Dick Pountain/16 March 2009 16:01/Idealog 176
For Christmas and my birthday this year I received two brown books that are just about as different as you could imagine: one of them was Sony's PRS-505 Reader, a portable reader for e-books, while the other was a 1907 first edition of William James' "Pragmatism". I've already written in an earlier column about the online library I'd been amassing to help with my researches, most of which consists of public-domain philosophy and politics volumes downloaded from archive.org. I've been reading these works on the screen of my Sony Viao TZ21 for over a year now in reasonable comfort, but only really while seated at my desk. A laptop may be portable but it's very far from ideal for reading on busses and trains: even the TZ is too big for a pocket; its landscape screen format is wrong for reading; when opened its balance is all wrong for reading on your lap; and while TZ battery life is excellent for a laptop, it's still of concern when you want to read for hours.
The Sony Reader fixes most of those problems, but introduces a few different ones. It's truly a joy to use being small, light, of the right form factor and easy to hold and page-turn. It has a nice brown leather cover so you hold it like a real book, and the thoughtful provision of twin page-turn buttons - one in the gutter and one in the margin - makes it even easy to read upside down lying on the sofa (more so in fact than many heavy, wrist-busting hardbacks). Its E Ink screen looks great, with a contrast ratio similar to rather grey ink-on paper, and its battery life is weeks thanks to the lack of backlight (the downside being that if it's too dark to read a real book it's too dark for the Reader too).
In the box with the Reader was a CD containing 100 free public-domain e-books and I installed 70 or so of the classics like Shakespeare, Moby Dick, Don Quixote and Middlemarch that I revisit a lot. They all look great on the screen, with proper covers and contents pages and neat page layout. When I came to transfer my library from the laptop things weren't quite so smooth. Many of the books were in HTML format which the Reader can't accept, and I had to read these into Microsoft Word and then output them as PDFs which it can. While in Word I did work on some of the volumes - particularly Project Gutenberg ones - because they had page and section numbers floating in the text, or hard carriage returns that appeared as blank pages on the Reader. Fortunately I'm an Olympic-class search-and-replace artist and regular expression junky, so it didn't take too long, and was worth it for books I refer to a lot. What I've never mastered is creating proper contents pages: the Reader doesn't automatically pick up PDFed contents pages and I have to manually insert bookmarks at each chapter instead.
Not being a big reader of contemporary novels I wasn't too disappointed when I scanned some publishers' websites and discovered how poor the range of ebooks available still is - and how utterly, knicker-wettingly comical their pricing is. There are even odd ones that cost *more* than a paper edition! No, to me the biggest drawback of the Reader is its lack of a search function, thanks to the absence of keyboard. I still often have to refer to a book on my TZ just to search for a keyword (purchasing an Amazon Kindle might get around this were it not 100% overpriced). The 505's screen isn't touch sensitive so you can't add software onscreen keyboards, and in any case its screen refresh is too slow for interactivity: some downloaded books I have in scanned bitmap format are unuseable because it takes over five seconds to turn each page.
And what of my other book gift, the William James? I won't dwell on its content here, except to say that James was not universally loved for nothing: this series of lectures is so captivating that I defy you not to enjoy them even if you have no interest in philosophy, or often disagree with him as I do. More relevant here, it provided me with a reminder of what book design used to be like. Bound in thick brown cloth-covered boards, it lies perfectly flat wherever you open it. Printed by letterpress on thick cream cartridge paper it looks gorgeous. The compositors knew their job well and its justified text is leaded and spaced to perfection: great 1" side margins and 1.5" bottom margins, with no more than eight words per line, make it far more pleasant to read than any modern book, or the Sony Reader. It's traditional at around this point to start crooning a sentimental, Luddite, song to the good old days of books, but I'm going to disappoint anyone who's expecting that. I'm quite happy to keep a whole library's-worth of great books in a single pocketable electronic device, and have beautiful old editions too (found more quickly and cheaply than ever before thanks to Abebooks, Alibris, Amazon and the rest). I've downloaded the very same William James lectures into my Reader: different horses for different courses.
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