Ebook RPG Books

[Danzauker]

I'm seriously considerating an eBook eInk reader, and I'm fairly convinced thi is the future.

As of now, I think the tech behind it is still primitive.

- No color.
- No (acceptably) scalable PDFs.
- Not able to create documents on the reader.
- Locked formats.
- Too expensive.

When I will be able to:

- Read color documents (I like comics, magazines and manuals to be color, you know).
- Read acceptabily any kind of formatted document (see point above)
- Edit and create documents directly on device, even if only pure text (I think many people overlooks this, but for me this would be a win feature).
- Store and read EVERY kind of document without DRM and stuff (sorry, but when I buy a book, I want it to be mine all mine for all my life)
- Spend less than 100$

I will surely buy one. I think well'have to wait some more time to get all these features.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

I am learning a shocking amount about mining practice as a result of this.

It would be fun if it wasn't so depressing.

I will concede readily and happily that mining is screwed up to Hades and back, probably more so than paper. We probably need to rein in both, but as a consumer of limited means, it's easier for me, personally, to cut down on my paper use (which can be substantial) than my heavy metal use, which is honestly nearly non-existent outside the laboratory, where I am properly constrained on my disposal. I only upgrade my computer about every 5 years, for example, and I'm darn careful about what I do with my computer parts. There are good recyclers and bad recyclers for that stuff, to be sure.

The nice thing about being too poor to be an early adopter is that I'll wait until the e-reader situation is settled enough that I can buy one device and have it last for years and years. I also won't adopt unless the file formats are made reasonably portable across systems and most books I want or need are usable on those platforms. As an academic, that means textbooks, and luckily the likely sort of device for such a thing would also be ideal for gaming books, IMO.

Ultimately, even with how scary mining is, I think buying one e-ink/e-reader device every 10+ years will have less environmental footprint than buying and using samples of all the books and textbooks that I'm forced to deal with. And for college students.... it's not even a question. With what is needed to equip the average college student in textbooks for 4 years (leastways in biology, where I have the most experience).... getting an e-reader that can handle textbooks would almost certainly have less total impact. If they actually removed the printing costs from the pricing equation, it would become massively cheaper, as well.

 

[El Mahdi]

deleted

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I am learning a shocking amount about mining practice as a result of this.

It would be fun if it wasn't so depressing.

I will concede readily and happily that mining is screwed up to Hades and back, probably more so than paper. We probably need to rein in both, but as a consumer of limited means, it's easier for me, personally, to cut down on my paper use (which can be substantial) than my heavy metal use, which is honestly nearly non-existent outside the laboratory, where I am properly constrained on my disposal. I only upgrade my computer about every 5 years, for example, and I'm darn careful about what I do with my computer parts. There are good recyclers and bad recyclers for that stuff, to be sure.

Well, the modern world suxxors, that's for sure!

Just a final tweek at you- all in the spirit of good fun and making informed choices- what kind of batteries do e-readers use, and how do you dispose of them when they finally die?

Don't get me wrong- I wouldn't be surprised to find the future of text to be nearly 100% electronic in some way. By the turn of the next century, your e-reader may be a small chip the size of a fingernail that is subcutaneously linked to your brain, and powered by your own biochemistry. And to get there, we have to take a whole bunch of tiny tech steps over time...starting with e-readers.

But again, I worry that by going purely electronic, we may find that we ultimately "save the environment" at the cost of losing cultures when, at some point down the road, our descendants lack the proper power supply (voltage, connectors) or readers (both hardware & software) to read what we've left them.

Compared to stone stele and paper products that (so far) have lifespans in the thousands and tens of thousands of years, a great mass of the writings of the modern age could easily be eradicated by a particularly nasty computer virus or EMP...a problem that may only get worse as we become increasingly techo-savy...and techno-dependent.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Heh. The battery issue does bug me. Luckily, they're putting money into that tech in a few countries, so improvements are coming down the pipeline quickly. Batteries that can be recharged over and over again forever are theoretically quite possible. We'll see how they do and if they're permitted to bring them to market.

One thing about batteries, though... people know that some types are bad news, and there are recycling technologies that do a reasonable job of containing the waste. People don't even realize how nasty paper is for the environment. They assume it kills trees and that's about it.

The computer virus and EMP thing just doesn't worry me. If we have enough EMPs occurring that they take out a meaningful number of computers and other storage devices, there won't be enough paper left to transmit culture, either.

And I don't really buy the permanence argument. History has proven that stone, wood, and metal don't really last if someone wants to get rid of them. We've misplaced entire civilizations under the Indian Ocean. Cultural artifacts have been deliberately annihilated by the victors in war or subsequent cultures who wanted to re-write history. One-of-a-kind items are a great thing, and I want people to keep making them, but I also want a copy in a digital format that I can re-copy and distribute all over the world with a click of a button, making them truly impervious to any one act of suppression or destruction or any one accident.

Before they put copies of them on the internet, one accident in a single location is all it would have taken to destroy all of Leonardo da Vinci's surviving notes. Now, even if that accident occurs, even if someone decides to destroy them deliberately, there will still be a copy somewhere, because multiple servers scattered in many places have redundant, instant, effectively free copies. Not exactly the same thing, from a visceral, tactile perspective, but the raw information is still there, which is at least something.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

And I don't really buy the permanence argument. History has proven that stone, wood, and metal don't really last if someone wants to get rid of them.

