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Sony Reader Now Available
Yaksha42 writes "The Sony Reader, which debuted at CES in January, is now available for purchase on the Sony website. The six inch screen uses E Ink, rather than an LCD, to display the text, reducing strain on the eye while reading. While you can buy books on Sony's Connect site, you can also load eBooks and other text onto the Reader in a variety of formats, including PDF and TXT files. It also comes with the ability to receive newsfeeds, display JPG images, and can play unsecured MP3 and AAC music files. Additional information can also be found on the Learning Center site."
Imagine a Project Gutenburg DVD loaded on one of these.
See, I love the idea. I even might be willing to pay $350(!!!) for the damn thing. But the eBooks are still too damn expensive! Looking at Sony Connect shows, for example, "Marley and Me," "I Feel Bad About My Neck," and "Ricochet" as a 'bundle' for $42.03 as opposed to the list price of $53.89. *WHAT*?! With music I still think iTunes et al are often overcharging, but at least music has an inherent production cost, even if digital distrobution becomes cheaper. Don't lie to me and say books have the same production cost when distributed digitally and I should save a 'whopping' 11 bucks and change. Books distributed digitally become (almost) pure profit in a way music or movies can't, simply due to the nature of having to produce the damn things.
Even the 'better' deals (Angels and Demons for $5.59) still seem absured.
Jeeze, Sony. It's so like you! Create a really cool product, technologically, then have shit media for sale. And I want so hard to like e-readers...
-Trillian
I'm kind of excited about this thing but at $350 you could buy A LOT of paperbacks before making up for the cost.
http://www.trashingtrailers.com/
This looks great for people in academics. I read 100 pages or so per week of articles in PDF that I may never read again. Reading them on an LCD screen is a huge pain, so I usually end up printing them out (and of course using both sides and recycling). This would save me a lot of paper.
The disconnect for e-book isn't LCD eye-strain. It's the tactile connection to a book.
The ability to tote a book anywhere and curl up and read it: either under a tree or in front of a fireplace or at a friend's house...the actual weight of the book, the thickness of the pages....thats a book. Thats why people buy books.
Not the lack of eye-strain.
"I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly shadowed seaport of dea
eh... at say $10 a paperback, you could buy 35. project gutenberg alone has 19,000 books, add to that innumberable articles available online, etc. etc. i think it's a good value.
I like being able to share books with friends. I doubt that Sony's going to allow me to lend my book license to someone else, nor am I likely to find electronic books in a used bookstore. Libraries probably won't be allowed to offer them, either. It's easier to just say "no" and rely on the old battery free paper versions. At least no one can deny that I "own" it if it's sitting on my bedside table.
I predict that the Sony® PRS-500 Portable Reader System® featuring innovative E-Ink® technology will meet the same fate as the Kamen Segway® Human Transporter featuring the innovative S-Feet® and S-Walking® technologies.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Ignoring for the moment the actual sentence structure, I'll assume you meant, "Yes, but books aren't free to produce either - how to you want to pay people to create things?"
What I meant is that while movies and music require physical equipment to produce - microphones, instruments, video equipment, etc - books require a single person and - if you really want to go bare-bones - a pen and paper. Even a nice computer is going to be cheaper than a recording studio rental for any significant period of time. So, while movies and music can reasonably say "Sure, distributing digitally means *distrobution* costs go down, production costs are still expensive! We'd love to sell you cheap movies and music online, but we can't afford to!" Now, they may still be lying (about wanting to) but they can make that argument and not be complete liars. Once you lose the cost of distrobution for books, on the other hand, you've cut out the vaaaast majority of your built-in costs. Obviously, you'll still want editors and (presumably) type-setters and layout designers and such, and you should probably pay the author at some point, but the assumption with books was that you were paying a good chunk toward the physical 'stuff' the book is made out of. With that cost gone, it would seem books should be dirt-cheap, but clearly they're not...
All I'm saying is that it looks like, once again, media distroution companies are trying to wring every last cent out, rather than selling at a point that is both profitable and reasonable.
