Op-Ed: A look at the all-time turkeys, or e-readers past and present

Buy an ad on DigitalJournal.com

Previously, the Sony Reader was the Next Big Thing. The reworked version just came on sale, and it's still no hidden miracle, just the current version of the one that came out with such fanfare a few years back. (At least I think it's reworked, since 2005, I would hope so.)

So far what’s come out are sawed-off laptop screens with buttons, at prices that would get a laugh out of Alexander Graham Bell and Marconi. The market savvy in these things is almost like Gordon Gecko’s biography. Like all those wide screens nobody asked for, and the eternal irrelevance of media players using different methods to read binary code, the readers represent the absolute nadir of product supply.

Kindle is a case in point. With all the timeless elegance of a Palm Pilot, and roughly the same quality, you could read the classics and become allergic to literature at the same time. Black type on tatty overpriced white paper may be getting a little stale, but compared to these tame, tedious offerings of the early 80s technology, it’s dazzling.

Let’s have a look at the Sony Reader, which if an absolute crock, was an effort to provide an actual product. According to specifications, this fossilized, expensive, insult to anyone with a PC is about as lousy as you could get without actually trying to end the entire computer industry and return to the caves.

(Speaking of insults, even the thumbnails on the site don't work. That's not easy.)

For a mere $249, marked down from $349 ($349 worth of what, for God's sake) , you can get something your two year old could trip over, or something the dog might bite and get sick, but not much else. The thing takes four hours to charge, off the mains. The hallmark 64MB RAM is there, for antiquarians, and there’s even formatting, for those who remember Boris Karloff as he used to be.

The Kindle, and this really stretches the laws of probability, is even worse, some years later. This glorified cell phone barely qualifies as technology. It can play MP3, it can “do more”, but so can a cell phone. It can take “hundreds of things”, according to this LA Times article, which is about as enthusiastic as I am.

So can a camera.

Actually, if people read War and Peace on a cell phone, they’d probably match their attention spans to their media, and read the thing.

As a writer, I can tell you that if I had the media, I could give you a book with a Sumi paper background, adjustable fonts, variable plot lines, a few symphonies in the background, and a few hundred MB of original art. Hyperlinks, you name it, you could put bloody MySpace and Facebook on it, and not even notice.

So could anyone else who’s ever accidentally strayed into a space containing a three point plug.

But not on this load of garbage.

All that’s needed, you timeless bunnies, is a basic web format, saves space, easy for media, can run anything, and a power source that isn’t being driven by the mentalities that are still sucking on the dead nipples of the Industrial Revolution.

The logical conclusion about this latest offering from the decaying rectum of industrial design is that the publishers, bless their talentless little souls, want to hang on to their paper, and the almost unbelievably inefficient, expensive, wasteful, technology that gives them their “jobs”.

I love my books. I’m also sick of watching them fall to pieces. A good book is an occasion, an actual event. They’re rare enough. They’re things to keep. Having to do a degree in conservation techniques to keep them, is in my opinion asking a bit much of readers. Not that people have much choice, with the need for reprints now being so hard for the desiccated little intellects of publishers to comprehend.

But why anyone would want to inflict a decent book with a dreary, obsolete-looking, regressive little gizmo which can simply fall to pieces itself, and be like having an extra computer to look after, I really don’t see.

The only thing to be said for the Kindle is that it can use a memory stick, meaning you can put it on an external hard drive or back up, so you don’t lose the books. Believe me, though. There’s nothing to be said for the intelligence of whoever keeps lousing up a very necessary idea like an e-reader.

And of course there are subscriptions. There always are. There’s a real turn on for people who want to be saddled with yet another cost. Just make something that will take html, pdf, and common document formats.

People ought to be able to make notes, do bookmarks, references, the whole shebang. Maybe the industry’s forgotten, but books do have uses other than on sales charts. You should be able to write books on the thing, and do the presentation so you’ll know what it will look like to readers. That, I could find a use for, if not the rest of the soggy little opera this product seems to be.

Amazon should know better. So should Sony. To hell with the technology, find out what people want, and build the readers around that.