For my own SlideMountain world (a work that I’m most proud of) I decided that the proper send off would be via a blaze of scripted destruction. Performance art, in a 2.5D metaverse.

After a maddening series of lag and connectivity issues, I kicked off the process today around 8pm or so.

The harbingers of doom arrived early

It seemed only fitting that I use the Multim0d script sequencer that I released a few months ago (and I have to say it worked pretty well :-)). The various effects plugins were written in an insane rush, between holiday obligations, etc, and could only be tested up to a point. Oddly it was not easy to guess exactly how long it would take to erode things from fully-running world down to bare tiles. Turned out to take almost an hour.

Yeah, you really “had to be there, XD”, but here’s how it went: First random clusters of objects were suffused with a blue-ish glow and then slowly pulled across the world into cluster of 4 moai surrounding a sparking lava core. Once there they were slowly deleted. Gradually, the clusters increased in size and the sliding speed was increased until all world objects had been destroyed. Then the moai vanished.
For the last stage the terrain began to “melt” in a multistage fading and leveling process, randomly distributed across the world grid. This was the one part which worried me a bit and sure enough the “erosion” process code caused a stack bust when tackling the 100×100 grid and a crowd of onlookers. I quickly flipped to a fall-back that spiralled through quadrants and everything completed nicely.

And that was that, weeks of work nuked in less than an hour.

It was a sad but strangely satisfying end to something I’d worked hard to complete and which was a source of amusement for many people. But to me at least, better than letting things evaporate at the flick of a switch in a server room.

And to all the avs who popped in to watch the “Meta Meta Immolation” let me just say thank you for your attention, camaraderie and support. Indeed, Best Wishes to all the MP community!

Metaplace is dead: the metaverse is just getting started. Onward.

It was soon joined by: a narrow strip of tape holding a set of underwear in a bundle, a jagged tear from a jasmine tea packet, a small, fragile and ripped anti-static bag, a twist cap from a water bottle, some remnants of shrink-wrap, a blade guard from a safety razor and a millimeter long fragment of red tinsel garland.

Only the water bottle lid is marked with a plastic identification code (#2, high density polyethylene) indicating recyleability. All the rest, every dinky bit, is without any obvious further use, destined for the garbage sack and dim points beyond.

Perhaps they will migrate far away, down the hill across the valley and out into the Great Pacific Trash Vortex, a mass of plastic crap twice the area of Texas. Perhaps they will drift evil and help choke a pelican or a turtle.

At best they will just be passive parasites, adding noise to food identification signals and taking up space until something comes along that can digest them. Will it be something that is friendly to the human-sustaining ecosystem? Maybe a microbe that sinks some carbon and excretes some water and oxygen along the way. Can we wait? Do we have to?

It seems that the potential of crap to commodity (”C to C” ?) processing should be a multi-billion dollar business, even with the current fledgling state of bio-engineering. Waste farmers armed with tweaked-out microorganisms, wielding digestion for the greater good.

Or perhaps the little bits of plastic crap are here to stay, a secondary life form condensed by an enzymatic action of human industry. A quiet organism whose replication and adaptative core is completely external to its form, residing instead in human memes. These controlling and facilitating memes are in turn parasitic aspects of human adaptation which must be culled in any long-term human future. A subtly toxic grey goo, independent of nanotech.

But likely it’s just a lot of garbage, produced by ignorant meat-sticks in their haste to earn a cheap buck. And the first generations of waste farmers will taste a new and hyper-lucrative arbitrage game thus far undampened by serious competition. Perhaps too, waste farming/mining will be the coming-out event for bio-engineering, as the science quickly begets the tech that begins to suck up all those discarded commodities.

For the moment however my little pile of resin orts requires a trivial immediate personal cost to discard, against an equally trivial near future return. The reversal of that time-valuation calculus will truly represent an economic revolution.

So several months later and I have gained a measure of fluency with the Lua-based toolchain and the art and gameplay idioms, met a variety of amazing and creative people, produced a number of effect and tool plugins via the MP commerce marketplace and have made a couple of well-regarded worlds.
Yesterday morning I finished a new, large and richly-scripted snow sport world that I’d been working on for a few weeks. It immediately filled up with enthusiastic and complementary players, and rocketed up the ratings charts. Good Times.

