#1430 – Peep
Posted on December 12, 2011 at 12:00 am by Chris
Chapter: Comics
Know someone that likes jokes and ridiculous facial hair? Get them some Books of Biff!
I remember reading an article about e-ink back around 1995 and was super excited to see it. I was reading this article in a magazine while riding the subway to work and imagined what it would be like if I just had a single thin e-ink device that I could read with. I would click a button to turn the pages and it would hold thousands of pages at once. I would lose my mind if I got off that train and a time traveler showed me one of the devices we have today but I would have been really pissed that I wouldn’t be able to buy them in 1998 like the article hinted at.
Today’s Maximumble pops the question.
Today’s Maximumble…. It’s not gonna end well.
depends on your view of marriage
Biff saves himself the cost an e-reader…
The contrast on e-ink screens really does need to be better. Mostly, the background needs to be lighter. While they’re useful for some things, I’d still rather have a paper book a lot of the time.
The reader I have has excellent contrast – It reads as well as most books, and way better than any newspaper.
Oooh, you mean e-books? At first i thought e-ink was something that’s printed with some special sort of ink, because I have only heard the expression “e-book” before… I have never understood how these things work. Do you download the books, or what are you supposed to do?
There are many different ways to read an e-book. The Kindle and iPad are two popular choices. The Kindle has an e-ink screen, the new Kindle Fire has an LCD screen like the iPad.
For some reason I’ve always thought that an e-book (or e-book-reader perhaps) was an electronic device of its own, and that downloading and reading books is all you can do with it, but now it seems kind of logical to me that it is possible to read books in an iPad (even though I don’t have one).
I think I’ll keep on reading non-elecronic books, though… An iPad would probably run low on batteries if I fell asleep while reading…
The nice thing about e-Ink displays is that they only need power to change the picture, but (almost?) none to keep it. So the batteries shouldn’t run low while you aren’t browsing, whether that is because you’re busy reading a single page or because you’ve fallen asleep. Unless something else in the device is consuming the power … like e.g. the W-LAN unit.
My e-reader (a Sony) goes about ten days between needing a recharge. Much less, if I’m listening to music on it at the same time. I find than any of the e-ink displays on any of the e-readers are quite legible, and are almost entirely free of glare or angle of incidence issues. Some illuminitated displays (OLED, LED, LCD) displays are equally glare-free, others, not so much.
Check before buying.
Generally, yes, you do have to download. (A Wi-Fi connection and a Wi-Fi capable e-reader are a plus if you want to do this without having to plug into your computer in order to put a book into your eReader.) However, I own both an iPad *and* a generic non-Wi-Fi-capable e-reader. (Rockchip 2729. I wanted something that wouldn’t be a huge financial hit if it got lost or stolen — unlike an $800+ iPad.) I use the iPad to download the books (I prefer to get them in .pdf format when I can), and I use an app called CloudReaders* to transfer the eBook file to my Win7 netbook. I then use a program called Calibre* to organize them and put them into the eReader. (The eReader has an internal 4Gb memory, and a microSD slot for up to 16 Gb more.) Also, the eReader also plays .mp3s and .mp4 & .AVI videos. It also has a radio, but it’s not terribly powerful and won’t play any but the most powerful local stations.
*Free to download
I just got me a nook, mostly for reading manga. I love it! I thought there’d be nostalgia problems since it’s not a real book, but once you start reading you don’t notice a difference.
I’m crazy enough that I’m thinking of ordering one of the recently discontinued Pocket Edge Dualbooks. It’s a e-reader on one side and a tablet on the other, connected in the middle with a hinge. The company that made them wants to focus on more conventional hardware.