David Pogue provides a good review of Sony’s new ebook reader. His assessment is much like that of Ben Vershbow at the Institute for the Future of the Book.
This sounds like an advance in ebook readers, though not without a few quirks. But I remain unconvinced that its designers understand how we read.
Business Week Online has an article that is rather optimistic about e-books, primarily based on new display technologies. I think they are right about the technologies. But I don’t think they have really looked at how people read.
Digital Books Start A New Chapter
Many experts are convinced that digital books, after plenty of false starts, are finally ready for takeoff. “Every other form of media has gone digital — music, newspapers, movies,” says Joni Evans, a top literary agent who just left the William Morris Agency to start her own company that will focus on books and technology. “We’re the only industry that hasn’t lived up to the pace of technology. A revolution is around the corner.”
Thanks to David Stewart for pointing me toward the WSJ article by Terry Teachout. I’ve written several times about Sony’s development of the E-Ink technology developed at MIT. I had missed, until now, that Sony is developing an iTunes kind of arrangement with several book publishers. This new business model is worth watching…
WSJ.com – A Hundred Books in Your Pocket
ony has made another promise that is at least as significant: It will also open an iTunes-style online store from which purchasers can download e-books as easily as they download music onto their iPods. Three major publishers, HarperCollins, Random House and Simon & Schuster have agreed to sell their books through Sony, and HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster plan to make their entire backlists available for downloading as soon as they negotiate royalty rights with the authors.
Here is another article about the release of Sony’s Reader, an e-book device that uses Electronic Ink. It’s too soon to say with certainty, but I suspect this technology will emerge as a viable platform for reading e-books. Public perception of electronic text has shifted and this seems to bring a number of technological advances to the platform…
BBC NEWS | Technology | Sony Reader targets book lovers
It has launched a handheld device designed for electronic books- dubbed the Sony Reader – at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
It has a screen made from electronic paper that makes text look almost as sharp as it is on a printed page.
I’ve been following the development of electronic ink for over a year. This is the first commercial use I can recall. We may find e-book devices much more usable…
ABC News: Sony’s E-Book Is Easy on the Eyes
The Sony Reader, introduced here at the Consumer Electronics Show, is a book-size device that can store hundreds of volumes and display them, one page at a time, on a screen that uses innovative electronic-ink technology to eliminate the glare and flicker that make prolonged reading on traditional computer and handheld displays so uncomfortable.
Electronic books are not new, but they’ve never caught on big, at least partly because of the aforementioned display problems. Battery life has also been an issue: A fair amount of juice is necessary to keep a conventional LCD illuminated—and up to now, most devices that support electronic books have had LCD screens. Another problem with books on LCDs is that they don’t look so great in bright sunlight.
“There is one bright spot on the immediate horizon for e-bookery — electronic paper. This is a catch-all phrase for thin, plastic, embedded with tiny colored balls or black-and-white disks that respond to electric charge, creating text and graphics like pixels on a screen. The stuff is by no means new — the first versions were cooked up by the wizards at Xerox PARC back in the 1970s — but recently some commercially viable implementations have shown up — where else? — in gadget-mad Japan.”
MIT has been working with several companies to develop new technologies to make reading digital text easier to read. Electronic Ink is a technology I’ve been watching for several months. While we’ve focused much of our attention on reading electronic texts on computer screens, alternate technologies seem more likely to win the mass market.
The Japanese gadget-makers have come at the problem from a new angle: by temporarily “printing” words on a surface rather than projecting them on to a screen. Sony’s Librie is the first device to use a material called Electronic Ink — a technology based on microscopic capsules which turn from black to white with a tiny voltage.
They sound like an interesting advance on previous technology. But, display technology isn’t the only barrier to widespread adoption of electronic books…
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