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- The Good: Sleek, light and highly portable in a leatherette binder, with excellent storage for a number of books.
- The Bad:A retrograde grey-on-grey display; the price.
- The Verdict: The best e-book reader yet, but it has a way to go before it can match real books.
The arrival of a new generation of e-book readers in Canada, led by the Sony Reader PRS 505, is a story that suggests we're nearing a peak of technological development. Does it mean e-book manufacturers will finally realize their dream of the past dozen years or so?
Technologically, perhaps. The Sony Reader PRS 505 is, compared to most of its competitors, small, capable of storing whole libraries, thin (15 mm, including its soft front and back leather-like covers), light enough (337 grams) to hold for a long period of time without fatigue, and ultimately really cool-looking. And the number of books being released is growing every day.
In short, wow.
But it still doesn't supersede or even match the experience of reading a traditional book. In fact, it can be argued that technologically, the PRS 505 and all digital readers are still far behind the technology that has been stuffed into books made from paper since Gutenberg turned the crank on his press in 1454. Although Gutenberg never used semiconductors, an awful lot of very real technology has been poured into books during the half-millennium before the digital revolution.
Advancements in book technology include binding, glue and typography, an artistic/technical undertaking that computer manufacturers are just beginning to glimpse. Page and type sizes have subtleties most makers of digital counterparts have yet to imagine. Everything in a book, from its type and layout to the thickness of its pages, has been carefully orchestrated to deliver the optimal reading experience for its intended audience. Readers of thrillers and romance novels, for instance, like their books big, so publishers “bulk up” the product with heavier paper, larger type and heftier price tags. Bible and guide-book readers prefer small type and thin pages, perhaps to carry them around more easily. People who read in bed or in the bathtub prefer small paperbacks, easier to hold when supine.
The point is that digital E-book readers have yet to demonstrate much comprehension of the less obvious or subliminal features that have characterized paper-based books for centuries. But many of these readers seem to have been designed by people who understand books only as text. As a result, readers — and this includes the otherwise wonderful Sony PRS 505 — seem to have been created with only one idea in mind: deliver text digitally.
That said, it's hard to imagine much in Sony's reader that can be improved technologically. The $299 device offers text in a decent serif font that can be adjusted to three sizes; its rechargeable lithium-ion battery will last over 7,500 pages, and it can store and display documents in PDF format and Rich Text, as well as digital pictures. It can hold about 160 average e-books, and has two slots for e-books on memory cards, including Memory Stick Duo and SD, for a total of 10 gigabytes of extra content. It can be charged using a simple USB cable, like a BlackBerry; the cable also serves as a connection to the accompanying software, used by your computer to buy books. (Sadly, Macintosh users are out of luck here.) Charging with the USB cable takes about four hours; it will take two with an optional AC power adapter.
When it comes to researching ergonomics, Sony seems to have done a good amount of homework. Ten buttons down the right side serve as menu selectors for different titles or documents in your collection, and two page-back and page-forward buttons are located on the right edge. Controls at the bottom include a left-hand page-turning control, along with buttons to magnify text and insert a book mark; the right side offers a navigation wheel much like those found on MP3 players, and a menu button.
One disappointment is the screen. Narrower and shallower than a paperback page, its monochrome 800-by-600-pixel display has no back light and resembles what we saw in the earliest Palm handhelds. That's to say its dark-grey-on- light-grey screen offers a puritanical reading experience, the kind usually reserved for data, not enlightenment or entertainment. It's not at all like a real book, more of a compromise resulting from the power requirements of backlit screens, colour displays and battery life.
How it would handle a hugely popular book such as William Goldman's The Princess Bride, where whole sections were printed in red, is mystifying: Would Sony have turned it into italics? This is not rocket science.
Still, the screen is quite readable in normal light and even bright sunlight, which is good news for people who read their books on tropical beaches. In low-light conditions, you have to get an optional clip-on light.
To test non-Sony text, I looked at a fragment in PDF format of a book on computer viruses called Windows Lockdown! by Andy Walker. The book's publisher, O'Reilly, which specializes in technology titles, had dressed up the text with colourful information boxes. Although the Reader understands PDF files, it can't handle them dexterously — the reader tried to force the text and colour boxes into the page exactly as shown, making the type very small and the highlighted text colourless. None of the text could be rendered in its largest size, because everything couldn't be fit on the screen.
Another problem with the screen is that the software, called e-Ink, doesn't really handle type justification elegantly. It tries to justify each line by putting in extra spaces between words, without using proportional type, an annoying display that creates white-space patterns (called “rivers”) in the text. This is particularly dramatic in the larger and largest type sizes. This issue had been solved by analog publishers long ago, as have many computer programs have figured it out as well.
It's possible that e-books haven't become very popular because of title selection. Good bookstores usually handle a balance of old and new titles, bestsellers and specialty books, and would order individual books for you. But Sony seems to treat books much like pop music, a field in which Sony is particularly and deplorably active, in which the number of titles, not content, is important. It stresses that its online store (ebookstore.sony.com) has 40,000 titles, a strange point to make since readers do not patronize booksellers on the basis of how many titles they offer.
This can be blamed on copyright, making it impossible for Sony to order individual copies from competing e-book publishers. It carries only books that publishers have translated into Sony's format and are wrapped in Sony's historically offensive digital-rights management software. Of course other books are available from many on-line bookstores, but they will not necessarily be optimized for Sony's Reader.
This is important in a wired world. The Internet is built on the notion that it's easier to get books online than in the real world. Yet wrapping books in DRM software, formatting them for a specific reader and limiting them to a certain vendor work against that concept. Moreover, the cost of books at Sony's store is uncomfortably close to the cost of paper-based books, and one begins to wonder whether buying a reader for $299 and paying for the books makes any sense beyond the obvious advantage of portability.
And that brings us back to the problem facing all e-book readers, no matter how well designed they are. Ultimately, digitizing e-books and protecting copyright are activities that create more difficulties for a reader than they solve. Yes, the Sony Reader PRS 505 is an excellent achievement as a piece of technology. Whether it can replace books, however, is another story entirely.
For Jack Kapica's full review, go to the Personal Tech section of globetechnology.com jkapica@globeandmail.com
