2008 VIP
mrkstvns
Austin, TX

Books for Dorks

1 star rating

a techie, practical
Cons
    DRM, hard to annotate, kludgey interface, can't handle visually intensive books, books don't need to be recharged, ugly, expensive solution to a non-problem, user hostile, price of downloadable books, heavier and bigger than a book, can't share books, harder to read than a book, books never have

MAR
25
2008
If there is one single most useless technological innovation of our day, it must be the e-book. The only thing more puzzling than the inability of big companies to understand why the consumer market ignores e-books, is that they keep flushing money down the toilet trying to make a better e-book reader.

Fact is that e-books are basically a niche product. The only thing useful they do is to store lots of information that people don't want to read for those very rare occasions when they need to read just one little tiny bit of it. For an aircraft mechanic, having the entire library of technical manuals and readout codes for a Boeing 747 searchable and retrievable is an excellent use of e-book technology. For you and me, reading the latest Stuart Woods whodunit on e-book is a tedious, draining experience that would turn people off of reading forever.

Consumers see e-books for what they are. They introduce an enormous range of technical problems to a simple experience where they've never before existed. No e-book reader has ever been as good as a paperbook novel, and no reader ever CAN be that good. The reasons are painfully obvious, and not even the stupidest consumers (of which there are usually many) have jumped at the chance to become early adopters of a technology that complicates our lives, costs too much, and delivers no tangible benefits.

* Reading a book is a fundamentally simple task. Reading an e-book requires memory, internet communications, high quality display, matering a sometimes complex interface, glare problems from a screen, weight and size problems, power supply problems, and so on and so forth. Just remember that nobody ever had their book disappear because of a power surge, memory address error, dropped carrier, system fault, missing DLL, divide by zero error, or license key error.
* E-books are hard to use for teaching purposes. They don't lend themselves to xeroxing a diagram, annotating a passage with a highlighter, or writing notes in the margin. While PDFs and similar formats do have the ability embed comments, actually doing so takes many times longer than simply grabbing a pencil and jotting a note in the margin of a book.
* You look like a dork if you sit on the beach with any electronic device. You just do.
* Paper is more durable and archivable than electronic media. Books printed by Gutenberg and Mantius still exist and can be read by scholars with no special equipment. 5-1/4 inch floppy disks used on IBM PCs of the early 1980s are unsupported by any modern device, and even if you have a drive for one, you might not know how to hook it up, or have software that can read the now obsolete file formats used just 20 years ago. Imagine the media rot problems that will come up from today's formats!
* DRM. Readers of books don't have to worry about onerous license restrictions that may cause your e-books to self destruct in a few weeks, after a certain number of accesses, or that may prevent them from being copied or used as you need. *ANY* file or device that supports *ANY* type of digital rights management is something you want to stay far, FAR away from. It is a Pandora's box of consumer hostility. 

The Sony Reader is actually one of the best e-book readers to ever hit the market. It has a crisp display that uses a magnetic ink technology to redraw the screen, it minimizes glare problems, and it has a simple thumb-driven "next page" function that is as close to natural feeling as an ebook interface has ever gotten.

As good as it is though, it's FAR harder to use than a simple paperback book. For one thing, the display only shows about 20 lines zoomed out and about 12 zoomed in, though with weird line wrapping, the usable text is much less. I figure you'd have to do about 12 times more thumbing and paging with the Sony Reader than you would with a simple paperback.

The Sony Reader has other problems though. It renders text using its own proprietary system. That's good in that redraws will be fast, but its bad in that the look and design of the original book are rendered moot. Not an issue with a technical manual of error codes. Huge problem with a commercial book that incorporates figures, tables, charts, and layout elements: can you imagine reading *ANY* book from the Dorling Kinderly Publishing Company that doesn't preserve all the vibrant photos, color illustrations, and clear diagrams? No, e-books just are NOT as good as paper books.

Sony's use of propietary formats is another huge problem with this device. It is optimized for use with files that Sony controls, and it performs poorly with industry standard PDF format files. If you choose to buy files optimized for Sony's device, there's an outstanding chance that the files will be obsolete and useless when the next generation of ebook readers is released. Technology changes to fast to waste your time and money investing in obsolescent technology, and that's what any non-standard media file is: use PDF for documents, use MP3 for music, use anything else at the risk of having a lot of useless files lying around.

The bottom line on the Sony Reader is the same as for any previous or future e-book reader: leave it to the niche users for whom it might make some sense. Ebooks are a fundamentally stupid idea for the consumer market because NO technological solution is as elegantly simple, durable, flexible, or usable as a simple paper printed book. Paper rules!



I_thumb_down Sony - E-reader 6IN LCD Portable Dark Blue E-book Approx 170 Pix/inch MP3 Player is not recommended by mrkstvns

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I_comment_shdw24 Comments about mrkstvns’s Review

 


mrkstvns wrote on Apr 27, 2008 at 2:25PM

In response to Sascha's comment from Apr 25, 2008 at 11:17AM:

Well, for every "problem" that might exist in a rural country with few big bookstores, there's a whole host of brand *NEW* problems that also creep in. I spend a large chunk of every year traveling in Latin America, and I have constant problems with every electronic device I try to rely on, from my laptop to my cell phone, and even alarm clocks. Power outages are more common, as are power surges. In some areas (esp. in Brazil), the voltage is 220 instead of the 110 that's common in the U.S. Even in some of the countries that *DO* have the same kinds of sockets with 110v current, the number of cycles is different, so any time/date functions suddenly start going bonkers.

And maybe *YOU* throw your old Dean Koontz novels in a landfill (shame on you!), but I always pass them on to a friend or take them to Half Price books to get a quarter or two back. Just try sharing one of those NASTY DRM-laden e-books with your mom!

Nope. For EVERY argument you can make in favor of ANY e-book, I can come up with a dozen that outweigh it.

Appreciate the comments! A little contrary opinion is always fun!
M

Sascha wrote on Apr 25, 2008 at 11:17AM

I see your points about bringing technology to an experience that doesn't require it but for the rest of the world that doesn't live in a country where a wide range of books are available for purchase or delivery, this is a very welcome technology. I live in rural Costa Rica and even when I drive 5 hrs to the capital city I still find it difficult to obtain books on the topics I want. Being able to obtain them quickly and easily from the net would completely open up my reading options.
Also when I travel, I would rather put one small electronic device in my bag as opposed to an extra heavy bag full of books.
And, finally, it is wonderful that books printed by Gutenberg are still in existence (and I highly doubt that the ebook will ever replace high quality books intended for more than a quick read) however do we really need hundreds of thousands of Dean Koontz novels filling up our landfills.

kid-kansas wrote on Mar 25, 2008 at 9:33PM

Very good points! ;)

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