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Sony Reader Now Available
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Sep 27, 2006 12:29 AM
from the my-book-is-out-of-batteries dept.
from the my-book-is-out-of-batteries dept.
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."
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The bookstore has more than just "regular" books (Score:5, Interesting)
At $350 USD, it's already doomed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Good books need good typography (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That will give you a titlepage of a book. LaTeX uses a double line-break as a paragraph-break, which I believe is also the standard for Gutenberg. The only other thing you need to do is mark up the chapter headings like this:
Then put this at the end of the document:
Save this as ebook.tex and then
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Re:The bookstore has more than just "regular" book (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
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HTML? Most of the Gutenberg texts that have formatted versions are HTML.
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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
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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.
Re:The bookstore has more than just "regular" book (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
PG (Score:2, Insightful)
eBooks still to expensive! (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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-Trillian
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But that alone wouldn't be too bad, as one can likely find some other stuff to load it up with.
What I'm worried about is how good the software will be to read PDFs and such (not like the whole page can fit on the tiny screen, and what about graphics? etc). They say you should resize them yourself if you want them to look better on the tiny screen - not something I like to do. And if there is conversion required, how good will that be (for sa
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The publishers love it. Low production costs and you get to lose the right of first sale. In otherwords, you can resell the dead tree edition when you are done with it, or exchange it at your favorite used book store.
Your eBook? How are you going to sell the copy or even give it away? Isn't it DRM'ed to your registered display device?
DRM, Right of first sale, etc. Don
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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,
Re:Creating still toO expensive! (Score:5, Insightful)
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".)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 paperb
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Daniel
It's great (Score:2)
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Wow... (Score:2)
That's unpossible!
I need to see one live, but I like what I see so far - The ability to also display pdf, word and txt are a (finally) smart move by Sony, and the mp3 AND AAC capability is a nice bonus.
The GUI for the Connect app looks awful familiar though...
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The display, based on technology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff E Ink Corp., is composed of tiny capsules with electrically charged particles of white and black ink. When a static electric charge is applied on the side of the capsule that faces the reader, it attracts the white particles to the face of the display, making that pixel show light gray. Reversing the charge brings the black pigments floating through the capsule to
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I was thinking the same thing
Thanks for the DRM Sony (Score:2, Interesting)
So I'll own the books so much that I get to put them on a whole six different player. Thank you very much Sony, your generosity is awe inspiring.
Academics (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Academics (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Finally.. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
The Iliad has a Wacom Tablet (Score:5, Informative)
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 [irextechnologies.com] see forum.irexnet.com [irexnet.com]
k2rFor more independent info on both products see [mobileread.com]http://www.mobileread.com/ [mobileread.com] .
Parent
Sony Reader runs Linux too (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [sony.com] says it runs MonteVista® Linux® professional edition and gives a link for download [sony.net] of the GPL bits.
Source code to GPL'd components (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.sony.net/Products/Linux/Download/catego ry3.html#2 [sony.net]
The older, Japan only model is there too. As well as various other interesting products.
Just say no. (Score:4, Insightful)
Shipping On or Before October 31 (Score:2)
But it's not a reeeeeallll book! (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
(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 litt
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Barry
"Ultimate digital reading experience" (Score:5, Funny)
Sony and open standards - too good to be true? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Loved ebooks, but the pricing.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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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 d
Re:It's not LCD, dumbass (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What's to stop you curling up with this reader?
Re:PDF-s !? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:PDF-s !? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.