mandarine

A new technology is slowly but surely gnawing at the marketshare of e-books. P-books, now distributed by many traditional publishing companies (under a license from inventor Goodmount Inc., Streetburg, AL), openly aim at seducing and bringing e-book readers over to the other side, with an outrageous number of claims in terms of technological superiority and innovation. I have taken some time to actually compare the various features between e-books and the dreaded p-books; the results are presented below, in as unbiased a viewpoint as I could achieve, my natural preference for good-old e-books notwithstanding.

P-book technology

Goodmount Inc., inventors of the p-book reading technology describe the product in those words:

P-books feature two major breakthroughs in information technology: non-binary digital encoding and immediate storage. They offer readers unprecented reading ease with unmatched ruggedness, at a very affordable price.

The inventors are quite discreet about what is under the hood, but I have tried to read between the lines, and hereafter are my best guesses. Non-binary digital encoding simply means that the information is encoded as a series of signs that can take more than two quantized values, not just ones and zeroes. It is not new per se, as the ten-value encoding scheme (’bits’ with values between 0 and 9) has been used by all makers of mechanical computers and calculators ever since Blaise Pascal’s Pascaline in 1642. However, the revolutionary approach with p-books is to abandon computation-oriented encoding schemes and choose an encoding where each sign can take as many values as there are written characters (approx. 200 for latin alphabets). This precludes any use of the stored information for calculations, but in return allows to store text in a very straightforward (should I say ‘immediate’) manner. Contrary to binary encoding, one does not have to carry an ASCII or Unicode table to relate a sequence of bits to a letter (e.g. ‘a’ is 01100001, ‘w’ is 01110111, etc.) but a simple table saying ‘a’ is #97, ‘w’ is #119, etc.

But then comes the brilliant part: instead of trying to save storage space and define a physical arrangement of quantized structures that will store numbers between 0 and 200 in the most area-efficient way, inventors have deliberately chosen to store character data in a very wasteful format, but which makes reading possible with no piece of hardware (nor software, for that matter). Let me be clearer: by using the light-absorbsion characteristics of carbon-micrograins embedded in a thin diffuse-reflective composite matrix made mainly of bleached cellulose fibers, and by not miniaturizing or densifying the character patterns, the inventors managed to have a data storage system that can be read by human eyes. In addition, each of the ~200 codes is stored in the actual shape of the corresponding character, meaning that we do not even have to translate via a correspondence table, thus eliminating the need for any algorithm, therefore software. This is what they call immediate storage, meaning that the data on the storage medium is directly accessible without the intermediate use of hardware or software.

This technological leap forward is quite impressive, and I admit it makes for a very interesting reading experience: you can carry a p-book almost anywhere, even in the very rare places where there is no power supply of any kind.

Hardware

The storage medium is quite bulky: 5 x 8 inches is a typical size. But as I said, this was intentional, so that human eyes could actually access the data without other hardware or software. The material itself is an array of composite sheets of cellulose fibers (C6-H10-O5)_n, with various thicknesses or weights depending on models and grades.

Extreme effort was spent in order to make p-books as rugged as possible, largely benefiting from the no-electronic-hardware / no software design paradigm. An average p-book can withstand a 2m fall with minor material consequences, and as the content is stored digitally, minor physical transformations do not alter the meaning of the data. Damp-resistance, heat-resistance, and resistance to dusty or sandy environments put p-books way ahead of laptops or handhelds. So much so that a primary marketing niche for p-books is probably the military.

There are downsides to the no-hardware concept, though. For instance, contrary to all laptops and most handhelds, there is no backlighting on p-books. Reading a p-book in the dark is impossible. An optional piece of hardware has to be purchased, but then we lose the power-advantage of p-books over e-books, as most lighting peripherals use batteries.

Another disadvantage is that one has to hold a p-book with both hands: to gain weight, there is no locking device to hold the hinge at the back of a p-book in its open position: it always wants to come back to its ’standby’ state. Again, you need a hardware option to free your hands, contrary to e-books (see table below).

Built-in copyright protection

Although Goodmount Inc. do not admit it outright, it looks as if the whole technology was tailored for copyright protection. This is probably why p-books are becoming such a huge fad among publishing companies. But it is certainly not good for readers. For instance, it is impossible to copy-paste content into another document. Some brilliant hackers have found a way to do this, but it involves optical scan and OCR, and the result is far from convincing. The Xerox company is now producing industrial machines that would be able to copy p-book documents without the OCR step, but the process relies on analog technologies (when p-books are essentially digital), resulting in a quite lossy copy. After two to three copies, the original p-book content is corrupt and unreadable. In any case, should I want a personal backup of my p-book, the cost of the consumables for the Xerox machine is quite prohibitive (see below).

Costs

The issue of cost is a difficult one, as the market target for p-books seems to be the under-equipped readers. Indeed, when you consider the cost of hardware, p-books are clearly much more affordable than e-books, as the basic version requires no hardware of any kind. Starting from scratch, a p-book is around 5$, while an e-book would cost at least 200$ (the cost of a handheld) up to 1000$ (for a good laptop). But if we consider that most readers now have access to digital hardware, then we have to compare the cost of storage space. There we show the limits of the wasteful storage approach for p-books: a Megabyte of storage on p-book medium is 5000 times as expensive as on electronic hard drives or optic DVD-RW. Anybody with a large collection of e-books will think twice before migrating to p-books. It will take decades before the p-book technology is mature enough to come level in terms of storage material costs.

