sony reader

Kindle is Amazon's new electronic book reader
By Ben Martin
Last Updated: 2:28pm GMT 20/11/2007



The world's largest web retailer has developed an electronic device that it hopes will replace the humble book.

Amazon.com has launched the Kindle, an electronic reader that can hold up to 200 books, allowing readers to carry around a virtual library in a device which weighs just 10oz.


Jeff Bezos with the Kindle. The device also offers subscriptions to newspapers and magazines

The battery-operated reader, which will go on sale this week for about ￡200, has taken three years to develop.

It allows users to download books, newspapers and blogs over a wireless connection similar to a mobile phone link.

Users are limited to shopping at Amazon for their books, where new releases will sell for about ￡2.50.

Early attempts to create a market for portable readers were stymied by the size of the devices and the glare that came from using a screen in areas of variable light.

advertisementAmazon claims to have overcome those hurdles, saying that its screen was not back-lit and used "electronic ink" which mimicked paper, in appearance, if not feel.

"The question is, can you improve upon something as highly evolved and well-suited to its task as the book? And if so, how?" said Jeff Bezos, the company's chief executive, yesterday.

In a note on his company's website, Mr Bezos, who has seen his company's share price double since January, wrote: "The book lover in me often has asked the nerd in me 'is there a way to get the emotions and experiences I love from books, but combined with the possibilities of advanced technology?'?"

But if the fortunes of its competitors are any indication, Amazon's move from online shop into selling its own technological hardware may not be the instant success it hopes.

The Sony Reader, created by the Japanese electronics firm, failed to set the literary world alight. And without the devices becoming a must-have item, the library available to those who have embraced the technology has, until now, remained relatively slim.

But Scott Devitt, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus, said Amazon's device "has the capacity to recreate the e-book business, as well as several other long-term options".

"With time, we believe Amazon Kindle could be Amazon.com's Trojan Horse into a complete 'always on' connection to all Amazon offerings," said Mr Devitt.

Amazon is relying heavily on the in-built wireless technology of the Kindle to set it apart from its competitors.

The wireless access, which is based on the cellphone broadband technology EVDO, allows books to be downloaded without a computer or having to find a wireless internet hot-spot. There are no charges or account fees associated with the wireless technology.

Downloading a full-length book takes less than a minute, Amazon claimed, and there are currently more than 90,000 books available. Downloading and reading the first chapters of most books is free.

The Kindle service will also offer subscriptions to newspapers, magazines and blogs for a monthly fee.

Subscriptions to newspapers such as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal will range from ￡3 to ￡7.50. Magazine subscriptions will range from 60p to ￡1.70 per month with some blogs available for about 50p.

I won't rehash the basic features of Kindle, but I will try to compare it with the Sony Reader--now in its second generation, Kindle's primary competition--and talk about what I see as the strong and weak points of the Kindle design. This is all based on what I've seen and read; I haven't seen a Kindle in person. Yet.

First, I'm surprised by Kindle's industrial design. The unit has the same screen as Sony's Reader (or one with identical specifications), but Kindle is much, much larger overall--longer, wider, and over twice as thick. Yet somehow it's only 1.4 ounces heaver--10.4 vs. 9. The Sony Reader feels solid; I suspect Kindle will feel lighter than it is.

Kindle includes a keyboard to facilitate searching stored content and browsing the Kindle ebook store. The keyboard, however, looks like it'll be in the way of reading, which is Kindle's primary purpose. The other buttons also look awkwardly placed to me-- the page-turning buttons, for example, are on the right and left edges. They're so large that they basically ARE the left and right edges.

To my eye, Kindle is fairly ugly. Angular shapes, sharp edges, weird button placements, etc. I'm not all that impressed by the design of Sony's Reader either, but I think it looks much better.

Amazon appears to have devoted some of that extra volume to shock protection; Amazon's Kindle page includes a video of drop testing. I'm all in favor of that. I am constantly worried about my Reader getting broken just from normal use-- since exactly that happened to my first-generation Reader, and Sony asked almost the same price to repair it as the cost of a new unit.

Also, the unit seems to be pretty much limited to a vertical (portrait) orientation; there's no mention of landscape mode in the user guide (which is available online). Sony's Reader works fairly well in landscape mode, which helps a little with extra-wide documents, especially in PDF format. But Sony's PDF viewer is pretty awful, so that advantage often isn't enough.

