This year Sony tested the patience of e-book fans like me by twice delaying the release of its new PRS-500 reading device, originally promised for the spring. The company finally started taking orders over the Web in September, and the gadget can now be purchased at electronics stores and select Borders bookstores. Was it worth the wait? That depends on the size of your wallet.
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The Sony Reader PRS-500 holds hundreds of digital books and displays them on a unique "electronic paper" screen invented by MIT Media Lab researchers. (Credit: Sony)
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The Sony Reader's main selling point is its black-and-white "electronic paper" screen, which is not, of course, made from trees. It has been advertised as a far better imitation of real 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 loaned to me by Sony, I'm happy to report that the device lives up to its billing. It isn't a replacement for paper--but it's enough of an improvement on older generations of e-book readers to impress this veteran student of the technology.
In fact, I'd say the Sony Reader is the first e-book device that's good enough to appeal to a large swath of readers, even given its hefty $350 price tag. The only major drawback of the system--and, in fairness, it's one that has marred almost every attempt at making electronic books into a mass-market product--is that content for the device, which must be downloaded from Sony's Connect eBooks retail site, is overpriced.
But early adopters, at least, aren't daunted by high book prices: so far, Sony hasn't been able to ship enough devices to keep up with demand. Personally, I'd been waiting for Sony to release an English-language e-book reader since 2004, when the company introduced its first e-book device, the Librié, in Japan. My interest in electronic-paper technology dated back to 1999-2001, when I served as managing editor for a technology news site called eBookNet. (The site was owned by a now-defunct 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 fact--in 1998.)
Even back then, I was already aware of an electronic-paper technology being developed by E Ink, a Cambridge, MA, startup founded in 1996 by researchers at MIT's Media Lab. The scientists' 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 at that spot (the equivalent of a pixel in an LCD screen). The technology held out the promise of both higher resolution (since the colored particles are smaller than conventional pixels) and longer battery life (since the particles stay in place, without any further expenditure of electricity, until the user calls up the next page).
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Comments
dhartsoc
11/08/2006
Posts:1
conrad777
11/08/2006
Posts:1
wroush
11/08/2006
Posts:6
hjstevensii
11/08/2006
Posts:1
joseparc
11/08/2006
Posts:3
By comparison, Sony's prices look pretty good to me, because reading a book does become cheaper. Having just thrown a whole bunch of old paperbacks away, I believe that the tangible element is not all that important in the "read once and forget" segment, a definition covering probably 95% of the whole printed media market. I'll be happy, when I can take all the newspapers, magazines and books on my reading list on a plane without having to check the weight and how to stuff all that paper into the tiny pocket in the seat ahead of me.
But I'll be in reader's heaven if I have to pay only for what I do read, say 99 cents per article or chapter, rather than 15 dollars for the whole magazine or book. It worked for Apple like magic, it could work for Sony just as well.
If they play it right, Sony et al. have the chance to become the iTunes of printed media!
MadInIsrael
11/08/2006
Posts:1
The point is that most people have laptops, and they keep developing at a break-neck speed. They become lighter and more versatile (think of the switchable laptop-tablets), and their battery lives start to increase significantly (top of the line laptops/tablets can already do 10 hours straight). Best of all, this trend is not slowing down. So 5-10 years from now, we will have extremely light laptops/tablets, and battery life won't be a practical issue. Then why carry around a separate ebook reader device, when your laptop/tablet can do it all?
gabrielg01
11/08/2006
Posts:400
It's hard for me to pay the cost for a reader that's equivalent to a whole desktop, and then pay close to hardcover book prices for a download that costs them almost nothing.
I want the author to get rich, but I'd rather not get ripped off at the same time. Paying full hardcover price for a classic with the author long dead is even worse.
I'm not cheap as a rule, but I hate to pay greed.
asdar
11/08/2006
Posts:69
"content for the device, which must be downloaded from Sony's Connect eBooks retail site . . ."
This is incorrect as written.
rttedrow
11/08/2006
Posts:43
wroush
11/08/2006
Posts:6
From what I have read of the device, Sony has made it possible to load some content that is not Sony DRM-ed material. Without all the advantages of the Sony-supplied stuff, but still. Also, if one Googles "sony prs 500 hack" one will find an abundence of ways to make the Sony Reader more accomodating, and so more worthwhile. Here are the first two search results from Google:
http://www.rudis.net/2006/10/28/prs-500-reader-diy-pdf-rss-feeds
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/09/make_on_the_new_sony_prs500_ei.html
Finally, one need not be a Nostradamus to see that unless book publishers become considerably more flexible than the recording industry in terms of sources and terms of sales and prices, we will soon be seeing [or at least hearing of] pirated ebooks available gratis on the internet. No question about it. None.
rttedrow
11/08/2006
Posts:43
But you were specifically talking about text, so in this case the resolution of newsprint is something like an order of magnitude better than eInk.
ms
11/08/2006
Posts:129
wroush
11/10/2006
Posts:6
We sell libraries comprised of full-text, interlinked, digital reproductions of Bibles, dictionaries, commentaries, and other theological books. Most customers buy the eBooks on DVD or CD-ROM and transfer them to the hard drive of their desktop or laptop. Books are then accessed via the Libronix Digital Library System which provides tools and reports for searching, marking up, and working with the content.
It may be that the nature of these books makes them uniquely suited to use in a more stationary, study environment. Most are reference works, not start-to-finish reads. But it's also true that thousands of pastors, missionaries, and chaplains take their laptop and digital library everywhere they travel. The user experience is greatly enhanced by the ability to jump between books, juxtapose information from multiple books, or stop to read straight through a section or article.
In terms of the economics, we typically sell individual eBook volumes at nearly par with discounted, print volumes. The sophisticated digital library features and tagging add a lot of value.
But in collections or bundles, we're able to get the price down to around ten cents on the dollar and still have something left when all the royalties are paid. The top-end Logos Bible Software library contains more than 700 books and carries a list price of $1,379.95. In print, the same 700 books would cost nearly $12,000! These collections, our bread and butter, represent quite the opposite approach as that taken by Apple and iTunes.
Our customers also buy discounted eBooks via a prepublication subscription program (www.logos.com/prepub) but this comment is getting too long already so I won't go into details...
I hope our experiences in this industry are helpful in thinking about some of the factors at play here. People who study the Bible tend to be "book people" so it seems likely that their preferences and buying behavior carries over to the broader population of eBook buyers.
Daniel Foster
Logos Bible Software
DanielFoster
11/08/2006
Posts:1
mkogrady
11/10/2006
Posts:202
1) The e-book reader must not be bulkier or heavier than a typical guidebook
2) The device must be sturdy and withstand some physical challenges. People often carry a guidebook in a backpack, and consult it outdoors, where it can be exposed to dirt, dust, etc.
3) For some books, having a color display and higher resolution will be important (being able to read detailed maps, for example)
There is also the issue of royalties to the author. As very small-time operators ourselves, we earn less than $1 per sold printed copy of our guidebooks. The bookstore earns the lion's share of the profit, but an e-book might be sold on-line directly by the publisher, eliminating the relatively "expensive" middle man (bookstore). And the publisher doesn't have printing costs, although they still have other production costs. I would think this should bring down the expected cost to the consumer to at least 60% less than the cost of a printed book.
I do believe the e-book is the future for guidebooks as well as novels, reference books, and many other venues. It probably won't replace the beautiful pictoral, coffee table style of book, however (at least not in the same form as a device to be used for other applications).
wingpeople
11/10/2006
Posts:1
Greg
gregarious
05/12/2009
Posts:1