[NatCh]

Ah. Now that, I followed.

Originally Posted by rmeister0

I'm unwilling to take anything Sony says at face value until I can test it for myself.

Heh -- I like the looks of the Sony (okay, I like them a lot), but I have also added a folder to the SD card I use to carry stuff around, and filled it with files expressly for testing all the various file types the first time I can lay hands on one of the rascals.

Originally Posted by rmeister0

...just about every one of Sony's endeavors in the past 10 years has been all about leveraging content to own the operating platform. Nevermind that said strategy has been hurting them pretty badly, I still see no real evidence that that mindset is changing.

Granted, but I think in this case, they may actually have a point. What have been the two major obstacles to e-reading? I think it's pretty well established that they can be summed up as hardware, and content availability (which rolls up a whole bunch of stuff, formats, DRM, just getting texts, etc.).

Hopefully, e-ink will address the former, but that still, as you point out, leaves the latter.

In effect, what Sony's Connect Store is doing (regardless of what Sony may be aiming to do) is to provide a pool of books that can be easily put on the hardware (I'll get to DRM in a moment, hang on ). I was explaining the general e-reader concept to my 62 year old, mildly technophobic mother, and she thought the harware and Connect Store sounded good to her.

Being able to click on the book she wants, and having it show up on a screen she can read easily (and enlarge the text) without hassling with conversion and such is just exactly what she wants. She doesn't care about DRM, because she only reads books once and then gets rid of them.

However, I think in the event, she'd be annoyed that she couldn't pass some of them along to others. But the point is that they've identified a way to reach a demographic that is outside the 'geek' set. Face it, there are a lot more middle-aged women readers than there are geeks. I think that kind of connection will do a lot toward making e-reading mainstream.

The DRM (told you I'd get to it) is something that a lot of publishers are going to insist on for the time being -- they believe they'll get robbed blind by piracy without it. I happen to agree that most folks are going to pay for such things if the price is reasonable (BAEN's example certainly seems to indicate that this is so), but the issue here is what they believe, not the reality.

I don't like DRM, but if it allows me to sell or give away my e-book, just as I can a paper book, I think I could live with that. The pubs will eventually realize that if I can't give away an e-book, I can't buy one as a gift for someone else -- gifts add a fair amount to my total book purchases.

I think that we'll eventually have some sort of industry standard for formats, as the publishers get on board. If I have to have DRM I'd prefer to see something that ties the text to something like an SD card (I bet 1Mb SD cards would be cheap enough to be viable), so that I could lend or give away my book without copying it.

I think about all the SciFi stories with book readers mentioned in them, they all seem to have the 'book' tied to a physical token, a tape, a chip, a cube, whatever. I don't see any reason that couldn't work for real.

I see the whole thing being tied up together, the hardware drawing the content, the content driving the hardware, and hopefully DRM getting mostly ground beneath the wheels. Call me an optomist, but I really think the advent of usable reader hardware (especially after the prices come down), at a time when the public is generally accepting of e-reading as a suppliment to p-books, will mark the point where the dam went from cracking to water beginning to run through those cracks.

You may be (perhaps, probably are) right that this will mostly penetrate the corporate world first, but so did PC's, and non-dot-matrix printers, and how many other things? The corps have more money to spend on things like this, and they'll do it if they smell a cost savings.

But on the other hand, this one may just surprise us. Call me an optimist, it's been done before, and maybe this will end up just one more disappointment on a road that's much longer than any of us would like it to be, but I'll hold onto the dream of being able to read anything I choose electronically.

The fact that folks had CD's lying around to be ripped to mp3 files did very much increase the mp3 player taking off the way it did. And the fact that books don't currently come digitally for transferring to a reader does mean that e-readers can't take off as fast as iPods did (and you're right that the more open the pubs are the less that will be a factor). On the other hand, there are a lot of products that are perfectly viable that didn't have the 'perfect storm' of circumstances that mp3 players in general have enjoyed. A product doesn't have to be the greatest commercial success in living memory to be successfull. Sony's Connect store may not be 'open,' but it is making a good claim at easy accessibility (okay, except for requiring XP).

As has been noted before, people regard books differently than they do music, the music models don't translate. The key is to make an e-reading situation that fits most people's view of what reading should be. That's what mp3 players have done for music, and when the e-reader manages to get into that range, then it'll do well enough.