Kindle books versus oldfashioned ones ??

[Timba]

Gumboot:

I have been working with my Kindle more (lost some precious reading time to get this done) and can now go to the beginning of a book, or a known point. But I don't know anything about this x-ray feature, but both of my Bibles on the Kindle were free versions so probably this is one of the things I miss. The index, which I now use, does have the books of the Bible so I can go to Matthew, but not directly to Matthew 4 or what would even be better Matthew 4: 4 or such.

Hm, business expense? I hadn't thought of that. Great idea!

Hi Parson,

I hope your well after a day of feasting. I took a look at Amazon and they sure have a lot of bible offerings but none of the free ones had x-ray enabled. Truth be told I did not find any that did but I did find these 2:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008732FSC/?tag=brite-21 and
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004UGNB1A/?tag=brite-21

The first is 99 cents and the second is 2.99 and both say they are fully searchable by verse. Clearly a business expense for you and not that pricey to begin with.

 

[Parson]

Timba, Thanks for the research.

This will help a lot. But I'll have to order it later even $2.99 is questionable for my checking right now. Holidays, presents, bills, .... you know the drill.

Thanksgiving was/is great. One family gathering at our home down, one to go on Sunday evening.

 

[Overread]

I think at present the functional use of ebooks is limited by hardware that doesn't quite want to give us everything because that leaves nothing for version two and by products (ebooks) which are not quite yet considered high enough value by the producers to really get the attention.

Heck at the moment it seems a lot of ebooks are scanned paper versions which results in all kinds of random strange words appearing here and there where the scanner hasn't quite got the right word picked up and randomly tried to guess.


Functionally within the kindle I think they could boost organisation greatly even if they just allowed us to make sub categories within the catalogues we can already make. It annoys me that I can make a fantasy section (for example) but that I can't then make subcategories within that fantasy section for the ease of sorting (And with 1000s of books potentially possible organising should really be top of their list).


Kindle are also trying to experiment with real page numbers, but its something the designers of the ebook have to bother with enabling and its still not quite as intuitive as it could be to use.


I think, given time, they will advance in their ease of use and in the features that they have; however at present they are a bit hampered against the features of a real book. That said I think the day that they make a kindle with a wacom style screen so that you can draw your own notes into books and write clearly on the unit without having to use a screen or fiddly button keyboard will be a great day for anyone taking notes!



PS - you can turn most Kindles off. You just slide and hold the powersave slider for a few seconds and the unit will power down. That said the nature of e-ink means that its one of the few items around the house that you can just leave on without any real concern of power drain.

 

[Vertigo]

PS - you can turn most Kindles off. You just slide and hold the powersave slider for a few seconds and the unit will power down. That said the nature of e-ink means that its one of the few items around the house that you can just leave on without any real concern of power drain.

I think you will find that that doesn't actually turn it off; it just puts it into a sleep mode. Most of these readers do not actually have a real 'off' switch. I imagine all the sleep mode does is suspend its idle event loop (detecting screen touches etc.) which uses negligible power anyway. Even if you don't 'turn off' it will timeout into this state after a while anyway.

My Sony does eventually seem to turn itself off fully if I haven't used it for several days and it then goes through a longer initialisation process next time I switch it on.

 

[steve12553]

At one point I believe the concept of not turning completely off was generated by one or more books where the right to sell were revoked. There were some complaints a few years ago that books were being "unsold" and electronicly removed from the devices. It was a while back and it may have only been one book but I do remember something about it. I suspect that was fully resolved because both Kindle and Nook readers are available for many other devices and personally I pull my books to a chip and frequently back them up to the hard drive on one of my computers. I don't think a book could be removed from there.

 

[Galacticdefender]

I think Kindles/Nooks are good for books that you will only read once, but I like to have physical books on my shelves. Also A physical book can't run out of batteries, and that's a plus. I'm usually all over new technology, but I just don't like reading books on a screen.

 

[anivid]

ho-ho see later

 

[anivid]

trying again

 

[anivid]

I think at present the functional use of ebooks is limited by hardware that doesn't quite want to give us everything because that leaves nothing for version two and by products (ebooks) which are not quite yet considered high enough value by the producers to really get the attention.

Heck at the moment it seems a lot of ebooks are scanned paper versions which results in all kinds of random strange words appearing here and there where the scanner hasn't quite got the right word picked up and randomly tried to guess.


Functionally within the kindle I think they could boost organisation greatly even if they just allowed us to make sub categories within the catalogues we can already make. It annoys me that I can make a fantasy section (for example) but that I can't then make subcategories within that fantasy section for the ease of sorting (And with 1000s of books potentially possible organising should really be top of their list).

Yes to the scanned paper version, OR - and nobody cared to control it for simple text faults

You're talking about some catalogues you can make yourself ??
Care to elaborate ??
I have to satisfye myself with the simple listing of the contents the automaton makes - I should want to be able to make catalogs/maps as I can in Words - is that possible ??
- or half possible
To have 5-10 pages of index as a simple listing according to author or title with no regards as to importance of the doc/book - isn't exactly my style - totally impossible to get an overview of the contents when no hierarchy is involved.

