Ray Hendon

Ultraportables, which include the newest incarnation of thin and light laptops, the Ultrabook, are thought by some to be a threat to tablet computers.  The instant-on capability of Ultrabooks are believed to be especially attractive to those who have been buying tablets because of this feature. 

It appears likely to me that Ultrabooks and other thin and light laptops will do well in the market place, especially when their prices fall a few hundred dollars.  But whether they will dampen any of the enthusiasm for tablets is another matter.  Personally I think both form factors satisfy separate needs for different users.

One feature of the new Ultrabooks that will help resolve the question is whether they will serve their owners as competent eReaders.  Surely there are some prospective buyers who would prefer to own only one device rather than two—but only if the one could do the work of two.  Can an Ultrabook do both heavy duty computing and convenient eReading?  Can one design satisfy both these needs?

Certainly a dedicated eReader or a tablet have some advantages over a laptop, even a thin and light one.  Reading electronic books, for example is probably done best by a device that closely emulates the look and feel of a book.  The popularity of the Kindle and Nook are thought to owe much of their success to their similarity to printed books.

How essential is the look and feel,  though, to those who read a lot.   This article takes a look at the possibility of using these new, thin and light computers as an eReader.

To put this question to a practical test, I loaded the top three eReading applications to an 11.6” screen Asus UX21 to see how they worked.  The applications chosen to test are:

Amazon’s Kindle App for PCs, Macs, iPad, iPhone and Android devices

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• Barnes and Noble’s Nook Application for PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone  and Android devices
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• Sony’s Reader Application for PC, Mac and Android devices

  

To give you a taste of the difference, I have taken screen shots of random pages from eBooks on the three applications I mentioned.

Beginning with Amazon, a screen shot of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, is displayed in the two column format for laptop viewing. The screen shot is taken of the Kindle application for PCs.

Screen of Kindle Reader in Two Column Format

The Kindle app is widely praised for its versatility of layout options, underlining, comments, bookmarks and especially its syncing abilities.  This app also has go-to options that ease navigation, and dictionary lookup for a highlighted word.  All these features work on Ultrabooks. 

Amazon also has a user friendly policy of allowing you to direct any book in your library to be sent to any device on your registered list of devices. Amazon is indifferent as to which device or how many you use for any their electronic titles.  It treats them all the same and syncs them in an effortless way. The moment I registered my latest laptop, the Asus ZenBook UX21, all books in my library were immediately available for reading.

The strongest features of Amazon is, in my view, the ease of use of its website.  It is easy to find books, send them to the device of your choice, and generally navigate their vast site.

Equally strong is the selection of books, magazines and newspapers. They claim over a million titles, but that includes some categories such as “Singles” that represent a new class of literature that is generally shorter than a book but longer than an article. 

The worst feature of Amazon is that they insist on using a proprietary format for their eBook files.  It has an AZW extension and works only on Kindle software or hardware.  Although all the free sites I use give the option of downloading their books in the AZW format, in practice it is not terribly inconvenient.  Amazon also can read PDF files, and they will convert your Word for Windows documents to a format that allows you to put them in you Kindle library.

The other downside to Amazon is that they use DRM (digital rights management) on everything, so there is no cutting or pasting using anything in the AZW format. 

The Nook eReader software also provides a good reader experience. The screen shot below is from one of their pre-DRM works. Don’t be fooled by the small typeface. My screen capture utility shrunk it because the Nook takes up more of the horizontal space of the computer screen than the Kindle reader, so it has to cut the size down to fit within the pasted space. In practice, the Nook screen is as readable as any other.

Screen shot from the Nook Reader using the dual pane format

All the formatting and user options are available for the Nook reader–font size, margins, highlighting, lookup, go-to. And the B&N syncing feature is excellent between devices, and they offer their reader software app for a wide range of devices.

As far as eReading goes, it is hard to find much to prefer of B&N over Amazon or vice versa.  Both are excellent and have almost identical features.

The same is true for selection of books. B&N’s inventory is huge, and they have a good selection of free public domain books—as good as or better than Amazon’s.

Nook uses the ePub format, as does Sony, although both will read many other formats as well.  They do not read Amazon’s proprietary AZW file format, however.

Something of an oddity: The Nook reader treats all ePub software as DRM protected, so they do not allow cutting or pasting of non-DRM books.  Even on the iPad, whose own iReader app allows cutting and pasting of non-DRM protected material the  Nook does not.

Sony’s reader app provides a good reading experience. The screen shot below is from an ePub file of a non-DRM version of Sherlock Holmes.

