I have noticed that a lot of online ebook stores have the nerve to try and charge as much as $10 each for ebook versions of books that are out of copyright, and thus to be found legally free on many honest on-line ebooks sites, so if you simply go to a site such as one or other of the two Gutenbergs you can download them perfectly legally for nothing at all – which is how it should be.

Different countries, different copyright laws:

As the majority of online ebook sites are based in the USA just now, obviously American copyright laws pertain to them, which I believe have copyright for about 70 years after the death of the author, but there are plenty of sites on line that are registered in other countries, who have much more sensible copyright laws.  In Australia for example it is 50 years, so basically anything written up to 1963 is now out of copyright in Australia and can legally be given away on sites such as Gutenberg Australia.

So it is well worth checking on the original date of publication before parting with good money for an ebook….   if it was written 50 or more years ago you can probably find it for free somewhere on the net, and the only laws you might possibly be breaking might be your own countries laws if you are unfortunate enough to live in the USA that is.

What is the point of long copyright periods?

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This has to be the most depressing video ever for any true book lover.

An intriguing and gripping short film

Rich Adin of An American Editor (a site always worth a visit by the way) drew my attention to this shortish film some weeks ago, and I have been contemplating it ever since I sat down and watched it all the way through – it lasts for some 20 minutes.

It is an allegorical story about a kid discovering the joys of reading in a terrible dystopian future world in which books have become effectively illegal.   This isn’t a rerun of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451″, but it does deal with some of the same ideas as that highly depressing book did.

I shan’t say much more about this film, but leave it to you to discover for yourself what it is trying to say to us.    I shall merely say that the pace of the film somehow matches up exactly to the feeling one has when reading a gripping and well written book, be it a paper one or an electronic one.

Share with us:

Now that you have seen this film, let us share any thoughts it may have brought to your mind – I can’t imagine it left you totally cold in any event.

I can imagine that many of you who are contemplating leaping into the world of ebooks are very confused by all the arguments and counter arguments out there as to the comparative virtues of ereaders or Tablets for reading ebooks with, and might appreciate a sort of comparison between the two gadgets for this specific purpose.  So I shall do my best here to give an unbiased look at the two systems.

The first thing you have to do though is to decide exactly what it is you wish to do with such a device.  As with any other tool, before deciding on which to buy you need to know what it is you want it for.

So to get us started, I shall give a quick rundown of what each type of device is good for:-

With a Tablet you can do the following, when you use it as an ereader.

• Read magazines which use a lot of colour.
• Read interactive ebooks.
• Read ebooks that use videos and sound.
• Read ebooks that have a lot of complex illustrations. Comics for example.
• Read Coffee Table ebooks.
• Read novels.
• Make notes and highlight parts of the text.
• Change the type and size of the letters on the page

With a dedicated ereader you may do the following.

• Read novels.
• Make notes and highlight the text.
• Change the type and size of the letters on the page.

You would be forgiven if you took from the above lists the inescapable conclusion that a Tablet is absolutely the better of the two types of device, but there is actually more to it when you really look at the two types of gadget.   As always there are other things to consider before making a decision.

I have listed the main benefits of a Tablet as an ereader, and happily ignored all their other abilities, since in reality a Tablet is actually nothing less than a highly portable computer, and is obviously capable of doing almost everything that you would normally do with a regular computer, and this of course is one of their main strengths.  As opposed to the humble – and much cheaper – dedicated ereader, which can really only be used to read novels and text based ebooks with, and not much more.  But it does do that relatively simple task perfectly.

An ereader is a device that is designed to do one thing only, and to do that one thing as well as the technology allows, whereas a tablet is a sort of universal tool, capable of doing many things very well, but perhaps slightly less well than a dedicated device can.

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Within hours of the terrible bombing of the Boston marathon, a quick thinking fellow brought out an ebook which basically consisted of photos (the gorier the better) of the catastrophe which he bunged together into a Kindle ebook and placed on Amazon for the princely sum of $7.99.

The 60 or so photos in this ebook he had garnered from the internet (Good old Google Images) and put together in what I gather was an extremely badly made ebook called reasonably enough “Boston Bombing (First Photos)“.

Carefully avoiding any copyright infringement myself, I have used a photo taken in 1906 of San Francisco burning

Obviously he had neglected to sort out the copyright of any of these images, the majority of which belonged to members of the National Press Photographers Association, (NPPA) who not unreasonably objected strenuously to this misuse of their images, both for financial reasons – copyright – and rather less convincingly on the grounds that it showed appalling bad taste to exploit other people’s suffering and pain in this manner.    Surely this last is exactly what Press Photographers do as well?   They make their living taking and selling photos of people in horrible situations too after all.   Which is why those photos were in Google in the first place.

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I have been forced to contemplated the demise or at least the stagnation of dedicated ereaders (devices such as the Kobo, Kindle, Nook and similar) as more and more people move over to reading ebooks on Smart Phones and Tablets.

When the iPad first hit the market, and everyone was gleefully shouting that the iPad would “kill” the simple one function ereader, I said that I did not believe this would happen, as the real ereader offered a much better reading environment than any brightly coloured Tablet possibly could.   I was wrong.

With the advent of ebook reading apps that make every tablet or Smart Phone into a fully fledged ereader, and in one stroke remove the dreadful limitation that most ereaders suffer from – only being able to read ebooks in a particular format the writing (no pun intended) was on the wall for the ereader, the end was in sight.

Whilst each year the various makers of ereaders solemnly produce their latest all singing, all dancing ereader models, in fact the changes we now see are actually very small, and to a large degree are  nothing much more than simple tweaks of the various basic ereader functions.  Higher contrast, higher resolution, more font sizes, better front lighting and so on.  All very good, but scarcely revolutionary.  And none of these factors can be made much better than they now are.   I mean to say, how high is it sensible to push the resolution?   Shall we see 444555 x 33124?   why on earth would that be an advantage?  Personally I think the latest Kobo (Aura HD) has probably reached the final development of the basic ereader.

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In a recent post on The Ebook Reader the author pondered on the mess that we now have with ebook formats.  As he so correctly points out, what used to be effectively the universal format for ebooks (ePub) has been so mucked about and modified by all manner of ebook sellers and ereader makers that it is now be almost hopeless.

We have versions of ePub that will only work on a Nook, or on an Apple device and so on,  we also have Amazon’s own private format (Mobi) that only works on Kindles, and of course, no ePub ebook will work on a Kindle.

Added to which there are a whole load of different DRM (Copyright protection software) systems out there, which makes it even harder to sort out which ereader and which ebook you can best use.   Altogether a mess.

However, the cries of “all ebooks should be in ePub format” isn’t really the answer.  ePub seems to work reasonably well for text based ebooks, but apparently is not much use when you start using graphics, videos and sounds to your ebooks, as many now do.

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