The reason I gave in and bought a third-generation Kindle was simple: price. With the wifi + 3G version now only $189, it finally falls into that price bracket of 'worth a try'. If I decide in the end that it's not working out, I won't have blown too much money — assuming that I haven't invested a great deal in books (but more of that later).

The improvements with the third-generation Kindle (or Kindle 3 as it's inevitably, but unofficially being called) don't end with the price drop. Amazon has reduced the size and weight and adopted the latest screen technology — the Pearl e-ink display.

And then there's the small matter of not having any other e-reader. At WebVivant Press we're publishing e-books, but my only experience so far of reading them has been on the laptop. That's just not right. I wanted to find out what the e-reader experience is like.

I could have bought a Nook, or a Sony e-reader. But, frankly, of the dedicated e-readers on the market, the Kindle strikes me as the only long-term prospect. Besides which, we publish on the Kindle through Amazon DTP, so it seemed like the right move.

The other option was the Apple iPad, but there were two very good reasons for not going that route: 1) it starts at 499 euros; and 2) it's still version 1 and I never buy v.1 of anything, especially when it's from Apple (and I'm a fan of their products).

First impressions

I opened the box (entirely made of recyclable card, BTW), lifted out the Kindle, peeled off a couple of transparent plastic protective sheets and was about to peel off a sticker covering the whole screen when I realised there was no sticker. What appeared to be a printed sheet was, in fact, the display itself. That's a good first impression.

E-ink displays are the opposite of laptop screens — the brighter the ambient light the easier they are to read. Sitting in the garden on a dazzling sunny August day, the Kindle's screen was a joy to use — very easy on the eyes. As light levels drop, that's when you start squinting. Now, you could say the same is true for those archaic, last-century reading devices … what are they called? … oh yes, books. And that's true except that, even with the latest Pearl screen, the Kindle still doesn't achieve the contrast (and therefore readability) of the printed page. It's not far off, mind, but there's enough of a difference that, as the sunlight fades, you'll be hunting for the light switch sooner with a Kindle than you would with a book.

The Kindle comes with a pre-loaded manual, but I've been a tech journalist for nearly 30 years and I'm damned if I'm going to start reading manuals now. Fortunately, navigation is reasonably intuitive. I showed the Kindle to a bunch of friends at a writer's group meeting. None of the group members is what you'd call in the first flush of youth, and among the people I know these are the least likely to be impressed by a gimmick or 'cool' bit of technology. But all were, in fact, impressed. One person (who, admittedly, is at least reasonably tech-savvy and certainly far above average intelligence) was quickly moving between books, checking out the text-to-speech feature and generally finding her way around with no prompting from me.

Connectivity

Where the Kindle scores above many other e-readers is the tight integration with Amazon. That sounds obvious, but an important part of the Kindle experience is not having to switch to a computer to find and download books. Immediate access to the Amazon store from the Kindle itself makes it a competely stand-alone product.

For example, during lunch, the subject of conversation alighted on Jack London and I had to admit I'd never read White Fang. A few moments later I had a free copy of the book on the Kindle (even with a slow Edge connection — no 3G around here). One of our group, a 70 year-old with, as far as I know, no special love of technological toys, was soon buried in the book, having adjusted the font size to compensate for not having his reading glasses with him. He said he found he was changing pages without any conscious action, just as one might flip the pages of a printed book.

Indeed, what I've found with the Kindle is that one can easily ignore it. When I read an e-book on the screen of my laptop, I'm always aware of the machine somehow. I have to try to see through it. It's an effort. With the Kindle, just as with a book, I soon lose any awareness of the physical object and am quickly inside the world of the story. I think the e-ink technology has a lot to do with this — its easiness on the eye erases the barrier between you and the text.

