eReaders and eBooks. eEk.

This has been re-formatted slightly from an email I sent to a family member, as I'm probably going to be ordering two of whatever we decide on. I'm leaning strongly towards the Nook at the moment, but I'm prepared to have my mind changed. Keep in mind, this is written from, and mostly for, an Australian perspective.

Let me know if anything is unclear, or I've missed anything that's important to you.

Intro:

I originally narrowed my choices down to 3 models:

1. The Amazon Kindle 3: Probably the current market leader. ( Amazon link )

2. The Barnes and Noble "Nook". ( B&N link )

3. The Kobo reader ( Kobo link, A&R link )

They all have more or less identical reading areas, 6 inch / 15.2 cm diagonal , 600 x 800 pixel screen with 16 levels of gray. I've not considered any of the full-colour options, as I'd like to use this out-and about, or while away from time to time, so good battery life is important. There are other readers out there, but none of them looked compelling to me, feel free to suggest others if you think I've missed something great.

WiFi or WiFi+3G?

The first choice was whether to go WiFi only, or WiFi+3G. WiFi only means you need to have access to a WiFi network to buy/download new books from the online stores. 3G means the unit has a SIM card and phone module embedded, which allows you to purchase anywhere there is phone coverage. This sounds good, but I decided against it for a few reasons:

• It makes the unit more expensive.
• It is likely to reduce battery life.
• You're usually limited to using the manufacturers eBook store over the 3G connection.
• I doubt I'll ever be completely stuck for reading material and absolutely have to have a new book right now.
• Many smart phones can be turned into a mobile WiFi hotspot anyway, so you connect to the internet via your phone, and your eReader connects to the phone's WiFi. (Update - this is trivial, but I find I don't do it all that often, I do most of my book management and purchasing at home)
  

Battery life:

These are manufacturers claims, I don't know how accurate they are, but if true, all are OK by me. I don't think I could be away from power for much more than a week, so they're all acceptable.

1 Kindle: Up to month.

2. Nook: 10 days.

3. Kobo: 2 weeks or 10,000 page turns.

Formats:

1 Kindle : azw (Amazon proprietary format), pdf, html, mp3 audio. Notably - no ePub

2. Nook: ePub, pdf, html, mp3 audio. Also does pdb.

3. Kobo: ePub, pdf. No html, no audio.

The Nook and Kobo are very similar. They both do ePub, and pdf as their main formats, and don't to azw, which is the Kindles default format. The kindle doesn't do ePub. There are tools around to to conversions and such, but this is based on out-of-te-box functionality.

Libraries here seem to be all using ePub, so if you plan to use walk-in services from libraries, the Kindle won't cut it.This is reasonably important in my opinion.

Storage:

Realistically, they all have enough internal storage to hold metric bucket-loads of books, it's mostly text, after all. However, I like the idea of removable storage, and if you do want to use it for music playback, it's some extra headroom.

1. Kindle: 4 GB internal, not expandable.

2. Nook: 2 GB Internal, microSD card slot, up to 16GB

3. Kobo: 1GB Internal, SDHC card slot, up to 32 GB

Phone Apps:

These are apps which, strangely enough, run on your phone, allowing you to read from your collection when you don't have your device. I kind of like this idea, and in I've already downloaded the Nook and Kobo Android versions and had a bit of a play with them, downloading and reading some free eBooks. Certainly handy, but not critical. They've all got good solutions here as far as I'm concerned. I've read entire books on my phone and even the old palm, so in a pinch, it's good to have.

1. Kindle:Android, Blackberry, iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows, Windows Phone 7

2. Nook: Android, iPad, iPhone, PC

3. Kobo: Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Palm

Web Features:

The Kindle and Nook both have web browsers, the Kobo doesn't. You're never going to use one of these devices as a serious internet tablet device, but I like the idea of being able to get on the web in some fashion, plus I have some ideas for using it at home for interacting with my home automation setup and such.

Other features:

The Kindle is the only one of the three to do text-to-speech. Not a big deal for me personally, I'm a podcast junkie anyway, generally having at least one or two other audio capable devices nearby, but a nice feature I guess.

The Nook has the extra colour touchscreen for navigation. Cute, and good for recognising/browsing book covers, although I suspect it will have a small effect on battery life.

