Google Set To Tackle eBook Market 170
Mike writes "Google's latest decision to try its hand selling eBooks promises to make life in the eBook world more interesting, and will likely spur a standards war that in the end may prove beneficial to many consumers. Google's eBook store will pit it directly against Amazon and Amazon's Kindle — an enormously popular eBook reader. This will push many companies to create eBook readers to take advantage of Google's new store, and will flood the market with tough choices. Google does not have a dedicated eBook reader yet, but it seems a logical next step for the search giant."
Re:Cost (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm...no.
Kindle doesn't work outside the US, period. We Canadians don't get it either(though I suspect that has something to do with our world-renowned awful telcos and monopolistic nationally propped up book broker Indigo more then anything else.)
Re:eBook Reader? Why bother? (Score:3, Informative)
Always the same back and forth on this topic every time eBooks are mentioned.
Someone says smartphones/PDAs are better, then someone else (like me) responds that the benefit of an eInk display is:
1) There is no backlight, which helps alleviate eyestrain during long reading sessions.
2) There is no screen refresh, so you can read for a very long time without killing your battery.
Having read extensively on a homebrew-enabled PSP with a LCD screen and now on a Sony PRS-700, I know that the LCD screen does hurt my eyes and the eInk screen does not.
baen has no drm (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why do we need stores? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm probably missing something obvious, but I have yet to understand why we need to insert a middleman store into the chain between producer and consumer. It seems to me cheaper and more efficient for the publisher of a book (or the author himself) to provide downloads directly.
One benefit I can see is that it gives you a single place to go get books from. I don't have to remember the web sites for 100 authors, or 50 publishers. Instead, I can just remember a single site which aggregates all the books together. Sure, I'll end up paying a higher monetary cost due to the middleman, but presumably the time cost savings is enough to me that it is worthwhile.
It's sort like having an iPhone App Store instead of hundreds of independent software publishers to download from. Another benefit is that the App Store provides common payment processing infrastructure, which keeps the cost of implementing this from being duplicated for every software publisher.
Re:The real questions is: (Score:4, Informative)
Can I have it? It apparently supports PDF, TXT, RTF, EPUB, LIT, PPT, WOLF, DOC, CHM, FB2, HTML, DJVU, MP3, TIFF, JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG, RAR, ZIP, and MOBI. I can get pretty much any book I want in one of those formats or something that can be converted into one of them by Calibre or Stanza Desktop.
Re:Obvious next step... (Score:3, Informative)
Google is not a hardware company
Not strictly true. http://www.google.com/enterprise/pdf/gsa_datasheet.pdf [google.com]
Re:Forget about proprietary eBook formats (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure why your post was modded Insightful as you've obviously haven't looked into this at all. Most eBook readers support unencrypted PDF. There are also conversion utilities to convert PDF for various ebook formats so that your device doesn't have to do the formatting on the fly.
I see that there's a CHM to HTML conversion app (Mac only it seems, and another commercial one), and with the HTML in hand, you can create an ePub book using a program called Calibre.
It's pretty messy as far as formats and conversion utilities right now, and you have to sort a lot of it out, but there are ways to read your stuff which shouldn't be too difficult for a techie.
Re:Obvious next step... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Forget about proprietary eBook formats (Score:2, Informative)
The eBook device you describe is BeBook [mybebook.com]. It costs 300 EUR and reads PDF, DjVu, JPG, PNG, GIF, TXT, DOC, EPUB, Mobi PRC, HTML, CHM, LIT, FB2, and many other formats. It is Linux-based and the firmware is open-source, but there is also OpenInkpot [openinkpot.org] which is openly hackable so you can even write your own reader for whatever format you want. Plus, the device works all over the world, and it accepts an SDHC card up to 32GB, but it also has 512MB of flash memory built-in. its battery lasts for about one month (yes, it's a 4 weeks battery!) and fully charges via USB within half an hour. Much better, the company that makes the firmware allows you to communicate with the software programmers and request features, fixes, etc yourself for the next version.
PDF is a print format (Score:5, Informative)
PDF is a terrible format for ebooks. It's designed to instruct a printer how to draw on paper of a specifc, fixed size. An ebook format needs to deal with different screen sizes (possibly wildly different - I read ebooks on my 1280x800 laptop screen and my 177x220 phone screen) and different text sizes (my long-sighted father is going to want larger text in his ebooks than I do). PDF doesn't allow for the kind of reflow that a good ebook reader is going to employ.
Re:Obvious next step... (Score:4, Informative)
I had a look at the E-Book Reader Matrix [mobileread.com]. I decided to buy a Bookeen Cybook. It's cheaper than the Kindle and it supports DRM-free formats as well. I am using it to read TXT, PDF, and Mobipocket documents. It's not a free software device though. The applications for displaying PDFs, MobiPocket, ... are proprietary. However you can download the source code of the customised ARMLinux (as required by GPL) from their website. The battery charge supposedly allows for 8000 page flips. But you can't help people looking at you strangely when you do anything intellectual.