Issue #69
Last Update October 31, 2010
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Technology Ereaders 101 by David Katz April 17, 2010 Portable readers for digital books have finally caught on. Sit in a subway car in New York City and you may well see three or four people reading from Kindles or its equivalent. A few more people may be reading on their laptops or smart phones. This article is the first of a series to introduce you to the ereader offerings currently available, and to alert you to additional readers due to be released in the next few months. First, ereaders 101.
Books and other reading material are generally produced in digital form nowadays. They may then be printed onto paper, distributed electronically, or converted to the spoken word. Older books, not originally created digitally, are being scanned into digital format by publishers, nonprofit organizations, academia, and Google. Ultimately, pretty much all of mankind's printed works will be also found in an electronic version. The advantages for the reader of having a book or other document in electronic format include portability (ebooks weigh nothing; you can carry around a whole library with no more physical strain than carrying one magazine), searchability (electronic texts can use a search function to find any word or phrase the text may contain), accessibility (you don't physically have to go to a store to obtain a book), and flexibility (you can vary the print size to compensate for poor eyesight or poor lighting, and sometimes you can convert the written word into the spoken word). The advantages for the publisher are that corrections and changes can be made easily during the editing and book preparation process, electronic distribution and print-on-demand take the guesswork out of print runs, and the electronic nature of the book, magazine or document means that there is no longer any cost or tax penalty for maintaining a book as available for sale forever (books will never go out of print). This is also a benefit to the author, in addition to acquiring the ability to break free of publishers and self-publish and self-distribute.
Once books are in electronic form, they can be read in a variety of ways: on ipods and other multimedia gadgets, on computer screens, on smart phones, and on dedicated devices known as ereaders. Ereaders differ from the other devices in that they optimized for this one task, and they have a very different kind of screen. Computer, smart phone and multimedia device screens are active screens. They are illuminated and require power to maintain the image. Ereader screens are passive. They are not illuminated and only draw power when setting an image. The image then remains until a new image is set. The “e-ink” format of ereader screens is also very printlike and easy to read. There are several other advantages to the e-ink screen: battery life is much longer, since no power is required for the display of a page once the page has been set. Ereaders can go a week or more without recharging, while laptops are limited to a few hours and smart phones are little better. Also, ereaders function well in bright daylight, since their screens make use of the ambient light, while the other screens wash out and become unreadable. You can take your ereader to the beach and enjoy the reading experience.
Most ereaders have six-inch (diagonal) screens, about the size of a mass-market paperback book. A few have slightly smaller (5-inch) screens, while some of the new ereaders have large ten inch screens that make reading business documents, technical manuals and newspapers easier. Currently, all ereader screens are black and white, notwithstanding Barnes and Nobles' claim that their offering, the Nook, has a color screen. (The reading screen is a standard 6-inch e-ink black and white screen. The color is limited to a touch screen strip at the bottom that functions as a control pad.) Regardless of size, ereaders acquire their content in one of three ways: they can download content from a computer over a USB cable, they can download content from the internet using a wifi connection, or they can download content over the cellular network using a built-in cellular modem.
All ereaders have some kind of memory for storing books and other content. Even the smallest of these can store hundreds, and in many cases, thousands of books. Some of the ereaders also support auxiliary removable storage like SD cards to expand the built-in storage, making the number of books practically infinite. Those eraders that connect to specific publishers usually allow you delete a purchased book from the reader, and then redownload it for free when it is needed. The import of all this is that you can take your entire summer reading with you without having to cart around a suitcase full of books.
Ebooks can be stored and distributed in many different formats. Many of these formats are propriety and therefore have limited portability to other devices or publishers. Many of these formats enforce digital rights management (DRM) schemes that theoretically act to prevent piracy, but actually mostly prevent a book purchaser from doing with his electronic book what he (or she) is perfectly free to do with a printed book. There are several DRM schemes, all of them mutually incompatible. Some of the most used ebook formats are .azw (the main Amazon format, used only by the Kindle), .prc or .mobi (the MobiPocket format that is identical to .azw except for the header), .epub, which is an open-source (nonproprietary) format, .pdf, the popular document distribution format for computers, .lrf or .lrx, used by Sony, and .html, which is the format for web pages. Ereaders usually can read a selection of these and others. No ereader can read all formats. Conversion from one format to another is not always possible.
The ereader itself contains a screen on which the content appears, navigation devices (usually buttons or keys) for paging forward or backward, some kind of menuing setup for accessing the library of books stored on the device and performing special functions, a keyboard (on some of the ereaders) and some means of dealing with power (on/off and recharging), data (often a USB socket) and radios (wifi and cellular) if the device supports them. Some devices allow highlighting and note taking, and many make the text searchable.
A fuller description of ereader functionality will be found in subsequent articles, where we will be discussing specific readers and their strong points and drawbacks.
New York Stringer is published by NYStringer.com. For all communications, contact David Katz, Editor and Publisher, at david@nystringer.com