Read Hornblower and sail home quickly
By Gareth Powell
Take an iPod Touch on a long journey and, if you are keen on reading, you need no other companion. Except an attentive steward who brings you a cold beer now and then.
This is the voice of experience. On my iPod Touch I had all the sea-faring books written by C.S.Forester. He also wrote some quite interesting stuff like The General but I was not bothered.
From Bangkok to Sydney I sailed with Hornblower and helped beat back the Napoleonic hordes. And managed to have it away with Lady Barbara Wellesley at the same time.
Were these electronic books better than printed books?
Sadly, the answer is yes and no.
Yes, because you can read when everyone has their lights off and it would be discourteous to have your cabin light on.
No, because no matter what anyone tells you it is NOT as easy to read an electronic book as it is to read a printed version. Not yet.
What are the problems?
First I think use. You are holding a book in your hand which is say half the size of a paperback and you are not used to it. The type is white on black albeit with a subtle back-light.
Much has been made of the difficulty of turning the pages.
Rubbish. It comes to you as to the manner born and after a while it is totally automatic.
What is a problem is if this is a Google Book, it will be so full of errors and mistakes — Google has never heard of proof-reading until lately and wished devoutly it had.
Luckily my books has been proof read before they were put on my machine and were pretty, but not totally, error free. And reading the books in order you can see the chronological mistakes. It matters not.
These are the best sea-faring books ever written — a pox take Patrick O’Brian — and they carried from Bangkok to Sydney and all I suffered is a slight headache.
You will find that if every 15 minutes you turn your head away from the book and focus on the rest of the world — in this case a cabin-full of Australian travelers most of whom were half-cut you do not get a headache.
You do not have to prove by me the virtues of reading books on an iPod Flash — or an iPhone for that matter — it seriously works for me. I tried the first Kindle and the first Sony and rejected them.
My guess is that Kindle may have sold near to half a million but it would be dead meat if Amazon was not pushing it like mad.
Now we have BooksOnBoard’s new Qik Clik technology for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I was ever suspicious of a manufacturer who could not spell.
Bob LiVolsi, CEO of BooksOnBoard said, ‘With this advance, format guesswork and long checkout forms go the way of analog TV, truly making eBooks available anytime and anywhere for iPhone owners.’
I simply have no idea what the fellow — or more probably his PR — is yammering on about.
We are told Qik Clik technology gives iPhone and iPod Touch customers a quick, one click checkout experience at BooksOnBoard, and takes only three clicks from eBook selection to download, automatically doing the format selection for them.
Which is a great book and benefit especially to those who had not heard of BookonBoard in the first place.
According to Neelan Choksi, Lexcycle/Stanza COO, ‘I am very impressed. The BooksOnBoard team deserves a huge amount of credit. They have taken the Stanza catalog format to a new level and greatly improved and streamlined the eBook customer experience.’
They talk about it as if it were only the beginning.
In fact, the way they are doing it is the end.
The books are on sale at roughly, half the printed price. To make it consistent and let them keep a profit. 20 percent of the cover price would be top of the mark. More is damned silly.
Why should you pay for a digital book half of what you pay for a printed book? Someone needs to do their sums.
It will all settle down eventually. And, for me, it will be marvelous.
Before any book publisher writes in to explain the complex maths I am both a publisher and author and the figures are engraved on my heart.
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