cybook, ebook, pdf

The Bookeen Cybook 3 reader can read PDF files. BUT it's pretty pathetic at it. You can't zoom in (you can "fit to page" by height or width, and rotate 90 degrees). So a letter sized PDF gets shrunk to something less than 1/4 of that size. It makes things really hard to read! PDFs that have been formatted for the small device are perfectly readable (the Cybook came with "Accelerando" by Charlie Stross and that appears to work out around 60% of a paperback page per PDF page and is easily readable) but PDFs designed for letter sized papers are almost impossible to read.

Disappointing.

At least in eBook reader mode you can select from multiple different fonts. I've actually selected a font size 2 choices smaller than the default because that fits more on a page (so less page turns, so less waiting for the eInk paper to refresh) and is still readable. The font smaller than that is too small for me to read in comfort.

I decided not to read "20,000 Leagues" but to read the next Dresden book in my "unread" pile (#8; Proven Guilty). And now I'm a little annoyed at the physical size of the dead-tree edition! Amazing how quickly I got used to to lightweight size of the Cybook. But I guess I'll lug the dead tree around for a while :-) This means my battery life testing won't be very accurate. But it might work as a good test of how much drain there is while the cybook is turned off.

Now I don't understand the economics behind the selling of ebooks. Well, firstly I don't know how much money the author actually gets per sale of a paperback, nor whether they get the same amount for ebook editions (or if that's a seperately negotiated contract). But I think they're gouging the customer here. eBook distribution costs must be vastly less than the cost of physically dealing with dead-trees; printing and distribution and shipping (and return of unsold items for pulping) and physical storage space and..and..and...

"Proven Guilty" is available in paperwork for $7.99 from Amazon. They sell the Kindle edition for $6.39 (which is useless to me, since I don't have a Kindle). That's $1.60 less than the dead-tree. But surely the savings to the publisher and reseller must come to more than that. So the profit on an eBook appears to be totally unrelated to the actual cost of the book. Elsewhere I've found this eBook (in Mobi format, which I could use) for $9.32 (ebookmall) or $7.99 (diesel-ebooks, mobipocket.com). WTF?

I still like the idea of dead-trees for my shelf. If I'm gonna buy primarily in eBook format then it MUST be DRM free (in particular, I can backup the files and restore them to _any_ reader I decide to get in the future; the book isn't tied to the specific breakable piece of hardware). Given how much I've come to like the Cybook, buying ebooks isn't as far out there as I thought it would be, just a year ago.

But I'm not going to pay the same amount as is being charged for paperbacks.

I'm almost seriously contemplating dropping publishers without a sensible ebook policy. Given I have an unread pile of around 40 books (and that pile will be refreshed due to birthdays and Christmas), I could probably last 3 or 4 years on that and the 160 books I've got from Baen. If I like a Baen book I may buy the dead-tree edition to help support them. Earlier in this post I mentioned that it came with Accelerando; well I also bought that in dead-tree because this is a book I want to read and wanted to pay the author for the right. I don't want to steal from authors, but I don't want to be ripped off by publishers.

Maybe by the time that I run out of free ebooks and my backlog of dead-trees has diminished some of the more forward looking authors (hey, I'm talking about SciFi here... there must be some!) will have pushed publishers to better ebook policies. Or maybe I'll go back and reread some of my existing books. In a library of well over 1,000 books I'm sure I'll find something interesting to reread!

So a warning to publishers: sort out your ebook policies or else you'll end up losing my money, totally!