The Kindle also copes well with my pathological compulsion to make notes. Highlighting sections of text is easy, and you can add your own notes. Or you can simply mark a page with a bookmark. You don’t need to do this to remember where you are — the Kindle automatically keeps your place, even as you flip back and forth between books. And there’s an option to synchronise your place between the Kindle and the Kindle apps on your computer, smartphone or iPad.

When reading magazines or newspapers, there's an option to 'clip' the article you're reading. This adds the text of the article to a file (just one file for all your clippings) which you can download on to a computer. No doubt this will prove a huge boon for students who need to plagiarise when writing papers.
The search facilities are not bad, too. The search results pages show chunks of text with your keywords highlighted, so it's easy to see the context and know which results are relevant.

Other features

The Amazon store access is provided by dedicated software. But you can also browse the web on this machine. The web browser is surprisingly good, though slow. It wouldn't be my first choice of platform for mobile web use, but it'll do in a pinch.

Amazon still classifies the browser as one of the Kindle's 'experimental' features. Another is the text-to-speech feature, which is mostly ghastly. The voice pauses in all the wrong places. It's like being read to by Stephen Hawkins' idiot brother. I can't think of a single use for it. If you're sight-impaired, go for real audiobooks instead. It's bad enough being blind without having to put up with this.

As someone who doesn't text (in fact, I don't even have a mobile phone anymore), using the keyboard with its tiny buttons is a challenge. Given that you can increase the size of the display font, I was going to recommend the Kindle to a friend with eyesight issues. But this barely visible keyboard ruled that out.

I've invested quite a lot of time working out how to hold the damn thing. The new Kindle is lighter and smaller than its predecessors. In fact, as far as weight goes, it's not dissimilar to a lot of paperback books. It's just that I've found it tricky to hold comfortably without hitting the back/forth paging buttons or the keyboard. I'm starting to think that a leather case would actually make it easier and more comfortable to hold.

Mixed blessings

So far, finding books for the Kindle has been slightly frustrating. Bestselling novels are generally not hard to find. But my tastes tend to run a little more eclectic, and so far I've found that only about one in three is available in Kindle format.

And in spite of Amazon's much publicised battles with publishers to get them to bring down prices, some Kindle editions can run rather more expensive than I'd like.

Against that is the availability of so many classic texts as free editions. These editions have largely been created by enthusiasts and volunteers (like Project Gutenberg) so the quality is variable. You get rogue carriage returns. There are rarely clickable tables of contents. But it's surprising how little any of that matters when the price is so right. Within minutes of starting to use the Kindle I had works by Austen, Dickens, Kipling, Swift, Chekhov, Wharton and Dostoyevsky, plus On the Origin of Species.

And in spite of my complaint above, there are inexpensive editions. I spent something like $3.75 for a good version of the King James Version of the Bible, with clickable contents and navigation links. (As an atheist, I've filed this under 'classic fiction'.)

A few reservations

The Kindle is not perfect. In fact, I still have a few reservations about the entire concept. I'm very conscious of the fact that any books I buy will be available to me only so long as I have a Kindle reading device. Now, that could include, say, an iPad with the Kindle app. Indeed, around 20% of the people buying and reading Kindle editions are doing so on something other than a Kindle. But all the same, the relative lock-in to the Kindle ecosystem does give me pause. I will probably limit my Kindle purchases to free books, and those I am likely to read only once or twice.

It also annoys the crap out of me that I can't load our ePub e-books on to this machine. (I tried, just in case Amazon had made the Kindle ePub compatible without telling anyone. They hadn't.)

You can get books on to the Kindle other than by buying them from the store. You can plug the Kindle into your computer, which will view it as an external disk drive. You then just copy readable files (plain text and PDF, for example) to the device.

Amazon also gives you a special email account: <YourUserName>@kindle.com. You can email various types of file (eg, Word documents) to this email address at which point Amazon converts the file to Kindle format and downloads it to your device. There's a small charge for this — $0.15/MB — presumably to cover the wireless costs. Alternatively, you can email the file to <YourUserName>@free.kindle.com. Amazon then converts the file and makes it available for you to download, via the web browser on your computer. You can then copy it across to the Kindle.

