At the height of the Internet boom, e-books were hailed as the shining new tomorrow for publishers and paper books were heading for the scrap heap. But the bubble has burst and electronic books are still the poor relation to the printed word with consumers preferring to turn the pages themselves when they curl up by the fire with a good book. "The limitless euphoria of the beginning belongs to the past," said Arnoud de Kemp, a leading electronic publisher with the science and business media firm Springer.
Three years after the e-book frenzy reached its peak, publishers in Frankfurt for the world's biggest book fair of the year were in a much more realistic frame of mind. Last month, top U.S. bookseller Barnes & Noble Inc announced it was halting e-book sales. "We did not see sales take off as we and many others had anticipated," a spokesman said. Targets have been sharply lowered and now publishers look on e-books as a much smaller market which does still, admittedly from a very low starting point, see steady growth. "Expectations were widely overblown at the time of the Internet bubble," said British publisher Helen Fraser, managing director at Penguin. "But there is a small market for them and it may grow as different reading devices appear on the market. Sales do go up month by month," she told Reuters.
News source: Reuters
Three years after the e-book frenzy reached its peak, publishers in Frankfurt for the world's biggest book fair of the year were in a much more realistic frame of mind. Last month, top U.S. bookseller Barnes & Noble Inc announced it was halting e-book sales. "We did not see sales take off as we and many others had anticipated," a spokesman said. Targets have been sharply lowered and now publishers look on e-books as a much smaller market which does still, admittedly from a very low starting point, see steady growth. "Expectations were widely overblown at the time of the Internet bubble," said British publisher Helen Fraser, managing director at Penguin. "But there is a small market for them and it may grow as different reading devices appear on the market. Sales do go up month by month," she told Reuters.
News source: Reuters
- 10/10/2003 - mIRC v6.11
- 1.Fixed channel folders join bug, wasn't setting focus on a channel window properly.
- 2.Fixed raw on/off not setting/unsetting red dot in remote toolbar button.
- 3.Fixed /fwrite text display bug.
- 4.Fixed $duration(N,3) bug with large values.
- 5.Fixed $base() bug when converting decimal places from one base to another by limiting the maximum precision allowed.
- 6.Fixed /hdec bug.
- 7.Fixed /mkdir bug.
- 8.Fixed $os, now returns 2003 instead of .NET.
- 9.Added language selection option to agents speech dialog. Must have the required agent language compenent installed.
- 10.Fixed /qmsg /qme display bug if not on a channel.
- 11.Undid change relating to firewall exclude list, in some cases mIRC has to depend on the socks5 server to resolve the address.
- 12.Fixed switchbar option via View menu not showing/hiding minimized window icons.
- 13.Fixed servers popup menu gpf bug.
- 14.Undid $submenu() change.
- 15.Fixed $comcall() $dllcall() gpfing with insufficient parameters.
- 16.Fixed favorites recent menu bug displaying channel keys.
- 17.Fixed Control+KN color bug when N was larger than 15.
- 18.Fixed favorites folder display of folder icons.
- 19.Favorites folder now allows multiple selection.
- 20.Fixed switchbar display bug when displaying the dcc send/get progress bar.
- 21.Fixed multi-byte mark/copy display bug.
- 22.Fixed gpf when attempting to load a corrupted png file.
- 23.Fixed bug with binary variables being unset too early in some situations.
- 24.Fixed identifier warning feature triggering on remote identifiers outside of remote events.
- 25.Fixed /color changes not being saved correctly.
- 26.Changed control/ignore dialog, now displays unignore seconds instead of minutes.
- 27.Fixed status window titlebar not showing "logging on" message when first connecting to a server.
- 28.Fixed /server not using the specified port.
- 29.mIRC no longer performs a soft disconnect.
- 30.Fixed right-click channel/query popup menus sometimes using incorrect nickname.
- 31.Fixed keys not working in popup menu items that don't use the & prefix.
- 32.Empty lines in popup menu scripts are no longer removed.
- 33.Fixed custom dialog tab control display bug.
- 34.Fixed Right-Alt key bug. Still works correctly as AltGr on keyboard layouts that use AltGr.
- 35.Added $sorttok(text,a) switch which sorts both text and numbers in a list. $sorttok(text,n) now behaves as it did in previous versions.
- 36.Changed /away handling, and fixed $awaytime.
- 37.Changed various API file-handling calls to c-runtime counterparts due to API calls resulting in some strange behaviours (most likely due to buffering) when used intensively.
- 38.Fixed duplicate separators bug in popup menus.
- 39.Fixed $highlight().color returning incorrect color index. If no color is selected, returns index for Normal text color.
