It’s that time of year again, and I’m starting to think of things I want to ask Santa to bring to me. I’ve been pretty good, so I figure I’ve got some leeway. I’ve been mulling over a few things, but nothing grabbed me until I saw another poster mention the Sony Reader and started wondering if such a device would be good for me.
Pros:
– My bag of books always weighs more than my suitcase when I travel. *Won’t someone please think of the poor bellboys? *
– It seems to have a night reading feature, which would be nice for reading in the car at night or in bed.
Cons:
– I love the tactile sensations which come from a physical book: the smoothness of the paper, the smell of the ink, and that awesome “virgin book” crackle you hear when you open it for the first time.
– I don’t generally read best-sellers. I’m concerned that I won’t be able to find the titles I want. They say “thousands of titles” but I’m wondering if that may mean “Every book that Tom Clancy and Danielle Steele have written plus whatever Oprah’s plugging.”
Tell me, those of you who have one of these devices or something similar: Do you like it? Is it comfortable to read for long periods of time?
Have you had any trouble getting the books you want? Can you get books from any website that sells them in electronic form, or do you have to use only the company’s approved site?
I want a Sony Reader pretty badly, but I don’t think badly enough that I want to fork over $350 for it.
But for all the joys of the tactile sensations of a book, think about the negatives:
spine breaking
thick books being hard to hold and keep open
losing your place when it falls out of your hand
sometimes, in really dry air, the feel of that dry paper
pages that get torn, dog-eared, or stuck together
hardcovers that are heavy and awkward to hold when you read them.
Personally, I think if I had an E-book reader that offered me the same quality of print and the same lack of eyestrain, yet was in a nice leather case and only weighed a few ounces, I’d rapidly find it to be much superior to books.
A couple of things annoy me about the Sony Reader, though. The first is the price. The second is the cost of the books. I’m simply baffled by these companies who think they can get away with selling a non-copyable E-book for 90% of the price of a regular book. First of all, the regular book can be lent to friends or sold back to a second hand bookstore for half its value. That makes the E-book much less useful and actually more expensive. Second, We all know that the price of a book is what it is in large part because of the cost of printing, shipping, the cut to the bookstore, and the cost of eating remaindered books. E-books cost a tiny fraction of that to distribute, and there’s no reason why the savings shouldn’t be passed on to the consumer.
If a new hardcover book that regular sold for 25 was 8.99 as an E-book, and non-bestsellers and older books were available for anywhere from .99 to $2.99, I’d be the first in line. It seems to me that the ‘right’ price for the market is somewhere in that range. But instead they try to nail you for almost the same price. $7.99 paperbacks are $6.39 in eBook form. That’s simply ridiculous considering how limited they in use with Sony’s DRM.
Also, the first reviews are saying that the screen isn’t quite as nice as it first looked. It doesn’t have quite the display area of a paperback book at standard resolution - it shows about half as many words. The display isn’t crisp black on crisp white, but a much lower contrast dark grey on light grey. And the pages take a full second to turn and the screen goes black during the interim, which the first reviewers have found somewhat annoying.
For me, I’d say eBook readers are almost ready for prime time. We probably need one more generation of technology improvement and one more round of price cuts. Make the Reader $149, make the display a little nicer, and cut the cost of books in half, and these things will start to take off. For now, I think early adopters only need apply.
Unless an Ebook reader is much larger than it looks in the picture, I’d say you’d be better off with a PDA. Mine’s not high end, but it does what an e-book reader does and a whole lot more… and for considerably less money. I use it for reading stories, but also listening to music, and using MSWord away from my computer (AFAIK only Ipaqs have office on them). I’m sure that readers are nice, but they seem awfully limited to me considering how much they cost - sort of like picking a word processor instead of a computer years ago.
It’s bigger than a PDA, it’s got an 800 X 600 screen resolution at 172 DPI, which is way higher than a PDA screen, the display technology looks like print with no eyestrain, and it doesn’t consume power while you’re reading - it only takes power to flip a page, and Sony says it gets about 7500 page flips on a charge. So this thing almost never has to be charged up. You might charge it a couple of times a year.
Those are big advantages over a PDA, if your primary purpose is reading books.
I got my Sony Reader Tuesday, and it’s more beautiful than I expected!
The display, with its new eInk technology, is amazing and very booklike. The text is crisp and a pleasure to read for long periods of time. The screen size is just like a page of a book, and the text can be sized S, M, L. The unit has a classy appearance and feels solid and responsive. I like the included cover, which has a silk-like finish, is light and thin enough not to add bulk and weight, and folds back without hand-strain. I had ordered the leather cover, but cancelled that once I saw the included one.
Lissa, there is not a night-reading feature. The screen is not backlit like an LCD. But I have found that it’s easier to read in lower-light conditions than a paper book is. The makers of the Light Wedge will make one for the Reader if the sales are good enough. But in the meantime, there’s a good $10 clip-on that is recommended for night reading.
The reader is easier to hold than a book is, much less strain on my hands and wrists than a trade paperback, and easier to prop in strange reading positions, like lying down on my side.
I’d read this too, and was nervous about it, but I was delighted to find that the screen was bright and the type was crisp with plenty of contrast, but not so much as would cause eye-strain. The page-turns are only that slow when there is embedded art or photos. Otherwise it’s easily unnoticed once you get your pace.
This is my first experience with ebooks, and I must say that within a couple of minutes I forget I’m using a device. It’s that non-intrusive. In fact, I found that I read faster and more comfortably with this than with a paper book.
I, too, love to fondle my books, and nothing will ever replace the sensory experience of paper, but I see no problem in having a second mode of reading for appropriate situations. It will never replace books, but it’s an amazing parallel experience.
There are several books and excerpts pre-loaded on the Reader in the proprietary format, but I’ve since downloaded a number of free and low-cost books and genre books, mostly science fiction from Creative Commons sources, Baen, SciFiction. The Reader beautifully displays .txt and .rtf files, and html is easily converted to .rtf via free software. Pdf files aren’t handled as well. The text cannot be resized in pdf form, and full-page formats display too small. However if the pdf is formatted to fit the Reader, it looks nice (the user manual is in this form).
The $350 includes a $50 coupon for downloads from their Connect site. There are 10,000 books already available there, and the list will hopefully grow. The site needs some improvement technically, but I was pleased at the range of books offered. I, too, don’t read bestsellers, but I’ve got a long wishlist from the site.
If anyone has any questions, I’d be happy to try to answer them.