Now, thanks to the generosity of the people in the Atomic Fez Executive Suite, you’ll find that trade paperbacks are as low as $15 / £8 and hardbacks are up to 25% off!

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE! Every title in the space-age Electronic Book format purchased directly from Atomic Fez^† is a full 50% off! That’s just $5 (roughly £3) for any title, and for that one price you get several formats in one handy *.ZIP file, and they’re all DRM-free!

REMEMBER: any order over $50 or £35 always qualifies for FREE SHIPPING! This is a perfect time to catch-up on those titles you keep meaning to experience, or to ensure your Christmas shopping is taken care of for those you know will cherish these well-written books.

All of the books’ product pages are live with their newly reduced prices clearly marked, and everyone can order books, anytime during the month of September, even if you can’t make it to the Atomic Fez table at either of those two events!

So it’s time to get crackin’ and click that “Book Catalogue” button on the site and join in on the Atomic Fez September Sale-A-Bration!

Books make part of a balanced diet!
Just ask Mother!

† PLEASE NOTE: this offer applies only to those copies of titles purchased directly from Atomic Fez, and does not apply to any external web-site such as KoboBooks.com, Amazon.com, or Amazon.co.uk. Please select the orange “E-BOOK” button on the product page. Thank you.

Not only will Mr. Martin be in the Dealers’ Room making the entire catalogue of Atomic Fez books available–including the brand-new title Ponthe Oldenguine, by Andrew Hook–he will also be appearing on a panel or two, details of which will be announced in the coming weeks.

Attend VCon and behold the Proprietor behind the mighty Atomic Fez Dealer’s Table of glory! Look to the image at left for an approximation of what this is like (with many thanks to Christopher Teague for supplying this extremely silly image).

VCON 35 — STEAMPUNK: FROM ALCHEMY TO ZEPPELINS

Tune up your gear and prepare to be amazed this fall, as the Lower Mainland’s annual
science-fiction and fantasy convention goes full steam into its 35th edition, October 1–3, 2010.

Vancouver’s Convention of Science Fiction and Fantasy (AKA “VCon”), organised by the West Coast Science Fiction Association, offers every science-fiction and fantasy fan something to satisfy the imagination. Even if vampires, dragons, Cylons, or Mr. Spock are not your cup of tea, you may find Steampunk refreshing. A popular sub-genre of speculative literature, Steampunk invokes England’s Victorian era as it might have been with the addition of technology and invention. Vast and incredible in its ability to borrow from history and create a new reality, it’s yours to discover through the words and works of the Guests of Honor and program participants.

VCON, a non-profit event run by and for fans, is Canada’s oldest science-fiction and fantasy convention, having been promoting Science Fiction and Fantasy in Canada and the Pacific Northwest since 1971. This year, the Guests of Honour are Cherie Priest, a Seattle-based author of seven novels, including the steampunk adventure Boneshaker (nominated for a Nebula award, winner of the PNBA award); Jim Beveridge, an Aurora award-winning artist with a left-handed aesthetic; and Canadian musician Heather Dale, who performs her own Celtic music for the 21st Century. They will be joined by a lineup of writers, artists, editors, scientists, musicians and other guests.

VCON welcomes all those interested in science-fiction and fantasy. The 2010 program includes a multi-author book launch, panel discussions, author readings, art show and auction, games room, KidCon, costume contest, filk music [no, that’s not a typo], dance, writing and art workshops, an artists’ alley and dealers’ room.

VCON 35 will be held at the Vancouver Airport Marriott Hotel (7571 Westminster Highway in Richmond), a five minute walk from the Richmond-Brighouse Skytrain Station on the “Canada Line”.

• Three-day memberships (before Sept.2): $50; at the door: $60.
• Discounts for students and children 12 & under.
• Children 6 and under free.
• Single-day memberships are available at the door.

Find more information and links on the website: www.vcon.ca.
Learn about VCON and related subjects via the Forums and Blogs.

WHOEVER YOU ARE, WHATEVER YOUR SCIENCE FICTION OR
FANTASY INTEREST, VCON HAS WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR!

Written with loving care and attention to details by noted British author Andriew Hœk from notes left on his doorstep one day by a mysterious and smelly individual (who shouted “PORCU–PIIIIINE” through the letter-box before running away giggling), Ponthe Oldenguine is the man you’ve been denied any information about. So secret was Mr. Oldenguine’s existence, you may not even be aware how badly you’ve wanted to know everything about him! But now, the story can be told and you can read it for yourself.

Here’s something about the book itself:

If you want a picture of the future, Trunka,
imagine a boot stamping on a cake . . . forever.
Imagine just how glorious that would be.

Ponthe Oldenguine is one part fictional biography of a former television impresario who claims he’s been hounded out of media history, and one part biography of the journalist commissioned to write his story. Where the tales merge, there is madness.

Trade Paperback copies of Ponthe Oldenguine are just $16.99 (Canada/USA) or £9.99 (UK/Others), with pre-orders being taken now. The electronic book (just $9.99 Canadian) will made available on the title’s Official Publishing Date of October 8th 2010.

To pre-order your printed copy, CLICK HERE.

EDITED AUGUST 23rd TO INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING UP-DATE:
The proofs for the North American run of the books have arrived!

Just before we get into the new Amazon Kindle, the Kobo eReader is available for only $128 this week-end, which is only £77.98 for those of you in the UK. Clearly, they’re battling the new price range of the Kindle models at $189 or $139 (depending on how important 3G is instead of only WI-FI).

Do you live in the United Kingdom, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, or Jersey? Are you interested in purchasing the brand-new 3G Kindle that’s only £149? Perhaps the new WI-FI Kindle for just £109? Or perhaps you don’t want to buy a Kindle at all, and are happy to read Kindle books on your existing Smartphone, or computer; in which case, there’s an app for that. No matter where, you can now get Atomic Fez titles directly from your very own Kindle Store in good old Sterling!

Purchasing Electronic Books via Amazon's UK site or the UK Kindle Store for only £4⁹⁹

If you use the Amazon UK Kindle retail site, the links on the covers below can be considered extraneous as you can purchase books directly through the UK Kindle Store on your Kindle device. If, however, you want to make a note of the ASIN or exact title of the book in order to do a quick search on your device, then click the cover of the book you want in the table below, and you’ll be taken right to the page on the Amazon.co.uk site.

The Terror and the Tortoiseshell by John Travis	The Beautiful Red by James Cooper	Twisthorn Bellow by Rhys Hughes	Wicked Delights by John Llewellyn Probert

The New Kindle Unit

The announcement that Amazon had released a new unit wasn’t too much of a surprise to me, but the price point of nearly 50% lower than anything they’d done before certainly was. Of any of the manufacturers of eReading devices, they were the last ones I expected to jump into the price war for the devices. No matter where you live, here’s what the new unit looks like (and the three images below will enlarge when you click them):

New Kindle 3G or WI-FI  model (both colours)	New Kindle 3G or WI-FI  model (side view)	New Kindle 3G or WI-FI  model (for scale)

The rough size and shape are slimmer than the previous Kindle models–mostly due to a reduction in wasted area around the screen itself–and results in an outline nearly the same as the Kobo eReader (which is still lighter), except the new Kindle unit has a “QWERTY” keyboard, one-month battery life, you can e-mail files to your unit for free now (previously it was a charge of 50¢/file), plus the Kindle’s screen boasts a larger number of “grey levels”, meaning the image rendition is closer to the original versions. Additionally, the new Kindle has a higher contrast than any of the other eReader models using E Ink displays, so this model is even closer in its display to paper than we’ve seen yet.

