HANDebooks

I was in a local store the other day and they had all of the current ebook readers lined up. There are quite a few. I was looking at them when I caught my eye that surprised me. The demo on the Sony reader was showing Harry Potter. I was a bit surprised, because to the best of my knowledge, it still hadn’t been released in ebook form. Looking at the demo that was running on the display model would have certainly led me to believe that if I bought that ebook reader, I would be able to read the Harry Potter books right away, because it was already on there it seemed. I went over to the reader at that time and tried to pull up the book. As soon as I did that, any reference to Harry Potter was gone. It was only shown in a couple of screens that flashed for just a few seconds in the demo.

I came home and fired up Google to see if I had missed something. Had Harry Potter been released? This is one of the books I always use as an example when people ask me about ebook readers and which one they should buy. I tell them ebook readers are great and all but just be aware that not ALL books are available as ebooks, for example, Harry Potter, and they are usually quite surprised to discover this and I think a lot of people don’t find out about this until they go to buy the books and can’t find them.

The only articles I could find about Harry Potter and Sony ereaders were from around August when it was announced Harry Potter had an agreement with Sony. I found other more recent articles saying the Harry Potter ebooks had been pushed back and wouldn’t be available until sometime in 2012.

I couldn’t find anything to say that if you bought a Sony ebook reader, you would be able to get a copy of Harry Potter to read on it right now. You might get a coupon so you could download it when it comes out, but it doesn’t seem to be out. Wouldn’t advertising an ebook reader with what is arguably one of the most popular books of all time, when that book is not available for that reader, be false advertising?

Christmas has passed, and this was the year of the tablet/ebook reader. The Kindle Fire, the Nook color, the standalone e-ink ebook readers and Apple’s products. Traffic on my site spiked 300% yesterday with everyone looking for information about what to do with their new ebook readers. I thought I would respond with a little post for all the new members of the ebook reading world. Welcome.

First off, despite the fact the Kindle and the Nook color are both built off the same platform, the formats they support out of the box are different. If you want to buy books for your Kindle, then go to Amazon.com. If you want to buy books for your Nook color, then you can go to Barnes and Noble.com. If you have some other ebook reader or tablet, you will need to find out what formats your device supports and act accordingly. Apple devices can get books from the Apple store with the iBooks App, or you can install the Kindle or Nook Apps and use them to buy from either of those stores as well. If you have an Android device, you can buy books from the Google bookstore in the Android market. This website is, and has always been, more about how to get books that are FREE and LEGAL and how to convert them so they can be read on whatever device you happen to have. In that spirit, that is what I am going to talk about today, for the new ebook/tablet owner that is looking for information.

The first thing you will want to know about is the Gutenberg Project. This is a collection of public domain ebooks readily available in a variety of formats for most of the current popular devices. When getting books from Gutenberg, if you have a Nook, you are going to want the ePub format which is an open standard. If you have a Kindle you are going to want the Kindle format, which is really an adaptation of a format called MobiPocket. If you are using a tablet or an iPad, you can download whatever you want as long as you have an App for the format you want to read installed on your device. This is not necessarily just Kindle or Nook or Apple or Google. If you are using Android, I highly recommend you grab fbReader to read ePub documents from Gutenberg. Again, these books are free, as they are in the public domain. Amazon, and Barnes and Noble may offer some of the same titles for free, but of course they will be willing to sell them to you as well. Always check Gutenberg first to see if what you want is there. It is a great opportunity to read some of the old classics as well.

If you obtain a book that you want to read on your device, but it is not in a compatible format, you are going to need to convert it before you can read it on your device. You can use our conversion pages here. There is also some excellent software that makes the process a little more user friendly called Calibre. It automates the process of converting back and forth between many of the most popular ebook formats and helps you keep track of your library as well.

One thing you are going to find different about having an ebook reader is if a book isn’t in the public domain and you have to buy every book you want to read, the costs can add up pretty fast. Not a lot of people bought EVERY book they read before ebooks. You got them from friends or borrowed them, etc.. This is where your local library comes in. Many libraries now have ebooks available and you don’t even have to set one foot in your library to get them. Go to the website of your local library to see what they have to offer. Chances are they have more than you think, but you might have to wait for them for awhile. They don’t have an unlimited number of copies of each title and with all the new ebook readers out there, there can be some lengthy wait times for the more popular titles. However, you can get new current titles from your local library for free. If you don’t already have a library card with the local library you may need to go in to sign up, but once you have one you can browse and borrow without even leaving your house. While you are there, you may also want to ask if they have any cooperative exchange programs with other libraries in the area. Some libraries do this allowing members of a nearby library to also get a membership to their library. This opens up even more selection and since you don’t have to go to the library it doesn’t matter if it is a little farther away.

