1) ConsumerReports video: E-readers for the holidays. 2) A DIY book scanner

Consumer Reports has made a videoclip titled "E-Book Readers for the Holidays" which they feature on their ConsumerReports.Org page.  They allow embedding of the video on blogs and other websites, so if you click on the picture or on the link above, you can play the video.

They discuss the Nook, Sony, and Kindle readers and make recommendations.
  Which reader(s) will get the nod?


UNUSUAL GIFT SOME CAN MAKE FOR THEMSELVES (only a few)


Priya Ganapati of Wired.com's Gadget Labs writes about an amazing Do-It-Yourself  book scanner put together by Daniel Reetz who saved several thousands of dollars by building a system with simple materials that cost him about $300.   Ganapati explains:

'So over three days, and for about $300, he lashed together two lights, two Canon Powershot A590 cameras, a few pieces of acrylic and some chunks of wood to create a book scanner that’s fast enough to scan a 400-page book in about 20 minutes.

  To use it, he simply loads in a book and presses a button, then turns the page and presses the button again.  Each press of the button captures two pages, and when he’s done, software on Reetz’s computer converts the book into a PDF file.  The Reetz DIY book scanner isn’t automated – you still need to stand by it to turn the pages.  But it’s fast and inexpensive.

“The hardware is ridiculously simple as long as you are not demanding archival quality,” he says. “A dumpster full of building materials, really cheap cameras and outrageous textbook prices was all I needed to do it.”

... commercial book scanners that are completely automated cost anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000. The $50,000 Kirtas book scanner, for instance, can capture 3,000 pages an hour. '

See the photos of his basic setup, including an animated one showing it from all angles, at Wired's report.  I have similar cameras and would be tempted if I were of a more creative bent.  Questions of digital rights are discussed, of course, as well as a lot more in this meaty story -- it's a fun read.

  You can download his 79-page guide to building the DIY book scanner at Reetz's site.

Banned Amazon user loses Kindle access ?

A customer banned from access to management of his purchased Amazon Kindle books and from ability to buy more Kindle books has had his predicament described by online media, including the usually thorough Wired, with wild inaccuracy, including the claim that the banning was turning Kindles into "$360 paperweights."

Hardly, since the books remain on said Kindles, though some readers have bought the claim, repeating to one another that Amazon wiped out the files from the Kindle.  The customer has been reinstated with a warning, the customer writing that an Amazon rep had referred to his returning "virtually everything" he'd purchased.

The problem of loss of access to management of one's Kindle library at Amazon is an issue that's very important to address though, because a ban against further purchases shouldn't be tied to the ability to manage the customer's Amazon library of books a user bought which should remain available to the user - and the Kindle is sold for what it can do, a main focus being the ability to instantly download books.  For non-Kindle users: "manage" in this case means to be able to download again to your Kindle any material you had decided to delete earlier, since a feature of the Kindle unit is that Amazon stores the books (and your highlighting and annotations) for you for retrieval as needed if you've deleted them from the Kindle.

But on this important issue, there has been careless reporting that occurred beginning with the first posting I'd seen on a news site days ago, to be repeated over and over again, this time even by Wired's Bruce Sterling (a posting which does not allow comments).

The main source for the story is a humongous forum thread started by the customer who was banned, ostensibly for returning several "large electronics" later described by him as "2 TVs and 'several' cameras."  Some members are a bit dubious about some of it because the customer posted exact-duplicate posts on the Amazon forums, which require an active account in 'good standing'... and once the issue was resolved, the user has not responded to questions about the particulars.

For the record, since this report will keep circulating, ArsTechnica repeated the errors of reporting, but users corrected them in the comments areas (which do not get the same kind of distribution).

"Zayin" posts a comment with a few actual facts:

'There are a few inaccuracies in this article...

"...reportedly due to an overly high volume of returns on their Kindle books"
  The "high-price" returns were not returns on Kindle books, but rather returns on "large electronics" purchased via Amazon. Amazon will (apparently) lock your account if they think you are abusing their return policy. Other retailers will do the same...

