Hasta La Gadget!

With the Sony Reader Daily Edition, the 3G-enabled ebook reader battle is pitched. At the end of this year, it’ll fight Amazon’s Kindle 2 and DX and Plastic Logic‘s eReader to the death. Here’s how they all stack up now:

Aaaand we can’t not do a proper sizemodo, naturally:

It’s what we thought; The Sony Daily Edition reader is Sony’s first (AT&T) 3G reader with a seven-inch touch widescreen display that you can rotate to view books in landscape. It’ll be available in December for $399. Updated.

But yeah, check out how crazy wide that display is. Newspaper content announcement is coming later, unfortunately—as in weeks later, not later today. Also unfortunately, Sony only brought one model and we can’t touch it. And while 3G will be free, just like the Kindle, wireless access only gets you access to Sony’s book store, none of the other new partnerships announced. Boooo.

One saving grace? The electronic library program: The eBook store will now have a Library Finder page, where you type in your zip and it’ll take you to local library, where you can check out books from your library electronically. Books will expire in 21 days. They’re taking the “virtual library” concept fairly literally here, so libraries will have to purchase licenses for each individual copy, which is loaned and returned in the same way as a physical one would be. That means a library will have a limited stock of virtual books—weird, I know—all licensed from an outside company called Overdrive. We’ll have to see what the selection is like before getting too excited about this, but it’s a pretty cool concept. And hey, free books!

Also, anybody else disappointed there’s no Barnes & Noble partnership to really fight the Amazon book Borg?

EXTRA, EXTRA: SONY’S DAILY EDITION ROUNDS OUT NEW LINE OF DIGITAL READERS

Wireless 3G Reader Extends Sony’s Commitment to Bring
Open Digital Reading to Mass Audience

NEW YORK, August 25, 2009 ¾ Delivering on its promise to give consumers a variety of choices, Sony today announced the third member of its new Reader family – the Reader Daily Edition™, a highly-anticipated wireless model with 3G connectivity. The Daily Edition caps its new line of Reader products, joining the Reader Pocket Edition™ and the Reader Touch Edition™ which were announced earlier this month.

The Reader Pocket Edition and the Reader Touch Edition are available immediately, and the Reader Daily Edition will be available this December in time for the holidays at SonyStyle stores and SonyStyle.com.

“We firmly believe consumers should have choice in every aspect of their digital reading experience,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division. “Today, we take another large stride to deliver on that promise. We now have the most affordable devices on the market, the greatest access to free and affordable eBooks through The eBook Store from Sony and our affiliated ecosystem, and now round out our Reader offering with a wireless device that lets consumer purchase and download content on the go.”

A Family of Three Readers

The Reader Pocket Edition sports a five-inch electronic paper display packaged in a stylish chassis and is available in a variety of colors, including navy blue, rose and silver. It is available for the ground-breaking price of $199, making it the most affordable dedicated reading device on the market.

The Reader Touch Edition features a responsive, menu-driven six-inch touch screen panel that enables quick, intuitive navigation, page turning, highlighting and note taking with the swipe of a finger or by using the included stylus pen. It comes in red, black or silver and retails for about $299.

The Reader Daily Edition gives consumers wireless access via AT&T’s 3G mobile broadband network to Sony’s eBook store from just about anywhere in the U.S. Book lovers will be able to browse, purchase and download books as well as select newspapers and magazines when and where they want. There are no monthly fees or transaction charges for the basic wireless connectivity and users still have the option to side load personal documents or content from other compatible sites via USB.

The seven-inch wide, touch screen display provides for intuitive navigation and comfortable layout of content, including newspapers and magazines, whether you’re reading in portrait or landscape orientation. In portrait mode, about 30-35 lines of text are visible, making the experience very similar to that of a printed paperback book. A high contrast ratio with 16 levels of grayscale ensures that text and images are crisp and easy to read. The Daily Edition also boasts an attractive aluminum body with an integrated cover for durability. It has enough internal memory to hold more than one thousand standard eBooks and expansion slots for memory cards to hold even more. It will sell for about $399.

