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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.'"
No more Sony in my house, sorry.
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.
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
I want one.
My problem with ebook readers to date has been the transmissive screens -- staring at a light-source is just not as comfortable as staring at paper.
I'm not even too worried about if/how the content is DRMed, since buying books is what money is for.
But what I don't really want to do is pay royalties for a book I've already paid royalties for.
What's the chance that ebooks will be available on a media-charge-only basis to those who already have the dead-tree edition? (Zero, I expect!)
Well, it would last however long it takes you to read 7500 pages.
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
As electricity is usen only when you turn pages, it will last as long as it takes you to flip 7500 pages.
how long does it take you to read 10 - 20 books.
From what I understand, once the page is displayed, they use no power to keep it displayed. they only use power to turn the pixels
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
Supposedly, eInk screens only use power when changing the image they display. If that's true the batteries really will last for however long it takes you to read 7,500 pages. That is as long as you don't take so long to read 7,500 pages that the self discharge rate of whatever type of batteries it uses becomes a factor...
^I'm with stupid.^
While this sounds like a cool gizmo it's strange that they shut down their zire operation, which had some success, and are going in a pretty much unproven direction like this which will likely not do much in retail.
they'll take cool technology and make it useless by imposing stupid restrictions and design flaws.
for example, in TFA they talk about how iTunes is such a success because of its ease of use and non-obtrusive DRM. the Sony reader will use the Sony Connect store based on the same idea - except you can't even look at Sony Connect without IE5.5+
well done Sony, yet another fuckup.
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.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
Sony may have a good marketing machine, but I make a note to always stay way clear of them.
* Sony products are usually 20% more expensive, with *less* features than the competitors.
* Sony products adhere strictly to DVD Region coding: corrupt racketeering of the DVD distribution.
* Sony products are simply not as competitive as other products.
* Sony products are slow to move to the marketplace, MP3 players were the most amusing addition to their product line, almost 4 years after the ipod.
Everytime I see some fashion crazy gumby tell me they just bought the top of the line Sony TV I sit back and have a quiet chuckle. They just spent 20% more than they needed too, and with probably only 50% of the features found in other leading products.
Wired writes: "There's no flicker, because the pixels are completely static (in an LCD or a cathode-ray tube display, by contrast, pixels need to be "refreshed" 60 times per second or more)."
LCD pixels don't need to be refreshed, ever. LCD panels are typically updated at 60 Hz, but this is just new data being sent from the computer, and mostly just due to how things were done before. Incidently, CRTs are typically refreshed at at least 80 Hz to make the flickering less obvious and less straining. Electronic ink does have the distinct advantage of not having to look basically directly into a lamp all the time. But anyway, if your LCD flickers, you should return it because the backlight is damaged.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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
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.
You'll be able to view plaintext, HTML and PDF on the new reader... but, before it gets loaded onto the reader, it gets converted into Sony's proprietary file format. So, it's not a simple matter of drag-and-drop, you have to run it through a file converter to get it onto the reader.
:/
That's the deal-breaker for me.
If it is universal in a sense that it reads numerous .pdf and .chm e-books (not to mention .txt and offline copies of web pages) that you can google for and download right now it could be a succsess. If you can only read overpaied crappy sony books, they will fail as usual on the inteligent buyers market and get only supported by idiots (as all DRM schemes were and are).
Copy-right,left,up or down, consumers don't care what the DRM whiners and sony-virus installers are yapping, we are only interested in the minimum investment and maximum return.
E-books are all free (some only on p2p networks but with sizes of couple of megs who cares where you get it from), only the "player" is the payable part and the player should play everything we users throw at it. If it doesn't guess what? Competitior's player WILL and we will buy their product and ignore sony's crap.
This is hardly news, Sony Librie has been out in the market for quite a while already. Just about all the questions that are being asked have answers on the web.
This new version has inbuilt (I think) rechargeable battery instead of 4xAAA, whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, I don't know. I have preference for the AAAs, because you can always get disposable ones if you are somewhere you can't recharge the batteries.
Also new is that it accepts SD card as well as MemoryStick. This has got to be a good thing.
Layout is different, Librie had a ful QWERTY keyboard, missing on this new one I think.
The file format for Librie is annoying, but manageable. There are many third party softwares that can easily convert most kinds of text files to the BBeB format. At the moment, only Sony Japan sell e-books tailored for Librie, with DRM attached of course, these DRMed files also have some stupid 60 day (I think) expiry period. But files you convert yourself do not expire.
