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 I found that The Temporal Void was listed as unpublished until a couple of days ago, with a release date in the past, and also that for many books ebook versions were being sold at hardback prices even when paperback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.

If you want to play with phreadz, which is lovely and run by the lovely Kosso who does it all of it himself, then you should be able to get a beta (closed beetroot era, to be exact) login via the politics channel.

I seem to have agreed this evening to look into sorting out video streaming and social media linking for British Computer Society Young Professionals Group talks, starting with a “New Leaf, New Year” evening for the green computing group. Time to work out whether the ideas I had in the meeting are actually possible…

So, I continue my life without papery books. I’ve had my Sony Reader for a few weeks now, and it is still lovely. Since my day one purchase of Anathem and upload of a bunch of classics, I’ve also grabbed Peter Hamilton’s Temporal Void, a pile of Tor short stories, a couple from Bookkake’s collection, Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book and my current read, David Peace’s Tokyo Year Zero. I’ve read a few graphic novels on top of those, but in a “must get used to it” kind of way, I’ve stuck to the e-reader for my regular booky needs. So, how did it do?

The hardware is quite excellent. Apart from a few random crashes and some weirdness where it didn’t charge one night when I plugged it in, it has functioned without hitch and I’ve only needed to charge it once since unboxing it, despite it being handed around to everyone I know and playing a couple of episodes of X Minus 1 as a test of its mp3 player. Ergonomically it’s fine, with my main annoyance being that the navigation pad on the right doesn’t change pages, something that would be useful as my main reading position is Jean-Luc Picard style with the coverless pad in my right hand and cup of Tea Earl Grey Hot in my left, while sitting in my ready room (this may be fantasy. I don’t have a ready room. Or any earl grey, hot or otherwise). This doesn’t work that well, leading to my having to change tea hand, which is more traumatising than the words alone might suggest.  The pages turn quickly when you’re using a non-PDF file and aren’t too slow with PDFs unless they are image heavy, and you get used to the flash of the refresh after a bit. You can change the size of the text with all the books that I’ve tried and with PDF files it reflows text quite well, although it still respects page breaks, meaning that you do sometimes end up with overly short pages when a PDF page is split unevenly across an e-reader page turn. The screen is about as reflective as a glossy magazine, maybe slightly less so, so there are occasional glare issues. However, I’ve not had much trouble reading it in a variety of lighting conditions, from on the tube with the sun at my back to the darkened back room of my local. It also gets comments – it’s quite a pretty thing, especially with its tan pleather cover, and I’ve had a few people wander up and ask what it is, how it rates against real book and just share a general appreciation of the shiny thing. I gathered a small crowd of staff in Carluccio’s a few weeks back, all intrigued by the new fangled device…

There are two pieces of software used with the device – the Sony Library and Adobe Digital Editions. The former is as clunky and ugly as Sony’s software always seem to be (my experiences with the NetMD minidisc player’s software have soured me against anything that Sony may shat out onto my PC) and the latter is a Flash based (maybe Air?) lightweight app that does its job efficiently, even if the interface is using the “I am cross platform by virtue of being totally different to all the avalailable platforms” trick that so many seem to try. I used the Sony software for uploading non-DRM’d books to start with, but having found out that I can just dump them on an SD card and have the reader Just Work with them I’ve not loaded it again. Adobe Digital Editions is used for DRM’d books, as in the UK it seems that Adobe’s locked formats are being used rather than Sony’s.

An aside, DRM’d ebook formats: The Sony secure LRF format seems to be a DRM’d version of the open EPub format, as are Adobe Digital Editions, although they don’t seem to be compatible. However, to muddy the waters further, Adobe also do secure PDF, which some sites bill as a Digital Edition, despite it not being a capitalised Digital Edition, merely a digital edition. Luckily the Sony Reader supports both, although in the latter’s case you don’t get the automatic formatting joy that a real EPub document gives you, locking you into the formatting of the PDF, which is generally not designed for the small reader screen. I’ve been looking into what makes up an EPub and behind the scenes it’s just a zip file with a bunch of HTML in. One day my attempt at EBook::EPub might appear on CPAN.

The big question though is how does it read? Answer: a bit like a book. No, it’s not the same. Yes, it still feels a bit weird. But overall it works well, much better than the Palms that I used years back to avoid the wrist snapping weight of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque cycle (note to self – buy the System of The World as an ebook so that you can finish the series, finally). The contrast is not as great as paper, but the resolution seems higher (it’s 170dpi). It handles images well (depending on how the ebook is constructed), with eight shades of grey, and reading The Graveyard Book with the illustrations was a nice surprise, expecting a boring text version as I was. Most of all, I got to read Anathem and The Temporal Void without having to cart around a hefty chunk of dead tree and also have that extra cubic foot of space free in my house, ready to fill with comics, pies or whatever else takes my fancy. I don’t care so much about the carting around of hundreds of books with me at all times, but the small size and fact that it currently contains about a shelf worth of books rather than filling up a shelf makes me a happy man.