All three models feature Sony’s award-winning industrial design and an E Ink® Vizplex™ electronic paper display that emulates the look of ink on paper. Sony’s eBook Library software 3.0, which now includes support for many Apple® Macintosh® computers as well as PCs, makes it easy to transfer and read any Adobe® PDF (with reflow capability), EPUB, Microsoft® Word®, BBeB® files, or other text file formats on the Reader.

Access to Even More Content at the eBook Store by Sony

In addition to announcing a new family of Readers, Sony has also made several changes and improvements to its eBook Store to provide better access to an even greater variety of ebooks. Earlier this summer Sony announced the availability of more than one million free public domain books from Google, and the company made new releases and New York Times bestseller titles available for $9.99.

Today also marks the launch of Sony’s Library Finder application. Sony, working with OverDrive (www.overdrive.com), the leading global digital distributor of eBooks and to libraries, will now offer visitors to the eBook Store by Sony easy access to their local library’s collection of eBooks. 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.

The Reader Pocket and Touch Editions, as well as available accessories such as AC adaptors, cases and covers with reading lights, are available now at SonyStyle.com and SonyStyle stores. Book lovers interested in trying out a Reader in person will also be able to find them for sale at Best Buy, BJs, Borders, Sam’s Club, Staples, Target, Toys”R”Us, Wal-Mart and other authorized retailers nationwide.

DIGITAL READING ECOSYSTEM EXPANDS FOR SONY’S READER

NEW YORK, August 25, 2009 ¾ Further evidence of the broad support for its open approach to digital reading, Sony today announced relationships with a variety of traditional and digital publishers who provide content in industry standard formats to create a universe of reading material compatible with the Reader.

All of these sites will offer content in the EPUB format, the International Digital Publishing Forum’s (IDPF) XML-based standard format for reflowable digital books and publications. EPUB has gained acceptance among major trade book publishers with dozens of publishers already producing the majority of their eBooks using the standard. Sony recently announced that the company is transitioning its entire content library to the EPUB format, giving consumers the freedom to purchase or download free eBooks from the eBook Store by Sony and read them on any EPUB-compatible device.

“From the beginning, we have said that an open format means more choice for consumers,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division. “Now, working with other industry leaders, we can provide a device that is compatible with the widest selection of content available. Readers can shop around for what interests them rather than be locked into one store.”

Sony’s eBook Store already provides access to more than one million public domain Google Books in EPUB format and, starting today, Sony’s Library Finder application will go live. Library Finder offers visitors to the eBook Store by Sony easy access to their local library’s collection of eBooks. Thousands of libraries 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.

Other sites offering EPUB content include:

* Independent Bookstores – More than 200 participating members of the American Booksellers Association-including stores such as Tattered Cover (Denver, CO) and Vroman’s Bookstore (Pasadena, CA)-will have the ability to sell e-content to consumers beginning this fall. The stores using ABA’s IndieCommerce platform will offer content in the EPUB format and protected by Adobe’s Content Server 4 (ACS4) digital rights management, which is compatible with Sony e-Reader products. In addition, plans are underway to make Sony’s e-Reader devices available for purchase from independent bookstores in time for this holiday season. ABA is a not-for-profit trade organization devoted to meeting the needs of its core members – independently owned bookstores with storefront locations – through education, information dissemination, business products and services, and advocacy.

· BooksOnBoard – BooksOnBoard, the largest independent eBook bookseller and member of both the ABA and IDPF, has been a staunch supporter of the EPUB standard through its founder Bob Livolsi. BooksOnBoard was the first eBook site to offer the EPUB standard to its burgeoning customer base and has sold more EPUB formatted books than any other online bookstore. BooksOnBoard believes that the EPUB standard significantly benefits the publisher, authors and most importantly the consumer.

· NetGalley – NetGalley is an innovative and easy-to-use online service and connection point for book publishers, reviewers, media, librarians, booksellers, bloggers and educators. NetGalley delivers digital galleys and promotional materials to professional readers and helps promote new and upcoming titles. Starting today, NetGalley will support the Reader with the ability to download a protected PDF file and this fall the company will offer digital galleys in EPUB format.

* Powell’s Books and Powells.com – Powell’s Books is the largest independent bookseller in the world. Innovative since its inception in 1971, it was one of the first booksellers online (beginning in 1994), and one of the first to sell eBooks for reading devices (the Rocket eBook) in 1999. Powell’s offers EPUB content for a wide range of compatible devices, including the Sony line. Powell’s is an important player in the open access world of eBooks, where titles are provided by a wide range of publishers in a competitive retail environment, read on a range of devices, and downloaded and owned by millions of people around the world.

