Earlier this week, I noted that book publishers and authors had, so far, been largely protected from the mass copying that has helped to undermine the music recording industry's profits. The reason is simple. You can't copy dead-tree books for minimal effort and cost the way you can CDs or MP3s. But, with e-books finally seemingly establishing a bona fide foothold with Amazon's Kindle, that's going to start changing.
New York Times Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman notes this trend in "Bits, Bands and Books" together with a corollary that Esther Dyson predicted in 1994:
”that the ease with which digital content can be copied and disseminated would eventually force businesses to sell the results of creative activity cheaply, or even give it away. Whatever the product--software, books, music, movies — the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to--distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships.”
This, of course, is what a lot of folks--whether as a way to justify music piracy or otherwise--have been saying for years about the business model for music. It's (supposedly) OK if you can't sell a lot of CDs (or iTunes downloads) any longer. Krugman notes that, according to a recent Rolling Stone article: "Downloads are steadily undermining record sales--but today's rock bands, the magazine reports, are finding other sources of income. Even if record sales are modest, bands can convert airplay and YouTube views into financial success indirectly, making money through 'publishing, touring, merchandising and licensing'."
I'm a bit skeptical that selling tchotchkes, tickets, and "extras" in one form or another is really a practical substitute for selling the music itself in the general case. But let's leave that go for the time being. It's been endlessly debated and isn't going to be resolved here. What seems to me even more problematic is the suggestion that there has to be viable alternative models for creative content that becomes de facto free in the general case. For example, Krugman goes on to write:
Indeed, if e-books become the norm, the publishing industry as we know it may wither away. Books may end up serving mainly as promotional material for authors’ other activities, such as live readings with paid admission. Well, if it was good enough for Charles Dickens, I guess it’s good enough for me.
And here, I'm deeply, deeply skeptical. At least with music, there are a variety of revenue-generating activities that are a natural outgrowth of the primary creative product. Most musicians do live performances in any case. The only question is how much money they can make by doing so.
But writers? Sure, some well-known authors make engaging speakers. Geoffrey Moore (author of Crossing the Chasm and Dealing with Darwin) is one I've heard fairly recently. J.K. Rowling just spoke at Harvard's commencement. But just because someone is a writer--even a best-selling one--doesn't make them a good speaker. Indeed, some of the best writers are reclusive and would shudder at the thought of having to make a living by public speaking.
Yes, business models are changing. And all of us will have to adapt in various ways. But let's not kid ourselves that advertising, live performances, or magic money trees are going to automagically pay the bills for creative content that we want to consume but don't want to pay for.
Calling it the iPod of the book business, CitiGroup analyst Mark Mahaney says the Kindle e-book reader will generate three-quarters of a billion dollars for Amazon.com in less than two years.
That should account for up to 3 percent of Amazon's business. See his chart and reasoning here.
(Credit:
Amazon.com)
His calculations assume that unit sales will grow from 189,000 by the end of this year to 2.2 million units in just two years. By then he assumes the price of the device will be just below $300. Mahaney also points out that Amazon does have the largest selection of e-book content.
Sure, Amazon has the e-book/e-book reader synergy going on, but still, his projections seem more than a little optimistic.
Besides the fact that the design leaves more than a bit to be desired, and it's expensive ($399 currently), his reasoning assumes people will completely change their reading habits, and that they'll be up for buying a separate device to do it.
More people would likely be onboard with the concept if it were rolled into their current device of choice, like a portable music player or smartphone with a decent-size screen.
(Credit:
eReader)
I love e-books. For years I've read them on whatever PDA or smartphone I happened to be carrying at the time. (Currently it's a Palm Centro.)
Sure, the screens are small, but you get used to that pretty quickly. For me, nothing beats the convenience of having a good book in your pocket (or clipped to your belt) everywhere you go.
eReader, one of the oldest e-booksellers, was recently acquired by another e-book veteran, Fictionwise. To celebrate, the company just dropped the prices on over 8,000 titles: Every book over $10 has been discounted up to 20 percent.
That's great news, as I think part of the resistance to e-books in general has been their pricing. Surely a book that has zero printing, distribution, and shipping costs should sell for less than its dead-tree counterpart, no?
