eBook Reading, Readers, and Ethos

I read eBooks back in the late ’90′s on my PalmPilot.  It was small, difficult to read, and the text scrolled down the screen automatically.  There weren’t very many ebooks to read, either, but I managed to find a few to satisfy my need for reading.  Since it was on my PalmPilot, while I couldn’t take notes on the actual pages of the ebook, I could take notes elsewhere on the device through the touchscreen and its ability to understand pseudo-handwriting.  The PalmPilot was actually designed for things other than reading ebooks, though.  Reading ebooks was an afterthought, possible with software created by a 3rd-party software developer.  Eventually, I stopped reading on my PalmPilot for various reasons, and ended up not using the device very much for anything at all.

Recently, on a plane trip, I sat next to a kind gentleman that started to read a Kindle in the middle of the flight.  I heard good and bad things about these devices, and my curiosity piqued.  I didn’t want to disturb the guy, though.  You don’t see people commenting or asking questions about a book someone begins to read because its generally rude and disruptive.  I decided to ask him anyway, “Do you like reading on that?”

His head popped up, looked at me, and smiled.  He paused what he was doing and proceeded to tell me all about his device.  “I imagine most Kindle owners would love to talk to anyone about theirs,” he explained, so I would feel less guilty about interrupting him.  He explained that it was an Amazon Kindle 2, and he was reading a free ebook.  It seemed like everything he explained to me about his electronic reader was good, and I probed further to find something bad about it.  Finally, he told me that the 5-way rocker switch, used to control the menus and select text, was a little too small for his fingers and that he would sometimes accidentally press down instead of left or right, so he figured the best way to overcome this was to use the sides of his fingers and fingernails.  This was hardly something bad about the device, and he made it seem like it was more a problem of his anatomy than with the device itself.

“I can buy books anywhere, and have them in 30 seconds,” he told me.  He explained that the Kindle 2 has wi-fi built in, and he could get on the Internet, go to the Amazon store, buy books, and download them to the Kindle faster than you can boot a computer.  I was impressed.

I asked him if he could download the ebook later on, if something happened to the device or the ebook.  It seems that once you buy an ebook from Amazon.com, its yours.  You can download it as many times as you like, which I had heard was a problem with previous incarnations of ebooks from various book stores in that once you buy a ebook and download it, you’re on your own.

Then, I asked him about the battery, since I was curious about how long a device like this can operate without needing to be recharged.  He told me that he has used his for weeks before, without needing to be recharged.  Again, I was impressed.  It is mainly due to the screen display technology, called “electronic ink”, or e-ink.  It is made in such a way that the screen doesn’t need to be refreshed frequently, relieving the battery from being needed all the time — the battery gets used really only when the screen gets refreshed, when the page is changed.

“Can you put other things, besides books, in it?”  He told me that he could put MP3s in it to listen to, and also visit websites, but it kinda sucks as a web browser.  I explained further, “What about like PDFs, or other documents?”  He explained that he could email PDFs to Amazon, which would convert them into something to be read on the Kindle, but it wasn’t always perfect and it wasn’t entirely free — 10 cents a document.

He seemed to absolutely love his Amazon Kindle 2.  After I was satisfied that he answered my questions, I thanked him for showing me, and tried to leave him alone.  After that, it seemed like he was searching for more things to tell me about his ebook reader.  He showed me that he could take notes on pages, search for text within a book and across books, and that he could store about 1,000 books.  He also demonstrated that, if he wanted to, the Kindle could read the books to him via the text-to-speech.  I listened to it for a few phrases, then he turned that feature off.  That didn’t impress me very much, because it sounded really robotic and reminded me of a Speak & Spell.  It isn’t something I would want to listen to for very long.

I thought it was a wonderful device, and how that must be handy to carry so many books around in such a small form, with the added ability to take notes, search, and buy more books whenever you needed.  The thought of having such a device rolled around in my head for the next few days or so.

. . .

