I’m writing this post from an iPad, I’ll write a longer comment about the sustainability problems and possibilities of this device. But I wanted to make a short entry on my experience of using it as an ereader (electronic reading is one of my interests).
Positive:

• The screen is gorgeous, the colors crisp and the viewing angle is good. The size is perfect for documents.
• Interactivity allows to do things as searching an unknown word in the dictionary, or copy it to your notes program.
• iBook program and store are neat and easy to use.

Negative:

• The screen is a normal light-emitting and it’s too tiring for comfortable long time reading
• It’s quite heavy and difficult to hold in one hand, for instance for reading in bed.
• Having internet allows multitasking and makes focusing in reading more difficult.

So after some use it confirms the expectations I had: the iPad is perfect for reading magazines in color and articles and documents. That together with the text editor and email make it a killer education/work device. But for reading books, the e-ink based devices as the Sony or the kindle are still the best option.

As seen in timesonline (via engadget) asus confirmed the release of a cheap double sided e-reader. Would it be an explosion as the netbooks? In the picture it can be seen that it have color screens and in the article is mentioned: Whereas current ebook readers have monochrome screens, the Asus would be full colour. It doesn’t specify which type of screen technology, but if it isn’t e-ink or equivalent it just misses the whole point of an e-reader! Without it it is not comfortable to read a whole 1000 pages book on it, nor sit outside in full sun. I will call this a tablet optimized for web reading, but maybe it’s probably the beginning of hybrid reading devices. Let’s see how it keeps developing.

Amazon has presented a 9.7″ e-reader, an optimal size for reading PDF documents and newspapers / magazines.

Of course, as the smaller Kindle, it cannot be connected to a computer and rely on the wireless network to get the documents. And working in USA only. So I still do not see it as a solution for researchers / professionals.

More on my opinions on the future of reading.

Via Engadget

Picture from Wired.

Wired has made a worth reading review of the new Kindle version, with a 8 over 10 and quotes as “Kindle 2 brings books closer to e-nirvana”

I really like the concept of the kindle, and the fact that it’s computer-independent. I think that’s the trend to watch for, the internet of things. Going mobile without actually needing a computer behind.

My ideas about e-reading

In my opinion we will live paperless. And sooner than later.

When I state this, I’m always met by skeptik looks, and it’s normal. We live in a society (specially we in academia) surrounded by paper. Myself I’ve grown up in a house full of books, and I love reading, buying, searhing for books. Why then do I think this?

1. E-ink technology

One important thing to mention is that until recently reading digital material was much less comfortable than paper. Reading a novel in a screen is just painful, the concentration span is shorter, a headache probable. This is the argument most people have against electronic books.

I use this e-ink device above, the sony reader 505. It uses a reflective display without light, works wonderfully under direct sunlight (actually work best under direct sunlight). I have used it for reading many books under the last year, and after the first pages you just forget that it’s not a normal book.

This devices as the new sony reader 700, the amazon kindle, the different readers from iRex, and more to come are the first towards making the act of reading in a screen as comfortable or more than a book.

2. Everything that can be dematerialized, it will be dematerialized.

Going digital is full of advantages, no weight, no need of physical space, easy to search and index, easy and cheap to produce, easy to scale up and provide to millions of users at the same time. Just in the tiny memory card of my reader with its couple of gigabytes there are space for probably more books than I could ever read in my life, everything packed in a thing that is smaller than a pocket book.

A fast calculation: A book the size of any Harry Potter is around 400kb (in the sony e-reader format .lrb), if I read 100 books per year during 100 years (I hope for improved longevity..), the total size of those books is around 4.000.000kb ≈ 4gb. I can buy that for my reader for less than 25€ in a memory card that is just 5 × 12.5 × 1.2 mm, the size of a fingernail.

Yes, that size, that price, compare that with 10.000 books the size of Harry Potter. (Not even talking about the environmental gains).

Let’s see other examples of things that can be dematerialized and that have already been:

Music.I think that editorials should be aware not to follow the discography example, following a business model based on the scarcity of a physical objects when those objects have been dematerialized. The change in music consumption just talks for itself, the change from collecting cds, to downloading mp3s and using ipods, to just listening to Last.fm or Spottify. Unavoidable.

