When You Die, Can I Have This

WHEN YOU DIE, CAN I HAVE THIS? The title of this post is an actual quote from my nine year old son after a couple of minutes of taking part in with my new Sony Reader. He tends to be drawn to any type of electronic gadget, however he really took to this one quick, even bragging to his pal about how cool it was, and the way cool it was that I received it free of charge. My first impulse was to inform him he may have it nowâ€"and not just to stave off the approaching patricide, however as a result of my very own first impressions have been much less favorable. But let me begin firstly. Just before Christmas I registered for a sequence of seminars in New York, the Publishing Business Conference & Expo, in an effort to get slightly smarter about the business I’m in. One of the benefits of a full-conference registration is a free Sony Reader. And they had been pretty much as good as their wordâ€"the reader confirmed up final week, and I couldn’t wait to open it up and see what all the e-book fuss was about. Let me now reiterate my fundamental stance on e-books: If individuals are reading books they’ve paid for, so publishers and authors are being paid, I don’t give a hoot in regards to the format they’re studying it in: hardcover or mass market e-book, e-book in whatever format on whatever gadget . . . If you’re a reader, you’re my good friend. If you’re not pirating content, you’re my buyer. As an editor and writer I’m a content supplier, equally joyful providing that content material in whatever format persons are more than likely to purchase. I’m also an avid reader and collector of books. I like having books roundâ€"my home is filled with books. I buy books from multiple sources, principally new but also used, and I even occasionally borrow books from the library. I’m not at all opposed on common principal to studying books on an e-reader or shopping for e-books, either, so no preconceived boundary there. I suppose I can provide some moderately unbiased opinions on the Sony Reader, but if I actually “evaluate” it's going to I be breaking two of my cardinal guidelines? The first, that critics are the lowest form of human life (well, okay, baby molesters, Nazis, then critics) and as such I’ve promised myself that I won't ever be a critic as long as I stay? Maybe. The second rule, that I don’t wish to look a present horse in the mouth. The good folks at Sony had been kind sufficient to team up with the nice individuals at the Publishing Business Conference & Expo to offer me a tool free of charge that retails for $188 or more, so I should smile and say thanks. Imagine me smiling. Thank you. I’m going to give myself a pass on the whole critic factor, simply this once, and provide some opinions. These are my opinions, and I encourage you to kind your own. I am only an expert on what I like, and even then I actually have the capacity to surprise myself. Your experience will be different. On with it . . . The packaging was pretty lackluster. S ony has some catching up to do in terms of design. I just bought a new iPod and Apple remains to be profitable the design warfare. Inside the boring field is the reader itself, which is smallâ€"the PRS-300, or “Pocket Edition” is the smaller of Sony’s vary of three e-readersâ€"6-1/8” tall, four-1/four” wide, and solely three/8” thick. It’s slightly smaller than a mass market paperback in actual size, however the display is significantly smaller than a mass market web page. I haven’t put it on a scale, but when I held it in my proper hand and a 352-web page mass market paperback in my left, the e-reader was somewhat heavier, which makes it lighter than a hardcover e-book. Certainly not too heavy to comfortably hold for extended intervals of time. The entrance face of mine is black. I wasn’t given the option of choosing the colour of my free one but I’m pleased they didn’t send me the obnoxious pink one Sony shows on their website online. The purple trim around t he edges is girlie sufficient. In the box beneath the reader was a kinda tacky padded sleeve to protect it, however then my new iPod came with nothing to protect it, so one up for Sony on that finish. The ubiquitousâ€"and essentialâ€"USB cable is included. This just isn't a 3G enabled system. Like an iPod, you need to bodily plug it into your pc to be able to obtain books into it. I actually have no beef with that, actually. I’ve never been particularly frustrated that I can’t order new songs for my iPod on a whim whereas driving, so the fact that I can’t make that snap determination with e-books isn’t a problem. Also included within the field is a little booklet with instructions in both English and Spanish. Interesting. A printed e-book that tells you how to arrange your e-guide. See? Print isn’t useless in any case. I’m a Mac person, so are typically wary of any non-Apple gadget. Don’t get me began on compatibility points, however on this case, there have been some massive ones. I followed the printed directions to install the Reader Library software program from the system to my house computer and it was a nightmare of a number of restarts, errors, and over-writing. You should know your Adobe password, which I didn’t, so I needed to go through a whole means of resetting that before I could register the reader, and the whole mess took properly over an hour, which doesn’t sound like that lengthy, however is about 4 or five instances longer than it should have taken. I was greater than a little annoyed, however eventually received it to principally work. Because of some confusing keychain password difficulties I could in all probability clear up if I put