Reading the electronic way

I went to the doctor’s surgery this morning, not for anything serious, just to have my ears cleaned ready to be fitted with new hearing aids on Thursday. I got there in plenty of time in case, as sometimes happens, the nurse was available before the nominal appointment time. I wondered whether I should take a book to read but in the end didn’t bother as I didn’t expect to have to wait long. Sitting in one of the nice roomy chairs they have there for the elderly among us, I had leisure to look around the waiting room and observe how people passed the time. There were the usual boring everything-you-never-needed-to-know bulletins published by the Council and the NHS and a few well thumbed general interest magazines.

Some people had brought their own books or newspapers and near me, a young woman was reading from an electronic book reader. I don’t know what model it was but it was small and neat and fitted with a protective folding cover. The screen, as far as I could see, was pleasant and clear.

I have already written about my experiences with electronic book reading (see How do you read ebooks?, Another way to read ebooks, Keep reading the tablet and DRM: legitimate protection or restrictive practice?) and the subject continues to fascinate me. As the young woman in the waiting room demonstrated, a good electronic book reader (or ereader, for short) enables you to carry a whole library of books with you in a device that is lighter and thinner than the average printed book.

I have often thought of buying an ereader but thought is as far as I have got. I have two principal objections to dedicated ereaders: firstly, the minor one that they help proliferate the number of devices the modern citizen feels obliged to carry everywhere and secondly, the fact that every ereader I have come across ties you to a specific book supplier, something I regard as restrictive practice of most exploitative kind. For that reason alone, I steer clear of them. You might say I am a conscientious objector where ereaders are concerned.

I did recently read that an a firm in, I think, Japan is producing an ereader that will not be tied to any supplier and will therefore read any books that you care to give it, though I have no information as to when it is expected to appear on sale. I think that if and when it does, it will cause something of a revolution in the ebook market. Why would you need to ransom your soul to Amazon’s mono-format Kindle when you can get your books from any source and in any format you like?

A small – very small – dent has been made in the hitherto rock solid DRM-locked book market by the Kobo-W.H. Smith’s alliance. They claim to sell you books that are not DRM protected and that you can therefore read them on any device. However, as far as I can see, the Kobo reader itself is locked to the Kobo site and allows to read only books downloaded from there, even though some of them are free (most of them acquired from Gutenberg).

So, if you don’t buy an ereader, how do you read ebooks? One way is to buy an iPad and read them on that. The iPad and its ereader capability arguably started off the whole race. If you can’t stretch to an iPad (or have moral objections to joining the Apple cult), you can read ebooks on most Android tablets, including those at the cheaper end of the price range, around £70.

What software do you need? If you had asked that question several months ago, I would have been able to name only a couple of applications but the market has opened up since then and more are appearing all the time. When we bought our Archos 7 Home tablets, we were completely new to tablets and correspondingly naive. With regard to reading, we were lucky though we didn’t know it.

We were lucky because the Archos came with Aldiko ready installed and this, it turns out, is about the best ereader you can get for Android tablets. It’s also the only one that is claimed to be able to read Adobe Digital Editions DRM-protected books but when I tried to do this, I couldn’t get it to work. I don’t know whether the fault is in Aldiko or in me.

I must admit that I have read only free books on the Archos. My one attempt to read a DRM-protected book (downloaded from a public library) failed, as mentioned above. There are now thousands, or perhaps over a million, free books available online and numbers are increasing all the time. These days, most are produced using electronic scanners and the results are therefore extremely variable in quality from good (but never perfect) to awful. Faults concern not only mis-spellings but also broken formatting. You find footnotes in the middle of the page, pages ending in the middle of a line, foreign characters reproducing incorrectly, etc etc. An ereader application therefore has to be able to deal with this, like a boat sailing over a rough sea. It cannot be expected to re-establish the broken formatting or correcting mis-spellings but it must at least take a credible shot at producing a legible text.

Aldiko does pretty well on the whole. Though it is tied to a particular supplier, I ignore that and it happily reads any books in epub or pdf format that I give it.