So when I popped over to the MP forums to post the official release announcement and saw the sad sad news that Metaplace.com was closing up shop Jan 1 2010, I may have stopped breathing for a moment. All worlds, all content to be lost to the winds.

And of course a big gut-wrenching loss is to the staff who lost their jobs in the middle of the holiday season.

Now, businesses come and go and the loss of a web platform is not unprecedented, to say the least. Various web sites and services have been lost in the past. But while basic web such as text, images and video are common media forms which may be copied to a variety of archival platforms, when a proprietary platform like MP goes down, the “content” may well go with it. Sure we can do screen and video captures, but the live part of the environments, the actual magic of metaverses, just evaporates.

And while it’s easy to smug sagely about the eeeeevils of proprietary platforms and walled garden architectures, the loss of all that creativity is deeply painful. It is not, after all, as if the ‘free’ time was spent watching TV or some other passive dissipation.

True archiving would preserve the platform as well. I know an audio engineer whose priceless archival recordings of live jazz are accompanied by the tape recorder(s) and monitors used to make them. Perhaps this trends to the obsessive audiophile stereotype, but for metaverse preservation it’s a fair bet that preserving the physical server platform is essential.

Perhaps in the future the Internet Archive will expand into the metaverse preservation domain, after all it would seem to be a logical evolution for them. But for now it’s a matter of well, loss mostly. Someone with deep pockets could simply buy the MP rackfuls and employ some curatorial staff to keep them running, but I doubt that will happen.

So, it ends: the venue, the domainful of art and assets and the friend/buddy cohort. And we’ve got just a few days, right in the midst of a major holiday/vacation season, to make our screencaps and videos, assure our scripts are saved locally, revisit our favorite places and exchange contact information.

And to recall some highlights that will probably fall outside of the rough archiving processes:

• The first screening of the excellent (best yet, IMO) virtual world documentary “Another Perfect World”.
• The groundbreaking “Rockin the Metaverse” series of live music performances., featuring (among several others) Grace McDunnough, Doubledown Tandino and Raph Koster himself.
• Various industry ‘celebrity’ speakers holding forth generously at The Stage world.

There are also a couple of things whose loss will only reinforce their importance:

• A soon-to-be-dissipated vibrant and creative community. Some of the more hard-core are likely already present in other metaverses, so they may well just change channels, so to speak. But the easy-access web-based MP platform was really good at bringing in fresh metaverse users who will find few acceptable substitutes at the moment. Their “outsider” perspectives are extremely valuable.
• The open User Created Game platform domain for which the loss of MP leaves a large and damaging void. Although in any such open system there is a lot of crap, there were also more than sufficient gems to compensate. So also tally up a loss to gameplay innovation.

As for my own modest contributions I’m most proud of the Multim0d “script sequencer” tool and API that allowed non-programmers to assemble in-world effects and manipulations into complex composites (e.g., disco floors, swarms of angry penguins, simulating snowboard-style avatar movement and all manner of tile animations.)
I also made a popular set of animated fire, the web-embed Isoasis and Regionware places and of course my comically ill-timed “SlideMountain” world, released literally hours before the closing announcement.

But the real talent of Metaplace can seen in these amazing, entertaining and insprirational works:

Happy, Dark City and Wonka (by Xuemei, probably my favorite MP creator)
Kyoto, Steampunk (Dalian)
Space1599 (TheBeeKeepers)
Thousand Rooms, Atlantis (J9scarborough)
GeoQuest, ZooEscape (John)
Fishing, Metapark (Legend)

And well, a great many more. Metaplace is still for the moment a living thing, full of creative expressions. Check them all out while you can

But high performance costs restrict adoption.

Not too very long ago embedding video in web pages was a big deal. A lot of client hardware wasn’t up to the task and in any event adequate deployment platforms were not widespread. The quasi-ubiquitous deployment of the Flash runtime has resulted in FLV video becoming the de-facto (though unfortunately proprietary) web video platform. Right place, adequate functionality, right time…
So, how about embedding a metaverse “player” in a web page?
There are various groups working on browser-based OpenGL and other 3D rendering, with some working toward eventual Second Life or OpenSim clients that run in-browser. Other efforts leverage Flash, such as Vivaty, Metaplace and the recently departed Google Lively.

