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By David Rothman

Ad for 1960 Edse1, from Wikipedia pageIn Peggy Sue Got Married, the Kathleen Turner character ridicules her dad for driving an Edsel.

Wikipedia describes the Edsel, unveiled for the 1958 model year, as “one of the most spectacular failures in the history of the United States automobile industry.” What can you say about a car where the automatic transmission controls replaced the horn doodad in the middle of the steering wheel? People kept shifting gears when they wanted to honk.

Monochrome Sony vs. colorful rivals

So will the endlessly touted Sony Reader be the Edsel of E-Ink? Or are rivals such as the iLiad doomed—a conclusion some might make, based on sheer publicity?

I myself see the $350 Sony Reader as a potentially successful niche product that iLiad variants and some dark horses could still rout in the mainstream marketplace if their sellers got their acts together. Oh, and don’t count out Panasonic, which is targeting the Japanese market with the forthcoming Words Gear, whose 5.6-inch color LCD display offers 1024×600 resolution. If the Words Gear goes into high gear in Japan, do you think Panasonic will obligingly keep it out of the States to help the black-and-white Sony Reader? On top of that, the b&w iLiad and Jinke machines are hardly Sony’s only threats in the U.S. I’ll tell about a low-cost, color-capable display technology that in time might wreak havoc on Reader sales, before color E Ink appears and maybe even afterwards as well.

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Faced with a variety of issues—not just a problematic screen but a BBeB-centric approach and a delayed release date and content issues as well—Sony is beating the drums even louder. It’s sticking to the old rule of high-budget, high-stakes PR, the same one beloved by Fortune 500 companies and George W. Bush. Drown out the negatives with the company line.

Sony’s Q&As with bloggers weren’t enough. Now Sony Electronics has “hosted” a bunch of ‘em in its U.S. headquarters in California, and MobileRead today carries wonderfully detailed accounts from the hard-working Bob Russell and NatCh. Without mention of a visit, Engadget has published its own commentary. But will publicity be enough to distract human readers from the Sony Reader’s shortcomings? It did not work for the Edsel, and in the end the Reader may not luck out, either.

Problem number one: The Dear Author backlight factor and other weaknesses of E Ink

The Edsel failed partly because people found it wasn’t as revolutionary as hyped. E Ink devices are still exotic to most consumers, but not to me. I owned a Librie, a more primitive Sony Reader aimed at the Japanese market.

From afar, at least, the Reader seems to be just the Librie II. Oh, yes, it’s been Americanized and there are more options in such areas as memory cards. But if you go by the omnipresent photos, the screen is more or less than same—with a gray rather than true white background. Will you enjoy the Librie, er, the Reader, on a badly lit train or airplane? Or even in your own house? Yes, this is subjective as all get-out. Feel free to disagree.

Once the novelty wore off, however, I myself couldn’t stand Librie—snail-ordered from Japan—except under a strong light. Otherwise the screen contrast sucked. We’re talking about real-life inside, not advertising photos or outdoors. Sony will apparently sell or promote a Sony-blessed reading light, which could help. But if used to compensate for the shortcomings of the display, this approach would be rather Rube Goldbergish. I don’t need optimal light to read from paper. Why should E Ink be different? The technology is awesome but is far, far from being fully developed.

Then there’s the touchy issue of performance in the bedroom. While reading, women don’t like to keep their husbands awake at night. Jane and Jayne at Dear Author worry about Sony Reader’s lack of ability to work in the dark. Of the DA readers participating in a poll, most say they definitely would not buy a machine without backlighting. Perhaps other readers will. But that’s no small obstacle for Sony. Women tend to be smarter than men on ergonomics issues—practical rather than so bedazzled by technology for technology’s sake—and the Sony Reader could be no exception. Thanks, Ja(y)ne!

Yes, those backlight problem will also dog the iLiad, which, like the Sony, uses essentially the same screen technology as the Librie—even if there have been incremental improvements. But as I’ll show here, the iLiad has other things going for it.

Problem Number Two: The Tower of eBabel issue

While the Sony can read unencrypted PDF, it can’t read the DRMed kind favored by large publishers. Instead Sony wants you to use its BBeB format to read best-sellers and other contemporary works whose publishers insist on “protecting” them.

Don’t you hate it when the commercial priorities of tech companies limit the books you can enjoy?

Either Sony, Adobe or both share blame here. None other than Adobe’s Bill McCoy has portrayed BBeB as a format that will give way to an XML-based standard. Meanwhile, if you want to read DRMed books from major authors, you’re stuck with BBeB. Once again I’ll turn to those smart ladies from Dear Author to size up the mess that Sony is giving us. Jane, although most likely continuing to believing in the long-term potential of E Ink, just as I do, has written:

Will iRex be more obliging in the format department? We already know that iRex’s iLiad at least does nonencrypted Adobe, and even if the device won’t do DRMed Adobe, the company may very well include Mobipocket on the iLiad. There has been a huge demand for it in Mobipocket’s support forums, and while Mobipocket isn’t saying yes, it is not saying no either. My strong belief is that iRex will include Mobipocket. That would be significant since Mobipocket is among the more popular formats used by large publishers and public libraries.

