Yesssir. Sony’s back. In more ways than one. (And that’s not just because I work for Sony Pictures).

I'm looking forward to the PlasticLogic device, too. They're partnering with B&N now, which could be huge.

Although I love large screens and clear print, and, in general, good hardware, it seems that eventually it is not the decisive factor in consumer electronic business success.

Amazon may have inferior HW but it is better positioned to be, and also to remain, THE vendor with the widest content offering.

Sony may claim that books and magazines will be widely available for its HW, but do we really think it can top Amazon's access to literature?

Amazon seems better positioned today in this field than Apple was at the beginning of the digital music business. And despite the many alleged "iPod-killers" none of them could unseat Apple's business.

In other areas Sony already showed us how to lose with excellent HW. Remember how the Betamax-VHS video recorder contest ended? Or who's video game console sale numbers are the lowest today: Sony's Microsoft's or Nintendo's?

i use the sony 505. a nice eReader. bigger would be better.

The most intriguing feature is that the Sony reader will allow readers to "check out" digital copies of books from libraries:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2009/08/sony-to-link-readers-with-libraries-allow-e-book-borrowing.ars

Assuming this is successful, it could be a good solution to one of my biggest complaints about the DRM found on the Kindle. If you could "borrow" books from friends who have e-readers, with a certain expiration date, that would be a very fair compromise in my mind.

Yes! I think this is great. I look forward to the future when these are a bit more affordable. The promise of checking out library books with a device is huge, IF the provider can make assurances they aren't going to confiscate already delivered books like Amazon recently did.

Dave ~ I totally get your point about using the device space for actual text ... BUT, I HATE touch screen ... just a personal thing. I find it practically impossible to set even my gps and can't imagine actually having to use touch screen exclusively for all of the options. I'll stick with my Kindle and it's intruding buttons. I did think I'd like the bigger Kindle better, but after trying to use it for a few days, I sent it back. The small one goes everywhere and in any purse (which is really the critical matter at hand) haha :) Thanks for the info! I do think the BN partnership is exciting ... I'll have to look into that one.

I'm waiting for a color reader. :)

And I agree with Skeptic Reader -- I'm waiting for them to be more affordable, since on top of the device's cost we'll have to pay for most of the content.

There is no way that it will possibly sell in really high volume while it costs as much as a slightly larger but much more powerful and versatile netbook. There are netbooks, weighing only a pound or so and with eight to ten inch high res screens available from six or seven different companies. Sony isn't in the race - and I am a Sony fan. (But also a realist.)

When I saw the screen of the last Sony ebook and compared it to the latest Kindle, it was horrible. It was like looking at a photocopy of a page - grey all over. This one is going to have to step up to the plate greatly in order for me to switch. And it's going to have to be more comfortable to hold with one hand, which is how I hold most books.

The reason Kindle hasn't used touch screen is because of the cost and because of durability. There are quite a few companies out there trying to make a touch screen reader. Me, I don't like touch screens because they are so touchy. Imagine trying to read in bed and gripping the device with one hand and having to avoid touching the screen. The Kindle irritates me because if the edge touches anything, it will turn the page.

Also, I can read my library books online now - my library offers quite few books this way, and I can connect to the library through the Kindle device.

Finally a reader that looks like it might replace the book.

"Although I love large screens and clear print, and, in general, good hardware, it seems that eventually it is not the decisive factor in consumer electronic business success."

there are a lot of factors--and ways to screw it up--and the factors vary by product. HW only becomes the key issue if the experience of using the device is about the hardware. love/clear screens are only decisive if it's about the screen. (eg, with early PCs, it was not primarily about the screen, or even the CPU; it was primarily about word processing and spreadsheets--that's what we wanted the damn things to be good at, ie, the software.)

but for hardware, look at the iphone. the screen size enabled by touchscreen revolutionized the phone. (lots of other things helped, but that was/is decisive.) and it went gonzo.

when all a device does 99% or the time is show you a page to read, it damn well better be great at showing you that page. (and it better be at least as good in that regard as the pile of paper it's replacing.)

i think this and price will be the key factors in which device takes off--aided by factors you bring up, like positioning.

but anyone can offer books. i assume that pretty soon, all major ebook makers will have access to most popular titles, and this will be no more an issue than buying your dvd player from sony vs jvc: you assume you can play the next U2 CD in either.

