King/"Riding the Bullet": A grim e-reading experience
Ken Jenks
The price was high for a novella. The credit card e-commerce system was
tolerable (only a little confusing -- what is a Softlock account and why
should I care?) and, at five in the morning, I had no trouble getting
in, unlike others who have been rebuffed by over-loaded servers.
The Windows-only software installation process generated a spurious
JavaScript error message and required a half-dozen clicks when one
should have been sufficient, and the document was displayed in that
horrible Acrobat Reader in a font so small on my 15" monitor that I was
squinting at it the whole time. (And you know how hard it is to read in
Acrobat if you dare to zoom in.) When I was done reading and returned to
Netscape, it crashed. (Netscape 4.72 on Windows 95.)
And in their e-mailed receipt, they can't even format a dollar field
with two decimal places.
I'm not impressed with Softlock.
The story was fair; King has done better.
-- Ken Jenks, http://abiblion.com/
Tools for reading.
J.A. Hitchcock
wrote:
>The Windows-only software installation process generated a spurious
>JavaScript error message and required a half-dozen clicks when one
>should have been sufficient, and the document was displayed in that
>horrible Acrobat Reader in a font so small on my 15" monitor that I was
>squinting at it the whole time.
And when I tried to print it so that I could take my own darned time
to read it in a proper format, it wouldn't let me.
Harumph.
And I'm writing a review of the story, so this will be very
interesting.
JAH
HELP Out - The Signed Book Sale!
http://www.purpleducks.com/booksale
Read BRIARWOOD for the HELP Fund
http://tale.com/titles-free.phtml?title_id=22
Ken Jenks
> And when I tried to print it so that I could take my own darned time
> to read it in a proper format, it wouldn't let me.
>
> Harumph.
>
> And I'm writing a review of the story, so this will be very
> interesting.
Where and when will your review appear? Will you be able to leverage
that review into a general e-book review column?
Kenny Keyboard
trying to tell him something. Unfortunately, as usual, he wasn't
listening because he was lost in his own grim delusions, which, even
more unfortunate, he heaps upon the public in manic desperation. If
there was any justice, his fingers would go numb for six months and give
us all a break.
In article <38D223D3...@abiblion.com>, Ken Jenks
<kje...@abiblion.com> wrote:
>This was a grim e-reading experience.
>
>The price was high for a novella. The credit card e-commerce system was
>tolerable (only a little confusing -- what is a Softlock account and why
>should I care?) and, at five in the morning, I had no trouble getting
>in, unlike others who have been rebuffed by over-loaded servers.
>
>The Windows-only software installation process generated a spurious
>JavaScript error message and required a half-dozen clicks when one
>should have been sufficient, and the document was displayed in that
>horrible Acrobat Reader in a font so small on my 15" monitor that I was
>squinting at it the whole time. (And you know how hard it is to read in
>Acrobat if you dare to zoom in.) When I was done reading and returned to
>Netscape, it crashed. (Netscape 4.72 on Windows 95.)
>
>And in their e-mailed receipt, they can't even format a dollar field
>with two decimal places.
>
>I'm not impressed with Softlock.
>
>The story was fair; King has done better.
>
>-- Ken Jenks, http://abiblion.com/
>
> Tools for reading.
--
Heelots! I hate them heelots!
(Walter Brennan in "Meet John Doe")
Nick Evans
you didn't like the reading experience, buy a Rocket eBook <g>. What did you
think of the actual book?
<psei...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:38d4908c....@news.supernews.com...
> I think you're being unfair. There is a difference between the
> reading experience and the purchasing experience. Do you blame the
> author if the clerk at Barnes & Noble is surly? Hardly.
>
> The price wasn't high for a novella at all. Have you taken a look at
> Annie Ernaux' works lately? Novellas routinely sell in excess of
> $9.95 in the brick and mortar world, if they sell at all. Usually
> novellas are bundled together (e.g, Handke's Three Novellas or
> Delbanco's The Lost Suitcase, a novella and essays). $2.50 is in line
> with prices for similar e-works. $8.25 for the paperback of Single
> and Single, by the way. You can obtain novellas for free on the
> Zoetrope site, or Gutenberg.
>
> (I'd prefer micropricing myself, but that's another story--i.e. priced
> at $.005 cents the reader wouldn't notice the payment but 1,000,000
> hits would translate into a tidy sum.)
>
> I can't speak to Netscape plug-ins, but I have read encrypted books
> with Adobe's reader as a stand alone application without any problems
> at all. You can easily set the font size.
>
> My copy was obtained in a Rocket edition. The graphic was one of the
> best I've seen on a rocket book, and text formatting was standard
> block paragraph html. As always, the Rocketbook provided a
> superlative alternative to the CRT (which is not to say that 600 dpi
> in a slate reading device is something to look forward to)
>
> There are also editions available for the Palm.
