cowfish

I’m rather loving the ebook thing, even though my current read is a bit hard going, but book availability is still in its early days. Waterstones are the official partners of Sony in the UK and my first trawl around their site (pushed along by the £20 ebook voucher that I bought from them for £10 as a special offer when I bought the reader) found little to encourage me – a bunch of things available from Gutenberg, the entire Mills and Boon catalogue, a load of rubbish and a bunch of electronic versions of softback books at hardback prices (I’m looking at you Prador Moon – £3.49 in paperback now as opposed to £11.99 for the ebook). However, a quick search on the internet in general found me Diesel EBooks and Books on Board, both with a large selection, although both also distributing secure PDFs rather than nice EPub books. They’re also both US sites, but I got both Anathem and The Graveyard Book for a snip compared to the prices of the physical books in the UK.

I’ve found that a lot of the major publishers in the UK have sections of their sites dedicated to ebooks, as well as methods of buying the books straight from them, but my success there was also limited. I found that The Temporal Void was listed as unpublished until a couple of days ago, with a release date in the past, and also that for many books ebook versions were being sold at hardback prices even when paperback versions were available and listed on the same page.

I had a trawl through the Waterstones’s site again a week or so ago only to find that they’d updated their selection and included The Temporal Void with a nice ebook launch discount. I followed that up with Tokyo Year Zero (the hard going book I mentioned earlier) using up my £20 voucher and a few pennies of my reward points (£6 of which I’d got for buying the reader).

Having read about Bookkake on Sizemore’s blog a while back I returned, grabbed their nicely EPub’d versions of Fanny Hill and Venus in Furs, for who doesn’t need a couple of landmark erotic books knocking around in a digital format. Their business model (print on demand, free ebooks with a “if you enjoy the ebooks then please donate or buy the paper copies) fits in well with the digital distribution models that I like the sound of (even if the nature of our society at the moment means that they probably won’t work for larger distribution due to the nature of people to treat digital items as “free”. But that’s a rant for another time, although I’ve started on it before) and they’ve obviously spent some time and effort in generating the books.

As for the larger publishers, I grabbed a few shorts from Tor, who use complete short stories as teasers to draw you in to hopefully buy the novels by their authors, and an obligatory freebie from Baen, who were lead the ebook pack a few years back and still offer a big range of books for free. Despite the temptation it was not a John Ringo book, as even though I enjoyed his Posleen series I am now deeply scared of him (Ringo approves of that article, and commented so, which makes the world just a little more awesome).

So, there are books out there, some of them are reasonably priced and more of them are becoming reasonably priced. Publishers seem to be gradually learning how to get ebooks to work for them, even if most of them are still DRM’ing themselves up the proverbial yin-yang, and they are starting to to see the potential of things to come. However, what does this mean to me as an owner of a Sony Reader – the format wars are all too familiar to us, with the recent HD-DVD/BluRay fun and games as well as a history of Betamax/VHS, computer hardware standards and Sony’s own problems with minidisc and their ATRAC format, especially when they started letting you connect up your MD player to your PC. The Sony Reader uses EPub in one of its signed or unsigned forms – how does that work out?

So far, I’d say fair to middling. Support for US buyers seems to be strong, with Sony’s store pissing all over Waterstones from a height, with a good selection, excellent prices and integration with Sony’s only semi-hateful library software. However, despite my best efforts at lieing to a computer, I could not convince the site that I was a US resident – my lack of US address and credit card put paid to that one. This led me to the other US stores, ones without such an attachment to hardware, and found more books, but generally not in EPub, and definitely not DRM’d using Sony’s scheme. So, at the moment, you are stuck with Waterstones, for better or worse, until such a time as we get more ebook stores in the UK, or more US stores supporting Adobe Digital Editions or Sony LRFs.

However, in the mean time all is not lost. Thanks to pfig (who being as much of a gadget fiend as myself called from Waterstones the other day to check the compatibility with his Mac and Linux boxes, as he had been playing with a reader in store and just wanted to be sure before he dropped his cash), I found out about Calibre the other day – a cross platform ebook management tool, written in python and originally for the Sony PRS-500, the precursor to the model I have. It’s only an alternative to the other book management systems, as it does only handle non-DRM’d books, but it does have a built in converter to make EPub books from pretty much whatever ebook format you can throw at it, as well as websites (exactly the reason why I started writing my perl back-end for manipulating EPub books). I grabbed a couple of Baen freebies in Microsoft LIT and old-skool Mobipocket formats and in a few minutes had a couple of Sony EBooks ready to go. The LIT worked out much better than the Mobi, the latter having broken spacing and tiny images, delivering a pretty much flawless transfer of the original formatted text. The DRM limitation does stop it being quite as useful as it might, but for now, with so many texts being out there ready for the taking for free, it helps out, and for those not wanting to touch DRM’d files it is an essential.

So, at the moment things are looking okay on the ebook front – we have Waterstones behind the Sony Reader in the UK and there is definitely a growth in the understanding and pushing of the books from the publishers. It’s not that great for us “early-adopting” Sony Reader users, but we have PDFs to fall back on for now, and as long as we reward the publishers who do give us what we want I see the potential for less wrist snapping hardbacks in my future.

Other posts

• Sony Reader: The Movie
• Sony Reader, the Return
• Never judge a reader by the cover of their book