I'll give Amazon credit for trying something new as part of Kindle's design-- the "cursor bar," a tall, skinny display alongside the main one that works with a scroll wheel to select on-screen menu options. The Reader has ten buttons down the side of the screen; menu options are physically aligned. Kindle's cursor bar appears to be more flexible. Whether it's as easy to use remains to be seen, but I appreciate the fact that Amazon is trying to innovate .

The other surprising thing was Amazon's decision to use a mobile broadband connection through Sprint's EV-DO cellular data network... and to shield users from all the complexities of that service. It's called "Amazon Whispernet," which is a strange name, but what the heck. Customers don't have to maintain a separate cellphone account; there are no bills. The cost of browsing Amazon's Kindle ebook store is covered by Amazon; download costs are built into the price of the books, newspapers, blog feeds, and other services available from Amazon.

This isn't a completely new business model; cellphone companies have offered similar deals for a while, but this is the first time I've seen this approach applied to mobile broadband. There is some risk to Amazon; it could be expensive to support Kindle users who browse a lot but don't buy much.

I wasn't surprised to see that Amazon is suddenly the world's best place to buy ebooks. Most New York Times bestsellers and other new releases are $9.99 or less. I searched Amazon's Kindle store and found thousands of titles at or under a dollar, although many of these were individual stories or articles. As a specific example, the novel Burning Tower by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, released in December 2006, is priced at $5.59 in the Kindle store.

There's no need for a PC; everything can be handled through Whispernet. Amazon even keeps track of your purchases so you can download them again later if you have to replace or re-initialize your Kindle for some reason.

If you do have a PC, you can transfer files via USB. There's also an SD card slot. Kindle natively supports only a few different file types (according to Amazon here), however, so I hope that situation improves soon. Several other file types can be handled via translation, including Microsoft Word, PDF, and HTML documents and JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP image files. Sony has a slight edge here with native PDF and RTF support, and possibly a bigger edge once Adobe's Digital Editions is available for the Reader, but I'll have to get my hands on one to see if Amazon's translation service works well enough to substitute for broader native file-type support.

I should be able to figure that out by Wednesday. Regular readers here can probably guess what's coming next-- yes, I bought a Kindle. I couldn't resist! Stay tuned for a Gizmo Report as soon as I've had a chance to make detailed comparisons with my Reader
Sony Reader
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The Sony PRS-500 Reader is an e-book reader for the U.S. market. It uses an electronic paper display developed by E Ink Corporation, that has 166 dpi resolution, four levels of grayscale, is viewable in direct sunlight, requires no power to maintain the image, and is usable in portrait or landscape orientation. Due to its lack of backlighting, it may be difficult to read in low ambient light. The reader uses an iTunes Store-like interface to purchase books from Sony's Connect eBook store. It also can display Adobe PDFs, personal documents, blogs, RSS newsfeeds, JPEGs, and Sony's proprietary BBeB ("BroadBand eBook") format.

The Reader can play unencrypted MP3 and AAC audio files. Unlike its close cousin, the LIBRIé, the Sony Reader offers no way for the user to annotate a digital book due to lack of a keyboard.

The digital rights management rules of the Reader allow any purchased eBook to be read on up to six devices (at least one of those 6 must be a PC). Although you cannot share purchased eBooks on other people's devices and accounts, you will have the opportunity to register five Readers to your account and share your books accordingly. At this time Sony has no plans to introduce time-expiring books in the U.S.

The Reader was announced in January 2006. By September 2006, it was available for order from the Sony online store. It competes with other Epaper devices― the Amazon Kindle, iRex iLiad and the Jinke Hanlin eReader.

Since 1 November 2006, Readers have been on display and for sale at Borders bookstores throughout the US, according to posts at MobileRead.com. Borders had an exclusive contract for the Reader through the end of 2006. As of April 2007, Sony Reader is sold in the US by multiple merchants, including Fry's, Costco, Border's and Best Buy. The Sony Connect eBook store is only available to US residents. However, if you imported the Sony Reader yourself and have received the standard Sony credits, you will be able to use the credits for books at the Sony Connect eBook store, even if you are not a US resident.

Contents
1 PRS-505
2 Specifications
3 Formats supported
4 Operating system
5 See also
6 External links



[edit] PRS-505
On October 2 2007, Sony announced the PRS-505, an updated version of the Reader. The '505 keeps the 6" SVGA display of the original Reader, but uses an improved version of E Ink's imaging film with faster refresh time, brighter white state, and 8-level grayscale.

PRS-505 is thinner than its predecessor (8 mm vs. 13 mm) and comes with more internal memory (192 MB vs. 64 MB).