Another technique is to run the heavyweight client app within the server farm, capture the user-screen, encode as video and relay to user. Basically app-to-video. You can then play the video in a lightweight browser plugin using Flash. User commands can be proxied to the “client head” at the server farm. This technique is performance-bounded by the video codec operations, but does allow for zero-deploy goodness.
Of course command latency can be a real concern, depending on the twitch factor of the game. But then latency and lag always cause problems.

Demos of this kind of thing have popped up now and again (including some by teams including myself). One notable effort demoed Second Life “running” on an iPod Touch/iPhone.

A more general solution has been recently shown by GaiKai. If they can deliver what they show in that exciting video it will be a Very Good Thing indeed.

Yeah, it seems almost a return to the days of remote Big Iron and local dumb terminal. But not exactly.

Since I’ve been spending some time there lately I’ll focus on Metaplace.
Metaplace is a Flash-based 2.5D browser based metaverse. By going with the simpler isometric environment Metaplace avoids beating their collective heads up against cutting edge browser performance barriers, while still establishing presence and refining system dynamics. Metaplace worlds are easily web-embeddable as shown below. From the embedded link you navigate and interact normally within the world. Unfortunately at the moment there is no provision for “guest accounts” so you can only see the actual embedded world if you are a Metaplace member.

As expected, Metaplace has relatively low requirements. Basically a box that can run a browser with the Flash plug-in appropriately fast to handle YouTube videos should be at least minimally sufficient.
This very low barrier to entry is a tremendous advantage. Another advantage of web-embedded metaverse engines is the seamless integration with the web. Links triggered from within a Metaplace world can just pop open tabs/windows on your browser, allowing you to easily move between contexts.

Overall I think the Metaplace team has done an excellent job, but see for yourself. I’ll leave the link up as a kind of companion metaverse for this blog, feel free to drop in anytime.
UPDATE: Jan 01, 2010: Embedded link removed since Metaplace is no more

Never mind the fancy business models.

Never mind the rent-seeking.

Much of the time what I want is to simply dump articles, clippings and pages to the Reader for later, offline reading. I don’t want to fumble around with loading SD cards, custom applications, server uploads or postscript tweaking. Basically I just want to treat the reader like a printer.

Sure, there are various workarounds for this but none have the simplicity of just printing. And the support infrastructure already exists as the “print page” paradigm for web pages is well-established.

Naturally any implementation should handle necessary format conversions to assure the best possible rendering for the given device. Hardly exotic behavior for a printer driver.

Look, I like the “iPod of books” tag and the sync paradigm has its advantages but most of the time what I want is a paper replacement. An official printer driver should be included with every Sony Reader and Kindle.

Popping over to the Sony ebook store I immediately find they have “The Complete & Uncut Edition”. Excellent! I hate how King’s novels always get cut down to a whispy scant 800 pages or so.
And the price is…US $35. Wow! That’s a lot for an ebook version of a novel published in 1978 by a super-popular author. Isn’t it? Since I find the Sony store prone to overpricing their books I’ll just look elsewhere.

OK, top of the search results: same edition ebook available from Random House. Hmm, US $50! No thanks.
A few dodgy torrent sources pop up, but I like books and authors and have this silly idea that artists should be compensated for their works. So no leeching. (hold that thought.)

Just for kicks, I check the Amazon store, as if I had a Kindle, but find only “Title is not available”. So much for that. It is however, fairly encouraging that other King ebooks recommended on that page are about $8 bucks each. And amusingly, a new DVD copy of the 1994 movie for sells for just $26. But to be fair it’s not the new “uncut” edition. Anyway King’s work is usually better in book form.

Other vendors offer the novel in a range of formats and prices, from $15 - $43, but none of the formats will work on my PRS-500 eReader. Hoorah for standards.
I could just grab the mobipocket version and do some conversion voodoo, but I’d like to avoid possible conversion artifacts and legal PITAs.

So for my $350 ebook reader I can either buy an unsupported version for about $15 bucks and perfom a possibly low-quality / quasi-legal format conversion or shell out $35 for a bona-fide Sony-compatible version of “The Stand’. And to think they say these things will never take off!

