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Closing Music:Zearle - Hackers and Crackers
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Closing Music:Zearle - Hackers and Crackers
Abstract: My impressions as a user of the Sony Ebook Reader
So let me start by thanking Knightwise for his review of his Sony ebook reader. Of course, the particular model he has is not that easy to get retail. However, I’m not quite sure that it is neither here or there for me. After hearing that the Sony ebook readers worked with Linux, I went down to the local best buy.
I’ve heard for quite a while about the Ebook readers. As a former bookstore owner, I’ve always known there was something missing because of the fact that getting a book on-line is not hard to do. But I always found reading a book on a computer screen to totally suck.
There is something inherently painful for me to read on a back-lit screen. I have heard that some people have no problem reading off a back-lit screen, so I believe that maybe it is something that effects a large number or readers but not all. Don’t tell me that you, as a computer user, are in front of a screen all day long. It does not count. I am not talking about the situation I am experiencing as I write the script for this program. I am typing this as I casually glance back and forth between the computer screen and the local newscast on a TV mounted on the ceiling in the waiting room of the office I am in. When I talk about “reading” in this context, I am discussing focused reading of dozens of pages in a concentrated manner without distraction. When I read a fifty page PDF, or a 300 page book, the LCD back-lit screen wont cut it. My eyes will physically hurt if I were to try it and I know this.
The most important thing with these portable readers is their display. The display is a new kind of display known as an E-Ink display. I am told that this display actually consists of many tiny balls that are dark on one side and light on the other. When you read a page of this, the device reorganizes these balls to be an image of a page of text. This display therefore requires external light to read from. Sony sells a particularly nifty cover for the book that has a built in book-lamp, it is an accessory I make good use of on mine.
I’m glad to report that I have read whole novels on this device now, so the display is as easy to read as promised.
Right now, there are three “big” devices that use E-ink displays. They are the Sony line, the Amazon Kindle, and the Barnes and Noble Nook.
These are all big corporate devices, they all have associated bookstores that you interface with in some way via proprietary commercial operating systems, and can purchase DRM’d commercial books.
This commercial state of affairs probably is not of interest to the listeners of this audio-cast, most of which are free-culture types and Linux types. I make this audio-cast to put out the word, for a Sony device, the Sony ebook reader is markedly open and works well with Linux. And if your an audio-caster and you can, we all want to know if your other device works with Linux.
So, with Linux, with a modern kernel, you just plug a usb to mini-usb cable into the device, and you can mount it, mounts like a USB thumb drive. From there, you simply drop books into the drive, whether they be PDF or Epub formatted books.
That’s the idea, anyway....
Actually, when you plug the device in, some weird auto-mounting thing, I think it’s HalD or something, mounts it read-only. You can then use a manual mount command and it will mount read-write. Then you can drag and drop with your favorite graphical file manager, or use that bomb of CLI file managers, “BASH.”
When you unmount the device, the Sony will re-index itself, so your book will be listed.
For more advanced usage of your Sony, you can use this free software called “Calibre.” You need version 0.6.46 or better, because that thing with the read-only and read-write mounts is fixed for Linux in those versions.
Calibre is cross-OS and cross-reader. The cross-OS is more important to me because I know I can recommend it to people I know who use another OS than mine. Thus, if I have a friend who decides to use the “Nook” on her Windows device, I can still say “get Calibre.” [Yeah, I know, my friends can be so not-cool, what can I say.]
Calibre is an ebook manager for you computer, it is written in Python and uses SQLite as it’s database manager. So it organizes your books for you. Now I know I have said that I don’t want to have a “music library” on my computer, because I think I can manage it better myself with directories, but things are a little different because of Calibre’s other functions.
Calibre’s killer function is it’s ability to convert between file types. The Sony uses a new standard for ebooks called the epub file. While the Sony can also naively support PDF, text-files, and to some limited extent MS Doc files, Calibre can inter-convert these and other ebook formats, including saved web-pages (HTML’s) and even RSS feeds. I have not experimented with taking, say, CNN’s feed and making a daily ebook out of it, but it is possible with this software. But converting formats, that is the thing. The epub format is compressed, and thus faster to flip through, on the ebook reader.
The second reason I use Calibre to transfer books onto the Sony is because it supports these things called “collections.” For instance, I can tag one novel with the tags of “fiction, scifi, cyberpunk” and another with “fiction, classic.” Then when transfered to the ebook reader, there is a menu called “collections” which has entries for “fiction, scifi, cyberpunk, and classic.” When you have more than a few dozen books on the reader, this really helps because you can more easily get to what you want, like saying to yourself, “I want to read a cyberpunk novel now,” or “I want to read a computer book now.”
I have found a slight bug, and can not tell if it is Calibre or the Sony reader. For some reason, I lost a book when I put my hundredth book on the device. Yes, I can acquire them faster than I can read them. I really don’t mind this bug, because 99 books is a lot. Also, what I call a book you may not. I like to also download research papers and Wikipedia pages and throw them on there for easier and more leisurely offline reading.
The device charges off of the usb port, but the smart money will go out and buy a game-boy charger at the local computer game store. You can thus charge while reading and without being at a computer. These are cheaper than the one Sony sells for the ebook reader, and the one I got also doubles as a wall charger for my ogg player as well, with a simple cable switch to a usb to mini-usb cable.
What it’s like, living with the Sony ebook reader? I can’t imagine living without mine. I essentially stopped reading books when I went on the Internet, and now I have that “I’m back,” feeling. There is so much free content out there too. Gutenberg.org has what I consider to be the highest quality ebooks, but you can also get tons of stuff on archive.org. I won’t recommend or tell you not to use pirated books, but those scenes do exist on Usenet and Torrent if you decide to use them.
The Sony weighs a little less than a small paperback and yet holds dozens of books in it. The convenience factor of this alone assures us that the future of the book is in the ebook. Now that I have the ebook reader, all bound books feel like encyclopedia sets to me.
My wife asked me if I missed bound books, and I can say I miss the artwork on the covers (a screen image is no substitute,) but dozens of books on a chip beat carrying those books. Just like with portable audio players, who wants CD’s any more, when you can have whole collections in a tiny device.
Also, the ebook reader has a “bookmark” button. You can have bookmarks all over the place now, and just browse through bookmarks and not only jump around a book, but jump around between books.