Other new product features include auto-synchronization to a folder on a host PC, support for the USB Mass Storage Device profile, and full USB charging capability (the PRS-500 could only be recharged via USB if the battery was not fully drained, and if the Sony Connect Reader software was installed on the host PC). Also adding books to "Collections" (a feature to organize and group book titles) is now possible on the storage card, unlike the PRS-500 model.


[edit] Specifications
Size: 17.5 x 12.4 x 1.3 cm (6.9 x 4.9 x 0.5 in)
Weight: 250 g (9 oz)
Display:
size: 15.5 cm (6 in) diagonal (approx 1/4 area of letter-sized page)
resolution: 166 dpi, four-level gray scale (8-level gray scale in the PRS-505)
portrait: 90.6 x 122.4 mm (3.57" x 4.82"), 600 x 800 pixels | effective 4.54 x 3.47 in (115.4 x 88.2 mm), 754 x 584 pixels
minimum font size: 6 pt legible, 7 pt recommended
Memory: 64 MB standard, Memory Stick (Pro Duo High Speed not supported. Normal memory sticks are only supported up to 4GB, despite Sony compatibility claims 1) or SD card expansion up to 2 GB (some non-SDHC 4GB cards may work)
Rechargeable lithium-ion battery, up to 7500 "page turns" per charge
PC interface: USB port

[edit] Formats supported
DRM-free Text: BBeB Book (LRF), PDF, TXT, RTF, DOC. Typefaces in PDF files formatted for 8.5 x 11 inch (216 x 280 mm) pages may be too small to read comfortably. Such files can be reformatted for the Reader screen size with Adobe Acrobat Professional, but not by Adobe Reader software. The Reader does not directly support Microsoft Word .DOC format. The 'CONNECT Reader' application uses Word to convert the .DOC files to RTF before sending them to the Reader.

DRM Text: BBeB Book (LRX); Titles from major publishers and most small publishers can ONLY be read in Sony's proprietary format (BBeB); For example, such copy-protected ebooks in Adobe format cannot be read on the Sony device as of 17 February 2007

DRM-free Audio: MP3 and AAC

Image: JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP (Loading an animated GIF will freeze the Reader)

RSS: Limited to 20 featured blogs such as Engadget and Wired, no ability to add others and no auto-update (as of December 1, 2006)

The Reader supports TXT and RTF documents with Latin character set only. Other character sets (such as Cyrillic, for example) are not displayed correctly. Sony customer support confirmed that units sold in US only work with Latin characters (as of March 2, 2007). (Unofficial fix allowing to properly show cyrillic characters is available in Russian PRS 500. PRS 505)


[edit] Operating system
The Reader currently does not officially support connection to the Apple Macintosh or Linux operating systems. However, users of alternate operating systems can write files to SD cards which can then be plugged into the Reader. The third-party tool Docudesk PRS Browser for OS X allows Macintosh users to easily manage content on the Sony Reader. Users can also use the free software library and utility libprs500 written by Kovid Goyal to communicate with the Reader and manage their digital library. This utility has both a command line and graphical interface, and is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

An examination of the operating manual reveals that the operating system for the Reader is MontaVista Linux Professional Edition.


[edit] See also
Sony LIBRIé: the precursor to the Reader, sold only in Japan.
iRex Technologies iLiad: a similar device with a slightly bigger page.

[edit] External links
Official

Sony: Product page at Sony
PRS-505: PRS-505 page at Sony Style
Sony Reader Guide to creating PDF files for the Reader
PRS Developer Site Beta: How to create BBeB formatted content
Forums

MobileRead Discussion forum, includes access to developers.
Slashdot article: Slashdot discussion of the Sony Reader
Third Party/Tools

libprs500: A library to use the SONY e-book reader with Linux, OS-X, and Windows.
MobileRead Wiki Conversion Software page: Listing of free and commercial software for e-book conversions for the Sony Reader and others including BookDesigner, libprs500, and pdflrf.
PRS-500 Formatting Software: A software used for creating e-books for the PRS-500
Readerette News Transferrer: Commercial application to download news, blogs, and pod casts to the Sony Reader
Docudesk PRS Browser for OS X: Free Mac OS X tool for manipulating files on the Sony Reader.
Bookpac's Biblioskop: Software solution (Mac OS X and Win XP) for organizing, tagging, searching, archiving and sharing everything you read: eBooks, weblogs, newspapers, web sites, papers or office documents
unofficial Russian language instructions: how to show cyrillic on the Sony Reader PRS 500
unofficial Russian language instructions: how to show cyrillic on the Sony Reader PRS 505