>
>
> It's one thing to criticize the text, another to criticize the
> purchasing process. But to lump in a generic javascript criticism in
> this context is ridiculous. After all, javascript is a curious
> demi-language created by the folks at Netscape as an alternative to
> Sun's uniplatform Java. The former 'extends' html pages; the latter
> is a true computer language. In my experience, javascript has been a
> complete pain to work with and serves little purpose. You can hardly
> blame King or his publisher for that.
>
> {Now, here's a topic for an interesting discussion: in view of the
> e-publication, in which King received roughly the same royalty, why
> does he need a publisher at all?}
>
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> On Fri, 17 Mar 2000 06:23:47 -0600, Ken Jenks <kje...@abiblion.com>
J.A. Hitchcock
wrote:
>Where and when will your review appear? Will you be able to leverage
>that review into a general e-book review column?
Are you hiring me?
<g>
It's for EON Magazine - I write weekly book reviews for them and
recently reviewed King's EVERYTHING'S EVENTUAL, which came on the F13
CD.
psei...@hotmail.com
On Fri, 17 Mar 2000 06:23:47 -0600, Ken Jenks <kje...@abiblion.com>
wrote:
>This was a grim e-reading experience.
Ken Jenks
>
> yes he's right. If you didn't like the purchase, complain to
> Softlock. If you didn't like the reading experience, buy a
> Rocket eBook <g>. What did you think of the actual book?
>
> <psei...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:38d4908c....@news.supernews.com...
> > reading experience and the purchasing experience. Do you blame the
> > author if the clerk at Barnes & Noble is surly? Hardly.
All right, you guys. READ THE SUBJECT LINE. I wasn't reviewing the
novella, which I dismissed by saying, "The story was fair; King has done
better." I was reviewing the e-reading experience.
Most people don't own Rocket eBooks. Most people will be reading this
novella on their Windows PCs with either Netscape or MSIE. And for most
of the people who read this novella, it's their first exposure to
e-books. And because it was such a grim experience, it may be their
last.
The anonymous psei...@hotmail.com said,
> > The price wasn't high for a novella at all. Have you taken a look at
> > Annie Ernaux' works lately? Novellas routinely sell in excess of
> > $9.95 in the brick and mortar world, if they sell at all. Usually
> > novellas are bundled together (e.g, Handke's Three Novellas or
> > Delbanco's The Lost Suitcase, a novella and essays). $2.50 is in line
> > with prices for similar e-works. $8.25 for the paperback of Single
> > and Single, by the way. You can obtain novellas for free on the
> > Zoetrope site, or Gutenberg.
Your comparisons are all inappropriate. This is an e-book, not a dead
tree. Paper novellas are priced and packaged the way they are because of
the inherent inefficiencies of printing, distributing, warehousing,
retailing and handling paper, not because that's the best way to sell
novellas.
$2.50 is in line with prices for what similar e-works? Many e-book
publishers routinely sell complete novels for about that price. And if
there are similar e-works, why are we all in such a tizzy about Stephen
King?
Sure, you can obtain novellas for free on the Zoetrope site or Project
Gutenberg, but they're not first editions by a modern master. That's
part of what we're paying for here.
Compare $2.50 for a novella -- which took me about five minutes to
download and less than twenty minutes to read -- to other entertainment
expenditures, like a movie or two days of cable TV. Compare $2.50 to the
price of other experiences you can have on the Web, mostly for "free"
(ad-supported).
From my point of view, $2.50 for a novella is too much.
> > I can't speak to Netscape plug-ins, but I have read encrypted books
> > with Adobe's reader as a stand alone application without any problems
> > at all. You can easily set the font size.
And why should you need to set the font size or otherwise mess with the
reader settings to have a comfortable reading experience? That's a
ridiculous user interface design and you're falling into the deception
that you should be responsible for making the reading experience
pleasant. That's the publisher's job. They failed.
> > My copy was obtained in a Rocket edition. The graphic was one of the
> > best I've seen on a rocket book, and text formatting was standard
> > block paragraph html. As always, the Rocketbook provided a
> > superlative alternative to the CRT (which is not to say that 600 dpi
> > in a slate reading device is something to look forward to)
That's wonderful for you, but completely beside my point.
> > It's one thing to criticize the text, another to criticize the
> > purchasing process. But to lump in a generic javascript criticism in
> > this context is ridiculous. After all, javascript is a curious
> > demi-language created by the folks at Netscape as an alternative to
> > Sun's uniplatform Java. The former 'extends' html pages; the latter
> > is a true computer language. In my experience, javascript has been a
> > complete pain to work with and serves little purpose. You can hardly
> > blame King or his publisher for that.
I do blame both King and his publisher for that. They were not required
to use SoftLock and its awful user interface and grossly inadequate
e-commerce system; they chose it. I believe that choice was
inappropriate, and I suspect that the publisher is now thinking of
alternatives, too. MANY would-be paying customers were turned away by
the faulty e-commerce system, and many actual paying customers had
problems with the user interface after buying the novella, including
browser crashes and other odd behavior.
