The recent O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in February had a very useful session by Liza Daly and Keith Fahlgren about e-reader devices which is available as a video.1 They reviewed the main ones available now and indicated what a better device would look like.
Many of the devices are the so-called ‘eInk’ ones, such as the Kindle and the Sony Reader. Amazon’s Kindle has some nice features: it uses a wireless connection to get titles, but only from Amazon, and the experience of buying titles is very straightforward. It does not yet support the epub format. It does have some text to speech, but not accessible for visually impaired.
The Sony Reader has a nicer design, but you need to connect to a computer to load titles and the book purchasing experience can be complex, especially from many of the e-book retailers (though at least there are multiple retailers). Supports epub format, but not perfectly; there are good epub features that Sony Reader doesn’t support.
On the mobile front, the iPhone is the standard, with: Stanza (epub support; now owned by Amazon); Bookworm; and Kindle. Often the buying experience is not great.
In short, the readers need to support epub, and properly follow the standard, and use all of its features. The book buying experience also needs to be easier. As yet few devices do enough for linking and formatting, images, tables etc, sharing of notes etc, which will be really useful for academic and other educational use. A new Plastic Logic device will be available next year 2010, with note and annotation feature, saving stuff back to PC automatically. The Daisy Consortium is also working on new readers that will be more accessible. And Bookworm is an open source epub reader.
Keith Fahlgren also posted about the epub standard, and that is a useful quick summary of resources available for it.2
- http://blog.threepress.org/2009/04/22/video-posted-for-survey-of-current-e-readers/
- Fahlgren, Keith. “ePub Resources and Guides.” 2 March 2009. O’Reilly Labs. http://labs.oreilly.com/2009/03/epub-resources-and-guides.html