Commercial e-books will be able to be read on Nokia smartphones, according to this information from FoneArena. Nokia has arranged with e-book vendor eBooks.com to enable the phones to find, buy, download and read books directly from their handsets.
eBooks.com calls itself “the digital bookstore” and has some “45,000 popular, professional and academic ebooks from the world’s leading publishers,” e.g., current titles as opposed to the aged set of public-domain titles available at no cost.
To buy the titles from commercial publishers, you have to have either the Microsoft, MobiPocket, or Adobe readers, none of which only the Adobe Reader is available in a Linux version. But MobiPocket and Adobe Reader have Symbian versions, and that is apparently how Nokia will enter the e-book era.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, Nokia’s interest in e-books dates back to at least 1999, when it was a participant in the creation of the original open e-book format. And as regular readers of this blog are aware, I’m interested in pushing Nokia to further its e-book participation by including FBReader on the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet.
Here’s what eBooks.com says about the benefits of reading e-books:
In most cases, eBooks are cheaper than paper books.
Instantly available worldwide — just download the e-book instead of waiting for “snail mail” or local release.
Full-text search available — search our entire database of eBooks for a specific phrase or keyword.
Convenient — imagine loading several novels and a few magazines onto a portable reading device before you go on holiday.
Quick to download — the average novel takes only 3-4 minutes.
You can build a whole library of digital books.
Users can do research and create or organize content.
e-book reading software is free and easy to download from the internet.
Actually I suppose you can build a library and do research and create or organize content with paper books too, but hey!, why shouldn’t we include that? After all, e-books have all the benefits of p-books, plus the instant availability and full-text search. I think they forgot to say “hundreds of titles can be stored in your handheld device to be carried around with you and available wherever you are.” That’s always a good one.
So maybe there’ll be new software in future Nokia 770 images. Are there sufficient justifications to include the FBReader in the base 770?
There are legitimate issues that need to be considered. Is it ready and open-source, and the best reader around? Yes, IMO (some might want to wait for bookmarks and highlighting).
Are there other apps that should come first? Well, that’s a big question. We should definitely get the most useful, wonderful, and necessary apps first. And VoIP and Instant Messaging obviously take precedence over FBReader.
As for the rest . . . various people have suggested other apps. I can see an alarm clock/calendar as being useful — except I use my phone to set alarms and, well, it keeps better time But is one really ready? And should we pick one PIM app to put on the 770 and ignore all the others?
A second browser? Please . . . one (Opera) or another (GPE-mini-browser or MANaOS), but not two (or three). Same for Evince and XPDF.
Business apps? I guess by that I mean AbiWord and Gnumeric. Me, I say leave those to individuals who need them. I don’t, yet. They’re not something my wife is going to use (when she gets the 770 as her Christmas/birthday present).
More games? Well, a few. Crazy Parking, BattleGweled. A great solitaire, if there is one. These fit the kids, who’ve demanded their own 770 screen time, and a tiny bit more variety might be good. Some people swear by MineSweeper. Me, I’m waiting for a two-person version of Battleship. Playing that with my son on two 770 — now that will be cool. (Operative word: waiting. Not in line for consideration here.)
But you know what? This list is straying fairly far from Nokia’s vision of this device and their vision of themselves as a “communications” company. As I noted before, Nokia wants to provide access to the “other” type of communication — voice being first. if you want to take the data that’s on the web and access it, you have a pretty good picture of the 770’s defining role — websites, blogs, rss feeds, email, VoIP and IM coming, internet radio, music and video, images. Even PDFs.
About the only thing missing from this list that you might encounter on a webpage or in a Google search is a slideshow viewer that accepts Powerpoint presentations. That I think is more mainstream than Word compatability for someone consuming information. Not in line yet (is it on the horizon even?).
And, then, of course, there are e-books.
We have huge repositories of essential data we need so much that we aggregate the different pieces into warehouses and let anyone access the whole thing for free — it’s so critical we started doing this even before the web. Libraries we call these data repositories. They house books and people are trained to use them, from their first day in school.
And, really, people like to access information in book form. The depth of information, the amount in a single package, these are levels that have been set over hundreds of years. They’re the depth and length people feel comfortable with. Websites, blogs and such, are pretty confusing because you never know how much is there. Start reading a labyrinth like Paul Ford’s Ftrain, and you may never know how much of it you’ve seen. And how far back do you read in a blog? There’s no beginning in a blog.