The screen on the new model is the same as the newly improved screen on the Kindle DX Graphite. According to Amazon, this results in a non-glare screen with 50% higher contrast than any other unit in the world. How do they calculate that figure? Your guess is as good as mine, really. However, thanks to this article at PC World Magazine, you can have a look at the difference in the image below [click to enlarge]; look especially closely at the density of the word “amazon” on the two screens. Even discounting the change in the colour of the plastic around the screen, you can see the blacks are specially better in the new screen on the right. I still maintain the experience is identical to reading a newspaper; the new screen means it’s equal to a better printed newspaper, is all.

Understandably, we’re dealing with very subtle differences here–very, very dark grey v black–but the more things get improved, the fewer complaints anyone can justifiably make about the realities of the units’ acceptability.

Onwards we go… let’s all try to ‘keep up’, shall we?

Is there any distinct advantage to digital books instead of what we have now? Is there anything wrong with printed books; something that doesn’t work?

Yes, frankly. The fact of the matter is that the printed book is incredibly destructive, filthy, wasteful, and generally ecologically offensive. The pages of a novel carry disease like no one can imagine, they are vastly over-priced, they take up far more space than they ought, and they add incredible amounts of dust and detritus to our already filth-filled homes.

This is obviously taking the matter to the extreme, but hear me out. There many things we have come to accept about books, when we wouldn’t do so about any other object or part of our day-to-day routines. I’m not arguing the worth of the printed book per se; far from it! But to say that the format is perfect ignores a few aspects of the matter.

Placing tongue firmly in cheek, let’s go through those ‘evils of printed book ownership’, shall we?

¶¶¶¶¶¶

The pages of a novel carry disease like no one can imagine…

Anyone who has either read the book The Name of the Rose, or seen the film which was adapted from it, is already aware of the pestilential potential of the pocket paperback (or any binding, I just used the soft-cover option for its alliterative appeal). Not only can a page be specifically treated for the murderous provision of poison, occasionally books are soaked in opium for the purposes of smuggling the material in a seemingly undetectable form. If a drug-sniffing dog were to begin ‘signalling’ when pointing at a book, who would consider it anything but a ‘false positive’ caused by the romantic smell of paper and paste?

To return to the germs, however: when you walk into a storage room in the basement of a library, “that old book smell” is you sucking mould into your nasal membranes. That’s right: bacterial growth, left to create who knows what sort of form of multicellular filaments–or hyphæ–that prompt you to say “ahhhh… the smell of old books…” and may also be responsible for you contracting a debilitating lung disease such as pneumonia that is still a leading cause of death among the young, the old, and the chronically ill.

So, if you hear that someone’s ageing mother has just returned to her home after having surgery, you might want to re-think giving her that first edition copy of Bleak House.

¶¶¶¶¶¶

They are vastly over-priced…

Actually, they probably ought to be far more expensive than they are. The Recommended Retail Prices (RRP) are kept artificially low through production costs based on discounts being applied for larger volumes of initial print runs. Sometimes, it’s actually cheaper to run twice as many books as you need; not just on a per-unit cost basis, but over-all cost of the entire print run.

Thus, most books, especially MMP editions, are produced in quantities that permit low RRPs to be achieved, yet it is pre-planned  that a goodly portion of the now considerable production run will be literally thrown away. It would cost too much to store them, yet their being made lowers the cost due to the volume of the numbers of copies.

Now that we have the books made, they then have to be shipped all over the world in ships and vehicles (some of them possibly using Wankel Rotary Engines… see yesterday’s post for more on that), which cause air pollution; they’re re-packaged by the publisher into their own boxes, after first throwing away the original ones; then they’re either mailed to you or to a store via more vehicles and creating more exhaust; you then drive to that store, creating more even exhaust; the store’s employees had to get to the shop somehow, and may have added their own exhaust to the atmosphere; then the copies of the book that the shop didn’t sell are shipped back to the wholesaler (more exhaust); and then they’re pulped, being the second lot of pulped copies of that title, as anywhere from 10%-35% of the original run was budgeted to be chucked from the word ‘go’.

Essentially, all of those wasteful practices, which are so much an anathema to how we urge corporation and citizen alike to proceed into the future with their behaviour patterns, are subsidizing the price you’re paying at the cash register. Yes, the extra copies being made mean that some poor sod in India, South-East Asia, or China have more work, but what is the real cost of that book you’re only willing to buy if it’s less than ten dollars? We’re willing to pay more for the ethically fair-traded, organic coffee, are we not?

Returning to the ecological concern, consider the newspaper and the ink which gets on our hands that we all love to complain about. You can have your newspaper delivered to your Kindle each day–advertising free, by the way–meaning that you can stay just as up-to-date as always without involving the needless destruction of trees, individual door-to-door delivery, etc. The first “R” is “Reduce”, don’t forget, not “Recycle”.

Kobo has announced they’re doing the same sort of thing later this summer, and this could very well be the only thing that will save the modern newspaper from extinction. Having my news shoved at me every morning in a convenient package on the doorstep is the only thing that keeps me from digging through web-sites for news coverage (although I do that as well sometimes). The contrast of an E Ink screen’s very light grey background and the black lettering is a perfect match to the black ink and very light grey newsprint of the daily paper, so there’s no change of experience there.

Magazines are the same thing, really: yes, instead of having my monthly issue of PC World mailed to me I could dig through their web-site for the latest reviews or tips on how to do things on and with my computer, but if the same content could be plonked onto my Kobo eReader where I can browse through it at my convenience, then that’s far better. That’s why magazines were invented, after all!

The principle advantage to this electronic delivery method–instead of printed paper being monthly mailed or delivered each morning–is the sheer reduction of production waste, paper, and hopefully a better profit line thereby keeping more writers, editors, photographers, and so on, employed and creating more things for people to read. Cynics can form a line on the right at this point, but if a news organization has a choice of shutting down altogether or finding a new way to do things and keep going, I can’t see anyone being laid off in the same amounts they have been in the past three years in the news and magazine industries.

¶¶¶¶¶¶

They take up far more space than they ought…

I’m not alone when I say “I need more bookshelves”, am I? At some point I may have to increase our wall space, as there’s little room to put any more up as it is!

One doesn’t want to have a copy of every single book one reads constantly around, some books are disposable. [INSERT YOUR OWN DAN BROWN / BARBARA CARTLAND / GLENN BECK JOKE HERE] Certainly, there are books that you want to have around permanently and refer to time-and-time again, yes; we all have many books like that which are valued beyond their cost for their possession. However, what if you just want to read something for idle curiosity’s sake? I’d wager that makes-up at least 33% of all recreational reading, if not more. You could certainly go to the Public Library and borrow a copy of whichever dead Swedish author is hot at the moment, but what if all the copies are out? Additionally, you have to get there somehow, which might mean causing more air pollution again, then you have to go back there to return the book, plus there’s the borrowing time limit that might be in conflict with something you’ve just had take place in your life.