Anyway, the required eReader software is available for Palm, Windows Mobile, and Symbian devices, as well as for Windows and Mac PCs. While you're at it, sign up for the free eReader newsletter to get an additional 10 percent off each purchase.
P.S. I don't care what Steve Jobs thinks about the masses: I read, and I would love to be able to read books on my iPhone or iPod touch. Betcha lots of other folks would, too.
Auctioneers at eBay were asking for more than double the retail price of Amazon's Kindle e-Reader on Friday.
A check of eBay at 2:45 p.m. PST showed prices for the e-Book reader went as high as $930. TechCrunch reported that a Kindle, which retails for $399, was bid up to $1,500 earlier in the week.
Has Amazon really discovered untapped consumer demand for digital-book readers?
The e-tailer, dabbling in electronics manufacturing for the first time, sold out of Kindles soon after introducing them last month. The device connects to the Web to download books--a feature that separates it from other e-readers that must sync to a PC to load a book.
Amazon has said it won't start delivering on new Kindle orders until after Christmas.
The company said it sold out of the Kindle in under six hours after the handheld went on sale. Some critics questioned how many Kindles Amazon had in stock. The company declined to say.
Amazon has released Kindle, its new e-book reader.
[Later update: my Kindle review is online now.]
Newsweek has published a lengthy article about it. CNET's coverage includes a review, a photo gallery, a Crave blog, and a News.com blog. That's plenty of factual coverage.
Amazon's Kindle e-book reader
(Credit: Amazon.com)I won't rehash the basic features of Kindle, but I will try to compare it with the Sony Reader--now in its second generation and Kindle's primary competition. I will also talk about what I see as the strong and weak points of the Kindle design.
Disclaimer: This is all based on what I've seen and read. I haven't seen a Kindle in person. Yet.
First, I'm surprised by Kindle's industrial design. The unit has the same screen as Sony's Reader (or one with identical specifications), but Kindle is much, much larger overall--longer, wider, and more than twice as thick. Yet somehow it's only 1.4 ounces heavier--10.4 ounces vs. 9 ounces. The Sony Reader feels solid; I suspect Kindle will feel lighter than it is.
Kindle includes a keyboard to aid in searching stored content and browsing the Kindle e-book store. The keyboard, however, looks like it'll be in the way of reading, which is Kindle's primary purpose. The other buttons also look awkwardly placed to me--the page-turning buttons, for example, are on the right and left edges. They're so large that they basically are the left and right edges.
To my eye, Kindle is fairly ugly. Angular shapes, sharp edges, weird button placements, etc. I'm not all that impressed by the design of Sony's Reader either, but I think it looks much better.
Amazon appears to have devoted some of that extra volume to shock protection; Amazon's Kindle page includes a video of drop testing. I'm all in favor of such protection. I am constantly worried about my Sony Reader getting broken just from normal use--that's exactly what happened to my first-generation Reader, and Sony asked almost the same price to repair it as the cost of a new unit.
Also, Kindle seems to be pretty much limited to a vertical (portrait) orientation; there's no mention of landscape mode in the user guide (which is available online as a PDF). Sony's Reader works fairly well in landscape mode, which helps a little with extra-wide documents, especially in PDF format. But Sony's PDF viewer is pretty awful, so that advantage often isn't enough.
I'll give Amazon credit for trying something new as part of Kindle's design--the "cursor bar," a tall, skinny display alongside the main one that works with a scroll wheel to select on-screen menu options. The Reader has 10 buttons down the side of the screen; menu options are physically aligned. Kindle's cursor bar appears to be more flexible. Whether it's as easy to use remains to be seen, but I appreciate the fact that Amazon is trying to innovate.
The other surprising thing was Amazon's decision to use a mobile broadband connection through Sprint's EV-DO cellular data network...and to shield users from all the complexities of that service. It's called "Amazon Whispernet," which is a strange name, but what the heck. Customers don't have to maintain a separate cell phone account; there are no bills. The cost of browsing Amazon's Kindle e-book store is covered by Amazon; download costs are built into the price of the books, newspapers, blog feeds, and other services available from Amazon.
This isn't a completely new business model; cell phone companies have offered similar deals for a while, but this is the first time I've seen this approach applied to mobile broadband. There is some risk to Amazon; it could be expensive to support Kindle users who browse a lot but don't buy much.
