Design a Decent E-Book In Your Spare Time
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 12. 7.07
We wrote prior to its launch about Amazon's Kindle e-book; we noted that when it comes to elegant design it ain't no iPod, more like a Trash 80/100 from 1985. Others were harsher, suggesting that it "looks like a prop from Charlie’s Angels and has, are you ready, a whopping ONE typeface. For everything! Yay!
To solve this problem Core77 is having a one hour design challenge, (closing Dec 11).
"The first page of submissions for the latest 1 Hour Design Challenge is a stunner, so get out those markers or 3D packages and get moviing. You've got 'til next Tuesday to enter, but why not take an hour out of your Friday afternoon and bang something out?"
Enter at ::Core77
i won;t enter the contest. But i like the scroll design. That would easily fit into a small purse or a glove compartment.
How about featuring some of the other eink devices that have been around a lot longer than the Kindle. They tend to do the job better.
Well the latest iPod's don't exactly hit 'elegant design' either. :P
Maybe something cool will come up.
I'd rather have eBook software on an ultra-portable tablet PC.
I have an HP iPAQ PDA. It can hold a Flash memory card of up to 2 Gb capacity, and has a good backlit color LDC screen.
I can use eReader for commercial eBooks. There is also some MicroSoft bookreader software. Both are free software. In addition, I can use AvantGo to receive a daily feed of selected news articles for free.
I regularly download and save the plain HTML "print-friendly format" pages of newspaper articles for convenient reading in Pocket Internet Explorer. This is a good way to pass the time when I am in a long checkout line at the store.
I love to read amateur fiction (anime-based fanfiction), and keep a library of short stories to novel-length works on my Flash card.
These books and articles hardly make a dent in the memory card. I have a choice of fonts and sizes to display, and can receive content from a wide variety of sources. The eBook readers all have some auto-scrolling feature, and also let me bookmark, highlight, copy/paste text selections to other documents and insert notes and comments associated with bookmarked text.
If I want to read really fast, I can use a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) application to display single words on screen in rapid succession. My eyes get tired and dry out when I use this.
All of this can be done in any PocketPC or Palm PDA for less than $100 from eBay. A new iPAQ can cost as much as $300, which still costs less than many proprietary bookreaders. A new-ish iPAQ also has integrated Bluetooth and WiFi, a suite of office-type software, audio capabilities (Audible.com audiobooks and MP3), video capability and a voice recorder.
I never understand why there is any buzz at all over the newest grayscale, non-backlit, proprietary, large-size, no-connectivity bookreader.
my blurb:
I'm very happy with my asus eee pc (512M/4G "surf" model, $349). I can use it to surf webs, track rss, trade email.
It comes with an ebook reader (FBReader) that works pretty well. I've actually read a book with it.
For me it a good portable device because I don't just want to read, I want to comment. The keyboard, just big enough for touch-typing, allows me to do that.
Oh, and after 5 days use I'm still under 0.5 kWh all told (as measured by my "Kill-A-Watt" monitor).