Celebrating "Read an eBook Week" - Finding eBooks

As I was reviewing my Reader, I noticed that two of my favorite eBooks were not there ... Isabella Lucy Bird Bishop's A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains and Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. (Turns out they were on an older Rocket Book.) So I went searching for them and ran into the Google Books collection. It turns out that classics like these are available for download in either a PDF or an epub format. Great.

This discovery led me to track down some other eBooks, and a slight download orgy ... reminds me of my first visit to Tower Records on Mass Avenue. :). Acquired were several books by Lafcadio Hearn (which I've read as "book" books), Zadock Thompson (which I didn't know existed), and my very first ebook ... Nathan Perkin's A narrative of a tour through the state of Vermont from April 27 to June 12, 1789.

Wrinkles.

Finding Zadock Thompson's History of Vermont: natural, civil, and statistical, in three parts was somewhat of a surprise. It points out one of the peculiarities of books ... the text is usually in two column on a page, is interspersed with tables, diagrams, charts, illustrations, and it's hugh! Google Books has this available as a 260 Mb or so PDF file. Not sure I want to try it on my Reader, but will definitely try it on my iPad.

The ease of finding Google Books points ou the peculiarities of book stores ... Apple is going to have a challenge matching the ease of use of Amazon and Google. Add Kurzweil's Blio reader software to the mix, and we're in for "interoperability" fun.

Celebrating "Read an eBook Week" - Firing up my trusty Reader

The bulk of Monday's work was ebook maintenance.

The battery on my Sony 505 had expired again, so recharging the battery was the first thing.

While doing that, I had decided to download the book I had selected to read - Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe. No particular reason except that it seemed like a nice break from Kokoro (more on that later, since I now realize it was also an ebook or two!) both in setting and time.

But I lucked out.

Eastern Standard Tribe, http://craphound.com/est/, besides being available in a wide variety of etext formats ... from plain text to epub to tiny jpeg images suitable for an ipodish book ... it comes with a couple of bonus chapters ... a text interview with a German magazine and an mp3 version of the interview also, not to mention a website / blog. The only thing missing seems to be a manga version ... :)

So I downloaded the epub version (339 KB) and the text version (305 KB).

While waiting for my Sony Reader to charge, I also scouted around for something else, and fount two short stories that sounded like fun, Kurt Vonnegut's 2 B R 0 2 B and Doctorow's I, Row-Boat.

When it had charged, I connected it to my MacBook and went about getting the books into the Reader. Halfway through the process, the Reader software says it needs to to update itself, so I said ... OK. And then immediately get error messages about my device being unplugged, maybe files were lost, etc ...

Luckily (!!) all of that was mainly sloppy programming work, the reader was fine. But since the reader itself is slow, the Mac software is slow, and the whole process is unnecessarily gruesome. It's easy to see why the Kindle has succeed when the Reader has not - the simple act of getting a book ready to read should indeed be simple.

So anyway, the Reader is loaded, and I'm my reading way.

Celebrating "Read an eBook Week".

On Sunday, I ran into an announcement celebrating March 7 th through March 13 th and "Read an eBook Week" (http://ebookweek.com/). Since this is Spring Break week at the University and I just finished reading Soseki's Kokoro, I though this would a fun mini project. (In the back of my mind, of course, are the coming adventures of the iPad, and I thought it would be good to brush up my classical ebook skills.

Alas, my calendar runs from Monday through Sunday, so I'll shift the celebration and my notes a bit :).

Apple announces the iPad ...

Yesterday, January 27, Steve Jobs announced the new iPad. (Image souce: Justin Sullivan, Getty Images, via USA Today) Needless to say, this sparked lots of reader commentary, on twitter, on blogs, and in comments to online articles. A lot of people were enthusiastic (the entry level $499 price tag was a nice surprise!), but a lot of people were either disappointed or hostile.

Except for the price being somewhat lower than I expected ($600), it is not a really surprising machine, but it is a very nice one.

What we learned:


1. the iPad is not a phone. no mike, no speaker, no camera, no phone company contract.

2. the iPad is not a computer. no keyboard, no mouse, no disk, no CD, no USB, no SD slot, no windows.

3. the iPad is a memory appliance. wifi, pay as you go 3d data, bing, google, wikipedia, youtube ... amazon, itunes, iphoto, ibook(store) ...

4. the iPad is an eBook. it is not a digital book, yet.

What we didn't learn:

1. A lot of folks are scared about "but how can i multitask?" ... "how can i do video conferencing" ... i suspect that lqck of these features actually help sell the device. This lack may make us realize that "multitasking" is something we really don't want to do ... expecially in the "reader" modes of use. Though from the reactions, it may be that there is a wide audience that doesn't understand what "multitasking" means in the realm of the iPod and iPhone.

2. A lot of people really wanted a "table computer", rather than a new category of device. It will be fun to watch what the Android and Windows markets come up with.

On the side:

1. The iPad sports a custom chip, called the A4.

2. The pay-as-you-go option for AT&T comes across as a nice surprise. (The fact that it also comes with "Free ATT wifi" (your milage may vary), is also nice.)

Image source: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2010/01/live-from-apples-event-in-san-francisco/1?csp=hf

"A" is for "Android"

Look!
Up in the sky!
It's a bird!
No, it's a plane!
No, it's the Android!

Perhaps it's the time of year.
Or maybe it's a resurrection of the Great Cargo Cult.

Last month, when Google gave some (how many?) employees an unbranded "Google Phone", the net went wild with speculation ... does this mean "free phones for all." The speculation was fueled a bit more with Google's "free wifi for travelers" at selected airports.

Things have settled down to a screaming pace as folks await a Google "event", scheduled for January 5th, just before the Consumer Electronics Show. Most folks expect that this will focus on an Android partnership between Google and HTC, perhaps others.

Two big areas of interest are "what does this mean for Google?" and "what does this mean for the rest of us?"

For Google, does this mean that Google will become a phone company, manufacturing (or branding) a hardware device? Will they become a telephone company, offering (or branding) 3G or 4G or 5G service? Perhaps some data only service?

For the rest of us, does this mean low cost phones? Or will we have to wait for the "clone" manufacturers to ramp up their versions of this model. Will we see, somehow, a low cost mobile communication service, something for $10 or $20 a month, rather than the $80 - $100 a month AT&T and Verizon want?

Or will the announcement be mostly a bust - something that will be interesting in principle, but very blurry around the edges. Something like "Chrome" or "Wave." ?

As the line of questions indicate, I'm interested, but not conviced one way or another.