Let’s face it: sometimes you just want to read some ‘mildly entertaining crap’, or you’re only vaguely interested in what book everyone’s chirping away about this week, and if you can get it as an electronic book for less money than buying the paperback–even ignoring the above wasteful production methods–and it’ll take up no more room in your home… well what’s wrong with that?

I read the entire “His Dark Materials” trilogy by Philip Pullman on my Kobo eReader, had no difficulty doing so at all, enjoyed it, it cost me less than the printed books would have, and now have no need to return to the books themselves. If I wish to, they’re still there in the reader’s memory as well as duplicate files on my hard-drive, but other than file space, they require no room to be assigned in my home. I’m not suggesting that this is in any way superior to owning the printed versions, I’m merely pointing out that it worked fine and my needs for the books’ enjoyment were met fully: provide me with words, tell me a story, entertain and enlighten me. All is contentment.

The fact that “you haven’t got anything to hold in your hand after plonking down your money” is precisely why spending anything over $15 for an e-book is ridiculous. Yes, formatting for e-books is specific to that format, and I spend a goodly amount to get it done for each of the Atomic Fez titles so that it’s done correctly, but once that’s done my production costs are complete; no matter the number of copies that are sold. People are far more prone to help you spread your costs out if the books are $5 each than if they’re $50 a pop.

An advantage of not having a printed book to hold in your hand is not having to work-out a way of disposing of a copy of The Undead Kama Sutra by Mario Acevedo that involves running through the middle of the night to leave the book on the steps outside of the local charity shop. Think about that the next time you shove your way through a stack of paperbacks you keep meaning to give away to someone.

¶¶¶¶¶¶

The one re-curring question about e-readers is “but I hate reading from a computer screen!”, or the other one I wholeheartedly agree with: “you can’t drag your PC into the tub!” Both of these things are reasons to use an e-reader like the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony, or any of the others. They are all self-contained, dedicated, hand-held reading units about the same size and weight as a paperback, utilizing low-energy E Ink screens that are identical to the same visual demand on the eye that paper requires.

If you’re considering getting into e-reading for the first time, and are considering various options, let me encourage you to avoid the iPad at once. Apple’s iPad, shiny though it may be, is the worst way to introduce e-reading to someone who is concerned about eye-strain.

There’s a fairly simple reason for this, and it’s the same reason that staring at a computer monitor of any variety, iPod Touch, or smartphone screen is similarly bad for these people: you’re staring at a big, bright, light emitting surfacfe. No matter what their feelings are on the use of computer monitors, anyone staring into a direct light has their eyes blink at a slower rate, which makes them dry out, which then causes the pain and fatigue typically called “eye strain”. While the new-fangled Thin Film Transistor Liquid Crystal Display (TFT-LCD) monitors–those are the bright, flat-screen ones–are a vast improvement on the Cathode Ray Tubes (CRT) of a few years ago–those are the big, heavy ones–the effect of a ‘reduced blink rate’ is the same. I heartily agree with Mr. Jobs about the incredible potential of the iPad’s use as a video device, as well as the wonderful possibilities of other visual media. The fact of the matter is, however, when one is reading text for an extended period of time, the most comfortable way to read is with the use of reflected light; just like paper or the E Ink screens of the Kobo eReader, Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, and so on. Sure, colour is exciting and spiffy, and the ability with the iPad to read graphic novels in their full tones as the artists originally intended you to is far superior to the varying number of grey tones of any E Ink display, but with that ‘advantage’ of colour comes a ‘disadvantage’ of eye strain, so we’re in a net position of ‘nil’ with the expensive iPad… plus you need to set-up a wireless coverage plan for the thing, so perhaps we ought to consider it a solid ‘loss’ when viewing it as an e-reader.

Yes, the people at Kobo have created an application for their books to be used on the iPad [HEAD HERE TO GET THAT], and there’s some pretty cool ways to use the iPad with any of the various applications designed for the unit. However, the only way you can possibly do anything about the ‘my eyes are burning’ effect is as follows: lots of bright light shining at you [left], or small amount of bright light shining at you [right]. Another way to describe it would be “bad” and “less bad”. Not really a choice wherein you actually like any option, is it?

Kobo’s iPad Application, showing ‘normal’ reading screen	Kobo’s iPad Application, showing ‘night time’ reading screen

Don’t get me wrong: this is not meant as a comment on the lack of ability by the people who developed the Kobo application, or any other of the iPad applications out there. This is the best that can be done, given the variety of screen the iPad uses: one that employs direct light. As is often the case, when a piece of equipment is used for a number of vastly different things, everything gets accomplished to a quality of ‘pretty good’ but nothing gets done ‘perfectly’. If you really are looking to try e-reading, you need to try an e-reader which is dedicated to that activity, and therefore uses the reflected light of E Ink.

¶¶¶¶¶¶

These are the days when electronic books start to actually ‘work’ and make sense for so many readers. Just as the Stanley Steamer wasn’t the end of the development of the self-powered motor-car, so too the e-readers of a decade ago were only the “proof of concept” items from which we’ve now developed the advanced formats and superior e-readers of today; and where the price has plummeted from the four-figure prices only interesting to the techno-toy addict, to that of the $150 Kobo eReader, which could easily be compared to the Henry Ford’s Model T, described by its maker as “so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one”.

While this is Part V of the ‘E-Book’ series, it’s actually the first half of a two-part rant, and part two of that will arrive tomorrow in the series’ Part VI, which will carry on from where this one leaves off. There’s far too much to consider with this particular area of the ‘E-Book’ topic to be assimilated in one go.

While many things may not be to one particular person’s taste, there are a number of valid reasons that others might enjoy them or find their use helpful and beneficial. I have no use for a Wankel Rotary Engine, like the one illustrated on the right for instance, but I do not decry the use of them by others.

Electronic books at the outset didn’t have much going for them. The expensive devices had screens that were tiny and too weak to read in bright sunlight, they were prone to so much glare that you had a devil of a time making out the text in all but the softest of light, batteries were replaced constantly (sometimes losing books if the engineering was bad), and the letter forms were only one step from something on a digital watch.

In some forms, e-books and reading devices still aren’t anything to write home about; especially when considering anything using a ‘traditional’ text display method akin to a computer monitor involving the use of a projected light source (EG: iPad, smartphone, laptop), wherein eye fatigue becomes a real concern. As well, it’s nigh-on impossible to sign someone’s e-book, you can’t get a favourite book in a ‘limited edition, hand-bound e-book’, and the appreciation of leather quality, guilt-edging, or silk end papers can’t be had.

To this I ask So what? That’s not a book you’re talking about there, it’s an object, and that’s different. Nothing wrong with having that object, just don’t try and tell me that an electronic book “isn’t a real book”. I’m reading the same words, the same story is being played out in my head, the author’s imagination is being made real… What essential ‘book-ness’ am I missing, Plato?

If I hear one more person lapse rhapsodic about the smell of books, I’m gonna gouge out their eye with my thumb. What, exactly, does this ‘bonus sense’ do to aid you in the appreciation of the words of the story? It can’t have had any influence on the author, can it? If Dickens was stuck for a plot development, and then thought of one after he remembered that the books were going to be bound in cow hide and had a good sniff of the sample his publisher sent him, I’d be starting to investigate what was in that leather other than the usual tanning agents.

