While you never know what Sony will do, it seems plausible that with their new eBook download service coming to Connect.com (their media download service), and their new eBook (it's beautiful), it would make sense to enable eBook viewing on the PSP's high resolution screen.
Electronic books have
traditionally gone straight from the manufacturer to the remainders bin
-- but the market has never gone away entirely, despite years of tepid
sales and failed predictions.
Now a new device from Sony is generating buzz worthy of a Stephen King novel. Some people are even wondering whether the Sony Reader might be just the ticket to kick the e-book market into high gear.
Scheduled to go on sale this spring for between $300 and $400, the
Reader is a compact slab about the size of a small paperback book
(5-by-7 inches, and a half-inch thick). But it's the 3.5-by-4.8-inch
display that made it the buzz of the Consumer Electronics Show earlier
this month in Las Vegas.
The screen uses E Ink technology
developed by a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company. It consists of
480,000 tiny "microcapsules," each of which contains positively charged
white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a
clear fluid. When current is applied to electrodes underneath these
capsules, they turn black or white, depending on the polarity of the
current.
The result is a display that looks far more like ordinary paper than
a liquid crystal display, because the pixels reflect ambient light
rather than transmit light from behind. There's no flicker, because the
pixels are completely static (in an LCD or a cathode-ray tube display,
by contrast, pixels need to be "refreshed" 60 times per second or more).
The E Ink technology also conserves batteries because current is
used only when pixels need to change their color -- between virtual
page turns, the Reader consumes no current at all. Its batteries will
last for about 7,500 pages, according to Sony.
Publishers are excited. Random House and Simon & Schuster said
they'll have 3,000 titles apiece available through Sony Connect for the
Reader's spring debut.
But will consumers take the bait? Even though an estimated 65
percent of new books are already available in electronic form, e-book
sales still lag far behind those of printed books. According to the
trade group International Digital Publishing Forum, e-book sales in
2004 totaled $9.6 million and will probably have topped $15 million in
2005 (final figures for last year aren't yet available). Meanwhile,
overall printed book sales for 2004 were $23.7 billion, according to
the Association of American Publishers.
It's not for a lack of dedicated e-book devices, either. In 1997, a company called NuvoMedia released the Rocket eBook
reader, the first of several such devices to hit the market in the late
1990s. These devices were similar in size and shape to the Sony Reader,
although they used older LCD screen technology. None were commercial
successes. Even Sony's Librie, which uses the E Ink display and was
released to the Japanese market in 2004, hasn't sold that well.
"The problem was that the devices weren't very good, the screens
were terrible, the prices were too high and there was a terrible
selection of content," said Michael Gartenberg, a vice president at
JupiterResearch, a market research company. By contrast, Gartenberg
said, the Sony Reader is small and readable enough to interest
consumers.
Also piquing publishers' interest is the fact that Sony plans to integrate its Reader with its online Sony Connect
store. It's a not-so-subtle nod to Apple's success in selling music
through the iTunes Music Store, which makes buying and transferring
songs to iPods extremely simple.
Currently, e-book readers for laptops and PDAs can be difficult to
install and configure. What's more, digital rights management built
into the books means consumers don't always know what they'll be able
to do with the books once they've purchased them. Sony is instead
promising a very simple purchase-and-download process.
"The pain is lessened somewhat if you have a seamless experience,"
said Nick Bogaty, executive director of the IDPF. "You don't hear a lot
of complaint about DRM with iTunes," although it does have
rights-management restrictions.
The market may also have changed since the late 1990s. "I think
consumers in general are ready for digital reading," said Keith Titan,
vice president of new media for Random House. "Before, reading
digitally was a completely foreign experience. Now, people are starting
to think, 'I'm reading all these PDFs, all these RSS feeds, and I could
really use a device.'"
Sony has said that the Reader will be able to display content from
RSS feeds and from PDF files in addition to e-books in Sony's own BBeB
format.
In the end, whether the Sony Reader winds up kick-starting the
e-book market depends more on Sony's marketing and pricing decisions
than on the sexy E Ink technology, according to Gartenberg. "The
technology looks like it's in place. What it comes down to is if they
can deliver enough content at a reasonable price," Gartenberg said.
Books have been written on sheets of dried, mashed plants for about
five millennia. Paper is a cheap, relatively durable and versatile
technology. Sony's new Reader will not spell the end of that long
history, but it could be the opening of an interesting new chapter.