New Sony E-Book Device To Debut This Year

Luke PiWalker writes "Sony hopes to pen a new chapter for e-books with a device set to debut later this year. The secret? A display based on E Ink technology that goes miles beyond LCDs and CRTs. From the article: 'Scheduled to go on sale this spring for between $300 and $400, the Reader is a compact slab about the size of a small paperback book (5-by-7 inches, and a half-inch thick). But it's the 3.5-by-4.8-inch display that made it the buzz of the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month in Las Vegas.'"

Comments

Could be great for textbooks

[jbrader]

As a college student I think this could really be a great gadget. The price seems a little steep at first but it's actually about the same as only two or three textboks. And if you could buy one of these and then download the book onto it for a few bucks a you'd actually save a lot of money over the course of your education. And it's much lighter than books too. Last year I was taking two physics courses and calculus and my bag weighed about 40 lbs and that was on days I didn't need to bring my lappy.

iBooks literature store?

[ecotax]

To me, spending a few hundred dollars/euro's on such a thing is only worth consideration if there is a possibility to buy plenty of content for a price that's much lower that I'd pay for paper versions of the same stuff. I guess theoretically it's possible that Sony will do the the same for books as Apple did for music.
However, given the recent experiences with Sony, I seriously doubt they have the vision to make this work. Possible DRM issues aside, they will probably screw this up by having too little content for too high price.
This may be a chicken-and-egg problem, but it's not *my* chicken-and-egg problem - I'll stick to books for now.

Well shucks

[DingerX]

from TFA:

Books have been written on sheets of dried, mashed plants for about five millennia. Paper is a cheap, relatively durable and versatile technology. Sony's new Reader will not spell the end of that long history, but it could be the opening of an interesting new chapter.

Well, depends on what you call a book. And frankly, I prefer the ones written on treated animal skins. It's a personal preference thing.

Anyway, DRM or not, the big problem I have with Sony (and the other, with the cooler-looking, fancier device) is that they seem to think I want to buy this thing so I can buy more things.

I've got tons of files -- my own docs, a bunch of .pdfs, and the like -- that I can see being useful in a handy format; I'd love to have a device like that to store a small reference library. Books are cool and they already work pretty well. When you've got something revolutionary, play to its strengths.

If you sell me something I can put two bookshelves of texts I consult regularly on, and maybe throw in some nonsense on birdwatching, I'll probably buy it.

If you make something that lets me read the Da Vinci Code for the same price as the paperback, plus $400, and doesn't let me give the work to a friend (a friend I don't like too much, given the choice of fiction), then forget it.

Oh yeah, battery life isn't just the screen, it's the processor too.

Re:But will it come with a rootkit?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Mainly by using their own crappy, non standard, proprietary formats (minidisc... atrac... memory stick etc. etc.) whilst staunchly refusng to support any sort of standard format.

I can't believe some people can post such childish comments.

Look: do you own a printer? ever noticed you can't buy a printer with "standard non proprietary" cartridges? If I follow your train of thought, you should be outraged, no? Of course not, you keep printing.

Sony has always tried to do the Bic business model, it's nothing new. To their credit, when they develop a shite format like the MD, they stick to it. You can still find Minidiscs today, 14 years after it was introduced. You won't find cartridges for your printer 14 years from now, yet I'm sure you're nowhere as outraged with your printer's manufacturer as you appear to be with Sony.

Re:if Sony follow their usual practice

[kalidasa]

I'm only interested in three things -

1. PDF - for Safari downloads. Gives me a work-related excuse to buy one.
2. UTF-8, ISO 8859-1, and ASCII plaintext - Gutenberg.
3. XHTML.

Mind you, if it could also read various eBook formats, RTF files, &c., it would be close to perfect.

Re:Oh please... how tiring can people get?

[Jasin Natael]

This is exactly the sentiment that ensures the consumer will get screwed every time. Let me sum up your claim:

Sony is so big, they already ownZ0R3d j00. You can't be diligent enough to avoid buying any of their fine products, so why bother?

The logic is so flawed, it's insane. It's like saying "You can't keep all the dirt off your counters, so what's the point of cleaning, ever?", or "You can't live forever, so why live at all?". Every penny this guy, or someone else like him, can keep out of Sony's pockets, is one less penny that Sony can use to marginalize and repress the public good. Whether I agree with his choices or not, he's acting in a conscientious way, with the ultimate goal of improving our society.

You probably think everyone's overreacting, but there are always calm, contented people who wake up to a new world one day, full of regret. "Slippery Slope" isn't just a Historical Analysis tool.

Jasin Natael

Re:But will it come with a rootkit?

[Nimey]

The difference is that there is no standard for printer ink cartridges. There are standard flash-memory modules and standard music media, but Sony chooses to ignore those standards as a customer-control tactic.

If you buy their hardware, you then must buy the media that Sony either sells you or gets a cut from every purchase from licensing agreements. When you then buy new hardware, you're more likely to buy Sony again to avoid the hassle of converting your data to standard media.