Survey about e-readers

[Uva]

At the University of Valladolid (Department of Business and Marketing) we are conducting a survey to find out what advantages people see in electronic books and other similar reading devices (e-readers or i-Pads). We are keen to know what you think, and would be grateful if you could fill out the following questionnaire.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF E-BOOKS, E-READERS OR IPADS? http://bit.ly/HnGS84

This research is not for business purposes and any information provided will be treated anonymously and for purely academic purposes.

[mal4mac]

I'm still wavering about buying a Kindle. Being able to get difficult-to-find classics for free is a big plus point for me - for instance, all of Chekhov's short stories as translated by Garnet. (They are available in an expensive paperback set - but that's the price of a Kindle!) But with a good public library nearby, do I really need one? Do I need 'complete Chekhov' that much?

[Charles Darnay]

I've found that Kindle hasn't been great with "hard-to-find" classics. You can get the major ones for for free, which I suppose is a plus, but the layout is often too atrocious to do anything with. Kindle does have the best selection of any of the e-readers I have looked into - but no better than a good bookstore or library.

[Kafka's Crow]

Why is an 'eReader' translated as 'Kindle' which is an over-priced product with no extra features and nothing that other (cheaper) eReaders can't do. This Kindle-mania will only give Amazon a monopoly over the ebook market which will be a bad thing for every one concerned. I would not trust a company with my library with this on their record:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/te.../18amazon.html

Same goes for Sony who have this on their record:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BM...ootkit_scandal

I recently bought a Kobo Touch for less than half the price of a Kindle Touch and I am perfectly happy with it. Free classics are available on all eReaders, I don't know why Amazon make such a big deal out of it:
http://www.staples.co.uk/SearchEngine-kobo+touch

[Charles Darnay]

I have found the Kindle's selection better than Kobo's. Also, I think Kindle is more globally available, but I cannot confirm this.

Either way, none of them compare to the ink and paper so I don't know why I spend the time trying to defend eReaders.

[JBI]

Why is an 'eReader' translated as 'Kindle' which is an over-priced product with no extra features and nothing that other (cheaper) eReaders can't do. This Kindle-mania will only give Amazon a monopoly over the ebook market which will be a bad thing for every one concerned. I would not trust a company with my library with this on their record:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/te.../18amazon.html

Same goes for Sony who have this on their record:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BM...ootkit_scandal

I recently bought a Kobo Touch for less than half the price of a Kindle Touch and I am perfectly happy with it. Free classics are available on all eReaders, I don't know why Amazon make such a big deal out of it:
http://www.staples.co.uk/SearchEngine-kobo+touch

In terms of hardware, Sony stuff is as pricey as Kindle, I would imagine. The hardware on the kindle isn't too shabby, and, as they still let you sideload anything you want onto it using Calibre, it becomes an infinite resource of public-domain and stolen ebooks.

My real quibble is not with the monopoly, but rather that the god damn thing does not handle other languages. I want to read my Chinese collections in a normal way, but the only way to get them on there is in small print pdf formart, which is so difficult to read.

I guess I will just buy a cheap knockoff when I head back to China, or in Taiwan, which will do the same thing, and allow me to get the other things I want. Still, you would think they would let the world go international with the product, but no. Nothing. They use the device only to market crappy romance novels at the least interested reader.

As for the Kobo, that looks to be roughly the same price as the Kindle in the States (they do not sell Kindle's for the normal price in Canada, only Kobos for slightly more than you seem to get off of Staples). Still, they do virtually the same thing, I wouldn't be surprised if they merge eventually.

As a Canadian, I applaud the use of Kobos, except for the fact that they overcharge us for them in Canada, making buying a Kindle over the border cheaper than buying a local product. Tsk tsk. I smell Collusion.

[kiki1982]

Well, I didn't know that about Chinese yet. That's annoying.

For me, there is no real disadvantage or advantage to it, apart from the fact that I like the feel of a real book. Nice and romantic .
But, as long as electronic technology is not permanent, I regard a paper book as an investment. Even if it is not cheap (price is one of the reasons why I read English instead of Dutch, my mother tongue), fifty years on, I will still be able to access it, provided my house doesn't burn down, there isn't a flood or I don't lose it.
If I upload an electronic book on such an electronic device, there is a good chance that it is either out of date or that it is no longer accessible due to degradation.

