The Bookseller.com

8th January 2009

Graeme Neill is retail reporter of The Bookseller.

The one dimensional Reader

03.09.08

I've always been a bit of a technology fan. I can't seem to leave my house without my iPod nestled in my pocket and two years ago spent hours fruitlessly trying to get my hands on the Nintendo Wii after it launched. So I'm probably what marketing types call an “early adopter” – the type of person who buys shiny new electronic toys before they cross over into the mainstream.

So the Sony Reader should be right up my street then. First impressions are good. It's extremely user friendly – you can take it straight from the box and begin reading almost immediately. The menu navigation system is easy to use, albeit a wee bit fiddly. You flick through the menus of books and their chapters using buttons just to the right of the screen. Occasionally I ended up at the wrong part of a book but I would put that down to me rather than the device.

As for the reading experience I decided to go back to Agatha Christie's brilliant The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, one of the samples preloaded on the Reader. Similar to Amazon's Kindle you forget you are using an electronic device after a few minutes. The screen does a weird flash to black as you turn each page but it's strangely pleasant. While there is a lag between hit the 'turn the page' button and the next page coming onscreen, you soon learn when to time your presses to coincide with finishing the final sentence of the screen.

It is definitely the sleekest looking device on the market. My flatmate seemed pretty impressed by it on looks alone when I showed it to her. While it does look like prop from a 1980's science fiction movie, it's much better aesthetically than the iLiad or Kindle.

All positives then. So will I spend £199 on one? Probably not. My problem isn't with the Sony Reader itself, it's actually a criticism of this entire generation of e-book readers. When I bought my iPod I spent a preposterous amount of time uploading some 30 days worth of music onto it. But then I was good to go – my entire record collection in my pocket. If I buy the Reader and want to reread David Winner's excellent Brilliant Orange (if you read one book this year on Dutch football etc etc), I need to buy it in e-book format, despite it sitting on my bookshelf in my living room.

Publishers' intentions to keep e-book prices at parity to its physical counterpart may be a good idea for them to avoid rampant discounting but it's not great for the humble consumer. To pay near enough £200 for a device and then fork out more money to add books I already own to it? Not exactly fair.

My other concern is how much use I would get from it. I like reading only a book at a time so the ability to jump from Jonathan Lethem to Richard Yates at the push of a button is not a major selling point. The portability is great but things like reading in the bath or on the beach are a wee bit risky to say the least.

But I think the overarching problem is it is just an e-book reader. That's it. The iPhone has shown that you can have technological Swiss Army Knife in your pocket with internet access, mp3s, mobile phone and camera. But if I want to look online for more details on something interesting I read in a book, forget it.

It's a shame because at a £200 pricepoint (or considerably more in the case of the iLiad) I would expect a bit more from a device. It is fun and easy to use and is the best-looking product on the market. However, until either e-book prices drop or a fancier version comes out offering web access I'll probably remain on the sidelines. Guess I'm not an early adopter after all.

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