I’m a convert. I got rid of hundreds of dead tree books a couple of years ago; I read exclusively on my ereader now. I actually have a couple of books in dead tree format that I haven’t read, that I want to read, that I’ve put off reading because I don’t want to deal with something that’s not on my ereader.
The sheer convenience of carrying 1,000 books in my pocket that I can pull out and read whenever I want…it’s like I’m living in the future.
The other thread reminded me of yet another reason I like my Kindle - I can read controversial books or embarrassing books in public without people questioning me.
Or even really, really popular books. You bet your ass I never read a single Harry Potter in public.
You should immediately strip the DRM and convert any Kindle purchases to the EPUB format. It’s free and open-source so you can be sure that there’ll always be some form of reader or software that can read it.
Stripping the DRM can be tricky but there are plugins available for Calibre that can help with the process. On occasion I’ve been unable to strip the DRM and that’s when I’ve torrented DRM-free epub files. Maybe not strictly legal, but perfectly ethical IMHO since I did pay for the content.
As for the Kindle, count me as one of the disappointed. I have a Kindle 2 and I find the page turns annoyingly slow and I hate the lack of contrast. Dark grey text on light grey background really irritates my eyes. I understand that later versions are faster and have better contrast but I think I’ll stick with the Kindle app for my iPad.
I don’t love them. I tried, I thought it would be great to have as many books as I wanted where ever I went. But I find I just still prefer my paper books.
I have a Nook but yes, I am definitely with you. I was so very high and mighty when eReaders came out. I had no desire to have one because, to me, reading books was more than just reading the words on the page. I had to feel the book. I loved the smell of them. Yeah, I’ve totally been forced to eat my words. I love my Nook. It’s amazing. Before I got it, I was reading on my iPad (which I use for work) and it was all right, but I definitely prefer reading on the Nook to that. I love the portability of it. When reading a lengthy book, it’s not a pain in the butt to read in bed anymore and it fits in my purse no matter what I’m reading. I don’t have to worry about bringing extra books along on vacation and using up precious suitcase space that could potentially be used for a fifth pair of shoes. Do I need it? No, but I sure do love it.
I particularly like the fact that with a few mouseclicks, I was able to trick my Nook First Gen out to look like a Starfleet PADD. 
SWMBO and I are both Kindle Fire devotees. However, I have a dead tree library of nearly a thousand books and I have no plans to get rid of them. And I still read them, too.
She’s running them through an OCR process, which looks at a scanned page and reconstructs it into ASCII text. It’s subject to typos (it might see rn as m, for instance), but even if you proofread the final product it’s still vastly faster than manually typing the book in.
Exactly - while I can type 92 words per minute, it is nice not having to
I have actually seen typos in purchased books [looking directly at Barnes and Noble] but a quick convert to text, fix and convert back fixes them up. And of course I read the electronic advanced readers copy of Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance and sent Lois Bujold a list of the typos in it so Baen’s editor can fix up their master file.
The main reason we started scanning and converting our old books is that most of them are out of print, and will probably never be back in print, and they are falling apart - mainly mass market paperbacks, a few trade editions, and some cheap hardbacks. Secondarily, my body is going to hell and there will be a time when mrAru’s body will do the same, and we will end up in assisted living and we will have to pare down our belongings to fit into a small apartment and then into a smaller room so we might as well do it now and get it out of the way. Eventually we will probably end up with our clothing, a banker sized box of mementos and whatever the future’s version of a netbook/ipad ends up being. [I figure that in about 20 years just like you can get a dirt cheap clamshell phone and pay by the minute plan for a few bucks a month, you will be able to get some sort of paperback book or hardback book sized computer device that is effectively a cell phone, netbook, ebook reader, individual television that is permanently linked to some sort of universal wifi and is pretty much dirt cheap.] With all of our books as ebooks, and we just buy our new reading as ebooks we will be all set for reading. Though in the future the public library may no longer be a building, but access to something like a scanned in Library of congress. I would love that.
I LOVE my Kindle. Easy to carry, easy to handle, always the same size, and I can set the typeface at a size that is comfortable for me (and I’ve found that at my age, this is a real concern – some of the mass market paperbacks have tiny print and do not contrast well with the grayish pulp pages).
