E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians • Hacker News Board

Re: E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

#151

Post by eyegor » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 1:18 AM UTC

pgeorgi wrote: post #62

uneekname wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a student that looks like exactly what I'm looking for, but I'm never going to shell out $400 for one when I can get an early-gen Kindle for free. Really hoping we will see prices decrease for higher-end e-ink displays.

> Really hoping we will see prices decrease for higher-end e-ink displays. Unlikely to happen: similar to silicon, eink's yield (that is, amount of parts produced with no errors) goes down quickly (quadratic if not cubic, I forgot) with increasing size. A system based on lots of eink chiplets with small enough margins that you can tile them could scale up, but the margins are also a difficult area.

I don't think the eink part of it has issues with yields since it's essentially just conductive ink and a suspension of particles, but the fancy transparent transistors they sometimes use certainly do. The real issue with eink is the economies of scale will probably never kick in. Most people would rather have a color screen, or a screen that exceeds 10fps, or something that doesn't have artifacts like an etch a sketch, etc. There's only 1 oem for the entire eink panel market (over 6") last I checked.

Re: E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

#152

Post by boring_twenties » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 1:41 AM UTC

johnisgood wrote: post #150

Freak_NL wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seem to instinctively feel that an e-book shouldn't cost as much as a real book. A paperback edition of a book often has multiple owners throughout its — sometimes considerable — lifespan. That's simply part of the deal, and it always has been. E-books lack the ability to share, sell, and pass it on. That's fine, but the market won't bear nearly the same price as a paper book that can do all those things. An e…

> E-books lack the ability to share, sell, and pass it on. How so? If you have the PDF file, it should be pretty easy to do all of these. Some or all of them may be illegal, but it is not the same as lacking the ability. If it is DRM-protected, there are still ways around it.

PDF is not a suitable format for ebooks, which is why epub and mobi exist.

Re: E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

#153

Post by boring_twenties » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 1:55 AM UTC

8ytecoder wrote: post #137

tadzik_ wrote: post #8

> There’s a tension in e-book pricing generally between consumer expectations that a digital file will be less expensive than a physical copy and the reality that very little of the cost of making a book is tied up in the physical format There's more to this than the cost of making a book. As a consumer, a physical thing inherently has more value than a digital one because it keeps the value after I buy it. I can len…

E-Books have some convenience that physical books don't: 1. I can pick it up from any device I have at any time, 2. I can pick up any book depending on my mood at that point in time (I usually read one fiction, one non-fiction and one craft related simultaneously) 3. I can highlight and keep notes with the book that's in a form I can just copy-paste later. More than a few times I have now bought the e-book even thoug…

Seconding the Calibre recommendation. It'll strip the DRM from your Kindle books with one click.

Re: E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

#154

Post by Izkata » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 2:28 AM UTC

mellosouls wrote: post #102

eyegor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually if you're willing to pay for it, you can buy 10+" eink screens with wacom digitizers on top (drawing pen support). They're quite good for tech papers and manuals because they're a similar size to real paper, no eye strain, you can draw notes directly on them, and ofc you can cram tons of papers/textbooks/manuals into something that weighs next to nothing. Edit: if you're curious, look into the likebook mimas…

Thanks - I have the Kindle DX, but it's slowness and general lack of flexibility is a significant negative that doesn't really balance out its superior page experience compared to a tablet. This is much more of a thing with tech manuals where reading is far less sequential than fiction or articles. I'm aware of the new breed of large readers but haven't been able to try any, and I'm concerned they won't be powerful o…

> I have the Kindle DX, but it's slowness and general lack of flexibility is a significant negative that doesn't really balance out its superior page experience compared to a tablet.

...I find it a bit amusing that its model forms an emoticon that fits your general sense of the device.

Re: E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

#155

Post by johnisgood » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 2:43 AM UTC

boring_twenties wrote: post #152

johnisgood wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> E-books lack the ability to share, sell, and pass it on. How so? If you have the PDF file, it should be pretty easy to do all of these. Some or all of them may be illegal, but it is not the same as lacking the ability. If it is DRM-protected, there are still ways around it.

PDF is not a suitable format for ebooks, which is why epub and mobi exist.

My experience differs from yours. Most, if not all of my e-books have been PDF. They work fine, and look absolutely great both on my PC, and my e-book reader. Epub and mobi on the other hand are horrible for medical books, for one.

Most importantly, my point is being ignored. I could have used epub instead as an example. It is irrelevant to the point I was making. I am not interested in a war over e-book formats.