> > {Now, here's a topic for an interesting discussion: in view of the
> > e-publication, in which King received roughly the same royalty, why
> > does he need a publisher at all?}
He needs a publisher for the same reason most other authors need a
publisher; it's not cost-effective for him to do the publishing and
marketing job by himself. His time is better spent writing.
(Quick rhetorical quiz: Who earns more per hour, your typical publisher
or Stephen King?)
Byron Collins
I really like the Stephen King
"Riding The Bullet" eBook.
I got it on my Handspring Visor.
This one I give a Thumbs Up, and
I don't mean I need a ride :-).
Byron Collins
---
Byron's Emporium - Cool GEOS/Palm OS eBooks
http://home.clarksville.com/~bcollins/index.htm
---
psei...@hotmail.com
where 'established' authors can be found (Arthur C. Clarke, for one).
They have another site called Mighty Words, I'm not sure if it's
linked.
I simply don't think that reading for pleasure can be done on a CRT.
Period. So if you don't have a rocketbook (which I agree that most
people don't have, sadly) or a palm (screen too small, but there are
other advantages--the experience will be less than satisfactory.
Micropayments could solve the financial issue you raise. The others
appear, in general terms, to be PC/CRT/software specific.
As for the text itself (cf. Roland Barthes) and maybe, as the litcrits
would counsel, we should best labor in the vineyard in the text, all I
can say is that several days after reading Bullet I think back to it,
and the terrible dilemma presented to the son. The revulsion the text
produced--there is a Greek term for this which I have forgotten--is,
after all, what horror fiction is all about.
On Sat, 18 Mar 2000 10:42:29 -0600, Ken Jenks <kje...@abiblion.com>
wrote:
>Nick Evans wrote:
Dick Harper
> I simply don't think that reading for pleasure can be done on a CRT.
> Period.
I agree, but with a caveat. Most of us read this
newsgroup on a CRT. A small percentage read it on a TFT
screen. I, too, would prefer to have a display that mimics
a magazine page in clarity and ability to reflect light,
but, as we've discussed in other threads, it ain't happened
yet.
--Dick
What ever
it would be a pain in the *&% if you tried to read it on a 15" monitor,
or for that matter a monitor at all. I think you should check out the
book on a palm or rocketbook before too many complaints about the
setup... I'll agree the payment for the book was a pain...
-=rhino=-
Prince Richard Kaminski
What ever wrote:
> reading it on my palm has been most enjoyable
But it must have been a tedious process to write it there in the first place.
Kurt Ullman
I am waiting for it come out on the head of a pin...
Ray Montalvo
experience. Do you think network television would get off the ground if you
had to watch it only a computer monitor???
Check out the rocket ebook.
For $2.50, the king book was a bargain adn an enjoyable experience.
-r
Ken Jenks wrote in message <38D223D3...@abiblion.com>...
>This was a grim e-reading experience.
>
>The price was high for a novella. The credit card e-commerce system was
>tolerable (only a little confusing -- what is a Softlock account and why
>should I care?) and, at five in the morning, I had no trouble getting
>in, unlike others who have been rebuffed by over-loaded servers.
>
>The Windows-only software installation process generated a spurious
>JavaScript error message and required a half-dozen clicks when one
>should have been sufficient, and the document was displayed in that
>horrible Acrobat Reader in a font so small on my 15" monitor that I was
>squinting at it the whole time. (And you know how hard it is to read in
>Acrobat if you dare to zoom in.) When I was done reading and returned to
>Netscape, it crashed. (Netscape 4.72 on Windows 95.)
>
>And in their e-mailed receipt, they can't even format a dollar field
>with two decimal places.
>
>I'm not impressed with Softlock.
>
>
Jezza
it such as waterstones.co.uk or amazon.com.
However, I agree that it was a pain to download this and some other free
books into the Glassbook reader. By making it so unfriendly they have
put off of actually trying to buy any Glassbook ebooks.
I would consider downloading straight PDF (even if protected), HTML or
TXT files.
At the moment I still find it easier to read a real book than an ebook
off of either a CRT (19" monitor) or Palm IIIx.
--
All unsolicited commercial email and/or advertising is unacceptable
and will attract an administration charge of £50.00 sterling per item.
This is to cover costs and time forwarding details to your service provider
and any other companies or persons that may be involved.
Dick Harper
> However, I agree that it was a pain to download this and some other free
> books into the Glassbook reader. By making it so unfriendly they have
> put off of actually trying to buy any Glassbook ebooks.
It's worse than you think.
When I began to install the Glassbook, an error message
popped up to abort the installation because it could not find
Internet Explorer, version 4 or above.
There's a simple reason the wizard couldn't find IE4 or
above: I don't use it. As it happens, an NT machine we have
here does have IE4 or 5, so I moved the Glassbook executable
over there.
Surprise! This program doesn't run under Windows NT.
Like most computer users, I have a very low tolerance for
programs that don't work. I doubt I will write very many
glowing reviews for Glassbook and I doubt that I will try to use
it again.
That result means they have not only lost a qualified
customer, but also the entire circle of people I will warn off.
--Dick