Just another nerd.
Plustek makes this interesting scanner, the Opticbook 3600, which is designed and marketed specifically for scanning books. According to the comments from buyers at Amazon, the included software is sucks, so expect to buy third party OCR/etc software on top of the $280-$300 price for the scanner.
Okay, it may be impractically expensive, but Atiz’s Book Snap is still a pretty cool book digitization solution. You put digital cameras in each of the housings on top, and then place the book in the cradle at the bottom which is specially designed to hold the book flat. The result, according to Atiz, is a far superior scan compared to what you could get with trying to use a flatbed scanner.
The downside is that the unit is $1,595 . . . plus, you have to supply your own digital cameras. Ouch. On the other hand, I can imagine someone with an extensive library he wanted to digitize going for this, or perhaps some cooperative arrangement where a group of bibliophiles share the cost (not to mention the possible use by smaller institutions, though I imagine copyright concerns would be a major deterrent there).
Not Another E-Book LLC is an effort by contributors to the Baen forums to build an open (i.e., no stupid DRM) e-book reader.
Essentially the idea is to put together a spec for the reader, then get enough people to sign on to buy one to contract with an manufacturer to produce the device. The group’s mission statement says that,
1. This is a reader by us for our own use and for any other book lover who just wants to read books without being trapped into anyone else’s business plan.
2. We will not lock you into any one format, or try to dictate your choice of download sites.
We don’t want anyone doing that to us and we’re not going to do it to you.
3. This is a bare bones reader. That means you can carry a small library with you and we don’t have to charge you the earth for it.
If you want something that does text messaging you’ve bought the wrong device.
4. No DRM and no hidden “gotchas” what you see is what you get.
5. We intend this reader to support as many formats as possible
Very nice effort. Personally, though, I’ve given up on separate e-book readers and have been using Mobipocket on my Treo to read books.
A friend whose wife uses Mobipocket tells me the app is a real pain-in-the ass to use with DRMed files, but I’m converting straight .txt/.doc/.html files to the Mobipocket format using Mobipocket’s library manager. The program as a whole is pretty slick and does a pretty good job of preserving highlights and annotations which are extremely important to me.
A dedicated e-book reader would have to be extremely impressive to get me to add yet another device to my gadget bag. I carry my cell phone everywhere and so always have the latest book I’m reading with me. It’s not perfect, but the convenience more than outweighs the negatives (which, in the case of the Treo, is the small screen size, but after a few hours my brain adapted to reading smaller chunks and constantly scrolling).
The Associated Press reports that to no one’s surprise the final Harry Potter book will not be available in an e-book version.
According to the AP,
Rowling has cited two concerns over the years: concern about online piracy . . . and the desire for readers to experience the books on paper.
The paper claim is nonsense given the numerous audio versions of the books. And, frankly, Rowling’s obsession with how people read her book is a bit odd (you can imagine some composer saying there’s no way in hell people are going to listen to his music on some vinyl record when the only way to truly appreciate it is in a live performance).
As for piracy, not releasing an e-book version guarantees that it will be widely pirated. All not releasing an official e-book version means is that rather than buy a legitimate electronic edition the day the book comes out, fans will simply have to wait a day or two after the release to download a warez version of the book. It takes about five minutes to locate and download the various unauthorized electronic editions of the Potter books online.
So a large number of people are already defying Rowling’s paper passion — she’s just not benefiting from it.
Source:
Rowling: No E-Book for Harry Potter VII. Hillel Italie, Associated Press, February 5, 2007.
So the Sony Reader is finally out and getting generally favorable reviews, though also with a lot of reservations. I really hoped Sony would get things right with the Reader, and they appear to have gotten a lot of things right.
The thing is, I’m not so much a reader as an annotator. When I read books, I am constantly underlining passages and making comments/asking questions in the margins. The Sony Reader has no ability at all to do any sort of annotating of texts.
If that weren’t bad enough, the device can’t even do a basic text search. That’s pretty much unforgivable, as searching through texts is something that e-books are far and away superior to paper books.
So the display may be revolutionary, but feature-wise my $125 eBookwise (which is a rebranded Rocketbook) is more functional than Sony’s $350 Reader.
That makes choosing whether to be an early adopter on the Sony Reader a fairly easy decision. Hopefully the Reader will sell well enough to warrant a second version that will include annotation and searching. Until then, I’m sticking with my eBookwise.
A couple months ago, Sony PR flacks sent e-mails to a number of web sites offering to answer questions regarding Sony’s (allegedly) upcoming Reader product for ebooks. Some answers to questions were posted on MobileRead Networks’s forum.
File Formats
Q) What File formats are supported natively and can be put directly on a Memory Stick or SD memory card?
A) With the Sony Reader you can take a file from your PC to an SD or Memory Stickâ„¢ media card and read on the Sony Reader the following file types:1. TXT
2. RTF
3. PDF (Unencrypted)
4. BBeB (Encrypted and Unencrypted)
5. JPEG
6. GIF
7. BMP
8. PNG
9. MP3 (Unencrypted)
10. AAC (Unencrypted). . .
Q) When will the Reader be released for sure?
A) We will announce an exact date as we get closer to the fall season.
It is very odd that Sony doesn’t just go ahead and support HTML natively. That would be a hell of a lot more useful than RTF.
But the big question is will Sony ever actually release this product? They’ve been promising this for almost 9 months now and still have yet to announce an official release date. Is Sony really going to release their Reader product? And if they do, are they really going to sell enough of them at more than $300 apiece to justify launching the product? Color me skeptical on both counts.