The future

In spite of the browser and a few other gimmicks, the Kindle is still a one-trick pony. But it does that trick — being an e-book reader — superbly well. It offers an excellent reading experience.

We all know that the predominant trend in technology is convergence. The Apple iPad scores so much better in this regard. It's a multi-purpose machine. It's capable of far more than reading books, and it’s larger size and colour screen make it superior for magazines. As an e-book reader it’s let down by being an LCD screen, which is immeasurably less crisp that e-ink and far more tiring on the eyes. When display technology improves, the Kindle's one advantage — ease of reading text — will diminish, perhaps even vanish. But I think we're still a few years from that point. And who knows? Maybe Amazon will expand the capabilities of future versions of the Kindle, making it more into a fully-fledged tablet device.

For the time being, though, for long-form reading, nothing beats the Kindle. And in the end, that's why I decided to buy one. The Kindle concept, as currently conceived, has no future. But that's fine, because I'm using it to read books now, and enjoying the experience immensely.

• The Kindle is available at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. 

There it was, sitting on my desk doing nothing. Our old Mac Mini was definitely surplus to requirements. With a PowerPC (PPC) CPU, it was never going to make the leap from Tiger to Leopard (let alone Snow Leopard). But I hate to see hardware going to waste.

At the same time, I wanted a replacement for our server. It doesn't do a lot of work - running our intranet and backing up our websites, mainly, plus a light bit of fileserving. But it consumes a lot of electricity. It was running on an old Dell desktop - and I mean old. So old, in fact, that it doesn't even have an Intel CPU - just a handful of transistors loosely soldered together, as far as I can recall. And a damn great power supply unit with an enormous and noisy fan.

I wanted a lower-power machine, something that doesn't run its fan unnecessarily, and preferably small, say the size of a ... ah, yes ... a Mac Mini.

I knew that a version of Ubuntu was available for the PPC, but had also heard that it is no longer properly supported, which is why I hadn't got around to doing this before. Then I searched some more and found that Debian - the underlying distro for many fine flavours of Linux, including Ubuntu - still supports the PPC.

"Ah well," I thought, "I've got a weekend coming up. What better way of spending my time than in the depths of frustration trying to install an operating system on a machine that clearly doesn't want it?"

How wrong I was.

You can obtain Debian in many ways, including old-fashioned, real-world, stand-your-coffee-on-them CDs and DVDs. But this is the age of downloading.

I could have downloaded a minimal file set which would then pull down the rest of the necessary files over the Net. But our broadband really isn't that broad (1Mb/s) and I figured this would involve sitting in front of the screen far too much, waiting for the files to arrive.

I could have downloaded gigabytes of files to burn a nicely stuffed DVD - but did I mention our broadband speed?

And so I chose the middle path - downloading 700MB-ish of files to cram onto a CD. This would happen fast enough that I could leave the download running while we had a leisurely lunch, and it would be waiting for me that afternoon. The CD image contains all the essential files to get a working installation up and running. Anything else, you get over the Net.

I downloaded, I burned, I waved a fond farewell to Tiger and rebooted with the CD still in place. Yes, I told the installer, I'm perfectly happy to erase everything currently on the HDD. I probably answered a few other questions, to do with where I live and what language I speak - stuff like that. But there wasn't a lot of do. Having installed Linux of several kinds in the past, Debian seemed curiously disinterested in talking to me.

And then suddenly the CD popped out and I was told to reboot. "No," I thought. "It's too soon. I'm not ready." But I rebooted anyway - what else was I going to do?

And there it was. Debian 5.0.5 running on the Mac Mini. No fuss. No bother.

This all happened on the Friday. Now I was going to have to find something else to do with the weekend.