EPILOGUE:
OK, nevermind the ebook and H1N1 virus, how about regular, olde-school paper?

Amazon lists a range of hardbacks, used-new-first editions, $15-$500 + shipping, but since I have to go out anyway I decided to just swing by the local big-box bookseller. Unsurprisingly, they have it. The nice stack of fat paperbacks is prominently displayed right next to a speciality section of disease-disaster thrillers. Well that’s some responsive marketing, you sick puppies!

But the real disaster is the $8.99 paperback itself. Very poor quality, uneven printing, flimsy pages (all 1000+ of them). Worse even than the regular paperback edition of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (which literally fell apart in my hands as I was reading it).

A Prime Argument in any iteration of the somewhat silly “ebook vs paper book” debate involves the tactile and other sensory aspects of holding a physical book in the hands, riffling the pages, the the look, the feel, smell, etc. And also the keepsake element of a tangible object. This argument is largely neutered by shoddy printing and cheap bindings. Yeah, I know, it’s a mass-market paperback so what do I want? Well, how about something that allows me to experience the author’s art without eyestrain? How about something that doesn’t look like it will fall apart well before the 1000+ pages can be turned? I have a copy of the similarly massive “Swan Song” by Robert R. McCammon that I must have bought 15+ years ago. Its clearly printed pages are still intact and readable thus demonstrating that at least a nominal level of paperback quality IS possible.
After a few minutes of trying to convince myself to just buy the damn cheap paperback I walk out of the store empty-handed.

So in the end I’m left with the public library, that dependable bastion of the written word. And indeed I should have gone there first, since they had a nice hardcover copy of “The Stand” just sitting quietly on a shelf, waiting for me. I was mildly surprised that some other twisted soul hadn’t beaten me to it ;^)

POSTSCRIPT:
While I’m of the firm opinion that ebooks should be priced less than their paper-based versions, I might have paid about $15 or so had a compatible ebook version been available. It’s also clear that I’ve been spoiled by the crisp e-ink display of the Sony Reader (also on Kindle) as evidenced by my somewhat snobbish dismissal of the cheaply-done paperback. And whomever may benefit from hefty ebook pricing and cheap paperback printing the only certain thing is that, just as in the case of ‘piracy’, Stephen King lost a sale.

Libraries Rule!

Wafery thinness

So for whatever reason I was thinking about that stuff recently and spent some time digging around the web. Unsurprisingly no luck, and no Wayback luv either although I’m sure there is a paper copy boxed away somewhere.

Anyway, it seems like it’s time for another ’snapshot’, this time scribbled out on a somewhat higher ‘hill’ in the Sierras and posted on a somewhat more memorious Internet. So, here’s the 2009 version:

The 1995 version rambled on for a couple of pages, but I live a more terse life these days so I’ll stop now ;-()

I recently re-read the novella and found it to be every bit as astonishing today, 25+ years on.
In terms of technology certainly things have advanced quite a bit since the 1980s, and all too often such rapid change dooms speculative fiction to quaintness. Occasionally however an author will really grok a technology progression and ride it right into tomorrow. Such is the case with Vernor Vinge, and True Names is notable for its descriptions of the emergence and leverage of mindspace, that particularly disruptive technology just now in its MMORG-3D infancy.

Once startling ideas become over time, commonplace. Today we are well along the path of integrating the “cyberspace” of the internet into our cultural fabric. And in these days when the “Singularity” concept is creeping ever into the mainstream (at least as half-baked trendy cliché), some of the mind-expanding aspects of True Names may not seem all that shocking. For example, in order to comprehend and manage data-streams beyond the handling bandwidth of basic humans, the protagonists learn to leverage extra-human sensory and processing tools, delegating lower level “awareness” to external computational processes much like the autonomic nervous system handles our breathing and other ‘background’ bodily processes without higher-level tending. It is at this point the flesh and blood protagonists transcend human awareness, in small steps at first, accelerating onward at an increasing rate. It is the cusp beyond which science, to the static observer, appears as magic. It is the seed of the Singularity.

Now this ground has been well-covered by a variety of authors in recent years, with notable efforts by John Barnes in Mother of Storms and Charles Stross in Accelerando. And probably even well before, in glancing blow, by Teilhard de Chardin. Indeed you could argue that this is an aspect of tool use that has been with us from the first fur jacket.

