Q: Why doesn’t Amazon support the popular "e-pub" standard used by your competitors and many libraries?

A: We are innovating so rapidly that having our own standard allows us to incorporate new things at a very rapid rate. For example: Whispersync (which uses wireless connections to sync your place in a book across devices) and changing font sizes.

Other standards over time may incorporate some of these things. But we’re moving very quickly to improve the state of the art. It’s very helpful not to have to wait for some third-party standard to catch up.

Chris Meadows nicely shot that one down. So ePub at one point would not even allow font-size changes? Come on, Jeff. From afar I love the better traits of the new Reader and may buy one myself, and I recognize that the Amazon has its share of positives. Respect for e-book standards just isn’t one of them.

In fairness to Jeff, I’m also grouchy toward the International Digital Publishing Forum, the creator and developer of ePub. He is right about the group’s inadequacies. Two years ago and probably earlier, I myself wrote on the sync issue, suggesting that the IDPF come up with an industry standard (since we’re not talking about format matters per se, I’d have been happy simply IDPF simply recognizing others’ efforts in this area).  No such luck. Whatever the reason, the IDPF has been too bleepin’ snailish in the past. I hope that changes, and in fact there are signs it might.

Regardless of Jeff’s monopolistic aspirations and the IDPF’s past slugishness, we need standards for the entire e-book industry to make e-books a truly durable medium; and rich corporations like Amazon and Adobe should be willing to help pay for the technical capabilities for the IDPF to keep up. Yes, Jeff: you should be in the IDPF, just as Google and Apple already are. You’re a freeloader if you’re not. Your dissing of Mobipocket format books—on which some hapless buyers spent hundreds and in some cases thousands of dollars for proprietary-DRMed editions they can’t enjoy on their iPads—shows how trustworthy you are on format matters. Mobipocket the company was once in the IDPF. But it isn’t now. Corporate pressure, now that Amazon owns it?

Meanwhile I’d suggest that the library world and other large buyers and potential buyers of e-books lay down the law for Jeff. “ePub when possible, or we won’t give you business. We’ll buy Kindles in small quantities or on our own to see what you’re up to. But no large institutional buys of Kindles or books in that format.” Hello, American Library Association? How much do you care about open standards? I’m going to send this post to an ALA tech expert and find out what the group is  up to. Any chance ALA can come up with formal collection development guidelines that position ePub as the preferred format for books that don’t have special requirements which the standard format can’t meet? Luckily, ALA’s Office of Information and Technology Policy is an IDPF member; but that should be just the start. I want action.

Audio

The device came pre-loaded with two piano jazz MP3s by Jun-ichi Nagahara, so I plugged in my earphones and listened through them. The control scheme was simple enough: a pause button, a slider showing how far through an audio file one is, and the page-turn gestures or buttons to flip forward or backward.

The sound quality was pretty good, though I would expect it to be on a device costing $400 suggested retail. Presumably you would use this to play audiobooks, thus making the 700 a “device for all seasons.”

However, devices that just play audio and are about the size of your thumb are getting less and less expensive all the time, and I have a hard time seeing many people using a device the size of a trade-paperback to listen to audio regularly instead of one of those.

“Adios”

This morning, I knew it was time. The two weeks were up. Technically, I could have waited until tomorrow, but I had done just about all I wanted with the device anyway, and preferred to avoid giving myself the chance to procrastinate. So I used the “format internal memory” option in Settings to remove everything I’d loaded on, packed it back up in its box, wrapped that box in bubble wrap, and sealed it up in a bigger box for shipping. (Ironically, it was an Amazon.com box.)

Then I took it down to FedEx Office (nee Kinko’s) and sent it away. The Sony rep was kind enough to pass on Sony’s account number so I didn’t have to pay for the return shipping fees. They should have it tomorrow.

Retrospective

The PRS-700 and its e-book reading ability came in very handy over the last couple of weeks, some days of which were quite busy. It gave me something to read on the road, on a triangular trip from Springfield to St. Louis to Columbia and home again. It gave me a new way to experience e-books, and educated me about how e-ink works.

That being said, I did not find it worth even the discounted price Sony offered me if I wanted to keep it. For one thing, being between jobs right now I have to watch what I spend. For another, for the amount of money they wanted, I could get a 32-gig iPhone 3G S (well, all right, I’d also have to pay $20 or so extra per month for smartphone fees, but still).

I’m going to miss the PRS-700, but only in the same abstract way I would miss any neat toy I got to play with for a while. It did not impress me as the “one true way” to read e-books; I’m still perfectly happy reading them on Stanza on my iPod Touch.

That’s not to say the 700 is a bad device at all. It had a few little quirks I didn’t like, but I was able to read close to a dozen novel-length books on it with minimal eyestrain and a fairly long time between battery recharges. Loading books was quick and easy, and most menus were intuitive (though I still think placing the Table of Contents under “options” is a bad idea).

One of the Internet friends with whom I chat regularly has a PRS-700 and loves it. He apparently bought it when it was cheaper than the Kindle, and says he likes being able to come home from his job as a network administrator and read e-books from something that is not a screen. The connectivity issue does not bother him; he also has an iPhone which he can use for that.

If you like reading e-books, want a bigger screen than the iPod Touch or iPhone, and don’t want to support Amazon, the PRS-700 may be for you. At least for now—e-ink is getting better and prices are getting lower day by day. In a few months, who can say what an even better e-ink tablet will cost?