Screen of Sony Reader’s Dual Column Layout

As with the Nook, the Sony Reader software uses more of the landscape screen to display its materiel than the Kindle app, so my clipping software has to reduce it to fit the pasting space. But Sony gives one plenty of formatting options and page control.

Sony lags both Amazon and B&N with book selection and syncing ability.  Their books are generally priced high; they have few free books, and their selection doesn’t match its two larger competitors.

Sony makes its reader software available to fewer devices—no iPad, no iPhone, no BlackBerry, for example.  They have syncing available to the three types of devices they support, but I have not tried it personally.

I like the Sony reader app for its ability to read almost any kind of document regardless of format, except, of course, Kindle documents. I will always have their app installed on my computers in case a particular book is not available in the Kindle format.  And they allow cut and paste options for non-protected books.

I find all three of the reader software about equally enjoyable to use. The differences in layout and options are not terribly important. I find I use the Kindle app more than the others because I find more books on their site I like, and I like to sync the books among all my devices. Still, I maintain active use of the Nook and the Sony Readers.

Summary:

First, the reality of the size and convenience of specialized eReaders and tablets makes it clear that they have the advantage. It is not possible for an ultrabook, weighing in at 2.9 pounds, to be as convenient to use as a 7-inch tablet or even the pound and a half iPad.

However, it is also inconvenient to carry two devices if one will do. So, there will be occasions when a thin and light laptop could be a suitable substitute for a dedicated eReader or tablet. 

At bottom, all of these tested apps work well on an Ultrabook. And they would work just as well with the software from other vendors such as Kobo or Blio. If your eReading preferences include comic books, magazines or children’s books, then you might like a specialty reader designed for the formats unique to these publications.

While all the eReading apps work well on an Ultrabook, it still may not be your preferred way of reading electronic texts.  But they are completely usable as a primary or secondary eReader. The choice of one over another is more dependent on which site you prefer to use because of its particular strengths than to the characteristics of their eReades.

From my experience, I have given away my Kindle reader. I simply do not want to carry another device with me in my travels. Now that I have a 7-inch tablet, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, I use it as my eReader of choice because of its lightness and ease of holding in one hand. I use the iPad for e-reading infrequently, but there are occasions when it comes in handy. Its weight, though, makes it a second choice, especially for long reading times. 

I rarely use a PC or my ultraportable for reading, but if I do it will be on the ultraportable.  Its lightness and instant-on feature does make it a better choice than the older, heavier laptops, but it is not as convenient to carry as a tablet.

An ultraportable may not be your favorite way of reading electronic texts, but it serves as a completely satisfying vehicle for reading if you want to carry only one device with you or if an occasion arises when it is all you have to use.

Reports out the last few days point to Barnes and Noble looking at ways of selling some or all of their Nook line of eRedeaders.  The problem is an odd one.  By most measures the Nooks have been successful products.  They competed effectively with other eReading devices, and the Nook Color almost singlehandedly defined a new niche in the tablet category of computers.

The bottom line, however, is that the sales success has not been translated to B&N’s bottom line:  the large book chain has not found  a way to sell their fancy new devices at a profit.  Development costs are high, as are the costs of keeping the products up to date in a fast-paced technology industry. 

B&N is said to be looking at two options:  The first is to sell the brand to another firm that could afford to continue developing the Nooks and to promote them in American and international markets.  It is understood, apparently, that these products need further development and to be promoted more than they are now if they are to become profitable.

The second option would be to sell a large percentage of the products to another firm but keep  a minority interest.  This would allow B&N to reap some of the expected profits from the line as it reached critical mass.  And it would free them from the need to raise additional capital.

Lurking behind the issue is that B&N is not currently profitable.  Furthermore, if they sell or drop the line of eReaders, what they are left with is a dinosaur brick and mortar book chain that is steadily losing ground to the same digital markets that the Nook has helped define.

Some analysts feel the Nook is doomed and will eventually disappear.  The price pressure applied by Amazon is simply too much for each of their products, the e-Ink Reader that sells for $100, the Nook Color for $199 and the Nook Tablet for $249.  At these prices, there is no margin left for profit and not enough money coming in to continue their development efforts.

If there is to be a buyer it must obviously be one with deep pockets.  Microsoft and Google qualify as having deep pockets.  But do they have the compelling interest?  It is hard to see Microsoft blowing itself up even beyond their present size to take on such a different breed of cat.  It is not an area in which they have much of a proprietary interest.  They are not hardware manufactures at their core; neither are they book sellers, electronic or otherwise.

The case for Google is better.  They have an electronics bookstore, although it is not doing particularly well.  And they make the Android OS that runs many of the eReaders, both e-Ink and LCD types.  They would have better bargaining power with the publishers for the electronic titles they would sell.  Perhaps a partnership would be possible for them.

