Alright, you've already heard
our take on the thing, but we've got a few more reviews for you from some old school tech journos. The general consensus isn't great. Sure, the
Sony Reader packs a quite exciting new display technology, allowing for long usage times and easy-on-the-eyes viewing, but so do paper books. The main actual benefit the Sony Reader offers you over traditional pulp is that you can store books aplenty in a quite small amount of flash memory, and you can buy the titles online at your leisure. Otherwise, the Sony Reader seems to take quite a few steps back, offering awkward controls, a hard to use online store and a few other baffling functional limitations. Online prices aren't great (luckily, Sony will be including a $50 gift certificate if you buy a Reader before the end of the year), despite the virtually complete elimination of production and distribution costs, and while the Sony Connect app works well enough with pushing around RSS, TXT, RTF, DOC and PDF files, traditional 8.5 x 11 PDF files are pretty much unreadable on the Sony Reader's low-res 6-inch screen. Other funkiness includes the 10 percent skipping buttons -- there's no way to go directly to a page number or search a book text -- and an annoying 1 second refresh between each page turn. It looks like the final word on the Reader is that you should probably hold onto those dead tree editions of your favorite novels at least until some 2nd generation eBooks start popping up.
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David Pogue
posted October 20th 2006 5:20PM
These devices ARE 2nd generation. The NuvoMedia Rocket-eBook and the SoftBook were the 1st generation REAL ebook devices. The Rocket had backlighting, a very sharp display, and could even play sounds embedded in the books. You could turn your own text/html into ebooks. They were $250-500 and were amazingly awesome for the year 2000. You can still pick one up on eBay and you won't be disappointed (don't waste time on the newer REB 1100 or 2150, get an original rocket).
The lack of a back-light is a sore disappointment for these readers. Having read hundreds of books on the old Rocket, I can safely say that the white-indiglo-like backlight on it was one of its best features, and really helped me go to sleep each night.
These discussions about the lack and overpricing of content are the same now as they were 7 years ago. It's a vicious cycle, where the publishing companies aren't going to release mass quantities of titles until they see a proven track record, and people aren't going to buy an electronic book that doesn't already have mass quantities of titles available. What's more is that the perceived value of an electronic title is about 20-50% of a physical book, and there aren't discount channels for receiving an electric book cheaper as there are with a) mass-market paperbacks, or b) warehouses like costco who can drive the costs down by volume purchases.
So the bottom line is that these are second-gen eBook readers, and the e-ink display is the ONLY thing that sets them apart from their predecessors. Fortunately for Sony, e-ink is FANTASTIC, and the books are worth every penny if they facilitate education and overall enjoyment of reading for more people.
Don't ever give Sony credit for anything, Sony sucks. Sony is one of the worst of all.
I was thrilled to get my Sony eReader, and in spite of the user-hostile and overpriced on-line store, and the already mentioned usability issues, the storage capacity won me over. Until I was reading my third book on it, and the display just died. Right in the middle of a vacation that was supposed to involve a LOT of leisure reading!
Their customer service interface is soulless and uncaring, but I sent it in, assured, on-line at least, that it was still under warrantee. Until I got the e-mail a week later telling me repairs were going to cost me $260. When I called to inquire, I was told that the display problem was caused by a physical break in a component of the display system, and that the warrantee did not cover physical damage. Since the display crashed while I was waiting for the page to turn (I really HATED that wait) I know it wasn't anything external that caused the issue.
We're still fighting it out, but I strongly recommend a boycott against this product. It just isn't worth the money or the hassle.
It's back to the real printed page and squinting at my PDA for me.
I just hope they drop the price on that, or resolve technical issues that other reviewers mentioned. Now that I've learned that you can reprogram e-reader to support Cyrillic (Russian) this opens a new door for me. To me the main priority is content. There are books that I can only get if I download them. Unfortunately it's hard to read of a computer screen for any length of time. But so far everyone seams to agree that Sony-reader is easy on the eyes. I also think that you need to by additional warranty on everything these days, I learned that after throwing in the trash last year a $500.00 camcorder that I only used for 20 minutes on my vacation.