E-reader advice

[Pluisje]

(there are more households in the UK which own two cars than there are households which own two novels)

Am I the only one who finds this shocking, even frightening?

I must be quite the exception then - I have no car and at least 25-30 novels in the house . Maybe I'm just biased, but I find this very hard to believe. But, if it's true, I have to agree with CML - it's about as sadly scary as it gets.

A quick google says books sales were 344 mln (in 2011) and car sales were 1.94 mln. With those numbers I would say it's a scary thought, but it's unlikely to be true. Not far of though..

As for readers, I would go for a dedicated e-reader, but I'm a dinosaur with an MP3-player and no tablet or smartphone.

[Smivs]

...but I'm a dinosaur with an MP3-player and no tablet or smartphone.

<Smivs doesn't even have an mp3 player...>

[Disembodied]

A quick google says books sales were 344 mln (in 2011) and car sales were 1.94 mln. With those numbers I would say it's a scary thought, but it's unlikely to be true. Not far of though..

The statistic was that there are more {households in the UK which own at least two cars} than there are {households in the UK which own at least two novels} ... I own no cars and a good couple of hundred novels, but I still only count as 1 {household which owns at least two novels}. There will of course be many households which own two cars (or more) which also own two or more novels, but that's not the question.

Googling produces the following: there are 26.4 million households in UK (Office for National Statistics, 2012) , and 53% of households (13.99 million) have 2 or more cars (Aviva Family Car Report 2012). The question is, are there more than 13.99 million households in the UK which own fewer than 2 novels? There aren't any good figures to go on. The best I can find is a 2011 survey by the National Literacy Trust that suggests that 3 in 10 UK children own no books:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/ju ... n-no-books

Obviously there could be loads of non-children's books in such a household, although I think it's unlikely. Roughly, that translates into about 5.5 million households with children which probably have no books. Are there another 8.49 million childless households out there - pensioners, single people, couples with no kids at home - which own fewer than 2 novels? It doesn't seem that unlikely.

[Wolfwood]

We have three netbooks, three laptops and a desktop in our house, as well as some older computers in storage. I've tried and used tablets and smart phones to read books.

But I prefer Kindle over all of them. There's no eye-strain and it is light and easy to take with you to read something. And you will not run out of battery life in the midst of a good novel.

For a serious reader, an e-ink ebook reader is a must. If you only read occasionally, or prefer to have a computer in the same package, then go for a tablet or a smart phone with a big screen - but remember that it shines light at your eyes and will strain them more than an e-ink screen will.

Kindle loves the .mobi format, but with Calibre you will have no trouble converting other formats to .mobi even if you get an .epub from somewhere by mistake.

[xzanfr]

Thanks for your comments about the ereaders, CommRLock78 & Wolfwood. I've been getting on very well over the last week with calibre on my old netbook reading for an hour or so each night (finished Coyote and now on to Incursio). The major issue is the battery life on the netbook which has got down to about 1 to 1.5 hours at a push with wifi off- I'm not sure if mint is quite power hungry of if its just down to it being an older battery. Either way I reckon my reading habits warrant an e-reader over a tablet so I've asked my kind benefactors for one for my upcoming birthday

With regards to the car / novel ratio, are the results skewed by the definition of a novel in this particular survey?
We live in a world where statistics can be used to prove either side of an argument so it might be that "a novel" equates to a book from a specific list (e.g. a list of classics) that ignore the very common books - the sales of harry potter and 50 shades of grey seem to suggest the quite a few people own books (for whatever reason )

[Disembodied]

With regards to the car / novel ratio, are the results skewed by the definition of a novel in this particular survey?
We live in a world where statistics can be used to prove either side of an argument so it might be that "a novel" equates to a book from a specific list (e.g. a list of classics) that ignore the very common books - the sales of harry potter and 50 shades of grey seem to suggest the quite a few people own books (for whatever reason )

Not as far as I know ... in the context of the original quoted statistic I think the only classification would be "printed". Most publishers/people in the book trade don't make any sort of distinction between "classics" or "popular" (or "trash", for that matter ): a book is a book is a book, and a sale is a sale is a sale (any sane publisher would be delighted to publish bucketloads of ex-Twilight slashfic porn, if millions of people are going to give them money for it).

There is a group of people who buy a lot of books (my previous estimate was way off: I have somewhere around 500-600 novels, and what must be another 250 non-fiction books), so even though there are a lot of books sold, it's not necessarily an indication that everybody owns books. 30% of children don't own any books, according to the Literacy Trust (and that will be any kind of book: picture book, nursery rhymes, Ladybird book, children's novel etc.), despite the popularity of Harry Potter.

[CommRLock78]

Thanks for your comments about the ereaders, CommRLock78 & Wolfwood. I've been getting on very well over the last week with calibre on my old netbook reading for an hour or so each night (finished Coyote and now on to Incursio). The major issue is the battery life on the netbook which has got down to about 1 to 1.5 hours at a push with wifi off- I'm not sure if mint is quite power hungry of if its just down to it being an older battery. Either way I reckon my reading habits warrant an e-reader over a tablet so I've asked my kind benefactors for one for my upcoming birthday

With regards to the car / novel ratio, are the results skewed by the definition of a novel in this particular survey?
We live in a world where statistics can be used to prove either side of an argument so it might be that "a novel" equates to a book from a specific list (e.g. a list of classics) that ignore the very common books - the sales of harry potter and 50 shades of grey seem to suggest the quite a few people own books (for whatever reason )

I think Mint is probably on par with all the other distros when it comes to power use, but the old battery doesn't help. My notebook is really old and needs a new battery, too - I'm lucky if I can get 2 hours. You're probably best off with the e-reader...