And, of course, people like entertainment in book form. Sure we go to the movies, but when how many books do you give as Christmas/Hanukkah presents and how many movie tickets? If books didn’t do the job, people would be giving lots more ties and board games to adults, don’t you think?
Oh, you say, they’re not giving e-books as presents, are they. Rhetorical question, since we all know the answer to that. No, they’re not.
I think I’ll go into all the reasons for that in a succeeding post. There’s a whole set of issues that have stalled the e-book market — publishers’ concerns, DRM (digital restrictions management), multiple formats, expensive or awful e-book reading devices — that deserves exploration at length (hey, my specialty).
For now, let’s say it’s not for want of demand or desire. That’s what I think, and I’ll provide the justifications for my opinion then. But a critical aspect to consider is how we will use the 770 when we are forced offline. And an e-book reader is made for that.
Look for Part II later in the week.
If you like the idea of FBReader being included with other software on the Nokia 770, please add a comment to this blog post. If you have really well-grounded ideas for competing software, do add your comment as well.
I managed to borrow a digital caliper from a good friend at the office to accurately measure the height and width of the the Nokia 770, so screen protector makers (most are from the asian region), can start creating their molds, and not wait until next year for Nokia to release the 770 in Asia.
I took pictures of the Nokia 770’s screen width (91.65 mm), height (55.47 mm), and a corner (rounded) as seen below.
Screen protector makers, please do send us samples! :)
Here’s the bullet-point, executive-summary version of my long-winded proposal to include FBReader among the few ‘built-in’ apps on the Nokia 770, as requested.
People like and read e-books — there are many specialized devices for reading them already; the download records (tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions) are simply stunning when you look into them; people even read e-books on tiny Palm screens they’re so desperate hungry for them
This isn’t a new idea to Nokia, which participated in building the original OEBF e-book standard
Resistance to reading on-screen doesn’t exist — already a majority of people read most of their text off screens instead of paper when you include email, news sites, websites of all sorts, wikis and blogs, PDFs, reports, word processing documents, even instant messaging
An e-book reader permits offline reading and complements PDF viewing
The 770 provides the best physical experience for e-book reading of any device ever — small enough to carry around all the time, resolution that makes type a pleasure to read, showing more words on a page than ever before
A world-class open-source e-book reader is already available on the 770 — FBReader
The key to FBReader’s greatness: complete and elaborate control over the display of text, which provides great satisfaction to the (human) reader
FBReader rotates so you can read text in portrait mode and takes advantage of the hardware keys to access its paging, zooming and rotating features; it lacks only highlighting and bookmarks; it will read texts inside zip archives to preserve space
Can you imagine e-books with color images shown on a 770? Children’s books and photography books are practical for the first time
Here are links to pages showing FBReader screens so you can see for yourself (here, here and here)
Here’s an example page, showing the use of one of my fonts, Maiandra.
The only real resistance to e-books comes from publishers fearful of the same thing the record industry is fearful of — that being electronic threatens the way product is distributed today; but it’s the readers who are the mainstream, not the publishers
That’s probably worth repeating so it’s not misunderstood: your desire to reach the broadest possible audience means you must follow the wants of your users and not an industry concerned with protecting itself from shrinking sales
What everything listed here says to me is that an e-book reader on the 770 will be a tremendous offline hit with 770 owners. Some users will lose themselves reading during a commute (after all, how many times can you play marbles?) and others will fall asleep reading in bed and others forced to wait in a line will snatch five minutes here and there to read where there’s no Wi-Fi.
An e-book reader fits very closely with meeting the needs of users, of capitalizing on the strengths of the 770, of subsuming a whole category of more limited devices, and lastly of providing for another type of communication-as-data that I understand is an overall company goal. Nokia has been thinking about e-books for a long time. I believe now is the time to act on that long-held interest.
Ok, I think pairing the 770 with an N-series phone is great. I like how the 770 support RS-MMC and DV-RS-MMC cards. I managed to play with the N90, took 2-megapixel pics and captured videos with sound, saving them directly to the DV-RS-MMC.
I then popped out the card from the N90 and inserted it to the 770. I ran image viewer (Images), opened the image folder in the card and displayed the images. It worked beautifully!
I then ran Video player, opened the Video folder, and nothing. It can’t seem to find any video files. I then ran File Manager to check if the video files were indeed on the Video folder. I saw several .mp4 files. I then thought of changing the extension of one file to .avi. Surely enough, the icon changes to a video clip icon — but will the Video player recognize the format? Double tapping the file brings up Video player, and after a second or two, plays the video. Awesome!