My problem with the whole e-book thing is: what am I going to put on my bookshelves to make me look smart. Nothing says brainy & impressive like that unopened copy of "Tale of Two Cities".

darkscribe is dead-on about price.

these prices are ridiculous, compared a lot of ways, including the one he provided.

i was also thinking of my iphone--and my description of the main function of the ebook to sit there inert and show me the page. (yes, it can do lots of other things, but 99% of what i want out of a book is to show me the page. reading is not like most gadget devices. i, the reader, do most of the work just by looking at it.

my iphone sold for $300 and does a zillion things. (yes, i pay a monthly fee, which subsidizes it, but $300 is the perceived cost; and i'll pay for books on the ereader, too.)

i have to pay $100 MORE for a device that is modestly bigger and mostly sits there and does nothing but show me a page?

ebooks are NOT gadgets. they are mostly inert. they are competing with inert paper books with no entry fee.

i think the makers have been wooed into way over-designing, at way too much cost.

someone may come in and steal the market with a $50 device that does only a few simple things, but one of them is display text on a screen with the same quality as a piece of paper.

that's when these will take off.

"what am I going to put on my bookshelves to make me look smart."

i've actually heard this a lot. and thought it a time or two.

there's a pretty simple answer. u will be carrying your smarts around with you.

album/cd collections on the wall used to make people look smart, hip (or tragic--hahaha). now we carry them around with us, and look all those same things to someone who peeks at what we've got.

and we don't have to be in our living room for this to happen.

i had over 500 vinyl albums and god knows how many CDs and it was an adjustment, but i never even think about it now. and i actually find it refreshing not having them take up the room anymore.

Beat you to it. Just got back from the Sony touch launch in Montreal. It's pretty awesome. Love the stylus pen that allows you to take notes on the pages! They're sending me a demo model to play with over the weekend, so I will file a report. Very serendipitous, since my son dropped my itouch in the toilet yesterday. From what I've seen, and know already from my ipod touch reading. It really is as good as the paper edition.

Dave, you compare e-readers to music downloads or CDs. I understand your analogy, but it doesn't quite work. The problem is compatability. Right now, you can't "read" an electronic version of a book on every e-reader, whereas for the most part you can play CDs on any brand of CD player, and MP3s on most portable digital music player (let's not talk about the iTunes/iPod restrictions, I'm trying to keep things simple here LOL). PDF formats aren't the ideal for e-readers, so that's one semi-universal e-file that won't work. And there's no incentive for Amazon to make their format compatable with Sony's reader etc.

The great potential for e-readers is that you can not only carry hundreds of BOOKS in digital form, but NEWSPAPERS, and MAGAZINES, and, here's the best part, BLOGS. Yes, my blog is available on Kindle -- look up City of Kik on Amazon.

Will Sony's reader allow for wireless download like the Kindle does? That seems like a HUGE plus for the Kindle in this portable wireless communication age.

I love my Kindle 2 but, like you, begrudge the amount of space given to that stupid keyboard. Who in their right mind uses their Kindle as an internet browser, for gawd's sake? And I, for one, don't use all the nifty note-taking features. I could even live without the dictionary feature, although IIRC one can access that without actually entering text. I wish they made a bare-bones, reader-only version (at a lower cost, presumably) while offering a Cadillac version for those who wanted the option of the keyboard.

For me, the main determinant -- even more so than the initial investment, since at my rate of book consumption the ROI will always be short ;-) -- will be content availability.

I see that it is wireless, sorry. But I still ask, does it compete with Amazon's great Whispernet?

I product-tested both the version 1 and version 2 of the Sony Reader, and was not very impressed, honestly. The layout of the controls, the weird menus they have, the way you select things . . . none of it worked to my satisfaction. However, it is entirely possible that having a touch screen alleviates many of those problems.

On the flip side, I personally don't think that eBooks will sell big until eInk technology has a faster refresh rate--the entire screen goes to black for a moment when you "turn" a page--color technology, and backlighting. But ya know, I've been wrong before.