However at the time, as a punk kid knowing little about exotic phenomenology the “bootstrapping awareness” concept hit me like a lightning bolt. Even now it is, I think, one of the more powerful concepts illustrated by True Names. Barring self-extinction, Humans will continue to use, integrate and finally subsume a complex armamentarium of tools, ever increasing in power and ever decreasing in viable lifetime. Mindspace will inevitably exceed the mind.

In addition to their lush, adventurous prose Gibson and Stephenson gave us ‘cyberspace’ and ‘metaverse’, respectively, establishing themselves as visionaries of the modern internet-laced world. But prior to both, with his 1981 novella True Names Vernor Vinge provided a startling vision of extra-human mindspace, a vision that we are only now beginning to experience in the most primitive forms.

The fact that this classic and influential work was out of print for so long and remains somewhat obscure, when the shelves of your local big-box bookstore are larded with all manner of tedious crap is, well, a True Shame.

I first encountered her work in the 1954 film Secret of the Incas, itself a gem of obscurity (The lead character is basically Indiana Jones, down to fedora and leather jacket, and a couple of scenes presage ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’).  Sumac had a small role, but it was her ethereal singing that cast the lasting impression. Some songs from that film are included on her first album “Voice of the Xtabay” . She later had a show in 50s-era Vegas, a long period of reclusion and then a kind of resurgence. 86 short years.

Happy Journeys Yma Sumac, your voice will live forever.

Around early March the northwestern Reno neighborhoods of Mogul and Somersett began getting a lot of seismic activity, sometimes dozens of small M1-M2 quakes in a single day. There have also been a number of M3s and a few M4s, including a late-night M4.7 that shook up a lot of people. Because most of these quakes have been very shallow they are very noticeable, even M1 and M2 “micro-quakes” that usually  escape notice. And the M4s are way more violent and frightening than any M4 quake should be.

At the moment the rate of the quakes seems to have dropped off quite a bit and are no longer a kind of all-day background shimmer, but the sudden and often booming shakes continue. Just last night (about 4am) for instance a sudden loud M2.6 sounded like the ceiling cracking open.

The USGS web site has a lot of interesting data feeds so I thought I’d generate a bit of chart porn for the 2008 Reno Quake Swarm.

First-off, some disclosure: All graphs are prepared using USGS public data feeds (here and here) from 1970 to present. The region is restricted to a box marked by 39-40N latitude and 119-120W longitude (which includes the Mogul-Somersett area of Reno, NV) and only M1 or greater quakes are shown. And of course I am not a seismologist/geologist, have nothing at all to do with the USGS and these graphs are presented purely for curiosity and ‘entertainment’.

To start, here are the earthquake counts per year from 1970 to May 1 2008. Notice anything?

And the monthly breakdown for 2008 shows that April was shakin’.

The 26th was particularly active!

And just to round out the set:

So we’re getting lots of quakes this year, way more than in other years. And so far, April 2008 seems to have been the peak.

OK.

I’m about  a mile or so away from the epicenter of the swarm we are feeling lots of frequent shakes. How does the quake frequency of this current swarm compare with the historical record?

To take a look at quake historic quake frequency we’ll move away from the marketing-style charts and go olde-school:

The USGS provides timestamped data for quake events. By measuring the inter-quake time intervals for that data set, you can make a graph showing the number of hours between recorded quakes in the target area.

Note that on a count-based graph like this, the x-axis does not denote time, but rather a count of previous events, backwards in time from the present day. I have however, indicated a few dates just for reference.

The first graph includes the complete data set from 1970 to the present. You can see that the quake frequency really began to pick up on about Mar 8 2008, and that there have been quite a few quakes in this current swarm.

The second graph is scaled to show more detail for the current swarm. Wow, they were really coming fast and furious for a while there!

Well there you go. It would be interesting to see other likely regional swarms in the past and I’m sure the professional seismo people have long since published such work. But if I find a bit of free time I’ll do some auto-correlation analysis and post a few more graphs.

It sure seems that there has been an increase in the time between quakes over the last few days, but I’ll leave it to the experts to decide if this swarm is ending. I for one will be glad for this to be over and can certainly do without the sudden booms and crashes in the wee hours!

