January 07, 2006

• Not "some kind of e-ink", it's E-Ink's display technology. Every other electronic book reader has crashed and burned, and I'm a little dubious that the better display will really make the difference where so many other devices have failed, but we'll see.
• Thanks for the update briank. On the E-ink website, it says the resolution of the display is 170 pixels/inch. Which is pretty impressive ( a 4-inch horizontal display would be 680 pixels wide). On the downside it has DRM (bleah!). It needs a format called BBeB Book although it can also do PDFs. Straight text files might have to be run through some converter program.
• This actually sounds interesting. No doubt the prehistoric DRM technology will completely fuck this up.
• I bet the college textbook and programming publishers are trying to figure out how they can sell it for $2100.
• I'm of the "crash and burn" persuasion. As briank observes, ebook devices have been tried before and they've all been miserable failures. I think the only business model that has a possibility of working is to give away the device, and sell the ebooks for less than a paper book. I doubt they can make anything doing that yet. They'll have to wait until there are no more forests left.
• They are going to have to make downloads a lot cheaper than they are now if it's going to work. I'm not going to pay $300-$500 up front, and then pay the same amount for a download as I would for a paperback.
• I seriously doubt that I'll be buying any Sony DRM'd products.
• What was wrong with actual books again?
• I'd love an ebook reader (but not a Sony). The ability to store thousands of books on one device that is as readable as paper, but is also searchable, bookmarkable, hyperlinkable like a wiki/webpage etc... It would be awesome. I've been toying with the idea of getting a PDA for this purpose, but have never figured which would be the best bet for one. Of course, if a generic ebook reader came out, I'd go for one instead. Perhaps Project Gutenberg (or a similar enterprise) should get in touch with a manufacturer and offer a branded version that comes packaged with all the public domain books. I'd definitely buy one :)
• I've got the REB1100 ebook reader. It's not for everyone, but my casual reading increased about 10 fold since getting it. I've been waiting for an e-ink based reader for years. That said, I hope it does crash and burn. I bought my REB1100 for $60 from Staples when they were clearing out the inventory. Bet the same will happen with this too. I have heard that it lacks a search feature, which is odd, and wonder if it's based on Linux like the libre before it. Anyone know?
• I will never buy another Sony product. Ever.
• Sony has fantastic hardware, and craptastic software. I'd like to see with my own boggly eyes how easy it is to get stuff onto this reader thing. If it's as easy as the iTunes/iPod combo, then maybe it's worth buying. For the moment, I've got a Tungsten T5 that I use to read books on. The screen is great, but the battery-life sucks.
• What Argh said. Sony has declared War on Consumers. I'm not going to pay them to hack me.
• Good point about Sony... I'll probably give them a miss too.
• I beg to differ with some wander by mistake. With the exception of their CRT Tube Tvs, SONY electronics are always more expensive, and usually not as good as what their competitors offer. At least this is case here, in Canda; I'm not sure about other markets. This is especially true in fixed-pixel displays, and digital-imaging. Last year, their LCD WEGA was perhaps the 6th or 7th best display on this market, yet it inevitably cost more, and was in short supply. This is mostly due to marketing of brain-washed consumers, who wrongly believe that the SONY brand is synonymous with quality. Their audio product is a joke, consumers who buy SONY brand audio gear are often making the worst possible choice in the category. You couldn't pay me money to own a pair of SONY speakers. From a retailer's standpoint, they are simply the worst company to deal with, at least in my 20 years of experince.They do not take back defective products, DOA out of the box, as other manufacturers do, but will instead repair the defective item, and send it back. Their customer surface and inventory support is abysmal, the standard joke in the industry here is that SONY really stands for Soon, Only Not Yet,as it impossible to get a handle on inventory arrival, repair-times, product-shipments and back-orders. Don't get me started on BETA.
• /swallows ßeta fan pill, flexes muscles Hey, hey, PBoy; Beta had better quality, brought out many new technologies to consumer equipment years before VHS, in a smaller package. It was killed by stupid marketing, not VHS' 'technical superiority'.
• What was wrong with actual books again? Word to that. As much as I like technology, I adore real books more. I have great plans for the library that will be in my "someday" house. Also, I wonder how much someone got paid to put "The Da Vinci Code" on the advertisement. This is why my friends hate going to movies with me. "Look look, a Pepsi plug!"
• I'd like an ebook, but I want mine to fold up like a scroll to fit into my pocket. It needs a SD card slot too. Oh, and run on a single AAA battery and have Ogg Vorbis audio playback (MP3 optional). And I want it in 6 months so, monkeys, get cracking. BTW Lexar has a USB thumb drive with eink capacity/free space display: Lexar JumpDrive Mercury. I'd like to see more products like this.
• Oh BETA was the superior format for sure flagpole, providing both better video and audio. But good old SONY refused to widely share the technology, whereas JVC was smart enough to follow the open standards format. As a result, three times as many companies produced VHS machines as did those making BETA, and the format was doomed by SONY's corporate greed. That corporate culture of superiority is precisley the legacy that permeates SONY corporation to this day, and is what makes them so annoying to deal with.
• Here's the two reasons why I'd like one: Like Gestas, I think Project Gutenberg would be a nice fit. The other reason: it might be the thing for reading screenplays. Screenplays are expensive to print out and cumbersome to carry.