In the New York Times this morning, a longish article about e-books begins with discussion of the Sony Reader, a proprietary, monocolor, non-WiFi, non-programmable e-book reader that nowsells for $299.
David Pogue, the Times’ star technology columnist, writes about internet radio devices, single-function handhelds enabling you to listen to music over the internet without being tethered to a desktop or lugging around a huge laptop. Prices: Revo Pico $350, Terratec Noxon $330, Roku SoundBridge Internet Radio $300, and so on.
Or you could listen to the same stations on your NIT. While reading an e-book in FBReader.
The devilishly well-executed iPod seems to have misled everyone into regarding single-function devices as viable — single-function e-readers, single-function internet radios. But when you see how poorly every single-function music carryaround fares compared to the iPod, you realize that execution — usability, design, stylishness — carried Apple over the single-function barrier and not that no such barrier exists.
Then there’s the opposite phenomenon: the companies that treat you like all you want is a phone or PDA and everything operates from there.
Different misconception: that we love every single thing we do being monetized by greedy mega-companies.
In Pogue’s column about internet radio, he points out that it’s so hard to tolerate commercial radio because of all the commercials. “These days, it seems as though AM radio has 52 minutes of ads an hour,” he writes.
So one of the lures of the single-function internet radio device is simply to restore the balance of pleasure against monetization of music. The New York Times is preparing to abandon its Times Select pay service because it has discovered (finally!) that we readers can find just as entertaining writers are all over the web without charge.
If there’s a course to be charted between the Scylla of single-function and the Charybdis of one-device-for-everything, Nokia seems to be following it: The internet tablets do several related things really well, with the form of its devices (no hard disk, super-high-res screen that’s 800 pixels wide, under 8 ounces) rigorously matching the real needs while keeping every possible subsidiary use available (e-books, chess, even spreadsheets and word processing for goodness’ sake) without charging for it.
Usually, I steer clear of PDF files, especially on the Nokia N800 and 770 Internet Tablets. Documents are almost always designed for letter-size pages, and I don’t read text where I have to scroll sideways as well as up-and-down. This week, however, the N800’s PDF Reader was my salvation. The app is better — faster, more stable — than I expected but ignores hyperlinking.
When I read text on a Nokia Internet Tablet, I prefer FBReader to the alternatives. Usually I’ll be able to convert my text to the FB2 markup (this is simply XML, not a proprietary or binary format), and FBReader lets me pick fonts and sizes by XML element, so I can arrange this to my finicky satisfaction. And I prefer to page through text using the + and - keys on top of the NIT.
I had chapters of the book in html files, but no time for an html-to-fb2 transformation. So I grabbed a pdb I’d made a while back, since that’s the prime alternative among the many formats that FBReader will display.
The book is entitled “How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python,” written by Allen Downey, Jeffrey Elkner and Chris Meyers. I was skimming through the text when I was stopped by a code example. Here’s a screen capture from the N800:
Well, the code example isn’t stylable by FBReader in pdb format, but if you can’t see the indents in Python examples, then you’re missing something.
I found the book online at ibiblio.org and then used Adobe Acrobat’s feature for making a PDF from web pages with one key setting — making a custom page size 6 inches wide by 3.6 inches tall.
Opening this PDF, I set the page zoom to “fit page width” and got this sort of thing instead:
As you can see, not only are the lines indented, the code is in a different font and keywords in a different color. All that’s been lost in the quick-and-dirty pdb.
I experimented with a few different ways to make the PDF. I found my most successful result by downloading each html chapter, modifying the css stylesheet to choose Trebuchet MS as the font and 16 pt as the font size, then making a PDF of the chapter. (When I did the whole book from the website, the font size wasn’t consistent throughout the chapters, why, I don’t know.)
That experimentation led me to discover one flaw in the PDF reader — the Open dialog doesn’t display enough characters in a file name. Here are two screen shots showing my chapter file tests in the recent files list and in the Open dialog:
To be honest, I figured a 1135-page PDF would be too unwieldy for the reader to manage, so I started out making individual chapter files from my local html copies. Since the links weren’t relative, I used the complete online version to make a single PDF of everything, with the Table of Contents and Index linking to different chapters.
To my surprise, the progress through the pages of this huge document was no slower than through the small single-chapter documents.
The links worked fine on my laptop, but not at all in the NIT’s PDF Reader. Navigation in such a huge document is really awkward without being able to use the links or bookmarks. Anyone know more about the linking issue with PDFs?
— Roger Sperberg
For those who are interested, the PDF can be downloaded from here
Added later: Translations of this text into Portuguese and German are also available, as is a paper version from Green Tea Press. The first version by Allen Downey was written with Java examples and then a version rewritten by him for C++. The same clear-headed text was then modified to introduce Python and Logo. I like this book and as its title indicates, in order to learn to think like a computer scientist, you will need to learn to think like a computer and also, hopefully, simply how to think.