I’m the type of reader that frequently reads technical books.  Oh, I’ll read a good biography or historical fiction, sprinkled with a few humor books now and then, but mainly I read non-fiction.  Programming languages, Internet and technology concepts, and even some computer security books for good measure.  Usually, I have more than a couple bookmarks in the books I read.  I’ll get a book, read it cover to cover, and then put placeholders in and use the book as a reference until it becomes obsolete or innaccurate.  Other books I read, I’ll read them once or twice, and won’t have any bookmarks at all other than a placeholder if I get interrupted.

Since I read technical books, I subscribe to O’Reilly’s Safari for my fill of computer geek-reading.  I pay a monthly fee to have a number of books on my electronic bookshelf, and can download a few chapters here and there to read offline.  The chapters are downloaded as PDF files, which makes them relatively portable since PDF viewer software is readily available pretty much anywhere.  How awesome, I thought,  would it be to have a handheld device with these PDFs in them.

. . .

As with most technical purchases i consider, I research quite a bit.  Mostly, I try to determine if the purchase I might make is technically solving my needs, but then I look at it from a cost analysis — will the thing I buy be the most/best I can get for the money?  Things usually aren’t that cut-n-dry, though.  If something doesn’t solve my need/want, I move onto something else.  If something solves my need, I look at price.  If it costs too much, I weigh the price against the features, deciding if the feature is worth the price.  If a feature costs too much, I might weigh that feature against the possibility of a future need.  Then, I look at how long I plan to keep the purchase, how much I plan to use it, and weigh that against the total cost of purchasing.  In other words, it had better have all the things I need, not much else, and be usable for the entire time I plan on using it, and not be too expensive for what I plan to do with it, but if its more expensive than I expect it should have things that justify the cost.

I’ve done quite a bit of research in purchasing an eBook reader, thinking about how I might use one, and reading/listening to what other people say about them.

Amazon Kindle (1 & 2) don’t justify the price, for my needs.  Kindle 1, the first iteration, is about $289.00. Kindle 2 is about $359.00  They both have e-ink, wireless transfer of books, searching, built-in dictionary, and weighs roughly 10 ounces, with a battery life measured in weeks (actually its measured in page-turns, so your use depends on how much you read rather than the device sitting around idle).  This seems like a pretty good deal, as long as the main thing you want to do is buy and read books from Amazon.com.  Outside of Amazon, it gets sketchy.  Amazon says the PDF reading portion is “experimental”, and requires you to email your PDF files to Amazon as there is no software to convert file formats that comes with the Kindle.  This seems like a pain to me, especially if the PDF ends up not readable.  I’m not even going to go down the path of considering limitations in email (what if the PDF I want to read is too big for email?  what happens when someone spams the email address?).  Since I was used to writing and taking notes, I was sorta looking for something that would let me do that.  The Kindle does have note-taking abilities, but you have to use the tiny Blackberry-style keyboard.

The next device I researched, after many different forums here, here, and here, was the Cybook by Bookeen.  Not entirely a bad device, actually.  Comparitavely priced with the Amazon Kindle, and has similar features sans the ability to buy/download books directly from the device.  My main concern here was it seems to be Mobipocket-specific, as it relies on that format for the books within.  While Mobipocket is a well known ebook format, and has a rather extensive library, the Mobipocket book store didn’t seem to carry much of what I would typically read.  Also, the Cybook seems to rely quite heavily on the Mobipocket Desktop Reader software to do much of the conversion from other formats like HTML and PDF.  Also, it has no touchscreen, and the only ability I can see as far as note-taking is in the form of bookmarks, but the documentation isn’t very clear if you can attach a note to the bookmark.

Another ebook reader that seemed to be within my price range was the Hanlin eBook V3.  It seems to support a very large variety of formats — actually the most aside from the iLiad, which I’ll talk about next.  The potential drawback is that the Chinese company that makes the Hanlin, Jinke, decided to create its own proprietary ebook format, Wolf, to be its primary ebook format for the device.  While this is typically what large manufacturers do so that they can proliferate their devices and lock-in customers for future products, Jinke is a relative unknown in the United States.  Also, I have no idea what I would do if I needed to send the reader back “to the manufacturer” if it ceased functioning under warranty, and the Jinke Support Forum is disturbingly sparse, but riddled with complaints like:

When the developer is going to begin answering questions about units already bought (LBook V8)?
Thank you.

