Can You Judge A Book By It's Cover?

It looks that way. A tip of the beret to Sean McLachlan, indie author and blogger, for putting me onto the Lousy Book Covers website. Lots of (e)books here I would never pick up or put in the digital shopping cart based on their God-awful covers.

New On My Tablet Christmas Wish List

I've been considering getting an Ipad this Christmas, partly because I'm tired of trying to find print copies of The New Yorker in the small town where I live and getting it on a tablet seems attractive.

This piece in today's Globe and Mail on the new Kindle Fire tablet is intriguing. For half the price of the Ipad, if I can get a bigger screen than my iphone to read ebooks AND get the New Yorker, hmmmmm.

Oh, and it supports Plants Vs Zombies! Bonus!

Book apps: A reading revolution, or the end of reading?

As I post this I am sitting in a coffee shop in a strange town, with an old fashioned print book (PAtricl Hennessey's The Junior Officer's Reading Club) balanced on my knee, while synching, updating and charging my iphone before I hit the road. End of reading? Don't think so. Maybe mixed media reading? And as for the article below, I confess I would buy an ipad as soon as I can afford one, if only because I can't find the New Yorker reliably here in AB and I can't read it on my iphone. MP+


JOHN BARBER
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Saturday, Jul. 23, 2011 6:00AM EDT
Last updated Saturday, Jul. 23, 2011 10:12AM EDT



The On The Road app sells for $16.99, compared to $10.88 for a paperback on Amazon and $9.99 for an electronic copy of an earlier “deluxe” edition. “The app itself has all the text of the book and then it’s got five times more material,” Morrison notes.

But the economics of book apps are still a matter of guesswork. “We’re in this experimental stage,” Morrison says. “We’ll see how this one does, figure out how much it costs us and, if we were going to do more, how many we would have to sell to make it worthwhile.” It will be a very long time before the last of the 1,500 titles on the Penguin Classic backlist get apped, he added. “At this point, they are very time-consuming, so we have to pick our shots.”


Read the whole piece here.

Notable Quotable: Verlyn Klinkenborg on E-Reading

From the NYT:

Editorial Notebook
Some Thoughts About E-Reading
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: April 14, 2010

"In one way or another, I’ve been reading on a computer ever since it meant looking at green phosphor pixels against a black background. And I love the prospect of e-reading — the immediacy it offers, the increasing wealth of its resources. But I’m discovering, too, a hidden property in printed books, one of the reasons I will always prefer them. They do nothing."

Read the whole piece.

A cool ebook discovery

During a rather random bit of googling yesterday around the subject of ebooks, I came across an application called Calibre, which is billed as "the one stop solution to all your ebook needs". Calibre is available as a free download from the developer's website, which includes a very helpful animation of its features.

In brief, Calibre allows you to take your collection of ebooks, which come in a variety of formats, convert them to other formats as required, and then download them to whatever handheld ereader device you are using. In my case, it allows me to take ebook content and install it on my iphone, once I downloaded a free ebook reader app, Stanza, from the App Store.

The really cool thing about Calibre is that it allows you to gather news content from the internet and then convert it into ebook format. This is done by directing Calibre to the website of a news organization and then telling it to gather all the RSS feeds on that organization's website using what Calibre calls a recipe. The html programming for writing a recipe is rather daunting ... well, to be truthful, it looks way over my head. However, the Calibre install comes with prewritten recipes for many news sources, including 200+ English language sources. Shortly after installing Calibre on my PC and Stanza on my iphone, I was able to gather the latest issue of the New Yorker and of the New York Review of Books into ebook format and can now read them on my iphone in a matter of minutes. That in itself is just too, too cool, considering that I would have to drive two hours to buy print copies of these two journals.

If you are a news junkie and you have an ebook reader, that feature of Calibre alone is worth a look.

My ebook choice is made

Readers of Mad Padre (bless you!) will know that I've been struggling with making a choice about an ebook reader, and a number of you made some helpful decisions.

What settled the decision for me was the need to get a personal cell phone when I learned that I'd be spending a considerable amount of time this year away from home on military courses. So I looked at Apple's iphone and it was an easy choice.

Downloading apps on the iphone is quite easy, and I knew that Amazon had an app version of their Kindle ebook reader for the iphone. It took literally three minutes to get the app installed on my iphone, and then to use it to search Amazon's Kindle store. By chance I had just finished a short story by Ursula K. Leguin, and wanted to read more of her work, so my first ebook purchase was her short story "The Bones of the Earth", which cost a couple of bucks. I found the text easy to read, a crisp and elegant font on a clear, offwhite background. The pages can be thumbed easily, sliding from left to right or vice versa, and there is a navigation bar to allow you to jump around in the book, though that is taking some getting used to.

Today during a break in class I'm reading the New York Times daily email and there's a review of The Surrendered, a new book by Korean-American writer Chang-Rae Lee. The novel is partially set during the Korean War, which sounds interesting, so I check the Kindle store and it sells for $11.99 US as an ebook, compared to its print price of $26.95. Chapters, by comparison, lists it at $33.50 Cdn with an online price of $22.11. I chose to download a free sample, which appears to give a complete chapter, more than enough to make a purchase decision.

I love my iphone for its other functions as well, but I'm very happy with it's worth as an ebook reader, and from what I can see I like the economics of ebooks. It's worth mentioning in closing the article that appeared today in The Globe and Mail about the Canadian publishing industry's unease with Amazon wanting to open a distribution centre in this country. I love my local bookseller back in Greenwood, NS, and I'll continue to buy print books there, but in I can see myself reading more books off my iphone and fewer off the printed page. As more people catch on to ebooks (and I'm hardly an early adopter), I think the print distribution debate will soon be moot.

Notable Quotable: Craig Mod on ebooks

Craig Mod is a technology blogger quoted in the New York Times as saying “Print is dying. Digital is surging. Everyone is confused. Good riddance." As the NYT summarizes Mod, the real breakthrough will be when ebook platforms and readers get beyond the need to replicate the experience of reading and turning printec pages:

"For hundreds of years, we’ve been consuming information on static pages, and for the most part, this content has been presented with a beginning, middle and end. Nonlinear, digital platforms will prompt a new range of thinking about stories and how to tell them."

Meanwhile, in a piece that the NYT ran on Feb 28th, Motoko Rich reviewsthe economics of ebooks, and suggests that the current price point of an ebook, around $12.99, were to go any lower, it would undermine profitability of publishers as a whole.