So no e-readers for me yet.

[Paulclem]

Well, I didn't know that about Chinese yet. That's annoying.

For me, there is no real disadvantage or advantage to it, apart from the fact that I like the feel of a real book. Nice and romantic .
But, as long as electronic technology is not permanent, I regard a paper book as an investment. Even if it is not cheap (price is one of the reasons why I read English instead of Dutch, my mother tongue), fifty years on, I will still be able to access it, provided my house doesn't burn down, there isn't a flood or I don't lose it.
If I upload an electronic book on such an electronic device, there is a good chance that it is either out of date or that it is no longer accessible due to degradation.

So no e-readers for me yet.

With the Kindle your books are held on your Amazon account, and so they are still available if your Kindle breaks or is stolen.

[kiki1982]

Oh, of course, otherwise you could take a back-up anyway, but my point was that in fifty years that Kindle book is no longer available because it is too old. The paper one is still standing on the bookshelf with all the letters in it. (although I have heard that the new paper is not as good anymore as the one before, something to do with chlorine?)

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

I like them. I've had Sony reader, Kimdles, and now I mainly use my iPad. I have a different main reason, though--I'm disabled, and part of my disability is with my hands; they're deformed. Because of this it can be difficult to read big heavy books, especially when the binding is tight. Plus, I like being able to look up the definition of a word by tapping it. And, with an iPad, Wikipedia is only seconds away if I need to looks something up.

Still, I still love regular books. I like the whole paper thing. It's weird, but the experience between reading an ereader (whether backlit or not) and an actual book is different--reading a book feels somehow purer.

I've found that Kindle hasn't been great with "hard-to-find" classics. You can get the major ones for for free, which I suppose is a plus, but the layout is often too atrocious to do anything with.

Yep, this is unfortunately true. If you're okay with line breaks within paragraphs and numerous typos, they're fine. If that'll bother you, forget it. On top of that, sometimes classics are incorrect. For example, when I wanted to read Frankenstein, I learned from the reviews that what they have listed as the original version (there are two for Frankenstein, I can't remember the days) wasn't. I've also seen translations of foreign works that have whole sections deleted, Guy de Mauppasant's being the latest of which I ran across.

Why is an 'eReader' translated as 'Kindle' which is an over-priced product with no extra features and nothing that other (cheaper) eReaders can't do. This Kindle-mania will only give Amazon a monopoly over the ebook market which will be a bad thing for every one concerned. I would not trust a company with my library with this on their record:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/te.../18amazon.html

Same goes for Sony who have this on their record:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BM...ootkit_scandal

I recently bought a Kobo Touch for less than half the price of a Kindle Touch and I am perfectly happy with it. Free classics are available on all eReaders, I don't know why Amazon make such a big deal out of it:
http://www.staples.co.uk/SearchEngine-kobo+touch

There's an ereader cheaper than the 100$ Kindle of the same quality screen?

The reasons why Kindle dominate are simple: the devices are cheaper but are still of a high quality, and they have the biggest selection.

[Charles Darnay]

Well, I didn't know that about Chinese yet. That's annoying.

For me, there is no real disadvantage or advantage to it, apart from the fact that I like the feel of a real book. Nice and romantic .
But, as long as electronic technology is not permanent, I regard a paper book as an investment. Even if it is not cheap (price is one of the reasons why I read English instead of Dutch, my mother tongue), fifty years on, I will still be able to access it, provided my house doesn't burn down, there isn't a flood or I don't lose it.
If I upload an electronic book on such an electronic device, there is a good chance that it is either out of date or that it is no longer accessible due to degradation.

So no e-readers for me yet.

Umberto Eco makes this point in This is not the end of the book. You can read books printed hundreds of years ago if they have been kept properly, but digital formats change so rapidly. If you have a floppy disk with information on it - good luck accessing it today. ePub will unfortunately not last - it is very primitive compared to what will come. And when that happens, all your eBooks are gone.

If you are a book collector (of paper books) you are in complete control of your collection (as much as naturally possible.) With eBooks, you are basically loaning your books from Amazon, Apple, Sony &c. Once they go belly-up, your books go with them.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Umberto Eco makes this point in This is not the end of the book. You can read books printed hundreds of years ago if they have been kept properly, but digital formats change so rapidly. If you have a floppy disk with information on it - good luck accessing it today. ePub will unfortunately not last - it is very primitive compared to what will come. And when that happens, all your eBooks are gone.

