Dispatches From Taiwan: A Bewitching E-Book Tote-Along

One of the highlights of my recent visit to Taiwan actually occurred on the overseas flight back home at the trip conclusion. My seatmate was a six-year-old Asian girl named Tiffany; her mother, father and five-year-old sister were across the aisle from me. When one or both of us wasn’t sleeping, we passed the time conversing on a wide variety of topics of interest to someone of her age and gender. I confess, for example, that I didn’t know who the Jonas Brothers were until then

Tiffany was enthusiastic, precocious, gregarious, and (ironically, unlike her parents) quite fluent in English. She thought my MacBook Air was ‘neat’. As soon the California coast came into sight, she spent the remaining minutes of the flight glued to the window, repeatedly bouncing up and down in her seat and gleefully exhorting how ‘awesome’ the view was. And when she saw one of the tech toys I’d stashed in my carry-on bag, she proclaimed it ‘magic’ (Arthur C. Clarke would have been proud…see law #3).

The source of her astonishment? My model PRS-500 Sony Reader, which I obtained in the fall of 2007:

After writing about Amazon’s Kindle DX last month in the context of a bigger-picture analysis of the newspaper industry, I realized that to date I hadn’t yet had meaningful hands-on experience with an e-book reader; a somewhat embarrassing situation considering I’ve been opining on the concept since mid 2003. So after charging up the unit’s power pack (that E Ink-developed electrophoretic display sure delivers great battery life!), I tossed it in my satchel and headed for the airport, periodically pulling it out for perusal when appropriate during the subsequent week.

Particularly when keeping in mind that this was a first-generation Sony Reader, I was pretty impressed with the overall experience. Granted, ‘white’ was more like ‘light grey’, the four-level grey scale display sometimes made within-page contrast variations difficult to discern, and ‘page’-turning operations were molasses slow (the second-generation PRS-505 made welcome improvements in all of these areas). And the lack of a backlight made reading difficult-to-impossible when Tiffany was trying to slumber (thereby compelling me to keep the overhead light off).

But then again, paper-based books don’t have backlights either. And it’s pretty ‘magical’ to be able to shoehorn a few hundred manuscripts into a 6.9" x 4.9" x 0.5" form factor weighing 9 ounces, which you can read in either a landscape or portrait orientation (for which Sony provided conveniently located, functionally redundant operating controls). Speaking of shoehorning…where’s that Mac OS-compatible device management software, Sony? Fortunately, third parties have stepped in with passable alternatives to bridge the breach.

Next time, maybe I’ll try my iPod touch or its iPhone successor, in conjunction with Amazon’s Kindle application…wonder what Tiffany would think of it?