The rise, and fall, and rise again of the eBook.
Outside of a handful of nerds with surplus incomes, there’s no way eBooks could ever work. At least that’s what we were told, and on the surface of things that certainly looked like a good prediction. The first nervous forays into publishing books as electronic documents fell somewhat short of the utopian dream. Reading a book, hundreds and hundreds of pages of plain text, on a computer screen just isn’t that pleasant an experience. The writer in me held out some hope though for the future.
Microsoft’s Reader software promised to make things better. It used a new font technology that would, it promised, make extending periods of reading far less strain on the old peepers. They were right; Reader was certainly an improvement over firing up Adobe’s Acrobat Reader. I even downloaded a few books in Reader format and read them on either a Pocket PC or a Tablet - I can’t really recall which. Everything was starting to look very rosy where the future of eBooks was concerned, at least that’s how I saw it in my head anyway.
I’m a geek though, a gadget obsessed techno-hermit that gets excited by such things. The majority of the rest of the world’s populace aren’t so inclined. Books don’t run out of power after a hundred pages of reading. Books don’t burn your legs if you read them too long. Books have pages that you can flip backwards and forwards, and rarely have pages that reflect the ambient lighting in the room. The computer world today is obssessed with achieving the same goals the book publishing world satisfied a few hundred years ago; always on, instantly accessible, user friendly and with staggeringly low power consumption. A library on a computer, to a bookworm like me, holds the same alure though as an iPod does to a music junkie; your entire library, everywhere, anywhere, anytime. So, I continued to hold out hope at a time when eBooks seemed doomed to a minority interest group.
The eternal optimist in me was rewarded when some Japanese Geniuses invented electronic paper. ePaper is basically just a new display technology, but unlike CRT monitors, TFT flat screens and projectors, it’s designed to mimic the qualities of paper. It’s best viewed under a direct light source, just like paper. Once you get some text onto it, if the text remains static, it doesn’t use any power. It’s a static image, with no refresh rate so it’s very easy on the eyes, just like a book. All in all, it’s a pretty darn nifty thing.
There have been a few attempts to mainstream the technology in eReader hardware, but Amazon are going to go down in history as the company that really made it work. Amazon’s new Kindle bears all the design hallmarks of a 1970’s Casio Calculator. It’s not attractive, it’s not elegant, and it’s far from Apple-esque desirable. But it is convenient. With a free, always on network connection direct to Amazon where Kindle users can browse and then buy more than 90,000 eBook titles, it would be pretty tricky for a user to run out of something to read.
I did want one initially, but not so much now. I have a very understanding Girlfriend that gave in to my pleas and got me a Sony PRS-505 for an early Christmas present. I’ve read two books on it in the two weeks that I’ve had it, and I’ve got another 10 still to read. The display technology is exactly the same as that on the Kindle, it’s smaller and lighter than the Kindle too. Sony’s eBook store is obviously a lot smaller than the mighty Amazon, but what I’m sacrificing in terms of convenience right now I’m more than making up for in form factor. I love to read in bed but I think too many years of typing on computers has turned me into something of a muscular mush. My arms ache if I have to hold a thick paper book over my head for too long to read in bed. Not so with the ultra light Sony Reader.
Ultimately Amazon’s move into this market is a great thing, whichever electronic reader you now have, or desire. It’s going to make reading electronic books a very mainstream affair and I don’t think it’s going to be too long now before we start to see a rash of electronic publishing, with publishers hopefully pushing out content in all the major eBook formats simultaneously (it’s not hard to do after all).
The promise of the eBook is about to be realized, at long last.