One last thing that no one probably told you about your ebook reader. Some books simply are not available in ebook format. You may be surprised to find, for example, that to date the Harry Potter series is still not available in ebook format, so don’t be surprised if you can’t find some titles in the online bookstore.

For the books that are available though, reading books on an electronic device is very convenient. Good luck and welcome to the ebook reading world. If you like reading books, hopefully you will love reading ebooks.

DRM is an inconvenience plain and simple. This is becoming even more evident as more and more devices hit the market and more people are having to deal with it. I have especially noticed it lately with media I borrow from the library. As more people have discovered ebooks and audiobooks, libraries have taken notice by trying to provide new services to their customers. While they still offer books and CDs in the library, many also offer the ability to download electronic books and audiobooks from the web.
This is where the problem of DRM comes in. For a long time, owners of the Kindle couldn’t check out most of the ebooks available from the overdrive media service that many libraries use. The reason, DRM. Similarly, many of the audiobooks available for borrowing are only available in wma format, which means they can not be used with many of the devices people are going to want to use to listen to them with. People are not trying to steal the content, they are obtaining it through legal means, but they are not allowed to consume it on the device of their choice even though the devices they want to use are more convenient than the devices that can play it.
The worst part about it is the DRM isn’t really protecting anything. Anyone who wants to steal the content can; the DRM only makes it difficult and inconvenient for the honest consumers who want to use electronic devices that don’t happen to support wma. Most audiobooks are already available on CD, which have no DRM at all, so what is the DRM protecting? The DRM makes what should be non platform specific media not only platform specific, but reliant on a single application for playback. I think the use of DRM in this way has the opposite effect as to what is intended. I think rather than discouraging piracy, it actually encourages it. A consumer who would happily borrow DRM content from their local library, but discovers they can’t play it on their device of choice may, instead, simply find a pirated version, or figure out how to bypass the DRM. This circumvents the libraries and other legitimate sources who are paying royalties to the publishers. Once a user has taken the effort to figure out how to work around the DRM they have little incentive to bother with going through the hassle of dealing with content locked up with DRM in the future.
I think it would be better for everyone, even the publishers themselves, if they just did away with this type of DRM. I don’t have any issue with them trying to protect their intellectual property but DRM doesn’t work, certainly not in the case of an audiobook where audio quality is not as crucial as perhaps with music and an audio book can simply be rerecorded during playback. Since DRM doesn’t work, won’t work, can’t work, it does little more than inconvenience everyone who has to deal with it.
It seems some publishers have already figured this out. Some books, for example I recently borrowed The Gunslinger by Stephen King, don’t bother with DRM. It was just a series of mp3 files in a zip file. Stephen King isn’t some two bit writer and if there was ever an author that had to worry about piracy, he would qualify. Instead, it was presented in a format playable on virtually any device and they simply asked that you delete the files when the lending period was over. How simple.

Nook has finally announced their new Nook Color. It looks pretty nice. Of course the first thing to do is to compare it to Kindle’s fire since they are coming out at essentially the same time and are for the same purpose.

The New Nook color comes at a $50 premium to the Kindle Fire and the first generation Nook color has been lowered to the same price as the Kindle Fire. Is it worth the extra $50? Well, in a straight up hardware only comparison, the extra $50 gives you 8GB more onboard memory and twice the RAM as well as an SD slot so you can add your own media. Hands down, for these features alone, it is worth the extra money. The fact that the Kindle Fire does not have an SD slot is a big issue in my opinion as I observed when it was first announced. When compared with the now $199 Nook, it is definitely also worth buying the newer device.

Also, it has Netflix support out of the Box. Amazon plays media offered by their own website and through their Amazon Prime service, which is all well and good, but they have not announced if it will support Netflix or Hulu Plus yet. I expect at some point in the future they will, but the Nook 2 already has.

Add this all up and the Nook looks like the better deal at the moment.

Neither device offers a camera or a microphone, so they are definitely consumption only devices. If the possibility of wanting to use the device for voice or video calls is anything you might ever consider, then you might want to consider something else, but for surfing the web, reading books, or consuming media, either the Kindle or the Nook Color 2 should work just fine.

Just over a week ago, Kindle announced their new Kindle. I wrote a post about it.

The device looked all well and good. It was faster than the Nook, had a color screen, but some of my issues with it were no expandable storage, no camera, and a partial implementation of Android without access to the Android Market. The device is not even going to be released until mid November, but supposedly, they are already selling 25,000 units per day. The thing the Kindle Fire really had going for it was the price. A 7 inch tablet for only $199.

