 |
Sony Reader
(PRS-500)
$349.99
www.sony.com/reader
Credit: Courtesy of Sony
|
In 2006, Sony tested the patience of e-book fans by twice delaying the release of its PRS-500 reading device, originally set for the spring. The company finally started taking orders over the Web in September, and the gadget can now be bought at electronics stores and some Borders bookstores.
It was worth the wait. The Sony Reader's selling point is its black-and-white "electronic paper" screen, which has been advertised as a far better imitation of ink on paper than the LCDs found in laptops, cell phones, and earlier generations of e-book reading devices. After curling up for a couple of weeks with a unit lent to me by Sony, I'm happy to report that it lives up to its billing. It isn't a replacement for paper--but it is the first e-book device that works well enough to appeal to a large swath of readers, even given its $350 price tag.
If electronic publishing is to take off, a good reading device will be necessary but not sufficient. Sony's system for delivering e-books has a key weakness: content is too expensive. At the prices Sony and its publishing partners are charging for the e-book versions of current hardcovers, just 25 books will set you back about $350. The same problem has derailed almost every attempt at making electronic books into a mass-market product.
I'd been waiting for Sony to release an English-language e-book reader since 2004, when it introduced its first e-paper device, the Librié, in Japan. My interest in electronic-paper technology dates back to 1999-2001, when I served as managing editor for a technology news site called eBookNet. The site was owned by a startup called NuvoMedia, which manufactured the Rocket eBook, an elegant little device that captured my fancy when I first reviewed it--for Technology Review--in 1999. NuvoMedia is now defunct, the victim of high e-book prices imposed by publishers and an ill-conceived merger with Gemstar-TV Guide International. Most of its competitors went down, too. Sony was one of the first to reënter the market.
Even in my NuvoMedia days, I was aware of the technology being developed by E Ink, a startup in Cambridge, MA, founded in 1997 by researchers at MIT's Media Lab (see "Electronic Paper Turns the Page," March 2001). Their clever idea: sandwich millions of tiny, liquid-filled microcapsules between two layers of electrodes, the top one transparent. Floating inside each microcapsule are thousands of positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles. A negative charge applied at a given electrode on the lower layer pulls the white particles to the bottom of nearby microcapsules and pushes the black particles to the top, creating a black mark beneath the transparent electrode; clusters of these marks make up the equivalent of a black pixel in an LCD screen. This held out the promise of both higher resolution (since the pixels can be made smaller than those in LCDs) and longer battery life (since the particles stay in place, without any further electricity use, until the user calls up the next page). And this is the technology that Sony licensed for the Librié and the Reader PRS-500.
I'd long wanted to see E Ink's technology in action. And as it turns out, the Reader's six-inch-diagonal display is a beauty. It's 800 pixels high and 600 pixels wide, giving it a resolution of roughly 170 pixels per inch (that trounces a standard LCD's 90 to 120 pixels per inch), which means characters appear sharper and smoother than on other displays. The Reader's screen doesn't achieve the crispness of black text on the thick, bleached pages of a hardcover book. But the contrast ratio of the Reader's screen--the brightness of the whites measured against the deepness of the blacks--is 8:1, which puts it on a par with newsprint.
Audio »
Share »
Digg this
Add to del.icio.us
Add to Reddit
Add to Facebook
Slashdot It!
Stumble It!
Add to Newsvine
Add to Connotea
Add to CiteUlike
Add to Furl
Googlize this
Add to Rojo
Add to MyWeb
Favorite
Print
E-mail
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Comments
kmargh@yahoo.com on 02/06/2007 at 12:45 AM
3
I agree with this review's author that the price of ebooks are excessive. Epublishing elimates costs for printing, shipping, and stockings for many hardcover books; these costs account for the high price of hardcover books, especially those with photos. These costs should not be included in ebook pricing.
In fact, if I want to print some text from an ebook, I would be using my computer, printer, ink, and paper-- at my cost.
On the other hand, epublishing requires one master copy to be produced by publisher for each download website; and downloaded many times. Publishers already use computers to produce master texts for print books, so this can be adapted for dowloading, at very low cost. Thus epublishing should only factor in web related costs, which are much less, along with author royalties. An adequate royalty plan that doesn't rely on book price is needed.
Secondly, I am visually impaired and enlarge the computer screen to a great degree; I would love a portable reading device with disability accessibility features. If these were added to this device I would consider the price more warranted. This would involve adding readily available alternative format software, to enlarge text size, audibly read text, etc. Also, simple button access to these features is needed.
It is important for publishers to realize that ebooks should allow adjustments in font size and style [alterative formats], not limiting these to original 'artistic' print in hardcover copy. The text contents is the author's intellectual property; this should be protected. However, ebooks in alterative formats permit disabled people to read millions of books that are not produced in large print, Braille, or audible recordings. Not only those with vision problems, but those with learning disabilities and those with physical limitations would appreciate this.
mooncaine on 05/08/2007 at 5:23 PM
2
-bookmarks of my choice [long, thin ribbons are great for those thick books that have notes in the back, because you can mark both places with one ribbon]. Dog-eared pages, folded pages, and your auntie's handmade lace bookmarks count, too. All these things make your paper book easier to use.
-you can write in the margins
-you can quickly open it to any page, or, if it's a well-made non-fiction book, look in the Index. Every serious book should have one.
-you can drop it. Of course if you drop it in the bathtub, your book *might* be ruined. Drop an e-Book in the tub, and who knows what might happen? Definitely nothing good.
-you never need electricity [you might need light to read, but you don't need electricity, and the book never needs a recharge]
-you can look at two or more books side by side. Would you really buy two eBook devices for that? Not at these prices.
I think I'd rather have a waterproof, shockproof tablet Mac, with a screen like the one described in this article, than a dedicated book-reading device. At least the tablet mac would be useful for other things, and I'm already used to the context of computer use [i.e., never in the bathtub].
I found it ironic that the article mentioned "the contrast ratio of the Reader's screen--the brightness of the whites measured against the deepness of the blacks--is 8:1, which puts it on a par with newsprint." This coming from a website that publishes articles online in dark grey, instead of black, for no good reason except that some hip designers did it once in a while.
Usability tip: hip designers and web site marketers do not care about readability and usability as much as publishers and authors should.