dreamshovel

In October 2006 Sony began shipping its ebook reader (henceforth referred to as the ‘Reader’) and I couldn’t wait to get one. For me a usable electronic book is almost a mythical entity living in a world of the future that we’ve somehow missed, along  with the flying car.
Over the years I’ve used a variety of phones, PDAs, micro-laptops and one or two short-lived “electronic book” devices but none have provided a particularly satisfying ebook experience. Enter, the Reader.

The Screen
Once unwrapped and powered on you immediately see “The Screen”, the lauded E-Ink display technology making its large-scale consumer debut in the Reader.

This new display technology renders text that is crisp and flat and really beautiful. The background is slightly more dull light-gray than white, but the contrast is quite acceptable. And right away you encounter the difference between the e-ink screen and a backlit LCD. The E-ink screen, like a regular paper book, gets easier to read in brighter light. So unlike for instance, a regular backlit PDA, the Reader allows one to lounge around the patio reading, in the sun. More importantly, the display is very easy on the eyes, and I have personally experienced none of the eyestrain I had come to expect from reading text on a backlit phone or PDA display. Whatever happens to the Reader, the E-Ink display has set a new standard for portable display quality.

There is one display quirk in the form of a very noticeable flicker during page turns. It appears to invert black to white as the new page is rendered on the screen. It takes about a second for this repaint operation to complete, and the impression is of a “flicker”. Fortunately you habituate to this after about 15 minutes or so.

The Primary Assumptions

First off, the Reader is not quite yet the “iPod of books”. It is however a fairly solid book substitute and the further your expectation veers from this the more likely you are to be disappointed.

Here is what the Reader actually does well:

• provides a large number of books in a small portable package.
• provides a very comfortable display.
• allows you to move sequentially from page to page easily.
• runs for several days between recharges.
• looks cool.

Here is what the Reader does acceptably:

• purchase of book content through the Sony Connect site.
• transfers user-generated book and other content onto the Reader.
• plays audio (mp3) files.

Here is what it does rather poorly:

• render image-heavy documents, such as technical manuals.
• navigate pages outside of bookmarks or the Table of Contents index.

Here is what it does not do at all:

• keyword search
• navigate to a particular page number (outside of a bookmark).
• access internet information outside of the Connect web storefront.

Additionally the Reader is hampered by:

• Initial expense ($300+)
• Expensive content pricing.
• Connect web store supplies only Sony DRMed (BBeB format) content.
• Relatively limited content available via the Connect store.

Basic usage
The Reader is controlled by navigating and selecting items from a series of intuitive menus and lists. The responsiveness of the controls is slow and you must adapt.  As the E-Ink display itself is a bit sluggish, Sony seems to have designed the Reader’s user interface to minimize the adverse effects of a slow display.

The ten pushbuttons along the bottom edge of the display are soft-mapped to on-screen items and help to minimize the need for scrolling when choosing menu items. They also serve as “percentage jump” controls, seeking to 10%, 20% etc through through a document. You cannot jump to a particular page number, although you can bookmark any page with a single key-press.

In basic reading usage you mostly use only four controls (page forward, page back, bookmark and menu). Nothing to it. If you leave the Reader idle it will automatically power down in about an hour. The E-Ink screen supposedly requires no power when not changing pages and a single charge can supply a few days of usage.

There is also a button that selects zoom level. For plaintext and BBeB documents there are three zoom levels, but for PDF documents there may be fewer.

There is no keyword search facility and in fact, the Reader has no text entry interface.

The Content Caveats
The Reader may be the new hotness but there is a lot of ebook content out there, both commercial and public domain. So you don’t have to buy everything from the Connect Store, and you aren’t locked into only the default DRMed BBeB format.