I wasn't surprised to see that Amazon is suddenly the world's best place to buy e-books. Most New York Times bestsellers and other new releases are $9.99 or less. I searched Amazon's Kindle store and found thousands of titles at or under a dollar, although many of these were individual stories or articles. As a specific example, the novel Burning Tower by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, released in December 2006, is priced at $5.59 in the Kindle store.
There's no need for a PC; everything can be handled through Whispernet. Amazon even keeps track of your purchases so you can download them again later if you have to replace or re-initialize your Kindle for some reason.
If you do have a PC, you can transfer files via USB. There's also an SD card slot. Kindle natively supports only a few different file types, however, so I hope that situation improves soon. Several other file types can be handled via translation, including Microsoft Word, PDF, and HTML documents and JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP image files. Sony has a slight edge here with native PDF and RTF support, and possibly a bigger edge once Adobe Systems' Digital Editions is available for the Reader, but I'll have to get my hands on one to see if Amazon's translation service works well enough to substitute for broader native file-type support.
I should be able to figure that out by Wednesday. Regular readers here can probably guess what's coming next--yes, I bought a Kindle. I couldn't resist! Stay tuned for a Gizmo Report as soon as I've had a chance to make detailed comparisons with my Reader.
(Credit:
Sarah Tew/CNET Networks)
Amazon has announced its entry into the eBook reader category with Kindle.
It's not in many people's hands yet or mine (CNET's reviewers have some first impressions), so these will have to be preliminary remarks. But I can say that I find it a schizophrenic device and hard to understand what it is trying to accomplish in its current form. It's easy enough to see where it's going, but ambition seems to have got ahead of what Amazon could actually deliver in the near term, and the ambition was not updated for reality. As a result, it comes across as very much a work in progress that lacks the elusive sexiness that can carry interesting yet unfinished products when they first come into the market.
First, it seems geared toward book geeks and authors, not the mainstream mass market. The price is too high for the hardware, and the price of downloaded books (nicely handled it seems, sans PC via cell phone network) is not that much less than what you will find the same book in hard copy on Amazon itself. More on that later.
The value proposition seems to be about carrying lots of books around in a device that does not grow physically in size, and for spur-of-the-moment purchases achieved through the wireless capability that does not require a monthly subscription. But much of Amazon's legacy has been built on delayed satisfaction--in other words, paying less to wait for delivery, rather than paying more and going to get it at a brick and mortar store right away. And they've been very successful at that, so it's unclear whether a mainstream market is really hankering for getting a book right now. Book geeks and authors, perhaps, but not most people.
OK, so perhaps the device has other compelling capabilities that outweigh more conventional books? The screen looks pretty good, a black on light gray "e-ink" type display that has high resolution and good contrast and supposedly works well outdoors. It looks like the screen in the Sony Reader, so it has competitive parity there. Battery life is supposedly days in duration, again similar to Sony's. However, because there is no backlight you cannot use it in the dark, so Amazon anachronistically offers an accessory clip-on reading light just you would use for a book!
But it's in the look and feel where things really fall apart. The industrial design is, frankly, ugly. It has none of the visceral "gotta have it I don't care what it costs" appeal of an iPod or iPhone. The Sony Reader is rather bland but it looks good next to Kindle (the Reader is also smaller and lighter with the same size screen). There is a gray grippy area on the back with a random pattern of embossed letters molded into it--an amusing detail but not particularly iconic. The whole design is unresolved and dated looking, with unsophisticated form, surface, color, and graphic detailing. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that the goal was to make it nonflashy as a design. Well, mission accomplished there, but it goes beyond nonflashy to be actually unattractive, at least to my eyes.
The keyboard on the Kindle is a real puzzle--it looks '80s old school and not at all up to scratch in a BlackBerry and Treo world. It is also very large and fixed in place, but if you're reading fiction and light nonfiction, then there's relatively little need to type. A slide-out keyboard like IM-centric slider cell phones have would been far better.
A keyboard is much more useful for blog and newspaper reading, and the ambition of providing a "BlackBerry for blogs," as Guy Kawasaki calls Kindle, is compelling for heavy blog readers. But here, the ambition overreaches the realities of the shipping device, as blogs without color photos, embedded YouTube videos, and links to external sites are far less interesting (since there's no general purpose wireless data connection, normal Web surfing is impossible). And for the privilege of reading an inferior version of a blog, you actually pay 99 cents per month per blog.