Functionalities and useful options

Instant cold-start is a fabulous asset of p-books. Clearly they have spent a lot of development effort for this: you can open a p-book at any page in less than 1 second. As a comparison, my laptop needs a full minute for a cold start, and the reader software then requires at least twenty seconds to launch. A large e-book often takes ten seconds to load, while I had no problem to open a large p-book at page 1255 instantly.

Another brilliant idea is the fast-flip functionality: you can flip p-book pages as fast as ten or twenty per second. It takes some training, but then you find that you can very easily spot special text patterns on the pages or grab a word here or there. The feature seems really mature, and is available on almost all p-books. I confess that I would love to see such a feature in e-books, for which I hate the long scrolls when I look for something I cannot put an exact search string on.

Bookmarks are one of the weak points of p-books. While you can set as many bookmarks as you want inside an e-book for easier navigation, bookmarks in p-books are hardcoded as a flimsy ribbon sequence that the reader has to insert manually between pages. Few p-books are fitted with such a functionality, though. For the vast majority, you have to buy a bookmark option, generally available at any of the retailer shops for a small amount. For those who cannot afford 0.5$ on a bookmark, I have found a way to hack one myself: an old CD-rom or a bust memory card will do just fine.

No hyperlinks. This is where p-books are clearly not up to the task. I agree that 90% of e-books (especially novels and other literature works) do not need the functionality, but I still do not understand while p-books do not even include a provision for this, for instance in a version 2.0.

Another weak-point is the CTRL-F function. I have looked everywhere and could not find the function on any of the p-books I had purchased. Goodmount Inc. claim that the fast-flip option fulfils the same basic requirements, but I find that when I am doing research, having to flip through all of the pages is quite a tiresome task. An index could help me, but not many p-books have a really good one; novels and poetry works generally have none.

No zoom function. P-books do not meet standard accessibility requirements. A proof of this is the absence of a zoom function. I find this a rather miserly choice, even if p-book manufacturers claim that the underlying technology does not allow them to provide the zoom option. People with a sight handicap have to buy a compatible magnifier peripheral from an optics store.

Contrary to e-books and Adobe Reader 7, p-books do not come with autoscroll and read-out-loud functions out-of-the-box. For such features, you have to purchase the slavebot option, which is currently not distributed by any of the publishing companies or p-book distributors I could contact. Nobody was capable of redirecting my requests to a reliable website or address.
I called Goodmount Inc. to ask if they could at least deliver me a temporary slavebot license so I could conduct a full review, but they told me it would cost me 300$ a month, and that the slavebot hardware needed at least 2 square meters in my house for the 5 to 6-hour daily recharge cycles. I could afford none of the above conditions and therefore gave up. So we have to trust what the website claims about this option:

The slavebot option is an extremely valuable upgrade module. The cost of ownership is relatively high, but with a single slavebot license, you can enhance all your p-books, with no limit as to their number. Among the useful functionalities that a slavebot enables: automatic page turning (called autoscroll in e-books), speech recognition, reading out loud, and even literary commentary for professional-grade slavebots.

Overall, p-books are advertised as a no-frills reading medium, and I can clearly understand the lack of goodies as a marketing posture. However, for big readers and expert users, the limitations are all too clear to see.

Comparison table

	e-book (+laptop)	p-book (+nothing)
Power expense (W)	65	0
Ruggedness (fall from)	0.1m	2m
Ruggedness (heat deg. C)	50	150
Ruggedness (damp %)	80	99
Ruggedness (dust/sand ppm3)	< 1000	> 10 million
Ruggedness (fireproof)	no	no
Weight (g)	> 1000	< 200
Storage material	magnetic hard disk	cellulose composite
Resolution (dpi)	96	1440
Lighting	backlighting	no (option: flashlight)
Hands-free	yes (lap)	no (option: ledger)
Copyright protection	digital (electronic signature)	analog (built-in)
Cold start (s)	> 90s	< 1
Fast-flip	no (slow scroll)	yes
Copy-paste	yes	no
Bookmarks	yes	no (option)
Hyperlinks	yes	no
Full-text-search	yes	no (fast-flip)
Accessibility	standard	poor (option:magnifier)
Autoscroll	yes	no (option:slavebot)
Read-out loud	yes (speech synth.)	no (option:slavebot)
Cost of hardware ($)	500	5
Cost of storage ($ per Mb)	0,001	5

Conclusion

For all their briliant innovations, I do not believe p-books are in a position to replace e-books any time soon. They might conquer a small niche of readers, especially those that do not read a lot and those that do not have a handheld or a laptop. But on the whole, p-books are too expensive and lack too many basic functionalities to become as efficient a reading medium as good old e-books are.

Read on

Cross-posted at absidea

Read away

I swear I had not read this article before
Emily’s view on the subject

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