It also seems that Sony could be interested.  Their selection of electronic titles lags B&N and Amazon, so they would gain traction in an industry that is not in their wheelhouse.  They make eReader hardware now, so there would be some duplication in picking up the Nook line.  However, Sony could use the Color Nooks to enhance their offerings in the 7-inch segment of the tablet market.  Furthermore, Integrating these two sides of the Pacific might me more than Sony could do given their current state of struggle in the computer market.  This makes them a longshot, in my view.

12/21/2011:  Fire Fixes Flaws

From David Pogue: “Animations are sluggish and jerky — even the page turns that you’d think would be the pride of the Kindle team. Taps sometimes don’t register. There are no progress or ‘wait’ indicators, so you frequently don’t know if the machine has even registered your touch commands. The momentum of the animations hasn’t been calculated right, so the whole thing feels ornery.”

+A software update, sent out over the air on Tuesday, fixes these balky characteristics.  According to reviews, the carousel stops spinning on a dime; it takes only one tap to open an application, and one tap opens something much faster than before. and page turns are faster and smoother.

There was one enhancement, too.  The user can control which apps are in the home carousel.

A good fix for the Fire that makes a significant difference in user satisfaction.

12/19/2011:  Lenovo Has Quad-core 10.1-inch Tablet in The Oven

A report from DigiTimes, a newspaper based in Taiwan that keeps a close eye on electronics manufacturers in that island nation, says that Lenovo has a quad-core tablet ready to begin production in January.   It will be called the K2, which will be an update of the existing K1.  The new device will feature an  NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor, up to 2GB of RAM, and Google Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system.

12/17/2011:  7-inch iPad Coming in Late 2012?

DigiTimes, an infamous reporter of random rumors strikes again with a report that Apple is buying oodles of 7.85-inch displays from LG and Aupotronics.  Presumably these purchases are intended for use by the Cupertino firm, and it probably isn’t for a new laptop.  More likely it would be for the often speculated 7-inch tablet, a sort of mini-iPad. 

The rumor would put delivery close to the end of 2012.  DigiTimes has been right in some of their reporting, given the close relationship they have with the Taiwan firms that actually manufacture many of the world’s laptops.  But, they have also been wrong, so there is no way of knowing yet.

RIM’s BlackBerry Playbook  sold about 850,000 units for the three quarters since its introduction.  %00,000 weere sold in its first quarter, 200,000 the next and now, 150,000 in the last quarter that ended November 26th.  RIM has been working overtime trying to get sales going on their tablet.  They have sent out multiple OS fixes, and they promise a much improved model in February.  But, the main emphasis for boosting their sales has been to lower the price to $200.  this has helped, and it is rumored that after Christmas selling season is over they will keep the $200 price point as permanent.

This will make it hard for other 7-inch tablets to get more than $200, with the Kindle Fire selling at that price, too.  This is good news for those who are considering a 7-inch model to supplement their digital experiences.

12/12/2011: Kindle Fire to Get Software Update

Amazon will push an update to Kindle Fire owners before the end of the year, according to a report in the New York Times.  The new software will offer better performance, improvements in multitouch navigation, and the ability to edit the list of recently used items that show up on the home screen.

All of the enhancements are in response to consumer complaints that have been documented in reviews posted by the early adopters of the new 7-inch tablet.  Nearly 33% of early buyers have given the Fire three star or less ratings.  This compared with only 11% of the first Kindle buyers some years ago.

12/08/2011:  The Nook Tablet Ships a Million

It is clear now that the 7-inch segment of the tablet market will never be the same since Amazon and Barnes and Noble brought out their 7-inchers at prices that translate to roughly half the prevailing prices at the time.

Amazon’s success with the Kindle Fire has been widely publicized, and now Barnes and Noble is said to have shipped a million units of their Nook Tablet since its mid-November debut.

Neither the Fire nor the Nook Tablet are as full featured as their competition from Samsung or HTC, to name a couple, but the pricing at that end of the market will never again support a $400 price, much less the $500 price point at which they were initially offered.

An example is offered by RIM’s BlackBerry Playbook.  Even at the deeply discounted price of $199, they are expected to have sold only about 150,000 units for the entire quarter.  Admittedly the $199 price point was not in effect during the entire quarter, but with Amazon selling four to five million since mid November and Barnes and Noble at least taking shipments on a million units, this can spell only disaster for the PlayBook.  I wonder if it can be fixed.

The sales of Samsung 7-inch tabs and HTC are not yet known, but it cannot be expected to be much.  Altough HTC has reduced the price on their 7-incher to $199, I wonder how much they can sell.  The original Galaxy Tab is now selling for $200 with a 3G contract.  It is hard to see that the newer models of the same size will sell much at their $400 price points.