I totally agree on the tiny keyboard/keypad on the Kindle; it always seemed deeply stupid to me.

Nick,

All the big publishers will offer their content in whatever form the handful of megaplayers like Amazon, Sony, Apple and BN ask for. And all they are already getting the backlists together.

I don't see this market being won/lost on access to books. They'll all do that.

I think it will be won primarily on two things: low price, and a device millions of people actually want to read books on. (Part of the latter appeal may or may not be that it's a device the person already has in their purse, briefcase or even pocket. But it better have a damn good screen.)

It could turn out that NO ereader ends up being the winner, and that 20 years from now most of us are reading them on a device that does lots of other things: eg, a bigger iphone or a much lighter netbook.

Regarding the debate over keypad and touch screen, I have a Palm Pre cellphone (and have been reading digital books through Shortcovers) and I suggest the answer is to have BOTH. Touchscreens are very convenient for turning pages or clicking on hyperlinks, etc. But a real QWERTY keypad is essential for entering any text or Web-browsing, which would be necessary I think if you're using the ereader to search online databases/libraries for new books, or in the case of Kindle, to use their Whispernet wireless browser, which thank goodness is free with the device.

I agree with Douglas that despite the hype I'm not yet sold on eInk technology. Definitely need color (especially when magazines, newspapers, and blogs are concerned, and some illustrated books) and backlighting, plus fast/instantaneous page-turning.

And price. If you're paying for most of the content, and if new, "better" versions keep coming out, why would people invest so much money -- even early adaptors, instead of waiting for prices to drop or a clear frontrunner in the marketplace to emerge?

That should be early adopters. Sorry for the typos. Wish I could edit my comments. :)

I will have to check this out. I have been waiting on the Kindle--thinking there must be something better, and now there is. Thanks for the info!

I don't know. I just can't warm up to "e-books". Especially when reports came out recently that Amazon went into some Kindles and removed books without the Kindle owners' knowledge or consent. Seems to me that's wrong no matter what the justification.
I spend way too much time as it is reading off a computer screen and when I want to read a book or newspaper I want it printed, in ink, on paper.
And I especially don't ever want to get to the point where I have to take either my laptop or a Kindle or a Sony whatever with me when I go in to crap.

I want one!

"if new, "better" versions keep coming out, why would people invest so much money -- even early adoptors, instead of waiting for prices to drop or a clear frontrunner in the marketplace to emerge?"

i can answer that one. because that's what early adopters do.

that's nearly always the case with new/emerging technologies, and EAs are the people who jump in very early, when the stuff is really expensive and they know there will be much better stuff in 6 months or a year. they want it now. and they have money to pay for it.

there will always be those people, but there is a limited quantity. a device doesn't go mass market until it makes a much wider class salivate.

and even then, we know knew stuff will keep coming. i broke down to pay for an iphone this spring, knowing the next model would probably come by summer, which it did. at some point you just have to buy one, or you can wait forever.

the ebooks are not there for me yet, not even close. but i'm excited to see new models and more big players competing effectively so that we can get this train moving.

i don't want paper books replaced, but i do hope we might expand the universe of people buying books, especially if they cost half the price.

Instead of buying another single-purpose device, run the free Kindle app on an iPhone: thirty lines of tack-sharp text, touch-screen controls, and I can read it in the dark. Books cost the same as for the Kindle device, but you save $400 up front.

AND..an iPhone can also run the free Stanza app: same specs, but you have access to the other e-book formats that Kindle doesn't support. This includes access to the entirely free Project Gutenberg library.

agore, i'm glad the iphone size works for some people like u. (a guy emailed that he had just read my whole book on his iphone and i couldn't believe it.)

i get irritable just reading my emails on it after more than 5-10 minutes, though. a book would be torture.

how small do u have to make it to get 30 lines of text? i just counted 18 on mine at default size and i don't like it that small. -and it's all of six words per line, so i'm constantly scrolling. yuck.

RE: "It will never be mass market until it's actually as good as the damn paper version."