But while there is a vast amount of available text content online, many (non-BBeB) text formats don’t render very well on the Reader without some tweaking and/or conversion. For instance, most PDF documents out there are formatted for an 8.5×11 inch page but the Reader cannot auto-reformat these to its much smaller display. And even a plain text file can require a nontrivial amount of format twiddling as you try to get the font size and word wrapping into a comfortable state. Even for the gear heads and hackers among us (huh, what?) this can be an incredibly frustrating process. For the vast majority of potential users who lack the ability or will to expend a nontrivial amount of time on the conversion of their preexisting text documents this is a practical show stopper.

And of course this is where the “iPod of Books” aspirations fall short because the Apple iPod is not just a device, it is a pathway for getting music and other audio to you, with a minimum of trouble and most importantly without requiring that you be a audio format and computer expert. Sony is unlikely to have widespread success with the Reader if they restrict their market to the computer experts of the world. Or, I suggest, that subset of potential users that are willing to restrict their usage to only content available from the Connect Store.

Content
Many items available at the Sony Connect store seem to be somewhat overpriced. For instance, “Pattern Recognition” the 2005 novel by William Gibson, costs about eight dollars for the paperback. Connect store charges $11 for the ebook version. And if you are interested in Gibson’s latest novel “Spook Country”, you can find it at Connect for just over $20 while the hardback version can be had from at least one major bookseller for about $17! Hmm, I’ll pass on that one.

On the other hand there are many books priced at less than $6. Other value is in availability, for instance rather than special order the apparently out of print “Scorpion’s Gate” by  Richard Clarke, I was able to download it immediately (in the cafe of the bookstore, no less) from Connect for less than the cost of a trade paperback. Just the kind of pseudo-long tail instant gratification jag you might expect in the ebook world.

Connect also offers a number of public domain titles like HG Welles, Mark Twain, etc. While these can be obtained (in TXT format) at no cost from sites such as the excellent Project Gutenberg, Sony provides good looking ready-to-go BBeB formatted versions. As the preparation of nicely-formatted plain text files can be tedious Sony’s value add here is convenient, albeit at a premium of US$5 or so.

Why not follow the lead of Apple and implement some aggressive pricing that will induce people to make more purchases. Not one price for all, but how about one flat price for new releases and other tiers for “stock” and “classics”. Maybe US$10 for new releases, US$8 for stock and classics for US$5. Basically the paperback price for stock.
Obviously there are significant publisher hurdles to be negotiated but Sony is a big and important company and could perhaps be a catalyzing force in bringing book publishing and distribution into the 21st century.
Because as you use the Reader the impact of decoupling literary art from printed format is constantly reinforced. Just as record companies have had to face up to the dwindling prospects of a business model based on selling plastic discs, book publishers should take note. Why not provide a full ebook voucher with each hardcover purchase? And perhaps, a discounted ebook voucher for a paperback purchase?

Just as with music disks there will be a market for physical books for a long time to come, but dead-tree editions may not be the primary delivery format for very much longer. Actually I wonder if even a decade will elapse before the market associated with the new-release paper book portion of the publishing business is matched by that of electronic media.

OK, let’s face it, reading is not as popular as listening. If Sony wants to try to make a go of the reader by milking the premium class of customers mostly, then good for them, but the reader will remain a toy until they, or someone else, introduces a ebook reader affordable by more than just affluent technophiles.

The Big Gripes

• Please NOTE IN PLAIN SIGHT that a particular book contains illustrations or photographs that are effectively useless or non-existent in the ebook version. As only one of many examples, the dead-tree version of the excellent “Failure Is Not An Option” by Gene Kranz contains a number of photo plates but none are included in the ebook version, and there is no notice of their omission. Granted, image display on the Reader is low-resolution, but some notice should be given of omissions.

• The Reader’s rendering of diagrams, technical charts and tables is less than satisfactory, to say the least. Even diagrams and tables in BBeB content purchased from Connect seldom seem to be formatted for the Reader screen limitations, and zooming is of limited utility. Nor is there any panning functionality. I view this as one of the main disappointments of the device and for me this deficiency, along with the lack of keyword search, precludes usage of the Reader as a technical reference tool.