12/01/2011: Electronic Reading Continues it Rapid Growth

Electronic reading continues to grow at a fast pace as it continues to grab a larger slice of the book sales pie. Amazon reported today that they now offer over 900,000 eBooks in English and other languages, all offered for sale through their website.

Following this announcement, Juniper Research, a firm that follows the industry, released a report which foresees sales of electronic books to reach almost $10 billion by 2016. Sales for this year are estimated to be about $3.2 billion.

Juniper attributes the rise to the growing inventory of eBooks and in the number of eReading devices on the market. They also say that the spread of eReading to smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices is expected to contribute to the growth. The research firm expects that tablets alone may account for as much as 30 percent of eBook downloads by 2016.

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Ray Hendon

eBooks have been rewriting the rules about how, when and where we read. The convenience and low costs of reading in electronic formats has made headway among the reading public, and In terms of book sales, eBooks are now a major force in today’s market.

But it has been only recently that America’s public libraries have joined the revolution, but now they have.  11,000 public libraries across the U.S.A. now allow their members to borrow electronic editions of books, and a few weeks ago Amazon joined the chorus and allowed its Kindle readers to borrow from public libraries.

Early Friday, about 9:00am, I made a trip to the local Lake Charles library, filled out a form for a library card, and about half an hour later, sitting at my desktop, I borrowed my first eBook, John Grisham’s The Confession: A Novel.  The entire process was painless and simple; this article is an account of how to do it.

First, one does not have to have a Kindle reader to use Amazon’s borrowing service.   I have a Kindle, but for almost all of my eReading I use the Kindle application  on my iPad or Galaxy Tab 7 rather than the Kindle device.  It is too easy to read on my other devices that I happen to have with me, so my old Kindle mostly gathers dust these days. 

If you do not have a Kindle Reader, just download the Kindle Reader Application through Amazon for your desktop or laptop or through the Android Market if you use Android, or Apple’s App Store if you have an iPhone or iPad.

Free Kindle readers are available Here for the devicdes shown above.

Once your account is set up with Amazon, you are ready to proceed, assuming, of course, that you are a member of your local library.  If not, then join and get your member number.      Also, since the lending is done on-line, you must get a PIN number at the same time.  When these two things done, you are ready to proceed to the next step.

The second step is to get the appropriate software from site that handles electronic lending for all the libraries that lend eBooks—Overdrive (Click Here).  This is a great convenience to have a professional firm to provide a consistent interface to all public library eLending.

Once on the Overdrive page you will notice a box on the top right of the screen:  You can see that the service is available for desktops, laptops as well as many mobile devices.  Don’t confuse the Mac software for what you will need for the iPad or iPhone.  If you want to read on you home computers and on your mobile devices, you will need the software install on each device you plan to use.

Once the download is completed and installed, you are ready to borrow a library book on your Kindle reading app or your iPad/iPhone Overdrive app.  Sign on to Overdrive with your library membership number and enter your PIN, and you will then be able to search for the title or author of your choice.

When you are signing up with Overdrive you will select what lending period you would like. I chose the 14-day option. If I finish reading the borrowed book before that time, I can return it so it will go back into circulation sooner.

I noticed that the Lake Charles library (Calcasieu Public Library) they often have only one digital copy of a title.  The book publishers are holding the feet of the public libraries to the fire and require that they can only lend the number of books they have purchased.  So, if it is checked out you may put it on hold so you will be notified when it become available.   

With the Kindle, you chose Kindle as your reader on the Overdrive site, so when you select the title you want to borrow and continue with checkout, the Overdrive site lines up your download with Amazon’s website and switches your browser to that site so you can tell Amazon to which device you want your copy to be downloaded.    I chose the Galaxy Tab 7, and by the time I turned it on and synced it with Amazon it was in my archives files.  I simply clicked on the archived copy and the download was completed and then appeared on my Kindle library, ready to read.

For the iPad/iPhone device, rather than choosing Kindle, you need to choose Adobe ePub format which is the DRM enabled ePub format.  In this case, the file of the borrowed book is downloaded directly into Overdrives reader application, and the icon is displayed on the iPad’s/iPhone’s screen.  You simply open the reader app and the books you have borrowed appear in the library, ready to be read.

This same procedure will work with Nook and Sony readers, but they may also have their own way of handling borrowed book that allows you to use their proprietary reader apps in place of the Overdrive reader.Borrowing for these devices will be covered in a later piece.

Below is a video that goes through the process for Kindle.  If anything is unclear about the process, it may help to clear it up.