AND it will NEVER be as good as real books on paper. I feel that we should screw abandon all this hi-tech gadgethead stuff and remember that it is BOOKS that make us human. These e-readers are going to be the death of civilization as we know it. WHY? Because when we read on a screen, it is NOT reading. It is skimming, scanning, we do not process or digest the info as we do when we read on paper surfaces. Really. We are going about this kids in a candy store, but these e-readers suck. We do not need them. The suits just want to make money. We are addicted to new gadgets and the newspaper tech reporters get their jollies by writing every week about the next big thing in gadgethead stuff. But has anyone every STOPPED to wonder just why we need all these techno gadgets? We don't need them. Paper books and paper newspapers and magazines do just fine.

The Internet is great for things like Open Salon and Blogs and Email and Websites and Wikipedia and Yahoo News and even Drudge, BUT we do not need e-readers. They are being foisted upon us by greedy gadget-makers who only care about money. STOP THIS NONSENSE. Cherish your books. Think about it.

See my blog on this, i call it "Reading on paper versus "screening" on a screen" and "screening suck.....

http://zippy1300.blogspot.com

Mark my words: the gadget lust is gonna be the death of our hard won civilization. Don't believe me: See my invention of THE BINDLE at the same website or google "THE BINDLE" + "book" and see a photo of the new advance BINDLE. I am not kidding!

http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2009/08/introducing-bindle-new-reading-device.html

dan, i imagine the Sumerians wailed about civilization ending if we ever stopped writing with styluses on papyrus (or whatever they used). and the Medieval monks must have decried printed books, not hand scrolled. and in a different twist, the Greeks were probably aghast at writing Homer down, when it obviously had to be delivered orally. (without the verbal intonation, all the artistry would be lost. WRITTEN literature? craziness.)

we fall in love in love with artifacts. there is nothing magical about paper. we're just used to it.

500 years of printed books is a long tradition to break, but the day had to come. how cool is it that after 500 years, we got to be the people to witness the change, and participate in it.

DaveCullen,
You make some good points, and I like a spirited discussion.
Let me try to make myself more clear about what I meant above. I am not really a Luddite. I love gadgets, too. But what I worry about is not that we will move from reading from books to reading off screens, I am all for progress and change, my middle name is Heraclitus, but what I worry above, Dave, and nobody seems to be discussing this in our headlong rush to embrace anything new adn shiny is this: not the way we read on paper or screens, but HOW we read, and believe me, reading on a screen is a whole new ballgame compared to reading on paper, and the prognosis does not look good.

Why? When we read on paper, our brains light up in different ways than when we read on screens. Top scientists are already looking into this, from Dr Anne Mangen in Norway to Dr Small at UCLA. What this means is that when we read on paper, compared to screening (screen-reading, screading, skimming, whatever you want to call it, JUST DON'T CALL IT "reading"!) ...what it means it that when we read on paper we process the text in a deeper way, and we digest the text and we analyze the text and we use our critical thinking skills with the text in a much deeper way than when we , er, "read" on a screen.

This is what I am worried about. For emails and blogs and Drudge Report news, sure, the Internet is fine, and screening the news online is cool. But for literature, philosophy, sociology, spirituality, these kinds of texts will NOT be absored as well on screens. It's a a completely different ballgame in the brain scan department. Go ask the scholars stuyding this right now. We are headed for a society where critical thinking is a thing of the past.

Is that what we really want? If not, we must stop these machines dead in their tracks ASAP. Kindle, be damned. Long live the Bindle. And I am not joking!

http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2009/08/introducing-bindle-new-reading-device.html

RE: ...."Danny, i imagine the Sumerians wailed about civilization ending if we ever stopped writing with styluses on papyrus (or whatever they used). and the Medieval monks must have decried printed books, not hand scrolled. and in a different twist, the Greeks were probably aghast at writing Homer down, when it obviously had to be delivered orally. (without the verbal intonation, all the artistry would be lost. WRITTEN literature? craziness.)

we fall in love in love with artifacts. there is nothing magical about paper. we're just used to it.

500 years of printed books is a long tradition to break, but the day had to come. how cool is it that after 500 years, we got to be the people to witness the change, and participate in it."

This weekend, I spent my time packing to move. 13 boxes of books and two boxes of CDs. I realized in a few years time, I could afford technologies that would make lugging around both from apartment to apartment a thing of the past. Brave new world. My only concern is what books I could be missing because they are no longer in print or wouldn't be digitally available.

max, the digital age is going to allow us to recover literally millions of books which are out of print, and make them universally available. google's goal is to get every book ever published with a copy still available onto the global database.

