I'M PROBABLY the worst person in the world to test-drive the new Sony eBook Reader. I don't have Skype, an iPod or a Wii. On the other hand, I am an incurable bibliophile. For as long as I can remember, I've been besotted with books, whether it's the
Mr Men or Gilles Deleuze. So it was with trepidation I went to try this new gizmo, already being heralded in some quarters as bringing on "the death of the paperback". I imagine this is how small children feel when they first meet Daddy's new lady friend. However nice she is, however hard she tries, I'm not forgiving her.
The Sony Reader, launched last Wednesday, is one of three "delivery platforms" vying for the eBook market, along with Amazon's Kindle and the iLiad. The idea is pretty simple.You download books on to it – it can hold 160 titles – and read them on an electronic screen. Publishers are getting behind it, fast. Gail Rebuck, chief executive of Random House, is a fan, and Penguin have announced 600 titles (including the new Dick Francis and Zoë Heller) as well as a free taster of first chapters.
Walking into the bookshop, the first thing I notice is that I don't notice the Reader, being distracted by a McSweeney's magazine display. When I do get around to examining it, I'm not overwhelmed. But I'm not underwhelmed either.
It's certainly elegant, weighing no more than a paperback, and roughly the same size. I'd imagined it being like a Star Trek pad or mobile phone, but a neat cover means that it feels like holding something book-like. At £199 it's not cheap, but it's cheaper than its rivals. The shop copy only has 14 titles saved on it including a Mills and Boon that I haven't read. So I call that up from the menu, and start reading.
There's a slight but perceptible pause and momentary darkness as you click from page to page, but you acclimatise remarkably quickly, even realising to click just before you get to the last line. You're soon just reading, not reading on a Reader. The current version comes with 100 free classics – I looked at the list, and the only one I didn't have in my front room was Meredith's Sandra Belloni. I can't imagine buying a Reader, but I'd be pleased to receive one as a present. I can even imagine how convenient it would be on long journeys. If they managed to get out-of-print and backlist titles in eBook format, it would be even better; especially since the supermarket and Amazon price-war with the bookstores is rapidly depleting the biodiversity of books available to the consumer. It might be a very nice little afterlife.
But there are buts. The electronic paper can only do greyscale – so it's useless for biology and chemistry textbooks, travel guides, graphic novels and experimental prose like Ende's The Neverending Story (which has green and red ink). I was surprised that you couldn't search the text. My generation, going to university in the early '90s, was probably the last that had to read books to find quotations. Nowadays, I just click onto Project Gutenberg and can find a reference in a matter of seconds. But not on a Reader. It will hamper its prospects in the student market.
Where it really falls down is that you can't riffle. When I'm reading non-fiction, my thumb holds open the pages, and my index finger keeps tabs on the end-notes. The Sony Reader can't cope with that. If I'm reading a novel I'll constantly riffle back and forth: when a character reappears, you zip back to their last scene; someone might mention something (an object, an opinion, a name) and you flick back, refresh, continue. The Sony Reader can only manage this with laborious scrolling and a system of bookmarks.
In a way I was astonished at how low-tech the Reader is. The Kindle is clunky, but the Reader's slim-line look is achieved through not being WiFi enabled and forgoing an alphanumeric keypad. With no hyperlinks, no ability to write in the margins and no economic benefit in buying the eBook version (the paperbacks still tend to be cheaper) it seemed more like a device staking a claim and hoping for future developments than a fully realised alternative. I'll maybe buy Reader 2.0. One concern is security: the MP3 player had its Napster, and just this week Stephanie Meyer, who knocked Harry Potter off the top slot, announced she wouldn't complete her Twilight series after a draft leaked onto the internet.
In the short time I was there, people were buying Readers. Mostly male, mostly young, mostly in good suits. It was more executive bling-toy than the future of reading. I was relieved to get back to my home-cum-library, pawing my leather-bound Walter Scott and pristine Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps War, and remembering that real books have a touch, colour, shape and even smell that makes them irreplaceable.
The full article contains 863 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