If someone a century ago always read a book when sitting in the kitchen and someone was baking bread, then they would logically complain that pocket books let people read outside where they can’t smell what’s in the oven “like a proper book does”. The scent experience, however, has no more concrete connection to the act of reading than does the potentially dangerous bathwater.

The complaints about tiny, shiny, and un-readable screens was justifiable and fairly universally the case until about three years ago with the arrival of models from Sony and Amazon. With the innovation of eInk displays and non-glare glass providing a reading experience nearly identical to reading a newspaper, electronic books have neither anything to apologize for, nor any reason to be seen as ‘useless’. There are huge advantages for both the reader and the publisher with them, and to dismiss e-books today based on that earlier state and refusing to notice what vastly improved state they currently are in is a good way as any to make others stop listening to anything you ever say.

Remember: no one is being asked to throw out printed books, nor is any freedom to continue purchase a printed book going to be curtailed. That’s not my point at all. My home is filled with printed books and Atomic Fez remains committed to producing and selling printed books for as long as there are customers for them. The printed book will be with for a damned long time to come, with the electronic book happily co-existing and increasing people’s appreciation of literature in all its varied forms.

There was an article recently in The Huffington Post about how electronic books may have experienced increased sales in 2009 when compared to 2008, but sales of printed books also increased, so signalling the death of publishing is hardly a smart thing to do. Yes, as Jennifer Havenner points out, a printed book is more permanent than an electronic one, but neither is more valuable in terms of reading are they? Is one version more ‘worthy’ than the other?

¶¶¶¶¶¶

Yes, all this technology is wonderful, some of you are no doubt agreeing, these things are quite shiny and exciting but, you rightly ask, what’s the point? Do we need another electronic goo-gaw? Isn’t this really the publishers’ version of thew music industry selling people their LP collections in CD form, only to then re-master them and again sell them via digital downloads or in DVD-A format, and wring more money out of the same old recordings?

Well… in a way… yes and no… there are some similarities… however… ultimately, no.

On one hand, some publishers are not clear on the concept and are making the same mistakes that the music people did. First off, any electronic book has to be cheaper than whatever paperback edition there is, otherwise no one’s going to buy it. The price range for electronic books that people will willingly accept stops at $15 at the absolute most. I can see people grudgingly paying $14.99, but nothing higher. The “sweet spot” sits at just under $10. CDs were more expensive than LPs, but there was an inherent improvement of quality with the elimination of surface noise you were getting by buying the CD. There isn’t any improvement in the words of the book in the new format, so either the electronic book is cheaper than the printed book, or it’s a swindle. Yes, there’s a convenience to electronic books over printed ones, but there’s nothing sufficiently convenient to justify paying more for them.

Large publishing houses have missed this repeatedly, and continue to do so. I’ve seen e-books priced at or even above the price of hardbacks before they’re reduced from their RRP. No one is going to pay the $27 RRP for the electronic edition of The Passage, Doubleday Canada! Not when Random House has an RRP of only $29.95 for their hardcover edition, and your hardcover’s RRP is only three dollars higher at $32.95. You’re nuts!

Another mistaken notion that seems to be wide-spread is that all electronic books must locked off to such an extent that it is impossible to have anything done with them other than for the purchaser to read the book on the hand-held unit, preferably as fast as possible so they come back and buy another book.

Any sort of copy protection mechanism–such as the widely despised “Digital Rights Management” or ‘DRM’ system, as well as the one called “Content Protection for Prerecorded Media” or ‘CPPM’–have been the bane of music lover’s enjoyment of their legally owned recordings for over a decade now. The complete locking down of music files to prevent piracy was a case of the executives telling their customers “you can’t be trusted, and should be grateful you can buy music at all!” Certainly, the writer of a song and the performer on the record have the right to be paid for that work, which is part of the purchase price for the listener. However, if I buy a CD and then wish to listen to that music on my computer, according to the Music Industry P.R. Geniuses, I’m supposed to purchase the music again by way of a digital download of files in either the MP3 or AAC file formats, which frankly are lousy and even a relatively un-trained ear like mine can tell the difference between those and the original version on the Compact Disc. So not only are you supposed to buy this music twice, you get crap when you have pay the second time. Thank you, no.

By way of illustration of how much a pain DRM can create for the end-user, I’ve had to buy Miles Davis’s 1986 album Tutu three different times, owing to incompatibility of DRM-enabled files. Originally I downloaded it in WMA format from the Canadian on-line music retailer Puretracks and all was fine. Then Windows Media Player shifted to a major new version of some sort, and the new software couldn’t interpret the files’ DRM restriction properly, and refused to play the tracks. After ‘rewinding’ my computer to its previous state before the new software went in, intending to burn a CD from which I would then import the tracks without the DRM, the registry was now found to be in a state that the DRM interpretation was changed irrevocably, and the old version of Media Player was now telling me I wasn’t authorized to play the tracks and burning a CD was also impossible. So then I hustled over to some on-line store through Media Player, and downloaded what ended-up being low-quality files; again in the WMA-format, but at a quality setting half of the one at which my original files were created. After listening to this for a few months, still hating the quality I was hearing, and despising Windows Media Player’s way of doing things, I shifted to Apple’s iTunes. All of my files worked perfectly, but the ‘low-fi’ sound of the files continued to bother me. Once Apple began making it possible to buy high-quality AAC files without DRM, Tutu was the first thing I bought. I then immediately burned a CD and have that to go back to if anything screws up on me again.

[SIDE NOTE: For those who are interested in this sort of techno-geekery, I actually now use Foobar for playing audio, and rip using the Free Lossless Audio Codec (or ‘FLAC’ format) which is a ‘lossless’ one where you lose nothing from the CD’s full range of tone and separation. Vinyl’s “warmth of tone” is something I can’t hear, or simply cannot appreciate for all the surface noise annoying me.]

Some of the publishers are doing to e-book files the same sort of thing by using DRM restrictions so that you can’t move those files around to other devices, or their eReader units not giving you a complete set of options on how you’d like to display a file you didn’t load onto the unit through their proprietary software using their on-line store’s purchase process. These are understandable in their prevention of piracy, but when things change in a few years time–as they inevitably will, no matter what the change is, there’s going to be something–those files will instigators of some poor programmer’s migraine as they work out a way to prevent established customers yelling about some new eReader being incompatible with their previously purchased books.

¶¶¶¶¶¶

Even ignoring the arcane nature of DRM and cross-platform file interpretation conflicts, the real question for someone wondering about this new ‘e-book hype’ is one based on that previous experience buying music on LP, then Compact Cassette, then CD. Now the electronic book comes along and you’re wondering if–after getting snookered into buying your books from Amazon in their Kindle Store, or from Kobo in their store, or Sony, or whoever–in a few year’s time the file format changes and you have to re-purchase them all again after you’ve lost your eReader or file formats have been ‘upgraded’ and so on…? Honestly, for the most part, if you’re smart (as with much in life) you’ll be fine.

