Time for a good e-book?

Suzanne Choney • E-mail

Tech holiday gift checklist: LCD TV — maybe. New BlackBerry or iPhone — possible. E-reader — are you kidding?

No, not kidding. While they're unlikely to be high on many shoppers’ lists, Sony’s recent e-reader, the PRS-700, and Amazon’s Kindle, out for more than a year, are starting to generate interest. Whether they’ll generate sales remains to be seen.

Their relatively high prices — $399.99 for the Sony and $359 for the Kindle — won’t help either one in a season of frugality. But for those who are voracious book readers, travelers or students, the devices’ costs could be outweighed by the their ability to lighten the schlep load and save money on book-buying.

New York Times’ best-selling hardcover books generally cost $9.99 for the Kindle, and $11.99 at Sony’s eBook Store. Both prices are significantly lower than print versions of books.

Easier on the eyes
Both Sony’s Reader Digital Book, as it’s called, and the Kindle use a technology called E Ink. It helps digital pages look real, and is easier on the eyes for longer periods of reading.

“All of us can read short PDFs and e-mail on our BlackBerrys and our computers,” said Brennan Mullin, Sony Electronics vice president of audio. “But when you’re reading a novel or reading research materials and sitting for one or two hours, the experience on those devices is not great, the battery life is limited, and it’s hard on your eyes.”

Those are some of the reasons devices like smartphones, iPods and portable game players may not be the best options for reading books, although they certainly can be used for that.

“Cell phone screens are undeniably getting larger, and may emerge as a better fit for shorter-form content in the near future, such as magazine features blogs,” said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for The NPD Group market research firm.

“The Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle have certainly made progress. But, there’s going to be a limited market for a dedicated device that reads books simply because a relatively small percentage of the U.S. population are avid enough readers to justify purchases of such a device, even as prices come down, which they will continue to do.”

For e-readers to become “a mass-market item,” prices will need to drop, and they’ll “need to be embraced by the education market” to succeed, he believes.

Some of that is starting to happen. Sony says books can now be downloaded to its readers from some public libraries around the country. And, this fall, the company donated 100 of its readers to Penn State University’s libraries to see how students use the device for research projects, as well as for classroom and leisure reading.

Differences between Sony, Amazon
Amazon, which constantly releases statistics on everything from on who’s buying what and when — down to the hour — has not publicly shared information about Kindle sales.

The company recently noted that Kindle is sold out, “due to heavy customer demand,” and said orders placed now will not be delivered until after Christmas Eve.

Research firm iSuppli said earlier this year that the Kindle and Sony readers have "proven there is a viable market for eBooks," with shipments of all eBooks expected to reach 1 million units in 2008.

“It's possible that Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader could do for eBooks what Apple's iPod did for MP3 players,” said Vinita Jakhanwal, principal analyst for mobile displays at iSuppli, said in a report.

Sony’s first digital reader was released in Japan, then in the United States in 2006. The company has another reader, the PRS-505, which retails for $299.

Sony The Reader Digital Book (PRS-700) from Sony is $399.99. It has a 6-inch touchscreen display and can hold about 350 books.

One of the main differences between it and the newer model, the PRS-700, is that the PRS-700 uses a touchscreen and readers can highlight, annotate and search for words in books.

The biggest difference between Sony’s readers and the Kindle is how books get onto the devices.

The Kindle uses a wireless connection over Sprint’s phone data network to deliver books to the device, so it can be done from just about anywhere in the country, except from Montana and Alaska. No computer is necessary, and there is no extra charge for the connection.

Sony’s readers download books to a PC. The Sony Reader comes with a USB cable, which is connected to the PC to transfer books to the device.

Both the Sony and Kindle readers are fairly lightweight, between 10 to 11 ounces, and have 6-inch display screens, adjustable font sizes and long-lasting batteries of a week or more (less time with the Kindle if you use the wireless connection frequently).

One of the Kindle's draws is that customers can get discounts on suscriptions for newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Newsweek and Time.

So far, Amazon has more than 190,000 books for the Kindle; Sony’s eBook Store has 57,000, with more than 100,000 expected by the end of the year, said a spokeswoman. She added that Reader users can also buy and download books from “lots of places,” both free and paid, including Manybooks.net, Gutenberg.com and Fictionwise.com.

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