If you are a book collector (of paper books) you are in complete control of your collection (as much as naturally possible.) With eBooks, you are basically loaning your books from Amazon, Apple, Sony &c. Once they go belly-up, your books go with them.

Yep, this is all true . . . and also troubling, because all physical media is going out the door. CDs are almost dead, DVDs and Blue Ray players will soon be a thing of the past. At least with MP3s you're downloading the information, so it can't be taken away from you (still, it's a digital file, much harder to preserve than a physical CD, though those will be useless in the future, too). Movies will most likely turn into a completely streamed medium, the Netflix library of movies is ever-growing and extremely popular. I think physical books will take a long time to go, but they will.

[JBI]

Yep, this is all true . . . and also troubling, because all physical media is going out the door. CDs are almost dead, DVDs and Blue Ray players will soon be a thing of the past. At least with MP3s you're downloading the information, so it can't be taken away from you (still, it's a digital file, much harder to preserve than a physical CD, though those will be useless in the future, too). Movies will most likely turn into a completely streamed medium, the Netflix library of movies is ever-growing and extremely popular. I think physical books will take a long time to go, but they will.

A Library can burn down, as was the case in much of the manuscript's history, or books can be forgotten, or destroyed, or decay from bad pulp. There is a myth that somehow digital is less stable, but it is so easy to burn books, that one must think the idea of the internet being taken down as less likely than a library of some grand size having a large-scale fire.

As for preservation, well, my digital records of text are still fine. When technology changes, likewise I will upgrade my text to be assessed in new formats - the same way books went from scroll to codex to printed books - I can change my library from text to pdf, to epub, to whatever.

The technology is only getting better - the emergence of CDs did not kill music, therefore I see no reason that something cannot take over. There will always be people who argue vinyl is better, but for most of us, even CDs are becoming things of the past.

Take a look at the VHS for instance. Who still releases new ones? The trend has been to convert movies into digital format, a form that is much more easily preserved. Entire archives will be converted.

The very way we access information is being reformatted. With it industry is being changed too.

North America, and the Western World in general is slower to pick up on it. Asia right now has excellent markets where books are bought and sold in serial format similar to the 19th century newspaper serials online. with it comes artists who need not go through major publishing, and can rely on their readers to go through their books for sales. Such direct contact and pay-per-word transactions put the text back where it should be.

Digitalization is not a bad thing. It is unavoidable. Print technology costs money, web hosting for documents is virtually free. A text file takes up virtually no room.

The ones who should be complaining are the major publishing firms, as they rely on inflating prices for profit. With all the free texts available, such a middle-man is no longer necessary. Authors will charge what they want, and publish online. They will be awarded cash for their work, and readers will have access from them. Amazon already makes more money in sales of electronic books (inflated in price, I might add) than they do in physical books.

I suspect eventually even the whole idea of buying books will become dated. Soon people will just get sponsorships from publishing in the form of advertisement grants. Youtube has already done that, and soon it will be the norm, I suspect. Charging for the book will become less realistic than charging for the space around or inside the book. I bet companies will even pay to have items promoted within books, as they pay to have merchandise sold within rap songs.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

A Library can burn down, as was the case in much of the manuscript's history, or books can be forgotten, or destroyed, or decay from bad pulp. There is a myth that somehow digital is less stable, but it is so easy to burn books, that one must think the idea of the internet being taken down as less likely than a library of some grand size having a large-scale fire.

As for preservation, well, my digital records of text are still fine. When technology changes, likewise I will upgrade my text to be assessed in new formats - the same way books went from scroll to codex to printed books - I can change my library from text to pdf, to epub, to whatever.

The technology is only getting better - the emergence of CDs did not kill music, therefore I see no reason that something cannot take over. There will always be people who argue vinyl is better, but for most of us, even CDs are becoming things of the past.

Take a look at the VHS for instance. Who still releases new ones? The trend has been to convert movies into digital format, a form that is much more easily preserved. Entire archives will be converted.

The very way we access information is being reformatted. With it industry is being changed too.

