For at least two reasons I can think of. First, at least in my experience trolling for ebooks on the web, pdf files predominate by a wide margin. Second, it's interesting how almost all sample texts are novels, where page composition is so much less demanding. Yet at least half my ebooks are technical, and pretty much all pdf. Has anyone else had the test case experience with googled sources, where matches offer the text in multiple formats? And how the only satisfactory option seems to be pdf; and how unsatisfactory html is? (I've never seen a technical document offer EPUB in the wild.) On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 6:01 AM, Marcello Perathoner <marcello@perathoner.de>wrote:

Jim Adcock wrote:

I'm starting to believe PDF can beat EPUB on portable reading devices.

You cannot scroll on the Sony Reader, just flip pages, and your screen size is fixed, so a pre-paged format makes more than sense.

Also, footnotes are a real PITA with EPUB. The link is hard to follow without a mouse and they mostly end up in a different EPUB flow, so they take an eon to load and another one to get back.

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Re: Reading on cell phones: Seems that Amazon agrees with you about where the marketplace is: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=128 6678&highlight= Personally I cannot imagine paying $10 for the "joy" of reading on a cell phone!

Well, one consolation is that it's not random. They know where in the journey you're reading about, so you don't get calls about Hong Kong when you're only as far as India. On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 11:14 AM, Marcello Perathoner < marcello@perathoner.de> wrote:

Jim Adcock wrote:

Re: Reading on cell phones: Seems that Amazon agrees with you about where

...

the marketplace is:

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=128 6678&highlight=

"Amazon's Whispersync technology saves and synchronizes Kindle customers’ bookmarks across Kindle, iPhone and iPod touch, so you always have your reading with you and never lose your place."

So now they know not only which books you buy, but which ones you actually read.

Must be awful, all those travel agencies calling you while you are trying to read "Around the World in 80 Days" on your iPhone ...

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On Tue, 12 May 2009, Jon Richfield wrote:

On the subject of reading on cellphones: I (deliberately) have an old, old, vanilla cellphone that I use for... for...

What was it for again?

Oh yes, for those conversion, er... conventio.. um... communication thingies. It can't do much, but then I didn't do thingies much, so that was OK. Now people are talking, not so much of intermittent communicating and computing on cellphones, but actual industrial strength, continuous READING on cellphones?

I can read a computer screen all day without strain, but can someone tell me what kind of cellphone can give you say half a page of print at a time in comfortable size, steadiness, contrast and readable resolution for hours on end?

*Is* it viable? I guess memory capacity couldn't be too bad if you have ram for photos, but what about battery capacity etc? Is it time to jack up my standards and look at modern equipment, or can I still represent my anachronistic foot dragging as simple sanity? Will a new cellphone be a better investment than a new, big Kindle with non-volatile screen memory? (I don't have an old, small one yet!)

Nervously,

Jon

...

This may be a generational thing. Amazon may be targeting the Boomers who want/need larger fonts, larger pages, read aloud, and all that jazzz. Cellphone makers in general may be targeting the generations of people who grew up with Nintendo GameBoys and thus think it has been just fine to see the entire world through a tiny window. Of course, those tiny windows are getting larger and larger but still not to the point where the Boomers are going to use them. The iPhone, Curve, and other clones are somewhere in between in size, with several times the screen size, perhaps even 8 times, if you consider the smallest screens, as the iPhone is 6 inches compare to just under 1 square inch for the smallest, while the Kindle is that many times as large as the iPhone. However, as seen in the last Newsletter, people ARE using small screens, even only 14 characters wide, to read eBooks, and, the iPod had applications to read PG eBooks in the very first week. It would appear that people, perhaps mostly only people younger than the Boomers, will read eBooks on whatever they have, while the Boomers may more likely insist on something compensating to make up for waning eyesight, something other than just pairs of cheapy reading glasses, such as I am wearing right now, just $1 at our local dollar stores. I buy many of these, leave them in all sorts of strategic locations, including on my computer. iPhones are currently selling 10 million per year, but we don't really know yet how many people are reading eBooks on them, but eBooks ARE available through the iTunes store, and applications to read eBooks, so we must presume some market penetration. On the other hand, both Amazon and Sony are very secretive with their sales figures on eBook readers, and probably won't make a real hardcore announcement on these until they each reach sales of over a million. If so, then they obviously have not reached over a million sales yet, either one of them. However, don't despair, look at how long it took for Apple from 0 to 10 million. . . . Thanks!!! Michael S. Hart Founder Project Gutenberg Inventor of ebooks Recommended Books: Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury: For The Right Brain Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand: For The Left Brain [or both] Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson: To Understand The Internet The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster: Lesson of Life. . .

