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By David Rothman

Sony reader with lightThe ladies at Dear Author read a lot of books, so I can imagine why Jane worries about the Sony Reader pausing even a second or so between pages. Check out a You Tube video review for yourself and see if you agree with her.

I read my own share of books and would rather not suffer the delay, but could live with it; my beef is over the screen contrast. Ayrkain sees the contrast issue as “over-exaggerated.” A poster on a Librie list reports that the background is a “bit” lighter than on the Librie, which I once owned. Sorry—that’s still probably a deal-breaker for me. I’ll do the Borders routine, however, when I can, and behold the production version of the Reader for myself. The $350 machine is supposed to be out in the next few weeks. Here and here, TeleBlog commenters discuss the nasty format situation—the Reader can read DRMed books only in Sony’s BBeB format.

Meanwhile Gizmodo continues its earlier Sonyfest with an item on the Dock Night Light and Magnetic Suede Cases, and MobileRead serves up a Sony GPL sources download link.

Associated Press reviewer Peter Svensson on the screen issue and related matters: “Like paper, the display is readable from any angle, but it doesn’t look as good as the real thing, chiefly because the contrast doesn’t compare well. The background isn’t white and the letters aren’t black. The letters show some jaggedness, even though the resolution is a very respectable 800 by 600 pixels. It will display photos, though they look a bit like black-and-white photocopies. But it’s still a more comfortable reading medium than any other electronic display. The text is easy on the eyes in almost any light you could read a book by.”

He observes that the second between pages will rule out rapid scrolling, along with note-taking on the screen, and he complains that the Reader handles PDFs poorly. You can’t “zoom in on them, so if they’re formatted for standard 8.5-inch-by-11-inch pages, the text will be illegibly small.” Hey, whether the machine is the Sony or the iLiad, that’s exactly what dotReader could fix (usual disclosure: I’m a cofounder of OpenReader, and dot is the first software to be able to read our format).

Svensson concludes that “it’s hard to see the Reader as something that will bust the e-book market open. But it deserves a much better reception than the generally small LCD-based devices that hit the market a couple of years ago, some of which are already discontinued.”

 
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