I like to think of mass entertainment as coming in three major forms: music, movies (and other video), and books. The first two categories are readily digitized; in fact, they already are.

Music CDs and video DVDs are digitized versions of those media. Books, newspapers and magazines, on the other hand, remain firmly entrenched in the analogue world. They are inherently the stuff of atoms, rather than bits.

If you know anything about the publication of text-based material, then you know that it’s a thoroughly electronic process: writers compose on computers, they approve it on computers, they lay it out on computers, and they send it for printing over the Internet. It’s only at the very last stage that the electronic copy is utterly abandoned, and you get a hunk of old-growth forest.

Lots of people prefer it this way. We are uncommonly attached to the classic book form factor: it’s battery-free, works in most lighting conditions, has very high resolution, and is very portable. Of course, we don’t often consider the down-sides of the book: they are very expensive, they take up a great deal of space, and they tend to go missing when you lend them out.

These facts are especially true when you talk about technical books: the sort of material that remains relevant for perhaps a couple years before becoming irrelevant or obsolete. Ironically, because these books are so technical, they appeal to far fewer people than the average mass-market paperback, and are consequently more expensive. It doesn’t help that many of these books are very big! It’s not uncommon to see an $80 book at the local Chapters. Reminds me of my university days.

It was the technical book challenge that motivated me to purchase an eBook Reader from Sony. I’m currently learning to program the Mac with Objective-C and the Cocoa frameworks, and this monumental task requires the reading of dozens of texts on the subject. The good news is, Apple provides all this documentation for free on their Web site (along with the actual development tools, which is great). The bad news is, it’s very difficult to read all this documentation on a computer screen!

Well, okay. I also think the eBook Reader is a pretty cool gadget. This was my one solid excuse for evaluating something that I feel is going to change the rules for how the written word is distributed and consumed in the future.

The Sony Reader is about the size of a paperback book, but is less than half an inch thick. Its major innovation is its display: it uses a technology called E-Ink, which is dramatically different from traditional computer displays. You can read more at the link there, but quickly: the display contains microscopic beads with ink on only one side. When a charge is applied, the beads rotate, showing black or no colour. The result is a display that actually looks like printed text on paper, and that only uses power when a page is turned! My Sony Reader has a battery charge measured not in hours of use, but in number of pages turned. In this case, I can turn 7000 pages between charges.

The Reader is otherwise a fairly normal, low-powered electronic device. It has a simple interface for navigating through books, contains enough memory to store about 70 books, and it’s readily portable, and light enough to read anywhere.

It’s not a perfect device, however. The display is only six inches in diagonal width, which is fine for text but insufficient for detailed artwork or larger pages. It’s also capable of displaying only 4 levels of grey, so many images that appear in the books are dithered.

There’s also another downside: getting content into the Reader. Right now you can only buy books at the Sony Connect store. And while they offer pretty much every book that’s on the bestseller lists, you’ll be hard-pressed to find EVERY book that you might want to read. And prices are surprising: you’ll save 10-20% off the cost of a hardcover book. To me, that’s crazy, and suggests that publishers are more interested in profit-taking than in propagating this trend.

On the other hand, there are other uses for the Reader, and devices like it that will come in the future. The most exciting possibilities are in the ways an electronic reader could replace the ephemeral texts that surround us: newspapers and magazines. While the current Sony Reader doesn’t have the display quality or size to emulate my weekly issue of Macleans, there’s no doubt in my mind that we’ll see it in the next few years. I’m looking forward to the day where, instead of receiving a 96-page magazine in the mail, I’ll simply download it to my Reader. No trees were harmed in the making of this magazine! The benefits accrue even greater for newspapers, which are a voracious waste of paper.

One can hope that, while the technology for eBooks is coming along nicely, the biggest change — in peoples’ heads — will develop similarly. My wife is the perfect example; while she admires the benefits of my Reader, her love of the book-as-object is too great to let it go.

However, as books become more expensive to produce and purchase, it will likely become inevitable that we’ll all be using electronic Readers. We’ll always have paper books, but I see the day where we’re using eBooks much more often. I’m looking forward to it.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 9:50 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.