My e-book obsession | Long Head

Greg Langmead

Search

Long Head

• Home
• Blog
• Talks
• Projects
• Publications
•
•

My e-book obsession
Nov 9, 2001 Tech
I HAVE AN E-BOOK OBSESSION! Did you know that? Let me explain.
E-book is obviously short for electronic book. This sounds like a nineteenth
century name for what it is: a computer file. In such a computer file are the
contents of a book. For example, a Word document with Pride and Prejudice in
it is an e-book. So is a plain text file of the same book, or a web page or any
other format. The point is that the environment where the book is read is a
digital computer environment. There are a few issues about e-books that I think
are important. First, there is the issue of reading an entire book on a screen.
Despite that, I am obsessed with reading e-books, so I will explain why. Finally,
what does the future hold for e-books?
The detractors say that e-books are not going to be widely read until they appear
on screens that are much fancier than our low-resolution devices of today. A
typical computer monitor has fewer than 100 pixels per inch of screen, so the
most precise unit of measurement is 1 ⁄100 inch. Book printing is done at a much
higher resolution, and so the character shapes (‘glyphs’ in technical jargon) are

1
very detailed lovely curves, compared to the collections of dots that you get on
a screen. It is generally thought that it is easier to read the high-resolution
text than the low. Moreover, monitors and laptop displays are backlit, where
a book uses reflected light. Monitors blink at around 60-100 times per second,
which can give you a headache (though laptop displays do not blink at all, which
makes them more comfortable). All this adds up to a reading experience that
tires your eyes pretty quickly. In the future, we may have “digital ink,” which is
an umbrella term for a number of emerging technologies that work much more
like a book. These would have a sheet of material that would feel like paper or
plastic, but would be digital in that each page would have electrical current and
a grid of extremely tiny pixels, such that the resolution was maybe as high as
1200 pixels per inch. Some sort of computer chip, maybe embedded right in the
page, would turn pixels on and off and set them to different colors, to produce a
document as lovely as a printed page.
Okay, so if reading electronic text is so awful, and can give you a headache,
why do you read them? Well, my e-books don’t give me a headache. I read
them on my Palm, and it neither blinks nor is backlit. The Palm screen works
using reflected light just like page, or more to the point a digital watch. It has
black LCD pixels on a light gray background, so it has high contrast and no
flickering. When it’s dark, I do turn on the backlighting, and it indeed gives me
a headache before too long. As for the pixellated fonts, they don’t bother me. I
have a selection of fonts on my Palm and I have chosen ones that were very well
designed to take advantage of the pixellation.
There is an art to making text readable at low resolution – compare some of the
fonts on your computer at small point sizes and see which ones you think had
readability at small sizes as a design goal.
So the problems I mentioned before don’t bother me. What’s so great, though?
Why read an e-book instead of a paper book? E-books are one of those things
that don’t make as much sense before you use them as they do after. Computers
and the Internet required the same kind of transition, for example. But I can
give you some of the reasons that reading books on my Palm lead to this je
ne sais quoi. The main one is that the Palm holds several books. That means
that without carrying anything extra around, I have several novels. (And the
Palm itself is very slight and is always with me anyway, for notes and To Do’s
and names and addresses and the like.) If I’m stuck in line at the bank, or on
a bus, or waiting for Alison to find some pants at Old Navy, I can (and do)
slip my Palm out of my pocket and resume reading right were I left off. I have
one of the buttons on the front re-assigned to launching my e-book program, so
that I can perform all of this with just my thumb. If you like reading, then the
idea of bringing your books that much closer and having them that much more
accessible will make sense to you, too.
Another plus is the ability to read with one hand. I can use my thumb to scroll
to the next page if I hold my Palm upside-down and rotate the display as well
(screen orientation is an option in my e-book reader). This works great at meals,

2
and when straphanging on public transportation. You can search for text too,
which I’ve used to remind myself of past actions in the story, or to re-read a
passage where a character was first introduced (oh, he’s her uncle). Finally, the
backlighting is a boon for married folks. The dim light doesn’t disturb your
bedmate, and so it solves the “reading in bed problem” for me. Like I said,
though, it gets hard on my eyes within about 20 minutes. Your mileage may
vary.
If you’re sold on e-books, let me warn you off a little bit. It’s hard to get them.
If you want to see the best store there is, and it’s good but it’s no Amazon, then
visit Peanutpress.com. They are owned by Palm and they have a pretty large
selection, six or seven of which I’ve bought and downloaded. I hope that the
future brings great growth to this and other vendors. What’s to lose? They do
a one-time translation from the electronic source of the printed book into an
e-book, and they sell each copy for $6, without having to make any books. The
economics are there, so it’s just the usual chicken-and-egg market size story: the
market isn’t there until there are lots of customers, but customers aren’t drawn
until there are lots of books. Peanutpress is forging the way by selling all these
books into a tiny market. There are more e-publishing ventures than there were
a couple of years ago, though. The publishing houses have set up some online
e-book stores, but they seem mainly geared to books that don’t also get printed
the old way. This give the impression that they are second-rate fare, not good
enough to publish as “real” books. Still, this means they are giving a voice to
authors that they can’t afford to publish any other way (presumably), and more
voices is good (as long as they aren’t spewing crap).
I have read a lot more than five or six e-books, though. I’ve read about 20 novels
this way, and I’m reading one now with four more lined up. How did I do that?
It’s pretty interesting, really. First I buy the book at a bookstore. I put it on
my shelf and I never open it. Then, I go online (using Limewire usually, which
is a Gnutella client) and I type in the author’s name. Often a list of text files
pops up, and sometimes even fancier formats like RTF (which has formatting
and bold and italic fonts) or HTML. These are created by someone with a “book
scanner,” which is a regular scanner plus a page feeder. They cut off the spine
of a book and feed all the pages in. The software puts the images in the right
order and does character recognition on it, and makes a text file. These are
then distributed over the internet for folks to download. It’s exactly like the way
music and movies are pirated online, and it violates all the same copyright laws.
I don’t feel bad, though, because I buy the book and merely use this technique
to “move it onto my Palm.” Am I bad for doing that? I can’t tell, but I certainly
don’t feel bad.
Let me wrap this up by indicating some of the ideas that I consider to be at
the fringe of e-books. Some will tell you that dedicated e-book readers like
the Gemstar e-book are what e-books are about. These devices are crippled
compared to a Palm or other handheld. They are too big, too expensive, and
they control what content you can install. You cannot convert one of your own

3
text files or web pages to an appropriate format and load it onto the Gemstar,
like you can with a Palm.
Another non-e-book line of thinking are the Adobe E-book reader and the
Microsoft Reader. These are programs for your laptop or desktop machine,
and so they are lacking the two main requirements of e-books: portability and
reflective screens. I can curl up on the sofa with a cup of coffee and my Palm. If I
were a PocketPC user (like Palms only with a Microsoft operating system) I’d be
very disappointed right now. You can get lots of books in the Microsoft Reader
format, but only a subset of those can be used with the Pocket PC version of
the Reader. I can’t understand why, unless it’s because they have hard-coded
line breaks that don’t work on the smaller pocket-sized screen. But that’s not a
good enough reason – make the line breaking dynamic and get the books on the
handhelds!

Greg Langmead
Machine Learning Engineer
I am a software engineer and mathematician. I work on NLP algorithms for Apple
News, and research homotopy type theory in CMU’s philosophy department.
•
•
•
© Greg Langmead 1998–2019 · Powered by the Academic theme for Hugo.

Cite
×

Copy Download