within the time, I cannot entry the device or Sony’s e-guide retailer on my work pc in any respect. Hopefully Sony is engaged on an improve to this softwareâ€"it’s fragile, to say the least. The store itself is underwhelming compared to the entirely extra robust iTunes Store, however Son y hasn’t been in the sport as lengthy. There are a few free titles that I downloaded, just to have one thing on there, and the prices of the books themselves are consistent with expectationsâ€"not too cheap (and yes, there may be such a thing as too low cost), but not too costly, either. The next experiment was to download a PDF file into it and see how it dealt with that. I chose a very big file, the PDF of the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook. (As a Wizards of the Coast worker I have entry to these recordsdata, and use them for work functions.) It took some time to transfer over (but it’s an enormous 67.2 MB file) and there it'sâ€"you'll be able to see the entire page but the type comes out way too small to read. The art looks fantastic, however rendered in black-and-white. The Reader has a little button with a magnifying glass icon that zooms into the textual content. This makes even the PDF completely readable, though somewhat harderâ€"and so much slowerâ€"to navigate around. Let me inform you, reading from a PDF on this thing is pretty powerful. Pages refresh solely very, very slowly. That’s not the case for the EPUB books, which appear to alter pages kind of as quick as you would flip a paper web page. It’s undoubtedly constructed to read EPUB recordsdata, and kinda sorta support PDFs. What I was hoping to get from the D&D PDF, though, was affordable searchability. I hoped I may dump the PDF of all of the D&D rule books into this factor and use it in my D&D sport rather than carting around all these heavy hardcover books, but except I spend what would find yourself being hours setting up a labyrinthine series of bookmarks, attending to a particular page seems to be a torturous means of paging slowly forward, waiting for every intervening web page to refresh. No D&D game utility, I’m sorry to say. Properly formatted EPUB books usually have a table of contents that a minimum of permit you to click forward to a specific chapter. I was additi onally disenchanted in the Library software program in that it doesn’t seem to wish to permit me to alter the names of recordsdata, which you can do in iTunes. That means my D&D Player’s Handbook is known as 4E_PHB_Ch0FM_TOC.indd and the creator is “jeff,” who I assume is our digitech guy at Wizards of the Coast who saved the final version of the file. This morning I discovered a separate file marked PHB1 on my listing of books, but once I tried to open it the entire gadget froze and I had to hit the little reset button on the underside and restart it. This file name issue appears to me to be one thing comparatively simple to repair, and I hope Sony will get on that. After downloading a couple of the free books from the Sony retailer I began reading one and the reading experience isn’t unhealthy. The zoom-in operate is my favourite a part of the e-reader expertise. I’m old enough that it’s getting actually exhausting to learn small kind. There’s nothing wrong with my eyes, mind you, it’s just my arms aren’t lengthy enough. What disappoints me, although, is that any finesse that might have been within the printed copyâ€"graphic design and typesetting, both art types I actually have monumental respect forâ€"are entirely absent in favor of raw information. This tends to be the result of engineers left to their very own gadgets. You can virtually hear them ask, “But all of the words are there, what difference does it make?” To me, anyway, it makes lots of difference. Some actually rookie formatting mistakes are made routinely in this format, like a full line space between paragraphs, ragged proper margins, pretend “drop caps” that trigger a leading disruption . . . yuck. That type of thing does considerable violence to the artwork of the printed page and if the future is to disregard all that in favor of soulless blocks of textual content, nicely, that’s a crying shame. Just yesterday I received a new iPod which I full of almost 4000 songs and my digital copy of the brand new Star Trek film. The one hundred sixty GB iPod Classic cost about $50 more than I would have paid for the Sony Reader had I truly paid for it, but actually, the iPod is a far, far superior gadgetâ€"not for reading books, thoughts you, however in terms of its usability and suppleness. Had I paid $200 or so for the Reader, only to be confronted with buggy software program, a rickety store, severely restricted search capacity, snail-gradual PDF viewing, and an virtually stone-age lack of esthetic worth in design and readability, I would have been disenchanted, to say the least. But even then, I’ll attempt not to surrender hope. The subsequent step in the experiment: Actually learn a whole e-e-book from beginning to finish. I actually have no sense but of battery life, eye pressure, and so on. Maybe the expertise of studying an e-e-book will assist attenuate a few of my complaints with the format itself. I’ll publish once more, when I have e xtra to say . . . Meanwhile, I leave Sunday for the Publishing Business Conference & Expo, and intend to bring my laptop with me. Barring some catastrophe, I’m hoping to publish day by day reviews proper right here Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of subsequent weekâ€"recaps and stories of what I noticed and heard, and my opinions of the opinions expressed. Come back on Monday! â€"Philip Athans About Philip Athans