Other example, when I was working as a DJ I collected vynils, I loved the feeling of the turntables. Until Final Scratch arrived, connecting the turntables to a laptop, same feeling with virtual music, that was probably the last time I bought a vynil.  Once a technology has that unquantificable thing that I call “feeling”, plus the benefits of being digital, it’s over for the analogic equivalent.

Pictures. The change from film cameras to digital ones and the explosion in photography amateurism. I still use a SLR film camera, I love its analog feeling, but I develop only to digital copies and upload them to my Flickr.

Movies. Movie theater to DVD to DivX to streaming. Same pattern, same results.

3. Pattern recognition:

We have seen that it happened before, are books really that special? Well, yes. Books are a wonderful technology. A great way of transmitting content, and more advantages in its selfcontinement than a vynil or a DVD. But seeing the pattern followed by music, films, pictures, and some trends as the rise of new e-ink readers, traditional book companies as penguin starting to sell their titles electronically, amazon putting so much energy in ther kindle and people loving it, the success of mobile novels in japan, the increase in traditional books bought online, the boom of blogs as a source of news, the new generations of digital natives, the use of laptops as the OLPC (with its high-contrast reading mode) creating some million of new digital natives… All those trends point somewhere towards a change in the way we create, distribute and consume text information.

Of course point out that there are some trends against this hypothesis, as the rise of publish on demand and cheap online publishing as blurb.com and lulu.com

4. Linking the nodes

Ok, we have seen how dematerialization has work in other areas and different trends in electronic reading. From this and from my personal experience, my conclusion is that when the new digital technologies with all their benefits reach the feeling of their analogue predecesor, in this case e-ink displays making reading as comfortable as a normal book, the days for the analogic technology are counted. E-ink and new display technologies are the turning point, and paper will decline. I do not know if we will use specialized devices or if mobiles and tablet pcs will get screens that are as good for reading as the current e-ink or better (just see the olpc2 concept). The paper as we know it will dissapear, it will take a while, but in my opinion it’s unavoidable.

Pattern Recognition, originally uploaded by It’s a mobile world.

People usually ask if I have adapted to read electronically, it seems to look like a big step to leave paper behind.
But my opinion is the advantages are so big that the reverse adaptation is more difficult. I have loaned Pattern Recognition from William Gibson from the library, a book I wanted to read for some time. And well, it is heavy, I get tired of holding it, I can not take it with me for commuting (I could but I would it’s not that easy), I lost the bookmark at night and have to look again the page I was reading.. Well at least is from the library so I don’t need to take it with me in the next moving..

On the other side, the most negative aspect of electronic books I have found is the impossibility of sharing with your friends and family. Now just because there are not so many people using e-readers and then because copyright protections. I miss that social aspect of sharing literature objects.

Well, it seems that this blog is just about electronic readers, I’m sorry about that! but there are so many exciting news about it recently.

Recently I was talking about a e-reader adapted to academic needs, A4 documents and so on. Here it comes, by Plastic Logic supposedly early in 2009.

Who doesn’t want one? Our offices would look so much nicer without all the paper “kipple“…

Seen in NYT regarding its newspaper capabilities. Also tipped by Björn Hedin, regarding its academic possibilities.

I have seen a lot of news in mainstream newspapers about e-paper lately, a good sign, it seems that new readers as the Kindle are breaking the e-reading curse. The last new I read in El Pais (via Tech Crunch) is that Amazon is planning an oversized version of their Kindle for textbooks. Schools and universities are the more obvious application area for e-readers in my opinion. Heavy textbooks with a limited use time, kilos of printed articles. Think the environmental benefit of one kindle vs all the textbooks any kind of student (university, high school, primary,…) needs. A possible LCA study, anyone?

I will keep an eye on this. I read most articles in my Sony Reader, but the transformation from PDF A4 to the reader size is not optimal, neither its horizontal view is. Personally I think that a specific reader for the academic environment would be a killer device for the electronic paper.

Reading in the sun, originally uploaded by It’s a mobile world.

I’ve owned a sony e-reader for more than half a year now. Keeping the content in electronic format is one of the ideas for a more sustainable lifestyle, and electronic readers can greatly reduce  the paper consumption from newspapers, novels, office documents…
I’ll be posting my experiences with reading without books, the benefits and the problems that need to be solved.
But as a teaser, a picture in bright sun of the reflective e-ink screen compared with a regular LCD screen.