07.7.2K7: Sweet Sony Reader deals

The past week has seen some sweet and interesting deals on the Sony e-book Reader.

First, was a promotion through Tiger Direct, offering about a thousand Readers for only $100, about $250 off their standard price. (Don't bother looking for it... they were all gone within about 4 hours.) And second was a deal through Sony itself, offering the Reader for only $50 with the application for a Sony credit card.

Needless to say, the e-book reading community has been abuzz over these deals... pro and con. There are some who fear that the deals signal Sony's attempt to get rid of their Readers, and get out of the e-book manufacturing business. Others believe that Sony simply wants to liquidate their stock of existing Readers because they've gotten stuck with more of them than they expected. Still others simply feel that this is Sony's way of promoting the Readers, by offering them at heavily discounted prices instead of spending on advertising dollars. It could also be a way to evaluate different pricing models.

Personally, offering the Reader as an inticement to get a credit card is not my idea of smart personal economics. But you could always get the card, get the Reader, and lock the card away (you may be able to cancel the card right after getting the Reader, but don't be surprised if doing so invalidates the discounted price offer. Check that fine print!)

Whatever the reason, the availability of inexpensive Sony Readers means that more of them will end up in consumers' hands... which can only be seen as a good thing. The more Readers, the more people buying e-books, and the market grows. And the more Readers being seen by non-Reader owners, the more people are enticed to buy Readers for themselves, and contribute to the growth of the e-book market.

07.17.2K7: Playboy likes the Sony Reader... Prophetic?

I was recently referred to the August 2007 issue of Playboy, wherein the venerable men's mag mentions the Sony Reader in an article as essentially the future of reading books. Although it's always good to see compliments for an e-reading device, this is a far cry from what I expect to be the next step: Periodicals becoming available for e-reading devices. And I think this next step might happen very soon.

Right now, a number of newspapers are actively experimenting with daily delivery of electronic editions for certain e-reading devices. The idea is that a subscriber downloads the latest edition every morning, and has the entire newspaper to read... but no paper to throw away, contributing to our landfills or the burden on our forests. Many people see this as the future of newspaper delivery, and I believe that (as I've discussed before) a single dominant reader configuration and format would help a lot of these services to get started.

However, it has been my belief that it won't be newspapers that finally get people to start buying e-readers for daily downloads. I believe it will be magazines... specifically, young men's and young women's periodicals, and especially those that feature celebrities and/or racy pictures/soft porn images... that will sell e-readers. Imagine a magazine like Playboy, say—or People, Stuff, Cosmo, Playgirl, etc—available for an e-reader that is capable of color presentation (yes, color is key), and allows the user to save specific articles (and oh yes, pictures) for their archives. It would also sport plenty of interactive ads to web pages, a great mobile advertising vehicle for the target consumer market.

Then, once the number of e-readers has increased exponentially, and people are carrying them around everywhere they go, we would see the e-book market finally take off. As book publishers are loath to take the step into the e-book world, primarily because of an unsure future of specific formats and delivery systems, allowing the magazine world to decide formats and delivery for them would take the onus, and the risk, from them, and spur their efforts to jump the bandwagon.

Personally, I would expect a YM or YW magazine to be the first to get this thing started (once we have a color e-reader, anyway)... but on reflection, why not Playboy? After all, they are the biggest soft-porn peddlers out there, with plenty of cash to spend on a new venture, and about 50 years' worth of archived material that they could re-release to a new public. If I were Playboy, I'd be looking for just such an opportunity to capitalize on my backlogged content, which I'm sure is why the Sony Reader has come under their radar.

Once we have a good color e-reader, probably one with the new e-ink technology, or something similar... it may be a race. We'll see who gets their magazine to market first, which one defines the new e-reader, and which bandwagon everyone else will be jumping on.

07.18.2K7: UMPCs are for e-book reading, too

Have you heard about Ultra-Mobile PCs? Perhaps you've heard the word "Origami" used in connection with computers, or Windows, lately? Or have you seen anyone working with laptop or smaller-sized computers, with no keyboards on them? If you do, you should take a minute to check them out, because the Ultra-Mobile PC (or UMPC) may be the next major computer configuration to overtake the market.

Since PDAs are slowly being replaced by tinier cellphones and smartphones, the UMPC might be in place to replace PDAs down the line. UMPCs aren't as small as PDAs, but they run full versions of Windows and other operating systems, and hold much more storage and processing power. Many (like the one pictured above) do not include a keyboard, but can have a keyboard connected to it as an accessory. Some include wireless connectivity, and all of them can be connected to a wireless source in some way (say, through a cellphone), so you can browse the web or check your e-mail with it.

Their chief attributes are their portability, smaller and lighter than a laptop, and their functionality, more than a PDA. They also range in price, from almost $2000, to as low as $200, depending on maker and features. For those who like portable computing solutions, but for whom even a laptop is more than they want to lug around, the UMPC could answer their needs nicely.

