New Sony Reader at 30,000 feet: Mostly praise from Tim Bajarin, well-known industry analyst, in PC Mag
Tim Bajarin, a well-known industry analyst, tested the new Sony on a European trip and liked the results even though he cautions that e-book tech is still at the early-adopter stage. Here’s his PC Mag writeup.
In a nutshell, he sees four obstacles for the Sony. First, reluctance to shift from paper, at least among aging baby boomers, the very people who could benefit from the large-font option. Second, the cost of $299. Third, lack of color, which could hurt the Reader in the education market. Fourth, not enough digitized. That said, Bajarin believes that e-books are here to stay.
Meanwhile I hope that IDPF standard-setters will read between the lines and hurry up with format-validation and the .epub logos it could make possible—to simplify e-books, with those boomers in mind. Elimination of DRM would help as well. But if not—I won’t dream—the IDPF should press hard for DRM standards. “DRM is still a tough nut,” Adobe’s Bill McCoy recently blogged, “but with epub providing the open standard complement to PDF for reflow-centric text-based content, we are well on our way.” I hope so, Bill.
Related: Bill’s thoughts on the future of the iTunes store. Will we see many iTunes stores in time? And what are the lessons for e-books? I’m slightly less optimistic than Bill, in terms of avoidance of onerous centralization. Amazon is already acting like a nasty monopolist in casting out the PDF option in favor of its own Mobipocket. Yet one more argument for standards!
And speaking of Amazon, Sony’s rival: Oh, the arrogance of Amazon when it comes to my obtaining a review unit of the Kindle—even for a venerable publication like Publishers Weekly! Faithful to the official script from above, an Amazon guy acted as if the Kindle didn’t exist. I’m not going to let this influence my opinion of the machine, which seems to have many promising features, such as word-search. It will influence my opinion of Amazon—in terms of its publisher-friendliness or lack thereof—if these games continue.
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