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Monday, January 01, 2007 Tech's LibrisContinued from page 1 By Wade Roush
Sony was careful to make the quarter-kilogram device, which weighs about as much as a two-thirds-full can of soda, comfortable to hold and easy to operate. There are special buttons for navigating from any page in an e-book to the table of contents and to various chapters; there's another button for changing the text size, a helpful feature for the bifocals crowd. The device lacks a search function, but you can skip through a book in 10 percent (or 10-page) increments, and there's a bookmark button. The only two buttons you have to remember, though, are the ones for paging forward and back. And you can press those buttons up to 7,500 times before the Reader runs out of power, according to Sony. I believe it. I charged the device once, used it for more than 20 hours, and never came close to depleting its battery. But if you buy a lot of e-books from Sony's online bookstore, you will quickly deplete your wallet. The "Connect eBooks" store is to the Reader what iTunes is to the iPod and is almost as easy to use; customers browse titles using a Windows program provided with the Reader, download purchased e-books to their PCs, and manually synchronize their Readers with their PCs. The store offers a decent range of current and backlist titles, at prices comparable to those Amazon charges for print books. For example, the electronic version of Walter Mosley's Fortunate Son, which lists at $23.95 in hardcover, is discounted by the publisher to $17.95, and further discounted by Sony to $14.36. (Amazon charges $16.29 for the hardcover.) But I can't see readers paying that much for e-books. A $5.95 paperback, cheap as it may feel, is a concrete thing. In fact, I doubt that e-books will be seen as a viable alternative to commercial print books until they're so cheap that their ephemerality doesn't matter to buyers. With iTunes, Apple has demonstrated that for downloadable songs and TV shows, this magic price point is $1 to $2. Because reading an e-book is so different from reading a print book, e-books aren't directly comparable to downloadable songs, which can sound just as good as CDs. Still, I'd guess the magic price point is quite low; personally, I wouldn't pay much more than $5 or $6, or about the price of a low-end paperback. Of course, high book prices aren't the only reason the Sony Reader may be slow to catch on. Many people's pockets and purses are already stuffed with more gadgets than they'd like. A dedicated e-book reader may not make the cut. And while Sony's device is capable of displaying Word files, PDFs, gray-scale graphics, and RSS feeds (including news stories or blog entries downloaded each day from the Web), it doesn't do any of these things as well as laptops do. Still, when it comes to pure readability, the Sony Reader proves that e‑book technology is finally good enough to appeal to parts of the mass market. In fact, it may be just the first of a new generation of reading devices: in November, iRex, a Dutch spinoff of Royal Philips Electronics, started shipping the iLiad e-paper device (which looks remarkably similar to the Sony Reader but costs more than twice as much), and rumors in the blogosphere indicated that Amazon was working on its own e-paper device. Now hardware makers and content providers need to settle on a business model that makes sense to consumers. Economics, not ergonomics or engineering, will determine whether the second coming of e-book devices lasts longer than the first. Wade Roush is a Technology Review contributing editor. Sony Reader |
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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.