The large buttons along the side of the device for flipping pages also look pretty old school in an iPhone world and seem like they will be easy to hit accidentally. There is a huge "Next Page" button on the right, and a large "Previous Page" button on the left, following the left-back/right-forward convention...except there's also a small Next Page button on the left too. Schizophrenic. Is Jeff Bezos left-handed?
Lastly we come to pricing: $399 for the device itself on its face seems expensive given the quality of the hardware compared with what you get in less expensive MP3 players and cell phones that do, for the lay person, basically the same thing if not more. Book downloads themselves on Kindle cost $9.99. Compare that with an average price of about $15 for the books on Amazon's Best of 2007 book list, and you'd have to buy 80 books to make up the difference in price between hard copy and Kindle reader, plus downloads. That's a lot of books, more than most mainstream readers will buy over quite a few years. The capacity of Kindle is about 200 books, and that is more books than some people will ever own in their lifetime. So unless you put a high premium on portability, the hardware price is a big hurdle. Again, the pricing seems set up more for book geeks and authors who will read far more than the mass market audience.
Inevitably the iPod is a point of comparison. It was decried as too expensive when it launched, but it succeeded because it took a systems approach to solving the heretofore complex problem of getting my music onto my MP3 player, and because it looked damn good doing it. James Patterson, best-selling author and endorser of Kindle, claims it simplifies life, but I'm not clear how difficult people find it to purchase a book or magazine in a store, or to order a book online, have it delivered to their house, open the box, and start reading. That would be more OK if the device was so screamingly evocative, so sleek, so thin, so gorgeous, so mind-blowingly innovative to use that you would knock over your grandmother in the mad dash out the door to get one. But sadly, it is none of these things. Instead, it feels like Jeff Hawkins' Foleo--not a bad idea, but 5 to 10 years too late both in concept and execution.
In a video Bezos talks about how much effort and thought went into Kindle. Firsthand experience will have to be the true test, but right now this seems like a half-baked product. At 4:51 into the video, there is the book "Fiasco" prominently shown next to the Kindle. Hopefully this is not a foreshadowing of what is in store for Kindle.
In the house: Amazon's new Kindle
(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET Networks)The slow drip of rumors and leaks about the Amazon Kindle e-book reader exploded into a full-blown flood over the weekend, once it was revealed as this week's Newsweek cover story. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos filled in all of the remaining blanks (or most of them, anyway) at this morning's New York press conference that officially introduced the product to the world. Some relevant details, finally confirmed:
- Measurements: The Kindle weighs 10.3 ounces and is about the size of a trade paperback book. It's both taller and thicker than the Sony Reader.
- Connectivity: The Kindle connects to the Web via the "Amazon Whispernet," a free high-speed cellular wireless network (Sprint EVDO). Books and other content are available for direct download, without the need for connecting to a PC (though a USB port does provide PC connectivity for transferring files). The Kindle's internal memory can store up to 200 books, and it's expandable via an SD slot (which can also be used to load additional media).
- Books: Once you're online via EVDO, electronic books are available directly from Amazon for up to $10--just click on the title you want, and it's downloaded (and you're charged) in about a minute's time. Amazon is currently offering more than 90,000 titles, including 90 percent of the current New York Times bestsellers. The first chapter of most books can be previewed on the Kindle for free. Amazon keeps track of your purchases, so you can delete the file on the Kindle (to make space for more content) and then download it again later for no additional charge.
- Newspapers and magazines: The Kindle can also be used to subscribe to a variety of periodicals, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Le Monde, and Forbes. Newspaper subscriptions are $6 to $15 a month, and magazines are $1.25 to $3.49. Dailies are automatically delivered to the Kindle overnight, and each periodical includes a free two-week trial. (There appears to be no discount for existing subscribers of these periodicals.)
- Blogs: The Kindle also offers more than 300 blogs, including Slashdot, The Onion, BoingBoing, and Techcrunch--but these are customized Kindle versions that cost at least $1 a month. Moreover, unlike your RSS feeds, you can't add your favorite blog--if it's not on Amazon's list, you can't subscribe to it.
