Megatheriums for Breakfast

There’s a lot to love about e-books.  Lower cost. Portability.  Instant availability.  No need for physical bookshelves. Easily disposed of.

I celebrate all of these aspects.  But in the longer run, I do have some major concerns about a world in which printed books have been almost completely replaced by e-books. My biggest worry is about whether our grandchildren and their children will ever be able to stumble upon treasured books in the way that I, and many generations before me, have always been able to do.

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Just as I’d finished my survey of nine different e-reader apps for the iPad, here comes Amazon with another e-reader – the Kindle Cloud Reader.

Apple has recently been cracking down on iPhone and iPad apps selling content.  Basically, Apple wants a 30% cut of any revenue made through in-app purchases, a figure so high as to wipe out all of the profits of companies who are retailing such content, such as e-book retailers.  If they refuse to pay Apple that cut, Apple forces those retailers to remove, not only any mechanism for in-app purchases, not only any link to a web site where such purchases could be made, but even any mention of such a web site.  Personally, I think this is totally unreasonable. Read more…

Summary and Conclusions

It’s been quite exhausting looking at and writing about these nine e-reader applications, but now I’m ready to draw my thoughts together. I think my major conclusion is that there is no one perfect e-reader app, and further, that the best e-reader to use depends on what you are reading.

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Adobe Digital Editions

And so we come to Adobe Digital Editions. Most e-book vendors release their books in ePub or PDF formats which have been protected by Adobe’s Adept DRM technology, and so usually require you to have Adobe Digital Editions on your PC or Mac to download and read the books you have bought.

Considering this, and considering the fact that it is produced by Adobe – maker of Photoshop, InDesign, AfterEffects and all such high level design tools – it is astonishing to me how poorly designed and non-functional Digital Editions is. Read more…