"...never really took off"? Yesterday, Gemstar (the company that bought and promptly ruined the once-leading Rocket e-Book technology with their proprietary format hysteria) announced:
"Effective immediately, we will no longer be selling eBook devices. To enable current users to purchase additional content, we will continue to sell content until 5 PM PDT on July 16, 2003, at which point we will cease to sell all books and periodical issues."
One of the last titles you can get is Hillary's memoirs of the Clinton presidency. Load it in your Rocket e-Book and put it in a time capsule.

Gemstar make it impossible to publish Video+ codes legally without a license. And they refuse to grant licenses (strangely, they are granted to their in-house TV publications...) The sooner they crash-and-die, the better. that name leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

Edited by author 06-19-2003 10:42 PM
I thought the Vaio was the laptop?

I own a Clié, an older model in the series (PEG series) that's served me well. I bought cheap copies of The Scarlet Letter and Huck Finn from Palm Digital Media so I could just leave the paper copies in my school locker, and catch up on the reading whenever I needed to. (i.e. in class :-D)

In addition to Palm Digital Media, good places to pick up PalmReader or DOC-format e-book files are PerfectBound (I think it's run by Random House? Simon & Schuster? forget.) and the free library at Qvadis.

(Oh, and I checked Essential Blogging out of the library yesterday. Nice stuff, Cory. ;-) )

Edited by author 06-20-2003 01:46 AM
Dedicated reading hardware is probably a lost cause. There are plenty of companies planning to introduce new ones in the next year, but improving display resolution in general-purpose machines could easily keep these from selling many units. You don't need very many MIPS to run e-book software.

My hardware of choice is one of the Sony lightweights, with 1024x768 on a 12" screen but less than 3 lbs. (I could go smaller but then the keyboard is harder to use.) I use it to demo our e-books in Acrobat eBook or Microsoft Reader; the side-by-side display is almost exactly the same page and print size as a paperback book.

Two good places to learn about what's happening in e-books are knowbetter.com and ebookweb.org.

There are lots of good books available from good publishers. And you don't have to limit yourself to Amazon and B&N.com; good online retailers include Powells.com (the online arm of the great bookstore in Portland), eBooks.com, &etc.

And there are thousands of free e-books (of varying quality) to be found at sites like BlackMask.com, the Gutenberg project (as etexts you have to convert), the U of Virginia....

You should be reading e-books instead of wasting your life downloading video clips.

And you should check out our e-books, too: SF&F, Adventure, History...

By the way, maybe he did mean his Vaio; Palm Digital makes readers for Mac and Windows machines as well as Palm and PocketPC PDAs.

Michael Ward
Hidden Knowledge
http://www.hidden-knowledge.com

I always assumed they never really took off - not due to technology - but due to publishers being reluctant to release digital copies, due to piracy concerns.

in re SixDifferentWays' comment:

There are thousands and thousands of titles out there, from most of the major publishers. New books (including those at the top of the charts) are usually available as e-books when the print editions come out.

SOME publishers haven't yet figured out that this makes sense for them. They will, in the fullness of time.

And some publishers, like Baen Books, have realized that DRM is pointless, and instead use social engineering and community pressure to keep their books from being pirated.

Michael Ward
Hidden Knowledge

Sorry -- I did mean Clie, not Vaio. It is easy for me to confuse these two unpronounceable names.

E-books haven't lived up to tech-heads' high expectations because old-fashioned paper books are better. Here's why:
1. They're portable.
2. They're energy-efficient, needing no batteries or electric outlets.
3. They're RAM-- you can access any chapter or page at will.
4. They're interactive-- you can underline passages and write in the margins.
5. They're self-contained-- you don't need any other hardware or software to read them.
6. They're made of renewable resources.
7. They're recyclable.
I would like to see e-newspapers replace the wasteful printed newspapers. If newspapers offered free hardware to everyone who subscribed to an e-paper, people could download the paper every day, making it unnecessary to cut down thousands of trees to make a product that is obsolete in 24 hours.

Hey, excitableboy why do you diss e-books, but want to see e-newspapers? Don't real paper newspapers have all the same advantages you list for real paper books (/m9)?

You complain about the need "to cut down thousands of trees" for newspapers, but you say paper books are "made of renewable resources". Which is it?