- Web browsing: The Kindle can also browse the Web at large (it has its own QWERTY keyboard directly below the screen), but--unlike the Kindle-ized premium content listed above--most standard Web pages are something of a disaster. The CNET home page, for instance, was rendered as 18 separate pages. Likewise, don't expect support for any plug-ins such as Flash.
- Notation and bookmarks: You can bookmark key passages of what you're reading, and (using the keyboard), make, edit, and export notes. The Kindle also saves your place when reading anything, so you can always pick up where you left off.
- Price and availability: The Kindle reader is now available from Amazon.com for $400.
CNET got one of the first review samples, and we've gotten a chance to put it through its paces. What do we think so far? Here's a quick and dirty appraisal, based on just a couple of hours of use:
The Good: Excellent high-contrast screen does a great job of simulating a printed page; large library of tens of thousands of e-books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs via Amazon's familiar online store; built-in "Whispernet" data network--no PC needed; built-in keyboard for notes; SD card expansion slot; long battery life.
The Bad: Design is ergonomic, but not very elegant; pricing for nearly all the content seems too high, especially considering the periodicals and blogs are available for free online; black-and-white screen is fine for books, but less impressive for periodicals and Web content; lacks a true Web browser; included cover is clumsy and poorly designed; yet another dedicated device you'll need to lug around with you.
The Bottom Line: With its built-in wireless capabilities and PC-free operation, Amazon's Kindle is a promising evolution of the electronic book (and newspaper, and magazine)--but overpriced content could be its Achilles' heel.
In other words, the Kindle is a very promising gadget that offers the potential to revolutionize how we read books and periodicals--but I just don't see myself buying one (and I read about two books a month). But again, that's a very preliminary evaluation. The full review is coming soon. In the meantime, let us know if you have any questions about the Kindle's capabilities. And, of course, your opinions: is the Kindle the next must-have gadget, or is there a dealbreaker or two that keeps it from missing the mark? And how many of you are just holding out for the iTunes Bookstore on your iPhone or iPod Touch? Or would prefer to spend your $400 on an Asus EEE PC instead?
Correction: This article initially misstated the Kindle's built-in connectivity options. It connects to the Web via a high-speed wireless network called Amazon Whispernet.
NEW YORK--"Why are books the last bastion of analog?" Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos asked an audience at New York's W Hotel in Union Square as he unveiled Amazon Kindle, the online-retail giant's new electronic book reader.
"Books have stubbornly resisted digitization," he elaborated. "I think there's a very good reason for that, and that is, the book is so highly evolved and so suited to its task that it's very hard to displace."
Indeed, where hardware companies like Sony have failed. No e-book reader has ever been a market success.
CNET News.com reported last week that Amazon would be debuting its much-delayed e-book reader, which the retailer on Monday started selling for $399.
Kindle tips the scales at a total 10.3 ounces--"That's less than a paperback book," Bezos said--and uses an "electronic ink" technology to mimic paper, not a computer screen. There is no backlight. Currently, the screen is black-and-white; Amazon executives have confirmed that E Ink, which manufactures the screen technology for Kindle as well as for other e-book readers like the Sony Reader, has a prototype of a color display; however, that technology is not yet ready for market.
The battery life, company representatives said, will last several days to a week. A charger can juice up the battery in a matter of two hours.
Notably, Kindle does not require a PC for synchronization or any software to be installed. "Instead of shopping from your PC, you shop directly from the device. The store is on the device, and then the content is wirelessly and seamlessly delivered to the device," Bezos explained.
Amazon's new "Kindle Store" now stocks more than 90,000 titles, "including 101 of 112 current New York Times Best Sellers and new releases, which are $9.99, unless marked otherwise," according to a release from the company.
Kindle, which was manufactured by an undisclosed Chinese original equipment manufacturer, connects to its specialized Amazon store via an EV-DO (Evolution Data Optimized) cellular network through "Amazon Whispernet," built atop Sprint's EV-DO network. No data plan or monthly bill is required. "We pay for all of that behind the scenes so that you can just read," Bezos said, adding that he estimated that it would take "less than a minute" to download a book.
The device can hold about 200 books, the CEO explained. A slot for a standard SD memory card can increase that capacity to about 1,000 books.
