I've put this in the Ethical Issues forum because I'm sure there are a lot of people on this site dead against this thing, but I'm dying for the UK release date. They're going to be sold in Borders in the US and are supposed to be out very, very soon.

Link: Sony Reader

Colin M

Ohhhhhh yummmyyyyyyyyy.

Colin, that looks gorgeous. I want one! But I’ll still want the real books as well, I think… maybe not...

Any idea what it’s going to cost, and what price the downloads will be?

Dee

About $349 in the US, but if the idea takes off the price will plummet - just look at MP3 players and DVD machines. Sony are introducing their own format for books that you can buy (10,000 titles are being released on its launch) but it can also read PDF files.

The next stage it to incorporate a reading voice which can read the text with the correct pace and emotion, and in a voice of your own choice - I can see the day that you'll be able to download celebrity voices from the internet. Frank Bruno reading War and Peace or Jade Good reading A Brief History of Time, or Posh Spice... no, sorry - too weird.

Colin

Well, you know, following recent threads on here about self-publishing and marketing, this gizmo could open new ways of writers getting their work out there.

MP3s are changing the music industry. Bands like Arctic Monkeys built up such a fanbase by giving away CDs at their concerts and MP3 downloads from their websites. This eventually translated into a record deal.

Bands in the US are selling 100s of 1,000s of CDs without any label support, either via downloads or selling CDs from their websites. I know that is more akin to self-publishing, but now the big record companies are taking notice.

There are virtual record labels springing up, offshoots of major companies, that offer only download product. Costs are lower, because there are no CDs or vinyl to duplicate and marketing is done on the web via sites like myspace, so it doesn't cost much.

Obviously the downside is that those bands don't get as much of a push as the big bands or most favoured new artists, but hopefully it means more people will get more exposure for their work, even if it is to smaller audiences.

Perhaps new technology and an approach like this could change the way books are marketed and distributed? A writer could offer a free sample chapter of their book and if the reader liked it they could pay for the full download.

I suppose you could do that currently with technology such as PDFs, but paying for a PDF, printing it out (on your own paper and ink) and then carting it around like so many notes from a forgotten lecture is not as convenient, appealing or as sexy as this gizmo.

The net is an ideal way to market and spread the word about different writers and they work, via blogs, groups like this and so on. I hope the publishing companies consider it for at least part of their strategy.

I think it could all be quite exciting. I'm sure that purists will say that surfing the net for a book won't catch on and they would rather browse in a book shop or order on line, but again, look what is happening with music....

Sheesh! Stop it, Colin, you're cracking me up…

Think I’ll wait for the launch and see what sort of prices we’re talking for downloads, and what those 10k titles will be… 101 Interesting Ideas For The Disposal Of Surplus Concrete? The History Of Treacle Bending? Jade Goody’s General Knowledge Quizbook?

But can you read it in the bath?

Emma

Who cares? I haven’t had a bath since 1983.

I care - it's where I do my recreational reading! Well, in the bath or in nice bright sunshine in the garden, where I suspect the Reader wouldn't be readable.

Emma

You can get waterproof cameras and mp3 players, so why not - all you'd need would be a plastic "skin" with an o-ring seal and soft area to operate the buttons. Alternatively, you could hold it out of the water, which you'd do with a book. It isn't going to kill you if it falls in the water.

Using the Reader outside is another issue, and this is where it really stands out. They call the screen "electronic paper" and it is said to react to light, so that yes, you can read it out in the garden where a TFT monitor or a laptop would be unreadable. Alternatively, if you want to read under the covers, it's backlit!

For me, the price is still too high, reflecting its "gizmo" status, but once it becomes a common tool, like a mobile phone, it will hopefully drop in price. I think it might help self publishers, but for me the attraction is to have a small library with you wherever you go. You can store up to 100 books on one SD card, and as the SD cards are themselves tiny, you could easily have another ten in your wallet, so theoretically, you can be sitting on the tube with 1000 books.

Mind you, theoretically, with a PDA, you've got the internet wherever you go, and this is the major argument against these readers; that they don't do what pocket PCs do, ie no movies, no screen savers, recording, colour etc etc, bla bla bla - but if you want all of that, then get a PDA. This is an electronic book, and if I could afford one, I'd snap it up over ten PDAs. Also, unlike PDAs who burn batteries like they're going out of fashion, Sony insist that the Reader's batteries last much, much longer, as it only consumes power when perfoming a tast (such as turning a page) - so one battery charge can offer 7,400 page turns. That should keep fans of the new Harry Potter tome happy.

Colin
(I'm not a Sony rep. Honest! I just think it's time we had a gadget too)

How typical that Sony have gone for The Da Vinci Code in their advertising. Wonder how much Dan Brown got for that?

I still don't think it will ever replace the traditional book for me, and I still can't find any justifiable reason why we need this - other than to make huge corporations even more money. Yes, I know about trees - old batteries are more dangerous to the environment you know!

