A little over a month ago, on my birthday, I opened the New Yorker and found an intimate, in depth review by Nicholson Baker  of  e-readers currently on the market.  He hated his Kindle 2. Mostly he hated the e-ink, the technological “innovation” that is supposed to make on-screen reading more friendly on the eyes.  He found its palette of sickly grays as depressing to read as wet newspaper.  And he swore that sentences which were funny in print, just weren’t funny anymore in e-ink.  

So he tried out some other readers.  He preferred the higher contrast of the Sony Reader, but had even higher praise for the Ipod Touch.  Sure the pages were tiny, but the touch screen made them easier to flip.  And there were a variety of great reading aps which gave access to huge free libraries, like project Gutenberg, which has digitalized over 20,000 public domain books. He also enjoyed reading it in bed. On the Ipod you can flip the contrast so that words glow white on a black background.  No need for a book light. Going back to the Kindle, after reading on the Ipod, was like “going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks.“

I was sold.  I make my living mostly as a book critic. Publishers, editors and writers are increasingly sending me advance copies in digital form.  Like most people I find it difficult to curl up with my computer.  Plus it was my birthday.  

I loved my new ipod touch, though I soon stopped using it for reading. The pages were small. Like an imprinted duckling, I found myself easily drifting back to the solid, secure feel of books. But it was fantastic for other things: syncing my calendar with my i-mac, tracking my expenses, and  entertaining my son on long car trips with videos and games. 

It was all good, until the day I heard that quavering little voice at my elbow. “Mom, what happens if you drop the ipod Touch in the toilet?” Fortunately, in our case, nothing incredibly tragic (though I highly recommend buying thick protective silicon case, and I did lose the Wi-fi.)   But the bloom was kind of off my new toy.

Even more fortunately, this happened the day before Sony launched two new e-readers in Montreal. This was part of a joint project with a Quebec book and music store to digitalize books in French. The friendly Sony rep gave me a choice between which one I’d like to try out at home: the pocket reader, a smaller version of its popular PRS-505 model, or the new Sony Touch with a touch screen and nifty stylus pen that allowed you to scribble all over it and save your handwritten notes. I love scribbling on books. It’s the book critic’s version of dog pee. How could I resist the  jouissance (that's french for transgressive joy) of defacing everyone from  Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf?

A week later my demo model arrived.   I really liked the feel of the Sony Touch Reader in my hands.  It didn't come with the leather case that Sony Readers usually have, but someone had been working hard to come up with a metal that actually felt soft and warm. I was ready to start scribbling, and decided to download a copy of Sense and Sensibility (to prepare for the upcoming release of  Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.)

I started reading. I liked the larger pages of the Sony, but there was something vaguely wrong.  Something about the process of reading felt like an effort. First the touch pad was more like a press pad. It didn’t have the hypersensitivity of the Ipod. But that wasn’t really the problem. The words just didn't seem to attach as easily to my brain. I adjusted the size of the font. This seemed to improve things. Maybe I needed reading glasses? Or maybe I'd just read this book too many times. Had I finally become tired of Jane Austen? Should I scribble "getting old" in the margin?

I decided to try the same book on my ipod touch.  Austen’s sharp prose leapt off the screen. Suddenly she was sharp and witty and young again.

Obviously I needed to adjust the contrast. Except I couldn’t. The other Sony models have brighter contrast, but as I later discovered, new  technology demands that the Sony Touch lower the contrast to something closer to the darker grays of the Kindle. 

Sigh. It wasn’t horrible. It was probably something I could get used to. Eyes are amazingly adaptable. And there were a lot of great features on The Sony Touch.  Its design made it a breeze to annotate, highlight, bookmark and yes, scribble on.  For professional reasons I did want to keep it.  If I were back in school, this is the reader I would buy. It can read PDF and Word documents, so $399 (Canadian) is steep but not outrageous.

For pleasure reading, however, it was more expensive and not much better than the ipod. A problem, especially, since the ipod, in my opinion  isn’t much better than the book.

But maybe I'm just comparing these to the wrong technology.  I will say without reservation that the Sony Reader is a huge improvement on the highlighter, pencil and bookmark.  It is great to be able to keep, and erase all your notes. 

And for night reading, the ipod is a huge improvement on the itty bitty book light.   

So this race to create the ultimate e-reader  is not entirely a waste.   But at this point I'd say it's far from over.