Kobo is right up-front with how many ways you have simultaneous access to the books you’ve bought. You can have copies of your entire library on every single computer you own, plus your smartphone, plus as part of your back-up files because they even let you download a copy of the ePUB file outside of their software so you can have that as its own entity.

What happens when Kobo gets shut down by someone so you have to shift to the Apple product or Sony’s or something? If Kobo goes bust–Lord knows how, but if they do–or gets bought out by someone, then once your existing Kobo eReader dies you’ve got all those back-up files to re-load on some new e-reading device / smartphone / computer you’ve bought. That’s a pretty big ‘if’, though. If  you stick with someone big like Amazon, Sony, or Apple, or with a company like Kobo who’s tied to a big retailer like Chapters, Borders USA and Australia, or with Barnes & Noble’s unit called “Nook”, you ought to weather any corporate merger with nary a problem (granted, people said US real estate was a good investment, and look what happened there).

What happens if you lose your Kobto e-reader or it gets run over by a bus? Simple: you buy a new device (chances are today’s $150 cost will be south of $100 by this time next year) and you re-download the books you still have ownership of. There is no need to re-purchase your books. If you drop your paperback in the bathtub, you might have to buy a new one, but just because electronics aren’t waterproof doesn’t mean you’re risking your library every time you have a soak. The best way not to have the problem at all is this: don’t drop the thing in the tub! You’ve managed it for years with paper books, surely this will be just as easy?

What happens if the file formats change? Actually, let’s say “when” they change! It’ll be like Betamax and HD-DVD, won’t it? I’m screwed, right? No. Firstly, the file formats are pretty stripped down now, there’s a minimum of stuff in them other than just words, really; and secondly, we’re at the point of all of those file formats being readable by just about all of the units available now, and the next eighteen months or so will see the shaking out of the last of them, probably. The most universally acceptable format is ePUB, which can be read by just about any device you can name (CLICK HERE FOR LIST); and which is all but universally accepted by dedicated eReader devices, with the notable exceptions of all three Amazon Kindle units, the very first of the Sony units, and a Samsung model called the “Papyrus” that I’ve never heard of (CLICK HERE FOR LIST). The chances of ePUB being replaced are pretty slim and because 98% of the units use them–even if it did change–the new format would have to be backward compatible with the old format to avoid righteous indignation of a mammoth scale. When Steve Jobs accepts the ePUB as good enough for Apple products, you know it’s not changing soon.

Additional to all of that, even if one’s worst fears are made manifest and the ePUB format gets dumped and there’s no cross-compatibility, Kobo would ensure you still had access through their software to the new versions you’ve already paid for in their old format; and Amazon’s got more than enough customers world-wide that they would be doing the same thing so you could re-download the titles you already owned.

TOMORROW: Why the printed book isn’t the best business model for a company or for our planet; what the whole e-book thing is good for; plus, why you don’t want an iPad

The concept of “book” hasn’t changed since around the mid-5th Century AD. This date is a bit of a guess, but represents the rough time that “scroll” was replaced by “book”; the object sometimes termed “a codex”, which is best defined as “several or more sheets of paper bound together at one point so as to provide one cohesive unit containing multiple “pages”. In this definition, anything from an event’s slim programme up to a copy of The Bible produced by Mr. Gutenberg counts as “a book”. What that object aims to do–specifically the task it is to perform, and has performed quite well–is the whole matter we examine here.

The real test of any device–certainly in the case of one which replaces an already existing object–is how easy is it to operate? as well as does this operation get in the way of the task or assist you with the accomplishment of  it? A shovel (or spade, if you prefer) achieves the movement of soil; a knife cuts material into smaller portions; bleach kills germs, as well as reducing any colour or tint which may be associated with said bacteria. All of these tools require a sufficient awareness of their uses and some facility with their correct implementation as part of the doing of the task; using a shovel to pierce un-broken ground isn’t as successful as the use of a spade, for instance.

So, with this new “e-book” object–whatever the device you choose to use for the task; Kindle, Kobo eReader, PlasticLogic, iPhone, etc.–is assigned one specific purpose, just the same as the printed book: provide words for the reading of same with clarity of display, accuracy to the writer’s / editor’s / story’s intents, and all with a minimum of fuss and muss. Ideally, the actual provision of the words should be so effective and non-intrusive that you forget you’re holding any object of any kind as the story or narrative account carries you off to that far-away place the mind travels to when one is reading. Printed, bound books have done this quite well for a very long time, and do so just as effectively as “scroll” did prior to them.

When the time came for the shift from a long, rolled-up piece of paper or other thin material was replaced by a ream of sheets held together, people no doubt had a period of adjustment from “rolling and unrolling” to “turning the page”; this period of adjustment varying  in length depending on how set in their ways the reader was, as well as how much they subconsciously objected to the change in the first place. The chief advantage of “book” over “scroll”, was that it was less frequent for one story to span several “books” than it was for a story to span several “scrolls”. Certainly, we have multi-volume sets of books to this day, but principally these are limited to sagas of fiction which contain several novels in one ‘story cycle’ such as “The Lord of the Rings” (termed by its author as one novel in three volumes), “The Chronicles of Narnia”, or the “Foundation Series”; or the obvious use of multiple volumes to contain such a mass of information that the only practical method of achievement is the use of two or more, such as several varieties of the Oxford Dictionary or any one of a number of encyclopaedias or thesauri. The ability to locate and consume one story using only one “book” was viewed as “a good thing” by those at the time, but only because the method of “getting words into the brain” was the same: characters grouped into words which then formed sentences using rules agreed to by those who consumed the stories as being “language”, and thus the act was termed “reading”.

This may be reacted to by you as “well, obviously; but so what?” Keep in mind that, with any technology or idea, one has to break things down as much as possible without anything being taken for granted prior to examination of the question. In the case of ‘reading’, it’s important to define what’s important to the process. We’ve done it for several millennia, it’s served us well, but–like breathing–it’s so much a part of our life we easily lose track of how we do it.

Now we have a new way through which the written word can be provided for reading of fiction or non-fiction: electronic books. Some say “this is not a real book”, but I wonder how valid the statement is, given the double-enquiry below examining the matter:

• What portion of the act of reading is no longer the same as before?
  • words are presented on a flat surface
  • words are in an order predetermined by the author and/or editor
• What aspect of the “book” is no longer honoured?
  • there is a structurally defined beginning and end to each ‘book’
  • the “chapter”, “introduction”, and “afterword” are all present
  • if the reader wishes to go to the previous chapter or page, in order to review the story’s details, they may easily do so
  • each and every word is interpreted by the brain by means of a series of alpha-numeric symbols

Some challenge the actual validity of the existence of electronic books, dismissing them as being nothing more than than “a solution to a problem which doesn’t exist”. While this point is something I wish to go into some detail about in a future next post, the fact that those who do not see the use for electronic books by themselves should not–indeed, cannot–sufficiently dismiss the validity of the use of the form by others, as this is hardly considerate.

While there are those who are of the opinion that “all printed formats of books are useless and ought to be eliminated from the face of the earth”, arguing that “people need to be forced to use e-books”, this view is equally unacceptable due to its blinkered approach to the massive world investment in printed book infrastructure (shelves, library collections, printing and binding machines, distribution networks), never mind the sheer historical and aesthetic value of the objects. Why throw-away all those books, shelving, and so on, when there are countless years of use left in them?

