PressEthic

Google's got partial text of e-books online. Newspaper readership is shifting from print to online. Anyone care to curl up with a good e-book?

Sony has been working on a new product which will be made available this month in select areas. The Sony Reader is their attempt to contribute to the demise of paper. For $350, consumers can purchase this gadget which displays text on a non back-lit screen. An article in the New York Times explains:

E-books may have flopped the first time around, but you can’t deny that they offer some intriguing advantages. You can add dozens of them to your luggage without adding any more weight or bulk. You can adjust the type size. You can search the whole book in seconds, or insert an infinite number of bookmarks. No trees are destroyed to make e-books. And you can read during lunch without having to prop open your novel with a dangerously full can of soda.

Sure, there are these advantages, but what of the feeling of the paper? The smell of a new book? The way it sounds when you turn a page quickly, anxious to get to the next page? Maybe the world is going online, but I, for one, am not sold. The Reader is another attempt to integrate many different objects into one. Like our cell phones and Blackberries and iPods, The Sony Reader is a multitasker.

The Reader can also display digital photos — they look surprisingly good, considering they’re being depicted using only four shades of gray — and play music files (noncopy-protected MP3 or AAC format) through headphones. With a good deal of preparation, you could even read along as the same audio book plays.

The internet generation has embraced the iPod, text and picture messaging, and blogging. Will we eventually go blind from staring at screens all day? Will content begin to change because the mediums are constantly changing? The article continues:

Is that it, then? Is the paper book doomed? Was it only a transitional gadget, a placeholder that came between stone tablets and e-books?

Not any time soon. The Sony Reader is an impressive achievement, and an important step toward a convenient alternative to bound books. It will make certain niche groups very happy: gadget freaks, lawyers with massive document stashes, doctors and pilots who check hefty reference texts, high school students with 35-pound backpacks and anyone who likes to read by the pool for 20 weeks at a time.

The masses, however, may continue to prefer the more established portable-document format. Those older reading machines never run out of power, cost about 2 percent as much and don’t break when dropped. You know: p-books.

Call me old-fashioned, but for now, I'm sticking to the paper and ink.