Sony Reader Taking Hold?

An anonymous reader writes "Sony recently launched their latest attempt at an electronic book reader. The 'Sony Reader' is small and lightweight, about the size of a paperback book, and using E-Ink technology it only requires battery power when changing the page so light on power requirements. While it isn't their first attempt at an electronic book reader, critics are already predicting the Reader's success."

Comments

This will save my wrists!

[montyzooooma]

Having recently struggled through Johnathon Strange, The Cleric Quintet and half of the Thomas Covenant saga in massive hardback editions I am seriously looking forward to a convenient lightweight way to read these tomes.

Unfortunately with most ebook sellers pricing themselves higher than equivalent paperbacks it's going to take more than this to really liven up the market. I favour SF&F so Baen ( http://www.baen.com/library/ ) are a welcome exception. They offer DRM-free downloads and subscriptions AND offer a load of books for free download.

Doomed to failure

[Xenkar]

Paperback books are cheap. This ebook reader can't compete with real books so long as it will be priced $300 to $400. The only way eBook readers could become commonplace is if they give them away.

Re:Doomed to failure

[aussie_a]

The only way eBook readers could become commonplace is if they give them away.

Not true. They do have to become more reasonably priced then $400 US, but you don't have to give them away to sell them. Many people have bought PDAs mainly to read e-books. They are convenient and easy to store (I can take 100 books in the amount of space needed for 1 book). Don't underestimate that factor alone. Besides which, there is a TON of content online (I don't like reading long stuff on the computer, but on the PDA, let alone this e-book reader, I don't mind at all) that is either free or not available in print.

They'd have me if......

[aussie_a]

They'd have me if it was possible to install other readers onto it (I don't want Sony to write the programs, just make it so other people CAN write the programs and the user can install them on the reader). Alternately I'd be more tempted if their format wasn't DRM'd (yup, non-DRM e-books do exist. One store that sells quite a bit from numerous prominent authors (such as Kevin J Andserson) is Fictionwise).

I'm a big time e-book reader and I'm migrating to an e-book only library (for new books anyway). If Sony has success, that's great. But I'm finding it doubtful that they will, because if someone like me isn't interested, what is their demographic?

According to other reports it will support pdf

[antifoidulus]

without DRM, but I'm assuming that their book store is going to impose less DRM than the one they launched in Japan. In that bookstore, you could only "buy" your book for 2 months, after that it became unreadable. That defeats the whole purpose of having an e-reader! If I'm laying down $400 for an e-reader, I want to be able to bust out "Breakfast of Champions" on a whim, not make sure that my license is up to date before doing so. One of the reasons I don't buy a lot of books right now is that I hate having to find storage places for them, plus I tend to move around a great bit and shipping books is expensive and a pain.
I think a sanely priced bookstore would be a great idea, but till then I'm sticking with the library!

Why put a fake horse in front of the automobile?

[ian_mackereth]

These dedicated e-readers are all trying to look like a dead-tree book and are missing a big part of the point. My PDA is small enough to fit in my shirt pocket. A book, even a paperback, isn't. Neither is a paperback-sized e-reader.

It's like trying to make automobiles palatable to horse'n'cart users by putting a fake horse in front of it.

I do all my reading on a Palm (T3, if you care) and have done for years. All it took to make it worthwhile was a paper-white screen with 320x320 or better resolution.

Why do I prefer ebooks?
The 800-page book I just read weighed no more than the short story I read before that. And I could have hundreds of 800-page books in my pocket at once.
I can touch a word on the page and instantly call up a definition from a 150,000 word dictionary.
I can read in the dark, I can read while waiting in a queue, I can read while floating in a canoe (with the PDA in a waterproof bag.)
I can bookmark interesting pages, I can jot notes in an electronic 'margin', I can copy a relevant passage into an email without re-typing it.
If my house burns down, I have an off-site backup of my library.
I can search for a character's name or a phrase I want to look up.

And I don't need something that _looks_ like a book to do it!

Re:Success???

[Nogami_Saeko]

Sigh... I was actually considering buying this until you found the "catch". I don't want my files converted to their proprietary (likely DRM'ed) format. I want it to support PDF, RTF, TXT, HTML and the like natively.

For example: Device shows up as a USB drive when plugged into a computer, drag and drop your documents onto it, let the device convert/display them on the fly for me. No special software necessary.

Now it's possible (and I stress the "possible") that they're doing the conversion upfront on the host machine to save processing power and to make the battery life longer on the reader unit. But they should at least give the user the choice... Either do the conversion up-front, or support the file types internally with the understanding that the unit will have less battery life and may take longer to display pages.

I'll reserve judgement until reviews of their conversion software come in, but if that software tries to sneak any sort of DRM onto MY files, or prevents files loaded onto the unit from being transferred back to a PC it's connected to, they can kiss a sale goodbye.

N.