The ONLY bad thing is that I now spend about $40 a month on new titles, when I could get good used books for nothing from Amazon Marketplace. Plus now I face trying to slowly recycle all of my old dead-tree books.
You are not alone.
I have given my Kindle to my daughter. I never got used to it and I think I know why.
I read mostly non-fiction (history, science for idiots, etc.). Very often there are diagrams, maps, pictures, etc. that I need to go back and forth to. Sometimes with the Kindle, I couldn’t even find them in the first place (but I knew they were there because the author referred to them!). And, when I did find them, their quality was often abysmal, almost “unreadable”. Regardless, it was a pain to go back and forth (with a paper book, I could hold the needed page open with another finger).
Even without the diagrams and so forth, I go back and forth a lot when I read a book (“who was that guy again?”, “what was the part about virtual particles”, . . .). It was very awkward to do that on the Kindle. Maybe, in part, it’s due to losing the ‘left page’ versus ‘right page’ memory (“let’s see, it was on the bottom part of a left-hand page about 20 pages ago . . . Bingo! Here it is!”). Can’t do that with a Kindle. Well, not conveniently.
OTOH, it was a real treat a reading a book’s review at noon and having the book in my hands at 12:05. And, as others have said, the dictionary and font size options were also terrific.
I agree it doesn’t work with photos and diagrams. Unless you have a Kindle app on your computer, maybe.
I also don’t think graphics-heavy content works very well on a standard Kindle…however I do think the Search function can make it easier to go back and look stuff up (e.g. “who is this character again?”) than with a paper book.
I split my reading in two: Novels and non-fiction that doesn’t rely on pictures or diagrams are read on the Kindle. Non-fiction that is visual-intensive I still read on paper. It works well for me.
I have multiple E-readers AND DTB’s, each has their advantages, but I find myself reading more on my e-readers
My first readers were the Stanza, Kindle, Nook, and iBooks apps on my iPhone, they’re still there, great for reading on the go, the only drawback to the iPhone reader apps is the lack of screen real estate in either portrait or landscape orientation
My next reader was the B&N Nook Simple Touch e-ink model, and for plain text (no to minimal graphics) e-ink simply stomps all over the iPhone reader apps, it looks like ink on paper, and battery life is simply phenomenal, the NST is as light as a paperback and comfortable to hold, a great reader
My last reader? My iPad with the reader apps like on my iPhone, iBooks, Stanza, Nook, and Kindle, the nicest thing about the iBooks app, and what has made it my preferred reader app on the 'pad is that in landscape orientation, it shows two pages, just like a DTB, and even has a page-turn animation as you turn pages, with the sharpness of the retina display, and the “sepia” color theme, it’s not harsh on the eyes at all
The ebook revolution is amazing. I’d rather read prose on my kindle than anything else, and I’ve been amazed at how quickly my brain has made the switch to expecting to find ebook version of books I want to read, then petulance when they’re not available, or even being willing to wait for a digital version to be released.
Unfortunately, the publishers are for the most part being total goons about the whole thing and trying their damnedest to go the same direction of the record labels. Very frequently, digital files of books are almost as expensive as physical copies, or in increasingly disturbing cases, even more expensive. Too many publishers aren’t properly programming ebooks for navigation and indexing - an ebook isn’t just a lazy OCR scan of a book, it’s a new digital format that needs to be properly navigable, with proper in-text programming for hyperlinking of footnotes and endnotes. It blows my mind to see amazing novels, like Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, presented in expensive ($15) ebook formats without any programming for the endnotes or even chapter breaks. Fuck you, publisher!
Even worse are the publishers that ignorantly limit their ebook files to one device at a time, using a false and outdated scarcity model. Here’s my typical “lifestyle” of usage for an ebook that I purchase:
I read it on my kindle in bed at night or on the toilet in the morning. I read my kindle on the train during my commute, or if it’s tightly packed (when isn’t it?) I switch to the kindle app on my iPhone, which has automatically synced to where I left off when reading on the toilet. I get to work and load up my book in the Kindle Cloud Reader in a tab in my web browser and read chunks of it during downtime during the day. On my lunch break, I’ll sit outside and read it on my kindle again (automatically synced to where I left off on the desktop), transfer back to the desktop after lunch, switch back to my kindle or the iPhone app on my commute home, and then read it on my kindle at home or in bed in the evening. I destroy books this way, and having that transportability and agility of switching between all devices while keeping the content synced is a major, major bonus and incentive for me when it comes to buying an ebook.Then why the human ass are publishers trying to fight this sort of usage with restrictive and misguided DRM permissions!?
