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e-books Don’t Require Use of an
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Long before Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble offered their e-readers, thanks to Google, thousands of books whose copyright had expired were made available for free on PCs as "e-books". “e-book” being defined at that time as an electronic version of a book-in-print. Obviously, it was a situation that made no economic sense
for publishing contemporary works. There had to be a fee for service
component, and a supported distribution
infrastructure. We’ll credit Amazon.com with finding the formula that made
sense for the publisher, the distributor (Amazon), and the consumer. Amazon
built an e-book selling infrastructure that was capable of formatting a
book’s text in a way that could travel over a communications medium, yet format
properly on many different display devices. But that was not enough to
overcome resistance (and/or apathy) over procuring books in an electronic
form. Not just consumer resistance, but also publisher resistance. The
winning formula was to provide a display device specifically designed for
reading books that had a (perceived) advantage over PCs. Specifically, a device that would be glare-free when being used
out-of-doors. The Kindle is just such
a device. It was not meant to replace the use of PCs as a reader, but to
offer a more focused device. Additionally, the price of the book had to be
dramatically lower than the print edition. A pricing scheme analogous to how
Apple saved the music industry with 99 cents per song pricing.
Thus, for well-established authors, e-books sell for about $7 to $14 compared to over $17 to $36 for the print
version. But unlike Apple, the Amazon business model is not
focused upon selling hardware. One could buy a song from Apple’s iTunes
and play it on a PC, but Apple makes its margins by selling iPods.
Likewise, one could buy an e-book from Amazon and read it on a PC, a laptop,
a Mac, an iPad, and even some smart phones. One does not have to own a
Kindle. Nor does it matter to Amazon who makes its margins on selling books
(and futuristic cloud computing), and not e-readers. However, if one owns a Kindle and anyone of the other
aforementioned devices, Amazon will automatically place a copy of all of the
books one had bought for the Kindle also on
the non-Kindle device --
provided the customer has downloaded the necessary free software to the
non-Kindle device. To read an e-book purchased from Amazon, on let us say a
PC or laptop, a one-time additional step is required. When on the Amazon web
page that contains a book one wishes to purchase, one must first click on the
option to download a free software application called “Kindle for PC”. The
request to download is located just below the “Buy” button on the right side
of the web page. This will trigger the download of the necessary software
needed to read an Amazon formatted book on the PC. As with any software
download, when your security software asks whether to allow installation of
the software, you will have to give permission. Also, you will be asked if
you want to have the Kindle icon placed in your start tray (those are the
icons you see at the extreme bottom right of your desk top), and/or as an
icon on your desktop. Suggest you
just go for the latter. Then, every time you wish to read an e-book, you just
click on the Kindle icon on your desktop, and commence reading where you left
off from the last time you were reading an e-book. If one has any doubts about the process, select a book
for purchase that is being offered for free. That could even be a free
sample. You will have to go through the same process that is used to buy a book, but no credit card information is
required. It’s a relatively easy way to get familiar with
the system. What has been described for Amazon is just as applicable
for Barnes & Noble. For Barnes & Noble, the e-reader is called the
Nook, not the Kindle. There is one thing about using the Nook for PC software that is not intuitive. When one is reading a
book, getting at the controls to do anything such as reading another book,
changing type sizes, etc., one must first click on what looks like a chevron
on its side that appears mid-page on the left side of the display screen.
Then all the controls will appear. The Future of
Publishing Whether we like it or not, in a couple of generations, books,
newspapers, and magazines-in-print will be a thing of the past. In fact, at that time, the distinction between videos, such as
seen on YouTube, and e-books will be blurred. For example, in a futuristic
version of the e-book, The Muscles of My Heart, when the author attempts to describe the
difference between the before and after ECHOgram of his heart, he will be
able to insert into the book a YouTube type animation of both the scarred and healed heart actively
pumping. A vision that can’t be as thoroughly described by words. The formatting software for integrated book-video exists, and is likely to be employed sometime in 2012. No question there is a downside to losing having a print
book. One can’t curl up as comforting with a computer on a damp rainy day and
savor well-written prose. But just as we don’t miss reading a pre-Guttenberg
book written on a papyrus scroll, in a few generation, curling up with an
ebv-reader (electronic book-video reader) will seem just as comforting as a
print book is for us. And not to be overlooked is that one must rely on
e-books to read (for free) such out of print books as Thomas Paine’s Common
Sense – an incredible piece of thought that dramatically influenced the
minds of his contemporaries, and may well do the same in this century. Ironically, while the next generation e-book is not far
off, there are some fundamental issues with the current e-book generation.
They are mostly formatting issues. Amazon doesn’t do as good a job as Barnes & Noble in how it converts publisher-supplied text to its e-reader format. The publishers rightly feel that incidences of formatting inconsistencies (mostly related to indentation and paragraph separation) reflect upon them, yet they are powerless to unilaterally fix the issues. A problem that is not likely to be solved anytime soon is that of page numbers. A publisher dare not associate in the Table of Contents the beginning of a chapter with a page number. Simply because the page numbers will be different depending upon the display device. This can sometimes be irksome to the reader who would like to have some idea how close the reader is to the end of a chapter. It’s an issue of, “Do I try to finish the chapter before I fall asleep, or are there too many pages yet to go?” A derivative issue is that the number of pages of a book will vary by display device. That is why Barnes & Noble expresses the size of an e-book based upon the amount of memory space it consumes. A perfectly meaningless number for most consumers. While charts are not an issue for novels, the size
limitation of the e-reader makes charting nearly impossible. In the original
manuscript for The Mussels of My Heart,
there was a calendar that displayed the author’s heart healthy activities for
each day of the week. There was no way to shrink the calendar down to fit on
the e-book. Therefore the calendar was described in text only, and the reader
was invited to visit the wccn.com website to view the calendar. The gray scale “ink” of an e-reader eliminates the
ability to show anything in color. Additionally, any picture whose background
is shades of color, or gray is too similar to the
pictured item, is not allowed because it would
show up as a solid mass of gray matter. Unable to obtain a picture of a stent
with a suitable contrasting background, in The Muscles of My Heart, the stent is described in the text, but
the picture is on the wccn.com website. But heck, if for just $2.99, if The Muscles of My Heart achieves convincing just one
person that With Understanding Comes
Live-saving Behavior, the
publishing issues are mundane.
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