-Trillian
PS - In all fairness, it may be the book publishers, not Sony, who is requiring the consumer to get screwed. They may have deals about minimum book prices or some such BS. I'd tempted to blame Sony, but the main point is that *someone* along the line - Sony, book publisher, etc - is being a greedy bastard and it makes me sad because the tech seems so cool.
I do hope that the supplier of the ebooks for this device take a little more care than do the current crop of ebook producers. Most of the books I read now are ebooks through eReader or Fictionwise, and they often are so poorly converted into electronic form that it hurts to read them.
The one I'm currently reading is obviously an OCR job, because there are occasional soft-turned-hard hyphens peppered through it, and some lines where the wordspacing was evidently tight in the original, leadingtoareallylongwordin the ebook. Another one used hyphens for dashes too-which is extremely jarring in a proportional font-as this sentence demonstrates. Quotation marks and apostrophes are usually just the ASCII ones, which really isn't very professional-looking in print.
Then you see situations where the culture shock just got too much for the converter and they gave up. The sample book in the SonyStyle web page, The Da Vinci Code, has some pictograms in it. Those probably just get included in the ebook as a low-resolution bitmap. They certainly did on my copy from Fictionwise. I've lost count of the books which have hard-coded page references ("see page 321"), which is useless considering that pagination is up to the device itself. Forget about tappable hyperlinks; I've only seen one such ebook in the dozens I've read.
Don't get me wrong. I love my ebooks, and they compare well to Australian dead-tree books in price. But there's more to releasing an ebook than spitting out a plaintext file. If the parent poster is right about manga, hooray, finally. But history doesn't make me optimistic.
"Libraries probably won't be allowed to offer them, either. "
The Indianapolis Public Library offers online electronic books.
"It's easier to just say "no" and rely on the old battery free paper versions."
It also represents a good solution against piracy. Certainly better than what the MPAA/RIAA are offering.
"At least no one can deny that I "own" it if it's sitting on my bedside table."
You own the "original book", not the words on the pages.
About how you can get cheap laptops or PDA's, let me remind you of why this device was made: eye strain! Staring at a screen is like staring at a lightbulb, a dim one but a lightbulb nonetheless.
Ian raises some points, but I have to disagree...
(1) Yeah, it's big, but if it's popular I'm sure you'll see variations in multiple sizes from multiple producers. Also, I don't think your PDA has 20 gig of space. Also, the Apple Newton was rather large, and there are people who STILL swear by it.
(2) I don't think you can put a backlight on an e-ink display. Even so, it'll be of high enough contrast to read in most situations you can read an ordinary paperback book. You could always use one of those little LED book lights, and you wouldn't burn the main batteries either.
(3&4) I don't think it'll be long before people start hacking this doohickey and turning it into a general-purpose computer. I'm pretty sure the concepts will eventually merge and you'll have a reader that'll also function as a PDA.
Ah yes. Slashdot: Where uninformed opinions, flawed logic and factual inaccuracies are mere fertilizer to the flowerbed that is yet another ignorant rant.
(PS: "distribution".)
I hate DRM as much as the next guy, but i dont see my self ever needing to read something on more then 6 devices. hell, just my desktop, laptop, and reader would be enough. Would you have 6+ copys of the same (real paper) book?
PDF isn't propreitary, the format is entirely open and documented.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
but the assumption with books was that you were paying a good chunk toward the physical 'stuff' the book is made out of. With that cost gone, it would seem books should be dirt-cheap, but clearly they're not...
I never made that assumption for a second. Do you really think that a hardback novel costs something akin to $25 to make and distribute? If the costs were in the binding then they would bring out the hardback and paperback at the same time and let the customer choose. Instead they delay the paperback to push you towards the (relatively) overpriced hardback.
So where are the real costs? A book may take anywhere from a month to ten years to write. Ten years of a skilled labourer costs a million dollars. But more important, the occasional bestseller has to pay for all of the advances paid for unprofitable flops. In addition, there are substantial marketing costs to be heard above the noise.
