E-books are not the future - yet | Bangkok Post: tech

SLOAN Ranger

If you want to get a quick idea of why the world has not yet completed its move from publications printed on dead trees to digital books, magazines and newspapers, just take a look behind the hype of e-books.

So long as book publishers gouge the public for books which require neither material nor labour to copy, resistance to digital readers will remain high.

I've just spent a painful couple of days investigating whether, as advocates claim, we are soon going to stop chopping trees and start reading books in digital format. One of the claims is we are going to read them on our computers.

Here's the fact. No we're not. Maybe somewhere down the human evolutionary chain here will be a change in our chemicals and maybe my great-great-great granddaughter will decide differently.

But today's books and today's computers go together like wine and Pepsi. Reading a book on a computer screen is at least as upsetting as a disco cover of We Will Rock You.

Amazon.com has sold more dedicated e-book readers than anyone, ever, in history. And to sell more of their Kindle machines, they give away Kindle software that can (allegedly) display electronic books on your computer, too.

And, of course, since this modern-day version of Gillette plans to get rich via e-book sales, the free PC version of the Kindle lets you buy e-books.

Amazon has made a big error by releasing this software. It does about a tenth of what any PDF reader or word processor can do in displaying a document and it is so unimpressive that I am sure that Kindle sales from satisified Kindle PC users will, within a couple of years, dwindle to zero.

Because of my editor's policy of rewarding software reviewers, I obtained a few free e-books for the test.

Older books which are out of copyright are available in Amazon's proprietary format for free from various sources, along the lines of the Gutenberg Project's admirable attempt to spread reading worldwide.

The Kindle for the PC (or Apple, or Linux) turns out to be as exciting as a disco featuring the Greatest Hits of Tiny Tim, with all the spice and "wow" factor of a tin of khao thom (a product which actually exists).

Let me back up just a bit.

I think the actual Kindle is a nice little idea, and when it gets a lot better, and hugely cheaper, it could become the device that actually turns people from paper books and journals to electronic versions.

But Kindle for PC is an actual error. Anyone who uses this program will actually be turned off electronic books.

Let me count the ironies.

Probably the biggest one is that about the only actually exciting thing you can do with Kindle for PC is buy electronic books from Amazon. And that is the last thing you want to do once you get inside this static, unmoving program. You can load a book, go to the next (or previous) page of the book - and that's about it.

Consider Notepad. You can change the display font. You can copy a paragraph or a couple of pages you like and paste them somewhere else.

Of course Notepad won't show colours or photo galleries - just like Kindle for PC.

One of the real problems for ebooks is the huge pain their many formats create. And I don't mean two or three formats. There are dozens, of which six or eight are used by that number of major publishers, and they are totally different.

If you have a lot of books in Amazon's proprietary format, you will need Amazon's reader. That may work out to be a good deal for Amazon, of course, because anyone with a large library for the Kindle will most likely want to stay with the Kindle.

But fair's fair, and by the same token if someone accumulates a library of non-Amazon formats, that means she most likely will want to go for the reader that is not a Kindle.

The proverbial spanner in the already faltering gears was tossed by Apple when it introduced an app for e-book reading and an app for buying books at the Apple bookstore. Until then, there was a glimmer of hope that Amazon would break down and climb on the epub standard.

Now, as yet another big digital seller, Apple's proprietary format leaves human readers fuming and/or confused, and digital readers as different as, well, Windows and Apple computers.

The Kindle for PC, like the actual device, has few bells and whistles. A ‘‘home page’’ shows the covers of your books and articles, which are displayed one page at a time for reading.

The big problem isn't new books. It's old books that we are attached to. They may be favourite reads or, often, research-type volumes we dip into frequently. If I have an Amazon-format dictionary, I will be extremely reluctant to purchase a Sony reader. (Sony is happy to read the epub formats. That should give it a leg up on everyone, but Sony's reader is considered inferior to most of the others.)

So until publishers, and particularly the big three sellers, get together on format, they actually will be killing themselves and inhibiting sales.

There are people right here in the excruciatingly garish yet always calming Database suites who read some books in electronic format some of the time. As I type, our own Graham Rogers is squinting at his beloved iPhone screen and reading his latest Playboy magazine.

FB Reader was my second and final, painful free book reader for the PC. It came with high praise from a couple of reviewers. And here is what I found:

It is better than Kindle for PC.

Well, okay. This is low praise. This is like the sane-looking person who told me during a cocktail party conversation that he considered Electric Light Orchestra to be better than Captain & Tennille.

FB Reader will display the vanilla epub format, which is good, but of course will not display the Amazon books, so that forced me to download the same book again, only in a different format. Imagine how thrilling that would be if you were paying for the books.

One of the reviewers who led me to try FB Reader said it would display PDF files. That had me wondering if I would then use FB Reader as an ebook reader and also a PDF reader. Nope, because the reviewer was wrong. The program does display a couple of additional ebook formats - which is a couple more than Kindle for PC. But it shows no popular computer file formats, and its PC functions are almost as unexciting as Kindle for PC.

There are miles to go before people take to ebooks. Today's readers are overpriced for the market, and aren't the right hardware. Today's books are marketed and priced ridiculously. It is clear by now that the public at large is not going to pay something like 10,000 baht for a reader and then pay the same price for an ebook as the paper one costs.

For those who want to try the Kindle for PC, Amazon has a download link and a user's guide at http://www.amazon.com/gp/kindle/pc.

FB Reader is available at http://www.fbreader.org.

Relate Search: Kindle software, FB Reader, Amazon