Well, okay, it wasn't quite over. I have one of those lovely Apple keyboards, the type with the light touch. And while the keyboard believes that a certain key should produce an ampersand, Debian is under the illusion that it's really destined to be a double quote mark. There were a few other swapped keys, too.

No matter. Debian had thoughtfully installed Gnome for me. I don't like it much - I prefer KDE. Not that it really matters: this machine is destined to spend most of the rest of its life without a monitor, with me SSHing in from my MacBook Pro. Fixing the keyboard issue within Gnome was simplicity itself. System -> Keyboard brought up the required dialogue box. I selected the Layouts tab, chose 'Generic 105-key (Intl) PC' from the Keyboard Model list, then added a layout selecting 'USA 'and 'Macintosh' as my options. All done.

I understand that there is a way of setting the keyboard layout from within a console, too. Type:

dpkg-reconfigure -p low console-data

A program will pop up letting you select the settings you need. Apparently, 'pc / qwerty / US / Apple USB / Standard' works quite well (change the location to suit). 

There were a few other jobs, too. Debian installed Postgres as the default database server, but I wanted MySQL. Apache was already installed and running, but I also needed to ensure PHP5 support. And there were a few other odds and ends (Privoxy, Tor and so on). There is a GUI tool for adding new software, but frankly, I found it easier to open a terminal window and use Apt-Get Install <application>. It really couldn't have been easier.

Tablet fever isn't going away, even though Apple has finally launched its iPad and the rumour-mongering can end. Indeed, there are new rumours of further Apple devices, in varying sizes (including larger) and with capabilities more like a laptop. And Google has shown off proof-of-concept images and video of its own device - or, at least, of the Chrome OS running on a tablet.

The latter is, perhaps, more intriguing. It's hardly a surprise that Apple is planning to launch more tablet models. For a start, it needs to address some of the shortcomings in the current iPad, such as lack of multitasking. And the response to the 'overgrown iPhone' clearly shows that there is a market desire (if not a demand) for a more capable, laptop-like device running a fuller version of OS X, rather than the iPhone OS (even if version 4 with multitasking might be ready soon).

Google's possible entry into this market might be a tad more significant, especially for those of us interested in e-books. The images, shown on the Chromium blog (Chromium being the project name for the Google Chrome OS and browser), simply show what the company's forthcoming OS might look like on a tablet. It's not a preview of an actual device. But it might be read as an expression of intent. 

In Google's Chrome OS, the browser is the OS. Everything happens in the browser. Google is already making use of the features of HTML5 (which won't be finalised for some years) to create hybrid applications that blur the distinction between programs that run on your computer and those on the web. The online element is a key part of the experience and the functionality of the platform.

This is interesting in the light of the iPad. Tablet computers have been with us for years. But the majority took some flavour of Microsoft Windows and tried to squeeze this PC environment into a device clearly not suited to it. With the iPad, Appple has come from the opposite direction. Instead of attempting to put a PC on a tablet and then saying "see what you can do with this", it has asked "what do people want to do with a tablet?" and has provided those capabilities in a pleasurable and simple package.

No doubt, future iterations of the iPad will involve some degree of mission creep. But it's perfectly obvious that Apple is focusing on the experience that it believes people want.

An important part of that experience is reading books. And the iBooks app does for reading what iTunes did for music: it provides a single, integrated environment for browsing, sampling, buying, managing and using. And it does this by seamlessly integrating both the online and offline elements.

Enter Google. Its Chrome OS environment is ideal for creating these kinds of hybrid applications. Indeed, that's the entire basis of the operating system. One can easily imagine an application that provides both an e-book reader and a web browsing capability. And then you can add to this mix Google Books and the company's ongoing settlement with book rights holders. Now you have both the technology and the products for a major e-book platform.

Watch this space.

(«  View Part 1 «)

A better ePub

Given that Smashwords will create an ePub file for us, from the Word document, why do we prefer to do this from InDesign?

