Tag Archives: ebook readers

Sony held a press conference today announcing a new addition to it’s eBook Reader family, as well as some interesting partnerships.

Earlier this month, Sony announced the adoption of the ePUB format for its stores, making me seriously consider switching from the Kindle. Now Sony has upped the ante a bit. There are now several eReaders in the family.

The Pocket Edition has physical buttons and is smaller, sporting a 5 in display and 512 MB internal memory. It’s a perfect candidate for someone’s first foray into eBooks and is priced at $199. The Touch edition has a touchscreen, 6 in display, 512 MB internal memory and a slot for a Memory Stick Pro Duo SD card. It also includes an audio player and picture viewer. The Touch is priced at $299. Both of these devices are available now (and were actually announced earlier this month).

The big news is the Daily Edition, announced today and available by the holidays. The  Daily Edition is the top of the line, selling for $399 and is comparable in many ways to the Kindle DX. That includes 3G access via AT&T but unlike the Kindle, you can’t surf the web, just the Sony store. The Daily Edition includes a 7-in touchscreen and can be used in portrait or landscape mode. I’m not sure of the exact specs, but the press release states that the reader “has enough internal memory to hold more than one thousand standard eBooks and expansion slots for memory cards to hold even more.”

If I understand correctly, these devices are in addition to the existing Digital Book PRS-505, which sells for $279, but I suspect they may be phasing that one out and replacing it with the similar Pocket edition.

The really excellent news is Sony’s deal with the public libraries of the world. Believe it or not, your public library most likely has an eBook library available. For example, I have access to the Ohio eBook Project. Unfortunately, because my Kindle won’t read DRM’d .mobi or ePUB files, I can’t read any of the books available to me. Sony is making sure that its users can easily access the libraries and check out books, all from their eBook device.

Thousands of libraries in the OverDrive network offer eBooks optimized for the Sony Reader, and visitors can now find these libraries by typing their zip code into the Library Finder. Through the selected library’s download website, visitors can check out eBooks with a valid library card, download them to a PC and transfer to their Reader. At the end of the library’s lending period, eBooks simply expire, so there are never any late fees.

Sony has another major advantage over Amazon – it has physical stores. It’s one of the reasons that I am constantly asked about the Kindle in airports. “Is that a Kindle? Can I see it?”  Sony makes it easy. Not only can you walk into any SonyStyle store in your local mall to play with an eBook reader, you can also wander into any Borders to experience one. eBook Readers, whether Kindle or Sony, are hard to explain until someone actually has one in their hands, sees, the eInk, and “flips” a few pages.

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Cheers!

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by Michelle Lentz

As someone who purchased a Kindle 2 in February, I’m feeling a tiny bit screwed by Amazon. Really, couldn’t you just have released these at the same time so we’d have had a choice? This was a very Apple thing to do. Alright, just had to get that off my chest and so – now the specs …

The new Kindle DX has

• 9.7 inch screen with a squashed QWERTY keyboard at the bottom
• 1/3 of an inch thick (10.4″ x 7.2″ x 0.38″)
• 3.3GB Storage for 3,500 books (an increase from K2′s 1,500 books)
• “Long” battery life
• Native PDF support through built-in reader
• Automatic landscape/portrait text rotation
• Navigation buttons moved to right side of screen only
• Built-in/included EVDO for wireless book downloads
• Still black and white, if anyone is curious

The Kindle DX will be trialed by 5 universities this year (Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Princeton, Reed College and U of Virginia Business School) and they expect it to “revolutionize learning.”  As a current instructional designer and former college instructor, I would agree. I bet the eLearning blogs will be all aflutter about this over the next few days. Imagine how portable learning is becoming on a daily basis!  I’m literally pulling this from a few live blogs, but it sounds like Amazon has agreements with Pearson, Cengage Learning and Wiley to offer 60% of their textbooks on the Kindle. I’m not surprised about Cengage at all – I worked for them in another incarnation of the company and they were always a bit ahead of the curve when it came to forms of eLearning.

The New York Times and Boston Globe (now that they’re friends again), as well as the Washington Post, will be offering their own Kindle experiments this summer. They plan to offer lower prices on subscriptions for longer subscription packages. The NY Times also said that the Kindle DX will be offered to readers in areas where home delivery is not available. I don’t quite understand that yet, but there you go. I am curious if the newspapers will be formatted differently for the DX as opposed to the K2 and if those new subscription rates will apply to K2 owners as well.

So, my big gripe is that Amazon released the K2 in February and then this release a few months later. Really? While I don’t really crave the large screen format (demonstrated with newspapers, textbooks, and sheet music), I would LOVE the built-in PDF reader and auto-rotate to widescreen. *grumble grumble*

Retail price for the DX – are you ready? $489.  I’m hoping scholarships or grants help those college kids pay for that Kindle. Ouch! I also don’t think that a $500 price tag is going to help “save” newspapers, as everyone has been chatting about. It might be a step in the right technological direction however.

The Kindle DX is available for pre-order and will be available in “Summer.”

Your thoughts on Amazon’s latest foray into eBooks?

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by Michelle Lentz

Since it’s Banned Book Week, and because we should all step away from our computers and read some books, I thought I’d talk about eBook readers. Really, I want your opinion on them.

I’ve gone on record several times and in several places as saying I could never use an eBook Reader like the Kindle. Then I wandered into Borders Books over the weekend and ran smack into a display for the Sony eBook Reader. My husband had a heck of a time dragging me away from the display unit, as it was my first hands-on encounter with an eBook device.

I was impressed – amazingly impressed – by the size of the unit. It was slightly larger than a paperback book, but amazingly thin and light. The screen, with the special e-ink (my husband said something about solid state graphics or something), was easy to read. It was just like looking at a page in a book. In fact, I found it slightly easier to read than a page in a book.

I found myself wanting one. I can’t believe it. I love books. I love the feel of a book in my hand and the musty smell of old books. So I’m surprised at myself. It comes down to this. As a Web Worker, I’m on the go a lot. I’ve always got a book, newspaper, or magazine (or all of the above) in my briefcase, along with my Macbook and it’s necessary accessories. An eBook device would cut down on the number of things shoved into my briefcase. With the Kindle, in particular, I could actually download and read the newspaper without getting covered in news ink or dealing with the unweildy and impractical size. With either device, I could easily bookmark my place.

I’ll be traveling a lot (for me), over the next year, including two trips to California, a trip to Las Vegas, and quite possibly a trip to Seattle / Alaska. None of these places are close to Cincinnati, so I’ll be spending a lot of time on a plane. In my carry-on, I usually have at least one newspaper, two magazines, and two books, with more books in my checked luggage. An eBook device would free up that carry-on space for something else – or for nothing, which is even better.

I haven’t read a blogger review of the Sony eBook Reader, although I’d like to. My friend Jason, however, has written a rather glowing review of the Kindle. His review has made quite an impact on me – he’s a librarian. Granted, he’s a bit more digital than a lot of librarians I know, but really, his world is books and he loves his Kindle.

My biggest issue right now is price. The Kindle, in particular, seems extravagant at almost $400. I’d love to get my hands on a sample machine to use for a bit to see if it’s even worth $400 to the average user. Would I really use it all the time or just for travel? $400 is a lot if I’m not going to use it on a daily basis.

So tell me, would you switch to an eBook device? Do you have thoughts on whether you’d use a Kindle or Sony or something I haven’t yet stumbled across?  Tell me what you think in the comments below.

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