Re: E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

#156

Post by shantly » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 3:55 AM UTC

phjesusthatguy3 wrote: post #135

shantly wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more about the convenience than the price, for me. I'd pay $30, maybe $40, per month for access to basically anything I want to watch (past that I may as well buy as I watch, and even at $40 I'd have to do the math to make sure it's sensible). It's having to keep up with several subscriptions, having to figure out where something is when I want to watch it, inconveniences like logging in on a new device, expired…

$40 would get you three or four full seasons of any individual show on Amazon, if you're lucky. There isn't anywhere that $40 would get you what you want. Disney+ is probably going to be the future, as much as I hate to say that. Edit: I pay for netflix, I pay for amazon prime, and I'm a member of a really good tv piracy site. My wife is happy with the TV access we have. My thing is video games so I don't actually ca…

Three or four seasons a month is probably about the equivalent total TV+film watching in our five-person household, combined. As in maybe 50ish hours of distinct content of that sort watched a month, not counting one thing multiple times if several of us are watching it. Since some of that's re-watches we wouldn't necessarily be paying for it every time, too. $40's just the point where I might bother to check that the streaming service made sense—probably I'd conclude that it still did, just for convenience (again, assuming it had most everything) but that if they hiked the price to $50 I'd need to look again.

I'm fairly certain, without adding it all up, that at $60 we'd save money just buying/library-ing/redboxing, $40's just where I'd start to go "hm, better run the numbers" and there's a chance it'd work out against paying for streaming, so I'd call it a decent upper bound on what I'd probably be willing to pay for such a thing. Hell, I'm paying almost that now, but the fact that I can still only find maybe 1/3 of what I want to watch available on my three services is why Amazon's set not to renew next year and Netflix is on the chopping block soon (3rd service is a cheap, niche one with mostly anime, b-movies, and some original web animation stuff, sticking with it pretty much just because it's cheap).

Re: E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

#157

Post by Izkata » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:48 AM UTC

hrktb wrote: post #105

orbifold wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical books last at least ~50 years. That is longer than any physical computer lasts and longer than any of the companies that offer cloud services (IBM doesn't offer e-Books yet) have existed. There is a good chance that some of them will go bankrupt over this time.

> ~50 years That’s very carefully handled books. My kids books are in no shape in a matter of months. Then adults also spill, grease, and tear their books. I had to buy some cheap second hand copies for a series with no digital release and they’re gross, I made them grossier, and they’re going to the trash bin after me (there’s no shortage of them in the world). My amazon account is outlasting most physical books I b…

...this'll sound rude, but I've never understood how people do that to their books.

I have original-run Animorphs books, over 20 years old, from when I was age 8-13, all looking near-new. The pages are a bit yellow from age, but there's otherwise no damage. Same for the rest of my collection (some of which were published earlier, though I think Animorphs might be the oldest-printed ones I have).

Re: E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

#158

Post by kilolima » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 6:47 AM UTC

I don't think that libraries should purchase ebooks anyway. The checkout model translated to a digital file is awkward and un-natural- how does one checkout a single copy of an ebook? Why can't there be an infinite number of copies?

I'd rather see libraries give up ebooks entirely until there is a non DRM alternative. Libraries should not reinforce existing DRM regimes. Meanwhile, it would be great if they could function as the physical location for furthering the distribution of Free ebooks already in the public domain and helping to make these available to people, maybe by lending ebook readers instead! Imagine going to a library and checking out a cheap 2nd Feb Nook loaded with 1k of Project Gutenberg classics? Or being able to choose and load the ebooks you want at the library to a device and then taking it home?

Re: E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

#159

Post by GuB-42 » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 12:36 PM UTC

tadzik_ wrote: post #8

> There’s a tension in e-book pricing generally between consumer expectations that a digital file will be less expensive than a physical copy and the reality that very little of the cost of making a book is tied up in the physical format There's more to this than the cost of making a book. As a consumer, a physical thing inherently has more value than a digital one because it keeps the value after I buy it. I can len…

A way to (maybe) reconcile consumer and publisher expectation would be to offer an ebook to physical book service.

Sell the eBook for about the same price as a paperback but let the buyer exchange the eBook for a physical book for a fee that depends on the requested quality. Paperbacks would be something like $1 (fair since you already paid for the same price as the paperback), but a hardcover could be $10 or so.

Re: E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians

#160

Post by nirvdrum » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 2:12 AM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #76

nirvdrum wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A multi-page e-ink book would be nice. I love my Kindle for certain types of reading, but when I read, I like to flip back to previous sections. Search doesn't work because I rarely know verbatim what I'm looking for or the search terms are flooded with answers from the entire book, when I really want it narrowed down to a particular area. With physical books, I just remember roughly how far into the book it was and…

Can you use the table of contents on your kindle? It's not the same, of course, and some books don't have a usable chapter system (too many or too few), but if you've got an idea of where you want to go, it should get you close.

Unfortunately, I really only know roughly how thick the stack of pages was. I realize it's an imprecise metric. And I might be able to convert to a rough percentage and figure out a page number from there. But, then the page turning is just slow enough to make rapid scanning like that annoying.