Both of the above opinions are examples of shrill, knee-jerk extremism, and are neither logical nor intelligently arrived at.

What I wish to do is to challenge the wet-hen notions of those who even poo-poo the mere suggestion that electronic book forms have valid uses.

Previous hand-held electronic book units have had poor displays for reading in all but the most ideal lighting situations, it’s true, but the new E Ink technology is in some ways better than reading from traditionally printed paper when viewed in full sunlight. Other methods of display using screens employing a light within the screen’s construction are much like any computer screen: heavy use of power is required, thereby increasing battery consumption, plus adding an almost certain degree of eye-strain for the user over any extended period of time. Again, the E Ink display requires an outside source of light to permit viewing of the “page” of the “book”, identical to the requirements of the printed book’s provision of viewing via reflected light.

Previous hand-held units have had screens of such a small size, as well as typography of such dimensions, that words were either too tiny to comfortably read, there were so few words displayed that ‘page turns’ were frequent enough that the flow of the story was interrupted to the point of distraction, or the letter-shapes were simply too ugly to forget you were using a computer-based display. Again, the new crop of hand-held readers frequently provide the uses the option of using their preference of serif or sans-serif typefaces–both of which in faces identical to printed versions–as well as several size variants suitable to the requirements of the reader’s vision. Likewise, the screens used in various hand-held units can vary in size from the Apple iPod’s 3½ inches (320x480 PX at 163 PPI) to the iRex Technologies’ Digital Reader 1000’s more than 10 inch (1024×1280 pixels at 160 PPI). Somewhere in there is a device which has a screen to suit any requirement of being compact for convenient use, yet large enough for clarity.

If I read the entire “His Dark Materials” series of books by Philip Pullman in electronic form on my Kobo eReader–in case you were wondering, this is something which I have actually done–what portion of the books’ enjoyment and appreciation of their writings have I missed? What aspect have I not enjoyed or appreciated? For those whose reply is about the feel or smell of the printed book, you are asked to consider the notion that those aspects have nothing to do with the story per se and are, in fact, antiquity-based fetishism of “the book” as object, and not the book as story or tale. Ultimately, what the book is supposed to do is the provision of the author’s words into a reader’s head. The smell of the binding paste and the feel of the jacket’s laminated coating are merely a part of the book itself, and do not form a portion of the writer’s effort in even the smallest degree.

The simple fact is that e-books have a perfect right to exist alongside printed ones, just as both paperback and hardcover books are equally valid forms of printed books. To shun the e-book as “silly” is arrogant and demonstrates the programming of the consumerist society where packaging creates the illusion of worth applied to its contents. Merely because faeces are enclosed in a silk-covered box with a ribbon made from the carefully woven hairs of the pure-bred Alpaca doesn’t in any way increase the worth of them. Those who demand that any book cannot be truly appreciated in electronic form are of a similar mind-set as those who declare the Great Works of Literature can only be properly read in massive, leather-bound editions and therefore anyone who reads them in the Penguin Classic editions “aren’t really reading them, you know”. Who can fairly say to someone who is clearly enjoying reading the same words set out by the author “you may think you’re enjoying that, but you’re not”? They clearly are enjoying reading it, just in a convenient, pocket-sized, paperback format and not in the way the judgmental viewer would themselves prefer to. The words and plot of the story are identical in every way.

The contents and quality of the writing are what matter here, and are un-affected by the quality of their binding or format. Wine has its taste improved or changed by the shape of a glass or the temperature at which is it served, but that protean quality is not shared by the eternal and inalterable word.

Those who say e-books aren’t “books”, or even aren’t “proper literature” have, quite literally, lost the plot when it comes to what books are supposed to do. They’re not objects for looking at on a shelf as interior decoration; they’re a method of getting the imaginations of writers into the hands of those who want to share in those stories.

Fret not, we’re not about to deal with programming or electronic engineering of them, if for no other reason that I haven’t a clue. If you’re interested in how to create an e-book file in one of several formats, head on over to the wonderful people at B10 Mediaworx of Kansas City¹, Missouri. They’ve got the thing completely sorted out, which is why Atomic Fez has them create three of the five files you get in the ZIP file when you purchase a digital book directly from this site.

While I’ve tried to maintain as neutral an explanation as possible about this, the demonstration given will use the Kobo eReader, basically because I own one. The principles remain the same across whatever brand or model available, with the exception of things like the iPad and the iPhone, both of which use a liquid crystal touchscreen display using fingerprint-resistant and scratch-resistant glass as the way you control most functions.The Kindle, the Sony eReader, the Kobo eReader, and just about all the other ones use buttons of some sort to turn pages, select a new book, change the font size, or whatever.

Kobo Books Application on the Apple iPad	Kobo Books Application on the Apple iPhone

Please note that the relative sizes of the two objects are not to scale with one another. The iPhone is about the size of an audio tape, and the iPad is about the size of a framed, 8x10 enlargement (and you would look pretty silly holding that on the side of your head having a phone conversation with someone). Also notice that both units display colour, not just a number of shades of grey. This is the one area that Apple’s hardware has the jump on everyone else’s, and it’s the only reason I find the iPad tempting as a reading device. Its size, cost, and everything else turns me off, but the fact the iPad can show me graphic novels in full colour is a very sexy thing. Why Kobo even uses it as an example of what their unit can do is beyond me, as all it does is highlight the limitation of the screen.

Kobo Shows Dull Manga	Apple Does Marvel Comics!

Again, hardly a convincing reason to shell out anywhere between four and six times the amount of the black-and-white model simply to see red body armour and blue skies. There is such a thing as “imagination”, after all.

Books are the reason we’re thinking about these things, so let’s concentrate our thoughts on that, shall we?

The screen shows you the cover image of your book when you head into the book [photo, left], as well as typically when it’s in “Sleep Mode”, which is much like your computer’s similarly named state where it’s “ready to go” without using any more power than necessary.

The last screen–or “page” if you prefer–you were looking at when you turned the unit off or it turned itself off, is where you go when you ‘open’ the book. If the battery ran out mid-read, it still keeps that marker in its memory, so don’t worry about losing your place.

The power supply for the Kobo unit is an internal battery which is re-charged using the USB cable and your laptop or desktop computer, the same as many smartphones. According to the specifications you can go an average of 8,000 ‘page turns’ between charges, but I’ve not found whether that’s close to my experience or not because for one reason or another I’ve hooked the hardware up to the computer long before the battery has been emptied of its charge. Given that 8,000 ‘page turns’ is likely somewhere in the range of six books at the absolute minimum, and the biggest power usage is when the screen is ‘re-written’ with a fresh set of text on its screen, plus the sleep or power-off modes automatically kicking in if you either set the unit aside without turning it off first (or you fall asleep in the middle of a chapter), it’s probable that it actually will never run out of power in typical use. Even if you do need to charge up an entirely flat battery, it should only take about three hours (and the new firmware now changes the light in the upper right corner of the frame changes to blue when it’s completed).