Bezos also announced that dozens of newspapers, from The New York Times to France's Le Monde, would also be available for the device, as well as magazines and 300 of the most popular blogs, such as BoingBoing and Slashdot. "On Kindle, newspapers are delivered while you sleep, automatically," he said. The publications will receive a cut of the subscription fee revenue, as no advertising will be displayed on them.
Additionally, Kindle comes with an electronic dictionary and access to Wikipedia. Each device, as News.com reported, also provides the user with a personal Kindle e-mail address so that word-processing files such as Microsoft Word documents, as well as image files, could be sent to the e-book reader.
After unveiling the device, Bezos showed the audience a video of numerous literary and technological luminaries who provided testimonials about Kindle; including authors Toni Morrison and Neil Gaiman, and entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki, who said, "This is BlackBerry for blogs."
But even though the development of Kindle took three years, Bezos said, it still couldn't be entirely perfect. "We never did figure out how to do virtual book signings," he said. Nevertheless, the Amazon chief executive reiterated that the book is due for a 21st-century makeover.
"We forget (that the printed book) is a 500-year-old technology, and we sort of forget that it's even a technology," Bezos mused. "Gutenberg would still recognize a modern-day book."
The publisher Hachette Book Group USA, a member of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), has decided to go with the digital publishing organization's recommended standard for distributing books in digital format.
Starting with its December 2007 launch titles, HBG plans to release its bestsellers in the .epub eBook format, the company announced Friday.
The .epub is an XML file format for reflowable digital books that includes Open Publication Structure (OPS), Open Packaging Format (OPF) and Open Container Format (OCF).
Hachette claims to be the first book publisher in the U.S. to adopt the .epub format. It also said the move will allow them to create eBooks more efficiently.
But the publisher could also just be following the money, as eBook popularity begins to rise.
About $8.1 million in eBooks were sold in the U.S. for the second quarter 2007 compared with $4 million for the same quarter the year before, according to statistics released by IDPF and Association of American Publishers in August.
Since bestseller I Am America (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert has already been released digitally, the book will not be re-released in the new .epub format, April Hattori, vice president of communications for HGB, said in an e-mail.
The news follows reports that the Booker Prize Foundation is in negotiations with several publishers and the British Council to get permission to release books on the Man Booker Prize shortlist for free download to anyone in the world. In August, HarperCollins also announced that it would be offering free book excerpts for iPhone owners.
This week, Sony introduced the new PRS-505 Reader for ebooks. I've already ordered one to replace my PRS-500, which I used a lot before it broke not long ago.
Update: my PRS-505 has arrived. The review, in two parts, begins here.
Glaskowsky's broken Sony Reader PRS-500.
(Credit: Peter Glaskowsky)That's my old Reader there. The damage was internal, somehow. I have no idea what went wrong. I didn't sit on it or anything like that. I just turned it on one day and that band on the left side of the screen showed up. You can see that the band doesn't extend to the top of the screen except in one spot, and even within the band, some of the pixel columns still work normally. There's also a horizontal band of dead pixels. All in all, the damage makes it impossible to use the unit, although it still works in every other way.
The photo also illustrates the really abysmal placement of controls on the PRS-500. The pair of buttons on the left edge turn the pages. The top one moves forward a page, but unless your elbows are hinged differently than mine, you'd probably find it easier to hit the bottom button of the pair. In normal use, the bottom "page back" button is just in the way.
The standard way of attaching the folding leather cover puts the hinge on that edge, which makes it even more difficult to get to those buttons. Even folded all the way around, the cover is bulky and spongy along the spine. Fortunately I discovered it's possible to put the cover on backwards, allowing me to hook a finger into the space between the front and back covers. This works great for holding onto the unit; though in that configuration, the magnet that holds the cover closed no longer works.
The other button on the left edge changes the font sizes on the screen. In some documents, there are three sizes: small, normal and large. In practice, they're more like "too small," small, and medium. In PDFs, you only get two sizes...and the largest size still limits the display of any PDF to the width of the window. So if you have a PDF from a textbook, you probably won't be able to read the text no matter what you do.
This isn't just about how sharp the user's eyes are; the screen only has 600x800-pixel resolution, so small text is inherently fuzzy. Also, because the E Ink screen has lower contrast than paper, text has to be larger to provide the same legibility.
