Scott Hanselman

I'm sitting in a cab right now on the way to a large NW Bank (I'm using Verizon Wireless on my laptop, which is working quite nicely, BTW) and I am coveting the Sony Reader, or what I personal call "eBooks last chance." At least, until another generation of early adopters lives and dies and forgets (or at least chooses to) the sins of the father.

I remember reading eBooks on my Newton. I really wanted it to work. (In case you haven't heard, I may by an early adopter myself) back then and I struggle to read eBooks (funny thing about eBooks is that when there's no real modern content you find yourself reading Sherlock Holmes again because it's in the public domain and you're SUCH an early adopter that you convince yourself you're really interested in The Case of the Two Blue Shoes and not something with more meat.)

Besides the expense, which is currently US$350, the real issue will be one of content. How many books are available? To quote the guy at Borders "Well, all of them. The whole store." I can't confirm that claim, but I did check out the Connect eBooks Sony Store and it does seem to have a lot of books.

I wonder why Sony didn't just work a deal out with Amazon, who was already dipping their toes into the eBook pool, and may just jump in completely with the Amazon Kindle. The Kindle is looking pretty rough right now, but it's early.

Aside: Kindle? Seriously, could the marketers at ordinarily-savvy Amazon come up with we a limper name? How about Amazon Not-Dead-Tree? Amazon Vue? Amazon Perspective? Amazon ePaperBack, for crying out loud. Amazon Kindle sparks (sorry) images of burning paper, not exactly the kind of environmentally friendly eBook perspective you'd want.

I played with the Sony Reader for 15 minutes at the Airport Borders, and here's my first impressions:

• It's very light and very comfortable. It has a nice flip around case and reminds me of a larger Palm V - to this day still Palm's most elegant PDA, IMHO.
• There's too many buttons. There's ten 0-9 buttons that are multi-purpose (multi-purpose buttons are mistake cop-out number one in good design, IMHO). They are used to access the internal menus by numbered item, but their primary function is to quick jump a percentage of the way into the book. So pressing 5 gets you 50% of the way into the book. There's no way to go directly to a page that I could see.
• There's multiple ways to turn the page, and they are both on the left side of the reader. The two buttons on the left bezel while oriented up/down, are actually left/right page turning buttons. I think it'd have been more thoughtful and innovative to just touch a long line on the far left or far right bezel to turn the page.
• The memory card slot supports both Memory Sticks and SD Cards - choice is good.
• The lower right corner features a joystick-like, sigh, multifunction, nubbin. It's a little confusing because I assumed that the page-turning interface would double as the main interaction element for the utility UI.
• The screen, the screen. It's all about the screen. It's eInk. It's not an LED - that's important to note. It's 170 DPI with four levels of gray, versus 96 DPI (or possibly 120 DPI) on a laptop or PDA screen. The battery is used only to change the configuration of the screen i.e. you only use power when turning the page.
• You can apparently read RSS feeds on it as well, downloadable via USB. Interestingly, RSS might be the killer app for this Reader, rather than books.
• It also has volume buttons and headphones so you can use it as an audiobook reader or MP3 Player. This also allows you to read while listening to background music.
• The guy at Borders said they haven't had to change the batteries on the demo model ever. They say 7500 page turns on a single battery.
• There's 3 font sizes...each is comfortable, even the smallest, but I'm a big font guy so I think I'd have trouble committing to a size.

If it were US$99 or US$150, sold. $199, eh...getting dangerously out of the WAF range. Considering that I carried 3 books with me on my last three business trips and they were a hassle in my backpack, I could totally see using this little gadget, but it's really expensive at $350, although you do get $50 in free books.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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