"...which also locked him out of accessing his already-purchased Kindle items."
  This is partially incorrect. He wouldn't be able to redownload any books he had already purchased, or continue with subscriptions (if any) that had been purchased. However, any books already on the device would still be there, and any materials backed up to disk would still be usable as well.

"...turning their Kindles into $360 paperweights."
  The Kindle would still work as an ebook reader for any already downloaded content or content purchased from other sources. Most of my ebooks have come from Baen, not Amazon.

"A bookstore that locks you out because you treated it like a library doesn't take away the collection already sitting on your bookshelf, after all."
  Neither does Amazon, unless you leave all of your media on their servers, and keep nothing either on your Kindle or backed up to hard disk. I suppose that is possible, but it seems unusual, to say the least.

"Amazon is perfectly capable of yanking customer access to their books at any time—whether the service shuts down or not. The only way to get around it would be to break the user agreement with Amazon and crack the DRM..."
  This is inaccurate. If you have content downloaded, you can back it up easily. Plug the Kindle in to a USB port and copy the stuff to disk. As far as I know, Amazon has no method of pulling access to media already on a Kindle either (if you are really paranoid on this, simply disable the wireless)...'

"_fluffy" writes:

'I worked on Kindle, and wrote one of the DRM components (which was something I put off as long as possible, and basically tacked on at the very end).  The Kindle DRM is purely about keeping the publishers happy.  We didn't want to do it, but the publishers wouldn't allow us to sell their books if we didn't.  It was a make-or-break thing for the device's entire business model.'

 Again, it's my strong feeling that management access to one's Amazon Kindle Library of purchased books shouldn't be tied to a general banning of further purchases.

UPDATE:  A communique across the vast cyberspaces through which I can apparently toss a comment after all :-) Would that the K1 had lived as long as a hamster!  And you've a point: what happens to the entirety of Western Cybercivilization when the USA gets metabolized by the People's Republic of China (where gray Kindle screens first awake, sluggishly, and the PRC is looking to foreclose on us).

Amazon is considering K2 screen contrast issue

Which inner gray box has a lighter gray?  Why does one seem lighter?

  Posted 3/24/09 at 3:57pm   (Updated 4/9/09, at the bottom)
  I called Customer Service a couple of times to ask what Amazon is saying to us these days about the screen/font issue with the Kindle 2, in that some customers have felt that the thinner new font, used with a lighter weight than is used for the Kindle 1, is not as easy on their eyes.

  Some customers are driving a petition for a gray screen that is a lighter gray because their Kindle 1's have a somewhat lighter gray and a darker basic font.  For others, the differences are slight, and I find I can read full-width webpages because of the new fineness of the fonts when it's decreased. It's that sharp.

  But the relative lightness of the thinner K2 basic font, along with a somewhat darker gray perceived by a percentage of users moved to write to forums and to comment-areas of review columns, raises an issue (readibility) which is important and Amazon had earlier been a bit tone deaf to the concerns.

 The complaints are from people who prefer high contrast and who want to keep their Kindle 2's but want them to be as easy on their eyes as was the Kindle 1.  There have been odd choices by Amazon, such as changing the HOME item-listing from a dark medium-size font of the K1 to the wispy non-bolded thinner font weight of the K2.  Some people prefer to read output from medium-point pens to that from fine-point pens. And vice versa.

That's what Amazon seems to be taking into consideration.  I was told they do take customer feedback seriously and are working on a way to modify the darkness/lightness of the screen but that it's important to find something that will work for most of it customers.  As we've seen, many magazine reviewers have mentioned the 'sharper' and 'crisper' lettering.  Customers who read for longer stretches of time in different lighting situations may have quite different responses.

  I'm somewhere in between. I often wish for the more defined K1 weight for the font but I don't think about it much when I don't have the K1 nearby. But I do notice I used to be able to read for hours without noticing any eye strain whatsoever (new to me).

However, it was good to see they ARE working on a solution that can work for more customers, though it may take a while.  This is better than the silence we'd heard or the idea that there was no real issue there.  So, I'm encouraged.