The Nokia 770 specs say that it supports MPEG1, MPEG4, Real Video, H.263, AVI, and 3GP. Why only support .avi extensions for the Video player then? Was this overlooked? Any workaround to associate .mp4 with the Video player app?
It seems like Nokia is now working hard to fix the problems associated with the Email application. Dirk-Jan Binnema of Nokia just posted an announcement at the Maemo-Developers list that the source code for the mail app is now available. Also, he mentions in the Maemo-Users list that:
"There’s hard work going on in the code, so I hope we can fix these problems in the forthcoming releases."
The mail app is probably the most unstable application that comes pre-installed on the Nokia 770. Problems on IMAP synchronization, sorting, and inbox corruption are some of the problems that have been reported in the itT forums and in the Maemo-Users list.
Google’s m.gmail.com is designed for picking up email from mobile phones. Wow, does it work great with the 770. All the extraneous material is dropped and things fit much easier on the screen, with type much larger than the standard view. And it loads very fast. I didn’t time it, but perceptually, with my large inbox, loading took maybe a quarter or a fifth the time it usually takes.
The Compose screen input box stays at a phone-screen width, despite the 770’s ability to accept a wider box, and it has one significant disadvantage — it doesn’t provide for attachments. Note that the CC and BCC buttons don’t show up in this screen shot because they’re below the input box.
Above is the inbox and below reading an email and the Compose screen. All of these are shown at 150 percent to make it easier to see; the message has Optimized View checked.
Thanks to dillera for pointing this to us, and to The Syncing Apple for its post about this. And, hey, Apple is now on Planet Maemo — great to see you there!
Dr. Ari Jaaksi Director, Open-Source Operations/Multimedia
Nokia
Dear Ari —
I’d like to respond to your current blog post, which talks about the next steps in the Nokia 770’s progress as getting feedback and improving the product, openly and with outside participation.
I wish I had been able to meet you while you were in the United States — I would have pestered you with as many questions as Reggie and Mike Cane combined. I would also have made a suggestion to you in person that I’ll have to make in this open letter instead.
I propose a specific and significant addition to the software included in the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. On Monday, I did have the opportunity to meet the outgoing and incoming VP’s for Convergent Products/Multimedia, Janne Jormalainen and Ari Virtanen, to discuss the 770’s development. In our talk, Janne explained the dilemma you face with every suggested hardware or software addition. “Sometimes,” he said, “the hardest decisions are what to leave out.” I hope to persuade you that the suggestion I make meets even the highest level justification you can set. As you’ve written, you want to “concentrate only on things that matter for the mainstream users. We are building mass market devices; that is where we are going big time!”
For example, I know there are lots of games you could include. You could fill the 770 with games of all sorts, appealing across the spectrum, from logic games to shoot-em-ups. Yet in this regard, I think your inclusion of chess was extremely shrewd. Beyond the mere issue of the game’s popularity — might not Solitaire be more popular? — a specialized handheld chess-playing device with a decent screen costs $100 (or more — $369 for the Novag Star Sapphire Chess Computer). The 770 obviates the need for one of these utterly. To me (and others who play chess), the 770 is now worth $100 more.
Similarly, specialized devices that have no other capability than reading e-books sell for more than the cost of the 770. These include the Sony Librie ($479), the Hiebook (480×320 $289), the Cybook ($399), and others. There is a terrific hunger for electronic texts, for the ability to carry dozens of books on a handheld, both for reference and pleasure. Half a dozen e-book programs and formats exist for the small screen of a Palm, most of them created when the display measured only 150×150 pixels.
Here’s how hungry people are for electronic reading material — when the University of Virginia put 1600 texts online in 2000, without any publicity, without any official announcement even, in the period of six months 2 million e-books had been downloaded. And most of them were books more than one hundred years old (none written more recently than 1923). These are the books that sell for a quarter in a used bookstore, the ones you walk past without noticing — and there were 2 million downloads in that short period of time.
Project Gutenberg, with some 17,000 texts available in text, html and Plucker formats can’t even measure the number of downloads of their public-domain titles, all of the same vintage as Virginia’s, because these books are available from so many sites measuring is impssible. Michael Hart, PG’s founder, simply says “hundreds of millions,” but even accounting for hyperbole and wishful perceptions, conservative estimates are more than 50 million. I cite these download statistics to show you that the readers are there, that people totally accept electronic texts and like to read them.
