Fence-Sitting
Posted Mon Oct 20, 2008 in
Hardware
I’ve been waffling about e-readers for a couple of months now. I already wrote a bit about this here and here. Beyond those entries (and one is just a link), I have been thinking about this quite a lot. So, excuse me while I ruminate a bit here in this bit of web-space.
Rob Beschizza has a comparison of the Sony and Kindle. He had some of his initial facts wrong, but commenters fixed that problem for him.
There is a website of interest: www.mobileread.com/forums/. There’s a lot of interesting discussion there. I like the discussion of the textbook torrent that was recently shut down (here). It’s well worth the read because textbooks remain an issue and I’m concerned about intellectual property (having some of that material of my own).
The Sony eBook Store offers some insight into what is available for that device. I really think the Sony looks better. I handled a PRS-505 a few weeks ago and it was impressive. However, it doesn’t have the access to materials that the Kindle has through Amazon. That is the rub.
O’Reilly offers a lot of material in PDF form. However, their Safari service is not Kindle capable. Nonetheless, if you search through Tim O’Reilly’s articles for “Kindle” you find the device is on their radar screen. An e-reader for me must have access to O’Reilly books if it’s to be useful, because I want my O’Reilly library on the device.
I really, really want the ability to carry several books with me all the time. An e-reader is the way to do that (and save my back). However, like the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD warz, the e-reader warz do not seem to have straightened out. Maybe I need to be patient, but I don’t want to collect a lot of new paper books, unless I have a specific need for hard copy.
OK, more random walking. There is a comparison of second generation e-readers assembled by folks at MobileRead, here. There are more devices out there than I thought. I need to do more research.
We at O’Reilly have released about 3 dozen titles as Kindle Compatible Ebooks and expect to have most of our library available as DRM-free ebooks by early 2009. These bundles include PDF, EPUB (an open standard) and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket.
— Andrew Savikas 21 October 2008, 11:07 #That’s good news! Maybe I won’t be sitting on the fence so long if some of my necessary titles are on the Kindle.
I’m watching to see whether Amazon decides to update the device this fall. It’s a helluva time to invest the R&D necessary to develop and market a new device, but I suspect that, if one exists, it’s been in the pipeline for awhile now. So, I guess we’ll see.
— ruminator 26 October 2008, 07:12 #