…from a few years ago.  No touchscreen, also relies on Mobipocket, and has no note-taking ability.  Surprisingly, it isn’t even USB 2, it is ancient USB 1.1, which would make transferring of large ebooks a sit-and-wait process.  Not worth the $300 price tag, in my view.

In stark contrast is the iLiad, by iRex.  This thing is a monster.  Anything that you can print from a PC can be read on the iLiad.  Touchscreen.  Not just a touchscreen, though.  You can write on the screen, to take notes.  The notes can then be transferred to a PC or another iLiad where you can have other people annotate your notes, and then transferred back to the iLiad.  It had games — crossword puzzles and Sudoku, if you want.  It has a wireless connection, like the Amazon Kindle, but runs on Wifi rather than a 3G network.  There is very little you cannot do with this baby, it seems.  Price?  Are you sitting down?  This monstrosity will set you back about $700.  (read: approaching the price of a brand new Tablet PC)  It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway), this thing is way out of my price range.  Yes, it has a ton of features, and will most likely be able to read just about anything I throw at it, but the price is just too high for the device, considering a few of the features are not that important to me and thus will probably not end up using.

So, what did I finally settle on?

Sony PRS-700. It has a long list of supported formats, a touchscreen (with on-screen keyboard), a built-in front light for reading in the dark, and bookmarks and note-taking capabilities.  All for around $350.  Now, fans of the previous incarnation (PRS-505) will tell you that the PRS-700′s screen is dark and full of glare, but they say that when they compare it to the PRS-505, which doesn’t have a touchscreen or a built-in light.  I went for functionality, and features, trying not to compromise readability too much.  It has electronic ink, but you’re reading it through a touchscreen, on a recessed panel so that the lights are able to shine onto the panel from the side.  I would imagine the $700 iLiad suffers from the same problem, but not many people have those obscene devices, so really it came down to what I wanted the device to let me do, and not necessarily how good it looked.  Speaking of how good it looks, the looks of the device (and the PRS-505) are sleek and professional, which impressed me more than the Amazon Kindle.  Granted, the Amazon Kindle and the two Sony readers were the only ones I actually have been able to hold in my hands, I was most impressed with the PRS-700.  Sony is marketing the 700 as an upscale version of the 505, and not a replacement, mainly for the reasons I just stated.

[Update: It occurred to me that there's an entire string of stuff I haven't talked about, which actually pushed me over the edge to get the PRS-700 -- 3rd-party software.  A very smart individual created an Open Source application named calibre.  It runs non-concurrently (alone and separate) from the software that comes with Sony's eBook Reader, and is VERY handy.  The function is basically that it catalogs the ebooks you buy/download from various sources outside of Sony's ebook store.  It also allows you to convert it into one of 3 formats suited for the reader device, from a large variety of formats that are foreign to the Sony reader.  In all actuality, Sony needs to send this guy a check, because he has increased the device's usefullness exponentially, opening the reader to a vast inventory of possibilities for content not just limited to Sony's ebook store.]

I love it.  It is Sony, and while I’m generally not a huge fan of Sony’s computers, all my home appliances (TV’s, DVD players, VCR, etc.) are made by Sony.  They have an attention to detail that is hard to beat.

In case you’d like to do all the research about these yourself, feel free.  A good starting place is the huge matrix of eBook Reader devices.

One thing you might want to keep in mind, however, is that it is an evolving market.  As new devices are released, the manufacturers typically align themselves with content partners (ebook stores, which are associated with publishers).  So, depending on the device you decide on, you may be locking yourself out of specific content.  Also, the larger manufacturers tend to produce the device such that it works best with their own proprietary format of books, so be careful.

Since it is an evolving market, there seem to be a few ebook reader devices about to come out, but have yet to be released.  There is the Plastic Logic Reader, set to be available in 2010. Also, there will be the eSlick Reader, releasing in May for $260, which claims that you can convert any document to PDF and read it, implying that it only relies on ebooks being in PDF form.

That’s all I really have, and should go because I have about 50 books loaded up and have started reading about a dozen of them already.