Tag Archives: Electronic Publications

Kobo, Still Loading

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I picked up a Kobo eReader today at my local Chapters (Canada’s mega-bookstore).

The Kobo has a lot going for it. Because the company behind it isn’t an Amazon.com, and so they can’t do it alone, it scores big points by using common technologies and supporting standard formats.

For the Kobo being a 1st edition, and for wearing a much more affordable price tag at $150, than the Amazon Kindle at $260, it can be forgiven for falling short of the Amazon Kindle in a lot of ways.

But the Kobo has only itself to blame for where it falls hardest.

Their (boring) slogan is “eReading: anytime. anyplace.”

It should be “eReading: anytime… eventually. anyplace… eventually.”

It takes over half a minute to power on.

That’s just too long.

Reading is a sacred ritual. Those that read are going to be frustrated, and those dead tree books will also be calling them with their sirens song.

Charlie Sorrel of Wired is correct, the Kobo is a killer, suicidal that is.

I do expect it to do decent in the Canadian market, but this first edition is no Kindle killer.

I’ll be returning it this week.

Note: Chapters Help Lies, Thankfully It Should Be Easy To Return

Contrary to Chapters online help stating “Kobo eReaders must be returned in its original unopened packaging.” I confirmed first online with Kobo customer support, and then in store, that I have 2 weeks to return it open with the original package.

“If the unit is not defective and you simply don’t want it you can return it to your local Chapters/Indigo store within 14 days of purchase as long as you have a receipt”

PDF to Amazon Kindle

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The information out there makes it sound like you can view PDFs on the Kindle 2 e-book reader. This is not true.

So how do you get your PDFs on your Kindle?

In my experience both Lexcycle Stanza and the Calibre App PDF conversions result in mangled, unreadable e-books.

The solution is Amazon.com offers an email to your Kindle service, [email protected] for a small fee (not quite so small if not in USA).

I just discovered if you send to your-kindle-email@free.kindle.com there is no charge as it’s sent back to the email address you sent it from, not directly to your Kindle.

Although Amazon.com calls PDF “an experimental file format” the results have all been great for me.

ePub Wins, Consumer Win Next?

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‘…the ePub format, which is open and freely available for any device, unlike the Kindle’s proprietary format, which functions only for Kindle. The ePub format is used by every electronic reader except the Kindle, and promises to be a big selling point for Google Editions, the search firm’s planned Web-based electronic bookstore scheduled to launch this summer, which will allow buyers to read books and much else on any number of devices. (This may include, by year’s end, Google’s own tablet computer.) It’s through ePub that readers have instant access to millions of books in the public domain, that electronic publishing has a chance to become standardized, and that writers will have more options when it comes to disseminating and selling their books. …’
Sue Halpern, “The iPad Revolution“, The New York Review of Books, June 10, 2010 (future date)

Photo of an e-reader inside the cut out of a paper book

Photo "Electronic Book" cc by-sa flickr user timonoko

e-text and e-books are topics I’ve been passionate about since ~1998 when Boris Mann tried to convince me that reading a book on a Palm Pilot could be an enjoyable experience — I never did get through more than a few chapters back then.

I’ve watched with fascination as audio, and then video, not text have migrated to digital. Although, writing has always been the main interface to computing, and digitization it is magnitudes smaller than the other medians, the reading experience has been much harder to improve upon than the listening and viewing experiences.

Fast forward to today and since Christmas (spoiled), I’ve read a half-dozen books on my Kindle 2. I’m already itching for better tech. I’m continuing to eye where publishing goes next, particularly the free culture implications

Sue Halpern’s whole article is excellent, and provides deep insights into e-reading, where the iPad fits in, and where e-books fit into Apple’s iPad business. Her essay is among the best I’ve read in a while: clear domain expertise, wide knowledge (open source shout out), objective, and excellent prose.

I emailed Sue, and she confirmed for me,

“DRM [(digital rights management) protected] books don’t go anywhere– yet. I think this will change when Google gets into the game. Right now epub on new books mainly benefits publishers, who don’t have to have books digitized in numerous formats in order to be read on various devices.”