What’s the Matter with Ebooks?

The size is also perfect for reading: your eye can focus on several entire lines simultaneously without any eye scan.

I have several nice e-readers, but I always read on my phone because the size is much more comfortable. That forces me to sit up so I can rest my arm in my lap.

In the dark an OLED screen will always be superior to e-paper due to the lack of a backlight.

Well-bound hardcovers are a bit of a harder call. But still, I'd contend a lot of people's "comfort" with such books is still just familiarity. Hardcovers can still poke you, when brand new can still be stiff and pages can tend to flip themselves back and are really fairly particular about how they are held... I mean, I don't want to make it sound like reading a book is some sort of physical ordeal, my point is merely that, well, both ebooks on easily-available hardware and real books are really quite trivial now and to the extent that there is a difference, it isn't much.

Why, the Kindle app even occasionally accurately captures the experience of dropping the book on the floor and losing your place when you accidentally pull up the bottom bar and then accidentally swipe 50% forward into the book! And it replicates the experience of finding your place again by finding where the pages start sticking together because they've never been opened (there's a little marker left in the book's scrollbar when you jump somewhere). Really the verisimilitude has gotten out of hand in ebook apps if you ask me.

I think there is a sharp divide that needs to be drawn. Biology textbooks require an entirely different kind of device than Harry Potter. Books already acknowledge this- the paper, size, ink, hell even the binding & covers are completely different.

I agree that the biology-textbook-format readers have a ways to go, although I think that's largely a question of demand. There is little market interest in a 14" 4x3 tablet (which is the digital equivalent to the 8.5x11 format). I'm bummed because I have a number of magazines and reference books I'd like to have on tap.

When it comes to textbooks or art books, yes. Monochrome is fine for novels.

The eInk Kindles have quite a long battery life, too.

I can understand your interest in larger screens such as the iPad Air 2, but there are so few book I even have access to (much less, use) that are that kind of format. The largest books I regularly use are O'Reilly publications.

My notes are usually taken in A5 spiralbound notebooks, or Field Guides pocket books. A4 is a gigantic format for me.

As for ownership of books, I buy DRM where possible, and strip the DRM from the books which aren't available any other way. So I have Michael C Feathers, "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" in my iBooks library even though it is exclusively a Kindle book. Yes, I had to taint my credit card with the stench of Amazon, but I won't let them take back something they have already sold me. Especially when the electronic version costs more than the paper one!

And already at that point I said it was better than carrying books around. I could read on the bus on the way to school, even with the backpack already full of stuff I needed to take. Now I buy .epub/.pdf versions without protection whenever possible, but also got a lot of google play books. Honestly, apart from one or two, I don't expect to re-read them later and if my google library disappears for some reason, I don't care. (which doesn't mean I don't say DRM/file-rental is bullshit and shouldn't exist anyway)

I haven't experienced the "particular app to find a particular book" issue in ~15 years. At the moment I have two apps - play books (store + epubs) and kindle (just one or two books not available on play). I rarely had more than one in the past.

Maybe my experience is different than yours - but just saying that we're doing way better than in the last decade. And for some of us the last decade was already enough to drop physical books whenever possible.

I have a Kindle Paperwhite and a Nexus 7, both are perfect for reading books; I don't find them bulky or non-ergonomic (except the zooming problem which I have on all multi-touch devices...I don't seem to have the motor control required to effectively use multi-touch screens). A friend had one of the 10" Kindles and I found it bulky and non-ergonomic. It was just too big. I can't even begin to imagine trying to curl up in bed with something the size of a mid-sized laptop screen!

Current tablets are already cheap, full-color, and have quite long battery life (though not as long as the original Kindles which had tremendous battery life, or the current gen Kindle e-ink models which last a week or so).

Your point 2 is valid, and I agree with it, but not enough to not buy ebooks. I have read more books in the past five years of having a Kindle than at any time except when I was in school and read to escape the tedium of my teacher's talking. And, your predicted deluge of ebook buying has begun, and there has not been a drop in sales, though some of the old publishers are feeling the pinch, thousands of independent authors have stepped in to fill the space.

This is easily remedied with about 30 minutes of googling and fiddling with the right software. Once you have the software installed, it is pretty easy to strip the DRM from all your ebooks. You will be able to keep them forever and pass them on to your grandkids.

> Fix these two problems and the eBook deluge will really begin.

If you want to fix #2, don't support those who publish e-books with DRM by buying them. I.e. vote with your wallet.

I like reading PDFs and ebooks of texts in a window while taking notes with emacs in Org mode. I structure my notes with the chapter-section-subsection-etc. structure of the text, and in this manner, I always have a good gauge of my understanding of the text, and am more confident with jumping around to the chapters that interest me more or are more relevant.

This has been so useful for me that I've started to refrain from reading long non-fiction texts that are not amenable to this structure, as I'm less likely to be able to recall and apply information learned that have not been hierarchically organized, given equal investment of time and focused effort.

It can be hard to find a pirate copy of a single book, but it's fairly easy to find a huge package of hundreds of fantasy or science fiction books.

I think there are some interesting opportunities for startups to explore new publishing models. I think authors should be looking at what is happening with free to play games or crowdsourcing.

It might be hard to convince investors there is serious money in fiction, but people like to be entertained and I think there are ways you can get people excited about, and spending money on, written stories.

Actually, if anybody wants to toss ideas around I'd love to chat some more.

But the project itself is really interesting. Definately bookmarked. Formatting on some Project Gutenberg books has indeed been awful.

If the price of an ebook is not going to go down with age, or popularity, and I can't resell it to make money, I'm not going to buy the,

I found odd that the author didn't mention piracy.

Exactly how ebook pricing relates to any form of sanity is something of another matter. IIRC Amazon, Apple, etc all take something like 30%+ of the sale price, and the retail book industry (after allowing for unsold returns and all the weird accounting jiggery-pokery) operates on quite thin margins.

[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...