Any mention of prices on thee HTC phones???

On Wednesday, 13th May 2009 at 00:08:00 (GMT -0800), Michael S. Hart wrote:

...

http://www.mobile-review.com/pda/review/htc-advantage-en.shtml http://aboq.org/athena/Ebook_on_HTC_Advantage_7500.jpg

Any mention of prices on thee HTC phones???

I think I saw a list price of $899, but it did NOT show up when I went thru the link, then found these and I am NOT sure they are for THIS. Dell Home $494.99 / Buy.com $508.08 / CDW.com $603.99 / Unbeatable Sale $672.50

There are lots of different kinds of HTC phones. (And the Google phone with the Android OS is [going to be] manufactured in cooperation with HTC.) I purposefully went for the largest HTC phone, because I'm an e-book fanatic and to me, the 5-inch screen was top priority. This was my dealer: http://www.ebuy.sk/HTC-X7510-Advantage,841.html The price (minus local VAT) is 669 EUR = $915, so a list price of $899 sounds about right. But the special offers might be legitimate, too. (Note that the dealer now sells the updated model, HTC Advantage 7510. However, the update went wrong, IMO, as in a silly attempt to copycat the iPhone, HTC got rid of most of the hardware buttons of the original HTC Advantage 7500 model.) Anyway, most people would probably find a phone of these dimensions (5-inch screen) too large. It doesn't really fit into your shirt pocket. So, there are smaller, slicker models. The lower the resolution, the lower the price -- but also, the lower the enjoyment of reading e-books! Here are 3 other HTC phones: * HTC Touch HD: gorgeous 3.8 inch screen, resoluton of 480 x 800 pixels, that's even *more* than VGA -- but: the letters are necessarily somewhat smaller than on a 5-inch screen device. Still perfectly legible, though. (I tested this one first-hand.) The price (without VAT) is around 490 EUR = $670: http://www.alza.sk/htc-touch-hd-blackstone-cz-d107046.htm * HTC Touch Pro: would not recommend this one; more expensive than the Touch HD model, yet the screen is a full inch smaller, even though it sports the VGA resolution, too. The price (excl. VAT) is about 510 EUR = $700: http://www.alza.sk/htc-touch-pro-raphael-d100466.htm Now, it makes a *lot* of difference if you view the same VGA screen (640 x 480 pixels) on a device with a 5-inch screen or on one with a 2.8" screen! On the latter, the fonts will be minuscule. Naturally, you can enlarge the font in your e-book reader, but that makes a 700-pages novel out of a 350-pages novel... * HTC Touch 3G: a traditional phone, meaning it comes with a 2.8-inch screen with the QVGA resolution, that's one half of VGA = 240 x 320 pixels, so that the letters in e-books are nice and large, but again, you get to read a 700-pages novel instead of 350 pages. ;-) The price (excl. VAT) is about 325 EUR = $445: http://www.alza.sk/htc-touch-3g-jade-modry-d104503.htm QVGA is the standard for traditional PDAs (= pocket PCs that are no phones), and I used to read lots of e-books on my previous two PDAs with QVGA, but I confess the frequent turning of pages does not really make the reading as pleasant as enjoying books on paper. The real breakthrough for me, therefore, was the VGA resolution of 640 x 480 pixels; it was at *this* point I could finally say that reading e-books started to be as pleasant as reading books on paper, and a thousand times more practical (due to the possibility to make highlights and annotations of unlimited length right inside the books, and utilize them later on the desktop PC). So, here's why I wouldn't buy an iPhone: its resolution is smaller than VGA. And that does not seem to me to be quite enough for optimal e-book enjoyment. I'd call VGA (640 x 480 pixels) the minimal threshold. And here's why I wouldn't buy a Kindle: no lit background! You can't read in bed in complete darkness, which would be a terrible nuisance to me. Also, you can't choose to read white on black, as I do. I believe it's been scientifically confirmed that human eyes get less tired when they read white on black instead of black on white. Black letters on a white background indeed produces a *glare*. (Or if there's no glare, deciphering black-on-white letters is alleged to produce more eye-strain than deciphering white-on-black letters.) With white letters on a black background, there's no (noticeable) glare at all! -- Yours, Alex. www.aboq.org [processed by "The Bat!", Version 3.80.06]