Cool move by Sony to bolster the number of titles in its Reader ebook store — it’s linked up with Google to provide over a million free public domain works from Google Books, just like those fun folks at Barnes and Noble. The books are in the EPUB format and will work with the PRS-505 or the PRS-700 in the US only for now — different countries have different copyright terms, so we’d imagine the lawyers are busy sorting it all out. Sure, none of this will do much to shake the Kindle’s market- and mindshare, but at least Sony won’t be deleting this stuff off your device without your permission, right?

[Thanks, Tom]

Filed under: Handhelds

Sony brings over a million Google Books to the Reader originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Kindle DX is the true heir to the Kindle throne, but whether Amazon’s ebook kingdom is growing or shrinking depends on the next wave of books—textbooks. In the meantime, bigger screen, cool new tricks…

I know now I have a love/hate relationship with Kindle. The drive of Amazon to make this unlikely little thing a star is inspiring in a world where most companies just go around copying each other. Amazon has, from the beginning, delivered on so many of promises of e-readers—cheap books delivered instantly to a lightweight screen that’s easy on the eyes and stays powered for days on a single battery charge.

The Kindle 2 that hit this spring was a disappointment, nothing but a Kindle 1 with a more predictable design and some novelty tricks.

The DX, arriving just months later, solves real problems of the first generation. Internally, it has native PDF support, which allows for reading of the vast bulk of formal business literature, not to mention a bazillion easy-to-download copyright-free (free-free!) works of actual literature. Externally, the DX’s larger 10-inch screen makes it better suited to handle the content, not just PDFs, but textbooks, whose heavily formatted pages would look shabby on the smaller Kindle’s 6-inch screen.

The DX also has an inclinometer, so you can flip it sideways or even upside down. I didn’t know what that was for at first—but I do now.

The DX is not-so-secretly the smartest thing Amazon could do to show academic publishers it was time to green up and get with digital distribution. But it’s a real “if you build it, they will come” strategy, because although Amazon has announced that it “reached an agreement” with the three publishers who account for 60% of textbooks sold—Pearson, Cengage Learning and Wiley (but not Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)—we haven’t seen any actual textbooks distributed to Kindles yet and, more upsettingly, we have no idea how much they will cost or what weird rights issues may be involved in their “sale.”

So while we’re sitting here, DX in hand, waiting for the real reason for its existence to come to fruition, it doesn’t hurt to talk about it as a reader for regular books, right?

I am currently a little over halfway through Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, a heavyweight champ of a book, even in paperback, that sits on my chest each night, restricting my breathing until I have no choice but to fall asleep.

As you can see from the scale shots below, the DX weighs about half as much as the paperback, a real load off my chest. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) As Kindle lover Chen is apt to point out, the Kindle 2 is just half the weight of the DX, but I counter with this lazy man’s factoid: Even using a slightly larger font, I can see the equivalent of two and a half Kindle 2 pages on a DX screen. It is, in fact, a better reading experience.

When it comes to PDFs, the Kindle DX lives up to its unambitious promise: There they are, in the menu, the minute you copy them from your computer to the Kindle via USB. What won’t show up are .doc, .docx, Excel spreadsheets or any other text-based pseudo-standards from the Microsoft people, and no images either.

The good and bad thing about the PDFs is that they appear squarely in the DX’s 10-inch rectangular frame, “no panning, no zooming, no scrolling,” as Amazon’s bossman Jeff Bezos likes to say. This is wonderful when you have a PDF like my free copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s presented in a big clear font and saved to PDF, meaning I can’t change the font size, but I don’t want to either. The trouble arises when you have something like the HP product brochure below. Damn thing was meant to be seen on a computer, with full-color graphics and the ability to zoom in on the fine print. As you can see, some print is so small, the Kindle’s slightly chunky E-Ink screen resolution can’t render it legibly.

That’s when I found that you really can zoom.

