Become A Robot

E Ink is good stuff.  Gone is the eyestrain of staring in to a glowing screen for hours. Gone is the battery sucking LCD display.  E Ink makes sense.

But when E Ink devices are only now starting to dip down to reach the $199 price point (unless you look at used/refurbished devices), Mobile Internet Devices (MIB) like the SmartQ are starting to make a lot more sense.  For almost the same price as an E Ink device, you can buy a device with a bigger screen that’s in color and capable of playing video, as well as supporting a variety of opening systems and third party software.

Sure, being a jack of all trades, such a device is not a master of reading e-books.  But I suspect it’d be good enough.

And for the record, I’d prefer to have a smartphone like the iPhone or Droid and carry my my e-books around in my pocket at all times, but I can’t justify the monthly charges for a fancy data plan.

I was shocked to read that of 158 pulbishers at the London Book Fair, only 84 of them had any plans for publishing their content as ebooks. It would be nice to see a list of the publishers surveyed and see how many of these were big publishers or obscure ones.  Not good news at all.

A good, fast way to see if a book is available in electronic form is to visit its Amazon page. Amazon tells you right away if a book is available for their Kindle e-book reader, and while it’s not a given, books released for Kindle are often also already released in other electronic formats as well (sadly, this gulf is widening; Amazon is doing a better job of convincing publishers to go electronic with them, and other formats are getting left in the dust).

Prior to today, the page for a book on Amazon that was not available for Kindle had a button that said something to the effect of “Publishers: Find out how you can make this book available for Kindle”. I’d often think “Look at that easy button! Come on publishers!”

But today I noticed that the button has changed:

Clicking it gives the following message (“Thank you for requesting this title in Kindle edition…”):

I hope that by doing this, I’m not contributing towards a publisher releasing a book for Kindle and not for other electronic formats. I’d like to think that once they’ve seen how well Kindle sales do, they’ll consider doing the same easy electronic release for others.

Anyway, thanks Amazon for letting us help you help publishers get their act together.