For me, the 38-minute train ride from Montclair into New York City is my prime personal time for computing and writing. And fast or slow, the WiFi-ization of America won’t reach that zone for a long while I’m sure.* That means the commute is offline for now and hereafter.
So I diligently worked out a plan to pluck information off the web every morning, put it automatically into my preferred reading format and transfer the info to my internet tablet to read in FBReader.
Since FBReader gobbles up the Plucker pdb format rather handily and Plucker desktop efficiently automates the webpage plucking, I thought this would work nicely.
I was wrong.
Too much me
The process involves me too much and requires two computers. It’s a system that was designed to use a person’s desktop computer for the plucking and processing, synch to a Palm PDA, and utilize the Palm for reading.
But why should I have to synch? My internet tablet has WiFi. It will run a python program. It’s got a great e-reader already.
Ah, the Linux version of Plucker desktop uses wxWindows. I can’t run it on my internet tablet. Plus it has all the synch-to-Palm conduit stuff.
What’s needed is an interface written for the internet tablet that sits on top of the already-written Python plucking code.
Then every morning (and afternoon), the stuff I want to look at would be grabbed, streamlined and made ready for me to read on the train.
Python-meister available?
Would that I could develop this on my own.
But, besides not being a developer, I found Python unintelligible in my two attempts to learn it (and then found Ruby the complete opposite — clear, elegant, intuitive). I realize I need someone who knows what they’re doing to guide me when I get stuck, which is often, even at my noice level (or: because of my novice level).
Still, the Python tools available for the Maemo are so powerful and give me a real reason (and platform) to develop that I look longingly at this project and wonder, What can I do to make it a reality?
If there’s a Python-meister who sees in this a project not too complex and which could be incredibly fruitful for the internet tablet community . . . well, I’ll sign on as chief cook-and-bottle-washer. Tester, UI guide and documenter. Evangelist.
I’ll do everything I can to make the project succeed, apart from the, um, Python part. We await only the emergence of a true code master.
________
* I could connect to a phone’s data plan and surf — I’ve done that, it’s great! — if I chose to squander my discretionary income on that instead of extravagances like children.
Here’s my review of the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, the gosh-darned most revolutionary device around, smaller, lighter, better-screened, less-expensive and capable of see-me phone calls at voip prices — what do you think, will I like it?
But first, let’s get the formalities out of the way. I’m a fanboy of anyone who shows egregious genius. The makers/builders of the internet tablet twins qualify on several counts. My attitude shows in everything I write about the 770 and the N800. Secondly, speaking my opinion and wanting to further the development of the scene has qualified me to purchase both a 770 and an N800 at steep discount — 58 and 68 percent, respectively, as one of 500 participants in both the 770 and the N800 developer-device programs. (Of course, I know people who got them free!)
So, here’s my review:
The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet came as a shock to observers of the web tablet scene. No one expected Nokia to expand its line and push the tablet envelope so soon and so far, considering that widespread distribution in the U.S. occurred only 12 months ago.
But the strength of the 770’s appeal apparently persuaded Nokia to capitalize on its first-to-market advantage and hug the internet tablet to its N-series, smart-phone bosom. (Hence the “N” prefixing the name.)
Anyone who uses one of these tablets soon experiences a glowing recognition that, holy cow!, the internet doesn’t have to be confined to a desk or laptop-friendly chair. Now you can surf standing up, walking around, riding the train and so on, just as you can use a phone untethered from a phone jack.
This comparison to the cellphone’s liberation of movement comes from Ari Jaaksi, the head of Nokia’s open-source software group and the internet tablet team specifically. And it’s critical to understanding why the N800 and the 770 don’t fit into any neat categories that other reviewers seem to want to force them into.
DotReader from Osoft has entered the public beta stage. You can download Windows and Linux versions. This is an open-source ebook reader (source code here), written in Perl with the wxWidgets GUI.
I’m partial to FBReader, but I really like the idea of another Linux ebook reader.
I’ll report back what I learn about dotReader as I work with it. My question to the Nokia 770 community is whether dotReader’s use of wxWidgets might make it an unfriendly or large application on the 770.
Springer, a major publisher of “high-quality STM journals, book series, books [and] reference works,” has just introduced its own portal for its collection of scientific, technical and medical works. Already there are about 11,000 titles available, including journal articles, book chapters, monographs and atlases. About 3,000 titles are expected to be added annually.
The big news here is that Springer is not requiring subscribers to submit to some system of digital restrictions management. The works are available in html and pdf form, libraries own ebooks they purchase in perpetuity, and everything is readable on the Nokia 770 Tnternet Tablet. Yes, you can use FBReader to read these works.
Smart move for Springer. Good news for Nokia 770 owners.
