Book v.s. Kindle
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Sander_Marechal Aug 05, 2009 5:04 AM EDT |
I just fished this link out of an EFF newsletter. It's a series of video challenges pitting the paper book against a Kindle. It's pretty funny :-) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/07/book-vs-kindle Also visit the Youtube channel linked in that post for more videos! |
| tuxchick Aug 05, 2009 11:38 AM EDT |
Those are great. I'm still appalled at how free our corporate overlords are with our data and property. I guess the moral is it's OK to waltz into a customer's cyberdomain without fear because they can't sic the dog or shoot their scatterguns like they could in their meatspace domains. |
| Steven_Rosenber Aug 05, 2009 12:55 PM EDT |
Clearly there needs to be not one but many e-reader alternatives to the Kindle, and there need to be open formats for e-books. There probably already are; I just don't know about them. |
| gus3 Aug 05, 2009 1:01 PM EDT |
FBReader is included by default on Ubuntu Netbook Remix. http://www.fbreader.org/ |
| jdixon Aug 05, 2009 1:47 PM EDT |
> FBReader... FBReader is the cat's meow. My wife loves it on both her Nokia 770 and her Asus Eee 701. |
| caitlyn Aug 05, 2009 2:10 PM EDT |
FBReader is nice. I use it on my netbook as well. It's even ported to mipsel so the new tiny netbooks that run MIPS chips can and do use it. I believe it's even installed by default on most. |
| Sander_Marechal Aug 05, 2009 3:41 PM EDT |
Quoting:Clearly there needs to be not one but many e-reader alternatives to the Kindle, and there need to be open formats for e-books. Just take a look at the number of devices that Open Inkpot runs on: http://openinkpot.org/wiki/Hardware As for a book format, we already have a perfectly acceptable open standard for books. It's called PDF/A. |
| techiem2 Aug 05, 2009 4:27 PM EDT |
Quoting:It's called PDF/A. Exactly. I think that every time I read about eBooks and formats. I think "Why do we have 500 special 'eBook' formats when PDF has worked just fine for formatted portable documents for years? After all, that's the whole point of PDF." Other than that, just about any standard document format would work as long as the reader could parse it. RTF, ODT, etc. The whole idea of having all these special formats just for eBooks seems pretty silly/stupid to me. |
| edt Dec 22, 2009 4:14 PM EDT |
Combine FBReader with calibre and you have a real winning combo. Calibre allows you to organize your ebooks and to convert them to your perferred format (among other things). See: http://calibre-ebook.com/ |
| hkwint Dec 23, 2009 8:58 AM EDT |
Quoting: "Why do we have 500 special 'eBook' formats when PDF has worked just fine for formatted portable documents for years? Once I found myself at a T-Dose presentation with a representative from iRex explaining: PDF is unwieldy. The reader-devices need more time to process the PDF, than to change the image on the display. Therefore, any 'latency' (5 seconds or so) is caused by the file format. This also happens any time you 'scroll' or zoom a PDF page. Therefore, PDF is not very well suited for e-readers. However, nowadays, now hardware becomes faster and more energy efficient, PDF may as well work. |
| Bob_Robertson Dec 25, 2009 11:01 AM EDT |
I'm a dinosaur. I prefer HTML. I've got a Linux-running Zaurus, and while it can display PDF, the screen size being absurdly small by today's standards makes PDF pretty much useless. I have to constantly scroll left-right to read. HTML automatically formats to the width available. The simpler the HTML the better, in fact. The problems that the Kindle has had with DRM, deleting books, etc, makes me very wary of any system with so-called "rights" built in. Security is one of the reasons I use Linux, why would I give that up now? |
| jezuch Dec 26, 2009 6:42 AM EDT |
Quoting:HTML automatically formats to the width available. AFAIK the ebook-oriented formats like EPUB allow (limited?) reflowing too. That was one thing that really convinced me that ebook-oriented formats are a good idea. I recentry read trollout[1] by the founder of Xanadu project in which he laments that first we ported the terribly restricting text-on-paper format to computers while we could do much much better, and then destroyed the hypertext concept with HTML. [1] http://hyperland.com/trollout.txt So yes, I'm afraid I tend to agree - text-on-paper format is simply wrong. |
| gus3 Dec 26, 2009 1:44 PM EDT |
"Destroyed the hypertext concept with HTML"? I don't get it. |
| jezuch Dec 26, 2009 7:08 PM EDT |
Quoting:I don't get it. Then go and read the, um, article I linked :) The original vision behind hypertext was a far cry from what we got with HTML. And since we have HTML, there's no incentive to realise this vision. Now everyone thinks hypertext is HTML and the web, but it's only a small percentage of it. Hence, we destroyed the hypertext concept with HTML. |
| hkwint Dec 26, 2009 7:42 PM EDT |
Quoting:Then go and read the, um, article I started, and started reading the site too. But it's, um, very long. These guys should have made some nice 3 minute flash animation of their ideas I guess, given todays short attention spans from readers such as me. |
| gus3 Dec 26, 2009 9:05 PM EDT |
Quoting:Then go and read the, um, article I linked :)Okay, I'll admit, I didn't click the link originally. Actually, I googled "hypertext" to see what came up, and among the first five links, nothing justified your claim. Then, based on your reply to my IDGI post, I clicked. AAAAAAARGH![/CharlieBrown] Get some line breaks, people! Either that, or wrap it in some HTML! Really, jezuch. If anything, that link justifies the flexible rendering of HTML. Why should I be required to save that article, then open it in an editor to get some line-wrapping, when HTML would make it perfectly legible in any WWW browser? |
| hkwint Dec 27, 2009 11:52 AM EDT |
Quoting:Why should I be required to save that article, then open it in an editor to get some line-wrapping Indeed, just what I had to do. |
| jezuch Dec 27, 2009 6:35 PM EDT |
Quoting:Why should I be required to save that article, then open it in an editor to get some line-wrapping My thought was that it was exported from Xanadu (or whatever he's using) to HTML. And since HTML is "inferior format", the, um, glitches would be excused (in his mind) :) [There are also some strange characters that I can't map to any typical charset. Weird.] |
| Bob_Robertson Dec 31, 2009 3:24 PM EDT |
> Why should I be required to save that article, then open it in an editor to get some line-wrapping, when HTML would make it perfectly legible in any WWW browser? I feel vindicated. |
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