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

But will it come with a rootkit?

[Anonymous Coward]

No more Sony in my house, sorry.

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: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.

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.

This is hardly news

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

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