From your own experience, you know how much text you read on-screen every day — at a conference in Montreal five years ago I polled the audience and found even then that 60 percent of them did three-quarters of their reading on a screen — email, news sites, websites of all sorts, wikis and blogs, PDFs, reports, word processing documents, even instant messaging, everything mounts up. I expect the percentage both of overall reading and of the overall population meeting a high threshold have increased in the intervening years. And this means the resistance to electronic reading predicted in 1999 by publishers just doesn’t exist.
What this says to me is that an e-book reader on the 770 will be a tremendous offline hit with 770 owners, those wanting to lose themselves reading during a commute (after all, how many times can you play marbles?) or in bed or in line at the bank, where there’s no Wi-Fi or media features aren’t what you want. And that’s my suggestion: include an e-book reader.
Of course, one reason I foresee ready acceptance is that the 770 already has world-class e-book software in the FBReader, which possesses more and finer controls over display than any other reader ever. Having belonged to the publication structure working group of the Open eBook Foundation back in the early days of ebooks as carryaround devices, I know something about this. When you control the precise size of the type, and the font, and other subtler aspects that affect your visual appreciation of the text on-screen, there’s a tremendous personal gratification. (You probably recognize the opposite feeling, the one you get when you go to a website and just feel utterly antagonized with the small typesize or noisy design or some other unreadable and unchangeable aspect.)
FBReader is an open-source reader written originally for the Sharp Zaurus by Nikolay Pultsin and ported to the 770 by Mikhail Sobolev, whom I expect you know. The current version is 0.71b and it awaits two desirable features — highlighting and bookmarks. But it is fantastically adapted to the 770, capable of rotating text 90 degrees by pressing the center Scroll button, advancing or going back a page by pressing the zoom + and - keys (right under your finger tip when the screen is rotated), reading text or html files inside zip archives to preserve space on the MMC card.
With the 770’s incredible resolution, the curved and diagonal letter shapes in FBReader are beyond that ever encountered in an e-book reader — it’s easy to say, as I have at MobileRead, at Teleread, at Internet Tablet Users blog, that the FBReader on the 770 is the best e-book reader ever, bar none. Add color pictures to the text (OK, not so many of those public-domain ebooks have color illustrations) and it’s just icing on the cake.
A PDF enables a designer to control font choice, image placement, other layout aspects. But few PDF’s are constructed to be read with screen proportions, especially the 770’s, and they just do not allow one to increase too-small type to readable sizes. Instead you must zoom the whole page, and when you do that you go back to the preposterous need to scroll horizontally, back and forth, back and forth, to read a page. You can see many screen captures of FBReader online, including here, here and here to see for yourself.
FBReader complements the PDF viewer the 770 includes; it can display content in formats (html, text) the PDF viewer can’t handle. Thus reading content can be provided that still gives the reader/user controls to make the text readable.
Readers — the human kind — have enthusiastically embraced e-books. Print publishers are more reticent, fearing like the music industry that releasing their product electronically will undercut sales. This is no small distinction — it is not publishers who are in the mainstream, but readers. I want to say this carefully: your desire to reach the broadest possible audience means you must follow the wants of your users and not an industry concerned with protecting itself from shrinking sales.
So I hope you will take a very close look at this program and include it in your basic set of applications. It fits very closely with meeting the needs of users, of capitalizing on the strengths of the 770, of subsuming a whole category of more limited devices, and lastly of providing for another type of communication-as-data that I understand is an overall Nokia goal. Indeed, I know that Nokia has been thinking about including e-book readers on its devices since at least 1999, when I met the company’s representative to that OEBF working group. I believe now is the time to act on that long-held interest.
With much gratitude for what is already reality in the 770, I am
Sincerely yours,
In Dr. Ari Jaaksi’s latest blog entry, he boldy lays out Nokia’s plan for the Nokia 770:
"Now, how do you develop a product such a 770? How do you work in open source in general? You
1) release early, 2) get feedback – including code contributions, 3) improve your product – all very openly, and letting others to participate
So we have #1 already. Now we are doing #2., and with the maintenance and next major software upgrade releases we’ll do #3. This all sounds very familiar to us who are into creating software with open source. But it is also a pretty neat idea in a context of and entire product family, such as the internet tablets."
Dr. Ari Jaaksi is the Nokia Director for Open Source Operations - Multimedia. He maintains his Nokia 770 related blog here.
But is one really ready? And should we pick one PIM app to put on the 770 and ignore all the others?