The answer lies in how we create the file in InDesign. Rather than have one big file for the whole publication, we use InDesign's 'Book' feature. With this, you have a separate file for each chapter (plus, we use separate files for the title page, copyright page, etc), all managed from the book document.

When you output the ePub file, InDesign builds it in such a way that there are links created to each section. This is best explained in images. Here's the Lady Caine ePub e-book created via Smashwords, viewed in Adobe Digital Editions. Note the section on the left.

Now here's the ePub version we created via InDesign.

Note how the left-hand section has links to the separate chapters. It's like an automatic contents page.

Formatting with Word

We need to deal with some formatting issues you might encounter with your Word document. Like the web, e-books present a challenge for designers who are used to controlling every aspect of the look and feel of a document.

E-readers are designed to give a great deal of control to the reader - how large the type is, and so on. But even if you keep formatting to a minimum, you may be in for some surprises when using a service like Smashwords, or Amazon DTP, or even when creating your own files with InDesign.

For a start, blank lines are stripped out. Gone. If you were using blank lines to separate sections of text, think again.

Our Word and InDesign templates are designed so that the text we flow into them has no blank lines at all. To provide space between text, we use paragraph styles. For example, in the following snippet from Lady Caine, the space between the chapter heading and the following text is achieved by creating a ChapterHead paragraph style with a 'space after' setting of 36pt.

Similarly, to separate sections of text, we created a TextBreak paragraph style, applied to a line of three asterisks, with 'space before' and 'space after' settings of 30pt.

That's why our Word and InDesign templates have a lot of paragraph styles.

If you try applying text centering, right-align or character attributes like bold and italics, you may find these don't work in the e-book file unless you define them as part of the paragraph or character style.

For example, let's say you have a 'BodyText' paragraph style which is normally ranged-left, roman font. If you just click the 'align right' button on Word's toolbar, it'll align right in Word, but will still be aligned left in the e-book. What you need to do is create a new paragraph style called, say, 'BodyTextRight' and apply that.

Similarly, if you highlight a word and click the button to make it bold, it won't be bold in the e-book. Instead, you'll need to create a character style in which bold is selected and apply that.

The Smashwords Style Guide advises against creating multiple paragraph styles, but we've simply ignored this and it's worked fine for us. That said, the simpler you can make your book, the easier a time you'll have during production.

OpenOffice issues

Finally, a warning: not all Word files are equal. When we started using Smashwords, we were outputting Word (.doc) files from OpenOffice, our preferred WP. This largely seemed to work except for some irritating faults. In spite of all those carefully created paragraph formats, text that we'd centered or right-aligned in the Word file were still left-aligned in the ePub document created by Smashwords. And there were other, smaller glitches.

Now, Microsoft is very secretive about the details of the .doc format, and so OpenOffice has had to reverse engineer it. It occured to me that maybe they hadn't got it quite right.

And so it seems.

The same file, loaded into Word and resaved, now works as expected. You may find similar issues with other word processing packages that claim to output Word files.

Resources:

• Smashwords Style Guide
• Amazon DTP formatting guides
• Lulu eBook FAQ

(«  View Part 1 «)

E-books show all the signs of conforming to Cringeley's Law. Formulated by pundit Robert X Cringeley, this states that the initial uptake of new technologies is often surprisingly slow - much slower than we have any reason to expect - yet the long-term impact can be immense.

I think we may be at a transitional stage. The Kindle has been with us for a while now and has largely been little more than an object of curiousity or even contempt. Until, that is, this Xmas. As far as we can tell (Amazon keeps its sales figures to itself), it sold in large numbers over the gift-giving season. That resulted in Amazon selling more e-books than print books on Christmas Day.

Now we have the Nook and countless other e-readers. Apple's tablet computer, possibly dubbed the iSlate, is expected to be announced on 27 January, and Apple is in talks with HarperCollins, presumably to sell books for the device. These may well prove to be 'augmented' books, with additional content, much as DVDs now come with extras. And there are rumours that Apple is also doing deals with newspapers, including the New York Times.