Update for May 8 2008:

Yep, still shaking.

Here’s an additional quake frequency graph that includes data for this last week. Note that the scale is changed to show more detail.

As you can see the quake rate has dropped off, although they continue to occur every few hours or so. And of course last night we got a M3.8 as a reminder that the ’swarm’ is still kicking.

Update for May 16 2008:

After working into the wee hours last night I awoke around 10am and a few minutes later the house got a pretty good rattle, enough to wiggle the bed and shake some books off a shelf. Easily an M3, I thought. Well that little quake must have been really shallow and right under me since the USGS site marked it as M1.6!

I’ll take that unwelcome wakeup call as an excuse for one last (?) inter-quake interval update. This update is based on data up to May 14.

I guess we’d all like those intervals to be growing a little faster, but considering the recent M7.9 tragedy in China I’ll gladly take hundreds of small rattles over a couple of larger catastrophic temblors.

First-off, whatever the ultimate fate of the Kindle, Amazon has certainly got the PR game in hand. Kindle is all over the popular press right now, including a lengthy Newsweek cover piece by Steven Levy. The Sony Reader may have a year’s head start but I wonder how much of that sales advantage will evaporate in the coming weeks.
In one sense Amazon is at a slight disadvantage due to the fact that Sony, being first to market with the Reader, has already tapped some portion of the ereader appliance early adopter market. Are such leading edge buyers ready to cough up another $400 for this latest hotness? And then there is the absurdity of DRM content lockdowns and format incompatibilities that continues with Kindle. For my Reader, for instance, I have purchased a couple of dozen DRM-locked BBeB format books that I can’t resell and can’t legally convert for use on another device, such as Kindle. Of course I knew this going in so I’m not whining, just saying “Behold device lock-in, in your face !”.

But the main area in which Amazon looks to win is selection. I have wasted a lot of time searching around the relatively sparse Sony Connect site for books to buy. Think about that. A customer who is ready to buy, but nothing to sell him. I don’t know the business internals of Sony Connect, but it sure seems that they rolled their own store instead of partnering with an established bookseller with a comprehensive stock. The Reader, like Kindle, is the quintessential long-tail gadget, but without a deep backlist it’s little more than a novelty. A couple of months ago Sony announced a partnership with Borders that would deepen and/or replace the offerings of the current Connect store. But nothing yet and, well it may be too late to help thwart the Kindle release and overwhelming PR blitz. Anyway, isn’t Borders an Amazon partner?

Much has been written about the Web-connectivity features of Kindle, and I agree that OTA book purchases represent a second significant advantage to Amazon. But IMHO, Web browsing not a particularly good use of the current generation of e-ink based devices. Due to the slow refresh rates and relatively low pixel resolution of e-ink screens graphics must be converted, animations culled and text reformatted. Why else would Amazon try to charge you monthly fees for otherwise free content? The EVDO-connected Kindle may be good for basic emailing and reading RSS or other Web text, but many of us can already do that on our mobile phones. And if I felt the need to purchase a portable, non-laptop web device I’d have to go with the $299 iPod Touch, trading EVDO for WiFi and because the iPod display is faster and renders much more detail than the e-Ink displays of Kindle or the Reader.
So while the net connection for Kindle may allow all kinds of communications activities, it really need only exist in order to facilitate impulse purchasing from the large Amazon catalog. Other uses are marketing gravy.

But despite its debatable email utility, WAP-reminiscent formatting woes or Web format conversion vigs, the Kindle appears to offer superior ereader utility to that of the Reader. If Sony wants to stay in the game, at the very least they had better respond to the access and selection advantages of Kindle. Perhaps they can address the access challenge with a USB-based WiFi accessory, something small and self-powered. As for the selection and backlist, well that’s Amazon’s turf and strength. Maybe the Borders partnership can help. Perhaps Sony can compete by eliminating DRM-restrictions although I doubt publishers are yet ready for such a move. Whatever Sony does it had better be quick and smart because Amazon just grabbed their lunchbox.

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.

Come to think of it, we’re nearing the tenth anniversary of that landing, wow! And just around the corner in 2009, the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Almost 40 years and we haven’t been back.

That’s just sick.