Good point about the results, too. The definition of a novel could definitely affect the results. A quick survey of the bookcases revealed I wasn't far off in my estimation - we have about 40 novels (no Harry Pothead here ) excluding the complete works of William Shakespeare. But that's just a drop in the bucket to the total number of books we have, since I've always found the reference section much more enlightening.

[aegidian]

Personally speaking, I've just recently begun using the Kobo Mini e-reader.

I prefer its form factor to that of the Kindle (which other members of my household use) and I prefer reading on it to reading on a netbook or my iphone. It's small, very light, and allowed me to carry several large novels in a very small space when I was travelling in Switzerland last month.

I look forward to late 2014 when coloured e-ink screens are likely to become available, although convergence on the tablet will still occur, the extreme low energy requirements of e-ink are likely (IMHO) to maintain a market for e-readers.

[Disembodied]

It's possible that e-ink readers might get a boost by being either massively subsidised, or even given away with a subscription, by newspaper and magazine publishers. There's an interesting article, a couple of years old now of course, on the economics of the newspaper business from the London Review of Books:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n24/john-lanchester/let-us-pay

A persuasive looking analysis in the Business Insider put the cost of printing and distributing the New York Times at $644 million, and then added this: ‘a source with knowledge of the real numbers tells us we’re so low in our estimate of the Times’s printing costs that we’re not even in the ballpark.’ Taking the lower figure, that means that New York Times, if it stopped printing a physical edition of the paper, could afford to give every subscriber a free Kindle. Not the bog-standard Kindle, but the one with free global data access. And not just one Kindle, but four Kindles. And not just once, but every year. And that’s using the low estimate for the costs of printing.

[Diziet Sma]

Aye.. but those printing costs keep a lot of people employed. Especially when you look at all the subsidiary industries that contribute to feeding raw materials to the newspapers, and subsequently get them into the hands of the people. Replace all that with a single device, the sales of which benefit just one corporation which employs slave labour in 3rd-world countries to manufacture said device, (and don't even get me started on Foxconn) and a whole lot of people are gonna be hurting, along with the larger economy.

The law of unintended consequences is a bitch.. and the global economy is going further down the toilet all the time.. don't be in too much of a hurry to help it along.

[Disembodied]

Aye.. but those printing costs keep a lot of people employed. Especially when you look at all the subsidiary industries that contribute to feeding raw materials to the newspapers, and subsequently get them into the hands of the people. Replace all that with a single device, the sales of which benefit just one corporation which employs slave labour in 3rd-world countries to manufacture said device, (and don't even get me started on Foxconn) and a whole lot of people are gonna be hurting, along with the larger economy.

The law of unintended consequences is a bitch.. and the global economy is going further down the toilet all the time.. don't be in too much of a hurry to help it along.

Yes, they do - but the print industry, and others, have seen this happen to them already. When I started working with print there was an intermediate stage between artwork (physical or digital) and printing plate: we'd send artwork to a filmsetter, who would put it through a giant DuPont raster image processor and output huge sheets of film. The film would then be used in another giant machine, via a photographic process, to make aluminium plates for offset litho printing. Then along came Adobe and disk-to-plate technology, and now all those filmsetters have all ceased to exist, and their DuPont RIPs are R.I.P., and the factories which made the film, and the chemicals to develop the film, are defunct, and the companies which distributed the film have disappeared or found other things to distribute. And speaking of film, look what happened to Kodak: people came along and invented an entire industry, and all its associated industries, into oblivion, within a few years. These things happen. They're happening at an accelerated rate, too. Industries in the information field are particularly vulnerable, but the ground under everyone's feet is shifting, now.

I'm in no hurry to help it along: as far as I'm concerned, the best way to read text is print-on-paper. But what I like and what's going to happen are very different things. In defence of e-texts, though - particularly for ephemera such as newspapers - the resource and energy usage is vastly lower. Think how monstrously wasteful it is to chop down a tree, mince it up, soak it in chemicals, squash it flat, bleach it, package it, ship it, print on it, cut it, repackage it, ship it again, just so that someone can read that there's Trouble in the Middle East and that Something Causes/Cures Cancer, before they dump it the next day. Even if it's recycled, there's still more bleaching, mincing, squashing, shipping, printing and packaging to be done before we can use it again to find out that there's Trouble in the Middle East and ...

[Diziet Sma]

Also good points. And a number of critical resources are on the verge of becoming much bigger issues than they are currently. The next few years are gonna be "interesting", in that old Chinese curse kind of way..

[Fatleaf]

After reading the last couple of posts I found this short clip.

[Thermonuklear]

Personally speaking, I've just recently begun using the Kobo Mini e-reader.

Have you been happy with your unit? I'm considering to get a Kobo myself. After rummaging through teh interwebz and making comparisons, I'll probably buy the "E-Reader Touch Edition". It's got a bigger screen, but otherwise it's basically the same product.

[Disembodied]

If you wait a bit you can get this one: