Getting started with ebook readers
Posted: December 31st, 2009 | Author: tevk | Filed under: Hardware, Software | Comments Off on Getting started with ebook readersNow is a great time to get into ebooks, with tons of free content available, reasonably-priced commercial content, and good technology for comfortably reading without being stuck at a computer.
Readers
The market for ebook readers is heating up, with three major players now:Â Sony, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.
All three have readers with similar e-Ink technology, with similar-sized screens. e-Ink is crisp and easy to read, but does not have a built-in light, so you will have to read by lamplight or daylight, as you would a paper book. The screens are reflective, so occasionally you will find yourself tilting the reader to avoid glare. The page surface of e-Ink is a light gray rather than white, so not as high contrast as a paper book, but still easy to read.
All three are priced similarly, for a 6″ screen, the Sony PRS-600 is $300, the Amazon Kindle is $260, and the Barnes & Noble nook is $260.
They each have a distinct feature:Â the PRS-600 has a touch screen, the Kindle has a keyboard, and the nook has a second screen, a color LCD touchscreen.
Each device has its own ebook store, with similar pricing, and fairly similar selection, since if a publisher agrees to make an electronic version of a book, they also want to have the widest audience by being available in all three stores. There are probably some titles that are exclusive to one store or another, either at initial release or altogether, but most big titles are available in all three places.
Although Sony has been doing ebook readers the longest of the three, so far Amazon has the most polished experience when it comes to shopping for and purchasing ebooks.
Really, all three readers are pretty well put together, ultimately any of the three will provide a good reading experience. If you can, each one out before you buy – the Sony Reader and B&N nook have demo units in stores, for the Kindle you’ll have to ask around and see if any friends have one you can try.
Content
Ok, so you picked a reader. Now what? Well, you can use the provider’s store to buy bestsellers and such, but there are a few things you should know first.
The demon of DRM
DRM is the ugly part of current ebook readers. If you’re not familiar, DRM stands for “Digital Rights Management” – essentially a method for publishers to try to prevent piracy by severely limiting what you can do with content you buy from them.
From a practical standpoint, what that means is this: when you buy an ebook from B&N, Amazon, or Sony, you are purchasing a LICENSE to use the ebook in a limited way. Currently you cannot lend ebooks (you technically can on the B&N nook, but in such a limited way it doesn’t count), and cannot give them away or sell them when you are done with them. Usually the DRM is locked to the specific device you own, which could cause issues if the unit is lost or stolen. Also, returning, exchanging, or buying an ebook for someone else as a present may be difficult or impossible currently.
There’s not really any way to sugar-coat it, DRM sucks. Until publishers can find a better way to handle things, it’s going to be a very negative aspect to using ebooks. There is some hope, however. The music industry was heavy on DRM, but has recently realized that removing DRM from MP3s they sell has actually been good for them in the long run.
Free content
It’s not all bad news. While DRM is a downer, there is a big plus to ebooks that can balance the negative of DRM.  FREE! Yes, there is lots of free content available as ebooks. For starters, any book written before 1927 is in the public domain, which means it is no longer copyrighted and can be legally copied and distributed.
Project Gutenberg is a big effort to take public domain books, scan them in, convert those scans into text, correct any errors from that process, and even format them nicely for different readers. The Australian version of Project Gutenberg goes one step further, they also provide works with no clear owners, where the author is dead and the publisher has gone out of business, and no one has claimed the rights to the book. These are considered a gray area legally, since they are after 1927 and still technically covered by copyright, but there is no one left to actually claim copyright. Also, copyright laws may vary in other countries, so the cutoff might be later than 1927.
So that is a wealth of classics, available for free. Sony, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble all offer these classics in their stores, often for free or very low prices. But basically, you should never have to pay for any work created before 1927. Those are public domain and in a very real sense belong to everyone now.
What about more modern content? Well, one current practice is for an author to offer the first book in a series for free, or for a very low price, to lure readers in so if they like it they buy the other books in the series. Some authors offer their works for free when they are first released, to drive the book up the “sales” charts so it gains more visibility. It pays to frequently check the ebook stores for deals like these.
There are also free samples available for most commercial ebooks, so you can download the first couple chapters and see if you like the author before buying the whole book.
“Rolling your own” content
Another option is to “roll your own” content, that is, convert files into a format that your ebook reader can recognize. The Sony readers can recognize .txt and .rtf files, which are plain text formats that any word processor can output. For a fee, you can email files to Amazon which will be converted and sent wirelessly to your Kindle.
The best application I have found for converting all sorts of content to ebooks is called Calibre. It is free, runs on Windows, Mac, or Linux, and can convert just about any format into just about any other format. It does have a lot of options, which can be a little daunting at first, but once you get the hang of it it’s very easy to use. There are even content “recipes” which are scripts for getting content from popular websites such as the New York Times and formatting it for your reader. Calibre can even automatically sync new content to your reader, making it very easy to use. In a future article I will give an in-depth guide to using Calibre.
The fun of it
Don’t let yourself get too bogged down in the technology or overwhelmed with terminology. At the end of the day, it’s about the core experience: sitting down in a comfy chair and reading a good book. No matter what the means of getting the content, that’s what reading a book will always be about.
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