Today though, you can pre-order another 7″ color tablet. The Lenovo ideaPad A1 for the same price as the Kindle. It runs the same operating system, but not crippled, and it has access to the Android Market? It also has front and rear facing cameras, memory expandability, bluetooth, and gps. They also both have the same screen resolution. It will also be released two weeks before the Kindle Fire. The Fire arguably has a better CPU, but does that really matter for reading books? Also the Processor in the IdeaPad A1 is faster than the processor in the Nook color, which has had wide acceptance as being fast enough, and it is $50 cheaper than the Nook color, which also has no cameras.

It makes the Ideapad seem like a downright steal. Since the price of the Kindle Fire and the IdeaPad A1 are the same, what can one do that the other cannot.

The Ideapad will be able to be used for Navigation with its GPS. It will be able to store much more data through its expansion slot. It will be able to be used with external devices like headsets, keyboards and mice, through its bluetooth interface. It will be able to be used for video calls with its front facing camera and it will be able to take pictures with its rear facing camera. It will also have full access to the Market and all it has to offer including access to the Nook ebook Reader Application as well as the Kindle.

What will the Kindle Fire be able to do that the IdeaPad will not? Well, it really comes down to the faster processor, but the IdeaPad should be fast enough to read bbooks, surf the web, and play flash video, so what exactly will the faster processor allow the Kindle Fire to do that the IdeaPad will not?

When taking all this into consideration. It looks like the Lenovo IdeaPad A1 is what the Kindle Fire should have been. This makes the Kindle Fire, which looked like a steal when it was announced last week, look like it needs to be about $50 cheaper today. Otherwise, I would choose the IdeaPad over the Kindle Fire.

Kindle is putting up the good fight. Nook trumped them on a small color ebook reader. Nook trumped them on a touchscreen ebook reader. Nook trumped them on being compatible with libraries. Kindle recognized this and now they are coming out with their own color ebook reader, their own touchscreen reader, and they are now compatible with Overdrive, used by many libraries.

Today they announced the release of their new models and along with them, very attractive prices. Of course everyone is going to be comparing the new color model, the Kinlde Fire, to tablets, just as they did with the Nook, but Amazon is definitely not going for the full tablet market. You can tell because the device does not have any expandable memory, it doesn’t have any cameras, and it doesn’t even have a microphone. Excluding all these things and keeping it what it is, an ebook reader and media player, let them keep the price down. Kudos to them for doing that.

Will it erode some sales of tablets? Maybe. For what I use a tablet for, this would probably work pretty well except for one thing, and that is the memory limitation. It has no external memory expansion capability. If I want to use it as a media device, and I have to use it with a wifi connection, The internal memory available isn’t going to cut it for any kind of video content. Maybe you can store media on the cloud, but it won’t be available when you don’t have wifi access.

I think the omission of an sd card slot will be this devices Achilles heal. I think it is a huge mistake. I understand they want people to use it with Amazon’s media and cloud services, but why prevent them from being able to add storage? Would it really have brought the price up that much? Also, if it is being marketed as a media device to access all of Amazon’s video content, how can it not have an HDMI port? You have all this content available, as long as you watch it on your 7″ screen.

It is an interesting announcement. The part of it I found most interesting though was not the Kindle Fire, it was their new base model Kindle without a keyboard on the bottom, for under $80. That is intriguing and definitely brings the Kindle down to the realm of a good Christmas gift.

The color Kindle Fire will probably get the most attention though, but I think Nook, who always seems a step ahead of Kindle, will probably have something even better available here soon. Since Amazon has very aggressive pricing, Nook will have to do the same with whatever they come out with too. Competition is a wonderful thing.

eBooks are not the only way to enjoy books electronically. There are also audiobooks. Books that have been read and recorded. They are available in many different ways. Books on tape, Books on CD, or via services such as audible.com.

Audiobooks are great to listen to when you can’t dedicate yourself 100% to reading, but have some time where you can listen to audio. Your daily commute, for example. Listening to audiobooks does take more concentration than listening to music, for me anyway. I find I can’t really listen to them if I am trying to do mental work and sometimes, even if I am driving, I often have to rewind sections if I get focused on a task because I might miss some of it. They are great if you are a passenger though or if you have some time where you are doing something that doesn’t require a lot of concentration. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of people ask me what type of device they should buy to read ebooks with. The answer is, it depends. It really depends on how you are going to use the device. The devices most often compared are the Nook and the Kindle. At first glance these two devices look pretty much the same, but in actuality they are quite different and which one you should purchase greatly depends on how you plan to use it.

One of the first big differences among ebook devices is how they obtain books. Kindle came out with the idea that you shouldn’t need the Internet to be able to get books and you shouldn’t need to be in a specific location to pick up a new title. Books can be purchased using the same signals mobile phones use, which makes the device completely independent. It doesn’t need to be connected to a computer and it doesn’t need to be tethered to an internet connection This is true also of any smartphone used as an eBook reader, such as an iPhone or an Android Phone.

