Just uploaded a recording of a presentation I did yesterday on eBooks. Here's the description:

eBooks: Promise and Reality

eBooks have been around for several years and every couple of years the technology is hyped as being ready for mass consumption. We'll take a look at the current eBook landscape. I'll demo several hardware solutions, including the Sony PRS-500 Reader System and alternative devices like cell phones and the PlayStation Portable. I'll demonstrate how to use BookDesigner to convert among formats and other software tools. We'll talk about sources for eBooks like the Gutenberg Project. We'll also take a look at newly announced technology, including Amazon's Kindle eBook reader, Adobe's new Digital Editions format, and color eInk devices that were shown at SIGGRAPH this summer.

View the Presentation

(Adobe Presenter Flash format)

The much anticipated Amazon Kindle is finally here. I have to say I was a bit skeptical about the device from early images and leaks of information on the web on various gadget sites. Looking at the videos of the Kindle in action, I think the form factor is better than I expected. And given that EVDO network access for the device is free, $400 does not seem as much as it did when I was thinking about monthly fees initially. But for $400 I'd still take an ASUS Eee PC any day.

There are two serious flaws with the Kindle that I think will really hurt the industry as a whole. First, the eBook format that is natively supported is a proprietary format based on mobiPocket. By not using a format that is readable on other hardware, they will be stifling growth of the market as a whole. Secondly, it looks like the only way to get your own files onto the device is by emailing them to an address provided for you from Amazon at a cost of $.10 per email. The jury is still out on whether you will be able to use the SD card and a PC to transfer files to avoid this fee. As a very astute observer in the discussion of the device on Amazon's site points out, the device seems less an eBook reader and more a microtransaction system for Amazon sales.

The eBook market is still in its early growth stages, and unfortunately, I think the end result of Amazon's choices may well stunt that growth significantly. We shall see.

I received an interesting comment on my post about getting video onto my Samsung Sync mobile phone this morning. In the comment, Matt asks if I've ever tried to use the Sync to read eBooks. I hadn't. But being an eBook user and fan, I took it as a challenge. Matt had already tried copying a text file over using Bluetooth and opened it using the Picsel file viewer. The results are unsatisfactory - clunky zoom and the need to pan all over the place to read because the text does not wrap. I suspect the text is being treated as if it is an image and this makes it impossible for the software to understand the document's text flow. Matt had been on the right track after this initial attempt. He says he tried to open the browser and could not find any way to use the file:// protocol to call up the file in the web browser.

Here's how I solved these problems and was able to read text comfortably on the Sync:

I took a Word document (it could have been any text format) and saved the file from Word as HTML Filtered. The "Filtered" option in Word 2007 strips out all the nasty Microsoft specific code that might not render properly in the Sync's browser. I then copied the file to my MicroSD card and popped it into the phone. I navigated to the file using the "My Stuff" file browser and opened the file. Because it was an HTML file it opened directly in the phone's browser. This result had two consequences that were an improvement over the Picsel file viewer. First, the text was sized properly for reading on the small screen, and second, the text properly flowed vertically and wrapped nicely so that no side-to-side scrolling was necessary. In addition, the browser allows you to resize the text on the page; there are three text size settings: normal, smaller, and larger. I found the normal sized text to be very much readable on my phone, and scrolling down for more text was not too bad.

Thanks again to Matt for asking this interesting question. I still find it really cool that we have these fantastic computers that we carry around everywhere with us and that fit in the palm of our hands. I feel like I'm in a Star Trek episode sometimes when I think about the ubiquity of this kind of technology.

Just read a nice article on New Scientist about work by Microsoft and Mitsubishi on a novel approach to handling the occlusion problem and the "fat finger" problem of current multi-touch interfaces. There's also a video of a prototype of the LucidTouch device.

The current prototype device uses a camera on a boom focused on the hands on the back of the device. An overlay shadow is superimposed over the image showing the location of the hands without occluding the display. Active finger touch points are shown and a very intuitive method for showing the hand-off of selected items between fingers is also used. It's a nice glimpse of what's ahead in the multi-touch arena.

Check out the very cool tech from Carnegie Mellon University, NASA's Ames Research Center, and CharmedLabs. Here's the press release. The technology includes an inexpensive robotic device that snaps pictures and software for stitching them together and uploading to a community-driven website. In cooperation with Google, a new Gigapan layer is being added to Google Earth to allow fly-throughs of Gigapan-captured environments. Take a look at the Gigapan site and try out some of the shared environments. Very cool.

