There has been a lot of hoo-ha and kerfuful about eBooks and eBook readers lately, following the launch of Amazon’s Kindle 2 eBook reader, and, as an early adopter and the proud owner of a Sony PRS-505 (that’s Personal Reading System) I’d like to take some time to extol the virtues of these fabulous little gizmos and debunk some of the rubbish which some people have to say about them.

Many believe that eBook readers will never take off because people like the tactile sensations, the feel and the smell, of a real book. I can sympathise with this opinion, I’m a reader and I like my books, but in the end it’s just sentimentality. People said the same thing about Vinyl LPs, but in the end the superior sound quality and convenience of CDs (and then MP3) won people over, and time and mortality will always take care of the last of the naysayers!

And then there are others who believe that Apple will come out with an oversized iPhone or iPod Touch that will take over the market, after all there are already plenty of people using their iPhones to read eBooks. These are the people who, in my opinion, just DON’T GET IT. While it may be convenient to have a few books on a device you have with you all the time for the occasional boring train journey, it’s not the most practical or pleasant reading experience. To start with, reading on a device like the iPhone would kill your battery flat in hours, not days, and even the iPhone’s screen, though large for a mobile phone, is still only three inches – eBook reader screens are at least double that. The biggest problem, however, is the type of screen. Like most computer and mobile phones the iPhone uses an LCD display and, as any cubical slave can tell you, reading on LCD screens for prolonged periods of time causes eye strain and is just generally unpleasant. This is the reason why eBooks haven’t taken off until now, people just don’t want to spend any length of time reading on conventional screens, and it’s also the reason why dedicated eBook readers, devices like the Kindle and Sony Reader, are so freakin’ brilliant – their screens use a new technology called E-Ink. I’ll put on my little science hat and explain shall I?

Traditional displays and computer screens are made up of pixels of red, green and blue light, the combination of which creates any colour you want. E-Ink displays are made up of balls. Tiny balls. Each ball is light on one side, dark on the other, and what you do is pass an electric current over the ball which makes it rotate from the light side to the dark (insert Darth Vader joke here) and vice versa. The combination of all the (thousands / millions?) of balls creates the image on screen. Now that’s the basic premise, obviously it’s much more complicated than that in real life. To start with the latest generation of readers can displays sixteen shades of grey, not just black and white, and colour E-Ink screens do exist although you won’t be finding them in any consumer products for a few years yet – the most advanced colour E-Ink display I know of takes about 17 seconds to refresh and only has around 4,000 colours. Compare that with current mono eBook readers which can redraw a page in about half a second or, at worst, depending on the format and size of the document, 1-2 seconds. Not very good for watching video, but for reading, not an issue at all. Some people might argue with me on this point, they might say that waiting 2 seconds for the page to change is completely unacceptable, but from my personal experience when I’ve been reading books which do take this long to refresh you adjust how you change the page, pressing the button when you still have one or two lines to read for example, making page changes seamless. This was a completely unconscious and natural adjustment.

There are some genuine problems with eBook readers however, their ability to handle PDF files, or not as is the usual case, is one. The problem with PDFs is that they are more like image files than text files, so once they have been designed they are quite fixed. This becomes a problem when you have to adjust an A4 formatted PDF document to display on a six inch eBook reader screen. I don’t know how the Kindle handles this, so I can’t comment, but the Sony Reader attempts to reflow them, and has a pretty good success rate too. I would say around 70-80% of all the PDFs I have sent to the reader have been perfectly readable on it and it’s this ‘reflow’ that made me choose the Sony over any of the other readers available in the UK (note that the Kindle is not, and for technical reasons, will not be released in the UK in its current form).

Price is an issue. All of the readers on the market in the UK cost around the £200 mark, but this will come down as the technology advances – you have to remember that this is still really the first generation of these devices. I can remember paying more for a 32mb MP3 player when they first hit the market than I did for my 30gb iPod a few years later.

A bigger concern is the cost of contemporary eBooks. Publishers are, at the moment, taking the piss. It’s very often the case that an eBook version of a modern novel is being sold for the same as, or in many cases even more than paperbacks. A complete rip-off. The publishing industry has failed completely to learn the lessons that the music industry has had to painfully learn, and they too will suffer for their greed. Which brings me neatly on to the biggest problem facing the adoption of eBook readers, the lack of piracy. What stimulated the growth of MP3 players was the ready availability of albums to download online from less than legitimate sources, and of course the ease of transferring your existing CD collection to MP3 format. Transferring a paper book to a digital form is a tedious and time consuming process which few people are going to be able or willing to do, which in turn causes a lack of pirated books available online.

This twin source of problems, exploitative pricing from publishers and lack of pirated eBooks, is what will constrain the popularity of eBook readers for a long time to come, and for all the hype surrounding the Kindle I think it’s incredibly optimistic to call it Amazon’s iPod.

This wasn’t a problem for me though. As a philosophy student the majority of texts I’m interested in are out of copyright and freely available from legitimate sources such as the Gutenberg Project, most of my text books are published by the Open University in PDF format and there are literally hundreds of ‘classic’ works I’ve always wanted to read, freely available from Gutenberg and many other sites . No, for me the biggest fault with eBook readers is that they are not waterproof, so I can no longer read in the bath!

I had been hoping that on my photos you would be able to see how brilliant the screen was, but it wasn’t to be. When I put the macro mode on my phone it wouldn’t let me turn flash off, so I’ve actually got some cracking photos where you can see how brilliant the text is, but unfortunately there is a big yellow circle in the middle of all of them. See the links below for more information about eBook Readers if I’ve perked your interest.

Amazon Kindle 2

Feedbooks

MobileRead eBook Reader Comparison Table

Project Gutenberg

Sony Reader