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Gadgets The buzz around the Sony Reader
Michael Hoffman (Blog) - January 8, 2006 4:16 PM
Print 10 comment(s) - last by Pr1mus.. on Jan 9 at 2:08 PM

Sony's Japanese ebook reader
Sony has recently launched a product designed to read e-books

Although e-books are still far from popular, Sony hopes to change that with one of its newest products.  At CES, Sony launched what they call the Sony Reader, a handheld device that is designed for e-books.  The six-inch black and white screen is supposedly as easy to read as a printed page from an actual book.

The device is a bit over a half inch thick and weighs almost 9 ounces.  The Sony Reader will be available this spring and should cost between $300 and $400. However, at the nearly the same cost as low-end or used laptops, we're not quite sure spending $300 to $400 on a screen that just reads e-books is worth the money when a used notebook can do all that and much more.

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A thought about E-books future
By char1320 on 1/8/2006 9:32:39 PM , Rating: 2
I really hope that e-books start taking off as they fix many of the problems books inherently have.

E-books might prove to be cheaper and much more available worldwide (that's speacially important for me since I live in Chile and most good books about my speciality are released in Spain). They would also be able te be updated, correcting mistypes or refreshing certain information.

Obviously it would be much more comfortable to carry this handheld than a ton of books in case a college student (my case) wants to go and study for a hard exam at a friend's house.

Finally, I haven't seen pics of this device, but as far as notebooks go, they are not suitable for reading since there is the keyboard in the way, and you need to be seated in front of a desk, and other issues you might come across (just try and use a notebook like a normal book and you'll get my feelings about it).

My idea on the perfect reading device is strangely similar to a tablet, but with less unnecesary functions that make the price go up, like the touchscreen, the keyboard in some cases and even the OS, that way a good sized "reading machine" would be easily the size of 13" - 15" screen, would be light and have some nice battery life and would work very nicely with pdf files, making the device friendly to exchanging files with a PC.

This would be heaven for college students, the faculty might chose to give them the chance to buy one of these devices containing all textbooks required for their classes at much cheapes price than usual.

Just my thoughts, sorry for the bad English but as you may guess it is not my natural language.




RE: A thought about E-books future
By Josh7289 on 1/9/2006 8:06:32 AM , Rating: 2
Bad English? I could have sworn you spoke English natively ^^

But in any case, I actually would REALLY like something like this, just not by Sony, unless of course they can go against their traditions of DRM-filled software and hardware...

Anyway, I'm still exited about this device.


RE: A thought about E-books future
By Lifted on 1/9/2006 9:37:12 AM , Rating: 2
I'm confused Aren't "ebooks" a standard format? Why would the reader Sony makes/uses be any more crippled by DRM than those from Adobe or Microsoft?


By RandomFool on 1/9/2006 11:15:00 AM , Rating: 2
because people love to rip on sony, it's the cool thing to do.


By littlebitstrouds on 1/9/2006 11:56:00 AM , Rating: 3
Because people don't realize that Sony has a record company... why would they put something out that allows people to rip them off.

I'd be like the farmer selling everyone a garden that he will charge you to set up... He might be getting money now to set the garden up for you but as soon as it's done you're going to stop buying vegitables from him. Instead he sells you something that makes his vegitables more accessable to you.

People need to get off the DRM crapping. Does it have flaws, yes, but they'll get it figured out sooner or later, till them be happy that you can carry all your songs on a 1.3oz machine, cause remember our parents had records to deal with, and they weren't very good for jogging.


I dont carry 40+ books with me.
By rqle on 1/8/2006 7:01:10 PM , Rating: 4
I'll just buy the book and pass it on.




Why Sony?
By BladeVenom on 1/8/2006 9:21:45 PM , Rating: 4
Of course Sony will cripple it with DRM and a proprietary format, making it far less useful than an actual book.




A Few Things...
By Pr1mus on 1/9/2006 2:08:02 PM , Rating: 3
First off, that picture in the article is not the new Reader, but Sony's previous Japan-only E-Ink product called the Librie. You can see a number of in-action shots of the Reader (as well as a hands-on review) at http://engadget.com/2006/01/06/sony-reader-details-and-pics/ .

The Reader is already listed on Sony's web site for a price of $349. Won't be available for a few months yet, though.

It'll be able to view PDFs, JPEGs, Sony's proprietary BBeB format, as well as being able to play MP3s. It'll have an internal storage of 64MB (I think, Sony's web site is lacking in this regard), but has a SD slot as well as a USB port for additional storage.

That's all not bad, and I do have a need for a device like this. However a few other companies are coming up with similar e-book readers in the same timeframe, and there's one in particular that is several steps better than Sony's Reader. iRex's iLiad ( http://www.irextechnologies.com/downloads/Productleaflet-Iliad.pdf ), is essentially the same as the Reader but adds TXT and XHTML support (RSS feeds, anyone?), 802.11b & 10/100 ethernet connectivity, larger base internal storage, a CF slot as well as the SD/MMC & USB ports, and a stylus with the ability to write comments and scribble notes right on the displayed text.

Finally, as to the comments below about crapping on Sony for DRM, there's a good reason people do so. The original Librie was absolutely crippled by DRM, and unable to read any files besides Sony's proprietary BBeB format, which includes a wonderful time bomb which can delete BBeB files after 60 days. It wasn't until a few years after the Librie's release that Sony finally made available a program to convert text, HTML and PDF documents into the BBeB format for display on a Librie, but by that time the Librie was pretty well dead. And that's just once device. Sony has a history of eschewing more popular formats in favor of their own, inferior DRM-laden ones. How many years of portable audio players did Sony have before they finally came out with one that could natively play MP3s without having to convert them to ATRAC? And that's not even getting close to stuff like the XCP/Media Max crap Sony/BMG pulled.




Notebook Comparison
By SLCentral on 1/8/2006 6:34:16 PM , Rating: 2
Uh, what about battery life? No notebook can TOUCH the battery life of this, which is kind of the point ;). Plus the screen is very reader-friendly.




maybe
By RandomFool on 1/8/2006 7:21:32 PM , Rating: 2
This could be really cool if it was alot cheaper and could do color. It could be eventually used as a replacement for textbooks. Which would be pretty nice, get this thing and you can carry all your college books around with you. Of course then you wouldn't get raped by text book prices which would be nice for studnet but colleges would hate it. Of coure then there's no selling back the book so you never know it could work.




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