Reading is one of those small indulgences that I would almost rather lose a limb than have to give up.  When I’m stressed with work or life in general, loading up my eBook Reader and losing myself for a day or two almost always puts my mind right again.  Although dedicated eBook Reading devices have been around for awhile, they still don’t seem to be as well-known or mainstream as they deserve to be. However, eBook popularity is definitely on the rise , so I think there is going to be a wider array of device options available to consumers over the next couple of years.

eBookwise 1150

I currently use a low-cost eBookwise 1150 for 99% of my reading needs.  It has flaws but essentially does what I wanted it for.  Before making that purchase, I’d struggled for at least a month or two as to whether or not I should opt for a higher-priced e-Ink device [2] instead.  Living in the middle of nowhere as I do, walking into a store for a hands-on demonstration wasn’t an option.  Instead, I watched dozens of YouTube videos and read every review I could find on all of the models available at the time.

In the end, I decided on the eBookwise 1150 because it was so much cheaper and I wasn’t convinced that I’d be happy with the e-Ink technology itself.  The refresh delay from page to page looked annoying and I wanted something I could read in low-light situations.  As it turned out, I was able to test out an e-Ink reader some time later after a friend purchased the Sony PRS-505.  Although I was very envious of the crisp, clear text and that you could read it effortlessly in direct sunlight  – I didn’t like the navigation logic as much as my eBookwise and was able to confirm that the refresh delay was slower and more annoying than the instant page turns I can get with the eBookwise. Plus, he paid several hundred dollars more for his.

BTW, a lot of people say they experience eye strain from reading text on a back-lit LCD screen, but I personally don’t find this to be true.  I’ve had some 18 hour reading marathons on my eBookwise and my eyes hurt about the same as they do reading a regular book.  I can also adjust the brightness and contrast to make the backlighting less harsh when I’m in the dark.

However, my biggest complaint with the eBookwise is that it doesn’t natively support any document formats aside from its own proprietary IMP ebook format.  It will automatically convert compatible files (doc, rtf, txt, html, rb)  into the necessary IMP file when I import an ebook, but I run into a lot of character encoding issues that require manual editing of the source document – especially so with .doc and .rtf files.

Additionally, PDFs aren’t supported by the import utility, which means I have to first convert PDFs to a compatible format beforehand. The problem with this is that spacing and paragraph definitions are often not translated properly, which means I end up with run-on sentences instead of defined paragraphs .  When working with a PDF source document, I almost always have to go through and use regular expressions to add in paragraph tags or line breaks.  Usually the former, as my preferred document format for ebooks is html, as I can strip out all embedded font declarations and assign formatting universally through a stylesheet.

Anyways – so although my little eBookwise has served me well, I’m just not satisfied with the amount of prep time required for certain types of ebooks.  I have started researching dedicated eBook readers again to see if any of the technologies have improved or if prices were more reasonable.  I don’t like the small screen sizes of pocket pcs or mobile devices, so those options are immediately ruled out for me.

In a perfect world, this would be my criteria for the perfect eBook reading device:

1. Priced under $200
In a market saturated with multi-use devices, I think the current pricing of $300-$500 for an eBook reader is just too high.  I realize this is due to the e-Ink technology being more expensive – but until prices come down, I fear these devices will remain in the niche market as opposed to being a mainstream, must-have device.  A lot of people love to read – but I think the average consumer will have a hard time dishing out $400 for a single use device when they can do the same thing on a netbook (albeit less comfortably), which is priced the same and also functions as full time computer.  There are even applications available that allow you to rotate the screen and touchpad on a netbook, which would provide a more reader-friendly layout.

2.  More LCD-based Options
Although I’d love to have an e-Ink reader as a secondary device to use outdoors or in bright light  – I actually prefer an LCD backlit display for indoors.  There are very few LCD-based ebook readers available and most of them are outdated models no longer in production.  Obviously an LCD reader requires more power and would need to be recharged more often, but this doesn’t bother me personally.  My eBookwise charges very quickly and can go for about 10-12 straight hours before running out of juice.  Granted it has a very low-res (half-vga), grayscale display, so it has less power requirements than a color, high resolution display would have.

Unfortunately, every new and upcoming reader I came across is based on e-Ink technology – which apparently means backlit LCD readers are a thing of the past.

3. DRM-Free & Lower Priced eBooks
If you want consumers to actually purchase media instead of downloading pirated copies, then don’t impose annoying restrictions on where it can be used.  Frankly, DRM is counterproductive to driving sales and just doesn’t work.  I purchased an eBook off of Fictionwise last year and discovered I couldn’t read it using just my laptop. Very annoying (and it was the last time I ever purchased a protected eBook).

Also, given that electronic books don’t have the same overhead and production costs as their paper-based cousins – I think a reduced pricing structure should be applied.  I often see ebooks priced the same or even more than a print copy.

4.  Format Standardization
The perfect ebook reader would be capable of natively handling all of the most common document formats ( txt, html, pdf, doc, rtf, opf, etc).  I guess I wouldn’t mind a proprietary format so long as the conversion process was quick, painless and accurate in translation.  I also want to have the ability to read my ebooks on other devices, so a proprietary format should be backwards convertible.

5.  Form Factor
I think the Amazon Kindle (first gen) is a very ugly device. Kindle 2 isn’t so bad…but what’s with all the buttons at the bottom?  I want my eBook reader to look and handle like a book.  I don’t want a keyboard on it or a bunch of buttons that I have to worry about accidentally hitting when I’m rolling into one of the 17 different positions I find myself reading in.  I don’t mind a few shortcut or bookmark buttons if they’re out of the way – but I’d rather have everything like that software-based so there is more room for the screen.

Additionally, I love how the sony devices come with a folding cover .  It would be great if all readers had this as a standard feature.

Even better, a folding, dual-display ebook reader would be like a wet dream for me.  I came across the following dual-display concept reader and think it looks amazing:

Dual Display eBook Reader

6. More robust and flexible UI
Although not as important as everything else mentioned above, I’d really like to see a more intuitive UI and browsing experience that allowed end-users to navigate in list or thumbnail (book cover) view, with more advanced filtering options such as author, genre and tags.  Something visually like the ebook Classics App for iPhone, which is super sexy.  I’m not sure what would be the best way to implement a thumbnail view given that this would traditionally mean importing a 2nd image file in addition to the eBook…but I was thinking perhaps it could display it from the first page of the ebook itself.  Of course, this wouldn’t work for ebooks that didn’t have a book cover image for the first page.  Another option would be some kind of 3rd-party software indexing service similar to how you’d fetch ID3 tags automatically for a music or video library.

7. Inline Editing/Corrections
It would be insanely handy if I could make text or formatting corrections on the fly while I’m reading.  I’m always coming across typos or characters that were incorrectly encoded during a format conversion or import process.  Right now I’m just setting bookmarks while I read, and then go back through the source document later to make corrections.  It would be a huge time saver if I could do this real-time.

So there isn’t anything on the market right now that covers everything above, but there is definitely a wider array of device options than there were a year ago – with more still to come.  There seems to be a heightened consumer awareness to ebook devices, which I think is owed to Amazon following the Kindle launches.  I believe we’ll see a significant boom in device option and sales over the next few years.   I’d like to keep track of everything currently available on the market in addition to upcoming prototypes or concept devices – but will save it for another post.