ebooks Archives - Sky's Blog

I have been reading ebooks for about 5 years now. Mostly I buy them from Fictionwise.com and most often I download their sci-fi short-story Nebula-award nominees series, which they publish once a year, for free. But, I’ve probably spent on the order of $200 on other books as well.

Oh, and I subscribe to Scientific American digital (monthly) and read it as a PDF on the screen rather than get all that paper that just piles up before I can get to it.

As in quantum-tunneling^[1] effects, you can get me past the initial resistance to an ebook if:

The price of the ebook is 60% or less than the price of the physical book; or if
I don’t want the physical book hanging around anyway after I’ve read it; or if
It’s available in PDF so I can read it anywhere (though I do purchase prioprietary DRM formats frequently); or if
It’s $9.99 even if I think I could find a paperback for slightly less somewhere else.

It is just so much easier to take an ebook with me and read it on my screen (or iPhone in the case of the Kindle^[2] and Fictionwise readers)!

[1] I use quantum-tunneling as a metaphor all the time. Read about quantum-tunneling here in Wikipedia where it’s a difficult article to follow, but go the the paragraph that describes Shroedinger and has the little illustration of the “tunneling” particle (see above).

[2] There’s a Kindle book reader iPhone app that allows you to buy and download Kindle books from Amazon to read them on your iPhone. No reason this wouldn’t also work on the iPad, since they say 140,000 apps already run on it. (I wonder who took the time to test that assumption…) Fictionwise.com also has a reader available in the app store.

If you live in the US and a few other parts of the world, you might think that “being connected 24/7” is the future of the entire world. That we will have mobile communication and memory and computing devices with us everywhere we go and that they’ll be connected to the network and consequently the rest of the world, at all times. That the world will be Twitter-like. Especially tweens may think this way. I suppose that US tweens don’t even think about there being any alternative. They’re just connected and that’s the way it is.

Well, there are more than a few barriers to “being connected 24/7” which lead me to believe that our real connectivity model will be “on again, off again.” And that what developers need to focus on is memory/computerpower that is self-sufficient and can operate standalone most of the time, but can instantly “sync” itself to the rest of the world when a connection is available. If you have a PDA or iPod or practically any device that utilizes large files, you’re already acquainted with the term sync.

I know I’m not the only one thinking about this. Vis the (last month) announcement of the Kindle, an e-book reader on steroids, that syncs itself whenever it has a network connection and otherwise doesn’t seem to care. (I’ve used e-books for years, but in the form of downloaded files and “reader” software on my computer.) Groove, which I haven’t used for a couple of years, also had this kind of model – opportunistic syncing. Google Docs (documents) currently works only when you’re actually online, but there’s lots of talk about how to enable it for offline work, including perhaps a big Ajax (Ajax==”lots of javascript on the browser side manipulating DOM objects”) effort that would allow offline work that would later on upload to the big server in the sky. And I’ve blogged already about Ecto and other tools that let you create blog entries while offline and then upload them when you’re connected.

What’s the real future? Well, it’s obvious to me. Ultimately we’ll all carry devices that are capable of functioning “quite well” in standalone mode, but which sync up whenever there’s connectivity, refreshing information from the network while at the same time updating our own information on the net. Remember in 2013 to remind me of this and see if I was right.

The $9.99 ebook

On again, off again, the future of connectivity