Just got my first "real" look and demo of a Kindle at one of my book club meetings last week. I was ready for some kind of magical technological machine. Nope, just black and white pages with a push button mouse. I had heard you can access the internet from it, which you can, but alas, more black and white, texty looking webpages. I am in the market for some type of gadget for my evening use at home just for play.

Iphone is out as I have Verizon with a family plan and don't want to spend the extra $300 + $70 per month minimum. I have been looking at notebooks, but eh, they are price and I can get a regular laptop for the same with many more options and a bigger screen, getting older you know, I'm going to need big type sooner or later.
Anyway, I agree, this reader should be about $50-$100 to be a big seller IMHO.

(I think one hyperlink made my post not work, so am trying again.)

Dave, I believe we first interacted on TalkLeft, before Linked-in.
I like your openness in general, in your book (which I mentioned as 'Kindleworld' on Twitter) and in these discussions.

Re e-reader features, montanarose, a fellow Kindle-user, that drew my attention with
--- "Who in their right mind uses their Kindle as an internet browser, for gawd's sake? And I, for one, don't use all the nifty note-taking features."---

Well, I for one do, and I think I'm in my right mind :-) The new Sony Daily Edition due in December is wireless but for that money accesses ONLY the Sony store (and the Overdrive e-book part of local libraries via the Sony store.
That's for $100 more than the Kindle 2 (and the touch screen of the Sony PRS 700, now discontinued, was known for poor readability due to the added layer needed over the e-ink screen on a device that small).

The Kindle gives 24/7 free access to the entire net from whereever we are and some of us use it a lot when out of the home to look up things via Google, Yelp.com and assorted other things.
It is a Godsend if you know the mobile-optimized versions of websites. Works in a bus or during concert intermissions etc.

There are ways to use it for faster access, and even normally-non-techie users have traded notes in an Amazon forum about creative ways in which they've used their Kindles, which includes the notational tools montanarose doesn't use much. The inline-dictionary is fantastic for some of us who preferred to guess by context in the past :-)

In fact, it was with Columbine (and Musicophilia) that I've used the highlighting and note-taking tools the most. Dave's book has so many people involved in the story, many of whon became important to me while reading it that I never felt right if I didn't remember who anyone was -- because these people had gone through such intense experiences that were life changing. Almost everyone mentioned had an important role in it. So I found myself using the search-book feature a lot (which we can actually do without typing) and this results in rows of 'finds' surrounded by context and in the order of the person's appearance in the book. It gave me, more easily, a way to get much more out of it than I normally would if I had to flip around to see when/how that person was mentioned earlier. As Dave has said, it was difficult to handle well so many people, but the individual stories were integral (the ones that remained in the book) to the story of that day.

I used a Kindle screen-capture from the Columbine kindle book for two illustrations on my blog. One is at
bit.ly/kfind
and also in a rebuttal to Baker's New Yorker story that wondered why the Sony was 'ignored' vs the Kindle while choosing the Sony model (PRS-505) which does not have any study tools nor free Net access.

The ability to highlight, search, notate is very useful in re-viewing portions of a book which really struck me for one reason or another. All our notes are (w/our permission) placed on one page for each book on a personal webpage area at Amazon and becomes part of our copy of a book, always downloadable with it and very useful.
Of course I use this only for more interesting books with important points made and with items I want to discuss with others.

Re Dave's point on paper vs other media. I wrote a long post once trying to explain why I personally am mesmerized by reading on a good e-ink screen. For me, that rectangle, without distracting colors and layout concerns (and no glare), is like a window to the author's mind. It is only the author's words, which is all the author had in mind while writing it -- not the cover, the paper, the fixed font size, style, etc.

BUT I'm also still drawn to paper-bound books too, for material where that's essential (travel, photography, highly-illustrated histories). In the meantime, will be interested in the coming Apple iPad (2010?) and the CrunchPad for more Net-focused portable access. Thanks for this discussion.

- Andrys
kindleworld.blogspot.com (identifies my current bias)