Welcome to Brendon Davis

More evidence of stick-in-the-mud mentality

Autor brendon | 05.02.2010 | Category Rant, eBook

In a recent article on Wired Magazine, several publishing houses have complained about the pricing structure of Amazon eBooks. Regardless of the fact that a lack of distribution costs warrant a lower retail price; to protect book shops publishers want to artificially increase the price of eBooks.

Cheap MP3 downloads have been available for years now and I still can’t throw a stone in a shopping centre without hitting a music shop or two. I don’t see how the sale of books is any different, not to mention the increased selling capacity of a global store front.

Massive Book Sales lost by people using ‘Book Loan’ scheme

Autor brendon | 27.01.2010 | Category Rant, eBook

I love this, with the proliferation of eBooks someone has looked into the state of book distribution, sales and ownership as the RIAA would. They have raised a very important point. Book publishers are losing billions of dollars every year due to the practice of ‘book lending’. Society has become blasé to the questionable practice of loaning books from a library. A single book is purchased from a distributor and then without royalty or fee, read multiple times by people. Consider for a moment, the poor artists writers. They get no additional revenue from multiple readings their work. If this were music, it would be argued as illegal!

Someone decided to do an RIAA style study of online sharing of books. In response, Eric Hellman has done up an awesome article about the implications of physical book loaning. Consider the fact that as few books are released in digital format, a physical book must b purchased to create the digital version. Almost sounds like the same thing a library does… (almost)

My personal opinion is still the same, make the content available for people at an appropriate price and most will do the right thing by you. Publishers should embrace the change because there is NO WAY they can stop it.

BeBook – 1 battery cycle on

Autor brendon | 18.01.2010 | Category Rant, eBook

I was pleasantly suppressed with the life span of my BeBook battery. I have left the device on but locked since its first charge on the 17th December and the device only yesterday showed me the low battery warning. 30 days of battery life, cram that up your kindle! ;-) Read on..

More on my BeBook

Autor brendon | 27.12.2009 | Category eBook

I like the device; I am still getting use to it and have been showing it to all my friends that enjoy reading. I have been seeing some mixed reactions, some find the concept very interesting while others are adamant that they will keep reading books because they like the feel. (I’m sure people said the same about vinyl records…)

I finally received my accessories from BeBook on Thursday; strangely they shipped several days after the BeBook reader. I was pleased to find a number of PDF books and reading resources on the SD card because the device only shipped with the User Guide. Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be anything worth reading.

I ran a firmware update on the device which was a very easy process. This should be very easy for basic users to do and left all the books stored on the built-in flash intact.

On that, I’m yet to find any digital books that I am interested in reading available in Australia. The Harry Potter series, Tomorrow series & Ender’s Game series are not available for download in any eBook format. Lord of the Rings is only available in secure ePub format which the BeBook new firmware doesn’t support. This is where the Kindle triumphs, but is also its downfall. If you ever decide to use a non-Amazon device, all the books your purchased are useless. It is DRM in MP3′s battle all over again.

As for reading, in reality it takes two hands to turn the page of a regular book. I have found a few comfortable reading positions but you need to use two hands to turn the page, so I will stop complaining.