Of e-readers

I have a guilty secret. I have an e-reader—no, not really. I have two of them!

Yep. I have a Kindle™ and a Nook™ on my desk. And, I use them—regularly. Last week, I had a Kindle Fire™, too. And, we have an iPod™ and access to an iPad™, as well.

What in world am I doing with all those e-readers? Testing, of course. I know far more about the displaying of Hebrew on e-readers than I want to. And, I can tell you how PDFs look on them, too.

Wanna know more? I thought so. Let's start with PDFs, that old standby format that we all use and have a love/hate relationship with.

A PDF displays on all of them. But, it does best on a Nook™. It reflows, you can change the font size, non-pointed Hebrew shows up perfectly, all the funky transliterations, such as š show up correctly, too. But, pointed Hebrew doesn't do as well. Sometimes it shows up perfectly; other times, you get a character or two on a line, then some blank lines and a few more characters. Strange...

What about the Kindle™ with PDFs? Not so good. It just allows a page view. You can re-size it, but, it doesn't re-flow. You have to use the buttons to move the screen. Talk about a pain!

But, you didn't buy an e-reader to read PDFs, did you? I didn't think so. So, how does our Hebrew fare on the Nook™? It doesn't. Period. It doesn't show up; it doesn't even leave funky squares to let you know it's missing. Frustrating!

The Kindle™ fares a bit better. The Hebrew font displays fine; the character size is correct and readable. One problem, though. It's backwards. Yep. It goes left-to-right! So, I thought maybe that was a function of the stripped down operating system in the Kindle™, so I borrowed a Kindle Fire™, which is Android™ powered, thinking it would do better...Nope. Still backwards...

So, what's a scholar to do? Well, enter the iOS devices. We dumped one of our books onto an iPad™. Sure enough. It was all there—and right-to-left even!

So, how is it that some books with Hebrew are showing up in Kindles™ and Nooks™? Well, it's easy—sorta. You take the file and turn all the Hebrew into a graphic. But, there are several problems with that: 1. It doesn't scale well when you change the font. 2. It isn't searchable! 3. It takes extra labor and therefore costs more.

So, don't be looking for a huge flood of academic books into the e-book market anytime soon...

By the way, most of the cost of a book is in the editorial and prepress (typesetting) process. The physical books are a small part of it—at least if you still edit your books, which Eisenbrauns does. Not sure about some other publishers.

I was reading a book this weekend and came across a sentence that used "then" where they clearly meant "than." Ouch! This was an academic book, too...