- 40.Changed /fopen behaviour, now fails if file doesn't exist. The -n switch creates a new file, fails if it exists. And -o creates a new file, overwrites if it exists.
- 41.$fopen() now returns $null if you reference a name that does not exist.
- 42.Fixed $md5() bug with plain text containing % characters.
- 43.Nick color list now uses the ignore/protect/etc. lists even if ignore/protect/etc. in the control dialog are not enabled.
- 44.Address book whois section no longer strips control codes.
- 45.Control+M in the Script Editor now displays the More dialog. The Editbox in the More dialog now performs auto-completion.
- 46.Fixed "move server to top on connect" option not always moving the last connect server to top.
- 47.Improved dual monitor handling for @windows and custom dialogs. The script editor is still displayed in its last saved position.
- 48.Fixed $mask() gpf bug with long parameters.
- 49.Fixed /timerN without parameters listing all timers.
- 50.Added /echo -c color name switch, eg. /echo -c action text. The line color uses the selected theme in the colors dialog.
- 51.Fixed $* gpf bug.
- 52.Added auto-hide nick list option in channel nick list dialog.
- 53.During a dcc resume, the last 8192 bytes are chopped off only once the transfer actually begins.
- 54.Fixed /hload and /hsave with binary files when some items in table are empty.
- 55.Fixed windows not being auto-tiled when switchbar is moved.
- 56.$online now returns value based on settings in timer dialog.
- 57.Fixed dde gpf bug.
- 58.Fixed /filter numeric sorting bug.
- 59.Added /showmirc -m switch, minimizes according to tray options.
- 60.Fixed $fline() bug with wrapped lines.
- 61.Fixed numeric 472 not being displayed or processed by scripts.
- 62.Added support for server password in irc://password@server links.
- 63.Fixed menu handling bug that affected the favorites popup menu as well as various other menus under 95/NT.
- 64.Fixed /fseek -wr bug when the last line in a file did not end in a CRLF.
Last edited by 11680 on 10 Oct 2003 - 23:21
Thanks,
Barry
More than 90% of the ebooks are books which you wouldn't even buy the print editon of.
Maybe they could sell them and immediately you have to register them to your self, and then you can't share because you risk give your id and password to someone else.
IMHO University textbooks are just getting too expensive.
Even if they did it for pc, laptop, or ppc too. Anything would be better than lugging around 50 pounds of paper that cost you $400. lol
My college has this event set up at the end of the semester where they buy your books back. The books cost you somewhere around $350 for 4 classes a semester, then they'll give you $25 for your $350 worth of mint condition books.
it's a monopoly I tell you
Case in point: I bought a $10 book from Amazon. I was presented with two options: Adobe PDF, or Microsoft Reader's LIT format. I chose Adobe, because I believe PDF to be more cross-platform compatible (and I will be switching to Mac in December), and also because I have Adobe Reader on my Palm. I usually read PDF eBooks on my Palm, which I find to be easier on my eyes than my laptop.
Unfortunately, after I bought the book, I discovered that I could not transfer the book to my Palm, as it was DRM protected. I also discovered that since the release of Acrobat 6.0, Adobe has discontinued support of the regular eBook reader (and disabled new installations of it).
Long story cut short, I have to read this 500 page book on my laptop using Adobe Reader 6. I have to scroll through this book like a webpage, because Acrobat Reader doesn't support an eBook viewing mode.
Amazon won't give me a refund (I don't blame them, it's not their fault) and I have yet to contact Adobe. I squarely blame them for this. They bought Glassbook and their software, then killed it.
No wonder eBooks aren't popular. It's not like Adobe's doing their part in keeping the industry alive.
One of the advantages of physical books in a physical store or library is that you can discover someone or something you weren't even aware of. I often go into a book store not looking for anything in particular and just look around until something catches my attention. When I was 12 years old, I discovered one of the most influencial authors in my life this way. At the time I had never heard of this author (Robert Heinlein) or even the genre he wrote in (science fiction). I simply stumbled upon one of his books by chance.
Throughout the entire course of my life, without having had many physical books collected in single locations for me to examine at random, I may never have discovered this or many other authors or subjects that I wasn't aware of. I can't think of how I might have accomplished this using any digital medium.
It sounds kind of stupid to say it, but one of the drawbacks of digital information storage and retrieval is that in most cases you have to know what you're looking before you can find it!
When computers are light enough, and can imitate a book or at least a piece of paper, then I'd think about buying one.
It bloody rocks!
Adobe PDF's look like crap compared to this new format (wait, PDF is crap!
So keep a look out for a new reader soon
Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!
Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.