Cost:

1 Amazon Kindle. Amazon will ship here. Their web site say it should be US $155 shipped. There are also people based here re-selling. Approx $240 per unit in Sydney, I'm not sure why the big difference, the exchange rate it pretty good at the moment.

2. Nook: Not available locally. B&N don't ship to Australia. Purchasing on-line elsewhere, I can get two of them here for just approx $206 each.

3. Kobo: Nice in that you can buy them retail in Australia. Angus and Robertson have them for $179

eBook Stores:

I picked about 20-30 authors and titles, and checked Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the Kobo bookstore and Borders. Prices and availability vary a lot. Prices in the US stores are typically a lot cheaper than the Australian equivalents. Amazon and B&N had the best ranges and prices by my estimation, although there may be a bit of technical messing about to purchase directly from the US stores, but I've got that more-or-less sorted out. Both the Nook and Kobo do ePub (with DRM), but you could transfer titles from any store to either.

Other links:

Wikipedia's comparison of eReaders.

--
John

Ubiquity

I've been playing around with Mozilla labs ubiquity plug in in recent weeks. It's still in beta, and far from fully featured, but even so it's quite impressive.

Tonight I was reading comments on a boing boing post where a few of the commenters had used ROT13 to obscure spoilers. There are plenty of good sites to do the conversion for you (I'm too old/lazy to do that sort of thing in my head these days) but I thought to myself that this would be a perfect for for a ubiquity command.

I know the world isn't really crying out for a ROT13 utility, but I thought it would be a good way for me to test the waters in writing some browser code. My javascript-fu is far from strong, but it was surprisingly easy. I spent far more time futzing about with publishing it than I did writing the code itself.

You can check out my notes here. Even if you've no interest in my almost embarrassingly trivial utility, check out ubiquity for it's own sake. If you're a power web-user, you won't regret it.

Broken Windows Updates

This post was inspired by a folder cleanup in which I found a note to myself from earlier in the year (May 27, 2008). I'm putting it here as a quick reference, as it's the sort of thing that happens once in a while, and filtering through all the google hits can be time consuming when you just need to fix something now. *

Symptom: Neither Windows Update or Microsoft Update would complete. The machine in question in this instance was a vanilla P4 somethingorother, running XP pro. Before finding this solution I tried a bunch of things, including an install of Service Pack 3.

You can read the full thread on the techarena forums. I found it via a google search, I'm not familiar with this forum in general. The bit that I needed is from post 3 in the thread:

Start regedit.exe and delete the following key (contains the WU
service configuration):

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\wuauserv

Do a reboot now!

Then run this command line (from a command prompt of from Start/Run, it
installs the AutoUpdate service (line will wrap in the newsreader!):

%SystemRoot%\System32\rundll32.exe setupapi,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall
132 %SystemRoot%\inf\au.inf

(it must be a space between DefaultInstall and 132)

If it asks for your OS CD-ROM to get some files, just point it to the
folder %windir%\System32 (%windir% is typically C:\Windows).

Then run the following commands:

regsvr32.exe wuaueng.dll
regsvr32.exe wuapi.dll
regsvr32.exe wups.dll
regsvr32.exe wucltui.dll

Do a reboot again.

Then check if you can start and stop the Automatic Updates service
successfully from services.msc

These steps repaired the problem.

* Caveat: This sort of stuff does change from time to time, but it should still serve as an indication of the sorts of problems you should look for if you have similar symptoms. At the very least, you might include some of the relevant terms in your search to speed things up.

Long file names and removable media

I was recently trying to copy a bunch of files onto an SD card, and kept getting an "out of space" error message, which was kind of odd, considering the 300 or so image files added up to a grand total of just over 20 MB, and the card was en empty 1 GB card.

Much poking, prodding, trying stuff from the command line and googling resulted in me learning more about VFAT than I'd originally intended. Anyway, it turns out that the implementation for long file names in VFAT is a workaround which means that if you have too many(1) long file names in the root directory you may chew up all your allocation units and get "out of space" errors long before the media itself is full.

Files in sub folders are not implemented in the same way, and therefore don't exhibit the same behavior. Put all of the files in a subdirectory and all is well.

References:

Wikipedia's entry on various implementations of Mr Gates' File Allocation Table.

A MEPIS forum post that really pointed me in the right direction.

Notes:

(1) How many depends on how long your file names actually are, you use one extra directory entry for every 13 characters. I think it's 512 directory entries, so assuming I had 302 x some number greater than 1, I was bound to run into problems.