Nook has added the same capability to their devices too, but with either device, it is something you pay extra for. If you get a wifi only device, it means you need to have an Internet connection, or you need to connect it to a computer to get new books. If you get a 3G capable device, it doesn’t need to connect to anything to get content.

With the Kindle, you buy content from Amazon.com. The device uses its own proprietary format. This has an unexpected side effect that a lot of people are not aware of until they have already purchased a Kindle, and the is incompatibility with books that may be offered by their local library. My library, for example, offers ebook lending via Overdrive. You just register with the local library and you can browse all of their titles and check out ones you want to read for free. This service works fine with Nook, it works with Android, it works with Apple, but it doesn’t work with the Kindle. Therefore if you plan to supplement your reading materials through the local library at all, the Kindle might not be the best choice for you.

If you travel at all, there is another key difference between the Nook and the Kindle that many people do not realize until after they have purchased a device. With the Nook, you can only purchase books if you are in the United States. If you take it to another country and you try to buy books, it won’t work. You can download books you already purchased from another country, but to purchase them, you need to be in the U.S.. This means, if you plan to travel a lot, or live in another country for any amount of time, the Nook might not be the best choice for you. Kindle does not have that restriction, nor do devices that can read Kindle books, such as smartphones.

Both devices offer e-ink screens for reading in daylight conditions. These displays also offer exceptionally long battery life. The latest Nook also offers a touchscreen, something the Kindle to date has not embraced.

If you don’t read outside though, and if you want access to things other than text based media, like comic books or magazines, Nook has another option, the Nook color. The Nook color is essentially an Android based color tablet, which allows it to present color images and content.

So in summary, if you just want to buy text based media to read from the US, the Kindle and Nook are much the same. If you plan on borrowing books from your local library, then you probably want to go with the Nook. If you plan on spending any time outside of the US, then you probably want to go with a Kindle, and if you want any content other than text based media, then you might want to move to a Nook color or some other tablet like an iPad, iPod touch, or Android tablet or phone. The device you choose really depends on how you plan to use it.

I created this website when I first started reading ebooks on my Palm Pilot. If you wanted to read a book on such a device, you usually had to convert it from a format used by a PC to a format that could be used by the Palm. The new breed of handheld tablets and smart phones are much more powerful than those old devices, have better screens, more memory, and are capable of reading most of the same file types as a PC.
I recently picked up an Android Smartphone, and one of the first things I wanted to do with it was see how it worked as an ebook reader.

As for purchasing books, apps are available for the primary stores, Kindle and Nook. I looked in the Android market to see what was available for reading non-DRM books, preferably epub format, which I have used exclusively on my Nokia Internet Tablet for the last several years.

At first, I tried an app called Cool Reader. It seemed to have a lot of fairly positive reviews. I found it did not perform that well, when switching the device between portrait and landscape mode there was a long delay before it would redisplay the text. Then I saw they had fbReader. This is the same reader I have used on My Nokia tablet for years. It is open source and is also available on Windows and Linux, so you can use the same application on many different platforms.

I installed that and it works very well, handled my ePub books without any issues and rendered quickly, even when switching between landscape and portrait mode.

The screen on my particular Android device, an LG Optimus V, is small, so optimizing screen real estate is important and fb reader allows you to do this well. I use a font size of 20 when reading. In portrait mode this gives me 17 lines of text and in landscape mode it gives 11 lines of text. This may not sound like much, but it is actually plenty for reading text based books. Turning the page is simply a matter of tapping the screen or pushing on the volume button.

The device is small enough, it can easily be held in one hand and is easily pocketable, so you always have it with you. No matter where you are, you can slip the device out of your pocket and start reading.

Not too long ago, I purchased an iPod touch 4th generation. It is my first Apple product and to date, I have been pretty impressed with the build quality. It is also much more lightweight than my old Nokia 770, which I often still using for reading.

I decided to see how it would fair as an ebook reader. It has a very nice display with 960×640 resolution. It is very compact and lightweight, so I had pretty high expectations. It did not disappoint.

I went to the app store and looked for an ebook reader. I installed the Apple, Google, Nook and Kindle apps, but I also wanted something generic to read my ePub files that I used with fbReader on my Nokia Tablet. It seemed the reader of choice was an App called Stanza. I installed Stanza, and then I tried copying a book over so I could read it. This is where I had problems. The way you get content on to your iPod Touch is to synch it through iTunes, and just because you have a book copied over to be read with one application, like Apple’s reader, doesn’t mean you can read it with another application. Finding how to get the book to where it needed to be so it could be read by Stanza was a pain, and in the end, to test the book on two different applications, I had to have two copies of the book on the device in two different locations.
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