I’m excited to see more publishers get on board and start doing it right. I envision a future where every hard copy of a book automatically has an included/free digital download of the title in the ebook format of your choice, maybe via a QR code on it or holding something on it up to a webcam. I’m not paying again for one of the thousands of physical books I’ve bought over the years - I’ll just torrent those titles if they’re available. Likewise, it’ll be interesting to see if publishers start offering cheap “legacy bundles” - “every Nabokov book in one bundle for $9.99!” It’s absurd when I look on amazon for a legacy or ubiquitous title, see the ebook for 9.99, and then 500 used and new corporeal copies "starting at .01." Fix it, fix it, fix it.
I’ve been getting edging closer and closer to buying a Kindle for several months now.
But I just took about ten giant steps back away from the edge.
A couple of months back, I saw that an author I liked was publishing a new novel only in an e-book format. Not expensive - only seven dollars - but I don’t have an e-book reader. Somebody here told me that I didn’t actually need an e-book reader to read e-books - I could download a free program from Amazon that would let me read Kindle books on my PC.
So I decided to give it a try. I downloaded the free PC reader and a few free Kindle books to try it out. It worked so I bought the novel I wanted and even bought a couple of others.
I just clicked on my “Kindle for PCs” program and guess what happened? I got a message saying the reader had “expired”. There was certainly no mention of an expiration when I downloaded it.
Now, I can accept the idea that I don’t get a lot of obligation from downloading a free program and free books. If they cancelled that without warning, I couldn’t really bitch too much. But dammit, I paid Amazon for some of those books and it was in the expectation that I would be able to read them in the future.
I’m guessing Amazon thought this was a good idea. Give people a free trial of how the Kindle would work on their PC and some of them will buy an actual Kindle. But it’s had the exact opposite effect on me and I doubt I’m the only one. They’ve highlighted a glaring flaw with the entire Kindle idea - you don’t really own the books you pay for.
If I buy a book, I own it. It doesn’t matter if the place I bought it from changes its mind or decides it wants more money from me or goes out of business - I have possession of the book and they can’t take that back from me.
But suppose I pay a couple hundred dollars for a Kindle and then spend several hundred more dollars buying books from Amazon. At any moment, I could have it all taken away. Amazon might decide I should pay for an upgrade, it might decide it’s going to sell a new reader and close down the Kindle, it might just decide e-book readers were a fad, or maybe Amazon will go bankrupt. I could turn on my Kindle one morning and find there’s nothing there.
So I think I’ll stick with books for a few more years.
Every mention I can find of the Kindle for PC program “expiring” indicates that it’s just a notice that you need to update the program. While there are unresolved issues with ownership of digital media, it’s really not that hard to protect yourself from all of the issues that you’re afraid of.
Much like people who rely on glasses to read never truly own paper books, since they always need some other technology to read them.
You have a big misconception here. When you buy the book from Amazon, you have it as a file. It’s yours. Amazon cannot reach into your computer and erase it (it can reach into your Kindle, supposedly, if you have wireless connection turned on, but not into your computer, if you sync your books with your computer with something like Calibre).
If Amazon goes out of business tomorrow and all Kindles self-destruct, I will still have all my books on my computer and will be able to read them on a Nook, or an IPad or any other e-reader either now or in the future.
And I don’t ever even turn my wireless connection on. Like I keep saying, I download my books to my PC and then to my Kindle. Amazon is not going to physically reach into my computer and take my books, and if they did that, you know there would be a huge outcry.
You are not going to turn your Kindle on one morning and “find nothing there”. It may be possible they stop selling new books for it, or decide it’s not a valid proposition, but this isn’t iTunes where they always have a hand on your shoulder (and let me note, they haven’t reached into my computer and taken all my songs, either, and they’re far bigger dicks).
I don’t even “sync” my books; I manually copy them into the Kindle. If people would only read the thread…
Admittedly the diagrams and maps don’t work too well. But I almost never read stuff with diagrams and maps!