Sony Ebook Reader, first impressions
Jun. 2nd, 2008 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
johnridleyI've now read a few short stories plus HP&t Deathly Hallows, and Spider Robinson's _Very Bad Deaths_ on the Sony reader.
I really have nothing bad to say about it, and plenty good. It's as good a reader as I could hope for given current technology. I felt every bit of the page turning stickiness (IE, I found myself staying up too late to read, because I couldn't put it down) that I do with paper books, but none of the irritations I have with paper books (wrist cramps from holding the book open, having to shift positions when I'm trying to lie on my side and shift from left-of-binding to right-of-binding and back again. I can hold it in either hand and flip pages back and forth without moving my hands, I can use a variety of hand positions, it's very visible in anything from low room light to full sunlight.
I can change books, and it remembers where I was in each one. I can drop as many bookmarks as I like with a single button press.
The technology disappears and allows me to get into the book. That's what really counts.
In short, I have no regrets about buying it. It's still too expensive to make a huge splash in the market. Sure, iPods cost as much, but iPods don't have the cheap, portable, tested alternative that an eBook reader does. I think these need to get to $100, and I think they will. Probably less; I wouldn't be surprised to see knockoffs on woot.com for $50 in 5 years or so. They'd go faster than that but as I said, they're competing against paper and not as many people read as compared to listen to music.
Now all we need to do is to get some standards, and for all publishers to release ebooks for their own sake, not giving away a 5-year-old book for free to make you want to buy the paper version of the sequel; I want to buy the ebook, not more paper. I can have pretty much any book I want for free off usenet, but I WILL buy them if they're at a reasonable price. Hardcover price is not a reasonable price. A couple bucks less than paperback is about right; $4 to $6 is what Baen charges and I think that's about right.
I paid for _Very Bad Deaths_ even though I had a good, but pirated, copy sitting on my hard drive. I didn't pay for Deathly Hallows, partly because we already have bought two hardcover copies of it, but mainly because there is no authorized ebook version.
Sony gives you a credit for 100 free "classics" - this means public domain works. It's pointless because you can go to mobileread.com and download copies of all that and more that have been converted from the carefully-proofread Project Gutenberg archives by users that are trying to impress one another with their layout craftsmanship - the Sony copies by all accounts are sloppy versions of badly-typed copies.
There's an absolute s**t-ton of good stuff up on the mobileread.com forums, already formatted for whatever reader you have. If it's PD, it's probably already up there. And for me there's a ton of good stuff in PD. And if it's not up there, 5 minutes on Gutenberg, squirt it through Calibre, and you're good to go.
I really have nothing bad to say about it, and plenty good. It's as good a reader as I could hope for given current technology. I felt every bit of the page turning stickiness (IE, I found myself staying up too late to read, because I couldn't put it down) that I do with paper books, but none of the irritations I have with paper books (wrist cramps from holding the book open, having to shift positions when I'm trying to lie on my side and shift from left-of-binding to right-of-binding and back again. I can hold it in either hand and flip pages back and forth without moving my hands, I can use a variety of hand positions, it's very visible in anything from low room light to full sunlight.
I can change books, and it remembers where I was in each one. I can drop as many bookmarks as I like with a single button press.
The technology disappears and allows me to get into the book. That's what really counts.
In short, I have no regrets about buying it. It's still too expensive to make a huge splash in the market. Sure, iPods cost as much, but iPods don't have the cheap, portable, tested alternative that an eBook reader does. I think these need to get to $100, and I think they will. Probably less; I wouldn't be surprised to see knockoffs on woot.com for $50 in 5 years or so. They'd go faster than that but as I said, they're competing against paper and not as many people read as compared to listen to music.
Now all we need to do is to get some standards, and for all publishers to release ebooks for their own sake, not giving away a 5-year-old book for free to make you want to buy the paper version of the sequel; I want to buy the ebook, not more paper. I can have pretty much any book I want for free off usenet, but I WILL buy them if they're at a reasonable price. Hardcover price is not a reasonable price. A couple bucks less than paperback is about right; $4 to $6 is what Baen charges and I think that's about right.
I paid for _Very Bad Deaths_ even though I had a good, but pirated, copy sitting on my hard drive. I didn't pay for Deathly Hallows, partly because we already have bought two hardcover copies of it, but mainly because there is no authorized ebook version.
Sony gives you a credit for 100 free "classics" - this means public domain works. It's pointless because you can go to mobileread.com and download copies of all that and more that have been converted from the carefully-proofread Project Gutenberg archives by users that are trying to impress one another with their layout craftsmanship - the Sony copies by all accounts are sloppy versions of badly-typed copies.
There's an absolute s**t-ton of good stuff up on the mobileread.com forums, already formatted for whatever reader you have. If it's PD, it's probably already up there. And for me there's a ton of good stuff in PD. And if it's not up there, 5 minutes on Gutenberg, squirt it through Calibre, and you're good to go.
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no subject
Date: 2008-06-03 02:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-03 02:39 pm (UTC)The prices have been coming down, and they are leaving the store shelves; it's no iPod but the Ann Arbor Borders stores can't keep them in stock, so I expect them down into the $250 range by xmas, and probably break $200 in 2009. There's enough competition, and Amazon just dropped the Kindle to $360.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-04 01:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-04 01:47 am (UTC)A built-in light would probably draw 10 times more power than the rest of the device. My friend took his on a Florida fishing trip last week. He read about 15 books between the two airplane trips and 5 days on the ocean, and the battery indicator only dropped one bar (out of 4). If it had a light it'd probably kill the whole battery in 2 hours.
Basically it's just like a book. If you want to read it, you provide the light.