
Cats, are you feeling well? You look greenish…:-P
Thanks Hugo but that is a no go and neither converting files is an hack.
Incidentally, not previously mentioned is the ability to change the font size. That’s a nice feature for my aging eyes.
If I had a nickel for every time I heard (or read) that I could buy a Dx and have money left over for the complete works of Isaac Asimov. I’m curious about the age distribution of Kindle buyers.
Not sure of your point, Eric. You’ve heard it many times because it’s true. There are 5 font sizes to choose from.
His point seems to be that Kindle buyers tend to be people who have parted from their diapers for longer than a few months. Of course, some of them may also be people who soon will have to be reacquainted with said diapers:-)
Kindle app for iPhone (etc) is not available in the UK.
I just tried.
Interesting the Barnes&Noble reader *is* available, but as a commenter on that app says:
> You can’t buy ebooks from the UK
…it sounds crippled.
I have taken to using “Stanza” on the ITouch, which at least gives you *a* free reader and a pretty good selection of content…
So, let me get this straight.
Instead of a book, which is more or less indestructible, lasts for ever, needs no power supply ever, can be handed to friends, lent to relatives, bought and sold, used anywhere in the world, dropped down the back of the sofa, etc etc, well you get the idea.
Instead of that, we’re going to use an expensive, delicate, heavy piece of technology, which needs batteries, breaks if dropped, is ruined if wet, costs a fortune (relative to a book), is hedged about with Digital Rights Management crap, and will certainly be obsolete and require replacement within a very few years, even supposing it lasts that long.
Can someone remind me again of the advantages?
‘more or less indestructible’? Most of mine are falling apart. And they do get ruined if they get wet.
“Instead of that, we’re going to use an expensive, delicate, heavy piece of technology, which needs batteries, breaks if dropped, is ruined if wet, costs a fortune (relative to a book), is hedged about with Digital Rights Management crap, and will certainly be obsolete and require replacement within a very few years, even supposing it lasts that long.
Can someone remind me again of the advantages?”
It’s lighter than a book. If you put 10 books on it to take on holiday, it’s much lighter than 10 books and takes up much less space.
The device costs a bit but the books are cheaper, and indeed classics (gutenberg.org for fiction, mises.org for fact) are free. You can save a huge amount of money overall.
I currently use a tablet laptop instead of sheet music and have played many tens of pieces which would cost me a fortune from a music shop. (I don’t say “I have saved a fortune” because I simply wouldn’t have bought/played them otherwise.) I would love to use a large-format e-ink machine instead – lighter, more portable because of the much (much) better battery life (hours and hours away from a plug socket), and most importantly, the screen looks like paper but has a better resolution than paper.
It does use batteries, but only e-ink only uses power when updating the screen (i.e. turning the page). Apparently you get about 10,000 updates each battery charge, but I don’t know what it’s like in practice.
Books are obviously much more robust, but there’s no reason why your ebook reader shouldn’t last as long as your laptop, provided you don’t drop it in the bath. I admit not being able to read in the bath is a disadvantage. I’d be happy taking one to the beach, though.
The current ones display PDFs and plaintext so will be useful for quite some time. You might want to upgrade in a few years if a decent open ebook format becomes a standard. But current ones can have their firmware upgraded. More important than an open format for ebooks is an open ebook reader, that anyone can write firmware etc for.
The main attraction is that they save you a lot of money. When the book piracy scene gets going to the same extent as the music and film piracy scene, and virtually any still-in-copyright book is available in an open format, then they’ll save you a huge amount of money.
Mr. Duffin:
“Can someone remind me again of the advantages?”
I’m in Iraq. I live in a rather luxurious (for where I am and what I’m doing) 6×10 foot space (My half of a 12×10 room). I have a kindle that has over 60 titles on it, ranging from short stories to the complete work of Edmund Burke. At times I’ve had to jump on a helo with short notice and fly somewhere else for 4 days or a week. Since space is short, I can take MY ENTIRE COLLECTION with me.
Yeah, the Kindle is FAR from perfect, it would be nice if they used an open DRM free file format. It would be even better if Amazon would convert an ebook to *any* format.
But life is far from perfect, and for travelers, soldiers/contractors, and anyone short on space it’s a marvelous thing.
