Hacker News Reader

Comment by frossie | Hacker News Reader

The people I know who are aware of e-readers and have not adopted them are holding off not because of presentation issues, but because of DRM concerns ("Once I buy this e-book, will I have the same freedom that I had with the dead tree book?").

It may be that content presentation issues are holding off more publishers from joining the fray, but the main beneficiaries of that would be textbook publishers, and right now many of them don't seem to be very enthusiastic about the e-book market at all.

Still, it will be interesting to see what happens.

[Edit in light of responses: I am not suggesting that people I know constitute a representative sample; but I haven't seen much real data either - I would be interested to know what the real issues are in the wider population]

View on HN

I'm holding off because it's just not the same thing. I read a few fiction books a month, I enjoy going to a bookstore, picking out books, carrying them home, reading them, and putting them on a shelf. I enjoy having friends over, and discussing books while standing in front of the shelves. I can lend out my books or give them away. Good books get worn and loved and scratched and used and thumbed. I can place good books in better spots than bad books. And they're all gonna last a lot longer than any electronic books and always be accessible. A book has no bootup-time, no interface, no buttons, no electricity, no charger, no bit-rot, no broken files, no virtual cloud-based shelves tied to an arbitrary account, no uptime, no downtime, no batteries, no keyboards, no nothing.

For fiction, having my entire library with me all the time is useless, because that's just not how I read. I travel a lot, but only carry one or two books with me. That's enough.

It's been a long while since I was in school or university and read textbooks, but the value of having actual paper books that you can write your own notes and drawings in is very high.

For reference books, when I need them, I'm usually at a computer anyway, and why look in a single reference book when I can use the entire internet instead?

DRM? That's at the bottom of the list of drawbacks with e-books for me.

And they're all gonna last a lot longer than any electronic books and always be accessible. [...] DRM? That's at the bottom of the list of drawbacks with e-books for me.

"Always be accessible" is part of the umbrella of DRM-related concerns. This is exactly what I mean - people have adoption concerns related to issues fundamental to e-books (at least right now), rather than their formatting.

This is the issue for most people I know as well. Everyone I know who reads a lot also enjoys the experience around reading, from browsing bookstores to the care and feeding of a good bookshelf.

When it comes to DRM, I don't think it's a big issue, because,

- Non-tech people don't care about it.

- Tech people care deeply about it, but know how to get a pirated copy in case the DRM crashes on them.

I have a Kindle, and while I think it's a great device and that E-ink is a big win over back-lit monitors for prolonged reading, I use it a minuscule amount compared with dead-tree reading. It just doesn't feel right, especially for fiction. I would note that you can make notes and copying quotes is actually practical (although an argument can be made for hand-copying sections that you really want to sink in). All in all I think it will be awhile before I trade in the bookshelves.

Actually, as an owner of a Kindle I find presentation issues to be a big deal. I generally only buy simple books for pleasure reading on the Kindle, and so don't really care about DRM (I probably wouldn't bother reselling the paper book, and I don't care if I can't read it again in 5 years).

Approximately 1 in 4-5 Kindle books I consider buying I don't because of reviews that say something is seriously messed up with the presentation (pictures missing or improperly placed, chapter divisions completely gone, tables with data messed up or missing, etc.). If I have these problems with simple fiction and non-fiction, I imagine the problem is even worse for the examples he cites such as cookbooks, schoolbooks, travel guides, etc.

But thats it - you already own one. His point refers to: "[people] are aware of e-readers and have not adopted them are holding off".

Once you get past the DRM issues, though, presentation issues are a big hurdle, particularly on the desktop. I still haven't found an ePub reader for Windows that renders text attractively, and I have an ongoing beef with how most PDF viewers render pages of scanned text (it's basically impossible to display embedded images with a sensible scanned pixel::screen pixel ratio and resampled text scans just look like hell). If Bilo addresses either of these, I'm interested.

Right, I have that same ongoing beef (embedding images is another area where PDFs are completely brain-dead) but if you're scanning pages direct to PDF to produce a professional e-book, you're fighting an uphill battle anyway. On the other hand, scan the material into inDesign, clean it up, typeset it appropriately, and then export that to PDF. This is the way to beautiful PDF typography and it's an area where the PDF format really shines. (And this is coming from a guy who hates PDFs as a rule.)

My concern with an e-reader is in the quality of the reading experience first, DRM or transferability second.

I didn't buy a kindle specifically because I didn't like the e-ink experience.

I will likely buy a tablet (undecided what OS as yet) for reading, and seeing as from a screen technology standpoint, the experience would is improved over e-ink, drm/format becomes an issue. But as long as the format is readable on multiple devices, I doubt I'd be too concerned.

Interesting, I see this completely opposite from you. I spend all day looking at a lit screen and can hardly stand the idea of settling down to read a book on way in my leisure time. E-ink isn't as good as real paper, but it is far better than a computer screen in my opinion. I wish I knew someone who reads a similar amount as I do and touts the pleasures of iPad reading, so that we could discuss it, but I don't know any such person.

I don't know how much you read, but I read a lot and I have no problem whatsoever with leisure reading from a "lit screen". I've been doing it since the Palm IIIc. The lack of legitimately-available content -- and its price when it IS legitimately available -- is the real obstacle to my reading more books in electronic form.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com