Wayne Martin Talks About His Sony e-Book Reader.

Palo Alto Resident Wayne Martin talks about his Sony Reader.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Palo
• Alto
• Library
• Sony
• Kindle
• e-books
• ebooks
• digital

[wmartin46]

To Mountainviewguy:

There is an on-going evolution of these devices. The Sony has released a PRS 700 which introduces a touch screen, and a search function. Kindle has just announced an 8x11 full-screen reader.

Still, none of these devices is really an "ebook" of our dreams. Actually, there are many, many features that would be needed to allow one of these devices to replace books. At some point, one would end up with a very small PC, with the form factor of a book.

I can't wait.

[wmartin46]

Books can be easily downloaded individually from Project Gutenberg's WEB-site. The text files can be downloaded to the Sony reader directly, or converted to Microsoft .rtf/.doc files and then downloaded to the Reader.

A fellow in Holland has actually converted about 11,000 of the 30,000 Project Gutenberg books to native Sony format (.lrf). This 11,000 book/file collection can be obtained via Bit Torrent. Just Google "gutenberg sony torrent" and then download the files into your PC.

[wmartin46]

Libraries are not really free--they are quite expensive, in fact. Full cost analysis of library operations reveal that circulation costs can run from $5-$12 per item. This is public money, as opposed to private money, but if you are a taxpayer--you are paying handsomely for something that easily can be found on the Internet these days. About 80% of all books are out-of-copyright, so this means that almost 30M books are available for scanning by Google, or the Internet Archive.

[themountainviewguy]

I saw one of these in Borders a while back. I looked at it, and it did not seem quite there yet. The Kindle seems better, but it is pretty expensive really, and does not share or print .... you are also forgetting that pictures are a bit more memory intensive. It is all about money, and at whatever price you have to pay for media, and support. How many Kindles would get broken or go missing?

[bondabakoda]

Good review. Interesting thoughts on conventional and digital libraries.

I was recently at the Library of Congress, DC, and was wondering to myself - do we really need such extraordinary buildings to house books any more? No more will humans need the Library at Alexandria. Perhaps a small, cold steel bunker somewhere will store all the knowledge in the world on a few servers.

[SchalaKid]

Interesting information. Many thanks!

[muskndusk]

But libraries are free, ebooks are expensive unless you read out of copyright ones. I've bought a sony ereader for Xmas, but intend reading Gutenberg Project ebooks, which I hate reading on my PC.