If:book vs. Sony’s ‘Phony’ Reader: No word search, rotten navigation and other flaws galore

By David Rothman

Yes, I’ll get to the Sony Reader and if:book in time. But first some context—plenty:

Is reading a digital book like touring Normandy (photo) while gazing down through a bomb sight? Geoffrey Nunberg, a well-known linguist, has drawn that comparison. As he apparently sees it, you can’t wander blithely around and absorb the whole. If nothing else forget about tracking “the diminishing distance between our thumb and forefinger.”

Based on my experiences with the Cybook, PDAs, Gemstar machines and the rest, however, his arguments just don’t hold up. Cybook-style tablets can display several hundred words at once and let you instantly change pages. And via the Mobipocket program or the equivalent, I can gauge my progress by way of a line at the bottom of the screen. Search functions let me keep up better with characters’ names. I’ve actually found complex classics, such as Moby Dick and Crime and Punishment, to be easier to digest on the screen than on paper. I’m horrible at remembering Russian names and the rest; but with the right software, e-books can at least help.

Blunders on Sir Howard Stringer’s watch

But what if some meanie disabled or weakened the same search and navigation features that make me such a raving fan of e-books? As a matter of fact, Sir Howard Stringer has apparently done exactly that, in a sense—albeit quite unwittingly. He’s no meanie, just a well-intentioned guy who really should pay more attention to the people below him. Sir Howard, the CEO of Sony, isn’t running Sony’s e-book operation, but he may have been cheering on the Reader without using it as much as you would expect an Oxford-educated booster like him to be doing. And if Sir Howard is testing the Reader a lot, then he may have low expectations for e-books as a human reader’s friend.

No, so far, Sony hasn’t even agreed to send me a review unit yet—hello, Bennett, did you get the email I mentioned earlier?—but I can extrapolate from a rather credible source, Ben Vershbow, at the MacArthur- and and Annenberg-funded Institute for the Future of the Book. The Institute is the home of Sophie, which, like dotReader, the first implementation of OpenReader, allows sophisticated interactivity. But Ben has found the Sony Reader device—dubbed “Phony Reader” in his item if:book blog—to be wanting even by less ambitious standards than his and mine.

Here is Ben’s list of omissions and other shortcomings in navigation, search and other areas, based on his brush with a Sony Reader earlier this week:

1. The “resolution is still nowhere near that of ink on paper.” My own problem, if the Reader is like my old Librie, would be lack of sufficient contrast. We’ll see if Sony acts out of character and sends me a review unit; if not, I’ll just try a reader when it’s available at the local Borders.

2. The Reader “greatly diminishes” readers’ “control over their place in the book, and over the rate and direction at which they move through it.” In other words, the Sony reduces “random access” and, along with it, the ability to tour a book. Nunberg almost surely would hate the Reader in this regard, and rather deservedly so. In access, it is a giant step backwards not just from other e-book hardware and software, but even from paper books.

“Though it does allow you to leave bookmarks,” Ben writes, “it’s very difficult to jump from place to place unless those places have been intentionally marked. The numbered buttons (1 through 10) directly below the screen offer offer only the crudest browsing capability, allowing you to jump 10, 20, 30 percent etc. through the text.”

Given this failing, I would emphatically suggest that educators at any grade level avoid the Reader except in very limited quantities to acquaint themselves with the technology. Any school official who makes a mass purchase of Sony Readers–at least with their current limitations–should be fired for incompetence. How dare anyone saddle students with such a hobbled machine! Ben didn’t write those words, but that’s how I would feel if I handled procurement for school systems.

Speaking of moving around, Ben also finds the the delay between pages to be a nuisance, but I can grudgingly live with that.

3. The Reader won’t let you annotate your books, and in fact, there are “inputs on the device at all—no keyboard, no stylus—apart from the basic navigation buttons. So, to sum up, the Sony Reader is really only intended for straight-ahead reading. Browsing, flipping and note-taking, which, if you ask me, are pretty important parts of reading a book, are disadvantaged.” Given a choice between a Reader and an old Rocket eBook, I might well go for the latter if Ben’s on target here, which I believe he is.

4. The Sony comes with only 64 megabytes of memory. That would hold 80 books, but remember all the space that image and audio files could add up. Yes, you can add memory cards. But Sony really should have been more generous.

5. You must limit your RSS feeds to the ones that Sony chooses—just ten right now. Sony’s working on the problem, but as I’ve noted before, the existence of this limitation tells a lot about this giant conglomerate’s priorities. We’re not talking about Many-to-Many Central.

6. The reader is “proprietary”—well, at least if you want to read titles from large publishing houses that insist on DRM. Sony’s BBeB format is the only one offering “protection.”

Following up on earlier sentiments, Ben concludes that “ebooks are a dead end.” In terms of brain-dead devices like the Reader, I certainly would agree, based on his Sony Encounter.

Except perhaps for the screen—and that assumes it offers far more contrast than my old Librie did—I just don’t see what’s to like here. That’s my opinion for now. It will be good if Sony can FedEx a unit to me so I can judge for myself. Librieguy from a Librie list has emailed me that some of the older Libries having darker backgrounds than the newer ones, and I’m willing to consider that as a possibility in evaluating the technology.

Lest Sony think, “Oh, but you’re just POed that we’re not using the OpenReader format and dotReader,” let me emphasize that that’s a rather hypothetical question now. To go by the information from Ben, the present Sony is too crippled a machine to do any justice to OpenReader; perhaps future ones will be better. Along with OSoft, our first implementer, we’re about interactivity and the future of books. Sophie, reflecting a similar philosophy, is the same. The Sony is about a return to the past.

In fact, perhaps I now know why—due to his love of the Sony machine—an executive with a certain large publishing conglomerate didn’t even want to consider OpenReader. He may have felt comfortable because he viewed the Reader as being safely like print. Trouble is, it isn’t. In areas such as reader control, it’s apparently much worse, and I’m grateful to Ben for joining me in raising the obvious questions.