Charles Ott's Web Site

A sort of review, with a great deal of extraneous material.

I bought myself an eBook reader. It's a BeBook Mini, from a Dutch company called Endless Ideas. You can visit them at MyBeBook.com. It cost about $200, plus twenty-five bucks for a nice leather case. With an SD chip plugged in (the same kind used for digital cameras, available at any drug store) it will hold thousands of books. It's also an MP3 player, if you like music with your reading.

Like the Kindle, the Sony, the Nook and lots of others, it uses the e-Ink display that doesn't glow and does not have a backlight. In other words, it's a matte surface like a paper page (albeit a somewhat shiny paper page), rather than a bright screen like an iPhone or a computer monitor. It's a judgment call how much that means to you. I find it much easier to read for long periods with a light over my shoulder, such as in my reading chair. Trying to read a glowing screen is okay for work, but not good for relaxation. If you don't have that reaction, this may be a non-issue for you.

But I have to tell you that for the solace of my personal neuroses, e-Ink has a truly wonderful benefit over an active-matrix LCD with a backlight. The e-Ink technology retains an image without power, which means that the ebook reader does not use power except at the moment you turn a page, which means that it can sit for at least three days without depleting the battery, which means — here comes the punch line — you don't have to turn it off when you put it down, or turn it on when you pick it up.

Hah? Do I hear you going "ooooh" out there?

Okay, so maybe you don't have that particular neurosis. For me, one of the problems with using a computer, or for that matter an electric typewriter, is that it's always on while I use it. It's waiting for me, and wants me to type on the keyboard. With an electric typewriter, there's an audible hum. With a computer, even an iPhone, I don't hear anything but I know that the processor is cycling at millions of instructions per second, just polling the keyboard to see if I'm doing anything. I know it's using power until I turn it off, and that makes it just a little hard for me to relax.

With the BeBook, I can pick it up when I want to read and put it down without guilt, and without toggling the power, when I'm done. This is the deal I've always had with books, and for whatever deep-seated reason, it's kind of a big deal for me.

This model of BeBook has a five inch screen, and the type can be scaled as large or small as I need. It's less than half an inch thick. It's the same width as old, small Ace paperback, and even a little shorter, so it fits in my pocket the same way my good old books do.

At this size, it's not really good for anything but plain prose. It's good for novels and essays and poetry, but too small for any book that depends on illustrations, or which needs a particular layout. I have a bunch of computer books in PDF form that would be handy to carry around as I move from one programming job to another, but those will have to wait until I buy an iPad or that upcoming Plastic Logic ebook reader, which have much larger screens.

That's okay. I don't have a neurotic need to carry a stack of computer books, or DOC files from work (although the BeBook can display them). I do have a neurotic need to carry a lot of old science-fiction books with me wherever I go — even if I've re-read them recently, even if I haven't gone back to them in years, even, in fact, if they aren't really very good. I just like knowing that I've got them.

One thing that surprised me to learn is that the Amazon Kindle uses a special, proprietary format not available on any other machine (with the extension .AZW), and Amazon sells ebooks only in that format. But there turn out to be lots of book shops on the Internet that will sell books in the "EPUB" format that does work on my reader and others. If Amazon wants to walk away from my patronage, so be it.

Moreover, there are a lot of legal free books available. ManyBooks.net is a wonderful resource with lots of books I want to read, including the swell old Henry Kuttner book shown here. You might also check out Baen.com — Baen has arranged with a number of good authors to give away a few books in hopes you'll buy other books at the store, which seems like a reasonable business model.

But the critical point about this little BeBook, for me, is this: it feels like a book. It feels good in my hands, it's easy to read, and the experience of using it is very much like the experience of reading my old books. For most of my life, I've had the habit of picking out a book in the morning, before I leave the house, that I think I'll enjoy reading during the day. Now I can conveniently carry a bunch of books, and decide what to read at the moment I sit down. Technology that makes a big improvement in my life always seems at little scary at first, but this technology makes only a small, pleasant change in my life that isn't scary at all. That's well worth two hundred bucks.

A Late Note

I have to add a caveat to this review after some personal experience: while it's been easy and fun to add free books to my BeBook, I haven't had any luck at all buying books. The problem is that commercial ebooks use DRM (Digital Rights Management), which involves various tricks to lock down the file and prevent you from copying it. It turns out that it's not just Amazon that uses its own proprietary DRM — so does Barnes & Noble, and so does Sony. Moreover, I haven't successfully been able to load a file from EBooks.com, which is supposed to work. In the case of EBooks and BN, the file loads onto my desktop computer but I can't transfer it to the BeBook.

There is a new BeBook model that has a wireless connection, just like the Amazon and BN models, and that may work better for buying books. At the moment, I have (1) wasted some money paying for ebooks I can't use, and (2) still enjoying those free books.