The electronic book seems, and I say this very tentatively, to have arrived at last. Well, ish.
As we march, with fixed, brave smiles, like characters in a Soviet propaganda poster, into the ridiculously futuristic sounding year of 2010, Sony and Amazon are leading the charge to arm us all with a portable
gadget which can contain hundreds or thousands of books and access them in a usable way.
The reason that I am hesitant is that it has been longer coming than any gadget I can think of bar the flying car. Whole technologies have come and gone while we’ve been waiting for the relatively simple development of a viable e-reader.
I had an adequately OK Sony e-reader, the Data Discman, on test in 1991, five years after a Sony executive announced to a stadium full of people in Mexico that the Sony MiniDisc or something like it was going to be the future of book.
The Data Discman got Sony nowhere but they kept the faith through the Nineties. The e-book was derailed by the arrival around 1997 of the internet as a way of distributing electronic versions of books and these dribbled out through the current era.
Came another Sony, the Reader, a couple of years ago. I bought one in Pittsburgh Airport, but it failed soon after — leading to an interesting struggle to get a transatlantic refund. Amazon’s Kindle emerged weeks later and nothing much happened. At the time of writing, it had only just been made available outside the US, after two years on sale there.
Yet the latter half of 2009 has seen a sudden flood of e-readers, accompanied by a persistent media buzz that, yes, they are finally coming. A friend saw two people reading from the devices poolside in Spain this autumn, which is two more than I’ve ever spotted outside a store.
Rarely does a week pass now without somebody else announcing one. At the recent IFA technology fair in Berlin, there was a Ukrainian company demonstrating its own e-reader design; no reason why not, but it’s still the first Ukrainian gadget I’ve seen.
E-readers are all similar, with their ink-on-paper-like ultra low power consumption screens which work better in daylight, even bright sunlight, than in a darker environment.
The biggest advance, judged by media noise, has come with Sony’s launch of two especially nice e-readers, the Touch Edition and the smaller Pocket Edition. I have had both of these arrive at my desk and, with Sony’s permission, done something I’ve been wanting to for ages — see if they break when dropped, like a book doesn’t. They didn’t, not even when allowed to fall from my hands while standing up onto a concrete surface.
The Sony Touch and Pocket are both, well, fine. Absolutely fine. Books are quite readable. A charge lasts for weeks. The technology is flawless.
Yet the books and the interfaces on the devices look grey and, dare I say it, boring. E-readers are just not exciting. They’re good. Excellent. But no more — and therein may lie the problem.
Most people don’t realise e-readers have been in development for a quarter of a century. Yet even when seen as new, whizzy technology, they still don’t pack a fraction of the excitement of breakthroughs like the 1979 Sony Walkman. Or the 1984 Psion Organiser. Or the 2001 Apple iPod.
Waterstone’s have made a big commitment to e-books, and tried to sound all excited when they wheeled out Jerry Hall, of all people, to launch the new Sony devices in September. “We predict that by this time next year, we will have sold approximately 1,000,000 e-books,” they said.
That to me sounds like, if not a flop, a pretty quiet revolution. Remember how downloading music exploded onto the scene after Apple’s iTunes Store launched in 2003? This just doesn’t equate, sadly.
A Waterstone’s full of enticing new book covers to browse through still looks a dozen times more interesting, to me at least, than a few hundred grey books on a grey e-reader.
The e-reader’s time should have come. If nothing else, the desire for being green should have secured our love for them and persuaded us to add one to our bulging bags of gadgets. But I am not convinced they will ever be more than niche.
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