What I bought with my Kindle 4 is a ticket to the world of e-readers, where I'll get some experiences, where I can download book extracts, and where I can buy an e-book from time to time.
I take care not to fill too many docs of my own into it, because of the primitive indexing.
The next reader I'll buy will not be from Amazon - too much half baked solutions with those.
- and it'll take some time before I'll do that - much, much time - time as measured in years.

 

[Dave]

Reviving thread...

...since I was reading this Harvard Blog http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/futureoftheinternet/2012/06/01/war-and-nookd/ and there are things I hadn't thought about regarding e-books... things that are/were impossible with the printed page. Ah! But progress must continue!

Shades of Fahrenheit 451 I think? Ironic too, that it was 1984! And the War and Nook is too funny.

 

[thaddeus6th]

Dave, this is something I'd thought about when it came to matters of historical record. When most information is electronic it's far easier to censor or alter.

Reminds me of the tale of a young Chinese censor. She'd failed to remove a reference to Tiananmen[sp] Square from a website and was hauled before her superiors to explain. She didn't know she should censor it because she'd never heard of what happened at Tiananmen Square.

 

[Dave]

Well, too much of Big Brother has already come true. It came without anyone noticing, despite George Orwell's predictions. And like that young Chinese censor, most people asked would tell you they thought it was a TV show.

It isn't, what the Victorian's termed "Progress" that is the problem. I believe it is the sheer speed of technological change. 60 years ago, the majority of people in the UK had never watched TV. Their first experience of television was watching the Coronation of Elizabeth II. 60 years on, the majority of the crowds watching the 60th anniversary of the Coronation were recording it for themselves on smart phones and cameras. 15 years ago, the majority were not internet connected. 15 years on, can we cope without email, Wikipedia, Google Maps, Facebook, Twitter or SFF Chronicles? How would we ever order a Pizza?

But, I think I digress. These e-books are here to stay, and the newspaper archive and the National Archives are digitising everything, but maybe we should always keep a backup hard copy in a library of the "original" version - before we forget what it was?

 

[chongjasmine]

If not for space constraint, I actually prefer paper books, as compared to ebooks.

 

[Gordian Knot]

Dave said "Well, too much of Big Brother has already come true. It came without anyone noticing, despite George Orwell's predictions."

Oh, we noticed. Not enough of us spoke out against the Powers That Be that were busy implementing it. Now it is too late.

Also, per David, 15 years from now we will not physically own any of the media that we bought and paid for. It will all be on some SuperCorp's cloud. Which in reality means any media you purchased resides on someone else's data farm.

There has already been a case here in the U.S. where an older man wanted to leave his massive digitally purchased music collection to his heirs. The courts said NO. Unlike CDs or DVDs, digital files are not considered part of what you own after you die.

Brave New World!

 

[steve12553]

Dave said "Well, too much of Big Brother has already come true. It came without anyone noticing, despite George Orwell's predictions."

Oh, we noticed. Not enough of us spoke out against the Powers That Be that were busy implementing it. Now it is too late.

Also, per David, 15 years from now we will not physically own any of the media that we bought and paid for. It will all be on some SuperCorp's cloud. Which in reality means any media you purchased resides on someone else's data farm.

There has already been a case here in the U.S. where an older man wanted to leave his massive digitally purchased music collection to his heirs. The courts said NO. Unlike CDs or DVDs, digital files are not considered part of what you own after you die.

Brave New World!

My Nook takes an SDM card. AS long as I can I own the card and the backups. Not as elegant as my books but so far mine.

 

[Dave]

My Nook takes an SDM card. AS long as I can I own the card and the backups. Not as elegant as my books but so far mine.

You mustn't have followed my link then. The part where every mention of kindling fires in War and Peace was altered to read Nook; probably at touch of a single mouse click. It matters not if you own the SDM card if you cannot have access to the original source material. The point is that just like Winston Smith, books and historical documents can now be rewritten to match the way the wind blows, only now you don't even need a Ministry of Truth to do it. It is completely automated.

 

[Vertigo]

I suspect this will sort itself out before long. It is not a new problem; for example, as manipulation of images gets more and more sophisticated it is becoming ever harder to determine whether an image has been manipulated or not. This has to be an growing problem for the legal world. Then there's the issue of digital signatures that are becoming more and more common and consequently more and more horrifying in their potential for post-signing manipulation.

I suspect it won't be long before a truly and certifiably write-exactly-once digital media is developed. Such a media could be used for example in police cameras. I imagine the problem is that it has to be seriously cheap as it could never be reused.

Important documents, books, etc. could then have a mastercopy(ies) written to this media along with maybe some kind of biometric signature of the originator, made so it can test for a match against another signature but cannot be read externally and so cannot be copied. This doesn't necessarily mean one chunk of hardware per document that has to be stored. I would imagine you would end up with high capacity chips like existing memory storage that could be added to until full.

 

[Dave]

Can't we just have the memory equivalent of CD-R compact discs as opposed to CD-RW compact discs? We used to have both ROM and RAM in the early personal computers that I started with. I guess that stopped because it was a waste of memory, but memory now is never limiting.

However, what you ask only works as long as people are willing to play ball. I don't ever see an electronic document being as canonical as a hard paper document. I don't trust people.

 

[Mariella]

Nook as a portable second source is fine but I will always want printed matter books, even though they are in the bedroom, living room, kid's room, kitchen and bathroom. Books everywhere. And I would not change it.