Jon Richfield wrote:

Now people are talking, not so much of intermittent communicating and computing on cellphones, but actual industrial strength, continuous READING on cellphones? I can read a computer screen all day without strain, but can someone tell me what kind of cellphone can give you say half a page of print at a time in comfortable size, steadiness, contrast and readable resolution for hours on end? *Is* it viable?

I read several hours a day on my O2 Flame GSM-enabled PDA, much of it in a darkened bedroom next to my sleeping wife. It has a 3.6 inch diagonal screen at 480x600 resolution and a Micro-SD slot which is currently populated with a 2 gig card full of e-books. At this point, I think the Toshiba TG01 would be an even better choice, with a slightly larger screen and slightly smaller mass. And occasionally I will make or receive a phone call on a pay-as-you-go, 10 cents/minute plan.

On 5/12/09, Jon Richfield <richfield@telkomsa.net> wrote: SNIP

but actual industrial strength, continuous READING on cellphones? I can read a computer screen all day without strain, but can someone tell me what kind of cellphone can give you say half a page of print at a time in comfortable size, steadiness, contrast and readable resolution for hours on end? SNIP

Jon

Well, It's not a half page of text, more like 3/8 at normal font size though it's configurable. (font size, contrast, brightness, etc - everything but resolution) I've been doing 'industrial strength' (~a book or two a week) reading on my Samsung i730 (Verizon, 3G, CDMA) for 3 years now. It's a 4 year old phone design, windows mobile, 2.8 inch screen (diag) 240x320 resolution, transreflective LCD (full sunlight or dark of night readable). No longer offered directly from Verizon, but you can get a used one on ebay or elsewhere for between $60 and $90 dollars (I bought a second for my wife 2 months ago). BONUS: You can permanently turn off the cellular internet in 5 seconds by renaming a file, and then use wifi only for internet access. No data contract fees or subscription required. It's always in my pocket, it's got a 4gb SD Card installed, and as a windows mobile device, can read everything except the one device formats (Kindle, and Sony). eReader (plain and encrypted) Mobipocket (plain and encrypted) MSReader (plain and encrypted) PDF (no DRM) Text and and every other open format available. Battery life on the normal battery is 4+ hours of continuous reading (but the battery is swappable) and 6+ hours on the extended battery. This phone shipped with one of each, and the base station can charge one battery to full in 2 hours while you are reading off the other battery. The 2 batteries were enough for 15 hours in airports and airplanes for me last week. (Note: I have 'replaced' the original batteries... I wore them out after 2 years or so - this performance is with 'new' batteries)

I'd like to mention, that you can find TEI texts with the help of the Anacleto searching of PG as well: http://bookmine.tesuji.eu/gutenberg/searchResults.do?query=format:tei Péter ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ralf Stephan" <ralf@ark.in-berlin.de> To: "Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion" <gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org> Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 2009 7:17 PM Subject: [gutvol-d] gutenberg.org now known for TEI samples

You wrote

...

I'm experimenting with PGTEI and my Sony Reader and I'm more than pleased with reading PDFs on it. Picture:

http://www.gnutenberg.de/pgtei/0.5/examples/pgtei-pdf-sony-reader.jpg

BTW www.gutenberg.org is now referenced from this page:

http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/Samples_of_TEI_texts

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