E-Books: Calming the E-Terror of Book Lovers [Part III]
Posted by Ian in Books, Business, Industry ThoughtsSo, here we are again, having previously had an over-view of the topic in general, then covering a couple of fallacies about e-books. Today, we answer the grammatically challenged question how does they work, exactly?
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.
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| 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, 8×10 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.
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| 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?
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| 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:
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| 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”.
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| 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.
- They got some crazy-lookin’ women there / and I’m a-gonna get me one [RETURN]
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