Converting files from Gutenberg is trivial. I've uploaded a lot of books on mine with no problem. Only beef I have with it is that in Gutenberg files the line breaks are hard, so I had to remove all linebreak characters at the end of lines which are not end of paragraphs. There are probably some 3rd party software that can do this easily.
The screen is amazing, but can only do 4 level greyscale. Great for text, not bad for comics, useless for photos. It's for reading, not for pictorial porn.
Text font size is changeable, there are some five or six level of font size you can select, depending on your eyesight and the book default.
In Librie, the sorting on the Bookshelf is useless, probably because I can't decipher the Japanese too well, I hope the US version is more useable.
At the moment, PDFs suck. Although you can convert pdf to the format, it's converted as image (I think) and the resolution is decreased to the native resolution of the screen: 800x600. The entire page is squeezed into the screen, and you can't zoom for images, so you can't read the PDF files, unless the text on the file is headline sized. I read somewhere that the new version can actually zoom, I hope this will improve.
Battery life is as good as Sony claims, although remember this is number of pages, and the number of pages per book depends on the font size and the actual book. If you use a big font size to read War and Peace, you will probably only get through half of the book.
And if you worried about rootkit, why, isn't this Slashdot? just use Linux and don't install Sony software. Just plug in your choice of the flash memory into the memory read, and upload the converted files and database/TOC without using Sony software. Even better, since the Librie (and I assume this new one too) runs on Linux (source is available from Sony), just hack this thing yourself!
Well, this is another customer that is not interested in the 20% of the market in Europe that does not use Internet Explorer.
It may be a good product (technically) but its marketing is fataly broken when it requires IE.
Thanks,
GerardM
Although the new technology is attractive, the technology in the Rocket eBook or the Franklin eBookman was more than adequate. I still have my five-year-old Rocket and I still use it. I can bring ten books on a trip in a device that's smaller and lighter than a trade paperback and have a pleasurable, immersive reading experience.
What has prevented the eBook from taking off--killed it, at least for the moment--is not the devices. It is, in order of importance: limited title availability, limited title availability, limited title availability, excessive price, and DRM. Fix those problems and the eBook market will take off, even if you have to read them on a cell phone screen.
Of these, title availability is the most serious. At one point I checked, and at that time, of about 44 books on Oprah's Book Club list, something like 35 of them were available as audiobooks... and something like six of them were available as ebooks in ANY format. And no more than about four of them in any specific format.
TFA is entitled "Screening the Latest Bestseller," but unless something changes drastically, only a small fraction of the latest bestsellers will be screenable. Maybe you don't care for Barbara Kingsolver but I do, and none of her books has ever been available as an eBook.
Price. I've had about half-a-dozen conversations with strangers who saw me using my Rocket. They would be interested, I'd hand it to them so they could scroll pages, they'd be impressed, they'd ask about price and capacity and so forth. Then would come the question: "How much do the eBooks cost?" I'd answer "About the same as a hardbound for books that are not out in paper, about the same as a paperback for books that are in paperback." They'd give me a you-gotta-be-kidding look of disbelief and that would be that. End of story.
And, DRM. Look guys, don't you get it? One of the pleasures of books is lending them. Why do you think bookplates were invented? If I can't lend my son the latest Stephen King, don't bother. True story: just last year, my wife bought a copy of Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything." "Wow, this is really good," she says. "You'd probably like to read it when I'm done with it." Pregnant pause. "Uh, honey... I'm afraid I've already read it. I bought it for my Rocket eBook a couple of years ago." Phooey. Paid twice for the damn book. Not that it would have mattered, as my wife doesn't own a Rocket eBook, and even if she did the content was keyed to the serial number of the individual device and I couldn't have loaned it to her anyway.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
To all the people pooh-poohing Sony on here- have any of you ever owned a (cassette) walkman or a (cd) discman? How about a Viao laptop, or a portable minidisc player? Whatever your opinions are about their non-portable equipment; their politics or their policies, Sony has ALWAYS made very durable and dependable portable equipment. Paying a "premium" for Sony equipment is like paying a premium for Apple equipment- except that you get durable devices instead of pretty ones.
Oh, and everyone saying they'll wait for Apple to release one? Remember, Apple hasn't always been the forward-thinking design firm they are today- gee, it's almost like they somehow CHANGED the way they do business? *gasp*... but Sony could NEVER do that! All sarcasm aside- Sony screwed up, folks, pure and simple. This rootkit business would obviously never have happened if their security people has been controlled better... and you can bet it probably won't happen again (at least not soon). Sony makes, has made, and will continute to make quality hardware, and I doubt that will change in the near future. These people brought us the betamax wars (beta was better!) and, more popularly, the CD format that has been the basis for data and audio transfer for two decades. Let it go.
