BendTech

I’ve been considering buying an eBook reader ever since Amazon announced the Kindle two years ago.  But I’ve held off because I just wasn’t convinced they were ready.  While I’m an avid reader, I’m not exactly a technophile; I prefer technology mature enough that I can expect years of good service, rather than simply throwing it in a box to collect dust after a few months.  (In fact, I get a little teary eyed when I think about things like the old HP laser printer I’ve had for 17+ years… *sniff*… but I digress.)  It’s only in this past year that e-readers have come into their own enough I’m ready to seriously consider buying one. (My discovery of the 1.6M ebooks in the Internet Archive, including illustrated versions of A Princess of Mars and The First Men in the Moon, makes that decision a lot easier, btw.)

But… I still have my reservations.  So I thought I’d take a moment to take a look at some of the devices coming to market, and at what makes them good or bad choices.

Before diving in, I want to quickly mention a metric I’ll be referring to that I call the RRA – the Relative Reading Area. It is simply the ratio of the device’s display area to it’s overall surface area, and is an indicator of where these devices lie on the scale of readability (screen size) versus portability (device size). For example, if you have a device that has a surface area of ~42 sq-in, but a display area of only 17 sq-in, you get an RRA of 40%.

If that number sounds low to you (“40%? That’s less than half the space – ‘kinda like buying a book that only has text on every other page!”) you may be surprised to find it comes from the specs for the Kindle 2 ($299). Between the generous bezels and the spacious keyboard Amazon designed into the device, you end up toting around a lot more hardware than you’re actually reading.  Depending on your tastes, that may not be an important factor.  For me the biggest issue with the Kindle is  how difficult it is to work with content outside of Amazon.  I like my content open and DRM-free, and the while the Kindle makes it easy to buy eBooks from Amazon, reading stuff like PDF or Word documents you happen to have lying around requires some problematic hoop-jumping.

Barnes & Noble’s newly announced Nook ($249) supports several open doc formats, and thus promises to be a bit better in regard to open content.  It also scores a slightly better RRA of 45% by replacing the Kindle’s keyboard with a slightly smaller color touchscreen display that doubles as a menu system and keyboard.  The Nook is also the first e-reader to hit the market that runs Android, Google’s mobile operating system.  This opens up a whole world of exciting possibilities that can only be guessed at as far as 3rd party development.

… Speaking of which, it’s worth mentioning that the Barnes & Noble eBook software can be run on variety of other devices: iPods, Blackberries, Android/Windows mobile devices, etc.  It includes a lending feature that might appeal to people who want to be able to share their DRM’ed content (an oxymoron, that).  But I suspect this will be about as successful as the the sharing feature Microsoft put into their Zune player.  I.e. not very.

The Sony Reader Touch Edition ($299) isn’t getting all that much press but Sony deserves credit for selling e-readers longer than just about anyone else (their first reader launched in 2005.) You’d think this would give them an edge up on what consumers expect in such devices.  And while that certainly seems to be the case where the hardware is concerned – with a clean, no frills design, a full touch screen e-ink display, and a delightfully compact RRA of 52% they have a good platform to build on – their software is drawing some criticism from reviewers so the jury is out on this one.  I’ve seen claims it doesn’t work on Macs, and a number of folks complaining about poor functionality.  I’d definitely want to play with one before buying.  On the plus side, it’s not hard to find used Readers at good discounts.

The newly announced (but not yet available) IRex DR800 ($400) is on the pricey side but has a lot to recommend it.  It features a generous 8.1″ touchscreen display in about the same form factor as the other readers above, giving it an impressive 65% RRA.  It supports more document formats than other devices (possibly because IRex isn’t itself a content publisher like Sony, B & N, or Amazon, and so has less concerns about protecting content?) That doesn’t mean there’s no store or library to get content from however.  It plays nice with the Barnes & Noble eBookstore, Newspaper Direct, and LibreDigital so there’s a ton of content at your fingertips.  However, in reading their e-reader comparison chart[pdf] it gives the impression that the device lacks WiFi support, which may or may not be a showstopper depending on how well the 3G connection works.

All of these are impressive offerings that didn’t exist five years ago.  Still, it seems manufacturers are struggle to find the sweet spot in the consumer mindset.  If I had to pick one today, I’d probably give the nod to the Nook -  it’ll be available next month, it’s affordable, the color LCD touchscreen provides a nice, snappy interaction, and I’m very intrigued at what the Android OS will enable down the road.  But… I want to learn more about how you load non-B&N content into it.  For example, how hard is it to get that copy of A Princess of Mars from the Internet Archive.  If they don’t have a good solution to that problem, I may wait til Christmas 2010 to take the plunge.

If you have opinions about “must have” features in eBooks, I’d love to hear them.

General ebooks, gadgets

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