A package arrived from the US a couple of weeks after my last column on
e-readers went to press.
In the piece, I demurred a little from the ecstatic hype the media is generally affording to electronic bookpods, as I may soon start calling them. The parcel that came contained a Kindle, the bookpod Amazon launched a while back in the States and recently began to deliver worldwide.
I wondered if the Kindle might light my fire a little more than the perfectly OK, but, for me, deeply boring, new Sony Readers which were launched in the autumn and did nothing to change my view of e-readers as the celery of gadgets — probably good for you, but dreary and unsatisfying.
Well, I’ve found the Kindle just as slow and dull and unexciting, just as celery-like, as the Sony offerings. The wireless delivery you get from Amazon is impressive, but its e-book prices are often alarmingly high. One I bought, the latest Richard Dawkins, cost nearly $14 as an e-book, as against $10 as a paperback — and you can get that down to $3 if you buy it secondhand through Amazon.
This seems not a little nuts. Additionally, the electronic versions of newspapers and magazines that I’ve seen are downright lame, and also madly expensive.
Anyway, the e-reader game has already been rewritten by the US bookstore chain, Barnes and Noble, whose new $260 nook (sic) seems well worth picking up if you’re heading to the States and determined to get into e-books. The nook, although I haven’t seen it yet, brings at last a bit of colour to the deathly sub fusc of e-readers, in the form of a basic but welcome book version of Apple’s gorgeous Cover Flow — the feature that enables iTunes users to see CD artwork in a clever and seductive flick-through format.
Cover Flow is one of the most attractive features of
Apple’s iTunes, replicating, to an extent, the priceless ‘functionality’, to borrow from gadget-speak, of an old-school shelf of CDs and DVDs. With the nook, equally, we have the beginnings of a proper electronic bookshelf.
Shelves are underrated things. They display your books, music and films almost as if you’re over-anxious to show the world what a clever person you are. And although that’s also quite appealing, the most important function of the shelf is a more serious one — to chime with the random way our brains work.
If you could only select books from a list, it would be much harder for your eye to be caught by something that just looks interesting, or that reminds you that you bought a particular book years ago and never opened it. We don’t get the best out of a collection of books from a list.
And, while Cover Flow provides something a wee bit better than a list, a digital music collection is still more a list than a true library.
It is in an attempt to produce a more shelf-like experience for music lovers that Meridian, an upmarket British hifi manufacturer, has brought out a rather revolutionary system called Sooloos.
Sooloos takes the Cover Flow idea and turns it into a big, room-friendly piece of equipment, which looks superb and acts as a near ‘full-scale’ interface for seriously big music collections. Meridian buyers tend to be audiophiles with thousands of CDs. Sooloos media servers accordingly go up the multi-terabyte range. But it’s the Sooloos display unit, the £3,995 Control 10, and its super-intelligent software that’s so interesting.
You don’t only get a Cover Flow-style display (although less tactile and sexy than Apple’s) of your library, but there’s also an amazing ability to select music from your collection to match your fleeting moods or desires of the moment.
Whether you fancy something vaguely wistful or broadly uplifting, or you have a specific interest in, say, anything featuring a particular musician, composer or conductor during a precise period of his career, the Sooloos software will delve deep into the hidden metadata that accompanies all digital music produce an instant playlist, and play it in audiophile quality via a variety of delivery systems, from wired to streamed wireless.
Sooloos is a pretty complex system, but actually delivers the holy grail of great simplicity. Think £6,000 and well upwards for a full setup. Dreamy stuff, but well worth a visit to
meridian-audio.com.
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