The technology is advancing, too. Electronics firm LG has shown off a 19in flexible electronic ink screen. And Skiff has used a smaller, 11.5in version of this on its new reader. Such devices may answer the question "what's the future for newspapers and magazines".

Everywhere you look, publishers and content owners are cutting deals for electronically delivered content.

We're in a process that is so common that one analyst company has even given it a name. Gartner calls it the Hype Cycle. I think Gartner's model is a little too rigid (it has to be because that's the only way the company can 'own' the phrase and use it to promote itself). But this is my interpretation of it (the names given to the phases are Gartner's):

1. Technology Trigger: the new technology appears and generates lots of interest, even if people don't necessarily understand how to use it or why they'd want to.
2. Peak of Inflated Expectations: early adopters wet their pants and talk about how this is the future. There are, perhaps, a few high-profile successes, but most people look on bemused. Many pundits will pontificate about how "it will never catch on" or "that's not the way people like to read/watch TV/listen to music/etc".
3. Trough of Disillusionment: the technology fails to live up to the initial excitement. It doesn't catch on, often because the technology itself wasn't quite ready (think about the first mobile phones with short battery lives, lousy sound quality, poor geographical coverage, etc). The pundits proclaim they were right all along. Most people forget the technology exists or consign it to the hell of 'only for geeks'.
4. Slope of Enlightenment: while most of us have given up, the more forward-looking among us continue to explore the technology. In e-publishing, this might equate to those publishers building business models and distribution methods around e-books. Those who maintain the faith get to understand the technology and how best to use it.
5. Plateau of Productivity: suddenly, everyone wakes up to the fact that the technology has benefits after all. Gartner's model is geared to business technologies - hence the emphasis on 'productivity'. In a wider context, you might call this the 'plateau of acceptance', or 'plateau of ubiquity', or something equally pompous. This is where ordinary people - not just geeks and the trendy - see the value of the technology. In most cases, the technology itself will have advanced. Shortly after the technology arrives on the plateau, it's everywhere and people can't remember how they got along without it.

We're definitely in stage 4 and maybe about to hit that final plateau. The people who succeed in e-publishing will be those who held faith and got on with the task of making it work, technically and from a business perspective.

Excuses for not embracing e-publishing - such as "people like to read real books" or "you can't use an e-reader in the bath" - will sound increasingly hollow and silly (much like saying, "but all my music collection is on 78s").

It's also partly a generational thing, of course. This may be the last generation to have such a strong relationship with paper. In fact, that generation is already in decline, as today's kids develop stronger relationships with their phones, their computers and - perhaps - their tablet devices. It's possible that it won't be long before books seem quaint. "Where are the web links?" kids may ask, or "How do I search the text?".

What does this mean for writers who self-publish? Well, my approach is this - develop your book for the screen, not the page.

Most writers (and publishers, for that matter) still view the printed book as the end product of their work. If they're smart, somewhere along the line they also start thinking about an e-book edition. If they're not so smart, then once work has been completed on the print version, they'll have a moment of panic and somehow crank out an e-book version.

Today, I think that's the wrong way around. Start with the e-book. Why? Because that makes you think about what additional content or features you might be able to provide. At the very least, with an e-book there's an opportunity to embed web links in the text. There are also some limitations with design when producing e-books (I'll deal with this in a forthcoming post). If you don't allow for this, producing an e-book edition of your print book may be unnecessarily difficult. The InDesign template I've created for our books, at WebVivant Press, is geared to e-books, but works just as well for print.

I think we're now nearing the stage where the e-book will be the default format, with perhaps print versions available as an alternative for those who want them (with such sales fulfilled using POD technology). Rather than lamenting the decline of the book, why not celebrate the coming of age of a new and exciting form of sharing knowledge and enlightenment?