The launch of the Sony Reader is drawing nearer, and it has garnered another mostly positive review, this time from the Washington Post. The Reader gets high marks for its look and feel, as well as its ability to increase the font size for readers with vision trouble. With “twice the pixel density of most conventional LCDs, and on a par with the resolution of newsprint,” eye strain isn’t a problem
The device’s battery lasts for “7500 page turns,” and its memory can store 80 average length books. Sony has set up a store similar to Apple’s iTunes where readers can buy the books, and 10,000 titles are expected to be available at launch. Judging by the titles available for sale, the ebooks appear to fetch the same price as their paper counterparts. The device generally gets high marks, but not enough to make it worth the price tag for everyone, according to the reviewer: “Is the Reader worth $350? Only if you want to trim your luggage, stop collecting dead trees, or use the large-font feature for easier reading.”
Given how impressed many have been with the technology, I suspect those reasons will be enough to make the Sony Reader reasonable successful, especially if it can keep expanding its library of titles. More broadly speaking, books – the old-fashioned paper kind – are far from an endangered species, but the Reader may appeal to people for whom lugging around a bunch of books has gotten to be a pain. Were Sony to add the ability to download newspaper and magazine articles (perhaps this is in the works, I don’t know), it would up the usefulness of this device considerably.
According to the Web site, it looks like the Reader has begun shipping already, and is proving popular: “Due to overwhelming demand, new Sony Portable Reader orders may ship as late as mid-November,” reads a notice on the site.
Bonus Links: I’ve written about the Sony Reader and ebooks a couple of times before: The digital future of the book and The Possibility of an eBook Summer.