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Sony Reader gets nice writeup in Wall Street Journal
September 5, 2007 | 11:21 am
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By David Rothman
The Sony Reader has received a nice little notice from Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal, who tested Pride and Prejudice on it.
Keep in mind Gomes apparently was doing “casual reading.” I don’t see any references in the article to the lack of a word search feature, which students, academics and other serious readers will demand. Walt Mossberg, the main consumer technology columnist at the Journal, noted this important omission, among others. What’s more, Gomes doesn’t share my perception of insufficient text-background contrast. That said, the Journal reviiew is positive indeed, as is writeup by Wowio’s Gerry Manacsa on the Sony Reader and the Mac. Below I’ll repro an excerpt from the Journal:
“…in the past year, there has been another go at digital readers, thanks to an innovative screen technology from a Cambridge company called E Ink. This display is monochrome, and reflects ambient light rather than being back lit like an LCD. While you need to be in a fairly bright room for the screen to be easily readable, you can also take it outside in the bright sun, where it looks its best.
“Its resolution is much higher than on a desktop monitor, resulting in smooth text without any jaggy edges. And since you aren’t staring into a bright light, your eyes don’t get as tired…
“Michael Lesk of Rutgers University said reading researchers like himself know that readers retain information from a screen as well as they do from a printed page. But it’s an open question as to whether the emotional experiences of the two are the same, or whether ink stamped on a tactile piece of paper that you hold in your hands somehow makes more of an impact than ghostly letters that flicker on an ever-changing screen.
“My own little test, using the Sony Reader to reread “Pride and Prejudice” suggests it doesn’t.
“For the first few minutes, I was too aware of the new technology, and had trouble concentrating on the story. But that didn’t last long, and I soon settled in, laughing and worrying in all the right places. At the end, I was just as happy for Elizabeth Bennet as I had been when I first read it in paperback.”
The public domain angle: “Both the Internet Archives (archive.org) and Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org) allow you to download entire books free of charge, usually those no longer under copyright, either as text or as scanned images. The free, not-for-profit Million Book Project is a work in progress at ulib.org.”
(Via MobileRead.)
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Comments:
no mention of the next-gen of eInk either, which is pretty disconcerting in a financial/business journal.
I gather then that Lee wrote this for the Journal’s lifestyle section and was addressing mainly ‘beach reading’ – so he confined his review to this narrow slice of the pie.
It is nice, isn’t it, to read something (anything) positive about ebooks in mainstream press? Gets the public impression a little bit better, even if it only leaves a faint impression: “Ebooks? Oh yes, I read something about them somewhere a few weeks ago. I hear they’re rather nice.”
With the PDA market crumbling, we better hope for *something* that consumers can buy to replace them for ebooking, besides smartphones at $60/month service fees…
Like Gomes, I’ve come to like using the Sony Reader for reading text content in sequential order (reading fiction, for instance). On the other hand, its limited search/navigation tools (as David noted) and generally sluggishness performance make it painful for reference and research work. Its portability makes it seemingly ideal for a travel guide or language phrase book, for example, but it took too long to randomly access desired portions of the books to be practical.
As for a replacement for PDAs sans mobile phone fees — how about the iPod Touch? Once the file management and reader software issues are resolved, that is.
I haven’t tried it yet, but I do feel assaulted by its ad campaign, “Sexier than a librarian,” which is plastered all over the San Francisco BART/MUNI station I use on my way to and from work–as a librarian. If the ads said “Even sexier than a librarian,” I wouldn’t mind as much.