UPDATE - 4/9 - 4/12/09 At the Amazon forums, Ted-san (Ted Inoue) describes running private tests using the native Kindle 2 fonts, comparing the display of a tweaked set he made against that of the native font set.  It involves using a more bolded font as the basic one and making normally "bolded" fonts even more bolded to keep the differences.  He proposes that users have the option of choosing between 'normal' and 'enhanced' display while reading, so that those who like the current fonts setup as-is are not affected.

The perspicacious :-) and meticulous Inoue has reorganized his test reports, and his full set shows what the relative lack of contrast can look like for some users on some Kindle units and what effect modifications in font properties can have.  (However, my own Kindle 2 has far more contrast than shown and is very sharp too, but units in the same home have been reported to show noticeable variances in contrast ratio.)  Also, he has found an even better example (Michael Bach's) of an optical-illusion having to do with the perception of lightness and darkness of objects with constant luminance, their brightness values perceived as changing when seen against the luminance values of surrounding objects (simultaneous contrast).

 As for a fix, my own wish is simpler: that they just provide a darker-effect basic font similar to what they did for the Kindle 1 and that the e-Ink folks have a better quality control process over the relative lightness/darkness of the screen's gray.  Luckily, I have no problems with my Kindle 2 and I find mine a real joy to use (constantly), but my eyes are still more comfortable with the Kindle 1 font and I'm mindful that some other customers have a tougher time of it with the current-font to gray-background contrast ratio.  For balance, it appears most customers are quite happy with the current state, but enough aren't so that Amazon should do something, and I was told they were working on this very carefully, as mentioned, keeping in mind all customers need to be happy with the results.

UPDATE - 4/17/09 (late update) - On April 13, Wired's Gadget Lab posted an article about the screen font/background problem experienced by many K2 users.  By Priya Ganapati, it's an unusually accurate and thorough summary of the issues -- citing Ted Inoue's extensively detailed work on the anti-aliasing factor plus information from this blog and via a phone discussion).  It also references a busy Amazon forum thread that is a heavy request for darker fonts.  The story was picked up by most of the online computer and gadget sites, some listed at Inoue's "Kindle Optimizer" pages.

UPDATE - 4/26/09: Ted Inoue offered Amazon Customer Service representatives results of private tests with font replacements that would help the screen contrast issue for those having it.  It's a simple fix for those who want it or need it (there is a reason Amazon is doing easy Kindle 2 replacements) and the people who've been unhappy with their K2s are ecstatic over the change the fonts make.  Crunchgear writes today about the problems and the test results.

The $9.99-tag boycott on Kindle books priced over $10

Wired has an article on the boycott, by some energetic Amazon Kindle users, of Kindle e-books priced over $9.99; they're using Amazon's tagging system to identify books which go beyond their maximum acceptable pricing.

  Included in this piece of news were a couple of interesting nuggets by Priya Ganapatti:

Last year, sales of e-books rose 68.4 percent from the year before to $113.2 million, even as overall book sales fell 2.8 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers.  Much of that growth has been driven by the Kindle's popularity.' ...

The Kindle reader revolt is likely to be little more than a minor annoyance for the fledgling e-book reader ... analysts estimate that the company sold half a million Kindles in 2008.  By comparison, 250 users is a tiny drop in the bucket.

If that last sentence is true, there's scant hope for the online petition of those unhappy with the Kindle 2's lighter basic font and somewhat darker screen that many readers are reporting, except that the 250+ in the "screen contrast problems" group may represent many more customers - since the vast majority of customers don't post to online forums - whereas the boycott group involves organized processes by online customers.

Hard to know, though, how many other customers will look at prices higher at times than paperback editions and just decide that's more than they want to spend.  The article puts the onus on the publishers and likens the dynamics to the battle between buyers and companies over restrictive copy-protective technologies.

Amazon had not responded to a request for comment as of Tuesday evening although the boycotters have used the boycott tag more than 7,200 times so far.  Here's the massive forum thread

I know the feeling.  I have a couple of books that I've tried to get a Kindle version for, as I am more apt to read them on the Kindle, which is always with me, very readable, and is very easy to make even more readable (with adjustments possible for font size and line spacing).  But pricing above $10 has stopped me.  The article cites the usual reasons that people feel the e-books should be priced lower.