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New Sony e-Book Reader

Kookamoor

Kookamoor

New Member
Check out this new eBook reader from Sony. Could this possibly take off like the iPod? If you go to the link (which should be available for the next week or so, I think) you can see a picture of the eBook Reader. Despite the enthusiasm of Dan Brown this certainly seems to have a lot of potential ;).

I can't really imagine it replacing the printed page, but I can certainly imagine it augmenting it. You could receive magazine or newspaper subscriptions through the Reader, or students could easily download course notes in .pdf format. I only question how easy it really is to read. I don't really like eBooks at the moment because they can't be read comfortably. I'd really like to see one of these things.

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2006/01/07/1136609985601.html said:
Sony to turn up volume for reader

January 7, 2006 - 10:02PM

THE printed page is facing its biggest threat with the launch of the first electronic book that people can read for hours without straining their eyes.

Sony's Reader is the size of a slim paperback but can store hundreds of books at a time. When the cover is lifted, books are displayed on a sheet of electronic "paper", one page at a time.

Although electronic books, or e-books, have been around for several years, previous versions using LCD screens have never caught on. The biggest complaint is that readers' eyes quickly become tired from the glare and flicker of the conventional computer screen.

But the Reader displays its text on a page of high-resolution electronic paper virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. Electronic paper also needs relatively little power, so the life of a battery should not be a problem.

Sony, which launched its Reader at the Consumer Electronics Fair in Las Vegas, believes that the invention could do for reading what the iPod has done for listening to music. It is selling books for the Reader from its online shop, Connect.

Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code, is an enthusiast. "It is not about replacing books," he said. "But e-books offer features that traditional books cannot." For example, rather than carrying several books while travelling, owners of a Reader need take only one on holiday. "If I want a new book, I can download it instantly online even if it is two in the morning," Brown said. It takes only seconds to download a book.

Brown said students would soon be able to carry all their books with them and ensure that they always had the most up-to-date edition. Eventually, the lower costs of publishing e-books would encourage publishers to take risks on lesser-known authors, he said. "The effect of this is that there will be more books in print and more choice for readers," he said.

The Reader is expected to go on sale in America in April at $US300 ($A400) to $US400. It should arrive in Britain soon afterwards.

Owners will be able to buy books from Sony's online store, download them to a computer and transfer them to their Reader. They will also be able to download free any books that are out of copyright.

The gadget is designed to be held in one hand, and the pages are "turned" at the press of a button. It can also display drawings and pictures, and the text can be enlarged up to 200 per cent to make it easier for readers with poor sight.

Sony says the rechargeable battery will power 7500 page turns between charges.

The page is made from millions of tiny capsules, suspended in a transparent liquid coating a plastic film.

DAILY TELEGRAPH
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The original Sony Librie was a disaster partly because it was designed in part by lawyers worried about litigations - it had a preposterous DRM mechanism that deletes books downloaded into the Librie after 60 days.

But the new one should be interesting, and will probably succeed if it's comfortable to use and easy to get new material.

I'm happy with my iPAQ at present. :D

ds
 
Hmmm, sounds interesting. I'd like to see it. The only thing that would bother me is the cost of the Reader, and the availability of books. If they are only available from the Sony site, will they have all that many books? And what format will they be in? Plus, at the moment, borrowing books is saving me a lot of money, so I don't know if I'd be keen on the idea of having to buy every book I read. How much do e-books cost anyway? :confused:
 
Looks interesting. It's nice to see that someone is finally addressing the eye strain issue. I tried e-books on my PDA back in the day and just couldn't do it. I can't stand reading them off of the computer either, so it wasn't much of a surprise.

However, the price is just way too high for something with only one function. Perhaps if it would play music, store phone numbers, track my appointments and clean my house once a week I could rationalize the $300-400 on top of the price to DL the e-books themselves.
 
the gadget is designed to be held in one hand, and the pages are "turned" at the press of a button. It can also display drawings and pictures, and the text can be enlarged up to 200 per cent to make it easier for readers with poor sight.
Click to expand...
Ideal for users of porn, then.
 
This does look interesting - maybe this will be my first dabble into e-books.

angerball said:
How much do e-books cost anyway?
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From what I can see from the screenshots of their store, they mostly cost from $15-$25. The Da Vinci Code, for instance, is $15. So basically normal prices, I'm guessing?
 
