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By Branko Collin

A friend lent me his Sony Reader for a couple of weeks. He wasn’t using it as much as he used to, so he wouldn’t miss it.

I received the device with a power adaptor and a minimum of instructions. There’s a school of thought that says that reading instructions is a waste of time anyway, and that interfaces should be intuitive and easy to grasp. I don’t subscribe to that philosophy, and not just because it displays a woeful lack of understanding of the way humans and interfaces work. There’s no such thing as “intuitive,” the best thing you can hope for is that an interface is analogous to interfaces you’ve used in the past.

The Sony Reader has no problems on that score. For me it was incredibly straight forward to operate. My friend had told me how to work the power button, and the rest I figured out by myself. I was up and reading within minutes.

The only thing I struggled with was the “Leave the book” function. For some reason it takes a few seconds to go from a novel’s page to Sony’s auto-generated “book cover.” I don’t know if this is a “feature” or if instead I did something wrong. The first few times it was irksome though, because I kept pressing the Up button, and the Reader remembered all those presses.

What the Sony is very good at is just displaying books. It starts up in a second, you can (fairly) quickly jump in and out of the books, there are several interfaces for sorting your library (by name, by date, et cetera), the device remembers where you were but you can also add bookmarks, and leafing between pages is quick enough to be painless. In other words, I never had the feeling I was operating a machine. I was always just reading.

The only time this idea of “just reading” broke down was when I wanted to take notes or search a book for a certain phrase. Lacking a keypad and a touch screen, there’s simply no way to do this with the Reader (to my knowledge—again, I never read the manual). It’s not that I always need to be able to take notes, but when I do the inability to do so is immediately noticeable. Indeed it is probably a testament to the immersiveness of the Reader and its like that getting up to look for pen and paper feels like just too much work.

There are two simple reasons why I wouldn’t buy this device. One is that I have been boycotting Sony ever since they tried to install malware on millions of computers. The other is simply a matter of pricing. I still believe that a digital book reader should cost around 50 bucks, be they euros or dollars. Plenty of Readers, Kindles and Iliads have been sold to prove that not everybody feels the same way I do though. The E Ink devices have clearly resonated with lots of bibliophiles, and now the wait is for the mystery device that will find and bind us all.

It would seem that reading habits are at the basis of a lot of reasons why people would buy one device and reject the other. In order for you to put my findings into context, here’s a list of mine.

  • I am a voracious re-reader, and I keep books.
  • I realized the other day that I often read books for their atmosphere, which may explain the re-reading. James Bond for instance is great if you want to get yourself in a go-get mood.
  • I own a library that is small to book lovers but largish to the general populace (750+ copies).
  • I do not suffer from “eye strain” or other fictional eye problems.
  • My mind often wanders while reading—my biggest gripe with the 160×160 Palm Zire as a reading device is that I have to scroll back several “pages” before I get to the point where my mind forgot to warn my (browsing) thumb I had stopped paying attention.
  • I take notes. Not always—I don’t generally write in books—but often enough that I notice it when I am not able to easily take notes.
  • I read in bed a lot.
  • I read a lot of second hand books.

And finally, I simply don’t have money for gadgets: if I buy a reading device, it must fill a real need. Perhaps I am atypical for a Teleread blogger in this respect, but with me it’s about the books and not so much the gadgets. If your reading habits map to mine though, if you figure Sony has gotten past its questionable ethics, and if you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up. A new version has been out for a while that apparently has a better screen.

 
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