The Electric Wolfe

Adam Thornton · 21 Dec 2007, 05:54 · from 2007-December.txt.gz

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From: adam at io.com (Adam Thornton)
Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2007 23:54:05 -0600
Subject: (urth) The Electric Wolfe
In-Reply-To: <C39090E8.63D1%ishmael at drizzle.com>
References: <C39090E8.63D1%ishmael at drizzle.com>
Message-ID: <BD5F4214-5C83-41EB-820A-71F98A0B1204 at io.com>

On Dec 20, 2007, at 11:36 PM, James Crossley wrote:

> On 12/20/07 9:15 PM, "thalassocrat at nym.hush.com" <thalassocrat at nym.hush.com 
> >
> wrote:
>
>
>>
>> There are Kindle editions of PF and WK, for what it's worth.
>>
>> Does anybody here have a Kindle? I kind of want one, but they're
>> not for sale outside the US.
>>
> I used to work at Amazon, and I still have a friend there who's had  
> one for
> a while.  It's better than other electronic readers I've seen, and I  
> can see
> real early adopter types wanting one now, but I think it needs some  
> tweaking
> before I'd be interested.  It's a nice size and weight, but some of  
> the
> buttons aren't quite where they should be to make use fluid.  Page  
> turning
> seemed a hair too slow for me to feel perfectly comfortable.  The  
> visual
> quality of the text is good enough to prevent eye strain, but not on  
> par
> with actual print.  The system for acquiring books is really easy and
> effective.
>
> The main problem, though, is the pricing.  Simply speaking, they  
> either need
> to lower the cost of the reader or of the books.  I hope book  
> publishers
> figure out a viable model for buying, storing and sharing texts
> electronically more quickly than the record companies have for music.

For $400, I got an XO laptop, and some kid in some Third World country  
got one too.  That's what a Kindle costs, only no happy child in some  
other country.

It makes a *fantastic* e-reader for PDF, text, or HTML.  It *also*  
happens to be a perfectly good (if somewhat pokey) Linux laptop with  
802.11b.

WIth the backlight off, so it gives you a 200 dpi screen, the print  
quality is about as good as 1980s mass-market paperbacks: the "paper"  
is kinda gray, and the print is a little bit blurry, but it's nothing  
you can't live with.  It's actually better than most of my 1980s  
paperbacks, really, but not on a par with a modern trade paper edition.

It weighs more than a paperback but a hell of a lot less than _Against  
the Day_.  About as much as a normal modern 400-page mass-market  
hardback, maybe a little more.  You can rotate the screen when it's in  
Tablet mode and it's just about the same page size as a trade paperback.

Of course, you can't read DRMmed books on it.  But if you can get what  
you want in PDF, ASCII text, or HTML, you're golden.  PDF rendering is  
slow, so turning pages can entail a wait.  Still: *damn* impressive.

Adam

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