BilmBlog500

I keep seeing more and more and more people with e-book readers. Sunday night on the Acela back from DC, last night on the #5 train from Grand Central to Union Square, it's gone from being a special sighting to being a regular occurence. Barnes & Noble spends so much time touting their wondrous results and the immense huge hitted-ness of their Nook on their earnings conference call this week that it wouldn't surprise me if the executives on the call shit in their pants from the excitement of what they were saying. As is the case when Amazon shits in its pants in excitement talking about the Kindle, there are all kinds of buzz words and not a lot of specifics. When they sales sales "exploded" beyond expectations does that mean they were expecting to sell 4 and actually sold 6, or they were shooting for 82,900 and sold 126,800? Their market share on e-books on some books is now above their 18% market share of physical bookstore sales. Which e-books? Bestselle...

So, the iPad! While I type in one window, I'm watching the keynote speech on the Apple web site. Though I used the Kindle for over a year, I'm not the hugest fan of it. It allowed me to do things I couldn't do before, and I loved it for that. But it didn't allow me to do many of them very well. I could read a manuscript without carrying it around but not in cold weather and take notes on the same device but not easily and the relay to the author was cumbersome. I could read the Washington Post every day without schlepping into Manhattan to buy a hard copy, but the reading experience wasn't very good. I liked the Sony Reader less, because the note-taking interface was cumbersome and the glare on the screen distracting to me. And the Nook was surprisingly bad to me for how much learning curve should have been curved. I've never been a big laptop fan. They're portable, but not fun. When I live-blogged the Oscars last year, I had to sit at a desk inste...

I played around some with a demonstration model of the Nook at a Barnes & Noble in Manhattan on Thursday and was not impressed. E-Ink is E-Ink, so the screen look like all the others. But if the initial Kindle had a knock that it was too easy to turn the pages accidentally, I found it took too much effort to turn the pages on the Nook. And when I did turn the pages, the refresh rate was very slow, a good two to three seconds. B&N did acknowledge this problem, and they say it will be fixed with a software update in the near future. But isn't that the kind of thing you should work on before you release the product? Anyone think they decided to rush out something for the holidays? And then there's that LED screen at the bottom that's used for navigating. It's a nice idea, on one level, because one knock certainly on the first generation Kindle was the awkwardness of the little sliding side thingie to navigate around. But I think if they were doing the seco...

So my  Kindle died completely after being taken out in the cold last week.  I'm not sure the Sony Reader would be any better.  They are honest in their documentation (i.e., honest in that "buried in the PDF owner guide you get only after you've purchased it" kind of way that Amazon also is) in giving the operational temp for the PS 700 as forty-one degrees, which is more in line with when I started to see my Kindle start to misbehave, so I'm not sure their screen will do any better if it's in your briefcase while you wait ten minutes for a cab at the airport on a cold day.  I'm pasting below the letter I am mailing today to the heads of Amazon and the E Ink corporation in Cambridge that makes the electronic ink "guts" for the Kindle and Sony Reader. The bottom line on all of this is that if you are thinking of buying one of these things you need to be aware that your outdoor use -- i.e., the whole "portable" thing -- might be limited fo...

So I did a little reading on the Sony Reader we got for Eddie. With the Calibre software that Charles Stross suggested to me way back when , we are as yet experiencing no problems in putting files on to the Sony Reader for Eddie to read.  However, I'm told it prefers to eat RTF, and since most people send Word, Eddie has to convert the .doc to .rtf and then Calibre along to the Sony Reader. With the touch screen atop of it, I am finding a lot more of a glare problem with the Sony Reader than I do with the Kindle.  Eddie doesn't seem to be bothered by this, but it bothers me a lot. You run your finger along the touch screen either left to right or right to left to turn the pages back or forward, and then at the bottom there are two small buttons to do the same.  Reading on the Kindle, you have to teach yourself not to press down on the sides because there is too much forward/backward button.  If you don't put your Kindle to sleep while putting the case on or other things l...

We did it!  Eddie played around with a Sony Reader as well and said he liked it, so we got one this afternoon at the Borders at Park Ave., and I'm going to be curious to find out what he thinks of it.  I'll play around a bit with it myself, I'm sure.  Stay tuned for further updates, sometime or other.

I think that my Kindle was/is better, certainly for me, than the first generation of the Sony Reader.  But I was playing around some with the new and improved Sony Reader at the Borders in Manchester, CT on Saturday night, and I think Sony has leapfrogged over the Kindle in many significant ways with their 2nd generation reader. Instead of using buttons to move the pages back and forth, you can do that kind of iPhone touchy thing and drag across the screen to move forward or back a page.  Sweet!  The touch screen also can become a keyboard for searching for text.  Theoretically you can also bring that keyboard up to annotate text, but the fact that I wasn't intuitively able to figure out how to do that with the demo model suggests they might be able to improve upon that a tad (unless I was pressing the right buttons but the demo models don't let you do that so some 12-year-old won't look at the notes and find a pornographic treatise, which I'm thinking is a possibility?...