Video on Borrowing eBooks from you Local Library

Good reading.

Sony Insider reports that Sony is working on a new device that will run the Chrome operating system.  According to the report, the new device will be patterned after the Chrome “. . . Cr-48 reference design with roughly the same dimensions and keyboard but an oh-so-slightly smaller 11.6-inch screen, and NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 running the show alongside 1GB of RAM and 16GB of flash storage. Sony’s also shooting for eight hours of battery life, and a weight of just 2.2 pounds. “

For those of you who have forgotten the experimental Chrome CR-48, this link will take you to Engadget’s initial review it.  For my review, based on specs and other reviews Click Here.

The same report also suggests that Sony is working on a “Hybrid PC” with the following configuration: “. . . at a thin-and-light Core i7 notebook with an incredible 8 to 16.5 hours of battery life, Intel Thunderbolt and an internal SSD, all of which plugs into a dock of some sort that adds a Blu-ray burner and external graphics (by AMD) for gaming and multimedia.”

Both these devices seem to be Sony’s effort to leap frog the competition in two new areas:  Cloud devices, (CR-48) and a new ultraportable that competes with the Apple Mac Book Air.

For a Chrome OS device, although the reference design device received a great deal of press attention, there has been little written about it since.  It fell off everyone’s radar. 

This does not mean that manufacturers  are not working on their own versions of this radical new design, but no one is talking about it if they are.  A 2.2lb laptop would be welcome to those who need portability, although the lack of a strong central processing unit would limit its attraction.  I will be watching carefully if the business community takes an interest in it.  But, it seem to me to be a long-shot for Sony.

The ultraportable with new innards, though, seems more mainstream.  Thin and light is making a strong showing now among those who must carry their computing power with them in their frequent travels.  The Mac Book Air has been popular in spite of its $1000+ price, and other manufacturers are increasing their offerings in this new class of device.

There seems to be a misunderstanding about eReading on the various operating systems that power many of the new tablets coming to market this year.  Some fear that the larger screens and new operating systems will not be able to read electronic texts of the major vendors.

Each of the major new tablets is reviewed below for its ability to read Kindle, Nook and Sony electronic formats.

Android Tablets

There are four Android tablets that are either out now or will be soon.

· The Motorola Xoom is on sale now at Best Buy and at Verizon stores.

· The LG G-Slate is expected this month.

· Galaxy Tab 10.1 doesn’t have a date set, yet.

· Acer has its Iconia Tab A500 set for a date sometime in April.

All are slated to run Android 3.0, the Honeycomb version, and the first Android system made for large screen formats. The new version of Android is a source of much of this confusion. Earlier versions of Android were written for cell phones with their 3 and 4-inch screens. It appears that some believe that the new software will not work with the older eReader applications that were written with small screens in mind. The pictures below show the Kindle apps that Amazons offers its customers.

Note that the second icon from the left, the Kindle for Android, is depicted as a smartphone. This is probably the origin of some of the confusion. Android versions from the first through version 2.2.1 were written for this size screen. However, the new Android 3,0 scales these apps to larger screens with good results.  The problem of clunky graphics that plagued the iPad for apps that were brought over from the iPhone, are largely avoided by Android. (Update 4/23–Amazon announced a few days ago that they were re-writing their Kindle App for Adroid 3.0.  So any problems with the larger screens will be addressed with the new release. RH)

The Galaxy Tab 7 uses the older version Android eReading apps, and the Kindle eReader works well on it. The same is true for the new Honeycomb versions of tablets. I checked Motorola’s Xoom yesterday and the Kindle app scales well on the larger 10.1-inch screen. I can say the same for an independent eReading app from Aldiko. The reading page looks fine on both apps and all the font and brightness controls available on the small-screens  work as they are supposed to.

The only drawback to the scaling is that when the Xoom is turned horizontally, neither the Kindle app not the Aldiko switches to a dual-pane display—this feature isn’t available to the small-screen versions of eithr reader.  I suspect that Amazon will make this adjustment quickly, however. They made it for the iPad within the first month it it going one sale.

I mention this because on wide screens a dual- pane division is helpful to the reader. Long lines are hard to follow, and a dual pane window solves the problem nicely.

The absence of a dual-pane switch tells me that Amazon and Barnes and Noble will most likely rewrite their reader software for the larger Android screen.

The picture below is of devices for Nook eReaders.

They match up well with Amazon with the exception of a Windows Phone 7 app, but that will probably have one soon. The scalable properties of the Nook are the same as for Amazon and Aldiko, so Nook owners need have no fear of buying an Android tablet.

Other Operating Systems: HP’s WebOS and BlackBerry’s QNX

Kobo is the only eReader app available for the Palm/HP WebOS. The Palm Pre is shown on the far right in the picture below.

