Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

So I finally upgraded from the cheap but hearty Skytex Primer (backlit screen, not E-ink) to the Nook Simple Touch about a week ago.

I have to say that E-ink is taking some getting used to. There are often slight differences in text darkness from the upper region of the page to the bottom region, with the top few lines a bit light and the bottom few lines quite dark. Is this kind of slight variation normal with E-ink or should be complaining to the vendor? I find that it makes me hyper-aware of the letters' existence in a distracting way...

my nook simple touch does not do that. I would get a replacement.

Flipping is the big advantage of paper books for me.

Except when adjacent pages stick together and you have to painstakingly locate an edge by which you may seperate them, which is a pita.

That trouble is what makes books a sublime and ideal form for reading.

should be complaining to the vendor?

immediately

Alrighty then. The difference is very slight, but they're frickin' letters-- their physicality must not call attention to itself.

What ereader is it?

Nook Simple Touch.

Ah good. B&N should sort it for you.

I bought it in person at the BN Union Square store last week-- I was actually gonna go to their Nook counter after work today on the faint chance that I can avoid telephone consumer service...

If they're anything like Amazon they'll do whatever it takes to keep you buying ebooks.

That trouble is what makes books a sublime and ideal form for reading.

For me, the book is the ideal form only for certain types of material--the kind I flip back and forth through and jot down marginalia in. Poetry and reference books, and more difficult academic non-fiction or experimental fiction. But anything that is meant to be absorptive--standard novels, breezy non-fiction, magazines--is ideal for e-readers.

^^^this.

i keep seeing the argument about jotting in the margins and annotating andsuch and i can't help thinking 'YOUSE FUCKING ANIMALS BUY A NOTEPAD THAT'S A FUCKING BOOK YOU'RE DESPOILING'

that may be just me tho

yeah, that's just u. marginalia is the best.

i feel appropriately marginalised

Yeah I write in university textbooks but fuck defacing a novel

even textbooks

i'm obviously mentally scarred by years of book rental schemes in secondary school

A favorite freshman comp professor persuaded me to love writing in books - notes make the text part of the Great Conversation or whatever. But before then I had the guilt of defacement instilled grade school and high school.

Not to mention margin notes are useful for reference when writing about the text and studying for tests.

i'd just correlate my notepad notes, i don't know if i could ever learn to di it any other way- possibly with the help of a dominatrix i dunno

i hate when some other idiot has written his vapid thoughts in a used book so i don't write my own out of respect for idiots down the line

The Great Conversation makes me IA.

I *love* others' interesting notes as I loath others' vapid Deep Thoughts notes.

95% of the time I can't figure out why anyone would underline the things I find underlined in used books. Mostly the notes are illegible, too.

So I went to the B&N store last night and they exchanged my Nook for a new one with little to no hassle. We'll see if the new one has the slightly variable text-darkness which was nagging me. If it does, I guess that's just where the playing field is at right now.

I wrote upthread that I was impressed by the Sony e-reader which comes with several foreign language dictionaries (by known dictionary publishers like Collins iirc) and you can just double-tap with the stylus on a word and get a translation, and I got the price wrong, it's actually £129 and not £199. But that was still too much, so I got my Mum a Kindle.

Plus I've now realised that you can highlight a word in the Kindle and get it looked up in whatever your default dictionary is, you just have to change default dictionary every time you want to read a foreign book because it won't guess the language - but apparently the Sony doesn't do that 100% accurately anyway.

But dictionaries are expensive on the Kindle, so if someone does a lot of foreign language reading in several different languages (and the person I saw with one does - she teaches 3 languages at a school and is learning a couple more for fun) I guess the Sony would be worth it.

Jonathan Franzen weighs in

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/30/jonathan-franzen-ebooks-values

Just as well the first released edition of Freedom wasn't "permanent and unalterable" given the well-publicised number of proofing errors in it.

fwiw I think his argument's baloney.

Plus -

Franzen said at Hay that "the combination of technology and capitalism has given us a world that really feels out of control"

None of this makes any sense to me. This is a combination that you can take back to the dawn of time, and what... you feel in control of a world without that pairing?

All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things, are dying off

quote from a fictional character, but ... I HOPE YOU DIE OFF YOU BACKWARD-LOOKING CONSERVATIVE DELUDED ROCKIST PRICK

Very unimaginative approach too.

Although it's true, I can't remember the last time I saw an authentic 'thing'.

May 2002?... damn, I guess it must have been my early twenties now I really think about it.

Wow, that is a total Jeff rage bait article.

He should seal the hold in his butt while he writes too.

would assume the printing press did more to kill of "authentic things" than e-pub.

A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it's just not permanent enough.

He sounds like people I work with who can't figure out the difference between text in Word and a PDF.

I wonder if Franzen freaked out when they told them his books would be published in both hardcover and paperback.

Ebooks will become more and more popular, but I really doubt that print is going anywhere for a long time. It's not quite exactly the same, but think about digital photography v film. digital is a whole area all it's own and prints are still around bc they have value different from digital.

suspect that franzen's entire life is salieri frustration about his inability to actually become a serious writer no matter how much praise he gets, so he reassures himself by giving a couple interviews a year where he defines Serious Literature as having something to do with some easily adoptable external factor instead of with how good the books actually are

The thing I've noticed about people who are anti-ebook (and anti-technology) is they usually clearly just do not *get it*. And it seems like they think that *getting it* = buying into what they see as a scary and destructive plot.

they usually assume it's entirely part of the whole corporate marketing complex that is crushing our culture in a vise and no matter how much you talk to them you can't make them see that the free and light-speed distribution of all information and the dismantling of as many as possible of the old barriers to knowledge and education is actually our only way out

(usually cuz their opposition to the culture-vise has become a huge part of their idea of themselves and trashing ebooks for incoherent crimes like "impermanence" is a quick and easy way of redemonstrating just how athwart history they are standing and just how loudly they are yelling stop)

i'm not even going to read that, franzen is such a tool

lol

I'll wait for the print edition.

Ebooks will become more and more popular, but I really doubt that print is going anywhere for a long time. It's not quite exactly the same, but think about digital photography v film. digital is a whole area all it's own and prints are still around bc they have value different from digital.

― garbage corn fan (Je55e), Tuesday, 31 January 2012 02:36 (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

This is 100% otm. There's no print apocalypse ffs, it's not like buying a Kindle makes people physically incapable of buying and reading books anymore.

"The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that's reassuring"

i still have absolutely no idea what he thinks happens to the text in an ebook but i'll be fucked if i read the article either so

he saw fantasia and thinks the letters waltz around the screen

Stunningly, my boss - who was the one I was referring to upthread who gets frazzled when she can't make a PDF of text act like a Word document of text - is a huge Kindle fan. Just noticed this juxtaposition today, actually, b/c at lunch she mentioned that she bought a regular book b/c it had illustrations, and then a few minutes ago I was explaining why some PDFs are fillable and some aren't.

when she can't make a PDF of text act like a Word document of text

tbf i agree, fuck a pdf