I was in Borders this morning and I found someone from Sony doing demos of their ebook reader. I have two things worth noting.
Firstly, of the 10 books that they chose to put on the sample copy of the reader, one is George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones. Yay! Go George.
And secondly, it didn’t hurt to read the thing. I think that the lack of backlighting makes a real difference. Much as I love physical books, it would be enormously useful to me to have all of my library digitized so that I can do searching and bookmarking. I suspect that in a year or two I may buy one of these things.
I had one for a short while. The hardware is wonderful. The software is utter crap.
Maybe if they would encourage and support an Open Source project things would improve. Or, if they would actually involve people who read a lot in the design process, it would have turned out much better.
Yes, I’m one of those folks who really does have over 20K books in their library and I’m a lightweight compared to a lot of folks we both know.
Sigh. I could go off on a long rant.
I had a demo a couple of weeks ago. It has bookmarking but not search, and you can’t annotate. If I was a regular traveller I’d consider one for reading pleasure, but not for anything related to work or structured leisure or study. The hardware form factor doesn’t look sensible as a basis to control improved software, so I shall continue to monitor other solutions.
Thanks folks. The sales girl gave me the impression that it did to searching, which was perhaps a bit naughty of her. However, I’m not too keen on early-adoption, which is why I said “in a year or two” in the original post. Later models will be better, I suspect.
There’s an interesting post about the Sony device at the Pan Macmillan blog (here).