But will the control-minded people at Sony get it? Sony is a textbook example of a hardware manufacturer compromised by the conglomerate’s content executives, and this mindset is responsible for the fixation on the inferior BBeB format and the Sony store. Sony’s fiendish control tendencies might even be showing up in the RSS area. As I understand it, the Reader won’t let you plug in the RSS address of any site. You must choose from Sony’s list. Wanna read TeleRead on your Reader? Forget it under this arrangement—well, not unless the Sony people are eager to show I’m wrong in this case. Nothing like the linking of content and hardware, eh? While it’s possible that innocent technical reasons forced Sony to drop the choose-your-own-address capability, this is still a good example of a large corporation’s priorities or lack thereof.

Problem Number Three: The number of DRMed books that the Sony Reader can read

Sony’s BBeB-bookstore, which won’t even work initially with Macs and other nonPCs, will start out with a mere 10,000 or so titles—fewer than I have on an old DVD of classics from Blackmask. This number is pathetic compared to the millions of books in existence. In time Sony will offer many more titles of contemporary, copyrighted works, but guess who’ll already be way ahead in the game. Amazon. It owns Mobipocket and appears to be developing a hardware reader to compete with Sony’s. Live by proprietary formats, die by them. In the end, among people who read DRMed commercial books, not just the early adopters fond of the unencumbered PG variety, Amazon just might crush Sony. DRMed or not, the number of Mobi books will dwarf the number of BBeB books. I lent my Librie to Matt McClintock, owner of manybooks.net, so he could add the Librie format. Last I heard from Matt, things were still bumpy. At any rate, Sony will need to provide for good creation tools for Matt and others; in Matt’s case, he prefers to work with the Linux variety, which even Mobi doesn’t offer.

What happens, meanwhile, if OpenReader catches on? Yes, we’re in touch with major publishers, which are giving us a very close lookover. And at the hardware end, we indeed have had discussions with iRex. While iRex and OSoft, the developers of dotReader, have not reached agreement on business terms, it would hardly be a shocker if the iLiad eventually did the OpenReader format. As with Mobipocket, the grassroots pressure is building up. Unlike Sony, iRex isn’t basing its business model on an e-bookstore with limited inventory and wares in one proprietary format.

If nothing else, keep in mind that the iLiad is just one competitor. Below I’ll mention what could be a threat much worse than the iLiad.

Problem Number Four: A stronger iLiad—and low-cost hardware with better and cheaper e-book displays than the Sony

While Gene Cote’s candid TeleBlog review has raised some excellent issues about the iRex—such as the lack of decent documentation on old-fashioned paper—most of those problems are correctable.

What’s more, although the present iLiad goes for around twice the price of the Sony, it has advantages such as WiFi and a larger screen better for business and professional uses. Moreover, I could well imagine iRex (whose people came from Philips, a leading E Ink partner) creating a smaller, cheaper iLiad. This next-gen machine, if manufactured economically, would be a Reader-killer—or a Reader II-killer. For that matter, iRex and its Chinese hardware partners could license out the new machine to a whole variety of clone makers, including, yes, Jinke.

By contrast, Sony, while willing to some extent to compete on price, does not like to think of itself as a low-cost producer. Notice? It would rather focus on high-end innovative productions. Perhaps this is why it departed from the cut-throat market for PDAs in North American.

Problem Five: Threats much worse than the iLiad

Psst! All you super-alert TeleBlog readers–I hope you haven’t blabbed a not-quite-secret piece of information. E Ink could face a real threat from the low-cost display technology of the kind used in the 2B1 machine from One Laptop Per Child. See here and here.

Imagine—a high-res, reflective monochrome screen that OLPC promises you’ll be able to read both indoors and outside. And there’s a color mode with backlighting.

I don’t know if the OLPC people will wise up and sell their tablet-convertible laptop in the States for less than the $450 now contemplated. But I wouldn’t be surprised. If nothing else, this new technology is too promising to be limited to the 2B1 alone, and I’d be amazed if it didn’t show up on a whole range of machines, including those made or contracted out by Quanta Computer in the Taoyuan, Taiwan—OLPC’s hardware partner.

This isn’t to suggest that Sony will be standing still. I’m sure it will try to lower the price of the Sony Reader and introduce color and other new features in time.

What’s more, let me say that many and perhaps most of the Sony’s boosters in the press are genuinely excited about the Reader. Bob is. He tells me he already has one on order, and I wish him many hours of pleasurable reading.

In fact, I’d rather that the Sony not be an Edsel. That would bad for other e-book readers as well—in fact, other areas of e-bookdom, too, including actual e-book publishing. With PDA sales so disappointing, it would be a shame for other platforms not to take off, and everything is intertwined. So, like Jane, I’ll wish the Sony folks good luck despite their arrogant ways.

But please, let’s contain the excitement over the Sony Reader. I think a MobileRead reader got it right in describing the Sony Reader as an “early adopter’s” machine like the first $500 calculator: “The device seems just good enough to appeal to that segment.” Exactly. While the Sony probably won’t be an Edsel, I don’t see it as an iPod, either.

Update, 3:36 p.m. Washington, D.C., time: From the OLPC site–on the 2B1 machine, as it’s now called: “9. The LEDs that will be used in the display backlight have started lifetime testing in a 8-hour-on, 8-hour-off testing regime. The contrast
ratio on the transmissive mode has been raised from 50:1 to 85:1 with a target of 100:1. The bright-state-reflectance requirement has been raised to 30%, which rivals the best e-paper displays on the market today and approaches the readability of newspaper.”

Related: Gizmodo coverage and Jane’s latest thoughts. She likes the idea of a machine larger than a PDA for reading manga. I agree, and in fact, she might want to try the iLiad (bigger screen than the Sony), just so she fully appreciates the general limitations of E Ink in such areas as screen contrast.

 
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