Bill McCloy works at Adobe and writes in his blog about this headline and first paragraph of a Wall Street Journal article:
Gadget Makers Offer Features to Improve ‘Readability’;
‘The Da Vinci Code’ on a Treo
Chris Kwak, a 31-year-old financial analyst, spends hours a day glued to the tiny screen of his Palm Treo hand-held computer. He fires off emails, check stock prices — and recently plowed through the novel ‘The Da Vinci Code’.
So here we have reading an eBook matter-of-factly included, along with emailing and information retrieval, as a basic user behavior (!). While this surely doesn’t track to typical current usage, it’s yet another signal that eReading is, directionally, becoming a mainstream activity.
So this is more evidence accruing that e-reading is mainstream. Shouldn’t Nokia consider e-books as central an activity on the Nokia 770 as, say, Mahjong? The next release should include FBReader as part of the base system, I think.
The previous post in this blog, Let’s re-evaluate the 770’s chances in the market, was written and posted to the itT forums by cobalt and promoted later to the users blog to give it wider exposure. I wanted to make note of that, because Planet Maemo didn’t pick up the line about the different author.
Hopefully many other it Forum contributors will make posts that are also posted to the blog.
We know now that the 2006 OS will come with at least one new application pre-installed — Google Talk, with its instant messaging and VoIP phone capabilities.
Since Nokia has been promising IM and VoIP by mid-2006 for 51 weeks (hey! one more week till the announcement anniversary!), we knew this was coming.
I wonder if there will be any other pre-installed applications? Maybe FBReader, the world-class e-reader, for instance. We know that the 770 is an ideal e-book reader and that e-books are becoming more significant.
Or maybe there will be some additional games — Nako, Battlegweled and IceBreaker seem obvious candidates. Maybe a sturdy text editor to supplement Notes. Or built-in XTerm and CPU/MEM load graph. I would add PIM apps to this list, if there were any such available. I’m not envisioning the Nokia developers creating new apps with so much already on their plate.
I’ve definitely made my opinion known that FBReader is a natural application for the Nokia 770. But maybe not everyone agrees. RemoteUser (aka Gene Mosher) believes in the 770 as a remote control device. A whole crowd is making it a mapping/GPS displaying device. Not to mention others developing its audio and video playing side.
If Nokia isn’t going to pre-install all of these apps, and is wary of picking only one or another of them, I hope Ari Jaaksi and his crew provide a good clean automatic way to install and update them that even a rank beginner will be able to follow, as they’ve hinted will happen. If there are “click to install” links to add some of these apps, that will be the next thing to “pre-installed.”
NewsForge has a review of the Nokia 770 by Rob Reilly. Short, clued-in to the real nature of the 770 and to the steady stream of software, but somehow overlooking the world-class e-reading app, FBReader. (OK, my bias towards using the 770 for e-books.) He cites 103 “mature” software packages over and above those from Nokia, and another 73 in development, as listed at the maemo wiki.
Given his look at software, I’m surprised he didn’t mention the Python tools available. Here’s how he introduces the 770:
Most organizations aren’t ready to migrate to a wireless, network-centric, thin hardware, server/client model, which makes the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet a bit ahead of its time. This handheld device has a basic browser, email client, and multimedia player, but the real beauty of this Linux-based system is its ability to expand its functionality by installing a limited but growing list of applications.
Nokia has financed a platform known as Maemo that users can modify and configure easily to suit their needs. With the 770 hardware and the Maemo development environment, we have a promising setup that fits right in with the open source way of life.
A Google group has been established to discuss FBReader — the world-class e-book reader that runs on the Nokia 770, Linux desktop, Sharp Zaurus and other devices.
The FBReader forum at mobileread.com will continue, but the Google group permits posting in Russian (although the primary language is English).
And I will continue to post matters of interest here, with comments and discussion in our forums also encouraged.
Btw, I understand a new format and a new platform are in the works for FBReader, but I’ll wait till their announcement — or mention in one of these forums — before writing about them here.
In one of the first posts at Google groups, Geometer (aka Nikolay Pultsin, FBReader’s developer) writes:
About platforms: currently I am working [on a] port for GPE
(http://gpe.handhelds.org). In fact, the version for OpenZaurus/GPE is
almost ready, I hope to release it next week. Another device planned to
support in near future is Archos PMA430. (This device runs Qtopia and
is very like to Sharp Zaurus.)
About formats: I plan to add support for OEB and CHM files. And maybe
for OpenReader format.
This is great news — the tools to disassemble encrypted but non-DRMed[*] (or “personalized”) e-books in the Microsoft Reader .lit format are not hard to locate, their result being an OEB package file and the content files. Plunk ’em all into a zip file and add the OPF to FBReader’s library and you’ve got a direct pipeline for thousands of e-books in this very popular format.
And isn’t CHM the most popular format for documentation of Windows-based programs? The universe of content readable in FBReader is about to get very bigger.
[*] I can’t say what they do with DRMed content, because I’ve never owned any such in .lit format.
