A library in my pocket

In high school, a bunch of us entered a competition “designing” a cool new technology. I remember our team’s entry was an electronic reader that you could use to read books and magazines everywhere. Though we didn’t win, we were pretty enthused about the idea. It was conceivable yet wild and futuristic.

Well, the future is here.

Electronic book readers have made it into the mainstream. To be clear, e-readers are not small computers or large phones (two other devices one could use to read electronically); they are small, lightweight devices with passive displays that don’t themselves draw power except during updates. Amazon’s Kindle appears to be the most popular, in my perception, with the Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble’s Nook also in the mix. These readers all use the electronic ink created by the eponymous eInk Corporation, a privately held MIT Media Lab start-up. There is also an upscale, color e-reader manufactured by Fujitsu using their own electronic ink technology.

In our household, our evaluation centered on comparing the Kindle to the Sony Reader. The Nook was just about to come out (but the separate LCD screen at the bottom seems gimmicky, taking up useful real estate and drawing unnecessary power), and the Fujitsu is inaccessibly expensive for most consumers (and apparently only being marketed in Asia at the moment).

The Kindle is used primarily for books in Amazon’s proprietary DRM-restricted format, AZW. Although it can also read other types of files (Mobipocket, plain text, and PDF), and although Amazon offers an email-based service for converting images, HTML, and Word documents to AZW, the Kindle does not support the ePub e-book standard. The Sony Reader, of course, does not support AZW, but it does support ePub, thus making a huge number of books, both DRMd and not, available from libraries and the web in general. Analogous to the Amazon’s Kindle Store, where one can easily sample and wirelessly buy books, is The eBook Store from Sony (which, apparently, does not allow sampling books as the Kindle Store does).

Neither of the two platforms is a clear winner in usability. I like the minimalist hardware on the Sony Reader Touch Edition: unobtrusive buttons allowing a smaller form factor and a sizable touch screen. The software interface, however, seems smoother and friendlier on the Kindle.

In the end, the Sony Reader appealed to us more because of its support of the ePub standard. We are constantly striving to live clutter-free, so we’ve reduced our book-buying to a trickle and relied instead on the library, thus saving storage space and money. With e-books, the physical storage space ceases to be an issue regardless of whether or not one purchases books. Buying still takes money, however, although I see nothing wrong with regarding that money as a “usage fee” that goes back to the authors (in part) in return for my enjoyment. With the Sony Reader, we can have both: books from the library when we want to save money and can wait, and books from the store when we really want a permanent copy or can’t wait at all. Moreover, by borrowing e-books we hope to build demand for libraries to stay on the cutting edge of technology and make content available to wider segments of the population (on the arguable assumption that one day the poor and the young will have e-readers just like they now have cell phones, but may not have the money to buy books constantly).

But, ah, the library. The library issue brings up a host of DRM and usability issues that highlight how green the industry is, still. Here are the annoyances I’ve encountered in a typical e-library cycle:

• The Seattle Public Library website has a section for digital books, but its search page is too simplistic. There is also no capability for easily browsing books in an intuitive interface that’s reminiscent of the real world, such as the iTunes “cover flow” interface.

• The books are supported in two major formats (and some others): “Adobe EPUB eBook” and “Adobe PDF eBook.” The ePub format seems to work quite well, though in the one book I’ve read cover-to-cover thus far, sections that were called out in the paper version with shaded boxes, for example, were displayed in the main flow of the e-book with little (though sufficient) visual demarcation. On the other hand, the PDF format turns out to be quite bad for e-readers because the text does not re-flow when changing the zoom level: if one’s not looking a full page at a time, scrolling forward shows the remainder of the PDF page in a whole new e-reader screen. This breaks the metaphor of the reader screen being equal to a book page in favor of the poorer metaphor of the reader as a magnifying glass on a section of the book page.

• Books can be checked out for up to 20 days. This is implemented by some some sort of expiration mechanism built into the e-book formats. This means that one can’t return a book early (since “returning” is handled by the library knowing that a copy will become inaccessible at a certain time) and one also can’t hold on to a book past the due date (which one shouldn’t but, ahem, I’ve done on occasion with physical books).

• One can highlight passages from the book and then look at the list of highlights to be able to quickly jump to the source page. However, at least with the Sony Reader, the highlighted content is not itself copied to the list; only references to the file positions are. This has two bad consequences: one can’t download the highlights, which ought to be permissible to under fair use; and, when a library book expires, one loses access to its highlights.

• Supposedly (I haven’t verified this), lending a purchased book to a friend follows a similar pattern to borrowing from the library: one sets a specific loan duration, during which time the book is inaccessible to the lender. This time cannot be changed once set.

• Apparently, buying a book from the Sony Store ties the purchase to a handful of computers and readers by digitally signing the file. This is done, understandably, to prevent piracy, but gets at a much larger issue of how digital rights and restrictions should, in fact, be handled.

In addition to the library and the Sony and Amazon stores, there are many websites that make e-books available, such as Project Gutenberg, feedbooks, and Google Books. To manage e-book collections, the Sony Reader comes with adequate but not gripping software for Windows and Mac. However, there is a cross-platform package (written in Python) called Calibre for managing e-book collections on the computer and uploading them to various types of readers.

As Knox says, there is no question that at some point we will become a two e-reader household. I like having to carry only one device to read a large number of books, whether I’m on a half-hour bus commute, a 23-hour flight, or a two-week vacation. That said, our actual purchase of the Reader at this time was more obsession and excitement than anything else. If hard-copy books are adequate, it makes sense to wait a bit longer until the e-book ecosystem stabilizes, the usability kinks are worked out, and the DRM issue becomes more consumer-friendly.