alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

November 12, 2007

Beyond Mere Geekery: The Sony Reader

by AltHippo @ 10:56 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I’m delighted to report that reading ebooks is soup. By that I’m referring, of course, to the old Campbell’s soup commercial where some young consumer-to-be asks his mother “Is it soup yet?” We gather from the visual image of the steam rising from the bubbling pot of pureed tomatoes that it is indeed soup, and all is well in the sample household. Picture a Sony Reader with steam rising from the pages of Kevin Phillips’ “American Theocracy”, and you’ll gather my meaning. The Sony Reader is soup, and just as tasty as the printed volume.

While I’ve been reading ebooks on my Palm TX for the last year or so, it’s important to remember that the TX is more like a Swiss Army knife than a precision tool. Here, there’s a huge difference between the two devices. The Palm TX (and for that matter all of its cousins, including the Treo) have an illuminated screen. This is ideal for reading in dark places, such as a pub, but not so good for reading in sunlight. Well, let’s face it, it’s just awful. The Sony Reader has the basic properties of a book: sunlight good, dark bad. The advantage, I suppose, is that you can always add a conventional book light to the Sony Reader, if you want to read in the dark. To read off an illuminated device you’d pretty much have to carry a shoe box around with you, which you’d have to cradle in such a way that you could get a decent view of the device while shading the light. I would posit that would come across as eccentric.

In the hands-on way that I take on any recommendation of a device, I don’t just play with it for a day or two. No, in this case, I read both the pdf version of “The Authoritarians” and Kevin Phillips “American Theocracy” cover to cover. Currently, I’m reading the classic science fiction novel “Neuromancer” and Jeffrey Toobin’s “The Nine.” Granted, with pdf files formatted for 8.5×11 you need to go into landscape mode (pressing the “+” button for 5 seconds), I’d still say that the experience is the same as reading a paper back.

Here’s the rub. The Sony Reader costs $300 which puts it price-wise in the same league as an ipod. Granted, ebooks are usually discounted relative to the print editions. So, let’s say on average the ebook costs $3 less. That means you’d have to read 100 books over, say, a 3 year horizon to cost-justify buying a Sony Reader. While there are certainly people in that category, I’d venture to guess that most of us read, say 10-15 books a year. That’s about what I read, anyway. So, it’s hard to justify the cost that way.

Sony is sweetening the difference by giving 100 free downloads in the Classics category if you purchase a Reader now and download before January 2008. Certainly, there’s some classics that I’ve always meant to read, but never have got around to: I’ve never read “War and Peace”, for instance, or “Anna Karenina.” And, yes, it would be nice to have Plato’s Republic on hand, or Thoreau’s “Walden,” my favorite books, and volumes that I go through again and again.

I’m just not sure you can justify the cost, at least by any Math other than the special math Karl Rove used during the 2006 elections.

For that matter, I’m not sure you can justify an iPod on cost alone. You would need to be drawn to the aesthetics of the device. There is a kind of function-meets-art that hippopotami such as myself are attracted to in this case. Both the iPod and Sony Reader fall into this category.

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hip·po·pot·a·mus n. A notion, perhaps distinct from conventional wisdom, that needs to be verified by reality-based scrutiny.

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