It is true that the electronic age does let us store huge amounts of info in caches all over the world, thereby reducing the likeleyhood of loss significantly.

However, let us examine data humans intended to last. We have stone carvings from pre-Egyptian empires. We have paintings from before civilization. We have paper products going back several thousands of years.

We also have films that are only intact because someone noticed OTHER films had degraded completely. Those films are lost forever.

I have personal computer files- documents, databases, original digital art, etc.- ranging from 20 years old to as young as 5 years old that are lost to me because the programs that created them cannot be run on 99.9% of computers operating in the world. I was fortunate in a few cases to have hard copies of the data, but re-entering that data into a form usable on the computer will be time consuming...

And, of course, past experience has shown me that, in a few years, I may just be facing the same problem again.

The data may be safe & stable, but its stale, obsolete and inaccessible in a way and in a time frame that hard data takes centuries to achieve.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

This is the standard image I always show - my iRex DR1000S:

It's very expensive, though. Right now, I would recommend waiting for the QUE by Plastic Logic, since it comes out very soon, also has a large screen, and might be fairly cheap.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

The data may be safe & stable, but its stale, obsolete and inaccessible in a way and in a time frame that hard data takes centuries to achieve.

The ubiquity of the internet and open source formats and communities is solving this problem, though. pdf, mp3, etc.

Fast format shifts are typical of a new tech. Digital storage is becoming a mature tech. Industry is fighting us on it, as industry will, but they are moving to portable formats for data and building in ways to convert forward. They used to refuse to build in backwards compatibility. After the first couple times they did that, people like me got sick of it and wouldn't follow to the new format. They ended up losing market share once irritable people reached critical mass. Nowadays, new releases are always, always, always back compatible.

Even 10 years ago, I had to fight to keep old data in various labs accessible. Since then, data has become easy. Old hardware is more likely to be my problem nowadays, but if I'm not careful I'll start pontificating on how undervalued science is by our society that we have to do important research with baling twine and duct tape holding everything together.

 

[Scribble]

I have personal computer files- documents, databases, original digital art, etc.- ranging from 20 years old to as young as 5 years old that are lost to me because the programs that created them cannot be run on 99.9% of computers operating in the world. I was fortunate in a few cases to have hard copies of the data, but re-entering that data into a form usable on the computer will be time consuming...

Can you give some examples of the formats you'e talking about here? I'm honestly surprised by this.


As for eink, and digital paper. They say they're working on color eink, but apparently the makers of LCD screens also indicate that within the next few years they will be releasing LCD tech that's even easier on the eyes then Eink...

Could be just feather puffing, but if true, I'd see LCD as winning... SInce people already know LCD, are more familiar with it, and it has more applications.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Can you give some examples of the formats you'e talking about here? I'm honestly surprised by this.

The most obvious examples would be the stuff I did on my Apple IIe on 5" floppies. Obviously, the tech has come so far that you'd naturally expect the hardware to be obsolete. That also means that, but for the stuff I printed up (long before 5" floppies were supplanted by 3.5" floppies), all of that data is gone.

Now, of course, most computers don't even have 3.5" slots. Of course my 120MB optical data disks and Zip drives were also handy...until they, too, became obsolete. I'm fortunate that I have access to an old computer to read some of those files...

The next wave of hardware obsolecense left me with data trapped on those 3.5" floppies- some of which were placed further out of reach by being compressed. The programs that compressed them haven't been functional since 2000 or so, and modern compression programs can't understand them.

In addition, I had a Champions spreadsheet & campaign writeup + some work files done in Microsoft programs that were available for both PCs and Macs (my platform of choice). At one point, Microsoft decided that they were changing the way they were doing both their WP and spreadsheets...which coincided with a Mac OS upgrade that made the older programs malfunction. Being forced to run the new programs wasn't bad- they worked just fine, after all- but the problem was that there was now no way to get the old data. We even contacted Microsoft directly: they had no way for the new programs to open/read the data in the old ones, and there were to be no future updates of the older programs- they were dead. I had to pay a data recovery service to get my work files- I didn't have the disposable cash to get the gaming data.

And even though the service did fine work, some of the data wasn't in a form usable by the new programs- they were just readable on the screen. I had to transfer the data manually with cut & paste operations...LOTS of them.

Even staying within the Win/Tel world, my father had to use that same data recovery service to recover & transfer data from one proprietary medical practice hardware/software system into another when the first one went out of business.

I'm wondering what will happen if the patient records he had reduced to digital format wind up in the same situation.

In 2004, I was near the end of completing a Masters Program and doing a project in which the group I was in made extensive use of Microsoft Word and Power Point. I rarely encounter issues with these programs sharing data across platforms, but I noticed that I was getting lines of gibberish in files from one teammate in particular. Initially, I thought it was a Mac/PC thing, but it was actually an edition thing. As it turns out, when she included data from another particular teammate and opened it in her computer (running the most recent version of Word), then sent it to me, we'd get "transmissions from Mars." If, however, the data was transmitted to me then her, there were no issues at all. She and I could send stuff back & forth without error. It was only when the order was Old PC Word=> New PC Word => Mac Word that there was any issue at all- changing our team's editing sequence to Old PC Word => Mac Word => New PC Word or New PC Word => Mac Word => Old PC Word eliminated the problem.