If you want to flip through a book’s chapters, such as a collection’s various short-stories, then there’s a ‘table of contents’ you can jump into, scroll the list of chapter numbers or story titles (depending on the book’s contents), select one and go to the start of that chapter, or select “return to current page” which will take you right back to where you were before you started shuffling around in the Table of Contents. I’ve no idea why, but there’s no photo example of that taken by me, so you’ll have to settle for the screen shot below showing the “reading on a computer” option of the desktop application.

There’s also a number of ways you can choose to display the books you’ve got on your eReader, depending on your preference. This also varies slightly between units, but most of them give you at least two choices for this. As near as I can tell from the documentation, the graphics don’t either slow down the screen loading time or use a larger amount of power, so it really is a matter of you selecting what you’d like to see: sort by title or author; would you like only the cover images, only the text of the title details, or a bit of both?

Books With Only Their Titles	Books With Covers and Their Titles	Books With Only Their Covers

In addition to this, you can also choose to hide the “100 free titles” which come pre-loaded on the unit, so that the only books you see are the ones you’ve added to the unit yourself. Obviously I have chosen to keep them displayed, as having Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Three Musketeers showing up makes me look all smart-like! Or not, depending.

The ability to change font size is excellent, as everyone has a different idea of what the best size is. I find that “smallest” is best for my tastes; it requires turning the fewest number of pages because there’s the most characters on a single page, but it’s not too small to read comfortably. I also prefer the serif font as I like clearly seeing the letter “I” and the letter “l” as different characters.

Until the new firmware was released this week, however, that ability to change font sizes only applied to books you purchased directly from Kobo. If you loaded a file onto the unit without using the desktop platform–basically loading either an ePUB or PDF file via Adobe Digital Editions or through your computer’s file management–you couldn’t change the font size at all.

Here’s what it used to look like, before this week’s software update:

Smallest setting of font (too small to read, really)	Largest setting of font (identically too small to read, really)

This was due to some kind of wacky limitation inside the Adobe software in the unit itself. Here’s how Kobo Vice President Michael Tamblyn explained it on the TeleRead Blog mid-June:

Font scaling issues have been tricky–they are most often caused by hard-coded absolute font sizes in the ePUB CSS. Doing wholesale overrides of publisher CSS can earn us bad karma with publishers. And while we can easily override some CSS elements (font face, for example, since we have a limited number of fonts on the eReader), the Adobe SDK prohibits override of absolute font sizes. (Grrr…) So we have had to do some crafty things behind the scenes to get around that limitation. We have tested the new release of firmware with every file that users have sent us with font resizing issues and it has worked in all cases we’ve tested so far.

I’ve found the same as Mr. Tamblyn states: it’s totally fixed now. There’s no point in showing you how it now looks, because now it does look different, unlike the two examples above.

The other delightful improvement was the ability to re-size PDF files’ display. If it was possible before, it wasn’t really clear how to do that, and now it’s either possible or very easily accomplished. There’s not a big difference between the magnification settings here, but that’s all this document needed to make its text “nicely sized”.

PDF at “Whole Page” Setting	PDF Having its Settings Changed	PDF at 100% Magnification

In a perfect world, the software would handle re-flowable text on a PDF so you could make the words oodles bigger if you wanted or needed to without the line running off the screen, but as Mr. Tamblyn alludes to above, there’s only so much they can do with the text of a file before they’re starting to interpret the information enough to hit the DRM restrictions wall.

There are a few oddities that the new firmware / desktop application don’t address which I wish had been done–such as being able to mark a title as “read”, “unread” or whatever in one swift move–but chances are they will in a future upgrade.

All-in-all the new firmware is delightful. There’s very little to find fault with at all, and this is also a damned good example of how any of these sorts of units work. If you are intrigued by the concept of eBooks and are wanting to get your feet wet instead of diving in head-first and buying one of the top-priced units like the iPad or either of the Kindle models, this slim little easy-to-use Kobo eReader is perfect at just $149 +Taxes. Plus, the company is Canadian, so you know you’re supporting a bunch of maple-syrup smelling, hard-working, and polite people!

NEXT UP: more comparisons of iPad and iPhone, versus the book-dedicated units such as the Kobo eReader, Sony eReader, Kindle, Plastic Logic, and so on.

1. They got some crazy-lookin’ women there / and I’m a-gonna get me one [RETURN]

Let’s deal with a few things more carefully and in detail, but don’t fret as we’re going to do this one small step at a time. Honestly, it’s the only damned way to do it, as there’s a plethora of things to wrap one’s brain around, and it’s honestly taken me an entire year to get an in-depth understanding of both what what e-books are as well as what they are are not. Simply grasping what sort of printed books’ typographical and design elements are no longer possible or desired in electronic books was the toughest thing for me, but probably due to that being the most recent and freshest aspect of book creation in my awareness. Whatever the reason, I’m well aware that some people have next to no comprehension of what these things are, and that the un-known is the scariest thing to people. The fact it requires change to something that people feel quite passionate about already just makes things worse, doesn’t it?

Let’s get a couple of things out of the way right off the start.

Electronic Books Will Destroy Every Book in Your Home!

False. Totally, utterly, completely, incontrovertibly, incorrect in every way. No one is going to enter your residence and do something destructive to your printed books. All of you people afraid that Guy Montag and the other firemen are going to pay you a visit, resume breathing. No one is going to shove an e-reader device down your throat. People have a wonderful way of guaranteeing they get the products they want: they buy them. Conversely, they have a sure-fire way of stopping the manufacture of things they have no use for: they do not buy them.

You can still buy vinyl records. Hell, both U2 and Peter Gabriel are releasing brand new recordings  in LP format! Sure, you’re paying more for them than you would for either a CD or downloaded music files, but you are still able to get the warm sound of music wrapped in the surface noise of dust and dirt after you drop the needle on that twelve-inch bad boy.

You will still be able to buy printed books in any version of the future that we may arrive in. That’s my interpretation anyway. It’s not difficult to find really fancy, hand-crafted, gilt-edged, illuminated, leather-bound, hardback books today; they’re incredibly expensive, but you can get them.

In a few decades, it might be more difficult to locate a copy of the complete works of Dame Barbara Cartland in hardback (one certainly hopes, anyway), but if people such as yourself continue wanting and buying paperback and hardback printed books, then you can count on buying the latest titles and shoving them into your satchel.

It’s quite possible that the electronic book will come to be the preferred format for those who are simply looking for something to while away a few hours on their commute. Currently, this is the mass-market paperback, but for titles you want to basically read and then wonder what are you going to do with this book afterwards, the electronic book is the perfect alternative: less expensive, no requirement for shelf-space, and probably 1/3 of the books I’ve read and never returned to re-read a few years later. Sure, there are a massive number of printed books on my shelf I value enough to continue to own and so on; there’s no way I’m going to actually replace any of the ones already on the shelves with electronic books, but if there’s an e-book edition of a book I’m interested in, I’ll go with that one first. The last thing I need is more books in any format, but paperless books take up less space and use less money.

That said, there is far too much money in the world invested in shelves, buildings, and printed books for printed books to disappear anytime before all of us alive to day are all dead. Think of all the public libraries, their shelves and binderies, all of the machines built to monitor circulation status of all the books, and on and on. No matter what your opinion about e-books–or how their use suits your life–printed books will continue, have no fear.

