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."

The bookstore has more than just "regular" books

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.

At $350 USD, it's already doomed.

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.

Good books need good typography

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.

Re:The bookstore has more than just "regular" book

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.

Re:The bookstore has more than just "regular" book

It supports BBeB, PDF, .txt, RTF, Word files, JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP. This covers _all_ document formats I would be interested in reading on the thing. What do you feel is missing and sufficiently important to make it "nearly useless"?

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.

eBooks still to expensive!

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

Re:

Check out places like baen.com. I've bought quite a few of thier ebooks the day the hardback was released 5-6$. Seems like the old publisher, may he rest in peace, really wanted ebooks to take off. They also have a free library with a lot of titles. Go, re

Re:

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

Re:Creating still toO expensive!

books require a single person . . . you'll still want editors and (presumably) type-setters and layout designers and such

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".)

Re:

Try fictionwise for pdf versions of (some) books: http://www.fictionwise.com/ [fictionwise.com], and select "multiformat". I've bought a lot of books through there.

Academics

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.

Re:Academics

I should warn you, as the owner of a Sony Librie (previous Japanese version, uses the same screen as the Reader I believe), that the screen (and resolution) is definitely too small to read a 8.5x11 or A4 .pdf document. For the Librie, I can convert the .pdf files into 2 pages for every 1 on the .pdf file, and that works pretty well. However, this means more flipping around, and at about a second per page turn, could be inconvenient for academic books.

Finally..

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.

The Iliad has a Wacom Tablet

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]
For more independent info on both products see [mobileread.com]http://www.mobileread.com/ [mobileread.com] .

k2r

Source code to GPL'd components

Is on Sony's Source Code Distribution Service:

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.

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.

But it's not a reeeeeallll book!

I do virtually all my reading on my PDA (Palm T3, 1/2VGA) and have for the last couple of years.

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:

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,

"Ultimate digital reading experience"

Ultimate digital reading experience? I thought that was braille.

Sony and open standards - too good to be true?

From the presentation, it appears that the Sony Reader supports

• SD card in addition to Memory Stick
• Unencrypted MP3, not ATRAC
• RTF and unencrypted Adobe PDF, among other formats

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.

Re:

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 release

Re:It's not LCD, dumbass

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.

Re:

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?

Re:PDF-s !?

PDF isn't propreitary, the format is entirely open and documented.

Re:PDF-s !?

Sarcasm. Their previous model only supported their own special format, and required things like PDFs or even TXTs to be converted with special software.