The Pre runs the Palm OS that HP now owns.  HP has enhanced the OS and blown it up for the larger tablet screens. It isn’t known how the older apps will scale to the new 10.1-inch dimensions of the HP Touch Pad’s. But I cannot imagine HP not taking care of this issue before releasing their new tablet, scheduled sometime in the summer of this year.

I feel confident that HP’s new WebOS will have a full complement of reader apps when the time comes for them to go on sale. HP has too much credibility in the industry not to be able to convince Amazon and others to build reader apps for its tablet and smartphones.

RIM’s BlackBerry Playbook has several options of bringing their existing eReaders to the new seven-inch platform. First, with their huge installed base of BlackBerry smartphones, no book seller is going to be caught without a new app ready for it the day it is introduced. (Rumor has it that April 10^th will be the day).

RIM has also said that the Playbook will be able to run legacy apps from its earlier OS days, so existing apps from Kindle, Nook, and Kobo, for example, would be able to run on the new OS. There is also the real possibility that the new OS of BlackBerry will be able to run Android apps. Company executives have dropped the hint that they are considering making it compatible with Android —their hardware inside the tablet is certainly capable of being programmed to do it, and I would not be surprised to see it happen.  (Update 4/23–the only eReading app ready on the day of its release was Kobo.  I noticed the Kobo icon on the home screen when I checked the Playbook out at my local Best Buy store.  Kobo will read ePub files, so early adopters of the Playbook will have plenty of reading material available from day one.  RH)

Windows Tablets

On the few tablets that run Windows, all of the major booksellers already have software for it.  If it runs on your PC, it will run on a tablet.

This is not true for Windows Phone 7, however.  The eReader apps will have to be re-written, but that is already underway. Kindle had their app pre-installed on Windows Phone 7 smartphones the day they were introduced. Also, there are no expectations that this new operating system will be ready for a tablet until sometime in 2012.

Whether they will be as easily scalable as Android, though, we cannot know for certain until Microsoft steps forward with more details.

Overall it looks good for those who enjoy reading on electronic devices. The options are growing daily, and many of the new tablets have features that exceed what we have come to expect from laptops and the iPad. With the syncing ability of the major vendors of electronic titles, it is easy to switch devices without losing your place and without having to buy new copies.

As more magazines and newspapers become available in an electronic format, we can expect more and more time spent reading our favorite material whenever and wherever we happen to be. This is the liberating power of the new technology.

For those whose reading life encompasses electronic reading materials, life keeps getting better. We have had Gutenberg and Amazon for some time, and when Barnes and Noble decided that electronic delivery of books was in their future, our options were expanded once again. Border/Kobo was too little too late, but even so, it continued the expansion our options to acquire new reading material.

There have been many independent offerings of eBooks on the internet, but I have no way to keep up with all the sites where one may buy electronic titles. Few, however, offer the wide range of titles that Amazon and Barnes and Noble have.

Now, however, things have changed with Google’s entry into the market with Google Books. Google claims 3 million titles available, although many if not most are probably associated with the Gutenberg Project. On the other hand, it is not difficult to get contracts with the major publishers of electronic materials, and Google has done exactly that. Their new site is designed to be fully competitive with the established sellers.

Google has a difference with Amazon and Barnes and Noble: their eReader is web-enabled rather than app-centric. To visit their new site, Click Here.

The Google site is well organized and makes it easy to buy a book, and their search classifications are handy to zoom in to your area of interest. One feature I like is when you mouse over the cover, a popup window appears with a brief description of the contents. Barnes and Noble has the same feature, and Amazon could use it, too.   The screen shot below is of their home page.

For prices, Google are about the same as the other major retailers.  Many $9.99 books, but some are higher and some are lower.  Importantly, Google has a fair selection of the classic titles for free.

Google doesn’t sell any hardware for eReading, so they made their books readable on the web. If you log in to their site with your Google ID, then your reading is accomplished as a webpage rather than a specific standalone app that Kindle and Nook use. This also means that all the storage of your library is done in their cloud storage system. Barnes and Nobles does something like this with their multiple platform software and syncing. Amazon allows you to shift your local books to other registered devices. Both systems have their advantages, but I prefer to have my storage done locally. That way you do not have to have an internet connection when you want to read.

Another feature that will be handy for many is the ability of Nook and Sony Readers to read Google docs. Amazon, with their proprietary format, does not allow this. Having it available would allow Kindle owners to take their Google library with them, but Amazon seems to be adamant about not opening up ePub files on their system. As a convenience it would be nice, but not, apparently for Amazon.

