Slashdot Mirror
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."
For example they have manga too(albeit a small selection right now). If Sony doesn't fuck it up totally it could be an interesting distribution model. But given their history in this type of thing, I don't have too much confidence.
Monstar L
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
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.
I've been following these e-ink readers since I've first read about the technology. I'm an avid reader and re-read all the books I enjoy many times. Having all my books available on a SD card in a reader which lasts like 20 books worth on a single charge, all while looking a lot like real paper is like a dream come true for me.
:(
The main competition to this sony reader seems to be the Iliad from I-Rex. I think it is a much nicer reader for a couple reasons.
It has a nice page turn interface, it has a proper paperback A5 sized screen, and runs linux. There has already been quite a bit of hacking on it. Can code your own readers for various formats etc.
The downsize? It is like $850 instead of $350 of the sony
Guess I'm still stuck waiting till the iliad comes down in price or another reader comes out at a lower price point. These things are way to specialized for the price they are demanding.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
http://www.sony.net/Products/Linux/Download/catego ry3.html#2
The older, Japan only model is there too. As well as various other interesting products.
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.
Let's see, mod a troll, or respond... Never the smartest one in class:
Clearly you've never seen e-paper in action. No backlight, stupid, it's just dark print on a white sheet. Just like... paper, just as easy to read.
Glad to see Sony has finally released one of these in the States. Been out for years in Japan, though more expensive.
None of the reasons you list will be the downfall of the device. It'll be two things: Sony's crappy Connect service. Sony has never been able to make any software worth a damn. And two: The same reason ebooks have never gained popularity, namely they're too expensive for what you get, and there are not enough titles to make it worth buying a $300+ device.
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.
are you sure? That sounds very quaint to me, but merely habitual, like saying people would never switch to computers because they like the weight and motion of a typewriter.
ôó
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.
This Sony device has some of the same advantages; potential for large number of books in hand and ability to buy books online at any time.
However, it still misses some of the point of an e-reader vs a dead-tree book!
Portability: it won't fit in my shirt pocket like the Palm does. Why is it the size of a dead-tree book? Because that's what people who haven't used ebooks much think that they want!
The paperback size is a compromise between having enough words to balance the effort and inconvenience of page turning, and having a reasonable thickness for an average-length book. When turning a page requires just a minimal thumb pressure, fewer words per page is less of a consideration.
Backlight: Sure, it shortens the battery life, but being able to read in bed without the light on is great. Or in any other environment where the light levels are low enough to cause your mother to worry about you going blind!
Dictionary: being able to tap on a word on the screen and have a dictionary entry pop up is so useful, especially with obtuse and erudite writers. I always _mean_ to go look up words, but with ereader and a 150,000 word dictionary loaded, I actually _do_!
Availability: my PDA is a general-purpose device and I use it as an alarm clock, an organiser, an MP3 player, a movie viewer, a calculator, a map (with BT GPSr), a note-taker, etc., etc. Because I use it so much, I always have it with me. Because I always have it with me, I always have my current book(s) and magazines available for those unexpected spare moments (or hours!) Since even a long novel is rarely more than 3-400kB, they really don't make much of a dent in a 1GB SD card.
I often hear fellow bibliophiles say that they wouldn't like an e-book reader because they really like the smell and feel of real paper, and the tactile experience of turning pages, and so on.
I imagine that their great-great grandparents thought that automotives were never going to be popular, because people would miss the feel of the reins and the clip-clop of the hooves...
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.....
[/sarcasm]
Even though the website says the reader handles "Unsecured Text: BBeB Book, Adobe® PDF, TXT, RTF, Microsoft® Word; Image: JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMPit", not on one page did I see an image displayed on the reader. This is the most important feature for me as I read many IT books on PFD that include numerous diagrams, pictures, charts, pieces of code as a graphic, etc. I noticed it said it displays 800x600 resolution with 4 shades of gray, but why are there no examples of anything other than plain text? Are images something you do not want to even display on these? If anyone has more info, your insight is appreciated. That would be the difference between me buying one or not.
He who gets the last laugh, laughs last.
Seeing as books/writing are artificial constructs to begin with, that seems to me to be a pretty shaky point.
What's to stop you curling up with this reader?
Ultimate digital reading experience? I thought that was braille.
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've tried out the Japanese model (Sony Librie) on demo in a shop, and I have to say this thing makes me drool.
