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By Roger Sperberg, New York Editor for TeleRead

Sony apparently sees what we see — we Telereaders, the never-say-die e-text e-book believers — that there is a real market for electronic books. That’s how I read the company’s forthcoming announcement of an e-book reader for the U.S. market, as reported in today’s top story in BusinessWeek. Because after Sony’s release, four other companies are lined up in the wings with competitive devices.

I think that’s pretty strong evidence that the e-book comeback is about to start. That’s the good news from this release.

The bad news is that Sony — as David Rothman and others have pointed out — is not going to bring us to a better world with this device, unlike Apple with its iPod, say (Apple managed to revolutionize the music business with retrograde technology by “seamlessly wedding content to hardware,” as BW put it). Whatever else you want to say about the iPod (single-purpose, proprietary, anti-interoperability, “better world”?), the iPod/iTunes Music Store did rescue us from the morass the RIAA had led us to. Sony’s e-reader/online e-bookstore isn’t going to.

Back in July I suggested that e-books might break out in 2006 because of the factors bringing down the cost of powerful, wonderful handheld devices. A key part of my argument, though, is that an e-book device by itself is less likely to ignite things than a general device that works really well as an e-book reader, as for instance the Nokia 770 does. If Sony were to somehow “seamlessly wed content to hardware” in its single-purpose e-reader, that would mean people would end up carrying around a phone, a PDA, an iPod and an e-book reader. Oh, and a laptop.

You see the problem here?

As you can tell, I think people buying an e-reader will want to use it at times to surf the net, or read or write email, or play games, or run a word processor, or watch video, or play music, or whatever. I acknowledge that E Ink technology isn’t so, well, web-friendly; that obviously restricts Sony’s design somewhat. Still, why not imagine someone would want to read a book and listen to an internet radio station at the same time, as I did earlier this evening on my Nokia 770, reading Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe and listening to libraradio.com (“gypsy-style webcast from Maribor, Slovenia”)? (This is conceivably the only way one should read this book, btw. Your choice of radio stations, of course.)

And what Sony wants to do, of course, is to lock the books to their device in a proprietary format, so that no one can read them anywhere else.

Sony’s proprietary-lock-in approach is so 20th century, so colossally at odds with the zeitgeist, you wonder sometimes if this idee fixe will sink them as fast as the fabulous collapses of Arthur Andersen and Enron. Then again, those companies were run by crooks as well as idiots, and Sony’s leaders seem to be just idiots. Yet how thin the comfort is when that’s the favorable aspect of the comparison.

I understand why IP holders quake at opening their vaults to those feckless copyright thieves that normal consumers become when handed an electronic file (book, song, movie, program, whatever). When I worked at Random House the whole issue of DRM (digital restrictions management) was perceived as “How do we protect ourselves from catastrophe?” One unrestricted copy equals an unrestricted number of copies. But Tim Bray, the XML guy and now chief blogging evangelist at Sun, looked at it from the other perspective, writing in August that “what all the DRM dreamers don’t want to admit is that 95% or more of the population hasn’t yet encountered DRM, and when they do, they aren’t going to like it.”

I don’t think anyone is going to like Sony’s version one bit.

I personally am a copyright extremist (or maybe that’s “copyleft” extremist) and I believe that DRM is eventually doomed to failure, for all the oft-stated reasons. But until we reach “eventually,” I expect some sort of middle ground to be identified, a sort of trust-but-verify or don’t-ask-don’t-tell charade that everyone will be able to live with for a while so we can get on with our lives. One of those “it’s too cheap to copy” middle grounds, I would guess, where it’s less effort to buy something than find someone to copy it from.

But to get publishers and authors (and their kamikaze agents!) and readers and ereader manufacturers all to enter the same big tent, to come together to agree to pretend to agree, you can’t be welded to one side of the issue. Really, I’m not the only one who disbelieves that Sony will manage to do it.

And that’s the bad news.

 
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