Recently, Microsoft redesigned its MS Reader e-book software to function on its UMPC operating system, code-named Origami. This will make the UMPC an excellent e-book reader, among other things. Its greater capabilities, wireless connectivity and color screen could mark it as serious competition to dedicated e-book reading devices like the new Sony Reader.

In reality, though, these devices are not new. Sony not long ago offered their VAIO in an ultra-portable size, for example, but it did not sell well, due to its high price, and its (mistaken) impression of being essentially an expensive PDA. It remains to be seen whether these devices will overcome the impression of a high price for its size, or whether consumers will still assume the smaller size equals a lesser functionality. A lot will depend on how they are marketed (or at all), and how well they are targeted for certain consumer markets.

For more about UMPCs, visit the Windows UMPC site, or the UMPC Portal Product Comparison page.

07.21.2K7: Dealing with the digital mass

When you spend a lot of time discussing subjects like e-books with fellow geeks and e-book readers, it's nice to occasionally be joined by someone else in the field who can provide another perspective (or confirm your own). This is what happened recently, when a professor and library director joined into a discussion about legacy e-book formats on Mobileread.

The professor, who uses the name Panurge, reminded us of how miraculous the development of printing was to the recording of literature, converting much of what had been an oral process to a more disciplined press-based process. He suggested that the conversion from press-based to electronic, or digital, data storage represented no less a leap in technology today. But most importantly, he reminded us that just as the jump from oral to press created incredible and unforseen issues related to the recording and dissemination of information, we should expect issues arising today from a press-to-digital conversion to be just as serious. Panurge's major concern is that the incredible morass of data out there today is simply too large and unwieldy to sort through, and that will present our biggest challenge in the future.

I've heard others lament the big problem of sorting through all the available content to separate the wheat from the chaff, and I agree, that may be the toughest battle of all. However, I think people are so dedicated to such a pursuit, as it is essentially part of human nature, that we will figure out a way, though it's anyone's guess whether it will be through direct examination or by use of technology, or some combination of both. (With coming up on 7 billion people on the planet, a 100% human-based filtering system is a distinct possibility, I think, just to give those people jobs.)

Fortunately, the establishment of this digital information age we're in means that it is easier to store data, to copy data, and to convert it to new formats as needed, with the application of much less effort than it would have taken to manually copy documents in the past. Therefore, the sooner old formatted documents can be converted to digital formats, the better (certainly the second toughest battle).

And as we work, we'll be constantly working out new and better ways to store more information, both the data itself, and the history of that data... systems like OEBPS that allow any amount of a document's history (author, origination, copyrights, original recording method, number of conversions, retranslations, etc, etc) to be included with the document itself, and not hunted up from a separate source, will be essential.

Hopefully, we'll also figure out a way to detect falsified documents and historical data, something that's far too easy to fake now, and could represent the third biggest challenge of the digital era... separating the lies from the truth.

07.23.2K7: The bad news about ethanol

Ethanol has been an on-again, off-again popular subject in the U.S. over the past century... yes, it didn't just come up last election. The idea of powering our vehicles off of native crops has been an appealing concept for years, and never moreso than now, when we are fighting in a foreign land for the sole reason of being able to obtain foreign oil. Right now, the politicians love the ethanol idea, if for no other reason than that it makes them popular with the entire farm belt, as well as those who'd like to see an end to the war and a lowering of their gasoline bill.

But there's a problem with the ethanol idea: It's far too little, and far too late. Yes, American ethanol could potentially power our entire country's vehicles. But it would take about 97% of our country's current farmland capacity to do so. There are simply far too many vehicles, driving too many miles and using too much fuel, to make that work... and still eat.

Unfortunately, politicians and automakers have latched onto ethanol as our future savior, while keeping quiet about the fact that it's essentially a smoke screen. Ethanol can be produced, but with the present or projected available quantities, it can only be useful by mixing it with existing petroleum-based fuels (as it is done right now, unbenkownst to most American drivers), to stretch our foreign fuel resources. And that's really not helping us much.

Some politicians are trying to make everyone understand that we need to be conserving fuel, by cutting back on driving, and by using more efficient vehicles like hybrids. Unfortunately, there aren't too many of them, and they don't really have any public support other than lip service... Americans are still not flocking to public transportation, trading in their SUVs for hybrids, or cutting back on their driving in general. Politicians are also not making much of an effort to seriously encourage and fund the areas where we really need improvement, namely, battery efficiency, solar power, and decentralized power generation (producing power at home from local sources, like sun, wind, water, etc). They'd rather promote ethanol because, to those who don't think too deeply about it—in other words, the majority of the country—ethanol sounds great, and will therefore get them re-elected.

In the meantime, our country's energy crisis goes on, and we are digging ourselves deeper and deeper into our own hole. Apparently everyone hopes that, if we dig ourselves deep enough, we'll be able to power our country from the heat at the Earth's core...