Will the Sony Portable Reading System Revolutionize Publishing?

Four features of Sony's new eBook reader (Model #PRS-500) herald a potential revolution in publishing. The new reader is kind on the eyes, it doesn't gulp battery power, it can display several widely used file formats, and it is priced on the outer fringes of affordability. However, there are also some shortcomings.

READABILITY

Sony's product uses E Ink® Technology, the first device, designed for a mass market, to do so. The screen size is a tad over 3.5 inches by about 4.6 inches, a little narrower and quite a bit shorter than the type in a mass market paperback book. With a screen resolution of approximately 170 pixels per inch, the type looks comparable to cheaper paperbacks. The grey LCD-colored background helps mask the jaggedness which isn't noticeable in less intense lighting. It is easy to read for extended periods.

Readers do encounter typographical glitches in Sony's reader, however, that even the cheapest paperback avoids. Letter spacing is sometimes haphazard. The letter "i" is especially susceptible to straying too far away from the letter preceding it, giving the appearance of a word break. Hyphenation is non-existent, so justified text can have gullies running through it, especially with large type. A last italicized word will sometimes lean into the next word. And page breaks fall where they may, even if it leaves a single word stranded on the next page. Hopefully some of these shortcomings can be overcome as the product matures. (The product allows downloading of firmware updates.) As some compensation, the reader can pick three sizes of type for any non-PDF book, a boon to weak-sighted readers.

Photographs are restricted, of course, to black and white, and are limited to 4 scales of gray. They are acceptable (better than I expected considering the limitations) but not as sharp as most book photographs.

POWER

Sony's reader vaults from hours, to weeks of usage on a single charge of its lithium ion battery. It will display around 7500 pages before the juice runs out. Power is only required for page turns, and will display a page for up to an hour with no energy consumption before it automatically turns itself off. A four-segment gauge measures remaining battery life. No lighting is required from the screen. Like an actual book page or an LCD screen of a pocket calculator -- and most everyday objects that we view -- it uses reflected light. This eliminates the flicker and eye strain caused by the screen having to refresh itself 60-90 times a second to keep the phosphors on the screen glowing.

DISPLAY AND NAVIGATION

Although a page read on Sony's reader looks much like an actual book page, turning to the next page is a dramatically different experience. The screen flashes black, showing a negative image of the next page, then the current page again, before properly displaying the next page. This all occurs in about two seconds. I've found this easy to get used to, but it's more annoying for some. Speed readers, particularly, might find this too much to put up with, especially since Sony's pages are shorter. A 500-page printed book might run to 850 eBook pages. The screen flashes to minimize ghosting -- a fainter image of the last page caused by some black pixels not changing to the background color. The phenomenon has still not been entirely eliminated. A very faint image of the last page is still visible when a new page has a lot of open space, but it is only a minor distraction.

More problematic is navigating through the book. Getting to the next or previous page is no problem. Likewise, returning to the last page read in a previous session, or a page that you have bookmarked is gracefully handled. But to get to a particular page can be a chore. Sony has tried to handle this by utilizing a series of ten buttons numbered "1" to "0". Each successive number moves you another 10% through the book. Press "1" and you zip to book's first page; "0" zips you to the last; "5" zips you the middle; "3" zips you to the page 30% through. Also, you can hold down the page forward or back buttons for five seconds to move ten pages at a time. This helps. But if you want to get to page 572 of Tolstoy's War and Peace which runs 3762 pages you'd be pushing buttons for a couple of minutes. (The edition used in this example is Project Gutenberg's EBook which has been especially formatted for Sony's reader and can be downloaded for free at www.manybooks.net.) Much easier would be holding down a button while pressing 5-7-2 on the number keys.

FILE FORMATS IT CAN READ

Reading material for Sony's reader is not restricted to its proprietary BBeB (Broad Band eBook) format files which Sony uses for books it sells at its online eBook store. The machine also displays TXT files that Windows Notepad and other plain text editors make, and also RTF (Rich Text Format) files that Windows WordPad and most other word processors can produce. Unencrypted PDF files will also display, though the type size of most files made for an 8½x11 page (which includes most PDF files on the internet) is too small to be legible. In addition, Microsoft Word DOC files will be automatically converted to the BBeB format if the user has Microsoft Word installed. These extra file formats make Sony's gadget more than an eBook reader. Users can easily copy and paste files, or produce their own.

