e-books

[piranha]

i am getting really close to buying an e-book reader now. no, not amazon's newest toy (i don't want my reading tied to amazon).



the bookeen cybook gen3 is the latest shiny thing i am liking.

even if their website works like crap (the links across the top all error out; one has to go to the site map to access those pages, *sigh*). even if there is too much use of the davinci code in their promo shots. :)

about as high and wide as a MMPB, much thinner, and only half as heavy, 6" tall screen, 600x800 resolution (166 lpi), it uses e-ink (which means the battery lasts a very long time), it can display 4 levels of greyscale, landscape mode, it doesn't do its own proprietary crap (it can read text, html, pdf, palmdoc, gif, jpg, png, and mobipocket, as well as play mp3), it has a dictionary lookup function (your own downloadable dictionaries), it can change font family and size (your own downloadable fonts), zoom for images, it can bookmark, it can use intra-document hyperlinks, how much content it can hold is only limited by the size of the SD memory card you plug into it, USB slave connection.

that's not perfect (i have quite some list for my perfect e-book reader), but we're finally talking.

U$350.-

want.

Comments

[whey.livejournal.com]

I've been wanting an ebook reader for a couple of years now. I'm still waiting for the model for me to become available.

Kindle is most definitely not it. Ugh, fails on so many levels.

[thesilentsenshi.livejournal.com]

That is so awesome. I've been looking for something like that for ages. :D

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah, i have been watching the market for a long time now, and it looked sad for a while there, as if nobody would ever build anything cheap and decent enough. lately there have been a couple of models that appeal.

[whey.livejournal.com]

Hrmm, just found out via dearauthor.com that the Palm T/X is on sale for $199 (http://store.palm.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2113009&cp=2114867&parentPage=family). Not my ideal ereader, but at that price, I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to buy one.

palm

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

palms totally don't do it for me. i don't know HOW people read anything on those tiny screens. they're ok for what they are (personal digtal assistants), but not for reading books. for me, anyway. and since i don't run around a whole lot these days, the whole PDA thing isn't important to me; i have my big PDA sitting on my desk.

though in that general direction i am sorta tempted by the OLPC thing. i have about a week to make up my mind whether i feel charitable in that way.

Re: palm

[whey.livejournal.com]

The OLPC is awesome!! I showed that to Bunny a couple of days ago, and he said, "it's whey proof". The B1G1 aspect also gives warm fuzzy feelings. I'm leaving it up to him as to whether or not we buy one -- I figure if we don't really like it, it'd be great for his 4yr old niece (and maybe save him from having to rebuild their computer every 4 months).

Re: the Palm, it's definitely not the ideal reader (and I know you've mentioned preferring a large format to read in the past, so not a fit for you). But, the Palm T/X should work for what I want -- to read ebooks in bed. Now, if it was only waterproof so I could read it while taking a bath. Hmmmm... I wonder if a ziploc bag would work. XD

Re: palm

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

well, no sooner said than done, the *poing* is donating one OLPC and is gonna ship me the second one. yay! that'll be so much fun. luckily i have small hands, since the keyboard isn't fullsize.

better than ziploc, one of those optically clear bags they have for taking underwater pictures with a regular camera: http://www.rei.com/product/752383.

Re: palm

[whey.livejournal.com]

Nice!! I like that the keyboard is rubberized, and the entire case is sturdy enough for kids and clumsy bums like me. ^_^

Thanks for the info on those bags. I IM'd Bunny to pick me up one, since he's the mountain biker in the family. (He actually believes in exercise. Whatever.)

OPLC

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

They are so cute, and yes, small fingers are good. A friend had one (developing software for it) and he said jamver0 was the only adult he saw figure out how to open it without help. Apparently kids do fine :-). It also feels weirdly unbalanced in comparison to normal laptops because the keyboard part is very thin - nearly everything, particularly weightwise, is in the screen part.

Do they make different colours now or are they still all white/green?

Re: OPLC

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

since they don't give you a choice when buying and i haven't seen a differently coloured one on the website, i think the bright green/white is it. which is fine by me; it's a happy colour (if it were pink this would be much less attractive to me, however silly that is).

some of the software looks just as exciting as some of the hardware -- how thrilling for your friend to have done development on it!

OLPC as book reader Re: palm

[selki.livejournal.com]

Anything I could look up or research for you to help with that decision (either way)?

Re: OLPC as book reader Re: palm

[selki.livejournal.com]

Whoops, dinner break: should have hit "refresh" before replying. Glad you're getting one! I'm going to be in a local user's group and am looking forward to having one.

Re: OLPC as book reader Re: palm

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

neat! we can exchange notes! i am hoping at least one other person locally will have one, but since this is the boonies, who knows.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

The main thing on my list that isn't there is searchable annotations. Kindle does have everything on my list, though; I think I'm very likely to get one when it becomes available in the UK.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I came across that yesterday when I was looking up what other eBook readers were available. It does look pretty darned nice!

[firecat]

Thanks! Sounds like it has a lot of the features on my list as well.

(Although ghu knows I do not need another little electronic shackle.)

electronic shackles

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

*heh*. shackle, yes, that aspect is what has kept me from being the total gadget hawk i would otherwise be. but this feels slightly more freeing than shackling to me in the overall analysis. the boat looms large whenever i look at my library, i MUST find a way to reduce the number of books i own in paper format.

i do wish the cybook had a way to highlight and extract text; but the software is just in version 1.0, and the makers sound sufficiently geeky that i am hopeful that will come if the device survives.

[rockthecj.livejournal.com]

You might find The Guardian columnist Steven Poole's list of not-quite-so-technical requirements amusing. He's also made comments about Amazon's Kindle.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/11/the_kindle_doesnt_light_my_fir.html

Steven Poole's list of not-quite-so-technical requirements

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

*chortle*. very funny; thanks for the link.

the comments are something else though -- so many idiots.