I saw this on the news and checked out the website, and wasn't that impressed to be honest. I think all the digital readers miss out a lot of the things people like about books, the human aspect - someone commenting on a book you're reading in public because they recognise the cover; or the enjoyment in physically feeling the pages pile up under your left hand and diminish under your right as you work your way through the book; or being able to put your thumb in the book and flick back to an earlier section which illuminates or chimes with the bit you're currently reading (although I suppose bookmarking etc will be available on the Sony reader to achieve a form of that); or getting pleasure out of seeing the spine of a long-read book on your shelf and having a host of pleasurable memories flooding back, from the book itself but also from the rest of your life at the time (the most vivid books etch our past as well as music does). And so on! Not to mention more prosaic issues like lending a book to someone or how many non-mainstream titles will be available... I'm saying no for now!
 
MonkeyCatcher said:
From what I can see from the screenshots of their store, they mostly cost from $15-$25. The Da Vinci Code, for instance, is $15. So basically normal prices, I'm guessing?
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That's insane! :mad: I wouldn't pay that much for an e-book. The most I would pay is something like $5. :mad: I mean, think of all the overheads and expenses they save - it should be way cheaper than a paper book.
 
You'd also think electronic journals would be a lot cheaper for the same reasons, but they're not. The prices of scholarly journals have skyrocketed in the past 20 years or so - academic librarians are tearing their hair out trying to figure out how to pay their subscriptions to the basic journals the school needs... the bills add up to six figures and more per year, just for access to the electronic copies of journals that only go back 5 years or so. It's ridiculous.
 
KristoCat said:
You'd also think electronic journals would be a lot cheaper for the same reasons, but they're not. The prices of scholarly journals have skyrocketed in the past 20 years or so - academic librarians are tearing their hair out trying to figure out how to pay their subscriptions to the basic journals the school needs... the bills add up to six figures and more per year, just for access to the electronic copies of journals that only go back 5 years or so. It's ridiculous.
Click to expand...

I have just discovered that. Not for educational establishments, or libraries (I don't have a clue about those), but having done some searching for journal articles, and come across a few from publications my university doesn't subscibe to, I have found them to cost over £30 each in some cases, and for a single student (or anyone who needs access to a journal article), for 24 hours access.

So you have my sympathies!
 
I think that if the PDF files (or whatever they are) could be offered as a bonus for purchasing the dead tree version, they could get themselves some customers. But if I'm paying $15, I want something to show for it; not a bunch of electrons. Even if I could have the option of adding on the e-book purchase for, say, $3 more...


...this from an original Rocket eBook owner!
 
Thanks for the link!

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2006/01/07/1136609985601.html

http://theage.com.au looks like an interesting periodical, so I created a folder, Periodicals, in my netvouz.com bookmark account and added it. Another link I want to add is http://www.aldaily.com (Arts and Letters Daily, if I have remembered the link correctly).

I wonder if the users of stone tablets looked askance at those new-fangled sheepskin scrolls (I am certain the sheep did.) "Never catch on", they would say, "Flammable! And useless. If a judge throws the book at you, what injury will you sustain? " And then, millennia later, all those scroll users looked askance at bound books.

As a child, going through grade school and high school, I was literally deformed from the huge load of books I had to transport daily, back and forth, from school, in the 1950s and 1960s. My step son, in the 1990s had the advantage of backpacks (I had only a leather briefcase), but he was equally deformed.

Think of the convenience of making everything available electronically! One need not speculate about how many copies of an edition to print, or where to warehouse them. There is no labor or expense to stocking them, affixing price tags, checkout, dealing with returns.

Of course, I foresee a whole new class of excuses for not having the homework ready. "I forgot to recharge my reader!"

Textbooks seem to be such a racket! Some textbooks cost over $100. And how long are they useful before the curriculum changes?
 
Nice to see you back Sitaram.

I've made pretty much the same point in the ebook thread not too long ago. And yes, well, I suppose there is an element of romance and nostalgia attached to long time book readers, but I still think before long, ebooks will be pretty mainstream.

I do agree about the prices though - if Sony charges too high a price for ebooks, then it's going to fail to go mainstream. Sure, we can fill up the reader with free books from Gutenberg, but hey, that's not where the money is...

ds
 
There's a lot of good free stuff on the Web in PDF form, I've come across quite a few scientific articles and there's even some old out of copyright books I've scanned in myself. If the gadgets had a large colour display they could be very useful for reading these. :)
 
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