I have downloaded about eight books from Google, and I find that regardless of the device I am using, I can read them. They have specific apps for Android, iPad, iPhone and iPods, and I am confident that a WebOS and Windows Phone 7 app will be forthcoming soon. BlackBerry has already been observed being able to use Android apps on their up-coming new OS, so it won’t be long before all hands are on board.

It looks as if Google is ready to claim a share of this new and growing market, and their approach is appropriate for their vision of web-centric services. For readers of electronic texts, it is all for the good.

Ray Hendon

For those who recently acquired an eReader one of your first urges is to load it up with new books. Understandably, this urge is strong and eBooks stores are happy to help.

However. before jumping into paying for current titles, be aware of the availability of tens of thousands of books that are absolutely free of costs–all of them available for virtually any device, regardless of the brand. Even better, many if not most of the free titles are among the best books ever written.

In the United States, for example, books published in 1922 and prior years are no longer protected by copy-write restrictions and are free of fees to publishers. Before electronic reading began its growth stage, many publishers would print these old titles and sell them at significantly reduced prices in paperback format.   T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman are a few who come under this rule.

In Europe it is about the same, so we have available, free of charge, the high quality novels, poetry and essays of some the world’s greatest writers. Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Wordsworth, Blake, Pope, Flaubert, and thousands of others are available.

Printed copies of these titles are still being sold, but a major new wrinkle in publishing came along when the Gutenberg Project was begun. The Gutenberg Project takes as its mission in life to scan the huge library of copy-write-free books into a digital format and then give them away to anyone who asks. The internet has made this dream a reality, and the development of compressed formats of electronic titles made it easy and fast to download.  Regardless of your device, you can download a huge volumes of works to a PC, Mac or proprietary electronic reading device—Kindles, Sony Readers and Nooks, e.g.

Now there are hundreds of sites that either feature these free classic titles or at least carry many of them along with their regular for-sale inventory. Below you will find some of my favorite free sites.  Don’t forget, most of them have a variety of formats available. If you have a Kindle, you simply ask for the Kindle format. For most other eReaders, ePub and PDF formats are also available.

Gutenberg: Click Here. : The original site has a great selection of about 33,000 titles. Their site is not as slick in layout and user-friendliness as others, but once accustomed to its clunky interface, it is worth the effort. The main thing here to lookout for is that their search engine is not sophisticated in guessing what you are looking for. Spelling and precise names and titles are required to bring up a hit. Many of their titles are also available as audio books, wonderful for blind readers and others who prefer being read to.

Manybooks: Manybooks.net is much more civilized in its web page layout, and it boasts over 35,000 titles, all free. Many of the titles will be the same as Gutenberg, of course, but they have many of their own. The file formats available for download are many—all the usual suspects plus many you may have never heard of. This is almost always my first choice when looking for a classical title. Their search engine is also unimaginative, so be precise with titles and authors, or use their browsing by category system or browse alphabetically by author.

Inkmesh: Inkmesh has no inventory of its own, but will search sites for you to see if your title of choice is available and if so, where. It is also handy for fee-type titles if you want to compare prices. They also have classifications that you can browse by: adventure, romance, business, etc. It is a handy site to have available.

Amazon Free Books: Amazon has a rich library for free books, but they are not easily found. This link will get you directly to their free book section, but expect to have to fiddle with it some. Also, be careful and observant on their title searches. They will often bring up a range of options for any title, and many of the titles have fee versions as well as free. You may end up paying 99₵ or more for a title that may also be free if you look further down the list.

Barnes and Noble Free Books:  Everything I said about Amazon is true for Barnes and Noble. They have a good selection of free books, but the only file format available is ePub.

Kobo:Kobo has the ePub format, so Kindle users need not try. But Kobo has many free books. Finding them, though, is not easy. Usually, searching by a classic title will bring up paid and free versions of the title.

There are other sites, but this list should last for the first few thousand titles. Also, if you have an iPhone or Android smartphone, all the reader apps for Kindle, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo (Borders) are available. This way, you can download to your Nook, for example, and have the same library available on the iPhone or Droid. This is handy for short waits that allow you to read your current selection for a few minutes of productive fun.

The netbook-looking device you see above is neither a netbook nor a laptop, though it has a screen large enough to qualify. Its basic computer and storage abilities are not robust enough to meet a laptop’s criteria. Off-line computing on this guy will leave many users howling at the moon.

The crux of this gizmo (touted as revolutionary) is that it is a terminal, connected to the internet rather than to a mainframe. The news, though, is that this black and skinny little gadget doesn’t do much of anything else.  It is the slave; the internet is its master:  If it needs to add one plus one, it must rely on a computer somewhere on the internet to do that simple chore and then send the information back.  A dumb-terminal, in an older vernacular, comes closer to the concept of Chrome.