Then, down at the lower-left corner of the unit, about three inches away from the pair of page-turning buttons, there's a big round rocker button. Guess what it does? It also turns the pages. Its active positions are toward the upper-right and lower-left directions, so it works equally badly in portrait and landscape orientations. But since the other page-turning buttons are basically out of reach in landscape mode, this rocker button is pretty much mandatory for that mode. And of course, Sony stuck another button underneath it. (That one's for marking a page for later reference. I never found a use for it.)
Over to the lower right, there are two more kinds of control-- a tiny little joystick surrounded by a one-way rocker switch in the shape of a ring. The joystick controls menus-- although menus are strictly linear, not hierarchical as implied by the joystick's four-way movements. The joystick is also a pushbutton. Finally, the PRS-500 has a set of 10 buttons along the bottom edge of the screen. These also work for selecting menu items; there are never more than 10 on the screen. (But menu items are arranged vertically when using the device in its primary portrait orientation.) When viewing the book text, however, hitting one of these buttons sends to the beginning, end, or intermediate page numbers within the book: 11 percent, 22 percent, 33 percent, etc.
Do you ever find yourself wishing for a fast way to get to the 44 percent point in a book? Me neither.
Seriously, it's like there were four different committees at Sony, each fighting for a different user-interface model for the PRS-500...and they all won. How Japanese.
Sony PRS-505 Reader Digital Book
(Credit: Sony)OK, here's the new PRS-505. (It's also available in blue, like my PRS-500.) Some things have changed. The 10 buttons are now disposed vertically along the right edge, next to the primary pair of page-turning buttons, which are tucked into some kind of cosmetic crease that seems pretty weird to me. The other buttons at the bottom of the unit have been redesigned a little, but some of the basic problems haven't been fixed. All I can do is hope the PRS-505 is actually easier to use than it looks.
I should know pretty soon; I ordered a PRS-505 as soon as it showed up on the SonyStyle online store. Sony said it'd be able to ship the unit within a couple of days.
Here are some things to note about the new gizmo. The price has dropped from $350 at the debut of the PRS-500 to $300 for the PRS-505, but you can still get the PRS-500 from some retailers, typically for $280 or less. However, the PRS-505 doesn't come with an AC adapter, as the PRS-500 did. You can charge the unit from any USB port. But the PRS-500 could get into a situation when fully discharged where it couldn't wake up enough to start charging from USB, requiring the user to plug in the AC adapter. If the PRS-505 has the same issue, customers could find themselves with a "bricked" Reader. I'm betting Sony has fixed this problem, though; I didn't buy the optional AC adapter for my PRS-505. (I still have the AC adapter from my PRS-500, too, so I may be OK anyway.)
The PRS-500 came with a $50 credit for the Sony Connect ebook store online, at least at first, when I bought mine. The PRS-505 doesn't. Sony still offers a credit for 100 free titles from the "Connect Classics" series, but these are all available on Project Gutenberg anyway-- and in fact, at least on the PRS-500, the Project Gutenberg versions work better.
On the other hand, Sony offers free engraving when you buy the PRS-505 online. That's pretty cool. Apple does the same thing for online sales of iPods, and I've always taken advantage of it. I did the same thing on the new Reader, supplying my name and e-mail address, so if I lose the thing, there's at least some chance I'll get it back.
Of the software improvements, a Sony press release states:
More advanced users will appreciate the new USB-based mass storage capability that allows them to use the device as a portable drive for the direct transfer of documents, images and other files to the Reader. A new auto sync feature also lets users set up folders with books and documents that can be automatically synchronized when the device is connected to a PC.
These are significant improvements. Probably more important is that Sony plans to add support for Adobe Digital Editions, a new software platform for viewing PDF and XHTML (aka ePub, a format defined by the International Digital Publishing Forum) documents--later, that is; it apparently isn't in the PRS-505 yet. Since the PRS-500's built-in PDF reader is so awful, I'm sure the Digital Editions software can only be a big improvement.
I have to say, if you already have the PRS-500 or any other good e-book reader, the PRS-505 is probably not worth upgrading to. But for myself, I'm looking forward to getting the PRS-505 and getting back into my e-book groove.
