TOKYO – Geeks the world over have long dreamed of the day when the content of books, magazines and newspapers will be downloaded digitally onto electronic readers.
Yet despite an explosion of digital content and gadgets to read it on, paper still rules – in part because nobody has yet been able to beat its portability and readability.
Now the world’s two biggest consumer-electronics companies – Sony and Matsushita Electric Industrial, the maker of Panasonic devices – are giving the digital book a whirl in Japan, though not yet anywhere else.
Both recently started selling electronic readers that let users view a variety of material downloaded from Internet sites. But despite some attractive services and compelling technology, a week of testing the Sony Librie and Panasonic SigmaBook reminded me how great paper still is.
The Sony Librie gets high marks for its svelte size: at 8.5 ounces and 5 inches by 7.5 inches by 0.5 inches, it’s smaller and only a bit heavier than the 138-page instruction manual it ships with.
But its best feature by far is its display – the first-ever consumer application of something called “electronic ink.” The technology, developed by E Ink of Cambridge, Mass., forms images by electronically pulling around microscopic particles of black and white pigment that float in tiny capsules inside the screen. The result is a display that uses very little power and looks almost identical to black print on white paper. For reading, it’s a vast improvement over the liquid-crystal displays common in notebook computers, PDAs and cellphones.
I took the Librie with me on a coffee run – down a dim hallway, into the elevator and out into bright sunlight – reading comfortably all the way. It also let me enlarge the text size up to 200 percent, and has a set of built-in dictionaries for easy reference.
But it didn’t do as well on my graphics test, Vol. 1 of Shotaro Ishinomori’s 1963 comic “Cyborg 009.” The display left a faint afterimage of the previous page’s lines on the black areas of the drawings. And with only four levels of gray shading, the images often looked rough. The Librie’s relatively small screen was also a problem. Rather than shrinking the original page to fit the display, the publishers of “Cyborg 009” decided to put one frame on each page. The resulting story pace was so slow I got bored, even in the middle of a pitched battle between cyborgs and evil robots.
Part of the problem is that the Librie display’s response is excruciatingly slow. “Turning” a page takes a full second, and using the jog wheel to move the cursor through menus is frustrating. It’s still tolerable if you’re chugging through a story from start to finish, but returning to a section you’ve read before is a real slog unless you’ve had the foresight to “bookmark” the page you want.
Where the Librie really fails is in its handling of digital content. It can only view content that comes from a site run by Publishing Link, a Sony-affiliated company with investments from most of Japan’s big publishers. Users download digital books to their computers from there and then transfer them to the Librie, but only about 600 are available. What’s more, your right to that content expires after 60 days. The only English-language books I saw being offered were textbooks.
The rental model keeps prices relatively low. I paid $2.89 to “rent” the autobiography of comic artist Shigeru Mizuki, which was selling for $5.60 new on Amazon Japan.
Though it costs the same hefty $370, Panasonic’s SigmaBook reader gets right a lot of what Sony gets wrong. Although Panasonic’s own online-content site, SigmaBook JP, has only 100 titles, the SigmaBook can also handle content downloaded from an independent site called 10 Days Book, which mainly features comics but boasts around 5,400 titles.
The SigmaBook is also better suited to reading comics because it has two screens. At 7.2 inches, they are bigger than the Librie’s and capable of more tonal gradations. But the device is also twice as thick and almost twice as heavy as the Librie.
Buying digital fare from SigmaBook JP or 10 Days Book is usually a little cheaper than purchasing the physical book. Plus, once you buy it, you own it.
In general, though, the SigmaBook services are complex and confusing to use. The reader has no internal memory, so all the content must be transferred to an SD memory card using a special device compatible with the SigmaBook’s copy-protection system. You need different software to manage the books you buy from SigmaBook JP and those you buy from 10 Days Book. What’s more, the books come with a number of different kinds of viewer software – six at last count – each with slightly different functions and separate instruction manuals.
Panasonic opted for an LCD technology that doesn’t require a back light or power to maintain a picture. But the blue-on-gray screens offer very poor contrast and are hard to see from an angle.
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