• The default formatting for Connect store eBooks can be very frustrating. Often the text size is quite small (about 1/2 the size of text in a paperback) and a bit uncomfortable even though I have good eyesight. Zooming this text with the handy built-in zoom button to the medium or large levels increases the font size, sure. But the word wrap is very imprecise and littered with unsightly gaps as page flow and layout aesthetics of the book are destroyed. In a purchased book this is an especially grating deficiency!

• There is no way to erase or rename files without the PC-based Connect software.

The Big Worry
The current expensive pricing of individual book titles from the Connect Store, on top of the $300+ purchase price of the Reader itself amount to a fairly serious handicap for the longevity of the Reader.

But to me the big worry is that an expensive library of DRMed BBeB format ebooks is mostly worthless without the Reader device, and I have no interest in taking another ride on the sucker carousel and re-purchasing book content because of an orphaned product or DRM wrapper. Besides, egregious rent-seeking makes me very angry and Sony did after all cull the Aibo, another cool niche-driven gadget.

If ebook readers are to thrive, this problem MUST be solved! A successful ebook format doesn’t have to be perfect, just open and freely available. BBeB/LRF? PDF by default? Whatever, just as long as any ebook format standards interregnum is minimized. Perhaps the biggest impediment to ebook proliferation is not due to Sony or a jumble of document formats, but with the book publishers so feverish with worry of being ‘Napsterized’ they don’t perceive the benefits of being ‘iTuned’.

The Wish Lists
With the design of the Reader, Sony has done a very good job of keeping focused in order to deliver a product that acts like a book and doesn’t pretend to be a computer. But there are a couple of tweaks I’d like to see in a subsequent version:

• Improved word-wrap algorithm. Zooming often ruins page layout.
• Add an ability to jump to a specific page.
• Make the screen a bit whiter so as to improve the contrast. This may be difficult given E-Ink constraints, but nice to have.

Wish List for next version of the Connect Store and software:

• Clean up the extremely awkward Connect application and Sony store. The Connect Store user interface is marginal by the standards of iTunes, and for that matter other major commercial sites. It is updated from time to time, but remains rather clumsy and slow. A major revamp (in conjunction with Borders) is apparently under way. Please hurry.
• Lower prices of Reader and Sony Store ebooks. Books should be cheaper than their print counterparts. Until this is possible I don’t see wide acceptance of ebooks.
• Mac support.

Dream list for subsequent versions of the Reader:

• Add support for auto format conversion to the default BBeB format of the Reader.
• Add keyword search. This is a biggie both in terms of processing power and user interface makeovers as you would need to provide a means of text input. The Reader will lose a measure of simplicity here.
• One really effective feature for a Reading tool is to provide a built-in dictionary to lookup whatever unfamiliar words you might encounter. This requires a fairly responsive navigation system, and this of course requires a more responsive screen.
• A really nice service would be to assure that all words occurring in a given text are present in the dictionary. This will also require additional processor power, not to mention some measure of cooperation with publishers.
• Add WiFi to the Reader, and allow direct store browsing and purchases from the Reader. This will require adding a new store face to accommodate the slow response times of the Reader screen. Must use secure connection for all transactions. No doubt Battery life will take a big hit with WiFi.
• Make the battery removable. This is one area where the iPod is a BAD example.
• Decouple the Reader from total reliance on a support computer. Users should be able to delete files from the Reader, for instance, without having to use a USB-connected support computer.

Conclusion
While Sony’s first ebook reader effort is disappointing and frustrating in a number of ways, it does grow on you and in my opinion is the best ebook reader yet. I often carry the thing with me and have become used to having a few fresh books at hand whenever a bit of slack time crops up. Thanks to the Reader I have probably doubled my recreational reading and that’s always a good thing. Would I buy it again, after a year’s experience? You bet! I would however, strongly advise potential buyers to consider the costs and risks associated with DRMed book content. Those considerations, not minor technical quirks and deficiencies, should be your main decision point.

Update 10-2007
There is a new version of the Reader expected any day now. Apparently it allows direct page jumps, but still no text search.