Oh yes, Apple fans, remember- expect to actually pay MORE for a compareable Apple product then the Sony MSRP because, well, it's Apple!
That being said, I probably won't buy this product, but for different reasons then most people. I prefer my books in dead-tree format, because I can toss them in bags, bang them around, sit on them, whatever, and they only cost me about $6 to replace. Also, many of the books I like are out of print now, and although I'm sure the library they have available when these are released will be large, I doubt it'll have much in the way of out-of-print science fiction and fantasy.
What I'd like to see come out of this is the development of a thin-but-durable paper/plastic product that you can write on, and then save the data to put on a computer later. Pair this screen technology with a memory recording device and a touch-screen applique, and you'd have a low-power electronic 'notebook' that's good for taking notes in classes or at work, but doesn't require hauling around a $700+ device.
I'm getting quite tired of the "boycott SONY!" tirades some people go on.
:D
Yes, the music/CDs branch of SONY f'ed up royally.. and if you want to boycott them - by all means.
But boycott the entire company? That's just a little strange - do you really think that, for example, their overhead projector group has *anything* to do with the music division? Yet you're perfectly willing to 'punish' them equally. It's like as if you were to scratch up my car, and I suddenly shun business from your entire family - and make this clear to everybody, too.
So far my thoughts on it.. and I respect that you may not share those thoughts. You may still wish to boycott all of SONY. So be it.
However, have you considered just exactly how much you will be needing to boycott?
Just for kicks - did you happen to see "Memoirs of a geisha"? Let's say you did - oops: you already screwed up.. Memoirs of a geisha is a Sony Pictures Entertainment distribution. Maybe you didn't see it - but you'd like to go see "The DaVinci Code", "Spider-Man 3", "Hellboy 2", etc. Well, if you were to stick to your "boycott SONY", then you'll have to shun those, too. I'm sure your friends will understand when they ask you to go out with them, and you tell them "no - I'm boycotting SONY".
Of course it's not just these new movies. Did you happen to watch, rent, or buy any Columbia, Tristar or MGM movie? Yes? Oops again - SONY owns most of them. Yes, that's right - watching Tom & Jerry cartoons (that you didn't already own) means you're supporting SONY financially.
Maybe you don't care for those, though - I've yet to see any Slashdot person not like Stargate SG-1, however... and assuming you are among them.. I feel for you - for Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis are Sony Pictures Television productions.
Now, obviously you didn't buy a PSP - but maybe some of your friends have, and you know they would really, really like this game for it.. and their birthday is coming up. Well, tough for them - because buying a PSP game also supports SONY.
And you certainly won't buy any CDs, yes (if you aren't already)? As, of course, SONY (and Philips) still get a tiny scraping of a dollar for every CD made - even if the music isn't connected to SONY in any way.
Come next hardware-upgrade, please also be sure to bring a magnifying glass so that you can check out the components on the PCB. Good chance there's some SONY Semiconductor...semiconductors on there.
The list goes on and on... quite honestly, you would be hurting yourself more than you would be hurting SONY. And what tiny little hurt you -do- do to SONY is being done to divisions that had zilch to do with the goof-up at SONY's music branch.
I'd love to see the day that Unilever, Nestlé and Procter & Gamble would all do something so outrageous (maybe RFID tracking) that somebody wishes to boycott them - hell, somebody make a documentary about that, and I'll gladly pay to see it
A half an inch thick E-ink based gadget? What are they thinking? The whole point with the E-ink is that it can be on a flexible super thin piece of plastic. All Sony is doing...is making an inferior PDA like gadget with a worse screen, sure - it will save batteries... but then again - so will an black and grey Palm-pilot without backlight too. Pointless stuff.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
When they make things digitally restricted and quite literally "locked up in crypto bottles" (John Perry Barlow), the fallout (especially among all the tech-savvy that should be the earliest adopters at premium prices) tends to be the one that can be seen from the start of this discussion: an immediate association with practices perceived as "evil" (why would any company in their right mind want to match Microsoft on this one?!) that only billions in advertising (if anything) can make go away again...
Once they do get over their impulse to restrict and restrain, however, and simply sell the customer what the customer wants (cf. reprogrammable Aibos, MP3/4-capable players - and remember when everyone wanted a "Walkman(TM)"?), volume, clever additional applications, and the power of a premium brand more than make up for anything DRM (and lawsuits against tinkerers) could ever have earned them - and this improves rather than taints the image they enjoy in the public eye.