The eBooks that Sony sells are DRM (Digital Rights Management) protected. The books can only be read on one of six devices (at least one of which must be a computer) registered with Sony. Unlike an ordinary book, the eBook cannot easily be sold, loaned or given away after it is read. The books are less expensive, however, than regular books and the purchaser avoids any delivery charges. The new revised edition of Freakonomics, for example, retails for $27.95, sells for $16.77 at Amazon.com. Sony sells its eBook edition for $15.96. In addition, books can be downloaded and installed on Sony's reader in just a few minutes, a great instant gratification experience.

PRICE TAG

Initial equipment cost might be the largest deterrent to wide acceptance. Sony's launch price is $349.99, more than some basic computers. Casual readers will be hard pressed to justify such an expense unless they need the extra large print feature or a less tiring and more portable way of reading articles and other material that are difficult to read on a computer screen.

LESS OBVIOUS ADVANTAGES

This leads us back to our initial question: whether Sony's new reader might lead to a revolution in publishing. It might seem that this question has been answered in the negative. Sony's reader falls short in many areas when compared to reading the old fashioned way. But when you contemplate what would happen if Sony's reader met with universal acceptance you begin to see additional advantages.

According to the Pulp and Paper Factbook, U.S. book publishers use about a million tons of paper a year. Business Week magazine, in a January 9, 2006, article estimated the annual number of books sold worldwide by U.S. publishers to be 944 million, of which only two-tenths of one percent were eBooks. That's a million tons and almost a billion books that have to be printed, shipped to warehouses, shipped to stores, many to be shipped to customers or back to the warehouses if unsold. That's nearly a billion new books that are seeking to fill up homes - just from U.S. publishers - every year. If everyone read books in eBook form, nearly all this would be eliminated. Most eBooks occupy less than 2 megabytes of space (pictures boost individual titles significantly). That's only about 2 million gigabytes going over the internet, an infinitesimal portion of the yearly traffic.

This represents significant production, transportation and storage savings for publishers, savings that rightfully should be passed on to consumers. If that happened, the cost of the machine could be recouped by savings in book purchases in a more reasonable time.

The entire 944 million books sold by U.S. publishers would fit on less than a half million DVDs. On a single DVD, a book owner could store over 2 thousand books. Bookcases would be unnecessary. No more anguishing, when moving to a new home, over whether to throw out old treasured books. School children wouldn't need those heavy backpacks anymore. Inside the reader itself is room for over thirty 2-megabyte books. If that's not enough, the reader has slots that accept standard memory cards of up to 2 gigabytes in capacity. When Sony dubbed its gadget a "portable reading system" it wasn't using hyperbole.

MORE HIDDEN ADVANTAGES

Publishers' savings on production, storage and transportation of thousands of copies of each book they publish will result in another benefit for book lovers: greater selection. Because books produced, distributed and sold in electronic form would change the entire economics of publishing, the break even point (the minimum number of books that needs to be sold to realize a profit) is shifted dramatically downwards. It's possible that the entire distributor-wholesaler infrastructure could be eliminated. The publisher could make more direct-to-consumer sales, thus reducing the cost of another middleman. Books for a limited audience - sure money-losers - would become economically viable. Older titles would no longer routinely go "out of print."

Self publishing would also be less of a gamble for an author, though it's very doubtful that established publishers would be eliminated. They have too much expertise in editing and promoting the books they publish. Book reviewers and consumers would resist having to deal with thousands of individual author/publishers.

If books had been sold as eBooks before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, he likely would have been greeted by ridicule. The inefficiencies would be a daunting barrier.

WILL IT BE SONY?

Sony is first off the starting line, but whether it will cross the finish line first is open to debate. Sony is, after all, the Betamax company which clung to its proprietary format long after VHS gained dominance. Its Blue Ray format is currently butting heads with HD-DVDs. The company seems to be resisting attempts to standardize eBook formats so that any eBook could be read on any machine. The OpenReader Consortium at www.openreader.org and the International Digital Publishing Forum at www.idpf.org have proposed open formats to accomplish this. Such standardization would be a must for eBooks to replace paper books in the marketplace. If Sony sticks with its BBeB format, it's liable to find itself the odd man out.

Already competition is jockeying for position. eREAD Technology Co., Ltd unveiled its STAReBOOK STK-101 in November 2006. Amazon.com is working on an eBook reader, Kindle, which could give Sony some serious competition. Philips (Royal Philips Electronics) has demonstrated a reader with a display that rolls onto a spool when not in use. It was designed with cell phone users in mind. But if all the new readers fail to live up to expectations, you can always develop your own. E Ink, the manufacturer of the screens used In Sony's reader, is selling prototype kits with open source Linux operating systems that can be custom programmed. Cost: just $3,000.