Anyway, that's my opinion. Not looking for an argument, and shell out £300 bucks that could go toward regenerating our failing forests or feeding a starving child for five years if you must, but I'll stick to old familiar.

JB

I don't think it will replace the traditional book for me either - reading from a screen can be very tiring. Scanning to find that elusive passage might be harder too, you know - when you can only remember vaguely what it was about and that it was on the left hand page about two thirds of the way down. Even a search facility won't locate it.

Fancy losing all your books in one go when you're mugged for the thing!

Is this good for writers? What about piracy being easier, as with music?

Naomi

It will be interesting to see how and if it develops. I'm sure it will be the techies and gadget nutters that invest first because it is quite pricey, so they might not be the kind of people that go around seeking out new writing.

But if Sony are behind it, I would be surprised to see them move into publishing as they have done with music so they can push new product - they're desperate for a major triumph, PlayStation is apparently the only thing keeping them afloat at the moment.

If the price comes down - or cheaper versions come on to the market - then kids might start buying them, and I could see them getting on to websites and swapping files of their new favourite books.

But I think Colin's point about it not being very multi-media could be a flaw... until Sony add an MP3 player, phone and PSP to it!

Of course it could also be a force for evil. If, as Colin susggest, a voice module can be added, people might just give up reading all together. And if it followed the same path as music, it could be hell!

Just imagine, you're waiting at the bus stop and some 13 year old kid's mobile goes off, but instead of the Crazy Frog, the ringtone is actually Stephen Fry intoning the latest instalment of Harry Potter 27 - the McJob years.

Ooh. Perhaps I should trademark that idea.

<Added>

But if Sony are behind it, I would NOT be surprised to see them move into publishing

Mmmm. so instead of losing just one book on holiday you can lose your entire collection.

I doubt that this unit will take off at this price, but it might lead the way for Creative Labs or Philips to copy the technology and join in the race. And a good way to market them would be to include a small SD card in the back of every paperback, not just including the text for these readers, but all the additional bits and pieces you get on the average DVD - ie, an interview with the author, prodoction notes, cover concept art - just general extras. The trick is to get these SD cards into people's posession. If they think they're missing out, they might buy the reader.

Colin

<Added>

prodoction?? - the extras could include hilarious outtaked such as that, crazy zany spelling mistakes - not quite the same as seeing a Storm Trouper walk into that door.

I'm sure I mentioned this somewhere else but...

I think the biggest marketing problem that a 'book reader' has is that it doesn't give you anything you can't do already. Portable music players allowed you to carry your music around with you - not previously possible. Portable video players have a similar benefit. But we've always been able to carry books around with us and many people do every day so what's the USP?

OK, so like an iPod, an electronic viewer will be able to store many books at once but just how big an advantage is that? Personally I tend to read one book at a time, and those that do have several on the go may not necessarily feel the need to have all of them with them at any one time.

Portable music players exploded onto the market because they gave consumers something they could never do before (other than through time intensive methods such as making compilation tapes or CDs). Book readers have been coming onto the market and disappearing for ten years now and I've never seen one that took off.

The only environment in which I can see such a device being useful is in research or study where a large number of reference works could be stored in one convenient location. However, this would largely depend upon those works being available and since publishing of the electronic format will probably follow the 'most popular first' route I doubt we'll see the more obscure titles out for a long time.

Jon

<Added>

... and there's more...

As for the SD card... well, the capability to do this already exists and has been used for many, many years. It's called a CD. I've a great many reference and training books (mostly IT/Graphics related) that include a CD in the back cover containing files and resources, etc. If the demand for such additional material existed for fiction works then I'm sure it would have been done already (and may well have been at some point in the past).

While memory cards are tumbling in price I doubt we'll see them reach the cost of a CD (less than 5p each) for some time to come and unlike CDs there's no standard format (I think there's 6 or maybe 7 different types of memory card out there).

Come to that, I've had the capability to read books on my PDA for 5 years. There's an application called 'Pocket Reader' or something that's for reading electronic books. I downloaded a couple of classics when I first got it and haven't touched the program since. Why? Well, mainly because the books I want to read aren't availble for it and some will NEVER be available for it. Even now, ten years after the introduction of DVDs and the enormous growth in sales, there are still tens of thousands of films that are not available in that format. Imagine how long it will take, even with a similar take-up of the technology, for even a fraction of the books out there to be converted. How likely is such a take up given that many people don't read at all at the moment while even those unfortunates watch DVDs?

So, you've got your reader and you've got some books on it. What happens the first time a novel comes out that you want to read and it's not available electronically? What happens when you have an electronic copy of an author and want to read their earlier, non-electronic works? You're going to buy the paperback, aren't you? Which means that you've instantly made the reader not only worthless but actually an additional thing to carry around. The difference with CDs and DVDs is that anyone can convert these formats into portable versions. Software to do exactly that is all over the place and once you've bought your CD or movie you can get it on your iPod. You - as an individual - will never be able to do that with a book so as long as there are any books you want to read that aren't available electronically the reader isn't helping.

Man, that got me on my soapbox, didn't it :)

Jon