sony's reader does not seem to sell terribly well. first it was available for $349. then the price went down to $299. then buyers received $50 worth of ebooks with a reader. and today the new york times has a full-page ad offering $149 worth of ebooks with every reader. it certainly is not as successful as apple's istuff, which seems to require no advertising at all and still generates tons of money.
one of the problems probably is that the reader is a terribly closed device. you can read ebooks purchased in sony's ebook store (which come in sony's proprietary DRM-crippled Broadband eBook (BBeB) format), and that's about it. in theory, you can also look at PDFs (but the screen is too small for standard-sized PDFs, and PDF rendering is pretty slow for non-trivial PDFs), pictures (but the quality is less than optimal because the screen has just 4 grayscales), and listen to your mp3 tracks (but that's probably not relevant for most potential buyers). my guess is that sony's decision to make the reader as closed as possible will add one more device to the list of sony's failures. which is a shame, because the reader is a beautiful and nicely designed piece of hardware, but given the software restrictions, it is hard to imagine how it will really take off.
sony might add the adobe ebook reader to the reader device, but that just adds another closed world and probably will not make the overall impression very different. sony's business model apparently is centered around the assumption that a pretty cheap reader device will generate enough ebook sales to make sense. i'd like to see the actual figures, but my guess is that this will not work out.
a less restricted device would probably be the smarter approach. imagine an electronic ink device that not only displays DRM-crippled ebooks, but also serves as a general platform for displaying content from PDF to HTML pages, including personalized html news pages assembled through configurable newsfeeds. i'd certainly pay much more than $300 for this, if i could just use it in ways which i find useful, not just the single way sony thinks should be possible.
the irex iliad could be this open alternative, but it has way too much of a prototype feel to it to appeal to the mass market. and the business model of irex is a complete mystery to me. there is quite a bit of interesting stuff on the iliad, including wifi and a touch screen. but apparently the wifi is only used for a phone home feature for software updates and for connecting to some central source for content distribution. amazing. how can you build a wifi-enabled device these days and not leverage the power of the web? i still haven't got around to play a bit more with my iliad, but it seems to me that this could be a really nice platform for experimenting with new ways of information aggregation and publishing, but also a pretty long way from delivering a polished end-user experience so that users actually like the device.
Until Sony releases a version that reads something other than Sony Connect drm-crippled books I will resist the urge to buy one.
As it turns out, I am not much of a fan of e-ink. First of all I miss the backlighting and my experimenting with the Illiad has been one long exercise in frustration.
The device is stupid: crippled WiFi, limited content, and the touch screen that only touches with the special stylus, Worse, it is SLOW: the screen refresh is maddening. I am reading a mobipocket books and it takes several seconds for the page to "turn" once you toggle the bar. Mobi zips along on my other devices so it's not the reader software.
I'd say this is not a technology that is ready for prime time!
Posted by: Gigi Reynard | Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 03:40
gigi: thanks for your comment, and i certainly understand your feelings about the iliad. i was very excited when i read the iliad specs and thought about the potential of such a device. now that i have one, the excitement is gone. the device looks and feels like a prototype, which would be ok, given the fact that irex does not have sony's design and manufacturing resources for beautiful hardware. the really disappointing part is the software, which made me think about all the missed opportunities. taking the iliad to a completely new level of mobile content handling with a full-scale browser and a web-based architecture behind that would have been that hard, technically, but apparently there is a completely different mindset at work at irex. that leaves the door wide open for some e-book company which actually understands the network effect of the web.
regarding electronic ink: it is a display technology with severe limitations, but i actually like it. it is super slow, but the iliad's display (which is one generation ahead of the sone reader) is really nice. it also is super slow, which in part is a problem of the display itself, but also can be attributed to iliad software problems. i like reading e-ink much better than reading lcds, but the display properties also call for an entirely differently designed interface, and in this area a lot of work still has to be done. i am waiting for some really good designers to take on this challenge and come up with some really useful metaphors which can be applied to e-ink devices; the traditional mousing, clicking, and scrolling approach probably is not the way to go. my guess is a touchscreen is a good thing to have for this kind of display, but now that i have my iphone, i certainly don't think that a pen-only touchscreen (such as the iliad's) is a good idea.
Posted by: dret | Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 11:38