[LMB] The worth of Ebook readers

[Francis Turner]

I'll add some more having made a second Swiss trip...

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 11:30 PM, Martin Bonham <martin at bonham.net.nz> wrote:
> In a post I read in Digest, Vol 35, Issue 66
>  Francis Turner <francis.turner at gmail.com> wrote
>  > I took my cybook with me to Switzerland this week ....
>  > Also the e-ink screen gets almost as many lines of text on it as a
>  > mmpb at the font size I like (3rd smallest)
>
>  I am another who just loves my Cybook Gen3, (purchased at a considerable saving
>  via the Baen fan buyers club -  http://store.naebllc.com/ )
As I noted in my review some time back (http://www.di2.nu/cybook.html
) non US$ currency folks save a HUGE amount buying via NAEB. I suspect
US$ folks get a saving too
>
>  I would say that it is the best out of the box experience I have ever had with
>  a new piece of hardware.
>  The quality of the eInk display is just superb - if you haven't seem one, the
>  best comparison I can make is that it is low res monochrome laser printer
>  quality.
And it is absolutely good enough that one can read it in comparatively
poorly lit places such as late night bus stops and trams. This of
course is an area where LCD screens are better because they are
(usually) backlit, but the Cybook is just as good as a newspaper or
magazine in such an environment - and in sunlight the strength of
e-ink compared to LCD etc is truly amazing.

>  The software - well it works well at what it does, and doesn't crash.
>  But it would be so much better with a couple of small improvements to the ways
>  of navigating within books, and displaying book lists in the library.
>  (The library needs another option with 20+ titles per page without thumbnails
>  and navigation needs (1) a numeric % display not just the bar graph, (2) a
>  current page number in the go to page dialogue, and (3) An option to use the
>  volume + and - keys to jump forwards and backwards either by chapters or by 20
>  or 50 or 100 pages).
There are masses of little things I'd like to modify which includes
your list but none of them are what I'd call critical. I wish Bookeen
would open up the API slightly so that one could personalise it.
>
>
>  Personally, I seem to be choosing the font size depending on the amount of
>  ambient light.  But, like Francis,  the 3rd smallest size of the default
>  Verdana font, is probably also also optimal for me most of the time.
>  I do note that the smaller fonts are MUCH more readable if you choose the all
>  Bold option (layout > emboldened text).
I use Palatino Linotype as my font of choice. I've experimented with a
few others (and found a really weird bug in one of the unicode fonts I
used which seems to have got its font metrics wrong so that the lines
overlap in the smaller sizes) but I just prefer the Palatino serif
view. Times (New Roman) also seems good.
>
>
>
>  > On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 1:37 AM, Stewart Dean <sdean7855 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>  > > A cartoonist roasts the Kindle...
>  > >  http://www.sheldoncomics.com/strips/sd080414.gif
>
>  I have never seen a Kindle, but I think that I much prefer the look of my
>  Cybook.
>  Of course if I won lotto I would like to get a Reader with wireless
>  connectivity, but in that case it would be the iRex.
>
>  The Cartoonist misses the point IMHO - the reason for getting one is battery
>  life - between one and two orders of magnitude better than a notebook.

I have consciously charged up by Cybook twice since I bought it (three
times counting the initial charging) and I have actually run out of
battery power once. I have also charged it up as a side effect of
copying books on to it of course and it probably gets an hour or so
charge each week on average.

While in Switzerland I used my eee to work and rediscovered that fact
that the eee gives you about 3hours of total usage before the battery
runs flat and that it takes another 3 hours of workign with the eee on
the mains for it to charge the battery up again. If I'd been using the
eee as an ebook reader, as I did in the month or so I had it and
didn't have the Cybook, I'd have been stuck reading the local free
newspaper on the train. As it was when the eee battery ran out I just
decided that something was sending me a message to start reading
instead and started reading the latest webscriptions.


>
>
>  Martin.
>
>  --
>  Martin Bonham, Auckland, (Aotearoa) New Zealand.
>  Home of Middle Earth, Whale Rider, and now also King Kong and Narnia.
>
>  --
>  Lois-Bujold mailing list
>  Lois-Bujold at lists.herald.co.uk
>  http://lists.herald.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lois-bujold
>



-- 
http://www.di2.nu/blog.htm
Faber's Fourth Law:
 Necessity is the mother of strange bedfellows.