I've been reading electronic books for a long, long time. I remember starting Honore de Balzac's century of stories known as The Human Comedy on a Zoomer and I finished the last of them on my 770 a few years back.

It's about content and convenience.

I'm no ipod fan, but I've got an ipod and an itunes account because arguably it's the only legitimate game in town where I can buy an electronic version of an album.

I read copyright free texts on whatever handheld is convenient for me. Frankly I prefer TXT files. That way I get to choose the fonts, etc.

But copyrighted works? For now I'll be going to the bookstore (and have been) because I've yet to make the leap that $360 is more convenient than a book that never needs batteries, won't crash, is mine to do with as I please when I finish it.

That said, if Stanza were ported to the NIT, I'd probably get sucked in to Amazon's scheme for world domination.

All 99% of the novels I have read (and I am never without one) over the past 7 years (I think - I just looked on http://ereader.com and the first book I purchased through them was in 2000).

I started on a Palm, and migrated through QVGA and VGA WinMo to N810. I like reading paper books, but generally only get the opportunity to read them while on vacation, because they are hideously inconvenient.

I find it interesting that people believe that a larger screen is important for reading a book. I think transitioning is difficult, but once you do, there is very little benefit to screen real estate - of course, it depends where you read, but for me it is in bed and on public transport mostly. Both of these places require something small that can be held in one hand and put away easily.

A smaller screen means less eye tracking. And page turning isn't like it is with a book, page transitions are imperceptible and unconscious (as opposed to a paper book where they (for me) often break flow).

I see the kindle and cannot imagine how that is better than a paper book, but I look at a paper book and cannot imagine how that is better than a N810 sized ebook.

But more page turning.

Page transitions obviously break flow for me, even in a ebook.

1. More text on each page, less page turning.
2. Bigger, more readable text.
3. Does not run out of battery.
4. Way better readability in daylight.
5. Makes you actually own the book.

Yeah - I should have said "in my experience, page turning is completely unconscious and imperceptible when reading an ebook for me". I can't speak for anyone else obviously.

And of course I was speaking to my own experience with my comparison.

But I wasn't really talking about discrete beneficial differences, I was talking about the whole package. When I sum the benefits of a paper book and sum the benefits of an ebook (for me I caveat once more), the ebook wins, and always will. But anyway - page turning doesn't matter - unnoticable, text size is adjustable (along with the distance of the book to my eyeballs), the battery has never ran out on me yet, readability of a paper book at nighttime levels of light is essentially zero, whereas the daylight readability of an ebook is not as good as paper clearly, but hasn't represented an issue over the years.

But I like the last one - "owning the book". I seem to have a whole bunch of books that I "own" but they are ebooks. I would consider a book to be the story, the ideas, the concepts, the journey. But I don't get to own the paper and ink that the paper books were made out of.

I do however have a whole load of paper and ink from all the crap that banks and utility and tax people send me that I am apparently obliged to keeps for years, so I guess that makes up for it.

It's all about preference. Even among books you have a dozen different formats/sizes to accomodate specific needs/requirements, from pocket dictionaries through encyclopaedia to newspapers. It's only natural that electronic readers have an even more diverse choice as the underlying tech is also more diverse.

Also, it's hard to make an objective judgement as most of us did a fair amount of reading paper books and are thus influenced by historical/habitual reasons.

Yeah too right.

It will be a shame to see them go, but it is difficult to see paper books being a lasting technology, if you take the long view.

10 years and I suspect they'll go the way of vinyl - there will be those that will suffer nothing else, but the rest of the world will be reading off roll-out oled type displays.

That's fairly defeatist! There has to be a way to feed the HTML renderer just enough to keep it from choking under the weight of the book. You could have the e-book app break the text up into page-sized chunks (the user can specify this, and/or it can be specified in the text), and then just have a page turning button or auto-load the next page as you approach the bottom of the current page.

Sorry, couldn't resist

...and that is almost perfectly describing what I'm doing now I keep the header/css and then try to split by paragraph/element. The problems are as follows:

- The html navigation gets broken
- Html formatting can be problematic if the original document had the text in a giant DIV or TABLE (if I loose the element, I'm loosing any style/formatting applied to it).

Also, in that case webkit is a bit of an overkill. If it's just static text, cut to manageable chunks, the 'goold old' QTextDocument will do just as fine (actually better, as it uses a lot less memory and does not need webkit installed).

I recently showed my N810 to a reporter for the San Diego Union during a discussion about Kindles. She seemed immediately attracted by it; I was using FBreader. I pointed out that it was color and much less expensive than the Kindle.

"Can I read books available for Kindle on it?"

"Well, not exactly, but ..."

She quickly lost interest.