Oh, and books *are not* anywhere near indestructible, especially paperbacks. At least if your kindle gets broken you can de-register it with Amazon and get a new one with all your content re-down-loadable. Which you can’t do with a shelf full of waterlogged books when the apartement upstairs breaks a pipe.
It may just be me, but I also have a huge problem with paperbacks: they have the tendency to stay closed, and the reason most of mine are falling apart is my forcing them to stay open. Hardcovers are better in that regard, but are less suited for reading while lying in bed, not to mention are much more expensive.
Having had my Sony Reader for just over a year now, I can thoroughly recommend it: Loads of books from Waterstones, hundreds of web sites selling compatible books, many for next to nothing, it holds as many books as you’ll need in your life, comes preloaded with 100+ classics and will accept text, word & pdfs. It adds just 9 ounces to your holiday luggage allowance.
QED (IMHO)
Andrew, the Kindle is lightweight and NOT delicate. I have more than 150 titles on mine. About 20 of those are the “complete works” of classic authors: Shakespeare, Dumas, Twain, etc. One of those titles alone has more than 2,400 pages. I am essentially able to carry an entire library with me wherever I go.
Titles are not only much cheaper via Kindle than paper versions, but you can make notes, highlight text, change the font size, and use the audiobook function.
The Kindle is definitely one of those “Don’t knock it until you try it” things. Bear in mind that it is still fairly new technology. E-ink doesn’t lend itself to PDF well (scrolling is not good due to the slow update of e-paper currently available). E-books from Amazon are, unfortunately, restricted by DRM but since this is a publisher restriction, this (currently) increases the number of books available rather than restricts them (though hopefully publishers will come to their senses over time. Some, such as Baen already have [and yes, their books can be read on the Kindle])
What really sets the Kindle off though is the always-on, free internet. Not only does this make books very easily available, it’s great for occasional web-browsing and even Samizdata works with it.
Bottom line, my wife loves hers and it’s one of those immediate-rebuy items should something happen to it. At current prices, I’m tempted to get one myself
I’ll further add that singling out the Kindle because it supports DRM is a bit fallacious. So many devices support DRM that it’s a fools errand to try and avoid it. From DVD players that support the Macrovision flag to music players that handle WMA to popular operating systems, it’s all there. The best you can do is ensure your devices support open content.
After all, some smart person will always work out how to break encryption.
Not sure of your point, Eric. You’ve heard it many times because it’s true. There are 5 font sizes to choose from.
Oh, I wasn’t disagreeing with you. I didn’t intend to be snarky or sarcastic. The point was while the advertising is centered around the convenience of downloading and storing books what I always hear first from actual purchasers is “you can make the text bigger”.
Kindle is a lousy deal for publishers. Amazon will not publish your book unless you give them the electronic copyright in perpetuity. They then pay you a royalty on sales of around 15%, It’s a rotten deal from what is, in effect, a monopsony.
“monopsony” LOL
Authors have gotten rotten deals historically.
If they could only get Bill Clinton as an agent, like him,
they’d get paid millions before their books are published
Ripoff to the great; millions for drivel. (Ministry of Truth)
The nicest feature I find is that I can bu a book at any time without actually having to haul my meat carcass to a store. If I am ill I don’t have to beg my wife to go buy me a magazine or a book. I can do it myself… any time of day or night.
I load all of my content onto my computer just like I would back up anything else but it is comforting to know that if there is a fire I can download my entire collection all over again. That is not possible with a real book.
It doesn’t matter whether you get a Kindle or not but there are advantages to having an e-book reader.
Sure, I’d love to be able to just key word search a book for something, but I am inclined to wait for the grandchild of Kindle.
Actually, the Kindle DX is the grandchild of Kindle, as it’s the third generation product! 🙂
Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with not being an “early adopter” of a new technology (I’m not either, usually). Just be glad some of us are, so we can get the bugs worked out and the price down.
I am sure everyone here is awaiting the verdict, so here it is: Kindle doesn’t support non-Latin scripts, but there is a cyrillics hack available. So in case anyone was raking their brain what to get me for my birthday next summer (or for this year’s Hanuka), the mystery is now solved!
So, what, you want a cyrillics hack?
Laird dear, if you want to get me a gift that doesn’t cost money, you can write me a poem. Good news is that it can be written in Latin script (although not in Latin):-)
ePub seems to be becoming the universal “reflowable” ebook format.