North America, and the Western World in general is slower to pick up on it. Asia right now has excellent markets where books are bought and sold in serial format similar to the 19th century newspaper serials online. with it comes artists who need not go through major publishing, and can rely on their readers to go through their books for sales. Such direct contact and pay-per-word transactions put the text back where it should be.

Digitalization is not a bad thing. It is unavoidable. Print technology costs money, web hosting for documents is virtually free. A text file takes up virtually no room.

The ones who should be complaining are the major publishing firms, as they rely on inflating prices for profit. With all the free texts available, such a middle-man is no longer necessary. Authors will charge what they want, and publish online. They will be awarded cash for their work, and readers will have access from them. Amazon already makes more money in sales of electronic books (inflated in price, I might add) than they do in physical books.

I suspect eventually even the whole idea of buying books will become dated. Soon people will just get sponsorships from publishing in the form of advertisement grants. Youtube has already done that, and soon it will be the norm, I suspect. Charging for the book will become less realistic than charging for the space around or inside the book. I bet companies will even pay to have items promoted within books, as they pay to have merchandise sold within rap songs.

I'm not arguing with any of that. I just like actually having something physical. I love that I have 33 GB of music on my computer, but I don't feel as connected with that as I do with the 500 or so CDs we have in the house.

Also, I didn't say media becoming digital was going to destroy music or literature or anything, really. All I'm saying is that the ownership isn't as secure. Soon everything we own will all be stored in 'The Cloud"--I suspect that in time even downloading things will become a thing of the past--we'll just buy the rights to stream something. There won't be any real "ownership" of anything, just like we see with Amazon and the Kindle. We buy the books to read, but we don't own them--Amazon can just decide to delete everyone's library if they so wished and no one could do a thing (I'm sure it's within their rights, written in small print somewhere it's not even visible unless you go looking for it), and it's probably the same with Apple and iTunes. I don't think this will happen, but I don't like the possibility that it could.

[Charles Darnay]

A Library can burn down, as was the case in much of the manuscript's history, or books can be forgotten, or destroyed, or decay from bad pulp. There is a myth that somehow digital is less stable, but it is so easy to burn books, that one must think the idea of the internet being taken down as less likely than a library of some grand size having a large-scale fire.

This is why I added the "as much as naturally possible" clause. I have suffered more computer crashes than library fires/flood/disasters (which is never).

As for preservation, well, my digital records of text are still fine. When technology changes, likewise I will upgrade my text to be assessed in new formats - the same way books went from scroll to codex to printed books - I can change my library from text to pdf, to epub, to whatever.

The technology is only getting better - the emergence of CDs did not kill music, therefore I see no reason that something cannot take over. There will always be people who argue vinyl is better, but for most of us, even CDs are becoming things of the past.

Take a look at the VHS for instance. Who still releases new ones? The trend has been to convert movies into digital format, a form that is much more easily preserved. Entire archives will be converted.

The very way we access information is being reformatted. With it industry is being changed too.

North America, and the Western World in general is slower to pick up on it. Asia right now has excellent markets where books are bought and sold in serial format similar to the 19th century newspaper serials online. with it comes artists who need not go through major publishing, and can rely on their readers to go through their books for sales. Such direct contact and pay-per-word transactions put the text back where it should be.

Digitalization is not a bad thing. It is unavoidable. Print technology costs money, web hosting for documents is virtually free. A text file takes up virtually no room.

The ones who should be complaining are the major publishing firms, as they rely on inflating prices for profit. With all the free texts available, such a middle-man is no longer necessary. Authors will charge what they want, and publish online. They will be awarded cash for their work, and readers will have access from them. Amazon already makes more money in sales of electronic books (inflated in price, I might add) than they do in physical books.

I suspect eventually even the whole idea of buying books will become dated. Soon people will just get sponsorships from publishing in the form of advertisement grants. Youtube has already done that, and soon it will be the norm, I suspect. Charging for the book will become less realistic than charging for the space around or inside the book. I bet companies will even pay to have items promoted within books, as they pay to have merchandise sold within rap songs.

All very true. But the problem is, in some cases, while the media manages to survive the shift in technology, your media does not. If you have a sizable VHS collection, you either have to make sure you have a suitable VCR or re-purchase the movies you want on DVD/Blue-Ray/Digital form. You will never have to re-purchase a book in order to use it if it has not suffered natural damage.