Remember I mentioned that inclinometer, that orients the screen horizontally or vertically depending on how you hold it? It’s not terribly useful for Kindle books, which are meant to look great in vertical (portrait) orientation. But when you’re looking at a PDF, and you can’t read everything, tilting the whole deal 90 degrees gets you a bit of a zoom. How much? If you think about it, that’s a little over 20%, not a lot, but a bit of a boost when you need it. The PDF support is so convenient, but means I especially miss the SD card slot from the first Kindle. It would make life with the DX a far sight easier.

So the screen is bigger, but perhaps still not big enough, at least for the text books and businessy documents. I’m happy to say that it’s finally reached the minimum required size for recreational reading, which is what most people will be buying it for anyway.

I haven’t got a lot to say about the newspaper industry that the Kindle will allegedly save, except that Kindle newspapers don’t look or feel anything like real newspapers, so they may disappoint a few old-schoolers out there. You don’t even get a fat front page of options pointing in all directions, but instead, incomplete tables of contents segregated by section. I am glad for the newspaper distribution on Kindle, but only in the same way that I am glad for the faxed New York Times cheatsheets they hand out at resorts that are too far from mainland USA to get an actual paper on time. Seriously, if this is somehow more accessible than reading a newspaper on a laptop, I’ll eat my hat.

The same goes for the text-to-speech that publishers are all frightened of. Sure, computer-generated voices are getting better, and the precedent set here might eventually shut down some voice-talent union, but in the meantime, their jobs are safe: I can’t imagine how anyone could listen to more than a paragraph. Apparently neither can Amazon: In the Kindle DX, the speech controls are buried, and you have to memorize a keystroke combination to get it working.

The DX also doesn’t give any new hope for E-Ink as a sustainable platform. The many people who bitch that color is king are not wrong, exactly, but color E-Ink is puke-tastic and far from cheap. Monochrome E-Ink may look nice by the light of your nightstand lamp—and thank God Amazon hasn’t gone and mucked it up like Sony did with that PRS (more like POS)-700—but it’s still too slow to leaf around the way you would a serious work of literature. (My best example of this is still Infinite Jest by the late great David Foster Wallace. I was surprised to discover that it’s actually finally available as a Kindle book, every glorious footnote intact albeit cumbersomely hyperlinked. I have always assumed it would be more daunting on a Kindle than in book form, but now that I have a chance to find out, I’ll have to get back to you.)

Unless E-Ink gets cheaper, faster, bigger and more colorful all at once, it’s doomed. The iPhone is an all-around worse system for book readin’, but way more people have iPhones, so it could beat Kindle by sheer momentum. And Mary Lou Jepsen’s Pixel Qi company is working on a new LCD screen that—like the OLPC XO screen she was instrumental in devising—will run on less power, be easy on the eyes in natural light, and have optimized modes for both black-and-white and color.

The hope for the current Kindles is that these boring old black-and-white textbooks we keep hearing about appear on the horizon like an army of indignant Ents. Give every college kid a DX and the chance to download half their texts to Kindle, and all bets are off.

So what happens next? Well like I said, we wait.

In Summary

Best ebook reader to date

Native PDF support

Larger screen means (almost) everything is easier to read

E-Ink screen is easy on the eyes and battery efficient, but makes pages slow to “turn” and does not come in color

Textbooks would be ideal, so let’s see the deals

$489 price tag is steep

No zooming means some PDFs will be unreadable

In a collision of journalistic labs heretofore unseen, the folks at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab hit up The New York Times‘ R&D lab for a look at what those ink-stained word-slingers think about the future of newspaper delivery. Nick Bilton, “Design Integration Editor” at the NY Times, and ever calm in the face of futurism, gave a guided tour of the devices they’re currently looking at, and while there aren’t a lot of surprises, it is nice to see they’re taking ebooks, netbooks and touchscreen PCs all very seriously. Of particular note is a (sadly damaged) e-ink prototype with a newspapery layout, complete with typography, designed for an “e-ink device that [doesn’t] exist yet.” Nick also makes mention of Mary Lou Jepsen’s upcoming Pixel Qi display, along with the marvelous world of RFID-based ads. Check out the full content delivery nerd-out on video after the break.

Continue reading New York Times R&D group is braced for the future of content delivery, being totally chill

New York Times R&D group is braced for the future of content delivery, being totally chill originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 May 2009 11:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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