The CR-48 is not entirely dumb, however. It has native on-board computing power of a modest amount. The Intel Atom processor inside provides less than powerhouse functionality, but it is capable of doing some off-line chores.

But to do critical tasks off-line would require it to bulk up too much: more CPU memory, more storage memory, more weight, and more money. The idea of a terminal is to off-load all the storage burdens placed on in when native programs are installed. Off-loading allows the Chrome to be more nimble in doing other things and be lighter, cheaper and faster at the same time.

Critical Weakness

To use the CR-48, you need to be connected, and your connection needs to be good—always good.  In real life the internet is almost always available—but not always.  Internet connections are far from perfect, especially if you move around.  Connections can break down in local areas for hours or more.   Remote locations have limited signal strength or none, etc.

This single fact of unreliability marks the limits of the CR-48, and brings its level of use well below that which is required and demanded by many mobile business clients.

For those who intend to use it for less than critical tasks, then the equation changes and the balance may shift to its favor.  Both tablets and net books are less than all things to all people. Yet both have found a viable niche in the larger market for strong mobile devices with a commodious screen. These instruments are sometimes alternatives to other computers.  But often they are a supplement and enhancement to existing computers. The iPad and netbooks do not always compete with larger systems as much as compliment them.

The task of Chrome is to find its niche, and this process will probably take a couple of new iterations before it is completed. Chrome needs to make room for off-line computing, but the tradeoffs of this move are unflattering.

My imagination is too limited to see how they will attempt to solve this Rubric’s cube of a puzzle of being more while at the same time being less. I am skeptical of the concept, but I am probably more likely than not to be wrong. The CR-48 is interesting, both in concept and in design. It is a return to the yesteryear of brainy, brawny mainframes and dumb terminals. It worked then. I just don’t know about now.

Review

Cnet got an early look here. But this is not a review:  The piece lists the specs, with few other comments.

• 12.1-inch display
• Full-size keyboard
• Oversize clickable touchpad
• World-mode 3G
• 802.11n Wi-Fi
• Eight-plus hours of use
• Eight-plus days of standby
• Webcam
• SSD hard drive

PC World has a more conventional review after a brief session with the new device here. Edward Albro is the reviewer, and he is candid about his experience. He mentions nine apps that come pre-loaded on the CR-48, and has valuable comments about how they work.  It is easy to see an eReader as an embedded application that would allow off-line reading.

There are other reviews, but everyone has caught on to the limits of the concept.  There is much water to flow under this bridge before it is ready to complete the revolution it promises.

There is a new use of eReaders that is fueling a boom in electronic readers and books:  A Kindle can serve as a brown paper bag for madam’s trove of racy romances with embarrassingly provocative covers.  “One Wicked Night is shown at right.

Hot romance titles are not a new genre in American lliterature.  They have been a staple of paper-back books for as long as there has been paper-back books. 

It turns out that holding one of these fast reading romances with a hot and happy ending exposes the lurid art on the cover to others.  This exposure is not welcomed by the women who read these kinds of books, and their solution is increasingly found by buying the electronic edition and read it on a Kindle, Nook or Sony Reader.  The readers don’t want their husbands to know of their taste for this steamy literature—similar to a husband who hides his Playboy from his wife.  And they don’t want others to see it either. (“Just for Tonight” shown at left.

According to industry statistics from Bowker, a research firm for the publishing industry, romance is now the fastest growing segment of the eReading market, ahead of general fiction, mystery and science fiction

“Romance,” said Matthew Shear, the executive vice president and publisher of St. Martin’s Press, which releases 40 to 50 romance novels each year, is “becoming as popular in e-books as it is in the print editions.”

The NY Times article also reported that  “. . .at All Romance, an online retailer that sells only romance e-books, sales have more than doubled this year, and the most sought-after titles are usually the raciest.”

These lustful lasses are an exceptionally profitable niche for publishers because of two characteristics:  they are fiercely loyal to an author, often willing to buy everything a particular author has written, once discovered.  And, secondly, they buy, on average, three books a month. 

An idea of the growth of this segment of the business is provided by  Sourcebooks, an independent publisher in Naperville, Ill.  In the first quarter 8 percent of total romance sales at Sourcebooks were from e-book sales. By the third quarter that number had gone up to 27 percent.

Another astonishing statistic is that nearly 75 million people read at least one romance novel in 2008.

The overall demographic of this group of mostly women  is they are between ages 31 to 49, something of a maturing, pre-menopausal group. They read voraciously, going through a book or more a week. 

Click here for the entire NYT article