Friday 30 January 2004

Pic of the day: Mars now! Screenshot from the Civ2 Fantastic Worlds scenario. Actually I haven't played that in a while, but this book made me think of it again.

Mars and Windows

One excuse for upgrading to a handheld with Pocket PC 2003 is the books. Cassie also came with Microsoft Reader, but it could only read "open" e- books. Open e-books can be read on any compatible device, and you have to trust the customers to treat it like a real book and not read it themselves while they lend it to a friend. While some writers are OK with this, many others take a more cynical view.

Therefore modern versions of MS Reader can be bound to one identity (as defined by Microsoft Passport). A "secure e-book" can then be bound to this identity as well, and will only work with readers with the same owner. This means that an e-book can not be resold as a used book. Since used books often sell for 25-50% of new price, e-books should by rights be that much cheaper (not considering that they have virtually no print cost). So far this has not quite happened, but then again we hardly have a fully functional market yet. I suspect most e-book buyers are geeks like me. But this may slowly be changing.

I get almost all my e-books from Fictionwise.com, a company that specializes in e-books. They don't advertise much ... I found them thanks to a rebate coupon at the end of a Mike Resnik book I bought from, I believe, Barnes & Noble. Ironically, B&N have closed down their e-book business, while Fictionwise are adding a huge stack of new books each week. When I first found them, they had mostly science fiction and few if any secure books, meaning many authors avoided them even in the easygoing and optimistic genres of fantasy and science fiction. Now they have stacks of romance and mainstream novels as well as non-fiction, and have even started to sell related hardware. (I worry about that, because it suddenly introduces new types of costs that they don't have experience with ... stocks, warehouse, stuff like that.) They seem to be doing well enough right now, though. While they still theoretically ask for prices similar to printed books, they have heaps of rebates and discounts so if you keep an eye on the site, you can often get things ridiculously cheap. I bought Dude, Where's My Country? with 100% rebate, and I'm not even American! (100% rebate means I get the whole price off against other books I may buy later, so it's not quite like free download. Still, it's pretty sweet.) Several political books of different colors are still up for grabs as I write this, but the offer expires February 5th.

And this week they were promoting the three books Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. The timing is impeccable, but should surprise no one. Even Bush's gush about traveling to Mars was leaked well before the official announcement; but even without that, the small flotilla of spacecrafts had been on their way for months. The unusual concentration of Mars landings are of course due to the highly unusual proximity of the two planets this season. (Or more exactly, the proximity between where Earth was at launch time and where Mars is at landing time. But that's beside the point.) It was a good bet that people would be interested in Mars now, and now the books are there, just in time. And they are secure e-book, meaning that if I want to read them on the bus I have to have the appropriate hardware.

So after I had bought the iPAQ 5550, I logged on to Microsoft's site and ran the activation sequence to bind it to my identity. This was reported as a success. I transferred a secure e-book to the device and tried to open it. Yes, tried. The program somewhat apologetically admitted that it could not read the book. Now this was Windows for Pocket PC 2003, which isn't all that long ago. Even so, eventually I checked the version number and found that a newer version of MS Reader has been released. I downloaded it and put it in the Pocket PC's RAM, then activated again. Lo and behold! It worked. It also squats on some of my precious RAM, which is kinda unimpressive when the previous minor revision is already in ROM. Why not get it right first time? I would like to think that I'd test a program fairly thoroughly before selling it at a nice profit all over the planet. Admittedly, the new version was absolutely free. But RAM is not. Boo, hiss!

But at least I can now add another batch of interesting e-books to my to- read list. Since I don't much read at home, it is bound to take some time. The Mars fever may be largely forgotten when I finish, if I ever do. Red Mars isn't the best book I have begun to read, but not the worst either. The sad thing is, if I don't write a review during the next month it is hard to say whether I have just forgotten or whether I never finished the book. This has happened to a few books in the past, including a couple e-books. It could easily happen again. I am not often bored, so a book needs to be either well written or unique in some way to keep my attention. The competition for said attention is hard, even on the bus. I have Scientific American and New Scientist to get through too. As I have said before, I feel like I need a longer commute...

And now, I also need sleep.