I Hate Staring at the Computer Screen All Day!
The Last Thing I Want to Do is Read a Book Like That!

Rubbish. I won’t use the ‘apples and oranges’ simile becuase that’s not fair. Comparing reading on a computer screen and reading on an e-reader is like comparing apples and a pack of raging tigers. There’s no similarity at all.

Let me explain: the computer screen you’re probably reading this on is directly shooting light at your eye-bones (or, if Steve Jobs gets his way soon, “iBones”). The typical e-reader device uses “E Ink technology” which is a fancy marketing way of saying “LCD screen”¹. Unlike the iPad, a netbook, or any actual computer screen (flat screen or big CRT tube thing), there is no light in an e-reader; you have to turn on a lamp or light a candle to read by. This is one distinct advantage over a computer that printed books have over computer screens. Have a gander at this little example I un-scientifically whipped up:

The one on the left is the equal of you reading on a computer screen, because it’s a bunch of black letters on a background comprised of a bright light blazing into your face (because that’s what it is). The one on the right is about the same as what an eInk display would show you. Paper may be thought of as “white”, but it’s not as bright as a screen would be. The background of an e-reader is darker than paper, but it’s a damned site easier to read than from a computer screen.

The fact that there’s a hunk of glass involved in the way the words are displayed is no reason to worry too much about glare. Yes, there’s a possibility of it, but there’s hardly a guarantee of it. The image on the left is take by me at noon or thereabouts without any attempt to reduce the glare on the screen. This is a non-glare screen that is more successful than any ‘non-glare glass’ I’ve ever seen in a picture frame, trust me. Not all readers are as successful as this, but the “you can’t read using an e-reader except in the shade” is about a decade out of date and a non-starter of an argument with me. The building behind the Kobo eReader, on the other hand, was difficult to look at, let me tell you! A printed book’s purer white paper might have been more difficult to stare at as well. Behold the advantage of e-book reading!

The way any of these screens are set up to display letters using the typefaces that are part of the hardware’s programming, but if there’s a graphic in a book–a handwritten note, or a Venn-diagram, say–then the displays can also handle that using little dots too small for you to pick out with the human eye², but the real purpose of these things is to present you with words; in five sizes you can select yourself, as well as either serif (like Times New Roman or Palatino) or sans-serif (like Arial or Helvetica) which is again your preference. Again, this is a distinct advantage to the printed book, where you only get to choose “paperback, hardback, or mass-market paperback?” and even then it’s only what happens to be in print at the moment. Yes, it’s possible to make the typeface appear larger or smaller by moving the book nearer or farther from your nose, but this new technology makes it possible for me to put-off the use of bifocals, and that can’t be a bad thing³.

Now there’s a huge number of further matter both for and against e-books in general, and the next few posts will deal with some of them as part of working through the experience of using the Kobo eReader and its particular software; which I’m still waiting to get an update for; grrrrr… Tune in tomorrow for the start of that.

In the meantime, free your mind, and your library will follow (and today’s apology to a musician goes out to George Clinton and Funkadelic).

1. Okay, it’s a big development on a liquid crystal display, but all you tech geeks can just relax and remember we’re dealing with entry-level information here. [RETURN]
2. After working with photographs for years and being able to pick out individual bits of grain in an image, trust me, if you can make out one pixel clearly on one of these screens, your vision is record-breakingly precise. [RETURN]
3. Unless you’re my father and want to look all happy at getting revenge by noting how I’m getting older [RETURN]

–with apologies to Bono

Over the next few days or so, I’m going to be answering a number of questions about e-books and the equipment. Many questions are un-asked of me directly, but feel free to ask something in the comments section; either that question will be dealt with in a later post or–if it only needs a quick reply–it’ll be answered right below your question. Either way, no question is ‘dumb’, as long as you’re asking and listening to the answer. Not asking or not listening is the only mistake you can make here.

Here’s what we’re talking about: three devices, all simultaneously loaded with the same words, James Cooper’s The Beautiful Red. One single book purchase, but through Kobo it’s accessible on any one of your devices on which the Kobo application or software has been installed and you’ve connected to your Kobo account!

Simple!

You can even use more than these things: your smart-phone, your iPhone, your iPod Touch, your iPad, your Sony eReader (and many other e-reader devices). No fuss, no muss!

All of this is wonderful, yes. Exciting, certainly. Brand-new high tech shininess, absolutely.

The real question is, obviously, what’s the point on using an e-reader device instead of–say–paperbacks or hardcovers?

First off, there’s the compact and light weight of the things: roughly the weight of a mass-market paperback, you can be carrying more than one book of any length without any increase. Also, it’s always the same size and thickness: about 1/2 an inch thick and five inches by seven. Neither of these things are a big deal, as the weight of even two hardbacks are hardly a massive requirement of effort. Additionally, the capacity of any of these wondrous devices to have 100, or 1,000, or even a kabillion books is also neat-sounding but hardly something that really means anything to the actual practicality of the thing: how many books can you actually read per se, and how many books are you interested in having simultaneous access to? Just as one can clear the bookshelf and put new titles on it, you can remove books from a device and load new files on it. So far there’s not a really appreciable point to the things.

Here’s something to consider, however: the cost to publishing houses of actually publishing new books, as well as maintaining older titles’ availability to people who either didn’t read them when they first came out or wish to re-read the book, have increased incredibly over the last few years. The cost of editors, writers, sales representatives, sub-editors, proof readers, and marketing teams hasn’t really changed (although some of those positions have been eliminated as cost-saving measures). The cost of printing and binding books, however, has gotten far more expensive in the recent decade, and that’s the one thing you can’t get rid of in this book-making equation.

Until now, that is.

Here’s a gallery of what my Kobo eReader looks like, just so you can see what we’re talking about here.

You’ll notice later on that it’s all fancied-up with Atomic Fez livery, which is merely an adhesive sheet that’s printed with whatever design you want. There’s a bunch that Gela Skins have pre-designed for the Kobo eReader, but you can also provide your own images through their browser-based editing/designing thing to create your own as well; hence the Atomic Fez skin. Here’s some samples of their pre-designed ones. and a few that I’ve done up myself, each showing the front and back panels of the Kobo eReader. Click any of them to see a larger version of the image.

These are not a reason to purchase an e-reader, nor are any of GelaSkins’ removable vinyl skins for protecting and customizing portable devices a reason to get a mobile phone or any other hardware. The simple reason I’m pointing this out is that some people think that the various eReader devices are ‘ugly’ or ‘boring’, and this points out that you don’t have to stick with the vanilla looking unit if you don’t want to. Kobo’s eReader comes in “porcelain” and “black”, and I’ve turned my black unit into “Atomic Fez”, so clearly you can turn yours into “Penguin Edition of On the Road”, or “Star Trek Tricorder” or “Blue Jeans” or “Honking Big Picture of My Cat”. Do not be turned off by the klunky style of the Kindle if that’s the best option for your purchase, or if you don’t like the space-age minimalism of the Apple design ethic; both can be visually changed for a small amount whilst also protecting the surface of the unit from scratching.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll be discussing the actual use of the thing, the experience of reading on the little screen versus a little rectangle of paper, and the firmware upgrade that Kobo is sending out to customers–including me–even as I type this.