E-bookery

[kate_nepveu]

Because I just know you were all waiting breathlessly for my verdict on Amazon's Kindle e-book reader:

If I had stupid money, I'd get a Cybook instead. [*]

Since I don't have stupid money, I'll stick with my Palm TX, which functions just fine as an e-book reader except in bright sunlight, which is not that often an issue (though if a Cybook showed up my doorstep for free, I wouldn't send it back). Speaking of which, from now until Monday Palm is selling the TX for $200 with a wireless keyboard thrown in, which is so cheap that I'm tempted to buy a spare against the likely day that Palm stops making standalone PDAs.

I love my TX and would absolutely recommend it to anyone who's looking for an organizer, e-book reader, game player, etc., but who doesn't need a smartphone. On the other hand, when this TX eventually dies, I may have other options: Nokia is releasing a Palm OS emulator, and the Nokia N810 looks very cool: bigger screen! Built-in keyboard! GPS! Anyone got one of these, or played with one?

(Because, you know, what I really need is to be gathering information on a tech toy that I neither need nor should have . . . )

[*] References:

• Look At Me, I’m on the Cutting Edge
• 15 Things I Just Learned About the Amazon Kindle - Boing Boing Gadgets
• Amazon Kindle Hands-On and Questions Answered (Gallery)
• The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) [dive into mark] — Critique of Amazon's Kindle, in the words of Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos and George Orwell, among others.
• Comparing Amazon Kindle to E-Book Readers of Yesterday and Tomorrow

Comments

[sraun]

I've currently got a Nokia 770 - I love it's HTML support! I'm using an Opera variant to read there. I'll be getting an N810 as soon as I have the money squirreled away - with luck, that'll be the end of January. Watch for me to squee then - I'll certainly be talking about how it's going for me! I do need to come up with a calendar/addressbook app for it - there are options available already. Reports are the N810 uses a Mozilla-based browser - it can handle just about any HTML.

From what I've read, the Cybook's HTML handles single-file HTML reasonably well - the two specific tests I know it's been put to are samples from Project Gutenberg and Baen e-books in single file mode. It will not (currently) handle the multiple files of a standard Baen e-book multi-file format. Check out naebllc.com and/or bar.baen.com, the "EBook Reader" conference, for more info on the Cybook.

[kate_nepveu]

a calendar/addressbook app for it - there are options available already

Wow, they are really marketing this to a very specific crowd if it doesn't come with already. It never occured to me that it _wouldn't_.

But a really good web browser would make my mobile life better; Opera has one that runs on Palm, but as Java, and so I don't find it 100% stable.

And thanks for explaining about the "simple" HTML or whatever they call it; I couldn't figure out what the difference could be. Since I don't have any multi-file books, or would probably paste them together into one file if I did, this doesn't worry me.

[sraun]

The 700/N800/N810 are not marketed as PDAs. They're marketed as Internet Tablets - basically, a portable web browser, with e-mail & assorted media support. Since I last commented here, I've discovered that there's no native support for the webcam in the N810 - just the hardware and some OS hooks! Nokia is counting on the community to write one or more utilities for it. I'd guess that they're right - I'd bet there will be two or three by the time I buy one.

There's something called the "GPE Suite" that has had a number of parts ported to the Nokia - my check just found calendar, todo, and contacts. It looks like there's another matching suite added since the last time I looked.

The user community has a port of the OS2007 (latest version written for the N800) to the 770 - it's apparently taking some work. I would guess it's roughly the equivalent of porting PalmOS 5 back to run on a Palm 3 device. That's what I call a dedicated user community!