Make a Break for the Borders

Speaking of e-paper-based reading devices, coming this summer to a Borders near you:

The Sony Reader, a new text-reading device that lets you have the Bible or the entire works of Tolstoy on hand but carry around the physical equivalent of a paperback, will be sold at Borders bookstores.

The gadget, which debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, evokes the visual stability of something printed on overlay. It resembles actual paper and ink, with little flickering.

The high-resolution (SVGA 800x600) electronic-paper display screen supports BBeB Book, PDF and MP3 formats and can also display JPEG images.

The device measures 6.9 inches by 4.9 inches by 0.5 inches and weighs in at just more than half a pound. The Sony Reader takes Memory Sticks or SD flash memory cards to augment 64MB of internal memory, creating the potential to travel with hundreds of books.

The Sony Reader also has "a seemingly limitless battery life equivalent of 7,500 pages turns," according to a Stony statement. That's because there is no rundown on the battery over time. Power is only consumed when a reader turns the page.

I've seen a prototype of the Sony Reader and it is impressive--and highly readable. The device is kind of pricey ($299 to $399), but no more so than an iPod. Electronic books themselves will be downloadable from Sony's Web site. It will all hinge on number of titles available (look for all the public domain classics to be available), the variety thereof, and how annoying the digital rights management (DRM) ends up being. Sony (they of the CD rootkit fiasco) isn't known for making life easy for its customers (and they absolutely adore proprietary formats that are completely incompatible with anyone else's hardware), so hopefully they won't end up killing the market before it even takes off.