It is very expensive, but quality-wise, it makes other e-book readers feel clunky and painful to the eyes. And it even comes with a cover that makes it *feel* like a book. No backlight, but it conveniently runs on ordinary aaa batteries. The quality only problems are the slow refresh and occasional slight ghosting that reminds me of an etch-a-sketch. It's as close to the real thing as it gets.
PDF isn't propreitary, the format is entirely open and documented.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
I was really starting to get worried that my printed works would never benefit from the powers of DRM. I'm so glad we have Sony to protect us all.
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.
I'm not buying a damned, DRMed book, but there's always Project Gutenburg (http://www.gutenberg.org/). I'd actually like a peripheral display using something like e-ink. It would be something I can dump text from the main monitor for long reading (like Slashdot comments) - or documentation...that'd be a relief.
$350? for a little plastic box to read text?
Wow, that sets MY world on fire.
The more I see attempts to create an E-book, the more I appreciate paper.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
build in.
The Sony does not have a pen-interface, AFAIK.
That's a lot of additional potential for the Iliad, let's see if their software leaves beta soon and whether they provide us with an appropriate SDK...
For Iliad-Discussion from iRex see forum.irexnet.com
k2rFor more independent info on both products see http://www.mobileread.com/ .
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.
Ogg support would be nice, but I wouldn't say that its abscence makes the product "nearly useless". If it provided a stylus or input method for adding comments and markup to PDF documents I would probably buy one. As it is, the functionality wouldn't be worth the price and clunkyness of carrying a fragile piece of equipment around.
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.
The main competition to this sony reader seems to be the Iliad from I-Rex. I think it is a much nicer reader for a couple reasons.
It has a nice page turn interface, it has a proper paperback A5 sized screen, and runs linux. There has already been quite a bit of hacking on it. Can code your own readers for various formats etc.
The Sony Reader runs Linux too. The manual says it runs MonteVista® Linux® professional edition and gives a link for download of the GPL bits.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Sarcasm. Their previous model only supported their own special format, and required things like PDFs or even TXTs to be converted with special software.
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.
HTML? Most of the Gutenberg texts that have formatted versions are HTML.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
yeah, good point. HTML is a no brainer. Wonder why they didn't support it? Still, I think "nearly useless" is far too strong a comment. Gutenberg text can be just as easily viewed as a text or pdf file.
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?
I'm surprised how many people here want the ebooks to be in PDF format.
I've been reading ebooks for a while, and PDF is the worst format for a book. It works well for magazines, but that's because PDF is a PRINT format. It's designed to lay things out to be printed. With an ebook, you want flowable text, so that when you increase the font size (you know, for grandma) the text flows to the next page. PDF will zoom in, and now you have to move around on the screen to read your book. Completely unacceptable!! (Look at this from an everyday user, not a techie viewpoint.)
CHM is better, HTML can usually be formatted pretty nicely, but PDF, ugh! When I'm reading ebooks, I always look for HTML or mobipocket, or something that's not PDF. And it's because of the flowable text issue.
I think many people who get this device with the intent of reading PDF's will be sorely disappointed.
---- The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. -Thomas Jefferson
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've been watching the portable reader for a while and watched it slip its schedule twice, realized the screen is smaller than I thought/hoped earlier, and wished it had a stylus. What I always wanted was an 11" screen with these features and the ability to just draw ink onto bitmaps that I save. No text recognition, none of that crap. Just electronic paper (literally: just let me make marks on a blank page) and the reader funcitons. The closest I've seen is this: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/main/devices/device11 .htm/
and the goReader seems defunct and was way too expensive. So this seems like just another near miss to me.
The problem seems to be that no one can ever bring themselves to offer the product I described: they start pumping up the functionality until it just *has* to cost close to $1000 or they make the sony reader, which shoots a little too low, like the previous paperback-sized reader that didn't take off --anybody remember the Rocket reader? I actually saw one in a store a few years ago.
Is there any hope that someone's eventually going to make what I want?
PDA screens are too small. And I don't want PDA functions.
Most readers are just readers.
What I want is the sony reader with a digitizer and an 11" diagonal screen. I don't even ask to annotate books. Just let me draw on blank pages. Work on the software for later. I'll even pay mark-up to add software to do more things later. Just give me that damn device, so I can avoid carrying paper documents and a notepad and not carry a portable computer. An not path $2500 for a whole tablet computer, since that's not what I want.
In excess of half the business world would by my device, why won't anyone build it?
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.