Being curious – and at first thinking the faults in formatting were Aldiko’s fault when they are to be blamed on the book file itself – I searched around for other possibilities. What I found was that at least some of the vendors of standalone ereaders also supply Android ereader applications and, what is more, provide them free of charge. This is obviously intended as a come-on to get you hooked on their site. I won’t bother to list them as it’s easy enough to find them online and I will just talk about the one I tried – Kobo.

An annoyance associated with Android applications is that you nearly always have to obtain them through the Android Apps market. So what? Well, the problem with that is that most of the cheaper tablets (including the Archos 7) cannot access the real Android market, only a rather stunted lookalike provided by the manufacturer. When I downloaded Kobo from the Archos equivalent, it installed and worked correctly in every way but one: it would not let me read a book! There is something wrong with the Archos version of Kobo or something missing in the Archos OS that prevents the Kobo reader from working.

The “Kobo experience” was therefore something of a damp squib but it did teach me that the ereader attaches only to Kobo’s site and that it will not read books you supply yourself. All the free books available from Kobo are also available from other sources, such as Gutenberg and Many Books, so you don’t need Kobo to access them. Maybe if you buy books from Kobo, it’s a different story but as it’s not my story, I cannot comment on that aspect.

I tried downloading a free and uncommitted ereader called FBreader. The name suggests that it is tied to FeedBooks but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It is quite a good ereader and if I had not already experienced Aldiko, which is better in a number of ways, I might well have adopted it. Even so I have kept it on the machine.

I then came across another name, a good one if you are a fan of Jonathan Swift and slightly unfortunate if you are Hispanophone: LaPuta. (What does it mean in Spanish? Look it up…) I installed it and tried it and then uninstalled it. Why? Well, because its functions are not at all obvious and easy to access and I quickly came to the mistaken conclusion that it would not read books uploaded locally, only books downloaded from one of the linked book suppliers.

However, on reading a description of LaPuta on a Web site I realized my mistake and re-installed it. Yes, you can upload your own books and it will read them quite happily. The way it functions is a little quirky and takes some getting used to at first. Whenever you open it, it pops up a help screen telling you how to access the most frequently used functions. When you are fully conversant with these, you can stop the screen popping up. Again, had I not experienced Aldiko, I may well have adopted LaPuta because the appearance is quite pleasant and when it opens, it puts you, as does Aldiko, in front of your book shelf whereas FBreader immediately loads the last book you were reading, rather a nuisance if you have decided to read something else.

There are a few other ereader applications but I have not tried them. I think my curiosity is for the moment satisfied. Aldiko is not perfect but it is pretty good. Its settings are easy to understand and use. The test of a good ereader, I think, is whether you forget it while reading and become aware just of the book. That describes my use of Aldiko.

Android tablets are developing fast. If you bought one last week it will already be looking out of date today. They are becoming faster, more capable and more richly specified. Dedicated ereaders are also proliferating with new generations succeeding one another at a dizzying rate. Book reader applications are coming along more slowly but I think the pace will pick up there too. If I write an analogous post to this one next year, I think it will tell a very different story.

Finally, a note on Android. This was developed as an operating system (OS) for smart phones and because smart phones, even today, are pretty simple machines compared with, say, a laptop computer, Android was adequate. When other manufacturers wanted to emulate the iPad’s success and were barred from using its proprietary OS, they had to look for an alternative. Windows isn’t suitable for the job, though there are a few Windows tablets on the market, and, short of inventing an entirely new OS, manufacturers saw Android as the obvious solution.

Unfortunately, Android is not up to the job. In my opinion it is a weak and under-specified OS, and applications for it are likewise weak and underspecified because they are limited in functionality by the OS. As a result, the “tablet PC” is not a “PC” at all but a strange hybrid beast in a category of its own somewhere between a notebook PC and an oversized smart phone. It will require many upgrades to Android (and a vast improvement in battery life) before the tablet comes into its own as anything other than a rather expensive toy.

What the Android tablet does have in its favour is that, unlike the dedicated ereader but like the computer, it is – or could become – a general purpose machine, allowing us to carry only one device where several are needed at present.

Copyright © 2011 SilverTiger, http://tigergrowl.wordpress.com, All rights reserved.