Downloadability might actually cost the industry because people buy books to read "someday". But if every book is a download away, they won't buy speculatively anymore. They'll buy when they want to read. If my bookshelf is representative, that will represent a drop in sales for the publishers.
From the presentation, it appears that the Sony Reader supports
So where's the real Sony? Does this show what they are capable of developing when their audio division gets out of the way? If this reader actually supports these standards natively without requiring silly conversion software on the PC, I might even consider un-boycotting Sony to show that they are on the right track.
Editors don't do spell-checking. They typically do a round of reviewing of the story and work with the author on improving it and making it more readable to others. That's creative work too.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Can you take e.g. 10 paperbacks into long journey? After carrying heavy bag for several hours, believe me, $350 wouldn't look all that much.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
More formats, as in .DOC or .LIT files? Won't happen (I haven't read the current specs of the Reader, though), at least not officially.
But rest assured, as with the previous readers (and with almost all DRM-heavy Sony products, like the PSP and Playstations) it will soon be hacked to run anything you might see fit. The Reader runs on Linux, anyway, AFAIK.
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
PDF isn't propreitary, the format is entirely open and documented.
I find it amusing how you said that, and were modded insightful. This requires serious lack of sarcasm in both you, and all the people that modded you.
Congratulations.
I can't believe this. Sony releases a device that supports all the common open formats, and people whine that it doesn't support their competitors' closed formats? Ludicrous.
because the people who want them have probably already bought e-books they would like to continue reading. but they are in closed formats. and the stuff you buy for this in closed formats will suffer the same fate.
drm and closed formats are why i wont touch any commercially available e-books. the people publishing them are so worried about protecting their intellectual property that they make they property worthless to me. (Just ran into this the other day with a Sybex book - it came with a pdf on a disc, but I can't view it because they have drm in there that is busted. their support people told me to uninstall my current version of reader and install the one on the disc that is 2 or 3 versions back- i don't think i'm going to do that)
someday - when you can buy a cheap e-book reader that will support a common format that i can purchase - or get from the library - or share with friends, then i'll think about buying in. basically i want to be able to do all that i can do with regular books now.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
It's an ebook reader, not an mp3 player or a PDA.
I want one of these for *gasp* reading books. I don't even want it to have mp3 capabilities, I have an iPod for that which I'm quite happy with. I have no problem with devices that do one thing and do it well. Devices that try to do everything tend to suck at everything.
It is nice when something comes along with information that you need but this technology won't come anywhere close to replacing a real book, manual, newspaper, or even a stack of printouts. It is mostly hype and is only a granular change from what is already available.
Here is the problem: Your eyes and brain are designed to gather and analyze an obscene quantity of information in a real 3D world. You can grab a 100 page manual (or some other quantity of printed material) and flip through it in a couple seconds and find where the info is that you need to examine in more detail. You can also read much faster from a plain paper page. You can't "skim" with any efficiency on any digital display.
Blind love of technology that makes us give up very well proven methods and technology is a real problem. A lot of the people reading this have never seen a card catalog in a library. The total replacement of card catalogs by search computers is one of the greatest losses to research in a library. Search engines are nice but the ability to flip extremely rapidly through the cards would yield serendipitous discoveries that are now lost with search engines. It is a great loss.
Until the technology arrives that allows epaper to be in the form of a multiple sheet book that you can flip through this is no replacement for paper. It is just another display. Ho hum...
I was an avid fan of ebooks on my iPAQ 7 years ago, but stopped using them becuase I got pissed off at the pricing. I was paying the exact same price for a DRM restricted ebook that I was paying for the physical hard cover. This is a rip off. I understand why the publisher wants to maximize the bucks, but since they are saving printing, shipping, shelf space, and returns, ebooks are way cheaper and I should share some of the savings.
Alas, the publishers were much like the record labels and that means too greedy! If they provide price incentives than I'd use this, but given the expected restrictions if the prices are the same, I'll skip it and use the old fashion hard copies.