Hands on: Sony’s superb Reader Touch

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

“I want my books to be made of paper, to have a spine, and a cover. I like the feel of them in my hand”

This was the first comment I heard this morning when I returned to the office after visiting the British Library to play with Sony’s new Reader Touch. As an eBook advocate, I’ve been hearing this refrain ever since the original Sony PRS 505 dropped on my desk last year. People who like to read adore paperbacks. They’re cheap, perfect at what they do and are pleasingly tactile. We like how they feel, the way they smell; we like to run our hands over them in a book shop.

eBook readers have failed to convince because books don’t need upgrading. It’s brilliant that an eBook reader can hold 350 books, but the majority of people don’t carry around 350 books. The majority of people won’t read 350 books in their lifetime. If eBook readers are going to break out of their niche and really scar the public psyche they need to start offering useful features their paper brethren don’t. And with the curtain raised, let me usher the Sony Reader Touch to centre stage.

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Getting started with eBooks

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

If you’re in the market for an eBook reader and are baffled by the dozens of models on offer then hopefully I can help. Having reviewed a good number of the eBook readers on offer in the UK, I’m well placed to help you wade through the morass of marketing terms, claims and sheer nonsense that comes with every launch.

The first thing to note is that the UK eBook market isn’t actually as packed as it first appears. In fact it can be boiled down to the Sony PRS 505, the iRex range and the rest. And when I say “rest” I’m talking about the BeBook, Cool-er, Cybook Gen 3 and the Elonex eBook now on sale through Borders. Don’t be fooled by the slight modifications to their cases; beneath the exterior they’re all essentially the same device.

Basically, manufacturers buy the reference design from US-firm Netronix, tweak the hardware and software, slap their name on the case and sell them on. Currently at the top of this pile of identi-books is the Cool-er which is based on Netronix’s latest spec and so boasts double the RAM of its compatriots, a nicer screen and a faster processor making it noticeably nippier than the rest. If the Cool-er’s lurid colours and dedication to sexing up reading aren’t to your taste, then I suggest you take a gander at the elegant Sony PRS 505 – which sits at the top of our A List.

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The Kindle Swindle? It’s the book publishers who are conning themselves

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

Luddites of the world unite – you have a new leader. Step forward Roy Blount Jnr, a man who has one too many Os in his surname, in my opinion.

Blount is the president of the US Authors Guild, and last week wrote an opinion column for the New York Times entitled The Kindle Swindle? Blount argued that the new Read-To-Me feature of Amazon’s latest eBook reader was akin to the end of mankind as we know it; a computerised text-synthesiser that was going to leave the audio book industry as burnt out as a carelessly parked Porsche on a South London council estate. 

“You may be thinking that no automated read-aloud function can compete with the dulcet resonance of Jim Dale reading Harry Potter or of authors, ahem, reading themselves,” Blount argued.  ”But the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable.” 

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Ebooks: A bad idea getting worse

Friday, July 25th, 2008

Don’t get me wrong, I quite like technology. I’m the kind of person who’d be admiring the massive metal foot of the Terminator even as it stomped my skull into the dirt. But when it comes to eBooks, not only am I not sold, I’m sat on the shelf hiding my price tag behind my back and shooing people on towards the muffins opposite.

And it’s not just that the entire eBook market is beset with ridiculous proprietary formats, clunky readers and expensive texts being pushed by companies whose only knowledge of books is a hazy memory of drawing moustaches on sperms in science class. Even Amazon, which built an empire on the blighters, seems to have forgotten why we love them – digital texts cost more than paperbacks, you can’t share them and its reader looks as if it were built in 1893 and runs on steam. Amazon, quite contrary to its claims, doesn’t have an eBook strategy so much as a series of really bad ideas all lined up in a row.

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