03/31/07
Contemplating the Sony Reader, in the pages of The Weekly Standard, David Skinner writes:
[T]he virtues of portability are being exaggerated, but the Sony Reader has other selling points; above all, its potential to reduce the clutter of books. For me, the perfect advertisement for this device would be a picture of my bedstand without its ever-present leaning tower of literature. More reading, the tagline would say, fewer books.
No, no. This is wrong. At the risk of pedantry, I suggest that the line should read
More reading; fewer bookshelves.
Or maybe this:
More reading. Fewer ungainly towers of stacked books.
I have no trouble with the look and feel of a book. But the housing of such books, that can become a problem.
I've designed many a computer reader
in my head. Just its functionality. Not its technical foundation, of course. And I think I'd be a great part of the Apple team. Sony? I haven't read a Reader for a test read, yet.
But I do know something: A computer-based, PDA-like e-book reader should cost no more than a bookshelf. So the Reader has a long way to go. Over $300 is way over its ideal price.
Still, my ideal portable digital device, mimicking as it does the handheld codex, the book, could, I suppose, be priced nearly as much as a computer, because it could indeed do many jobs, from providing a drawing sketch pad through browsing the Web to . . . letting you read a book.
The key? Two pages . . . two screens. Perhaps I thought of it because I use two monitors on my computer. Perhaps because a book presents two pages to the reader at once. But that's just the beginning of a truly useful portable device, a device that would make the PDAs of today look as limited as Post-It Notes.
(I think of my design as the iCodex,
because it so well imitates the design of a book. The iBook name was already taken! Problem? It would almost certainly be shortened to iCod! Well, Apple could use as a logo a cod — yes, a fish in profile — and give it those three original Apple colors! Perhaps with a bite taken out on the right.)
From Skinner's review, it's obvious the Sony Reader was not designed by Apple:
[T]he Reader's shortcomings prove that whatever stage of development it represents, it is not to literature what the iPod is to music. Pages can be marked to help you find your way back to a passage, and the "continue reading" function returns you to the page reached before the device was last turned off. But pages cannot be marked with marginalia, a common enough practice with books that one hopes--or perhaps the verb "to dream" would be better here--that Sony is trying to figure how to make something like it possible with the Reader.
Also, maneuverability within books and within the Reader is limited. Text is not searchable. Flipping through several pages in a row is a small ordeal. A row of small buttons beneath the screen allows you to choose items from a central menu. Unfortunately, the buttons, like the Reader's small mouse-type pointer, are awkward and hard to use. The buttons can help you shift through a long text but do not correspond to obvious reference points like chapter openings, and the selection system is slow to respond.
But really, I'm more in the market for books and bookshelves than a replacement for them. Physical books, made of paper, seem like a very, very good idea to me. They've lasted because they are very good at what they do. They perform a function well.
I don't expect them to be replaced any time soon.
The newspaper, on the other hand . . . well, its days are numbered.
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