As promised, I'm going to try to collect in one place all of the resources I have found for dealing with eBooks on the Sony PRS-500 Reader System.

First let me start with a website that is a central clearing house for all things related to eBooks and eBook readers: the MobileRead Forums. If you can't find it there, it just doesn't exist. There are separate forums for each type of eBook hardware - here's the one for the Sony Reader. In addition, most of the software you would need to edit or convert eBooks for the Reader or any other platform can be found there as well.

In working with eBooks that I already have, I have found that several tools have come in handy: BBeBinder and Book Designer. BBeBinder is especially useful for converting HTML documents to the native .lrf eBook format of the Reader System. Book Designer is a much more full-featured tool for converting almost any type of text file or eBook format to .lrf format (and several other formats, as well). Of course, the files need to be DRM-free for the conversion to work.

Because PDF is such a second-class citizen on the Sony reader, one of the steps in my process is to export text from PDFs (when possible) to HTML or RTF. Once I have the text extracted from the PDF, I can use one of the other tools to create an .lrf file.

In future posts, I'll create some walk-throughs of selected conversions, including some Adobe Captivate animations.

I've had about a month to play around with and use the Sony PRS-500 eBook Reader System. The device uses technology called e-ink from E Ink Corporation. The e-ink technology provides nearly the same experience as reading printed paper. I have to say I have been very excited about this technology and couldn't wait to get my hands on the PRS-500. After a month of use, I can honestly say, I still really like the Sony Reader. But, as with most tech, when it comes to implementation, there will always be room for improvement.

Let me start by listing the negatives (of which there are actually quite few). The biggest problem with the Sony Reader is that there is just not enough contrast between the black text and the light gray background of the screen. There is just no substitute for black text on a white background that regular paper gives you. This problem is really only evident when lighting is too low. A good book light can really mitigate this issue when one is not in a well-lit room. Second, in terms of physical usability, it's very annoying for right-handed people that Sony has placed both of the buttons to go forward one page on the left side of the screen. This issue, again, is not a very serious one, since using the device for a short period of time is all that is required to get used to the button placement to the point of it fading from consciousness. Finally, the Reader System's support of PDF eBooks and documents is nearly useless in its actual implementation. The text zoom feature that is available for the native .lrf format eBooks is not available for PDF files. And, for that matter, even text files from the Gutenberg Project require additional processing to work well on the device.

Nevertheless, the benefits and fine features of the device far outweigh these problems. And because there is an active and vibrant community of users, there are several very useful tools and tutorials available to make the most of the Reader System. I'm looking forward to color e-ink displays and to more interactive implementations of color e-ink that would include markup tools similar to Tablet PCs, like those found in the iRex iLiad device, but at a more reasonable price. Look for a post in the near future with all of the tools and resources I have gathered for managing and converting files for use with the Sony Reader.

In an earlier post, I wrote about Microsoft's Surface technology and work done at NYU on multi-touch display technology. Peter Hutterer at the University of South Australia's Wearable Computer Lab has just demoed a new version of his MPX, Multi-Pointer X Server under Linux. There's an article on his blog and a video of his multi-touch extension of MPX under Ubuntu. Here are the hardware details. Now I just need to get my hands on a compatible touch screen and try this out

In preparing for our recent Faculty Symposium on Digital Trends: The Mobile Classroom, I took a video lecture that I had in AVI (Xvid encoded) format and converted it into several formats to play on portable devices to demo in the presentation. Getting the video on my iPod Video and Playstation Portable was straightforward and familiar. But the phone was new and even though I knew it could be done, it took some experimentation and an inexpensive hardware purchase.

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Microsoft recently hit the news circuit with an announcement of a new class of devices that feature touchscreen interfaces that allow for multiple simultaneous touchpoints. The project is called Microsoft Surface. Here's the ZDNet story on it. And here's a nice video of the system.

I have been following the development of multi-touch display technology for a few years. I ran into the technology at SIGGRAPH a few years ago and each year have seen major advances. The project was based at NYU and was recently spun off into a private company called Perceptive Pixel. The NYU software ran on Linux (I seem to remember).

I wonder if they will be able to get their systems to consumers at a reasonable price sooner than Microsoft. Either way, I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on one of these things.